My comrade here at the LBJ School Erin Lentz wrote this with me, to welcome Michelle Obama to Austin. Republished here from the Austin American-Statesman.
TEDMED: The Barefoot Technologists
Last year, I gave a TEDMED talk about some of the people we’ve been following at the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Project in Northern Malawi. Here’s the talk, and accompanying post, courtesy of TEDMED. See more of the footage at the GenerationFoodProject.org
The Secret Ingredient!
If it seems like I’ve been awfully quiet on this website, I’ve more than made up for it by being moderately loud with Tom Philpott and Rebecca McInroy at our new podcast. The full press release is below. At some point, I’ll figure out how to make the audio available right here but meantime, do have a listen. We’re particularly pleased to have had one of the last interviews with Sidney Mintz before his death, and to have covered everything from prison food to salmon. Coming soon: breastmilk, soylent, quinoa and, always, capitalism, colonialism and death. It’s a riot.
Ida B Wells, Science Fiction Writer
Ida B Wells deserves her place in the canon of journalism and social change. In the science fiction, not so much. I found her “A Story of 1900”, written in 1886, while digging for other things. It may not be a classic, but not only was it written two years before Edward Bellamy’s epochal Looking Backward, but the story lives and breathes Octavia Butler’s thoughts on the use of science fiction for black people.
A Window in the Cathedral of the Green Revolution
When the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations announced it was going to take agroecology sufficiently seriously to hold a conference on it, reasonable people were pleased, and sceptical. Pleased because the FAO has been agnostic about agroecology’s scientific developments in addressing problems that the FAO itself is charged with tackling. Sceptical because the reason’s for the FAO’s historical reticence are hardly going to be fixed by a conference. Nonetheless, the great and the good from agroecology made the case in front of a bevvy of senior officials. After the event, José Graziano da Silva, Director General of the FAO, proclaimed that “today a window was opened in what for 50 years has been the cathedral of the Green Revolution.”
Continue reading “A Window in the Cathedral of the Green Revolution”
Apologies to mailing list subscribers
Sorry gang – I was working on the Green Revolution post in idle moments over the past week, and didn’t realise that I’d set it to ‘public and password protected’. You can read the finished post now. Apologies.
How to Be Curious About the Green Revolution
Social media is alive with folks’ thoughts on Michael Specter’s recent New Yorker piece. As the controversy fades, I worry that people will be left with three ideas. Continue reading “How to Be Curious About the Green Revolution”
Joan Dye Gussow: Women, Food and the Survival of the Species
While I slog away at the Generation Food project, here’s more from the occasional series of pamphlets and books from the history of the food movement – a 1988 lecture by the excellent Joan Dye Gussow: Women, Food, and the Survival of the Species. With thanks, as ever, to DBS, and to Joan.
Continue reading “Joan Dye Gussow: Women, Food and the Survival of the Species”
Thoughts on Land Reform Summits in San Francisco
In San Francisco, from April 25-28, 400 people from across the country and around the world gathered to discuss an awkward problem – land reform in America. Land reform is a loaded term, one that reeled conference participants’ imaginations toward the antics of Third World dictators and communist zealots. It’s hard to conceive a more un-American activity than thinking about an alternative to private property. Yet here were the Friends of the Earth next to the NAACP west coast region, alongside the Archdiocese of Kansas doing exactly that.
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Cyberspace!
Whole Earth Summit. I’ll be talking with Nikki Silvestri about Love, Purpose, & the Food Movement, 5:15-6:15pm EDT. Click here to register for FREE.