7 Sustainable Food Campaigns to Watch and Support in 2011

Change.org put together a great little article on the top seven campaigns to keep an eye on in the food justice world this year.  If you’re not sure you care, it may be time to start: last year saw the passing of the school lunch reform bill, and the legalization of beekeeping in several cities (including New York, word up!).  Both of these monumental victories were made possible by the tireless campaigning of non-profit organizations and passionate individuals. You’re voice matters.  Find a food campaign you’d like to support and get on the picket line.   

Seven Sustainable Food Campaigns to Watch in 2011

Copenhagen, The City of Cyclists

If the last cycle city post was the wild card, then this one’s the trump.  Copenhagen.  Perhaps the most bike-friendly city in the world, it’s called “City of Cyclists” with good reason: every day, come rain, shine or snow, a third of the population make their daily commute on the city’s brilliantly designed system of cycle paths.  That’s over 500,000 two-wheelers a day, giving rise to a bicycle culture so well developed it’s coined the term “copenhagenize” (the practice of other cities adopting Copenhagen’s bicycle infrastructure). 

The overall impact of cycle culture may be obvious here, but the beauty is in the details.  Cycle carriages are attached to the front and rear of each subway train, and the city has implemented it’s own public bicycle system, so even tourists can experience Denmark’s capital like a local.  

The real momentum behind the movement is the people.  Die-hard and fabulous, the cyclists of Copenhagen cover 1.3 million kilometers a day in the most extreme of conditions, and they do it with style.  It’s one more way cycling contributes to a more aesthetically pleasing urban landscape, proving to the masses you can help the environment, improve the quality of city life, and look damn fine doing it.  

With that, I give you copious eye candy, in the hopes it will inspire you to copenhagenize your own city.    

All photos by Mikael Colville-Andersen via Cycle Chic & Copenhagenize.com

The Gotham Green’s been slacking.  Maybe it’s the holidays.  Maybe this cold weather lends itself to lethargy.  Or maybe we’ve fallen to the bottom of the latest wintry mix cocktail, rendered utterly useless by cheap sherry and expensive cloves.

It’s likely the latter.

Whatever the excuse, we’re sorry.  We’ll try harder, and we promise not to embarrass you like that ever again.  Give us another chance, and we’ll do right by you.

Now stop being such a wet blanket.  You’re killing our buzz.

;)

Bicycling…in Bogota?!

We’re talkin’ bout bicycles, and for the first official city-focused cycling post we’ve chosen a wild card: Bogota, Colombia.  Long known as a crime capital of the world, the South American metropolis home to roughly 7 million people is shedding it’s previous notorious reputation for a more positive one.  The Bogota of 2010 is viewed as a popular tourist destination, economic heavy-weight, and most recently, as one of the most bicycle-friendly cities on the planet.

The progression of cycle culture, like so many other happy changes in the city, has been a long time coming - since 1998 to be exact, when freshly inaugurated mayor Enrique Penalosa dutifully chucked aside plans for a $15 billion dollar highway system and invested in 300 km of bicycle paths instead.  Today, that investment is paying off, with 300,000 Bogotanos making the daily commute on what has been marked as one of the most successfully integrated urban bicycle path networks ever built.

photo:citiesforpeople.net

The city pedaled the extra mile in designing bike infrastructure, giving thoughtful consideration to the needs of the average carless urbanite.  Emphasis has been placed on connecting bike paths to Bogata’s public transit system, and secure, free of charge cycle storage facilities have been conveniently installed near major bus terminals.

photo: citiesforpeople.net

And we’ve saved the best for last.  In keeping with the festive spirit that so permeates Latin American culture, the city invented Ciclovia: a weekly celebration whereby 120km of roads are shut down to cars and opened up to cyclists.  Every Sunday from 7am to 2pm, you can safely navigate the streets of Bogota by foot, skate, scooter or bike…any method besides automobile.

photo:votewithyourfeetchicago.blogspot.com

How bout you?  Is there a particular city you’d like to see following Bogota’s lead?  Would you like a Ciclovia in your own city?  The Gotham Green wants to hear your thoughts!

GOOD Magazine Sheds Light on Green Innovation in Barcelona

Wander the streets of Barcelona’s district 22@ at night and you might notice something different these days: motion sensored LED street lamps, regulating the exact amount of light necessary given the season and circumstance of the moment.  It’s one example of the city’s commitment to green innovation, with a single neighborhood of LED lamps reducing Barcelona’s energy consumption by 30%.  

