curate:

Luckily, we still live in a country that is hopeless in its planning. The continued migration and unplanned development has its advantages— one significant one being that we are still reminded of the possibilities, plant- and food-wise, of our chaotic metropolis.

…My office building is inside a sort of “pseudo-subdivision” that has none of the planning aspects of those privatized zones. Our building is beside warehouses, small homes (some of them may be informal), medium homes, a lot of people sitting around all day, chickens, and yes, ambulant vendors and their fruit. Most importantly, there is a vacant farm lot beside my building. I often peer out into it.

…So I finally went and met the farmer from next lot. His name is Max and he is a migrant from Cagayan de Oro. He lives two blocks down (and carries his water everyday to his plot, Jeebus). The lot he farms doesn’t belong to him, but the owner has allowed him to use it. Apparently, there is a sort of farming tenant arrangement that is common in the periurbs— this is completely new to me (When chatting with Max about my garden, he asked me if I had a tenant in my lot. I kind of laughed and realized he wasn’t joking).

Max has trouble keeping his corn from being stolen. Judging from the amount of people hanging out in the streets, many are jobless. Probably a lot of them are migrants. Anecdotes point to areas like this supplying much of the labor of subdivisions of Ayala Alabang, the adjoining mini-suburban-city, and the malls.

His soil is also very poor, as it was subsoil dumped on the lot. His crops aren’t doing too well— there is very little mulch as well. He does use chemicals to “start plants up”.

That’s about what I know for now. I said I would drop by with seeds, so I want to poke around a bit more at Max’s context (does he have a sort of “day job” if you may, and how things all tie in with migration, periurban landlordism, and whatnot.

(via Gardencore: Periurban Farming is Everywhere (ie. Beside My Office, Luckily))

livemindful  Seasonal eating fruit & veg.

atallyn:gastrogirl:

lemon poppyseed cupcakes with lemon curd filling and blueberry frosting.

audaciaray:

Since February 2011 I have been collaborating with Ceyenne Doroshow, a black transgender woman from Brooklyn who while she was incarcerated on a prostitution conviction a few years ago, got inspired to write a memoir cookbook. We’ve made significant progress on the book: we have more than 50 recipes, plus an oral history about her life, and now we’re ready to start producing the book itself. We need $6000 to get it copyedited, pay for the cover photography, and have it designed and printed. This morning I hit the launch button on our Kickstarter campaign to raise that money.

Our rewards include signed postcards, copies of the book, baked goods, cooking lessons, and private dinners - all depending on the level you donate at. We need your support to make this book come to fruition. And really, any amount helps - the minimum donation is $1. If you don’t have cash to spare, please check out the video anyway - it really captures who Ceyenne is and why she’s amazing. Also, there’s paella and it is mouthwatering - we ate it at the shoot and wow.

If you think the project is cool, as I hope you will - please spread the word!

Bush Foods-Plants – Knowing your rights

Respect for traditional knowledge and cultural rights to them is integral to bush plant based initiatives. There are a number of organizations who are doing good work in this space. A range of useful information resources are also available to help you to better understand and to address what’s involved if you and your community are looking at developing bush plant based initiatives, or are being contacted by people about information that Elders and other community members in your community may hold.

The CRC for Remote Economic Participation portfolio of projects includes the project “Plant Business”. … This project will also create commercialisation models that return greater equity share value to Aboriginal people for the genetic resources that are used commercially.

…the Aboriginal Bush Traders Bush Harvest Project conducted by Aboriginal Bush Traders have developed three valuable booklets that were released in mid March. They are:

1. Knowing your rights to your Aboriginal Plant Knowledge – which provides Aboriginal knowledge holders an overview of what people need to consider when developing Plant based products.

2. An Analysis of Indigenous Body Products and Markets

3. A Support Manual – which has detailed information in regard to product development, legislative requirements, labeling and quality control. To obtain a PDF copy of the booklets email bushharvest@aboriginalbushtraders.com

via Bush Foods-Plants – Knowing your rights, from RIG News #12 | Remote Indigenous Gardens)

In case this needs clarification: RIG = Remote Indigenous Gardens network Australia. Generally, there isn’t much [any, negative] money in community gardening, but they act as a network for Aboriginal Australians who either retain traditional ownership of lands, or don’t but are engaged in creating community gardens and/or work on issues around native species and intellectual property.

