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A fix for global warming – Rodale continues to revolutionize agriculture

Organic farming practices could sequester more than 100 percent of our current carbon emissions, according to research from the Rodale Institute.

Achieving these goals would require the wholesale adoption of the practice of  “regenerative farming,” an organic farming technique that the study, Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change, describes as “widely available and inexpensive.”  Such practices include low- or no-till fields, crop rotation and cover crops in a bid to keep photosynthesized carbon in the soil.

In 2012, total annual global emissions of greenhouse gases were approximately 52 GtCO2e. These emissions must soon drop to a net of 41 GtCO2e a year if we are to have a feasible chance of limiting warming to 1.5°C, according to the study.

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Get your local food – HERE! Find restaurants, farmer’s markets, CSA & grocers sourcing local

LocalHarvest connects people looking for good food with the farmers who produce it.

Buying local is about enjoying real food, grown yourself or purchased from people you trust. It’s about developing strong local economies and producing food on a human scale. It’s about eating seasonally, practicing the art of cooking, and sitting down to enjoy meals together. It requires ample local and regional producers, processors, and distributors. As we see it, the goal of the local food movement is to create thriving community-based food systems that will make high quality local food available to everyone.

To that end, LocalHarvest makes millions of introductions a year.

Not seeing the forest for the trees – school nutrition food fight

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Not seeing the forest for the trees – school nutrition food fight

How can any rational person not step back and scratch their head? Michelle Obama is up against the House GOP who want to grant waivers to schools that show the new school food regulations are too expensive and onerous.  

“The last thing we can afford to do right now is play politics with our kids’ health,” Michelle Obama said Tuesday. “Now is not the time to roll back everything we have worked for.”  As it stands now, it isn’t likely that there will be any massive rollback in the new regulations.  

(from the curator) In our house, if our kids don’t eat their vegetables, whole grains, or better proteins – they don’t get an option, nor dessert, that reinforces bad habits.  Where we may differ, we focus on serving a variety of healthy, tasty and quality meals that appeal to us all. It’s more than possible, and there are many ways to learn how.  Instead of empowering bad behavior and entitlement by discussing how much good food is thrown in the trash everyday at schools because “kids don’t like eating veggies”, how about focusing on accountability and appreciation for what fuels our well-being. That goes equally for our kids and politicians alike.

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Parents take notice – METAL in every cheese single, M&M and Oreo cookie

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96 food items currently on US grocery shelves contain unlabeled nano-metal ingredients. Examples include Dannon Greek Plain Yogurt, Silk Original Soy Milk, Rice Dream Rice Drink, Hershey’s Bliss Dark Chocolate, and Kraft’s iconic American Cheese Singles, all of which now contain nano-size titanium dioxide. Radically miniaturized particles are attractive to the food and textile industries for their novel properties. Nano-size titanium dioxide, for example, is used as a color enhancer—it makes white foods like yogurt and soy milk whiter, and brightens dark products like chocolate. But what unintended effects might it have According to the Friends of the Earth report, nano-laced food products are “entering the market at a rate of three to four per week.”  

All of which raises the question of safety, and there’s real evidence that the small stuff poses significantly higher health risks. For example, in 2011, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) looked at the lung cancer risk faced by workers exposed to air containing various forms of titanium dioxide dust. The agency recommended sharply lower exposure limits for titanium dioxide in its nano form—the stuff they’re putting in yogurt and soy milk—reflecting “greater concern for the potential carcinogenicity” of the nano particles, because “as particle size decreases, the surface area increases (for equal mass), and the tumor potency increases per mass unit of dose.”

Of course, breathing in nano-size titanium dioxide isn’t the same as ingesting it in yogurt. But making stuff really tiny changes the way it behaves in our bodies—and the FDA should respond to its own concerns by making the food industry sweat the safety of the small stuff, before they feed it to us.

Full list of nano-metal foods found here:

Ian Aldrich shows us how to properly break-down a Lobster – Yankee Magazine

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Ian Aldrich shows us how to properly break-down a Lobster – Yankee Magazine

How to eat a Lobster – a New England tradition.

Lobster eating is not for the dainty; you’re going to get your hands deliciously dirty. Here are Terri Nunan’s expert’s tips on how to eat a lobster.

Much of Terri Nunan’s life has revolved around lobster. Her father was a lobsterman, she married a lobsterman, and in between, in 1974 at age 14 she took a job at Nunan’s Lobster Hut in her hometown of Kennebunkport, Maine, where she worked under Bertha Nunan, her future mother-in-law and one of Maine’s most beloved lobster cooks. Today, Terri owns Nunan’s Lobster Hut with her husband, Richard, and in-laws Keith and Kim Nunan. She also still loves lobster. “I could eat it every day,” she says. “It’s just got such a nice taste to it. If you’re in Maine, you have to try it.”

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’Fed Up’ in NE – where to see this MOVIE examining so many food issues

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Upending the conventional wisdom of why we gain weight and how to lose it, Fed Up unearths a dirty secret of the American food industry-far more of us get sick from what we eat than anyone has previously realized. Filmmaker Stephanie Soechtig and TV journalist Katie Couric lead us through this potent exposé that uncovers why-despite media attention, the public’s fascination with appearance, and government policies to combat childhood obesity-generations of American children will now live shorter lives than their parents did.

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What does hyperlocal mean to you – a look inside Vermont beer.

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“Do You Know Where Your Beer Is Brewed?” Soft guitar music played while clips of idyllic landscapes and sunrises peaking over breweries slid across the screen. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

The gentle voice of the narrator says, “With 12 breweries spread all across the United States, your next Budweiser is closer than you think.” Budweiser hangs its hat on the fact that it can produce the same beer at 12 facilities and it will always taste exactly the same no matter where you drink it. No small feat, to be sure.  But then the voice adds, “You might even say we’re America’s largest local brewer.”My eyes narrowed and my brow furrowed. ‘What in the heck is this?” I exclaimed. “That is our word!”

It took me a while to calm down from Budweiser’s blatant attempt to co-opt the word “local.” I was hot under the collar and wondered how Budweiser could justify this position…

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23 Photos of diverse folks and what they eat each day

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Photographers Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, traveled around the world and met people from all walks of life.  During their time with these people, they asked them to pose for photographs with their daily diets in front of them. 

The craziest part about the entire project is the caloric intake (and food value) difference between people of different walks of life.

Nutritional value of fruits, veggies is dwindling

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Nutritional value of fruits, veggies is dwindling

While we’ve been dutifully eating our fruits and vegetables all these years, a strange thing has been happening to our produce. It’s losing its nutrients. That’s right: Today’s conventionally grown produce isn’t as healthful as it was 30 years ago — and it’s only getting worse. The decline in fruits and vegetables was first reported more than 10 years ago by English researcher Anne-Marie Mayer, PhD, who looked at the dwindling mineral concentrations of 20 UK-based crops from the 1930s to the 1980s.

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Related:  Climate change threatens to undermine not only how much food can be grown but also the quality of that food as altered weather patterns lead to a less desirable harvest, according to a new study. Crops grown by many of the nation’s farmers have a lower nutritional content than they once did, according to the report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Climate change to result in less nutritional food