No Farm, No Foul
No Farm, No Foul
Re-examining the farm to table movement
by Tracey Middlekauff @urbanitemdfood
• Farm to table generally means rusticity, authenticity, purity, and simplicity, but some chefs note that it stifles creativity and technique.
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Save the dates
We have been asked to post the dates of our events so that everyone knows what we are planning. The first is this year’s installment of the film series, which will be April 20 at the Green Center on HACC’s midtown campus. The film being shown is Home, more details to come soon!
The second event is our annual fall Meet the Producers dinner at HACC. The date for that is Friday, September 28. This will be held at the Wildwood Conference Center. Stay tunes for detail on the menu.
We are working on a couple fo other events for early Spring so please keep an eye out on this site.

Fair Farms Campaign Kickoff Meeting!
Care about small farmers? How about healthy, sustainable food? Then please join us for…
Fair Farms Campaign Kickoff Meeting!
Thursday, September 22nd
7:00 – 8:00pm
HACC Midtown 2 – Room 118 – 1500 N 3rd St, Harrisburg
**Refreshments provided**
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Slow Food Book List
List of 100 food books
I’ve seen a lot of top ten lists but this one on TakePart is nice and robust: 100 food books to read. Click here to see it. Also, a post from our blog from a few years back, with specific recs from friends of Slow Food. Click here.

Current Food Policy Movies of Note
Food Movies
Film screenings and film-related events are always popular. A recent leader call on planning & hosting an effective event turned up a bunch of questions about how to secure licenses, how much to charge, etc. This thread will be a place to check in about current movie opportunities as well as a place to discuss the various logistics of planning a movie-related event. Continue reading

Why Local Food Systems are an Opportunity for Industry
By Jess Halliday, reprinted from FoodNavigator.com and posted 07-Feb-2011
The food industry should not rage against the idea of professionalised local food systems, nor unleash its lobbying force to uproot them before their green shoots can reach maturity. Rather, it should explore ways to benefit from local foods and, in turn, foster their development. Continue reading

Are we getting what we pay for?
Americans love cheap food. We spend less of our incomes on food now than ever before. In 1949, we allotted 22% of our incomes to food. In 2009, that figure dropped to only 10% (about half of what the Japanese and French spend). Seems good until you correlate another set of statistics. Back in 1959, only 4% of children were overweight. Today that figure has climbed to 19%. In 1979, 28% of adults were overweight. Now it’s a shocking 64%.
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The ‘90s set the table for a decade of good eats
(AP) – Want an easy way to sum up how Americans ate during the first 10 years of the new century? Three words should do it:
Sushi at 7-Eleven. Continue reading

Monsanto’s GMO Products to Blanket the Earth
The Associated Press just uncovered a series of confidential commercial licensing agreements that give around 200 smaller companies the right to insert Monsanto’s genes (resistant to their Roundup herbicide) in their corn and soybean plants.
This means that Monsanto will OWN and CONTROL roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S. Monsanto is blocking competition in the seed industry, forcing farmers into growing genetically modified crops, and all the while increasing seed prices. Now, when farmers buy bags of seed from obscure brand names, they are paying for Monsanto’s seeds. To read the AP article, click here.
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Slow Food at 20: The Graceful Revolution
Reprint from The Financial Times, December 12, 2009 By Harry Eyres
I don’t often feel tempted to raise my hand in salute but I’m making an exception for the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Slow Food Manifesto in Paris in December 1989. This is a fraternal greeting to the inspired organisation which, at the tail end of the most violent century in history, provided the perfect antidote to that lamentable paean to speed, Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto of 1909. Slow Food has not merely mobilised the beneficent force of slowness (which can be surprisingly powerful, like the tree-men Ents in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) but has also provided one of the bases for a new politics of food and environmental quality.
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