Posts Tagged ‘Food’
Eating Locally in Dakar: Shifting the Focus
Posted in Models, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on August 10th, 2010
Source: Nourishing the Planet: Worldwatch Institute
From Reigniting an Interest in Local Food by Danielle Nierenberg:
After journalism school in Senegal, Seck Madieng worked for the government. But he wanted to do “something real. I didn’t want to be a bureaucrat.” He left his job and started AgriInfos, the only Senegalese newspaper to focus entirely on agriculture, food, and healthy diets. “I’m interested in going into villages, talking to farmers, seeing how they work, how they eat. I’m trying to understand why they are poor and why they are hungry,” says Madieng.
In 2007, Madieng, along with local chef Bineta Diallo, started the Mangeons Local (Eat Locally) project in two schools in Dakar. Their goals? To teach students how foods were made and who grew and prepared them. Most urban residents in Dakar depend on foods made not in Senegal, but from Europe.
But their lessons aren’t just theoretical, they also teach students how to cook. According to Diallo, for many students it’s the first time some students have ever prepared or cooked food. Instead of baguettes and imported canned foods, the children are learning how to cook cereals and grains, including local rice varieties, fonio (a small grain typically used in couscous), millet, and sorghum. And rather than drinking milk out of boxes imported from Amsterdam, they’re learning how good local milk can taste, as well as all of the things that can be made from dairy products, including crème, cheese, and butter.
Children are the best communication vehicles to parents, according to Madieng and Diallo. They bring the skills they learn at school home, helping to improve their families’ diets. Mangeons Local also celebrates at the end of the school year with a big party highlighting local foods that parents, students, teachers, and the community can all attend. In addition to local food and juices, they play music from Senegalese musicians and singers, including Grammy winner Youssou N’Dour and Ismael Lo, and Bill Yiakhou, who all sing about agriculture.
Mangeons Local gets some support from Slow Food International, but all the staff are volunteers, which limits the number of schools who can participate in the program.
Original article by Danielle Nierenberg.
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Bicycle-Based Coffee Service
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on July 29th, 2010
Source: Springwise
Brooklyn-based Kickstand Coffee uses two bicycles, a fold-up stand and a hand-cranked grinder to serve up sustainable hot and cold coffee at events around NY City. Kickstand’s stated goal is to provide the best possible cup of coffee to community events in NYC with the smallest environmental impact possible.
The brainchild of three baristas, Kickstand Coffee relies on two 160-pound rolling carts that are each towed to location by a custom-built bicycle, according to a report on NYDailyNews.com. Once there, the carts unfold and attach to create a 9-foot-long bar that includes everything the trio need to make coffee. Beans are hand-ground on a cup-by-cup basis, and the iced coffee is cold-brewed; only Kickstand’s hot coffee – brewed on location using specially adapted Chemex glass beakers—uses any propane or electricity. The company is working on a mini folding bicycle that customers will be able to use to grind their own beans. Pricing for Kickstand’s coffee is USD 2.50 per cup, hot or cold.
Read the Springwise article.
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Food Hub: Connecting Regional Producers & Consumers
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on July 9th, 2010
Source: Springwise
From “Site connects producers and buyers of local food“:
The locavore movement may be focusing new interest on locally produced food, but regional farmers, ranchers and fishermen continue to struggle to find a market for their products. That’s as true in the Pacific Northwest as everywhere else, which is why Portland, Ore., nonprofit Ecotrust created FoodHub.
Launched late last year, FoodHub aims to increase food trade in the Pacific Northwest by connecting food buyers of all types and sizes with local farmers, ranchers, fishermen and food manufacturers. For food sellers, FoodHub offers an easy way to let buyers know what products are available and how to make contact to complete a sale. For food buyers—including local restaurants, public schools, grocery stores, caterers, universities and hospitals—FoodHub provides a robust database of food products that are available. Customisable search features allow a buyer to hone in on the exact product specifications they’re seeking — “pallet quantities of Northwest-grown certified organic black eyed peas,” for example. After paying an annual membership fee of USD 100, both buyers and sellers can create detailed online profiles; FoodHub’s message center, meanwhile, streamlines communications.
