| Our 6th Annual Living Local Expo Noon to 4pm  Free and Open to the Public No registration Required Read Flyer • Keynote Speaker - Albe Zacks, Terracycle |
For more information visit: Sustainable Lawrence – The Natural Step to an Eco-Municipality.
Winter markets: March 14, April 11 from 11am to 5pm
Inside the Community Room of
THE PRINCETON PUBLIC LIBRARY
55 Witherspoon Street
Located in the center of walkable, interesting and welcoming downtown Princeton
Outdoor weekly market on Hinds Plaza
Opens Thursday, May 16th, from 11am to 4pm
For more information, visit: Princeton Farmers’ Market – Home.
About Us
WHAT IS TAKEPART?
TakePart is a leading source of socially relevant news, features, opinion, entertainment and information – all focused on the issues that shape our lives. We’re also a community of people compelled to take action!
At the heart of everything we do is a belief that a story well told can change the world. That’s why our mission is singular: To inspire and accelerate social change by connecting content to social action.
WHAT IS THE TAKE ACTION BUTTON?
Just think: Every day, millions of people read stories around the web that make them wish they could do something about the issue they just learned about. That’s where the TakePart Take Action button comes in. It matches inspiring content to relevant and credible actions you can take to make a difference. We’ve partnered with the leading organizations across dozens of fields to deliver trustworthy actions intended for real good.
So click it, will ya? You’re already ‘liking’ and ‘tweeting’ stuff! One ‘Take Action’ click and you’re well on your way to spreading an even bigger message; one that helps make the world a better place.
TakePart is the digital division of Participant Media, the company behind important films such as An Inconvenient Truth, Waiting For Superman, Food Inc, Good Night & Good Luck, Charlie Wilson’s War, Contagion, The Help, and many others. Learn more about Participant Media.
Contact Us
TakePart on Facebook
TakePart on Twitter
Good, clean and fair food. I use these words each morning to establish a compass pointupon which to set my sights, and to prevent myself from being lulled into a false sense of everything-is-okay-ness. It’s easy to fall prey to seductive food marketing, and nobody’s mastered the propaganda better than the biotech seed industry. Dominated by a mere three players worldwide – Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta – the global market for genetically engineered GE seed has grown into a $13 billion dollar industry since its introduction in 1992 on a promise to help feed the world. But there is no free lunch. Everything has a price, and sometimes not even the smartest among us can predict what it will be. In the case of GE crop production, it’s everything we as Slow Food members hold precious and dear.Good food? Not for the farmer who pays more for patented genetically engineered seeds that claim to deliver higher yields, but don’t. Not for the livestock fed an unnatural diet of GE corn and soy. Not for the environment increasingly doused with chemical fertilizers and herbicides, something the industry claimed they’d reduce. Not for the consumer who has unwittingly been co-opted into an enormous human feeding trial. GE foods have never been tested for long-term safety in animals, humans or the environment. GE crops have, however, been great for biotech profits.Clean food? The US is the largest producer of GE crops in the world. Rather than fulfilling their promise to reduce the amount of herbicides needed to manage weeds, hundreds of millions more pounds of herbicides are being used each year and this overuse has spawned super weeds. Thanks to nature’s amazing resilience and adaptability, we’re facing deregulation of the next generation of biotech crops whose genes are stacked to confer resistance to more powerful herbicides, including 2, 4-D, one of two chemical constituents of Agent Orange, the Vietnam-era defoliant. GE crops that can produce their own insecticides, called PIPs or plant-incorporated protectants by the EPA, haven’t proven to be a silver bullet either. The corn rootworm is becoming resistant to Bt corn, a variety genetically engineered to kill the difficult to control pest, forcing the EPA to require that all growers put resistance management plans in place.Fair food? Certainly not for US consumers who are unjustly denied the basic right to know whether they’re eating genetically engineered foods, a right ironically enjoyed by China and Russia. Not for farmers who used to save seeds each year for next year’s crop, a practice prohibited under biotech seed licensing agreements. GE crops pose an ongoing threat to conventional and organic farms, which fall victim to devastating herbicide drift along with pollen and seed gene trespass from GE neighbors, forcing them to destroy contaminated crops and seeds and rendering them vulnerable to law suits for patent infringement. The power of the consumer is not to be underestimated. Some believe that labeling laws are the answer, reasoning that consumers, upon learning that the foods they’re eating are produced from crops that can withstand being doused with herbicides and/or can produce their own insecticides, will create a backlash powerful enough to force food manufacturers to abandon GMOs Genetically Modified Organisms. Proof of this hypothesis can already be seen in Kashi’s and Ben & Jerry’s pledges to remove GMOs from their US products. Many large, multinational food companies gladly manufacture Non-GMO products for European markets to avoid their labeling laws, something made possible through the segregation and identity preservation of non-GMO crops every step along the supply chain. read more The Myth of Genetically Engineered Food and How it Threatens Slow Food : Slow Food USA.
