What is Future of Fish? What unique role are you trying to play?

Future of Fish is a nonprofit innovation hub for the seafood industry. We identify and help entrepreneurs whose market-based ideas have the potential to disrupt the seafood industry practices that result in widespread overfishing. We’re trying to find the confluence of good-for-business and good-for-our-oceans and help those ideas get traction in the supply chain.

Why is seafood often the forgotten story of the food movement?

The history and experience of fishing is less accessible to people than that of farming. We can see the effects of industrial farming on the land and in our communities more readily than we can see the effects of factory fishing — most of which are underwater. It’s also true that much of the activist movement around fish issues has targeted saving charismatic species, like sea turtles, whales, and dolphins. Concerns about overfishing have been led mainly by marine scientists, who are often myopically concerned with fishery health.

The failure to illuminate the important connections to human health, livelihoods, community resilience, or energy consumption precludes the general public from relating to the problem on a visceral level. We are fundamentally self-interested beings — we learn about the value of environment through our lens of understanding how it affects us.

CONTINUES IN PERSPECTIVES >

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snP40-unO0A

Ready for your next trip to the supermarket? Here are some tips to make you a savvy shopper:

• Shop along the edges: Fresh fruits, vegetables, and other whole ingredients are placed around the edges of most supermarkets. Skip the center aisles where junk food and processed goods are placed.
• Look at labels: Stay away from foods with lots of ingredients – especially ones you can’t pronounce!
• Shop at a farmers’ markets: Whenever possible, buy directly from your local farmer to get fresh, seasonal and nutritious foods.
• Buy real food: As Pollan suggests, don’t eat anything your grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.

What are your secrets for smart food shopping? Join the conversation on Facebook.

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Anna Lappé sets out to bust food myths, and shares her vision for a good food future.

What inspired the Food Mythbusters project?

For more than ten years I’ve been talking about sustainable food and farming with people across the country — from hipster Brooklyn to small-town Montana. But no matter who I was speaking to, people shared some core questions: Can we really feed the world with sustainable agriculture? Doesn’t good food just cost too much? Don’t people just really want to eat junk food — who are we to say otherwise?

It didn’t take me long to realize that these questions — these doubts about the benefits of sustainable food and the true costs of industrial agriculture — were doubts we have in part because of deliberate marketing campaigns by the food industry itself. Marketing campaigns that are designed to shape what we think we know about food.

The food industry — chemical companies, agribusiness, agricultural pharmaceuticals, food processors and more — spend billions every year on marketing. And while I don’t have that kind of budget, I do have some powerful allies — great food, farming and labor groups who wanted to help spread the real story about our food.

So together with some great organizational partners, we’re creating Food MythBusters: a one-stop shop to get your burning questions about food answered through short films, Q&As with experts, and links to essential research.

CONTINUES IN PERSPECTIVES >

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What is the vision for the Dreaming New Mexico: Food and Farming project?

Peter Warshall: Dreaming New Mexico is a process more than a vision. It is a process in which all players involved in producing and consuming food take time off from the grind and politics to ask: What is it I really want? What do I deeply desire? Why did I get into this? What does my dream and success look like? It is a kind of sanctuary from everyday headaches, maybe even a purification to re-discover one’s original desire.

What is an agro-ecoregion? Why is this such an important frame of reference?

Peter Warshall: When you sit down and say grace or gobble a burger, can you trace in your mind the ingredients that will soon became your flesh and blood? All dreams about healthy food and sustainable agriculture must actually start with some tract of Earth. What soils and water grew the food? Who grew it? Dreaming New Mexico calls these landscapes “agro-ecoregions.”

Agro-ecoregions are crucial to the future of local foodsheds because they help each region define what it can produce each season and what it needs to import. They deconstruct arbitrary county and state boundaries and let us, once again, see how diverse landscapes support us in varied but crucial ways. Visit our website to see New Mexico’s six agro-ecoregions and our Methods section on how to define your own.