Deborah Kane, vice president of Ecotrust’s Food & Farms program, explains:“FoodHub is designed to be a one-stop-shop for the chef who needs six dozen artichokes for a menu special, the baker looking for a local source for flour, or the large institutional food buyer whose purchasing power could significantly stabilise a family farm.”
Currently, FoodHub is open to food buyers and sellers of all types in Alaska, California, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. However, Ecotrust intends to make the FoodHub platform available to qualified partners in other parts of the country as well.
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Chemical Free Farming
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 29th, 2010
Source: The Ecologist
From “Malawi reaps the reward of returning to age-old, chemical-free farming” by Molly Stevenson:
Mr Kanjanga is a farmer from Ntcheu District in Phambala, Malawi. In 1975, having seen the deteriorating effect that the application of chemical fertilisers was having on his crops, he decided to return to the composting techniques he had seen used by his father in the 1930s. His crops started to improve so significantly that he decided to set up the Lipangwe Organic Manure Demonstration Farm (LOMADEF) in 1980 so as to share his learning with fellow farmers. He decided that the most effective way to make sure that the learning reached as many people as possible would be to train community members to act as Agricultural Advisors in their communities. LOMADEF set about carefully selecting Agricultural Advisors on the basis of their innovative approach to farming, training them in sustainable farming techniques and in communication and facilitation skills so they can pass on their learning to fellow farmers.
Eveline Msngwa, an Agricultural Advisor from Bwese village, has been working with LOMADEF for ten years. The land that she and her husband Charles own is a textbook in sustainable farming practices. In one corner of the field are three heaps of harvested maize. The first heap was planted using only chemical fertilisers, the second using a basal compost top dressed with chemical fertiliser and the third using basal compost and liquid manure. ‘As you can see each heap is more or less the same size. Our fellow farmers can clearly see that there is little to gain in using chemical fertiliser. In fact when you use chemical fertiliser you effectively make a loss because you spend more money on the crop!’
There are also a variety of crops in their field. Eveline and Charles have planted nitrogen-fixing crops such as soya, groundnuts, pigeon peas and cowpeas that replenish lost nutrients in the soil. And, instead of simply growing maize as their staple crop they are now growing cassava and sweet potatoes. As a result they are less vulnerable to crop failure and have a variety of produce to sell at the market. ‘We have made 20,000 kwa (£185) from the sale of the cassava and the sweet potato crops. We are going to invest this profit in cultivating the additional land that we have. We have also already bought goats with some of the profits and have been using the manure in maize production. We were the first family in our village to do this.’
Just as Eveline and Charles’ successes serve as an example to their fellow farmers, so LOMADEF’s efforts have helped to pave the way towards a new approach to farming at a national level. After a number of years of promoting subsidised fertiliser and hybrid seeds as the best way to increase harvests, the Malawian Ministry of Agriculture, prompted by a rise in global fertiliser prices, decided that it was time to look into different ways forward. They therefore decided to hold a national composting launch at LOMADEF and a range of government officials, NGOs, businesses and farmers made their way out to the remote farm to watch demonstrations on a range of different composting techniques.
As a representative from the Ministry of Agriculture remarked in a speech at the launch, LOMADEF has demonstrated that ‘there is a need for an intensification of soil fertility management activities especially manure-making, conservation agriculture, and agro-forestry if we are going to have a hunger free nation.’
Read the full article by Molly Stevenson.
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Double Value Coupons: Promoting fresh local food
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 15th, 2010
Source: Sustainable Cities Collective
Image: Wholesome Wave © David Keh
From “Chef to the rich, advocate for the poor” by Marc Gunther:
Can you think of a simple idea that would fight obesity, support local farmers and help the poor, all at once?
Michel Nischan and Gus Schumacher did. Nischan is an award-winning chef, cookbook author and restaurant owner. Schumacher is a longtime government official who worked for the state of Massachusetts, the World Bank and as Under Secretary for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) during the Clinton years.
