alimental note
To the delight of microbrewers, the White House has finally released their recipes for White House Honey Ale and Honey Porter. They’ve even included a behind-the-scenes video of their home-brewing process.
Three egg-related posts in a row? On an egg roll. Ba-dum-cha! Okay, I’ll stop now.
(via localfoodlab)
Just discovered the Lexicon of Sustainability project. It’s a great idea to explain terms and concepts regarding sustainability in food systems and of ourselves, not only to educate but to take back words and stories spun from corporate marketing.
They’ve also teamed up with PBS & ITVS to make some short films - three so far, including The Story of an Egg. Pretty eggscellent har har.
Here’s a Q&A with Douglas Gayeton, one half of the team behind Lexicon.
The Story of an Egg, presented by PBS Food and ITVS.
More information at Lexicon of Sustainability.
“A lot of people call it going backwards in farming, we’re going back to our grandparents’ time — I call it going back to the future, because I see a future here, and I like the way that it is very much.”
Carole Morison, featured in the documentary Food Inc, is no longer a contract grower. Now, she’s raising these cheeky free-range ladies and selling their eggs in Maryland/Virginia/DC. (Raising chickens for meat isn’t on the table right now because of the lack of independent processing facilities in the area.)
More info at FixFood and check out Carole’s thoughtful blog.
— Suhita Shirodkar’s “Summer Fruit at the Farmers’ Market” (hey, it’s on sale!).
Check out her series of sketches of a San Jose farmers’ market.
(via localfoodlab)
As farmers across the region, and even the country, are doing what they can to keep their crops alive, Congress is playing a game of chicken with…whom, well, I’m not sure. The Republican-led house is refusing to move forward to pass the new version of the quinquennial Farm Bill. The Farm Bill…
Fun “food space chart”.
But — question about the homemade pickles in negative cultural & economic capital: doesn’t grandma cuisine have a higher cachet than the internet??? Am I missing something?
Sourcemap won funding from the Knight Foundation Prototype Fund to help support its project with Concord Massachusetts schools to create a custom platform tracking food from farm to school.
The idea behind Sourcemap is supply-chain transparency, whether it’s tracking the construction of a laptop or the environmental footprint of your new shoes. Most of the food-related maps seem to showcase ingredients of a product or dish, or present a visual for who supplies a market. I’d like to see more, and I’m quite curious to see the farm-to-school project in action. (This is Sourcemap’s entry describing the proposed project.) Supply chains (and distribution!) don’t get talked about much, besides a sort of vague “eat local” philosophy. There’s more to it than that. I want to know more about the nitty-gritty details.
This Food & Tech interview with Sourcemap talks about and hints at some of the difficulty of comprehensive food-mapping projects. A lot can be done by crowdsourcing and having open API and whatnot, but the maps still require dependable, usable data, people to make sense of that data, integration of separate sectors like the government and private corporations, and making sense of what may be considered separate, and sometimes competing, issues like the environment and food access.
The Post reports on how DC libraries are serving free lunches at 11 locations this summer to kids 18 and younger as part of the District’s Free Summer Meals Program, which provides up to two meals without income, residency, or identification requirements at nonprofits, community centers, and other government agencies.
Filling the gap of school breakfast and lunch programs, the library meals are “based on nutritional values and … a local grown component” as per DC’s Healthy Schools Act.
Great idea!
