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Dharma in the Dirt
Patricia Leigh Brown, New York Times
AS a proudly Birkenstocked Zen gardener, Wendy Johnson can mindfully muster up affection for many of the earth’s species, with the possible exception of persimmon-devouring gophers.

But poison hemlock holds a special place in her heart.

Without the presence of this pernicious carrot look-alike, a potent vertigo-inducing poison that when ingested can cause death, she reasons, her garden would be all cloying lilac- and lily-scented perfection - boring, in short. The innocent-looking malevolent weed, which she allows to flourish for its capacity to draw rich minerals from the soil for compost, “gives the garden its punch,” she said, “snapping me back to my senses.”

Like her beloved hemlock, Ms. Johnson has deep taproots in California. Her own garden, bordered by a mountain creek with a view of the Pacific Ocean, lies down the road from the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, where she helped pioneer the concept of organic gardening in the United States. Now the farm’s unofficial gardener emeritus, she lived at Green Gulch for 25 years, marrying, raising her two children and growing produce for Greens Restaurant, which was founded by the Center in 1979.

Long before Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver wrote best-selling books about eating foods grown locally, Ms. Johnson, with a long-necked English watering can perpetually in hand, was cultivating an awareness of how lettuce grown au naturel can also feed the soul.

“You should taste this place,” she said, offering a visitor dried lemon verbena tea from the garden, her wide eyes bringing to mind a surprised lemur.

It is a cliché to say that gardening is meditative. But few have meditated as long and as earnestly as Ms. Johnson, who arrived at “the Gulch” with a sweaty Kelty backpack in 1975 after trekking much of the way from Tassajara, a rugged Zen outpost in the Ventana Wilderness. In her new book, “Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate: At Work in the Wild and Cultivated World” - part memoir, part Sunset Magazine sitting on the floor mindfully eating a raisin in the zendo - she ponders such questions as whether it’s O.K. for life-embracing Buddhists to crush snails (ask forgiveness first) or to trap gophers (breathe deep, then fence instead).
(9 May 2008)
I heard Wendy Johnson speak at a local bookstore - a charming and unpretentious speaker. Her fresh approach could be seen when someone in the audience asked, "How do I get rid of stinging nettles?" Horrors! Stinging nettle is a rich source of vitamin C and a gourmet treat. -BA

Global Food Crisis: Nations, farmers need our help
Ban Ki-Moon, Journal-Constitution (Alabama)
There was recently a glimmer of hope in the world food crisis. Expecting a bumper harvest, Ukraine relaxed restrictions on exports. Overnight, global wheat prices fell by 10 percent.

By contrast, traders in Bangkok were quoting rice prices around $1,000 a ton, up from $460 two months ago. The expectation is that they will rise still higher.

Such is the volatility of today's markets. We do not know how far food prices might go, nor how far they could eventually fall. But one thing is certain: We have gone from an era of plenitude to one of scarcity. Experts agree that food prices are not likely to return to the levels the world has grown accustomed to anytime soon.

Consumers are grumbling even in the wealthy nations of Europe and the United States. But imagine the situation of those living on less than $1 a day -- the "bottom billion," poorest of the world's poor. Most live in Africa, and many might typically spend two-thirds of their income on food.

In Liberia recently, I heard how people have stopped purchasing imported rice by the bag. Instead, they increasingly buy it by the cup -- because that's all they can afford. It is worth remembering that Liberia's descent into chaos began, in 1979, with food riots.

... It might be tempting to let the markets work their magic. If prices go up, the thinking goes, supply will too.

But we live in the real world, not the world of economic theory. In Kenya's Rift Valley, the bread basket of East Africa, farmers are planting only a third of what they did last year.

Why, when you would think higher prices would prompt them to plant more? Because they cannot afford fertilizer, which is also skyrocketing in price.
(9 May 2008)

How potatoes could save the world
Terry Wade, The Scotsman
AS WHEAT and rice prices surge, the humble potato is being rediscovered as a nutritious crop that could cheaply feed an increasingly hungry world.
Potatoes, which are native to Peru, can be grown at almost any elevation or climate: from the barren, frigid slopes of the Andes to the tropical flatlands of Asia. They require very little water, mature in as little as 50 days and can yield between two and four times more food per hectare than wheat or rice.

... the United Nations named 2008 the International Year of the Potato, calling the vegetable a "hidden treasure".

Governments are also turning to the tuber. Peru's leaders, frustrated by a doubling of wheat prices in the past year, have started encouraging bakers to use potato flour to make bread. Potato bread is being given to schoolchildren, prisoners and the military, in the hope the trend will catch on.

