The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, 1954

“For fourteen successive years the gardens at Bilignin were my joy, working in them during the summers and planning and dreaming of them during the winters. The summers frequently commenced early in April with the planting, and ended late in October with the last gathering of the winter vegetables.
Bilignin surrounded by mountains and not far from the French Alps —”

[Read more →]

Author Steven McFadden Releases “An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century”

Lincoln, NE – “Food and farms are involved in a blitzkrieg of changes,” writes veteran journalist Steven McFadden in The Call of the Land, published this month by NorLightsPress. The book joins a growing chorus voicing a new vision for food and agriculture. Picking up where Food Inc., the recent documentary on industrial agriculture, leaves off, the volume presents dozens of creative responses to the crisis.

Dubbed “An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century,” the sourcebook documents a range of positive pathways to food security, economic stability, environmental health, and cultural renewal. To McFadden and others, the call of the land now is an SOS. The responses—from individuals, communities, cities, and institutions—are both imaginative and practical.

[Read more →]

See FAO’s Food For The Cities brochure here.

Invitation to participate in the FAO Forum on Food, agriculture and cities: challenges and priorities:

More and more of the world’s population is becoming concentrated in and around large cities. Ensuring that the billions of people living in cities have their rightful access to adequate amounts of safe and nutritious food represents a global development challenge of the highest order. Promoting sustainable agricultural production in urban and peri-urban areas and developing food systems capable of meeting urban consumer demand will become increasingly important to global food security. Currently however, the important relationship between food security, agriculture and urbanization is often not sufficiently recognized.

In order to pursue the work, broaden the approaches, bring new insights, for cities both of developing, intermediate or developed countries, FAO proposes a discussion on the forum http://km.fao.org/fsn/fsn-home/en/ . The Forum is open from this week onwards and will run for the coming 3 weeks.

[Read more →]