URBAN/RURAL – FALL 2012.  A Hunger Cycle play from Cornerstone Theatre’s multi-year exploration of hunger, justice and food equity issues.

Our Urban/Rural play examines the connection between urban and rural farming, and the journey our food takes from farm to plate. In a time when more and more of us are questioning where our food originated, and when mostly low income urban communities have very little control over what healthy foods are available to them, we want to bridge the gap between rural farming and urban supply.

“My connection to the shift from the rural to the urban is Brentwood, California: a small farm town about a half hour from where I grew up. Brentwood was my country, where summer Saturdays were spent at mom and pop u-pick ‘em farms. Like the peach orchard next to a small cemetery, where my mother was convinced that the dead sweetened the fruit. Fresh jams came out of these farm trips. My mother, raised in rural Louisiana, would stir hot pots of fruit and sugar relaying tales of picking cotton before school and drinking milk from the udder. For me the rural life was real, sweetened and sealed in mason jars.

But now Brentwood is just another suburb of San Francisco, filled with McMansions and strip malls, most of the orchards and fruit farms are gone. And with the economic troubles, houses sit empty. A once vibrant place that had the means to feed itself and the surrounding communities is now just another town on the verge of collapse.” – Playwright Sigrid Gilmer

via Cornerstone Theater Company - Urban/Rural

Wish I was in L.A. to check out this programe. Really atypical considered, connected approach to arts, food and arts on local people’s experience of their food chains.

unaguerrasinfondo:

Free Food for the Community Programme, 1971, Oakland. Photograph by Stephen Shames

veganfeast:

Dude Food Portobello Burgers by Ninaroid on Flickr. nom

for some reason, i’m craving burgers a lot lately

occupyallstreets:

Whistleblowing Wednesday: Children As Young As Six Harvest 25 Percent of U.S. Crops

Knowing the farmer who grows your food has become an important tenet of the modern food movement, but precious little attention is paid to the people who actually pick the crops or “process” the chickens or fillet the fish. U Roberto Romano’s poignant film, The Harvest/La Cosecha (2011), being screened across the country for Farmworker Awareness Week (March 24-29), informs us that nearly 500,000 children as young as six harvest up to 25 percent of all crops in the United States.

What’s illegal in most countries is permitted here. Child migrant labor has been documented in the 48 contiguous states. Seasonal work originates in the southernmost states in late winter where it is warm and migrates north as the weather changes. Every few weeks as families move, children leave school and friends behind. If you’ve had onions (Texas), cucumbers (Ohio or Michigan), peppers (Tennessee), grapes (California), mushrooms (Pennsylvania), beets (Minnesota), or cherries (Washington), you’ve probably eaten food harvested by children.

This isn’t a slavery issue, or an immigration issue per se. What’s remarkable is that most of the migrant child farmworkers are American citizens trying to help their families. This is a poverty issue and it gets to the heart of what we, as consumers, see as the “right price” to pay for food.

Children earn about $1,000 per year for working an average of 30 hours a week, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. When you consider that the average annual pay for a migrant family of four is $12,500-$14,500, it’s apparent why some families feel they have no choice but to bring their children into the fields with them. Half of these kids will not graduate from high school because they’re always moving around, perpetuating the cycle of poverty that caused them to be day laborers in the first place.

Read More

so much about this!

eta: i don’t wanna tag this class, rather than labour, migrant etc

Being back in food security- peasant-farm networks for the 1st time since I was a kid in a [white, australian] farmhand family, is really prompting clarity on how argrian class is it’s own type of class, distinct from - and usually the poor, browner cousin of - much of what online type class talk is about. 

And it’s at different stages in various countries to - depending whether the country is collapsing back into feudalism or hardly ever left or still has large peasant populations.

so of course it’s about migration or at least race [depending on where]. and, if not exactly the popular image of slavery, at least about families of landless peasant status working in entire economies where no one takes for granted the wealthier white nations benchmarks of class with citizen benefits & urban post-industrialized consumerism.