Supporters say it tastes just as good, but not enough mills are set up to make potato flour. "We have to change people's eating habits," Ismael Benavides, Peru's agriculture minister, said. "People got addicted to wheat when it was cheap."

Even though the potato emerged in Peru 8,000 years ago near Lake Titicaca, Peruvians eat fewer potatoes than people in Europe: Belarus leads the world in consumption, with each inhabitant devouring an average of 376lb a year.

China, a huge rice consumer that historically has suffered devastating famines, has become the world's top potato grower, while in sub-Saharan Africa, the potato is expanding more than any other crop. India has told food experts it wants to double potato production in the next five to ten years.

... The potato, sometimes dismissed as a fat-filled food, is actually nutritious. A medium-sized potato has about 110 calories, contains almost no fat and is full of vitamins and complex carbohydrates, which release energy over time. Potatoes come in many colours - not just white - and contain antioxidants, which are thought to help prevent cancer.
(16 April 2008)
Related at The Independent: Let them eat spuds: potatoes - the world's new staple?.

My wife delights in quoting her high school nutrition teacher: "Our much-maligned friend, the potato." It looks as if she was right. -BA

Broken food system
Patricia Donovan, University of Buffalo Reporter (New York)
Policy-makers, media blamed for global food crisis
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A food security expert at UB says the worldwide food crisis is a direct result of the choices made by policy-makers and the lack of attention paid to the food system and its relationship to global warming and fossil fuels.

“The current food shortage and rising prices of agricultural products are very serious problems and are going to get worse now that the use of agricultural land is encouraged for ethanol production,” says Samina Raja, assistant professor of urban and regional planning, School of Architecture and Planning.

As an active member of the national American Planning Association’s Steering Committee on Food Systems Planning, Raja works to bring the importance of community and regional food planning to the attention of practicing planners nationwide.

“Although food insecurity in the world isn’t a new phenomena, what is new is that the press and many policy-makers-the very people who did not attend to the crisis as it developed and therefore contributed to it-are now alarmed by food shortages, riots and soaring prices,” Raja says.

... Raja points out what some may not remember: Once upon a time, the vegetables, flour, meat, fruits and dairy products Americans consumed came from family farms located in local rural areas outside our cities.

“Today’s conventional food system,” she says, “requires the same products to travel roughly 1,500 miles from farm to fork. The transportation of food over long distances requires enormous quantities of fossil fuels and causes severe damage to the environment and contributes mightily to global warming.”

Raja also lays blame for the international food crisis at the door of agricultural policy-makers at the World Bank and international development agencies who continue to promote a deeply entrenched industrialized corporate mode of food production, processing and delivery sustained by the use of massive amounts of fossil fuel.
(8 May 2008)

Food fears
Michael McCarthy, Vancouver Courier
As oil and climate change drives up food prices around the world, Vancouverites will not be immune from the escalating squeeze on pocketbooks
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At Dollar Foods on Commercial Drive, manager Quoc On is busy in the back supervising the arrival of a food shipment. The aisles are jammed with hungry customers, the lineup at the cashier is deep, and outside the front door boxes of fresh fruit and vegetables are piled high on the sidewalk, the fresh produce sparkling in the warm springtime sun. The scene is one of affluence and abundance, yet behind this façade a crisis is brewing that may signal the end of the Age of Endless Abundance. At the very least, the days of cheap food imported from all around the world at very low prices may be about to end.

At the cash register, customers are quietly loading bags of Thai rice onto the counter. Sharp-eyed consumers who read newspaper headlines have learned the price of rice has risen sharply in the past few weeks. Some rice exporting countries in Asia have slapped a ban on exports because rice is not just a food staple in those countries; a bowl of rice is the difference between life and death. When the price of rice doubles, people die.

However, the same elements at play in Asia--and now spreading to Africa and South America--will soon affect Vancouver. The global food chain is disintegrating in direct relation to the global rise in the price of oil.

"Lots of our customers seem to know about the rice crisis," says On. "They know about the increase in food prices, and rising fuel prices, too."

... The reasons for the huge global increases in the cost of basic foodstuffs are as intricate as the links that comprise the earth's food chain. Truly we are living in a global village where the food we eat is as likely to come from Cambodia as Chilliwack or California. That the chain is starting to become unlinked requires an understanding of the supply system itself, and the huge forces acting upon it, and the fact that Vancouverites are not safe from those global forces.
(9 May 2008)
Long analysis.