Civil Eats

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed that it’s gotten more and more difficult for me to get a steady supply of California oranges for juice at my cafe. I keep getting offered oranges from Florida, from Texas, and from Mexico. I have nothing inherently against any of those locations, and wish them well with their citrus crop, but I’d prefer to buy what’s in my home state. Read More

Amidst all the hubbub about last year’s Farm Bill, which healthy food advocates criticized for maintaining the commodity subsidies that make “Big, Unhealthy Ag” profitable, young farmers-to-be might have missed a few small but significant changes worth celebrating. Read More

Sometimes things just get a little too serious, especially when it comes to the issues we often discuss here on Civil Eats. If you ever feel that way at times then here’s a demented solution to your conundrum. Go out and buy the glorious The Devil’s Food Dictionary: A Pioneering Culinary Reference Work Consisting Entirely of Lies (Written by the demented mind of by Barry Foy with devilish illustrations by John Boesche.) Billed as the “most unreliable food book you’ll ever own,” this beguiling little volume will surely help to put a smile on your face even in the worst of times.

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As new peanut butter products are added to the recall list, more public school lunch programs are being red-flagged. Add South Carolina, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Oregon and Texas to the list of states whose school cafeterias received products that originated from the salmonella-tainted Peanut Corporation of America. Read More

Rain is pounding San Francisco when I visit Kate’s house. We connected online, through a neighborhood group, and I’m stopping by to check out her hens because perhaps foolishly I’m considering getting some of my own. I’ve been puzzling over whether urban hens are pets or part of a living pantry. I have no idea what to expect. But visiting real birds seems like a good enough start. Read More

On the heels of Yoplait’s announcement that they’re going rbGH-free, Dannon is now saying that its entire product range in the U.S. will be free of the much criticized dairy cow artificial growth hormone by the end of this year. As reported here, Dannon, like Yoplait, is citing consumer demand, rather than health concerns, for this change in policy. Read More

I’ve always admired honeybees for their elegant cooperation, and of course because they make more honey than they need out of sheer industriousness, which I love to eat.  So I was excited when I heard that I could learn to keep bees myself, in the city. (after the jump: how to build a hive) Read More

It seems you can’t turn around these days without hearing someone reiterate the same basic message about the standard American diet: Simply put, we need to eat fewer animals. Read More

Omaha is a quintessential Midwestern metropolis.  It is a bustling city nestled among a sprawling rural landscape.  However, if you look you will find something changing and growing.  It is the local food movement! Read More

We call it ‘hitting the reset button’ around the office. Each February, my sustainable farming colleagues and I count the days until we make the trek across the Delaware River and on to State College for the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA) Farming for the Future Conference. It’s not so much that we’re not surrounded by great farm and food business owners in our own area, it’s that spending three days surrounded by over 2,000 like-minded folks from across the northeast is an annual reassurance that we’re on the right track. Read More

Reuters reported today that President Obama has nominated Kathleen Merrigan as the USDA Deputy Secretary of Agriculture. Finally, democracy in action! Thanks are in order to Dave Murphy, and all 87,000 of you who signed the Food Democracy Now petition, where Merrigan was one of the recommended “Sustainable Dozen.” While our fight is far from finished, we can all breathe a sigh of relief that finally eaters everywhere will have a voice at the USDA. Read More

“I do not pretend to give such a Sum; I only lend it to you. When you… meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and shall meet with another opportunity. I hope it may thus go thro’ many hands, before it meets with a Knave that will stop its Progress. This is a trick of mine for doing a deal of good with a little money.”

-Benjamin Franklin in a letter to Benjamin Webb, 1784

These are normally the times when I cook, when days start to lengthen just enough to give one hope. I have noticed some things about how it is I always can, even when money is tight, and I don’t skip joyfully to the market daily. I think cooking well and simply without worrying about costs relies on the same hard-to-swallow concept as the most trusting kind of charity: you must pay it forward. Read More

My style is more Birkenstock than Birkin bag, so Fashion Week doesn’t do much for me. You know the Shopocalypse has arrived when designers go dumpster diving for shoulder pads in the Dynasty/Dallas dustbin. Padded assets in this Grapes of Graft depression? Dust Bowl duds, à la the Waltons, would be more fitting for the hard times ahead.

But the John Patrick Organic fashion show managed to bypass both eighties excess and seventies scarcity and find fertile ground in “Green Acres,” the sixties spoof starring Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor as neophyte homesteaders. I knew this wouldn’t be a run-of-the-mill runway show because (a) it featured a “young farmer bake sale,” and (b) the invite came from Greenhorns director Severine Von Tscharner Fleming. Read More

It seems to be hardwired into the human psyche, the inclination to shout “It’s not my fault!” at the first sign of accusations. And we all know that the louder and the more frequent our declarations, the more likely it is that we actually are to blame.