Marxism has such focus on definition, on being able to stage ‘war’ while ultimately remaining secure within a very industrialized, politically stable, unstated white, culturally homogenous, and family politics invisible framework. Which was never true for Marxists realities either, to be fair.

But there is a sense, to class warriors in western white societies since, that society just exists, classes are layers within it and the issue is fighting for a piece of the pie with room for only one true class champion [you don’t want to be too high, or to low, in Marx’s moral code].

Which leaves little room for the agrarian working poor who even his class warriors prefer to undervalue. Especially if they’re also migrants, especially if they’re also working as whole families not ‘male adult ideal labour subjects’.

They can’t avoid exposing the contradictions of western white Marxist type ‘class warriors’. They challenge not just class, but the single issue class warriors whole assumptions about western society just existing in the background of their class war, by simply existing themselves. They live extremely hard working poverty that’s less lumpenprole, than a limbo labour state between multiple unstable economies and unwelcoming societies.

Some people online think that just looking at this with also race politics, also rural politics, also whichever politics until you got your intersectional checklists covered - addresses this. but it doesn’t automatically.

because I see plenty people doing that, like trying to copy one of the WOC who is good at it, still using class like it can only mean the Marx kind. Then still getting angry at the person for having contractions in their argrarian experience. Or saying they get it, then minimizing how that particular farm labour childhood shapes education, status, expectations, social norms etc. - based on their experiences as urban marginal poor.

So they still do things like judging these parents with ‘the simple solution is for them to not work - any parent who would allow this is wrong’ . Which, aside from being impractical - is promoting a notion about who can be proud of their family, and their labours, which is imo hard for some kids to reconcille when they do grow up.

i wonder if this is why even the ones who have or get citizenship, then get the scholarships, have trouble with ambition.  Like lots of ethical conflict, and social anxiety about work, and the ties you’d have to make for social mobility to sustain that work.

this is rambling. as always there’s more to make sense of than i think i can articulate well.

eta2: why is it called whistleblow, who are you meant to blow the whistle on? Yourself, if you eat? I loved unionism and what ‘class war’ i was able to accomplish doing it but…bloody class warriors and not dealing with farm labour. 

(via It’s All Happening « Brown. Girl. Farming.)

hey farmer, gardener, food people > awesomeness follows

As the Dogwood and Cherry Blossom trees begin to bloom, I know it’s finally time to begin my trek across the country.

My project to find, connect and hear directly from other brown farmers has been in germination for a year and a half, and I’m filled with excited anticipation now that it has emerged.

I started thinking about the need for this project while I was writing a series called The Color of Food for Grist.org in 2010. The issues of race and food were discussed and the voices of farmers of color rang loud and clear for me, yet I knew they weren’t being heard.  I spent the next year trying to make the idea of amplifying these voices come to fruition. And thanks to the support of many beautiful souls and comrades in this movement, at the end of 2011 the idea became a reality.

Yup, BGF of the Color of Food directory is about to create her photo documentary of POC farmers in the USA. Her twitter’s @browngirlfarmin if you’re in the areas she’s going to & wanna be involved or promote.  

also, ppl. can donate via her site if you can spare any to support the trip. I don’t get paid til Friday but you bet then. *signal boost please*

via The Spunky Coconut: Banana Chocolate Cream Pie - Oh my! dairy-free, gluten-free, grain-free But chocolate full! Oh yes.

Things that are unfortunate

So many vegan pundits have been obnoxious, racist, classist, misinforming etc. of late on tumblr, that sometimes I hesitate to even reblog something vegan - in case it generates bad memories/associations for people who’ve been targetted by that  niche of vegan punditry. Or attracts said pundits.

OTOH, to hell with those haters - big fish, small ponds. Really, does anyone else think it isn’t a coincidence that some of the most bigoted, dogmatic, drama starter vegans online aren’t half as influential, essential and above all really contributing anything to the food politics networks that they like to lord it up about? Am I wrong?? Y/N???

Anyway: to the food.

I used a packet gluten free flour substitute that you can get in supermarkets now, for everything where they suggest almond meal/flax flour mix as as wheat flour substitute.