Black Market…Cheese
Brazil – 11 Feb 13. In Brazil, illegal markets aren’t confined to the usual suspects like guns, drugs or contraband. There is also a sizeable black market in cheeses: not the imported variety, but rather traditional cheeses made from raw milk by thousands of small-scale artisan producers. According to Emater, an organization for technical assistance and rural development, today nearly 40% of all artisanal cheese made countrywide is sold on the black market.
The reason is simple. For more than 50 years an outdated, severe law that was created for the large industrial producers has forced a large part of the small-scale raw-milk cheesemakers to sell their products on the black market. The law stipulates that cheese made from unpasteurized milk, must be aged at least 60 days in order to be sold in other Brazilian states. It also requires that the tables, forms and workbenches used in production be made of stainless steel, instead of the usual wood. For many of the small producers it is too costly to make the necessary changes, but it is not only an economic concern; using stainless steel in place of wood changes both the quality and the flavor of the cheeses.
via Black Market…Cheese | Food For Thought | Slow Food International – Good, Clean and Fair food..
What the closing of Kansas City’s Mercantile Exchange can teach us about how Wall Street stopped treating food like food.11 FEBRUARY, by Elizabeth RushJust off of Country Road 518 in Hopewell, New Jersey, sits Double Brook Farm. It’s run by a self-exiled New Yorker but it’s not one of those now-standard upstart farms, with roving bands of earnest college kids tending rocket and a hearty couple of ex-Brooklynites overseeing the whole grass-fed operation. Double Brook’s turn-of-the-century-barn, its grazing cattle, and its hundreds of Rhode Island Reds clucking and strutting about all belong to Jon McConaughy, a 46-year-old with an all-American face, a football player’s build, money to blow, and a beautiful wife. Last year, McConaughy exchanged a two-decade long career as a commodities trader on Wall Street for these two hundred acres.Double Brook, a small farm specializing in grass-fed meat, free range poultry, and various vegetables symbolizes one of the most unexpected turns the American economy has taken in recent years. For decades, banks have shied away from granting loans to farmers because, like restaurants, farms are considered risky investments. But the tides might be turning as the price of nearly every commodity on the face of the earth is on the rise.
read more: The Futures of Farming – Le Monde diplomatique – English edition.
The Generation That Will Turn Soil Into Gold
Italy – 21/01/2013
Around 20 years ago, the French university system was revolutionized with the aim of rejuvenating the aging teaching body, which had been causing problems not just related to employment, but also to a whole culture and vision of teaching. In a few years the system renewed itself, benefiting everyone.
Now, European agriculture is in a similar situation: few operators, with a high average age, a culture tied to past decades and scant prospects for the future. Now, add to this the increasingly depressing statistics on youth unemployment. It would seem like a classic case of putting two and two together: agriculture needs young people and young people need work. It seems logical that the first concern of policies should be to assist young people (but also those in their 40s and 50s who have been stagnating without a job for years or who have recently lost a position previously considered “safe”) get into agriculture.
