Wednesday, March 25, 2009

A lagniappe: "a little something extra" in Cajun country

[Photo: An Asian pear from Edible Landscaping in Afton, VA]

A Lagniappe

Nicholas Kristoff of the New York Times recently posted on his blog that he is interested in writing more about food issues. Here is my response:


I applaud your desire to write more about our food and food supply. I hope through your column you can educate your readers about the industrial, factory-food system we have. This system, designed for efficiencies of scale, can lead to greater contamination of food, as well as poorer quality of food, than locally-scaled food production systems. I hope you will address the current crazy quilt of regulations governing food production, safety and monitoring; the lax food-inspection system and; the ecological costs (and environmental-health effects) of large-scale, petroleum-heavy food production. I recently heard Bill McKibben say that our current food production system only makes sense when we have cheap oil and a stable earth climate. As for what I am doing personally, I am dedicating more and more of my little half-acre suburban lot to growing organic food and encouraging others to do the same though one-on-one contact and an organic gardening blog.

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