Civil Eats

Energy security is an increasingly important—and sometimes overlooked—aspect of food security. Producing food requires considerable fuel, electricity, heat or cooling, and inputs that have embedded energy costs. Every step from seed to stomach requires energy, and has a carbon cost. And in thinking about a secure, decentralized food system we have to think about how to meet those energy needs in secure, affordable and local ways.

This idea is nothing new to farmers and ranchers, for whom the bottom line considerations of energy use are an essential part of their business calculations. Read More

I’ve heard stories of making granola bars under the heat of the sun, and I’ve seen advertisements attempting to sell $250 solar ovens. But developed and developing countries alike are proving that a scaleable solution for widespread use and availability of the sun’s heat has the potential to greatly affect our daily cooking practices and the concepts behind food production. In America, restaurants are experimenting with solar panels for operational use, even though the cost is still high for harnessing the power of the sun. And in some developing countries, solar cooking has come to mean survival–its value as an energy resource is vital to human sustenance. Read More

The new documentary screening around the country The Economics of Happiness says everything it should say. Ambitiously, it attempts to explain the many downsides of economic globalization, while offering actual alternatives that the viewer can get behind, and (for a movie just a little over an hour long) it does this concisely and without too much dreadful hyperbole or schmaltz. For this I am thankful. All too often, environmental themed movies rely on over-exaggerations, simplifications, and a preaching-to-the-choir sentimentalities–which result in a product unlikely to perform the educational (that’s entertainingly educational) role it was made for. Read More

Proposition 23–an effort by out-of-state oil companies to kill California’s landmark clean energy law–has been among the most hotly debated ballot initiatives this election. As a Central Valley rice, almond and wheat farmer, it’s one whose outcome will affect my business. Here’s why: Read More

If correctly identifying your problems is the first step to solving them, I’m afraid we’ll all be peeling tar balls off our heels before we get a handle on the BP blowout.

“Please stop calling it a leak!” Bill KcKibben pleaded at the Slow Money conference in Shelburne, Vermont last month. A leak, after all, suggests a kind of dribble. A spill sounds like something you might mop up with a towel.

“We’ve punched a hole in the bottom of the ocean,” McKibben added. “Is a knife wound a ‘blood leak?’”

We’re hitting some fundamental limits, he added, citing the ‘thousand year’ storms that seem to come every four or five years now, and the fact that we’re facing the hottest year on record, so far (and that was before the heat wave that hit the whole Eastern seaboard this past week).

Yes, we need to plug that hole in the ocean floor before the entire Gulf becomes one gigantic dead zone. But there’s an onshore contaminant threatening our future, too, and it’s called fast money. Read More

With the documentary movie Gasland making its national debut on HBO just last week, the nation is now more aware of the environmental issues natural gas fracking poses. What you might not have heard is that many farmers in upstate New York fear the impact that natural gas drilling will have on our grasslands and water, and ultimately our livelihoods. It is an issue that could threaten New York City’s food shed but many do not realize what is at stake. Read More

It’s morbidly painful to see ecological disaster strike at southern Louisiana—again. At risk now are the bayous—and all that delicious Gulf seafood.

Big Fisherman Seafood restaurant owner Henry Pynot in New Orleans believes shrimp prices will go up 50 to 75 percent [VIDEO]. The Crescent City Farmer’s Market in uptown New Orleans exhausted its supply earlier this month and markets as far as Florida were selling four times more seafood than usual as customers seemed to grab what may be their last. Gulf Coast fishermen—300,000 of them—catch at least 30 percent of the U.S. seafood supply, which begets around $2.4 billion annually to the region. Although most fishing occurs west of the oil spill, well-known New Orleans chef John Besh is very concerned about the long-term effect on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, Texas, and the Florida panhandle.

The bayou is French for slow-moving waterway. In Louisiana, it’s an offshoot of the Mississippi River that forms a delta at the river’s mouth.

