The food relocalization movement is coming of age, for it was twenty-one years ago that visionary Robyn Van En began CSA North America, the first organization to promote community-supported agriculture across the continent.
From her own collaboration with Susan Witt and others in Great Barrington, Mass., while establishing CSA Gardens in 1990, the CSA movement has grown to at least 4,570 documented American farms offering food shares to local community members…
Join the Wizard of fermentation, Sandor Ellix Katz, for a Hands-on workshop in Patagonia, Arizona. Learn the basics of food & beverage fermentation from best-selling author, Sandor Ellix Katz.
Learn how to make the delicious & nutritious fermented corn drink of the Tarahumara, tesquino; Learn how heritage crops from the Native Seeds/SEARCH Farm & the Nabhan Orchard can be fermented in your own kitchen.
Thirty thousand people have died in Syria’s civil war—and the killing is only intensifying. Obviously, human beings are any war’s most appalling casualties, but there are cultural conflagrations that matter, too—vital spaces laid waste, lost forever. Few alive today have experienced the reputed grandeur of old Warsaw, leveled by Nazi bombs in World War II. How would the celebrated Aztec city of Tenochtitlán have weathered the centuries?
We’ll never know, because the Spanish flattened it in the process of conquest, building over it what we now know as Mexico City.
In the days between the 2012 Republican and Democratic Conventions, a group of eighty farmers, ranchers, grocers, produce distributors and food activists met in Carbondale, Colorado. They hunkered down in a big tent on a farm nestled below the drought-stricken peaks of the Rocky Mountains as dry winds gusted around them.
Like many who spoke at the conventions, their goal was to discuss how to create jobs and help rural economies ravaged by the economic downturn get some rebound.
Pacific crabapple [Malus fusca (Raf.) C.K. Schneid.] is found in mesic coastal habitats in Pacific northwestern North America. It is one of four apple species native to North America. M. fusca is culturally important to First Nations of the region who value and use the fruit of this species as food, bark and leaves for medicine, and wood for making tools and in construction.
Not even a decade has passed since Sergio Arau filmed A Day Without a Mexican, but 2012 may go down in history as the Year of No Meals Without a Mexican because of labor shortages in American fields and orchards. Since mid-year, there have been a growing number of state and nation-wide reports indicating that hand-picked vegetables and fruits produced in the United States will be unusually scarce this year.
This is not merely because of widespread drought but also because of a paucity of Mexican-born farm laborers remaining in the U.S. Earlier this season, the American Farm Bureau Federation predicted a $5 to 9 billion dollar loss in this year’s harvest of annual vegetable crops requiring hand-picking, largely due to a shortage of farmworkers.
Welcome to the food system of the U.S.-Mexico border —the geopolitical boundary with the greatest economic disparity in the world. Stories written and spoken about this unnatural rift in the landscape are the stuff of myth, literary leaping or yarn spinning, depending on who tells the tale.
The U.S./Mexico border is also, for many, una herida abierta—an open wound. It’s a third country altogether; a ghostly apparition; America’s neglected playground; el Norte—where the grass is always greener (if it is alive at all), and so on.