Who said the future looks dim?

For more information, visit www.endesa.es/

8 Ways to Shop Local (as in, Brooklyn) for the Holidays

We love Christmas in New York.  But the idea of holiday shopping on those mean streets can send the average resident into paroxysms of fear.  If shopping for gifts in the city fills you with a sense of impending doom rather than the warm fuzzies, why not ditch the annual Macy’s trampling and head to Brooklyn this year?  A borough of local artisans awaits your support, offering stress-free shopping for goods that are better for the environment (not to mention more thoughtful) than a pair of Made-in-China jeggings purchased from Saks.  In dishonor of Black Friday, we’ve listed eight sans drama ways to get your yuletide consumer needs under wraps, the bk way:

1. Sprout Home - Lovely little shop in the heart of Williamsburg, catering to the every need and whim of the urban gardener.  Stock up on candles, books, vases, and of course, plants.  

2. Vera Meat - Ukrainian model turned jewelry designing Brooklynite, Vera Balyura hand-crafts quirky signature pieces from ecologically-sound materials.  Choose from vampire teeth neckaces and hybrid hippo-shark charms.

3. Word Bookstore - A gem of an indie bookstore located in Greenpoint, Word stocks a thoughtfully selected collection, choosing books with the neighborhood in mind.  You’ll find a knowledgeable staff, a bevy of fantastic events, and a genuine sense of community.  

4. Sterling Place - Unique New York antiques.  Try saying that three times fast.

5. McClure’s Pickles - Using Great Grandma Lala’s secret recipe, the McClure brothers churn out tasty pickles, relish, and yes - bloody mary mix - from their respective hometowns in Detroit and Brooklyn.  Because nothing says “I love you” like a well-made hangover cure cocktail. 

6. The Human Tarot Project - Artist Danielle Baskin paints bicycle helmets with designs based on images from tarot cards. Choose any one of the 78 cards in the Rider-Waite Tarot Deck as your helmet design.  

7. Campbell Raw Press - Maggie Campbell comes from a family of craftsmen, so it’s no surprise she’s put the fine-tune on a trade of her own, making handbound books and letterpress printed cards with her husband, Matt Raw.

8. Brooklyn Flea - This year-round fleamarket has become a beloved staple of Fort Greene, offering 100+ vendors under one roof.  Grab a homemade hot cider and troll the aisles for the many Brooklyn-hewn wares not listed in this post.  BONUS: no creepy holiday music allowed, although you might hear some Three Dog Night on vinyl.

Trees Grow in Brooklyn - The Economist

Check out this great article in The Economist, about U.S. cities investing in green infrastructure to utilize rainfall and clean up their waterways.  And Happy Turkey Day!

Trees Grow in Brooklyn

Truck Farm

When the sun beats down on a sweltering New York summer day and his tomato plants begin to wilt, urban farmer Ian Cheney gets behind the wheel, starts the ignition, and moves his truck underneath the shade of the nearest tree.

It may not sound like the best solution at first, but it makes sense if you’ve ever seen Ian’s farm - a bountiful .001 acre plot, growing out of the back of his 1986 Dodge pickup.

Cheney, a filmmaker living in Brooklyn, wanted a garden to call his own.  But with the lack of farmable land available in his neighborhood, he resorted to the only free space he had.   Truck Farm was born, and now Ian and his coworker Curt Ellis are trolling the streets of NYC and spreading the news: delivering food to their 20 CSA members, educating the public about urban ag., and of course, capturing the whole thing on film.

The duo is using the lushly vegetated lorry as a key component in their latest documentary, which will track other agricultural experiments cropping up in NYC.  Truck Farm is a kick-ass example of the farming possibilities available in creative spaces, and of the impact media can have in engaging the public.

The Pleasures of Eating - Wendell Berry

I’m not going to say a whole lot here - this piece speaks for itself.  It’s a gorgeously penned essay that sums up why I’ve come to care so deeply about the state of our food system.  I hope you’ll read it, and take a moment to ponder how much pleasure is in your eating. 

The Pleasures of Eating

Many times, after I have finished a lecture on the decline of American farming and rural life, someone in the audience has asked, “What can city people do?”

“Eat responsibly,” I have usually answered. Of course, I have tried to explain what I mean by that, but afterwards I have invariably felt there was more to be said than I had been able to say. Now I would like to attempt a better explanation.