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Yesterday, activists with Rainforest Action Network (RAN) occupied the executive offices of Cargill, the nation’s largest privately held agribusiness company. Cargill is also the nation’s largest importer of palm oil, a tropical fruit extract commonly found in thousands of consumer products, from soaps and detergents to breakfast cereals and biofuels. The protest comes on the heels of RAN’s newly released and highly damning report which documents systematic failures by Cargill to comply with international palm oil standards led by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). The report also documents rainforest destruction on two plantations that Cargill owns, but has allegedly hidden from the Indonesian government and its customers. In a statement, Cargill denied the claims, saying it produces palm oil responsibly on its own plantations and is working toward sustainable production from its suppliers. RAN issued its own statement today, in response to Cargill’s denial, standing by their position that Cargill is destroying rainforests. Read More

Oil is history, and food as it is currently produced and eaten is going the way of the dinosaurs, too. So what are our real options for producing food to feed our population? A great one hour film called A Farm for the Future from the BBC seeks to answer this very question by investigating some of the methods for making real sustainable changes to a livestock farm in Devon, England belonging to the narrator of the film, Rebecca Hosking. There are no easy answers, but she discovers one root of unsustainability on farms is the energy we put into working against nature. While speaking to permaculture expert Patrick Whitefield, she asks if what he is proposing is “to design the energy out, or design the labor out” of the system. To which he replies yes, on both counts. Read More

I grew up in Woodland Hills, Calif., a nominally pastoral, petrocentric Los Angeles suburb, so peak oil prognosticator James Howard Kunstler’s dim view of our car-crazed culture really resonates with me.

Kunstler’s relentless skewering of suburbia, and his penchant for apocalyptic predictions have landed him a reputation as a cranky Cassandra. But as Ben McGrath observed while strolling around Saratoga Springs with Kunstler for a recent New Yorker piece, “Far from the image of the stereotypical Chicken Little, he was more like an amiable town crier whom the citizenry regarded fondly, if a bit skeptically.”

So, when a friend and I found ourselves headed to Kunstler’s neck of the woods for a conference recently, we arranged to have dinner with Saratoga Springs’ resident soothsayer. Contrary to his contrarian reputation, Kunstler proved to be an affable, upbeat guy. Read More

The short flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco is prime viewing time to grasp the enormity of the state’s agricultural land across the Central Valley. But the last time I made the trip the predictable green and brown patchwork of farmland was interspersed with glittering squares: solar panels. I thought to myself, could there really be, in the middle of rural California? As if solar panels had been planted alongside the bounty of alfalfa and almonds, no more or less than any other crop. I grinned from my window seat. But then I started thinking: can solar panels be treated like just another agricultural crop? What is the significance of incorporating them into an agricultural landscape, particularly as one as lucratively productive as California’s Central Valley? Read More

The sale and consumption of “bottled water” continues to grow at an astounding rate throughout the world. This is especially so in the USA. If you have ever traveled well off the beaten path in a third world country, the lack of safe and reliable water for drinking, bathing, and cooking is always a concern. And with good reason—for much of the world, this is a very real problem that leads to countless cases of disease and even death, the likes of which you would not expect in this country. Read More

The Peak Oil story was never about running out of oil. It was about the collapse of complex systems in a world economy faced by the prospect of no further oil-fueled growth. It was something of a shock to many that the first complex system to fail would be banking, but the process is obvious: no more growth means no more ability to pay interest on credit… end of story, as Tony Soprano used to say. 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

It’s going to be a crowded field for those facing issues in the science of food, farming, ecology, and nutrition in the new administration. As Angie Tagtow points out, the incoming Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, and the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Daschle, are going to be forced to work closely together to form important policy for the years ahead.

But they are not alone – a handful of other high-profile thinkers will also be creating important policy decisions that will have implications for food, and it will be anyone’s guess how Obama will manage this diverse stable of talent. Read More

Van Jones was at the First Congregational Church in Oakland last Tuesday, ostensibly to talk about his green-for-all campaign, the subject of his recent bestseller The Green Collar Economy. But seeing as how he was back home, in the heart of his own congregation and community, he reveled in the show he put on and it was like we all had backstage passes. With his wife and two children in the audience and surrounded by old friends, including Ada de Leon (who read some of her poetry) and Alice Walker (who didn’t), he took us from bouts of hilarity to sober reflection and back again with memories of how this extended East Bay family had braved the last few decades and especially the last eight years.  “Barack Obama didn’t create this movement,” he said at one point, “this movement created the opportunity for Barack Obama!” He noted that joy over the Obama victory was twinned with outrage over the passage of Prop 8, adding that it “has an expiration date,” since voters 35 and younger overwhelmingly opposed it. But no one in this group is going to sit by passively and wait for justice to be served up to them. Read More

Gary Paul Nabhan, PhD., is an Arab-American writer, lecturer, food and farming advocate, rural lifeways folklorist, and conservationist whose work has long been rooted in the U.S./Mexico borderlands region he affectionately calls “the stinkin’ hot desert.” This poem was written for Slow Food Nation and will be read at Changemakers Day. Read More