Posts Categorized: Local Food

Good Food Purchasing Program Live in Chicago! Connecting Urban Farmers with Institutional Buyers

Urban Tilth photo “Governments have few sources of leverage over increasingly globalized food systems – but public procurement is one of them. When sourcing food for schools, hospitals and public administrations, governments have a rare opportunity to support more nutritious diets and more sustainable food systems in one fell swoop.” – Olivier De Schutter, U.N. Special Rapporteur on… Read more »

Boston Food Justice Young Adult Volunteer – Ashley Earley

My name is Ashley Earley and I am serving as a Presbyterian Young Adult Volunteer (YAV) in Boston this year and our focus is food justice. I will be posting periodically onto this blog about various food related topics for the next year.  First, I would like to introduce myself. I am from Rock Hill, SC (just south of Charlotte, NC) and graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in May with a bachelors in biology and a minor in math. I am currently taking a gap year before going to graduate school for a master’s in plant biology and afterwards plan to go into research. I have never been to the New England area before, but I am so far really enjoying my time in Boston.

 

For this year, I am serving at First Presbyterian Church in Brookline and at a non-profit called Woman and Girls Thriving in Brookline with a focus in the Healthy Food and Lifestyle working group. My role will be to learn and educate about food justice.

 

Also as part of the program we will be participating in two different food challenges. From September to the end of January is the local eating challenge and February to the end of July is the SNAP (food stamp) challenge.

 

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Small Grants Program for PCUSA Churches Doing Community Food Initiatives

The Presbyterian Hunger Program is encouraged by the emergence of the many faith-based initiatives sprouting up around the country to bring resilience to our food system, and health to people and God’s Creation. These efforts often engage youth and multiple generations, result in greater food security, give people decision-making power over their food, increase healthy eating, create jobs and local economic growth, support local family farmers, use land ecologically, raise awareness about local and global hunger and poverty, and encourage a view of food as sacred and as a right for all people. When done well, such initiatives are wonderful ways to build relationships, community and power. We are eager to support this work as one small way we can help build God’s vision of a New Heaven and New Earth.

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Who started the local food revolution? Cuba or Jamie Oliver?

“The organic and urgan agriculture revolution that is under way there is nothing short of amazing, but what a lot of people don’t know is the amount of hardship Cubans have been through to get to where they are. Unlike with most people in the US and other wealthy countries, growing their own and doing it organically were not really choices for Cubans: they did it to survive. Or to put it more flippantly, when life gave the Cubans limes (mint and rum), they decided to make mojitos.”

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Local Food at a Stand Still

“The local food movement is going nowhere.” That’s according to my friend Mike. Mike is an intern at a nearby sustainable, organic farm, and he told me this while we were sitting at a locally-owned restaurant eating grass-fed bison burgers…

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the corporate co-opt of local

Sure, buying local is getting big, but even I didn’t think corporations would begin attempts to profit off it so soon. Call me naive. Here is a section from an excellent article about the co-optation of local. Even Wal-Mart is getting in on the act, hanging bright green banners over its produce aisles that simply say, “Local.”

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Farmer’s Markets Pushing Farmers Out?

SF Gate – which is the San Francisco Chronicles’ web site – has an article on farmers quitting the Ferry Building Farmer’s Market. Too many folks selling the same stuff plus the distance and energy it takes to get the…

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$5 billion worth of local food!

Presbyterians and apparently lots of other Americans are buying locally-grown food. This niche has widened to $5,000,000,000,000 annually in the U.S. And in case you hadn’t heard, Barbara Kingsolver just wrote a book about her own family’s struggles and joys…

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A Terroir-ists Manifesto For Eating in Place

I’ll have the great fortune of spending a week this summer with Gary Nabhan, Director of the Center for Sustainable Environments, and wanted to share his manifesto for eating with you. Gary is the author of many books, including Coming…

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Eat Here & Fisheries Alert: Brian Halweil is the man

Brian Halweil, author of the excellent book Eat Here: Reclaiming Homegrown Pleasures in a Global Supermarket can make complex issues digestable. Here are a couple video clips of him talking about local foods and sustainable seafood: In this first one,…

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