Spade & Spoon
Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Up on the Roof with Urban Agriculture
While much of the Rocky Mountain West is rural, our urban spaces are the areas that are most inhabited and quickly growing. As these cities expand though, we have the fortunate ability to look at other examples of urban growth and the effects that growth has had on the environment. While urban sprawl is the commonly discussed disruptive and destructive form of growth, urban densification (the concentration of buildings in a small area) presents its own problems.
Many of the issues of densification are directly related to the flat roofs that become the ceiling to a city, and raised surface of the earth. The space on flat roofs is often a hot wasteland of blacktop and brick, which absorb and retain heat. Roof tops with little space between them form an island of heat, creating the heat island affect and causing city temperatures to be six to eight degrees hotter than surrounding rural areas. Hard roof surfaces are also meant to be impermeable and rainwater runs off into streets, often draining pollutants into the watershed. In the process, habitat loss has resulted in the decrease in biodiversity in urban centers.
These issues are seen worldwide as dense cities become the place where most people live. But the rooftops that seem so problematic remain underused spaces that could be the very source of greenspace that urban centers (residents and wildlife) desperately need. In order to increase urban biodiversity, and mitigate the effects of habitat destruction, the flat, heat seeking black top roofs can actually become gardens.
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Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Lessons on Aquaculture from Monterey Bay
"Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light... a nostalgia, a dream." --John Steinbeck
In 1921, Monterey Bay, California, bustled with the canning industry. Seventeen plants canned sardines, grinding up whole fish and processing them into feed for chickens or glycerin for explosives. The canneries employed 5,000 people in 1945, and the sardine industry was worth about $22 million. The same year, John Steinbeck wrote about the one mile stretch in his novel Cannery Row.
While Doc and Dora live on in the novel, the canning industry declined as quickly as it expanded and by 1948, sardine production fell by 94 percent.
While the sardine industry would not recover, Monterey Bay is now home to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a facility best known for playful otters. But the Aquarium has taken lessons from the aquacultural history of Cannery Row and the relationship between eaters and the health of oceans and waterways.
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Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Sowing Seed Security
On May 22 the Kew Millennium Seed Bank deposited the billionth seed into its vaults, continuing its mission to preserve the biodiversity of the planet by banking the seed from every plant on the earth. To date, the Millennium Seed Bank, which is located in the United Kingdom, has deposited seed from over 18,000 wild species from over 120 countries and has banked almost ninety percent of all the flora in the United Kingdom. The Bank has room to store half of the plant species found on the planet and it plans to collect twenty five percent of the world’s species by 2020.
The UK Government’s Minister for Biodiversity was proud of the milestone, saying that, "The Millennium Seed Bank must be one of the most significant conservation projects ever. It is a global insurance policy against the loss of uniquely valuable plant species through land pressures or dangerous climate change."
Other seed banks exist in China, South Korea and the North Pole. Norway's forthcoming bank will be called the Doomsday Vault.
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Spade and Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Increasing Montana Institutions’ Local Purchasing Power
On Friday, Montana Governor Schweitzer signed Senate Bill (SB) 328, a bill that passed through the senate and house with almost unanimous support despite a legislative session that was more contentious than cordial. The idea that brought so many disagreeing legislators together was support of Montana’s farmers and ranchers by providing more Montana grown food in large, institutional settings.
SB 328 allows public institutions such as Universities and hospitals more flexibility to buy Montana produced food. It does this by providing an optional exemption in the Montana Procurement Act. Introduced by Senator Donald J. Steinbeisser and supported by Senator Carol Williams, the law allows institutions to buy Montana grown food within certain parameters...
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Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Old Seeds, New Tastes: Growing Heirloom Plants Instead of Hybrids
Before the 1930s, farmers and gardeners around the world relied on open-pollinated seeds that came from previous crops. Carrot seeds were gathered from carrots and tomato seeds from tomatoes. Farmers would save seed from the plants that had done best and would continue to grow and collect those seeds, eventually passing them down to their children and their children’s children.