Attempts are being made by some. For example, two graduates from the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo. One, Nicola del Vecchio, returned to Molise to start a business on his family’s land, and the other, Carlo Fiorani, went back to Lombardy to restart an abandoned farm based on criteria of sustainability. I don’t know when they will start to break even, but I know that seeing them sell their products (bread, vegetables, fruit, cheeses and cured meats) or offer them for tasting and hearing the pride, mixed with amazement, in their voices when they say “I made this” gives me a sense of a solid future being built with tangible, extraordinary efforts, as well as courage and audacious dreams, in this era in which dreaming can be seen as an activity for losers.
Among the young people, some start from zero: no farming family behind them, no land, no capital. Sometimes even no skills, but plenty of curiosity, passion, faith, humility and gratitude towards anyone who can help out, teach, join in a network. Perhaps this is the ace up the sleeve of the younger generation: they network together, ask for training and information, use neighbors or social networks, and in the end they manage to work out why they shouldn’t have pruned when they did or why they shouldn’t work the bread in that way. And most of all they know many different things and decide to dedicate themselves to agriculture, bringing what they know and receiving whatever anyone wants to teach them. The new economy is strengthened when these young farmers know how to work throughout the whole production chain.
In order to respond to their needs, in the coming months the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo will be starting apprenticeship courses for cured meat producers, microbrewers, bread bakers and cheese agers.
Because it is by taking food as a starting point that we can change the world, improving the environment, our health and the quality of life for everyone.
Carlo Petrini
From La Repubblica, January 18, 2013
via The Generation That Will Turn Soil Into Gold | Focus on | Slow Europe – Our Idea of Europe.
Terhune Orchards Read & Explore Program: Animal Tracks
Terhune Orchards – (Princeton, New Jersey)
Terhune Orchards Read and Explore Program is our winter education series, following the popular seasonal Read and Pick Program. Our second Read and Explore program is Animal Tracks on Tuesday, February 5 at 10am. We will read two books including Owl Moon. After story time, we will make bird feeders with wild bird seed to take home and help the birds through winter. Weather permitting, we will explore the farm to look for some real animal tracks.
Everyone is welcome. Please call 609-924-2310 to register. Registration is requested. The fee is $5.00 per child.
via Terhuneb Orchards Read & Explore Program: Animal Tracks – LocalHarvest.
Terhune Orchards will host the Wassailing party on Sunday, January 27th 1:00pm – 4:00pm with activities, including singing, dancing and playing of primitive instruments, toasts of hot cider and placing gifts of cider-soaked bread in the tree branches while chanting the lively words of praise and New Year. Wassailing is an old English tradition where people would gather in the apple orchard and perform rituals to drive away the evil spirits and ensure a successful apple crop next year. Warm yourself next to our bonfire (marshmallow roasting included) or in our store. Farm wagon rides, weather permitting. Live music will be performed all afternoon in the farm market. The festivities are free and open to the public, young and old.
Call 609-924-2310 or visit www.terhuneorchards.com for more information For a list of all our events see: http://terhuneorchards.com/event_calendar.html
via Wassailing the Apple Trees at Terhune Orchards – LocalHarvest.
Tickets for Saturday the 26th and Sunday the 27th will be available at the door.
Join us for our 23rd Annual Winter Conference, Building on a History or Innovation in the Garden State. New Jersey’s largest agricultural & food conference featuring two days of classes and nationally recognized speakers in sustainable and organic agriculture.
23rd Annual Food & Agriculture Winter Conference
Building on the History of Innovation in the Garden State
Saturday & Sunday, January 26 – 27, 2013
Brookdale Community College | Lincroft, NJ
Presentation Schedule Now Available at nofanj.org/schedule
Register Here: NOFA-NJ Winter Conference Tickets