June Food and Agriculture Resource Roundup

Every so often, I run into books, articles, blog posts, videos, and other online media that help me better understand the food that we eat – from how to grow or prepare it, to how our agricultural systems work, to essays that evoke an emotional or sensory response to food and offer inspirational examples of how people are using food to change lives.

Here are the resources that stood out to me in June:

Connecting With Where Food Comes From

How Chickens Are Processed By MICHAEL RUHLMAN | Published: JUNE 4, 2012  Michael Ruhlman wrote about his recent experience processing chickens on a small, organic farm.  It is an enlightening view of what happens between the time a chicken is ready to be dispatched and when it is plucked and ready to be handed over to the consumer.   The video and pictures are not for the faint of heart.

Greek farmers rent patches of land to citydwellers in scheme to combat crisis by Jon Henley | Published in TheGuardian June 14, 2012:  The ‘become a farmer’ scheme offers guaranteed sales to farmers, and fresh food at cheap prices to those who invest.  The program is similar to Community Supported Agriculture, but instead of 1-to-1 relationships where you buy a share or two directly from a farm, GineAgrotis.gr coordinates the consumer-farmer relationship centrally and gives customers the opportunity to choose from all available farms, specify plot size, and select which produce (from a predetermined list) they’d like grown.

Health and Nutrition

 by nutritionists Dallas & Melissa Hartwig of the Whole9.  I am only a few chapters in to the book, but am impressed by the vast amount of research that went into it, and the consistency of results that people have experienced while following the authors’ recommendations.  Having personally experienced similar results when strictly following a whole-food diet free that happens to be free of grains and dairy (as well as legumes and sweeteners), I also appreciate their explanation of why it works so well and how to sustain it.  Looking forward to finishing the book and doing some re-calibrating.

The Future of Food

Slate: Future of Food Series:  Slate has a series on the Future of Food this month, with articles ranging from Soylent Green predictions and nanotechnology to climate change, farmland expansion, and what we can learn from Cuba’s agro-ecology model – a model that keeps popping up on the radar as one that other nations might do well to learn from.

• How To Feed the World After Climate Change: Genetically modified seeds aren’t enough. We have to change the entire agricultural system.
• The Future of Food: Five Frontiers: How nanotechnology, vertical farms, and lab-grown meat may change the way you eat.
• What Cuba Can Teach Us About Food and Climate Change: After the Cold War, Cuba faced many of the agricultural challenges that the rest of the world is now anticipating.

Urban Agriculture

Arch Daily: Urban Agriculture Series:  an interesting series on urban agriculture from a design perspective – how do we integrate food-productive lands into our city scapes.

• Part 1: What Cuba Can Teach Us (Exploring the question of what would our cities look like if we began to place food production/distribution as the primary focus of urban design)
• Part 2: Designing Out the Distance  (how cities are accommodating the food revolution’s urban bee-keepers, guerilla planters, rooftop gardeners, foodie activists, edible schoolyards, and productive landscapers)
• Part 3: Urban Agriculture Part III: Towards an Urban “Agri-puncture” (Urban Acupuncture is a way of planning that pinpoints vulnerable sectors of a city and re-energizes them through design intervention)

Inspiration

Red Rooster chef cooks up healthy food in Harlem:

If you have come across a food resource that has inspired or educated you recently, or maybe shifted your perspective, please consider leaving it in the comments section below.