Did you know that Tucson and its Pima County suburbs have 12 times the number of mobile food services per capita than New York City? The county reports some 941 mobile food businesses registered for business, including 235 full service food carts, 45 “dogero” push carts, and 85 other mobile vendors in Tucson alone.
Pima County appears to have tied with Los Angeles County in California for having the highest ratio of mobile street food businesses to people of any areas in the United States, with roughly one vehicle offering food on the fly for every 1,000 residents.
Native pollinators, it seems, were once forgotten as playing an essential role in providing ecological services for food security, but no longer. We have witnessed a surge in grassroots interest in returning pollinators to their proper place in sustainable agriculture, as witnessed by the enthusiastic participation recently seen at a workshop regarding on-farm pollinator habitat restoration in the U.S./Mexico borderlands.
The workshop featured practical teachings from Sam Earnshaw of Community Alliance of Family Farmers, who has helped plant or restore over 300 miles of pollinator-attracting hedgerows in Western states.
Many U.S. residents are amazed to learn that three-fifths of the fresh produce eaten in the U.S. comes from the West Coast of Mexico, and that much of the saltwater fish and shrimp they eat may come from Mexico’s reaches of the Gulf of Mexico, Pacific Ocean and Gulf of California. However, we should not belittle New Yorkers or Minnesotans for this lack of knowledge, since few of us who live much closer to U.S./Mexico border have an accurate sense of how much of our food comes from “el otro lado”—the lands and waters on the other side.
A novel approach toward helping young people ensure biodiversity in our world is studying seeds in the wild and planting them for food in the garden. Called “seed schools,” they should be in schools everywhere.
On February 27, an unprecedented alliance of more than 60 Occupy groups and 30 environmental, food and corporate accountability organizations have joined together for Occupy our Food Supply, a global day of action resisting the corporate control of food systems.
Salt River Project has mostly resolved the conflict in an east Phoenix neighborhood where rare black-sphinx date palms growing close to power lines threaten to cause fires or blackouts. A year ago, SRP offered several residents in the Mountgrove subdivision in the Arcadia area $100 each to remove their trees, but many balked because they prize the heirloom date palms, which are not found in a grove anywhere else.
Very few urban dwellers have paid attention to the catastrophic drought in the Southwest that began nearly a year ago. But last month, as farmers and ranchers assessed the year’s harvest, it became clear it had knocked back their yields and sales, while driving their costs higher than they have ever been. As the drought continues to drive both meat and vegetable food prices up over the next year, urbanites in the region and beyond will likely notice the change in prices
Local and sustainable are on the tips of many tongues as more and more people try to eat food that’s good for them and the planet. If you’re a part of this important conversation, you can thank Gary Paul Nabhan for helping to get it started. A Lebanese American living in the Southwestern United States, Nabhan has for more than three decades been writing books, directing research projects, forming farming alliances …
Some of the best known symbols of climate change are belching smokestacks and polar bears adrift on ice floes. A lesser known symbol is the chili pepper. Gary Paul Nabhan set out to change that.
In the new book “Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail,’’ Nabhan teams up with agroecologist Kurt Michael Friese and chef Kraig Kraft to examine the relationship between food production and global warming through the chili pepper.
The pollination services provided to food crops and rangeland forages by bees and other animals is valued at no less than $15-20 billion a year in the United States, but was at one time provided to us “for free.” Recent events suggest that if we want to keep these valuable services available to us, our society needs to make an investment in providing pollinators with food, sheltered nesting areas and pesticide-free habitat.