I begin with the proposition that eating is an agricultural act. Eating ends the annual drama of the food economy that begins with planting and birth. Most eaters, however, are no longer aware that this is true. They think of food as an agricultural product, perhaps, but they do not think of themselves as participants in agriculture. They think of themselves as “consumers.” If they think beyond that, they recognize that they are passive consumers. They buy what they want — or what they have been persuaded to want — within the limits of what they can get. They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged. And they mostly ignore certain critical questions about the quality and the cost of what they are sold: How fresh is it? How pure or clean is it, how free of dangerous chemicals? How far was it transported, and what did transportation add to the cost? How much did manufacturing or packaging or advertising add to the cost? When the food product has been manufactured or “processed” or “precooked,” how has that affected its quality or price or nutritional value?

Most urban shoppers would tell you that food is produced on farms. But most of them do not know what farms, or what kinds of farms, or where the farms are, or what knowledge of skills are involved in farming. They apparently have little doubt that farms will continue to produce, but they do not know how or over what obstacles. For them, then, food is pretty much an abstract idea — something they do not know or imagine — until it appears on the grocery shelf or on the table.

The specialization of production induces specialization of consumption. Patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers. This is certainly true also of patrons of the food industry, who have tended more and more to be mere consumers — passive, uncritical, and dependent. Indeed, this sort of consumption may be said to be one of the chief goals of industrial production. The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into our mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so. We may rest assured that they would be glad to find such a way. The ideal industrial food consumer would be strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into his or her stomach.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but not by much. The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical — in short, a victim. When food, in the minds of eaters, is no longer associated with farming and with the land, then the eaters are suffering a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous. The current version of the “dream home” of the future involves “effortless” shopping from a list of available goods on a television monitor and heating precooked food by remote control. Of course, this implies and depends on, a perfect ignorance of the history of the food that is consumed. It requires that the citizenry should give up their hereditary and sensible aversion to buying a pig in a poke. It wishes to make the selling of pigs in pokes an honorable and glamorous activity. The dreams in this dream home will perforce know nothing about the kind or quality of this food, or where it came from, or how it was produced and prepared, or what ingredients, additives, and residues it contains — unless, that is, the dreamer undertakes a close and constant study of the food industry, in which case he or she might as well wake up and play an active an responsible part in the economy of food.

There is, then, a politics of food that, like any politics, involves our freedom. We still (sometimes) remember that we cannot be free if our minds and voices are controlled by someone else. But we have neglected to understand that we cannot be free if our food and its sources are controlled by someone else. The condition of the passive consumer of food is not a democratic condition. One reason to eat responsibly is to live free.

But if there is a food politics, there are also a food esthetics and a food ethics, neither of which is dissociated from politics. Like industrial sex, industrial eating has become a degraded, poor, and paltry thing. Our kitchens and other eating places more and more resemble filling stations, as our homes more and more resemble motels. “Life is not very interesting,” we seem to have decided. “Let its satisfactions be minimal, perfunctory, and fast.” We hurry through our meals to go to work and hurry through our work in order to “recreate” ourselves in the evenings and on weekends and vacations. And then we hurry, with the greatest possible speed and noise and violence, through our recreation — for what? To eat the billionth hamburger at some fast-food joint hellbent on increasing the “quality” of our life? And all this is carried out in a remarkable obliviousness to the causes and effects, the possibilities and the purposes, of the life of the body in this world.

One will find this obliviousness represented in virgin purity in the advertisements of the food industry, in which food wears as much makeup as the actors. If one gained one’s whole knowledge of food from these advertisements (as some presumably do), one would not know that the various edibles were ever living creatures, or that they all come from the soil, or that they were produced by work. The passive American consumer, sitting down to a meal of pre-prepared or fast food, confronts a platter covered with inert, anonymous substances that have been processed, dyed, breaded, sauced, gravied, ground, pulped, strained, blended, prettified, and sanitized beyond resemblance to any part of any creature that ever lived. The products of nature and agriculture have been made, to all appearances, the products of industry. Both eater and eaten are thus in exile from biological reality. And the result is a kind of solitude, unprecedented in human experience, in which the eater may think of eating as, first, a purely commercial transaction between him and a supplier and then as a purely appetitive transaction between him and his food.

And this peculiar specialization of the act of eating is, again, of obvious benefit to the food industry, which has good reasons to obscure the connection between food and farming. It would not do for the consumer to know that the hamburger she is eating came from a steer who spent much of his life standing deep in his own excrement in a feedlot, helping to pollute the local streams, or that the calf that yielded the veal cutlet on her plate spent its life in a box in which it did not have room to turn around. And, though her sympathy for the slaw might be less tender, she should not be encouraged to meditate on the hygienic and biological implications of mile-square fields of cabbage, for vegetables grown in huge monocultures are dependent on toxic chemicals — just as animals in close confinements are dependent on antibiotics and other drugs.