Thus it goes with fisheries around the world – constantly looking for a scapegoat to blame for the decline of their fish stocks. Or in this case a “Scape-Whale.” Read More

On a cold, sunny Kentucky day at a solar-powered livestock gathering, otherwise known as the American Grassfed Association’s annual conference, I began to feel something like nostalgia. I say “something like” because it was an ironic reminiscence for a past agriculture I’ve never known yet at the same time feel connected to. Maybe this experience was not nostalgia, but instead an apparition of a sensibility returning to sow the seeds of posterity’s stake. Read More

Seed and chemical giant Monsanto and friends have lately been conducting all-out re-branding campaigns, seeking to present themselves as the answer to world hunger and the actualization of sustainability.  As an extension of this tight message control, Oxfam is hosting a panel discussion at the Asia Society in New York tomorrow at 8:30 am called “The Global Food Crisis – Time for Another Green Revolution?“  But the discussion seems like it will be rather one-sided. Read More

New Amsterdam Market is a non-profit organization dedicated to reinventing the indoor public market as a civic institution, in the City of New York. To date, we have held three seasonal market events that have drawn thousands of supporters from all five boroughs and beyond. Beginning this summer, we will hold monthly markets at a public site, whereby the aim is to increase the visibility of and demand for regional food, thus making the case to the city and the public alike for a permanent site. Read More

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told several consumer groups yesterday in a conference call that he will ask the meat industry to voluntarily follow stricter guidelines for new package labels designed to specify a food’s country of origin. If the industry does not comply, the administration will write new rules, reported the AP. Read More

The last couple sunny days have gotten me itching to buy seeds.  The skilled gardeners I know (of which I am decidedly not, having barely grown an herb garden that now looks like brittle sticks in dirt) have told me to get started with my highlighter and my catalogs – order before it gets to late and the best seeds are gone.  So I became a member of the Hudson Valley Seed Library ($20) and got ten complimentary packets of their heirlooms, most of which come from this area. Read More

My pal Alex is pretty cool. He works in Fair Trade coffee sales, lives with his wife Julie and two kids in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood, is a native San Franciscan and sings lead vocals in a band called Slippery People. He also spends some of his quality free time cooking in bulk with other families so he can spend more time with his own. Read More

The idea of community looms large in the current environmental debate. It offers a locus of action that complements both the national and international protocols and the individual behavioral changes that have, until recently, dominated the environmental agenda. Read More

Five years ago when I first told my friends in D.C. that I was moving to Minnesota, they were aghast. “But it’s so cold there, what kind of farmers’ market will they have?” I calmly reminded them that not only was there a whole other country to the north of Minnesota but that before modern appliances people all over the Upper Midwest grew their own food and survived just fine. But my confidence belied a secret fear that the shorter growing season would seriously limit offerings at a Minnesota Farmers’ Market. Read More

Growing up in suburban Oklahoma in the 1980s, I was three generations away from my farming ancestors but ate more prepackaged food than greens. Having spent the last decade improving my diet, I can now say I am ready to try my hand at growing some of my own food – on my rooftop in Manhattan. Read More

If you’ve been listening to the news in the past month, you’ve probably heard quite a bit about biofuels. Simply put, they are fuel made out of plants – principally corn and soybeans in the United States.

The new Obama administration is solidly in favor of increased biofuels production. Everyone from his Secretary of Agriculture to his Secretary of Energy has voiced their support for this policy. But the production of biofuel is by no means uncontroversial, and solidly at the center of this controversy is Dr. David Pimentel, Professor of Ecology and Agricultural Sciences at Cornell University. Read More

For farmers up and down the West Coast and for many more across the country, Eco-Farm marks the arrival of the new year. Some call it a conference, though you won’t find any dark suits or laser pointers or cafeteria food. I call it a three-day wonder. Read More

Seventeen years ago, I left a great job teaching at a prestigious northeast culinary school to move back to Iowa and be an executive chef at a Holiday Inn. It was difficult to find people, in Vermont or Iowa, who did not think I was certifiably insane. Those who thought they knew Iowa claimed, “There’s no there, there!” And those who did not asked, “Iowa? Isn’t that where they grow potatoes?” Read More

As First Lady you have the ability to set the table for what our nation’s children eat by adding a plank of food justice to your platform. Many ideas have already been sent your way, including starting an organic garden on the White House lawn and appointing a First Farmer. But where should you start?

I request that you make the health of our nation’s children your platform priority. Especially with two growing girls to nurture and nourish, you must understand that we will only be successful as a nation when all children in our country are healthy and well-fed. Read More

When I travel, I do the normal tourist things: I visit the most unusual museum I can find; I sample the local delicacies like fried ant thoraxes and cow stomach soup; I buy items of clothing in the vain hope that they will help blue-eyed red-haired me fit in. Then I visit the grocery stores. Read More

The stimulus package has passed – and despite whether you are pushing tax cuts or waving the flag of infrastructure spending, perhaps its worth reconsidering the underlying goal either version looks to achieve: growth.   I’m not the first to propose that our entire economic system is in need of an overhaul, but thinking back even further, I think we could take a leaf from Helen and Scott Nearing. Read More

California’s unfolding drought now three years running may prove to be the worst in its recorded history. Unprecedented action emerging from effective leadership is needed. This crisis will further rock the nation’s staggering economy and food supply. Farms have begun to fail, communities to crumble, food prices to rise, and more people are losing jobs and going hungry. Like the south’s hurricane Katrina, this drought provides a dry run for combined national and local response to global climate change. Read More