THE FOOD WE HAD… WAS KILLING US
“Statistics are always negative for people like me, or at least that is how I’ve always felt. High-blood pressure and diabetes run in my family. The problem was not that growing up we did not have access to food – but the food we had access to was killing us. So changing the way my low-income neighborhood ate became my new motivation.” (excerpted from Roy Friyas, WhyHunger Connect Blog)

+ Finish reading From Air Jordans to Food Justice

My Father’s Garden (1996) is a deeply personal look at the impacts of industrial farming in America. Filmmaker Miranda Smith, whose own family was devastated by the use of toxic farm pesticides, follows farmer Fred Kirschenmann as he warns of the past, present, and future dangers of chemically-manipulated agriculture.

As a farmer’s daughter myself, My Father’s Garden struck my core. Smith’s shots of the hands and faces of the elderly farmers of North Dakota remind me of my farming community back home. At one of theMOVE’s recent farm trips, I met an individual who said this is the first summer of his life that he’s had access to farm-fresh produce. For me, this is the first summer that I haven’t been spoiled with the produce of my father’s garden (and it’s been tough).

In the film, Kirschenmann compares the dirt from an organic farm to the dirt of a chemically-run conventional farm. The organic dirt: soft and crumbly. The barren dirt from the conventional farm resembled dried clay. The vegetables I’ve Read the rest of this entry »

URBAN FARMING AND LOCAL EATING are trendy nowadays, but are they meaningful acts?

Last week, Harvard professor Edward Glaeser wrote an op-ed in the Boston Globe arguing that urban farms are ecologically destructive, because they make people in cities have to drive or commute farther to get from place to place. Huh? We’ve seen no proposals for farms to overtake cities, nor even to take up more than quarter-acre plots. City Growers, for example, is simply focused on putting small, historically-vacant, city lots to productive use. In his piece, Glaeser also re-invokes the conversation from 2007 about how some foods which are grown far away, because they are produced under more ideal conditions, can actually end up consuming less fossil fuels than their local counterparts. Sure — sometimes. So then why eat “locally” and farm “urbanly”?

There are many reasons for supporting local/urban-grown food, but here are our TOP 4: Read the rest of this entry »