November 17th, 2010

Like many farmers of their time, the Lundberg family experimented with new pesticides being hailed in the mid-20^th Century as the wave of the future, the way to increase yields and tame food production.

Children gather to hunt for and rescue duck eggs left behind in rice fields at Lundberg farms.

Once, University of California at Davis researchers persuaded Wendell Lundberg and his three brothers to try a new strong new chemical on a field of rice. It proved so powerful, the crop was dead in a day.

That experience made a lasting impression, and was one of many that caused the Lundbergs to increasingly veer away from the chemical trend and return instead to their roots.

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October 19th, 2010

CAFO: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories, a large format book of essays and photographs exposing America’s uber-industrialized animal food production system, presents a flurry of disturbing content.

There are pictures of pigs, cattle and chickens in degrees of distress, packed into facilities lined with mud, manure and dead or dying inhabitants.

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August 26th, 2009

By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now

Fiskars Project Orange Thumb, the Home Depot Foundation, and the City of Baltimore are teaming to make over an area in a local Baltimore neighborhood in just one day. This Thursday, 80 members from all three groups and people from around the community will build a new garden in the Oliver neighborhood. They will break ground at 8 a.m. and complete the project just in time for the ribbon cutting that will take place at 4:30 that afternoon.

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July 7th, 2009

By Barbara Kessler
Green Right Now

Food, Inc. could easily have turned our stomachs upside down. There’s lots of raw material – cows mired in manure, pig carcasses whacked about on conveyor belts, immobilized chickens locked in dark crowded coops – to make the point about how mass food production can be an unhealthy affair.

The film does dish up selected gross-out shots of slabs of beef, downer cows, dead hens and grimy CAFOs. There are a few gasp-aloud moments, such as when chickens are beheaded (inexplicably, this hard-to-watch scene is on a small sustainable farm operation). But the beauty of this wonderful documentary lies in its restraint. Rather than beating up corporate culprits Smithfield, Cargill and others with the big stick of blood and guts, Food Inc. strolls confidently and methodically into our packaged food wonderland, armed with words, telling anecdotes and revelations of corruption and greed that make its case more compelling.

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March 16th, 2009

By Christopher Peake
Green Right Now

It’s already mid-March and that means the snows will melt and if the ground’s not too saturated farmers will soon be planting seeds for the food that will feed us this year.

Since time immemorial farmer’s markets have been with us: farmers harvest, bakers bake, dairy farmers milk their cows and they all meet at a central location where there’s lots of foot traffic … and they sell. The common theme: the food is fresh.

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