But in the 1930s hybrid seeds began to appear in seed catalogues. Hybrids were made by breeding two distinct and different varieties of the same species in order to bring out desirable traits. Hybrids were workhorse seeds, built for disease resistance and better yield, and these traits were desirable for farmers who were beginning to increase acreage and production. The seeds would not produce other viable seeds, and so while farmers were able to use the new hybrids to their benefit, they needed to buy them each year. Even so, the utility of these plants made hybrid seed the mainstay of agriculture in the United States.
As the food system became more industrialized, food processors and restaurants were looking for plant varieties that fit the standard shape and function of their machines and equipment. More hybrids were bred to handle long transportation or restaurant uniformity requirements. Tomatoes for instance were bred to be plump and perfectly red with skin tough enough to endure prolonged shipment.
Subsequently, many of the older, open-pollinated heirlooms were dropped by seed companies because they were not selling at the same rate.
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Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Urban Chick: Chickens in the City
There are more chickens than people in the United States. (And that’s just counting the chickens in large, commercial facilities.) In 2006, the U.S. people population topped 300 million, but there were already 450 million chickens (pdf) in large facilities.
While some of these commercial facilities are better than others, most concentrated animal-feeding operations (CAFOs) use tight confinement of chickens to increase efficiency and production. Such concentration leads to a lot of manure, which carries polluting amounts of arsenic, ammonia and other chemicals. (The $40 billion a year industry is adeptly covered in the engaging new PBS documentary, The Natural History of the Chicken.)
This pollution and the often inhumane treatment of CAFO raised poultry are reason enough for many urbanites to raise chickens in their backyards.
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Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Where’s the beef FROM? The Country Natural Beef Co-op
I don’t often eat meat, but while I was in Portland this weekend, my husband and I went on a romantic date and I decided to splurge at the French inspired, Carafe Bistro. I ordered the burger. It was the only meat that was clearly marked as Oregon grown. The price influenced my decision too. I wanted a glass of expensive Oregon Pinot Noir, so I ordered the $9 burger rather than another, more expensive, entree.
It arrived as thick as my fist and was topped with a home-made, well-buttered bun. In one bite, I was swooning. I could not contain my satisfaction. It was, in fact, the best burger I have ever had.
When the waitress leaned over to fill our water and ask how the meal was, the juice oozed from my mouth. I focused long enough to tell her how good it was when she reminded me that it was Oregon meat. I nodded in a stupor.
“We get it from Oregon Country Beef,” she smiled.
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Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Foodshed and Food SecurityIn recent weeks, stories of the tainted Chinese wheat gluten that killed sixteen cats and dogs and caused illness in 12,000 people have led to intense scrutiny over the safety of food import -- particularly those from China.
While no formal link has been made between the deaths and melamine, a colorless substance that is most often used in plastics and fertilizers, the FDA has blocked imports from the Chinese supplier until the investigation is complete.
Meanwhile, ports continue to block other tainted food from China.
But while critics continue to worry about the tainted food that gets through ports of entry and into our mouths and lives, this food danger actually travels both ways.
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Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Greenhoused: Climate Change Changes Agriculture
This week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (opens PDF) released the Fourth Assessment of Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. While the report made the news just before an Easter Weekend of unprecedented freeze warnings from Georgia to New Jersey, little of the coverage was devoted to the report’s findings about agriculture. [more]
Spade & Spoon: Localizing the Way Westerners Eat
Food and Ag Summit: Solutions to Healing An Ailing Food System
For Molly Anderson, research coordinator for the Farm and Food Policy Project, healing Montana’s food system begins by looking at the entire life cycle of food from ground to mouth, seed to sewer. To improve the health of our food system we must examine each organ of processing, packaging, advertising, cost... and the vascular transportation system that connects them.
For instance, food may expel fewer emissions when it travels greater distances than it would if grown in a greenhouse that is warmed with fossil fuels. Or food grown in Malawi might support the economy for that country while contributing only a fraction to greenhouse gases.
This two-part series on Spade & Spoon highlights the Montana Governor's Food and Agriculture Summit held in March in Helena. The first article noted the issues associated with creating local food systems in Montana. This piece -- the second -- discusses solutions.
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