CONTINUES IN PERSPECTIVES >

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKA-n8G9xhQ

Just like music, the same few food ingredients can provide inspiration for a variety of inventive dishes. Each dish expresses a certain mood, origin, taste, and personality. How is food like music to you?  Join the conversation on Facebook.

Here are some ideas for how music and art might inspire your experience with food:

• Be creative: Allow cooking to be an outlet for creativity and expression – have fun with it! Try cooking with lots of different colors, textures, and spices. What are some other ways you can experiment in the kitchen?
• Keep it simple: As Jamie says, some of the best tracks have simple, catchy beats. Simple recipes with wholesome ingredients can make for delicious meals. Try preparing a tasty meal with as few ingredients as possible, and discover how many meal variations you can come up with.
• Listen to music: What is the soundtrack of your meals? Is there music that would enhance your experience of preparing and eating food?

The post Video: Jamie Oliver, “Food is Like Music” appeared first on Nourish: Food + Community.

Nikki began her work in social justice through the foster care system in Southern California. She was a part of Slow Food USA in Brooklyn, NY, and she co-founded Live Real, a national collaborative of food movement organizations committed to strengthening and expanding the youth food movement in the United States.

Tell us about the work and mission of People’s Grocery.

Nikki Henderson: People’s Grocery is a health and wealth organization whose mission is to improve the health and economy of West Oakland through the local food system. We do that through health projects like our community garden and our partnership with Highland Hospital, and food enterprises like our grocery store spinoff, People’s Community Market; our Grub Box Program; and microenterprises and partnerships with leaders through our Growing Justice Institute.

What is food justice and why does it matter?

Nikki Henderson: Food justice is the belief that healthy food is a human right, so everyone has an inherent right to access healthy, fresh food. Access is a mixture between location, affordability, and cultural appropriateness. Food justice is important for everyone because food is culture. Food is your family. Food is part of how we communicate with each other; it’s how we share our love. Being able to enjoy and prepare food that actually nourishes the body and keeps us healthy is connected to our ability to stay sane as human beings.

The concept of food sovereignty is a global concept, and the concept of food justice is a local concept within America. This is key, because the global peasant farmer movement is huge, and it’s something that people see as being completely necessary and non-negotiable. The right of people to control their own food, the farmer legacy, is a priority in every culture. In different parts of the world, if someone asks, “What are you famous for?” the answer is often, “Our music and our food.”

CONTINUES IN PERSPECTIVES >

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Douglas is a filmmaker, photographer, and the author of “SLOW: Life in a Tuscan Town,” published by Welcome Books. The award-winning book features a preface by the founder of Slow Food, Carlo Petrini, and an introduction by Alice Waters.

What is the Lexicon of Sustainability project?

Douglas Gayeton: You can’t expect consumers to change their buying habits at the grocery store, or for farmers to suddenly grow their crops in a more responsible manner, if they aren’t aware of the most basic sustainable principles. In most cases it isn’t that people “need” to be educated. It’s that they “want” to be educated. They’re aware that their food system has become centralized, industrialized, and bureaucratized, and that it’s time for them to fix the system themselves.

They’re looking for information. For inspiration. And for a community of like-minded thinkers. This is how revolutions happen … but first, you need the words.

You’ve written that “words are the building blocks for new ideas.” Why is language so important in growing the food movement?

Douglas Gayeton: In communities across the USA, people are now talking about rebuilding their local food systems. The tools required for the job include words, because any social movement must first educate and enlighten before catalyzing change. We need these words to educate not only consumers, but food producers, too. Responsibly grown food is vital for our security and for our quality of life.

CONTINUES IN PERSPECTIVES >

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Arden is executive director of the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance, an advocacy organization for school gardens and outdoor classrooms. She is the director of educational gardens for the San Francisco Unified School District, and a founding partner of Bay Tree Design, a landscape architecture firm.

What does a successful school garden program look like?

