Susan Reimer wrote a piece on the Garden Variety blog of the Baltimore Sun about the objections that people have when it comes to school gardens. I’m pretty sure that the mentions were specific to the Chicago area. In my humble opinion the reasons that people gave were ridiculous. Before we get to the reasons I want to express my beef with the fact that the food grown in the school gardens can’t be used in the cafeteria’s to feed the kids. According to the article: Monica Eng of the Chicago Tribune describes the garden...
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Organic. It’s a terms that’s thrown around like crazy, but what the hell does it mean? What is organic gardening? What is organic food? There is the USDA definition of organic, which you can try to decipher and understand because it’s as useful as the last Juvenile album. I do know what organic, living organically and gardening organically mean to me. To me there are many things that factor into being organic. Some we have more control and access to than others. We can’t really decide that we don’t like...
I think the public school system needs to be called out on their hypocrisy when it comes to nutrition and education. Jamie Oliver said it best when it comes to food and what’s going on, “You can’t scream about bad health on one hand and then strategically feed them crap everyday on the other.” That is what pretty much what happens in the school system when it comes to food and food education. I am not saying that it is the sole responsibility of the education system to educate kids on food, the parents are just...
There was a post on CNN.com called Organic produce – when is the splurge worth it? The title in and of itself is ridiculous that to consider buying unsprayed produce that hasn’t been treated with any chemicals as being a splurge. It shows how disconnected we have become from associating real food with health. A licensed dietician, Sonia Angel, reported that organic produce isn’t significantly more nutritious than conventionally grown produce. She does say that organic is safer because it’s pesticide free. I don’t...
Maria Rodale recently wrote post on her Maria’s Farm Country Kitchen blog titled A Harvest of Healing. It was a beautifully written post about how there is more to gardening than just the harvest. The harvest is great, but it’s not everything. The one quote from the post that stuck with me was: With gardening, we harvest more than food and flowers; we harvest health and healing. She goes on to talk about the physical aspects that are involved in gardening – weeding, planting, carrying water, shoveling. So gardening helps...
I have already given you plenty of reasons to start growing your own food and am gonna give you another. In reading an article on Grist.org about urban agriculture, I learned that, “If some sort of natural disaster or terrorist attack were to shut down New York City’s food supply chain, our supermarket shelves would reportedly be picked clean within three days. Other U.S. cities aren’t any better prepared for such emergencies, thanks to our fuelish dependence on a globalized food system.” That is pretty nuts. I...
One of the things that I was most surprised during my trip to Costa Rica was how little the restaurants used locally grown produce. It became even more apparent to me how we have lost touch with our food. There were coconut trees nearly everywhere that you could turn. Yet it was impossible to go into a restaurant and get fresh coconut water. Some of the restaurants actually had signs saying that they were out of coconut water. All they had to do was go outside and pick up a coconut off the ground. The trees were steps outside of their...