Their idea? Subsidize poor people who get food stamps or benefits under the federal WIC (Women, Infants, Children) program so that their grocery dollars go twice as far at farmers’ market. Several years ago, to make it happen, they started the Wholesome Wave Foundation with the help of some well-connected friends. Wholesome Wave began working with about a dozen farm markets in Connecticut, Massachusetts and California in 2008. This year, Nischan says, the program, called Nourishing Neighborhoods, expects to operate at 160 markets in 18 states and Washington, D.C.
Among other things, Wholesome Wave is disproving the notion that poor people either don’t care or don’t know enough to buy healthy food. “The fear that some people had was that we would go into these communities, and it wouldn’t work,” Nischan said. “There was a wide assumption that people in poor communities didn’t know what to do with fresh food.” Instead, he said: “Everywhere we go, people flood the farmers’ markets and buy fresh fruits and vegetables. They actually buy with a vengeance.”
Libraries as Virtual Supermarkets: Food Security Innovation
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 11th, 2010
Source: Sustainable Cities Collective
From “Libraries as food desert oases” by DNaim:
NPR reports on a clever strategy being rolled out in Baltimore to provide fresh food to underserved neighborhoods. It’s being dubbed the Virtual Supermarket. Two library branches have been selected in urban locations where the nearest grocery store is basically inaccessible to anyone without a vehicle. The city public health department helps residents place food orders online using the library computers, and the bag of groceries is delivered [to the library for pick-up] the next day from a local grocer.
This program is up and running with the help of a $60,000 federal stimulus grant. According to the NPR story, there are currently a couple of dozen subscribers. This number may grow as people wade into the technology.
There’s so much to appreciate about this innovative approach to food access. Delivery costs are held down, because the the orders are aggregated for each day and condensed into a single drop-off point. Libraries get to broaden their horizons a bit, a trend Wendy Waters discussed a little while ago. Some more assistance with computers can only help knock the digital divide down a notch. And, of course, more people get to enjoy the nutritional food at fair prices most of us take for granted.
The department plans to expand Virtual Supermarket to other sites with additional programming, such as cooking demonstrations. Apparently, other cities are watching all of this very closely. Philadelphia has long been known for being on the forefront of food access solutions, but it looks like Baltimore is finding it’s own niche.
Read this article by DNaim on Sustainable Cities Collective, or the original article on NPR.
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FoodLoop: Design-Led Social Enterprise
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on June 10th, 2010
Source: Worldchanging
From “Food Loop: A Design-Led Social Enterprise for Localized Composting” by John Thackara:
Cities such as London face three environmental and social challenges. First, biodegradable waste in landfill causes methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Second, although about 50 percent of some inner city London boroughs are comprised of flats, many councils struggle to carry out waste separation in any dwelling that is not a single house. And third, about 20,000 people live in temporary accommodation for homeless people – but their social needs are so acute that of the 79 percent who want to return to work, only seven percent of them manage to do so.
FoodLoop is a design-led social enterprise for the localized composting of biodegradable waste on housing estates. It greens housing estates, and transforms unused and often wasted spaces of inner city council housing into rich and flourishing social and agricultural spaces.
The service, which is designed to be staffed by disadvantaged people, creates compost from waste using a specially designed community composting machine, the The Rocket Composter, and provides a door-to-door service from inner-city flats. As well as dealing with waste collection and management, FoodLoop workers will learn gardening and landscaping skills, using the compost to cultivate fruit and vegetable plants on communal areas of the estate.
The first FoodLoop project is up and running on a housing estate in Camden Town in London where the service is currently being run by the East London Community Recycling Partnership. The composter was installed in September, and the team has started food planting.
FoodLoop is available to other local authorities as a blueprinted system for the localized composting of biodegradable waste on housing estates. There are also plans to launch FoodLoop, with its accumulating expertise concerning the development of services for organic waste management, in the Middle East and South East Asia.
Read the article by John Thackara via Worldchanging’s Attention Philanthropy 2010
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Compost Cab: Food Scraps Pick-Up Service
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on May 28th, 2010
Source: Springwise
…For every 50 pounds of organics the company collects, customers can receive five pounds of fresh compost and one pound of worm castings in exchange.