Arden Bucklin-Sporer: A successful school garden has many pillars of support and is used frequently — day in, day out. It’s supported by the principal and used by a variety of teachers, and kids flow in and out. All this activity is managed by a garden coordinator, who acts like an air traffic controller. Parents host weekend work parties to build the more complex garden structures. End-of-the-year celebrations might take place there. All the sustainability efforts of the school, such as composting or water use, are modeled in the garden. It’s really a hub for community building.

How do school gardens help expand students’ understanding of the story of their food?

Arden Bucklin-Sporer: Astonishingly, we no longer really understand where our food comes from. Most of our food is a plant’s bud, flower, or root. It’s something we’ve forgotten about for a couple of generations. Illustrating these concepts in a garden is revelatory for people. You see the “a-ha!” moments, when they really understand what part of the plant their food comes from and the purpose of that biology. A school garden serves as a living laboratory to demonstrate the principles of sustainability.

CONTINUES IN PERSPECTIVES >

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Danielle, an expert on sustainable agriculture, recently spent a year traveling to more than 25 countries across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia looking at environmentally sustainable ways of alleviating hunger and poverty. She worked for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic and also currently serves as the food security advisor for Citizen Effect (an NGO focused on sustainable development projects worldwide).

What is the “Nourishing the Planet” project and what inspired it?

Danielle Nierenberg: Our mission is to evaluate environmentally sustainable ways of alleviating hunger and poverty. We want to highlight things that are working on the ground that have a lot of potential to be replicated and scaled up, but need more attention, more research, and ultimately more funding and investment. The project is the result of my travels to more than 30 countries across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, looking at environmentally sustainable innovations.

What is the state of hunger and obesity in the world today?

Danielle Nierenberg: Worldwide, 1 billion people go to bed hungry, while another 1 billion suffer from health problems related to obesity. There have been several unhealthy changes in dietary and lifestyle patterns worldwide, including an increase in calories consumed, a lack of balance and diversity in diets, a lack of education about health and nutrition early in life, and a significant reduction in the amount of time dedicated to physical activity.

Meanwhile, agriculture directly contributes to food security among the world’s poorest populations, and reforms are needed to reduce poverty and hunger. In addition to those that are hungry, millions more suffer from malnutrition and a lack of a nutritious diet.

CONTINUES IN PERSPECTIVES >

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In this video, Jamie Oliver shows off unusual varieties of common vegetables, and demonstrates how cool it is to be in the know about diverse fruits and vegetables.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3icQdIVsW0

What is your favorite summer fruit or vegetable? Join the conversation on Facebook.

Variety Is The Spice Of Life

When it comes to new foods to try, the supermarket is only the tip of the iceberg. Purple potatoes, red carrots, yellow beets, and white eggplants are just a few ways to add color and variety to your dinner table. Here are a few more ideas to bring new life to your kitchen this summer.

• Taste the season: In this video from Nourish Short Films, farmer Nigel Walker, author Anna Lappé, and others discuss the fun of eating seasonally. As Anna points out, “The joy of eating seasonally is the joy of fresh produce and fresh foods. It’s that much more exciting when your favorite foods come back into season.” Head to your farmers market and try some fresh new samples today.
• Be a seasonal sleuth: With supermarkets offering strawberries and tomatoes year-round, it’s easy to get confused about what’s actually growing in your foodshed. This seasonal ingredient map from Epicurious shows you what’s in season in every state, and updates as the months change.
• Find resources: Once you discover a new vegetable, you’ll want to learn creative ways to prepare it. Type your newfound food into Foodily to find a plethora of ingredient-specific recipes, or browse the constantly updating Punchfork, if you prefer more visual inspiration. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, check out Post Punk Kitchen, and introduce yourself to the world of vegan cooking.
• Sharing is caring: Now that you’re a pro at discovering fun new foods, it’s time to share them with your friends and family. Summer is the ideal time to host a casual afternoon gathering and introduce your loved ones to the joys of the season. Brush up on your potluck etiquette and learn some hosting tips at Simple Bites. To make sure no one doubles up on nettle pasta or roasted white asparagus, use this potluck planning tool to delegate and organize your guests.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and discover something new!

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