food

There's nothing like my heart stopping for 10 minutes while having my forehead sutured following a car accident to get me to think about the future of our children's children's children's ... children! Global populations quadrupled in the last century with the burning of coal and oil; what will happen as those resources dwindle to nothing, and global climates change as we burn them? » Read more

I found this, when browsing the blogs on www.transitionnetwork.org/blogs. I've often wondered what it would take to disconnect from the corporate food system...

Stupermarket break out!

by Rachel Lalchan

It's been over 13 months since we shopped in a large, intense, brightly lit, empire of grocery consumerism and I'm happy to report that life sans supermarket is not only viable but quite wonderful! With no intention of going back, I hope you will consider quitting too!

The thing about supermarkets is that there's really nothing super about them. Ripping off farmers and producers both here and abroad, selling cheap products at huge cost to suppliers, tricking us into buying far more than we need, producing tonnes of unrecyclable waste, filling our landfills, upping CO2 emissions, encouraging detrimental consumer habits, grabbing land from local ownership, promoting unhealthy over-processed crud disguised as 'food', destroying local communities and values as well as our own farming industry, I mean really, what's super about any of that?!

To ensure that farming can continue in the UK as part of our sustainable present and future and that we can feed ourselves instead of relying on other countries for our nutrition, we need to stop supporting supermarket shopping. It has proved to be an unhealthy, unsustainable and unethical method of putting food on our tables. » Read more

I came across this site about a week ago, when researching for The Auckland Food Alliance.

This is a website devoted to collaboration to solve challenges, and has been designed very cleverly to maximise the interaction and sharing, as well as the ability to build on others ideas, and eventually rank them so that the best float to the top, through the wisdom of the crowd.

www.OpenIDEO.com

And here's a link to a growing list (431 at last count) of food related projects.actions to build the connection between growers and consumers. www.openideo.com/open/localfood/concepting I've added a couple of them: www.openideo.com/profiles/jmsinnz

» Read more

It's not a new idea, but in the current circumstances it becomes more clear, that our industrialised, centralised, corporate food systems, do not represent a resilient system.

No doubt, they have done a remarkable job of facilitating bulk food to us for a few decades, however I can't imagine too many cabbages or lettuces fell over or went down cracks in the ground, so the food supply itself must surely still be there.

What this sign is pointing to I think (and I'm open to other views), is the vulnerability of a system where we take ourselves to central distribution points (big box stores), to get our daily bread, and fruit and veges and milk...

I saw this happen on Waiheke about a year ago, when the Supermarket was damaged by fire and closed for a few days.

It was a great opportunity to see where else we could buy or find food, and it highlighted our heavy dependence on a single system.

It's time to rebuild, but this time let's build it differently.

» Read more