Planning to entertain company? This simple to make cheese platter may provide just the right decorative, and tasty augmented cheeses to delight your guests. Some of the artisan cheeses that Chef Jacques, aka, Jack Campbell, uses in this video are:
March 16, 2010
Once again rural America stands on the Edge of Hope.
Ankeny, Iowa. There are moments in a nation’s history that define it. For America’s remaining 2 million farmers (less than 1% of the population) and the more than 300 million eaters, the recent joint Department of Justice and Department of Agriculture workshop on lack of competition in the food and agricultural sectors held in Ankeny, Iowa is potentially one of those moments.
Antitrust Workshop In Ankeny, Iowa
With concentration at record levels in agriculture today, well past levels that encourage or even allow fair prices or competition, the Obama administration’s call for public workshops is an historic event. While agribusiness continues to deny any problem, a simple look at the facts shows that the playing field for family farmers and American consumers is distorted beyond anything resembling a free or competitive market. Read More
New to the life of farming, a middle-aged couple make a career change to becoming sustainable farmers. First mentoring under Joel Salatin, they now raise pasture fed cows, pigs, chickens, ducks, lambs, and sheep.
I started to really think about the food the animals I ate were fed, after I saw “King Corn” and talked to Curt Ellis.
As I was breaking down the equipment and packing it all away, I said, more or less to out loud to myself, ‘I ought to do a story on pasture fed cows’. Curt was right there, responding, ‘You should!’. I nodded my head, thinking, Okay, I’ll look into it.
The looking didn’t come right away. But evidently the forces in the world were at work, for not too long after, I finally started reading “Omnivore’s Dilemma” . The second chapter was all about Michael Pollan visiting Polyface Farm where Joel Salatin raises his animals as humanely possible and on pasture. Not concrete, not alongside thousands of others, not full of injections, and not 100% grain fed. Sounded like a good idea to me. But Mr. Salatin was nearly 3,000 miles away. It wasn’t going to work, at least not right away. In the meantime, I started to read his book, “You Can Farm,” and I liked what he was doing and wanted to learn more.
In the meantime I met with Michele to talk about films and food. I mentioned to her I wanted to do a pasture fed story and she immediately lit up and told me about the Abundant Life Farm
buyers club, for that’s where she got her meat, and it was all grass fed and pasture raised.
So I gave the Jondles a call and found quite a story. Not Joel Salatin’s, mind you (but they did mentor under him!), but their own story that was quite compelling. What a wonderful environment they’ve created for their animals. The pigs get to root under brush and tree, the chickens get to scatter, and the cows and lambs run at will. In fact, when Marilyn opened the gate for the cows to go to a fresh area of pasture, they ran and kicked up their heels! What a sight that was. I’m not an animal psychologist, but these are happy cows!
A website that is dedicated to news and facts surrounding grass fed food is EatWild. Yes, pasture fed meat is more expensive, but I believe it’s healthier to eat, and more humane for the animals as well.
Check out the recipes from this show: Mom’s Potato Salad; Easy Baked Chicken
—Rebecca
Throughout much of agriculture, a remarkable span of 10,000 years, farmers were largely the stewards of the land and the crops that they grew. Seeds collected from one year’s harvest were selected, stored, and used again for successive growing seasons. As Frank Morton, an organic seed breeder explains in this segment of the Seeds Of Life series, the role of the farmer at the center of agriculture began to change with the advent of hybrid seed development beginning with hybrid varieties of corn in the 1930’s.
Hybrid seeds are created out of two separate parent lines, each (parent) line, incapable of producing the desirable plant characteristics themselves. Only the seeds of their offspring, provide the desired mix of traits, measured by characteristics, such as : crop yield; protein content; oil quality; disease resistance, and other characteristics. Most importantly, especially to the commercial seed companies, the plants grown from these seeds do not produce useful seeds for further use. Once grown, the plants themselves are dead ends; no further selection under the farmers control can be made to create better crops for the future. Giving new meaning to the term “free enterprise”, hybrid seeds can only be purchased from the commercial seed companies (those in control of the proprietary parent lines); nature’s inherent generosity, circumvented.
Frank Morton, Willamette Valley Organic Seed Breeder; Wild Garden Seed
As Morton points out, beginning in 1965, a period he refers to as, the end of the golden age of plant breeding, there was a push to bring crops that could be made into hybrids, onto the market. This is what attracted the giant chemical companies into the seed business, hybrid technologies, and later biotechnology innovations, conferred the special ability to prevent farmers from saving and reusing seed, making their investments in seed technologies, and closely related chemical products, almost full-proof investments. Land grant universities that formerly conducted plant breeding research under the public domain, and made seeds available to commercial seed companies for sale to farmers, began to shift toward proprietary research to serve private interests instead*.
This is all part of an unfolding story, since after World War Two, there has been a massive consolidation of seed, chemical, and related industries to promote global trade. By virtue of size, certain economies of scale offered protection against new entrants into the marketplace, along with the ability to control prices both at the buying and selling end of the value chain. This ushered in the modern industrial food system, one of the most concentrated set of industries in existence today, and to which, the current Obama administration Justice Department is examining toward possible antitrust litigation.
Although hybrid seed technology helped shift the control of seed production to the seed companies, the introduction of transgenic seed technologies with the extension of patent protection rights dramatically transferred the control of seeds to these massive corporations, the full implications, have not as yet, been fully realized.
As Claire Hope Cummings writes in her book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, whoever controls the supply of seed, controls the world’s food supply. Should such concentrated power be allowed to reside within the private realm, or is food so fundamental a right, only governments representing the public interest be allowed to retain ultimate jurisdiction over such a resource?
See Related:
*The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science – Part 2: Academic Capitalism and the Loss of Scientific Integrity (PDF)
The pictures can be tantalizing. Some even cause us to stop and stare. Join us for a behind the scenes look at a food photographer and his team, as they create sumptuous images out of fresh ingredients that seem to jump off the page.
We’re surrounded by images through billboards, television, magazines, the internet…the list is long. And since food is a part of everyone’s life, in some form or another, many of those images are about food. Some are blah, some are tantalizing, and some go unnoticed. But the ones that do grab my eye make me wonder and I begin to dissect. Why did they choose that background, who designed the arrangement, how did get that cheese get to look so yummy, and the lighting, how was it lit? These questions lead me wondering exactly what is happening outside of that frame.
I visited a food photographer’s studio to find out for myself. And boy, was it an education.
The day I spent at Ed Gowans Studio, he was doing a shoot for the Pear Bureau Northwest. In my naiveté, I thought everything was done by the photographer. Wrong. It’s a team effort. Besides the photographer there is a food stylist, or two, and the client pulled up her sleeves and was involved too. Each food item was prepared from scratch on site. Everyone put their 2 cents in. They took as much time as was needed for each shot, and then moved on to the next. It was a full day. Food that is prepared for filming purposes are not intended to be eaten. Food photography is one of the most difficult specialties of commercial photography, getting food to look just right on camera involves considerable skill and experience to get it right.
Ed Gowans with Client Christie Mather of the Northwest Pear Bureau Examining Image Monitor
I feel a kindred spirit with people like Ed and his team. They’re not just technicians, they’re artists. While there are so many images we are bombarded with daily, when it comes to images of stunning beauty, and artistry, there can never be enough!
Recipes from the show: Pear Bread; Ed’s Tangy Eggless Caesar Salad
—Rebecca
“Seed breeding is basically taking the process of evolution and turning it into a more controlled process” —Frank Morton
Frank Morton, Organic Seed Breeder; Wild Garden Seed
