Mining and film financier and Bill Clinton buddy Frank Guistra is investing in high yield farmland, local food, award-winning olive oil and is bankrolling Modern Farmer Magazine… He knows something. He has also put money into Vancouver’s Sole Food Farm.
Serious, curious money meets the good food revolution. Watch what happens…
You will not be disappointed. My talk on the heritage and future of urban food is tonight.
http://ow.ly/lfScU
See you there?
Vancouver’s Truck Farm is a cool, fun mobile classroom and seed dispensary based in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood. They’ve got an indiegogo campaign underway. It’s worth supporting.
Food in a nutshell: Judy Kenzie believes in small beginnings with big outcomes from her mobile truck garden.
The European Union is banning a bee-killing pesticide to stem the collapse of its bee colonies. Meanwhile, there’s no such ban in the U.S., where 45% of hives were lost last winter, up 78% from the year before.
Bees pollinate 1/3 of our food. We need them, and we need to stem the pesticides, monocultures, and loss of habitat diversity that are killing them off at alarming rates.
Ontario PCs want to add food literacy to the province’s proposed Local Food Act.
The MPP bringing forward the amendment to the act says that in his party’s consultations with industry stakeholders, the PCs found that food literacy was a theme that kept being brought up. “One of the main things that we found out in our consultations is that food literacy seems to be something missing…including understanding of what local food means,” said Ernie Hardeman, PC Ag critic.
The party’s education critic is also pushing this: “We need our students today for the next generation to understand where food comes from…how it is cultivated, how it reaches market and how to prepare it…this will prepare them for life,” says Lisa MacLeod.
The NDP is also on board with this.
Food literacy is a basic survival skill at a time when conventional food sources are under threat, and junk-food diets are bringing on chronic diseases that ruin lives and bankrupt governments.
Premier Christy Clark caused a lot of screeching brakes and other variations of media road rage after Jonathon Fowlie’s Vancouver Sun story describing her going through a red light while driving her son through an abandoned intersection at 5:15 am.
But what caught my attention was the sentence.
“In her son’s bag is the pizza and Krispy Kreme doughnut Clark packed for his lunch.”
I know, she’s the most stressed-out single Mom in the province, but it’s surprising she wasn’t aware enough of what that meal signals to the reporter who was in the car.
Christy Clark, as someone who has championed getting junk food out of schools, and someone whose number 1 job is to reduce public debt, should be especially sensitive to the relationship between feeding kids processed foods, sugar and fat rather than fruits and vegetables, and the heart diseases, obesity and other chronic diseases that are swamping our health care system.
The projected growth in health care costs in B.C. will be double the projected tax and royalty returns from the premier’s election campaign showpiece: liquified natural gas plants.
With 80% of health care costs coming from chronic diseases that are mostly brought on by poverty, wrong diet and lifestyle choices, fixing that should be our #1 economic priority.
Talking points on that topic should be on the political food literacy curriculum.
Catch my May 21 talk to the Vancouver Heritage Foundation on the urban food revolution. The Heritage Foundation sees urban farming as a return to the way the city used to be, but with a modern twist. Think “past forward”, “back to the future.”
Tickets for the talk here.
In addition to my talk (7 pm at the Unitarian Church, 49th and Oak), I’ll be on location at a front yard farm on a property in Shaughnessy as part of the heritage house tour.
For a deeper look at urban farming in Vancouver, here’s a report on a Nov 2012 forum organized by the Vancouver Urban Farming Society: Vanc urban farming report nov 2012
Find out at my new talk on the economic sustainability of local at the Stone Soup Festival 3 pm May 11 at Britannia Community Centre on Commercial Drive.
I’ll be looking at rooftop growing, new market niches for entrepreneurs, vertical greenhouses, aquaponics, and the struggle to put a price on non-monetary values of local food security.