Partially because it’s way cheaper and stores better than almond meal. Also because I’d rather not use an ingredient as nutritious and expensive to produce as almond meal is, in a baking process that would waste much of it’s flavour and nutrients. Partially because one of the gluten allergic people I cook for has nut allergies to. 

It worked fine, and this is a tasty thing to serve with/use up the last of the banana glut going on atm.

(via Make and preserve your own (absolutely divine) tomato pasta sauce - Brisbane Local Food)

I’ve never bought a ready made jar of pasta sauce in my life, but this is 4 million times better than any I’ve tasted. Note that my basil sprigs were fairly large ;)  Also I judge it cost probably less than one dollar per jar (including the dollar cost of the cooking gas).

Those cap jar things take me back. When I was a rugrat Dad used to make ginger beer in our enourmo vat, then decant into bottles like those pictured, which would always include one explosion specimen. Plus you know, what to do with a summer tomato glut.

Smörgåstårta. It’s a Swedish staple that’s perfect for parties, brunches, and those days where your family never seems to eat at the same time. Plus, come on — it’s a cake made of sandwich! You know you want it!

via Smörgåstårta: 15 Savory Sandwich Cakes | The Kitchn)

This changes my beliefs about sandwiches as the go-to lazy food forever.

reblogging this mmm meme is getting me lots of unfollows. i don’t usually get unfollows. what is interesting is that, it’s unfollows from people who are *also reblogging the exact same posts from mmm* but never in food sectors themselves. curious.

milkeemountainmama:

every-inch-but-one:

can someone point me in the direction of writing on this? Because none of the food deserts I’ve ever been in had anything like what this seems to be implying. Not to mention the fact that grocery stores supply more than just things that can be gardened, like milk, cheese, meat, etc. 

that would be me, and welcome to Detroit.

why yes i did. and now i’m throwing eco-lesbian frilly knickers at you in appreciation of the question. 

which segues to other issues about monopolies, supermarkets, food distribution and the whole co-op member/owner food box systems.

i have mixed feelings on the co-op/crop share distro system.

One the one hand, it can accommodate gentrification and revival of traditional land conflict issues, where there are significant gaps, within local community farming networks, between the more collective low income and more faddish but cash flow ready ‘greens’.

OTOH, it can be a very effective system for ensuring that some share of small scale crops remain in the region/families who produced.

Those types of share/DIY/closed local markets can also provide enough income to small, local growers to sustain their work/lives/landcare while working with other groups to transition to local garden semi-food independence, and lobbying supermarkets for better distro.

but it does vary hugely depending on the demographics of the region.

I think *some* of the populations who could afford to shop at niche ‘wholefoods’ grocers, are very likely to have not engaged in community farming anyway, or to have only done so in ways which would introduce consumer pressure & divisive relations to those local garden food networks.

At least that’s been my experience, witnessing and trying to work with the 2 streams of engagement in community farms; between those who work hard at growing even though they’re gardening to meet subsistence food and community needs, versus those who make lots of demands, have greater food security already and have no real notion of community growing which isn’t still, ultimately gentrifying and consumerist.

In summary: the white middle classist liberals who came to our farm in recent years, inspired by green ‘community food’ trends, were in some ways genuine, but also the people who introduced a difficult, year long, dispute about whether we should allow prison labour on the farm in exchange for govt. cash subsidies [!!!!].

At some point, despite the fact that I go to and do sometimes enjoy niche grocers - even if they are beyond my budget - at some point the market that those grocers are aiming at has minimal overlap with community building, local food sovereignty networks anyway. No matter how much that market are deluded about that reality.

so …. i don’t wanna  be a hater. but i am OK with saying: actions have consequences, let them eat wtf imported quinoa, so long as they don’t hassle, gentrify or try and influence local community based subsistence, local nurturance oriented, growers.

ETA: this is not snark, this is a very survival and loyalties testing IRL pressing thing for me.

ETA 2: I also do not endorse ‘working hard’ unless a person absolutely has to and reaps the gains. in farming or anything else. one thing i heart about permaculture is the embrace of just letting nature take over, to chill and enjoy some flowers whenever we can.