The consumer, that is to say, must be kept from discovering that, in the food industry — as in any other industry — the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price. For decades now the entire industrial food economy, from the large farms and feedlots to the chains of supermarkets and fast-food restaurants has been obsessed with volume. It has relentlessly increased scale in order to increase volume in order (probably) to reduce costs. But as scale increases, diversity declines; as diversity declines, so does health; as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases. As capital replaces labor, it does so by substituting machines, drugs, and chemicals for human workers and for the natural health and fertility of the soil. The food is produced by any means or any shortcuts that will increase profits. And the business of the cosmeticians of advertising is to persuade the consumer that food so produced is good, tasty, healthful, and a guarantee of marital fidelity and long life.

It is possible, then, to be liberated from the husbandry and wifery of the old household food economy. But one can be thus liberated only by entering a trap (unless one sees ignorance and helplessness as the signs of privilege, as many people apparently do). The trap is the ideal of industrialism: a walled city surrounded by valves that let merchandise in but no consciousness out. How does one escape this trap? Only voluntarily, the same way that one went in: by restoring one’s consciousness of what is involved in eating; by reclaiming responsibility for one’s own part in the food economy. One might begin with the illuminating principle of Sir Albert Howard’s , that we should understand “the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal, and man as one great subject.” Eaters, that is, must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used. This is a simple way of describing a relationship that is inexpressibly complex. To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as we can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive:

1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.

2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat.

3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence.

4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers.

5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to the food that is not food, and what do you pay for those additions?

6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.

7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.

The last suggestion seems particularly important to me. Many people are now as much estranged from the lives of domestic plants and animals (except for flowers and dogs and cats) as they are from the lives of the wild ones. This is regrettable, for these domestic creatures are in diverse ways attractive; there is such pleasure in knowing them. And farming, animal husbandry, horticulture, and gardening, at their best, are complex and comely arts; there is much pleasure in knowing them, too.

It follows that there is great displeasure in knowing about a food economy that degrades and abuses those arts and those plants and animals and the soil from which they come. For anyone who does know something of the modern history of food, eating away from home can be a chore. My own inclination is to eat seafood instead of red meat or poultry when I am traveling. Though I am by no means a vegetarian, I dislike the thought that some animal has been made miserable in order to feed me. If I am going to eat meat, I want it to be from an animal that has lived a pleasant, uncrowded life outdoors, on bountiful pasture, with good water nearby and trees for shade. And I am getting almost as fussy about food plants. I like to eat vegetables and fruits that I know have lived happily and healthily in good soil, not the products of the huge, bechemicaled factory-fields that I have seen, for example, in the Central Valley of California. The industrial farm is said to have been patterned on the factory production line. In practice, it looks more like a concentration camp.

The pleasure of eating should be an extensive pleasure, not that of the mere gourmet. People who know the garden in which their vegetables have grown and know that the garden is healthy and remember the beauty of the growing plants, perhaps in the dewy first light of morning when gardens are at their best. Such a memory involves itself with the food and is one of the pleasures of eating. The knowledge of the good health of the garden relieves and frees and comforts the eater. The same goes for eating meat. The thought of the good pasture and of the calf contentedly grazing flavors the steak. Some, I know, will think of it as bloodthirsty or worse to eat a fellow creature you have known all its life. On the contrary, I think it means that you eat with understanding and with gratitude. A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes. The pleasure of eating, then, may be the best available standard of our health. And this pleasure, I think, is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.

I mentioned earlier the politics, esthetics, and ethics of food. But to speak of the pleasure of eating is to go beyond those categories. Eating with the fullest pleasure — pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance — is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience and celebrate our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living from mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend. When I think of the meaning of food, I always remember these lines by the poet William Carlos Williams, which seem to me merely honest:

There is nothing to eat,
seek it where you will,
but the body of the Lord.
The blessed plants
and the sea, yield it
to the imagination intact.

Wendell Berry, 1989

Windowfarms

$35 won’t get you much these days - 2 packs of cigarettes. a week’s worth of subway rides, lunch at Dean & Deluca…

Or it can get you a whole winter of organic produce, so local, it’s grown in your very own house:

Visit www.windowfarms.org for more information.