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Read it on Springwise:
The average American family produces more than 500 pounds of leftover organic material every year; composting not only keeps that waste out of methane-generating landfills, it also produces nutrient-rich, fertile, natural soil. Composting may be the right thing to do for the environment, but it can be hard to get around the smell and the mess—particularly for urbanites without expansive yards. Compost Cab is a new service about to launch in Washington, DC, that can be called upon to handle all the dirty details.
DC-area consumers begin by signing up online. Once it launches, Compost Cab will then provide them with a standardized bin equipped with a sturdy, compostable bag liner. Each day clients will fill the bin with their organic material, and once a week—on a reliable, fuel-efficient schedule—Compost Cab will pick up the bag, leaving behind only a clean bin with a new liner. The cost is simply USD 8 per week per bin; no long-term commitments are required. Compost Cab’s primary composting partner is Engaged Community Offshoots (ECO), a seed-stage urban farm in College Park, Md., that uses finished compost to grow natural, nutritious food for local kids.
At least as interesting is that clients who have been with Compost Cab for nine months or longer can claim some finished soil in return. Specifically, for every 50 pounds of organics the company collects from them, they can receive five pounds of fresh compost and one pound of worm castings in exchange. Those who choose not to claim their share, meanwhile, can ask Compost Cab to donate it on their behalf to ECO. Compost Cab is a production of Agricity LLC, a Washington, DC-based company focused on sustainability.
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Effective Use of Substandard Local Vegetables
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on May 14th, 2010
Source: Japan for Sustainability
The government of Kumamoto Prefecture in southern Japan has launched a project that introduces substandard agricultural products produced in the prefecture to box-lunch shops in business districts in Osaka Prefecture in western Japan. Kumamoto Prefecture’s Osaka office has led this project, called the “Mottainai Project” (‘mottainai’ literally means ‘not wasting what is valuable’), and started it in earnest in 2010.
The prefectural government began this project on a trial basis in 2008 in cooperation with a shop that sells box lunches and set meals in the same building as its Osaka office. In this shop, vegetables and fruits that used to be discarded, mainly due to scars on them or irregularities in their size, were experimentally sold at display counters that had been clear after lunchtime. These agricultural products were better received than expected, because of their low cost, tastiness, and novelty. As for tomatoes in particular, as much as five tons were sold in less than a four-month period, with sales of about one million yen (U.S.$10,870).
In this project, farmers can distribute substandard vegetables and fruits to shops in small amounts, while shops can make effective use of vacant counters, and also can use vegetables and fruits for box lunches and other meals if they are left unsold. The project is well-received, as it involves little risk for the farmers and shops and brings additional profits to both. So far, 15 local food stores and farmers have distributed such farm products to Osaka, and 38 farmers have showed an interest in doing so.
The prefectural government’s Osaka office also plans to hold a food exhibition for box-lunch shop owners to allow them to see and taste-test substandard vegetables, with the aim of enhancing the network with Kumamoto Prefecture and acquiring new vendors in the Osaka metropolitan area.
Read the full article on japanfs.
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Changing Models: Labour-Intensive Farming
Posted in Opinion by Kate Archdeacon on April 27th, 2010
Source: Worldchanging
From Out of the Demographic Trap: Hope for Feeding the World, by Fred Pearce, Yale Environment 360
In Africa and elsewhere, burgeoning population growth threatens to overwhelm already over-stretched food supply systems. But the next agricultural revolution needs to get local — and must start to see rising populations as potentially part of the solution.
“I bring good news from Machakos, a rural district of Kenya, a couple of hours drive from Nairobi. Seventy years ago, British colonial scientists dismissed the treeless eroding hillsides of Machakos as “an appalling example” of environmental degradation that they blamed on the “multiplication” of the “natives.” The Akamba had exceeded the carrying capacity of their land and were “rapidly drifting to a state of hopeless and miserable poverty and their land to a parched desert of rocks, stones and sand.”
Since independence in 1963, the Akamba’s population has more than doubled. Meanwhile, farm output has risen tenfold. Yet there are also more trees, and soil erosion is much reduced. The Akamba still use simple farming techniques on their small family plots. But today they are producing so much food that when I visited, they were selling vegetables and milk in Nairobi, mangoes and oranges to the Middle East, avocados to France, and green beans to Britain.