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Meat must be rationed to four portions a week, says report on climate change
Juliette Jowit, Guardian
People will have to be rationed to four modest portions of meat and one litre of milk a week if the world is to avoid run-away climate change, a major new report warns.

The report, by the Food Climate Research Network, based at the University of Surrey, also says total food consumption should be reduced, especially "low nutritional value" treats such as alcohol, sweets and chocolates.

It urges people to return to habits their mothers or grandmothers would have been familiar with: buying locally in-season products, cooking in bulk and in pots with lids or pressure cookers, avoiding waste and walking to the shops - alongside more modern tips such as using the microwave and internet shopping.

The report goes much further than any previous advice after mounting concern about the impact of the livestock industry on greenhouse gases and rising food prices. It follows a four-year study of the impact of food on climate change and is thought to be the most thorough study of its kind.

Tara Garnett, the report's author, warned that campaigns encouraging people to change their habits voluntarily were doomed to fail and urged the government to use caps on greenhouse gas emissions and carbon pricing to ensure changes were made.
(30 September 2008)

Real food makes a comeback: You may now kiss your local farmer
William Dietrich, Seattle Times
We look at a few of the small, local farmers who are the new heroes of the growing movement that's turning away from "industrial food" and factory farming to embrace food raised locally, humanely and with environmentally sound principles. And that tastes good, too.
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Here's a brief history of civilization:

First 5,000 years, almost everybody is a farmer.

Last 50 years, almost nobody is a farmer. The 2 percent of Americans who farm are exotic, largely invisible pixies who magically turn petrochemicals into grocery-chain products encased in plastic wrap.

Last couple of years: Everyone wants to be a farmer. Or hug a farmer. Or at least buy and eat local food that isn't sprayed, injected, modified, adulterated and transfatted into inedibility.

People are revolting against tomatoes with the resilience of tennis balls, strawberries that ship like Styrofoam, farmed salmon injected with dye, chickens that have never seen the sun, pet food from China stretched with melamine and fast food that speeds the way to a heart attack.

Our food system has become the poster child for all that seems awry in American life — the frenzy and mediocrity, the cheap, the homogenized, the excessive and the bland.
(28 September 2008)

Farming interns sow their sustainable oats
Jared Flesher, Christian Science Monitor
... I’m one of those young adults you hear about who comes down with a sudden, unshakable yearning to grow some vegetables. After graduating from college in 2005 and completing several tours of duty in fluorescent-lit offices, I decided I needed to get back to the earth. A slight difference in my case is that I went way back, about 100 years or so.

Howell Farm, located on 130 public-owned acres in Mercer County, N.J., is both a real farm and an active museum, dedicated to the preservation of American farming practices circa 1900. For the past six months I’ve had the opportunity to guide old-fashioned walking plows, seed drills, and cultivators through the fields behind 1,800-pound draft horses or one-ton oxen.

... One thing that drew me to Howell was the idea that lessons in historic farming might provide unique insight on important modern issues: global warming and peak oil, the safety and quality of our food, and the movement toward sustainability and self-sufficiency. Essentially, I wanted to travel back in time and see for myself if the good old days were as good as advertised and perhaps worth returning to.

I moved into Howell’s moldy, drafty farmhouse in late February. I started blogging about my daily experiences, using my laptop computer and the Internet connection available at the farm’s visitor center. In one of my first posts, when the nostalgia of it all was still fresh, I wrote this:

“Every act is intimate. Need breakfast? Fry an egg from the henhouse. Need firewood? Harvest a dead tree and then get to work sawing. Fertilizer for the fields? Put on your boots and start shoveling. I don’t think any animals get slaughtered for meat at Howell, but if they did, it would be an intimate affair, and the people who ate that animal would know where their burger came from.”
(24 September 2008)

Feast to celebrate the traditional harvest on the Vancouver coast
Richard Boyce, Island Lens (blog)
Qwaxsistalla stands overlooking his family’s Tekilekw. He points out three distant ridges on surrounding mountains which, when triangulated with a single wooden post, mark the corner of a root garden that has been cultivated by his family for thousands of years. He looks over a grassy floodplain thick with a multitude of colourful flowering plants.

Chief Adam Dick is sharing this knowledge with the people of Kingcome Inlet and the world by hosting a traditional harvest, pit-fire cook, and feast to celebrate this year’s crop. This type of feast, honoring the traditional ways in which his people tended, harvested, and relied upon the plants that grow on the flood plain estuary, has not been held in over seventy years.

In order to document this historic event he invited several leading academics, graduate students, and myself. Abe Lloyd, a graduate student at the University of Victoria, with the guidance of Chief Adam Dick has spent the past year cultivating the family plot of land using traditional methods.

Several small boats brought everyone down to the Tekilekw and the harvest began using traditional yew tools to dig out the edible roots used as a food source by coastal first nations.

... Known traditionally as Qwaxsistalla, he is the Clan Chief of Kawadillikala (wolf) Clan of Kingcome Inlet and was educated in the ways of his people by the Chiefs and his grandparents who sheltered him from the residential schools imposed on his generation. This system, imposed by the Canadian government, strictly prohibited indigenous language, culture, and beliefs. The knowledge that remains is now being passed on through events like this harvest celebration.

All along the coastline of British Columbia, rivers run through estuaries that were traditionally cultivated by First Nations. Many of these have been destroyed or are being threatened by development, pollution, and other human activities.
(24 September 2008)