Category — Nutrition

The rearing of insects can be carried out in rural, peri-urban and urban areas. Insect consumption is a part of the diets of over 2 billion people worldwide!

By Arnold van Huis Joost Van Itterbeeck Harmke Klunder Esther Mertens Afton Halloran Giulia Muir and Paul Vantomme
Food And Agriculture Organization Of The United Nations
Rome, 2013

“Edible insects: future prospective for food and feed security” was launched on May 13th during the International Conference on Forests for Food Security and Nutrition. This publication describes the contribution of insects to food security. It shows the many traditional and potential new uses of insects for direct human consumption and the opportunities for and constraints to farming them for food and feed.

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A new study looks at the difference between gardeners and their neighbors. The gardener’s likelihood of being obese is far lower than the foodie, non-gardener’s.

A new study recommends that city planners and public health officials take a new tack when it comes to keeping their communities healthy: gardening.

By Ansa Varughese
Medical Daily
Apr 23, 2013

Excerpt:

Working in a community garden could mean the difference between obesity and healthy weight, a new study suggests.

Researchers culled measurements of body fat and weight from community gardeners and non-gardeners and found that the gardeners weighed less than their non-farming neighbors. It wasn’t just luck of the draw, either; gardeners were shown to have a lower body-mass index than their non-gardening siblings.

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This year, Mrs. Obama invited children from schools that have made exceptional improvements to school lunches through implementation of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.

The garden so far has produced more than 3,000 pounds of food

By Associated Press
April 04, 2013

Excerpt:

WASHINGTON — Salad using lettuce from Michelle Obama’s garden could be served up in just a few weeks.

The first lady on Thursday planted lettuce and other crops in her garden on the South Lawn of the White House, with an assist from schoolchildren from Washington, D.C., and several school districts around the country.

Two varieties of wheat were planted for the first time: club wheat and bread wheat.

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See urban faming network at minute eight of the video.

Tastes Like Cricket: Designing A Delicious, Insect-Based Food System

By Patrick James
Fastcoexist
Apr 9, 2013

Excerpt:

“If you roast wax worms, which are these little caterpillars that eat only honey,” says Aguirre-Bielschowski, “they taste pretty much like pistachios. Locusts, they’re very nutty, kind of like walnuts. Crickets are different, actually very meaty. So if you pan fry them, they taste a bit like sausages. And obviously I think the first time you try them, you associate them with a lot of things that are already familiar to you. But as you eat them more and more you start recognizing their own flavors.”

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Delicious pine nuts possibly coming to Vancouver neighbourhoods

By Bill Stephen
City Arborist
City of Vancouver
March 27, 2013

The Korean pine (Pinus koraiensis) is a prodigious provider of the staple food – the pine nut. Harvested by ancient and contemporary cultures throughout temperate eastern Asia, it is rich in unsaturated oils and flavour. It is used in its pulverized form as a soup stock, and has many purported medicinal uses.

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Jeanne Kelly in Rockdale, a community garden in Los Angeles. Photo by Ryan Robert Miller.

Just in Los Angeles alone, more than 70 community gardens are spudding and feeding about 3,900 local families.

By Sophia Lee
World Magazine
Feb 28, 2013

Excerpt:

Jeanne Kelley has a big bowl of salad for dinner every night.

She lives across from a giant supermarket in Eagle Rock, a hill-studded neighborhood northeast of Los Angeles. But instead of driving to the store, she walks three minutes down the hill to a community garden called Rockdale, where she picks arugula, lettuce, snow peas, spinach, tomatoes or kale—whatever is in season and ready to harvest.

Kelley, a cookbook author and food stylist, owns a few feet of beds in Rockdale. The community garden forms a long stretch of 50 plots on what used to be light-rail tracks. One sunny Tuesday afternoon, Kelley walked me through the shady garden, snapping emerald snow peas from their stem.

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Mark Twain Middle School, a Title 1 school where 83% of students get assistance with meals

By MeiMei Fox
Huffington Post
Feb 25, 2013

Excerpt:

Mark Twain Middle School’s Seed to Plate Program in Venice, Los Angeles is a model for school nutrition programs in the L.A. Unified School District and across the nation. The garden serves as not only a source of healthy food for the students, but also as a classroom. The children learn entrepreneurship by selling their produce at a local farmer’s market; math by counting loaves of bread baked from the wheat harvest; and history by studying Aztec and Mayan agricultural techniques.

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Yale’s Sustainable Food Project

Mark Bomford is innovator in both non-profit and academic contexts. Mark has founded and managed projects focused on urban agriculture, community food security, and food systems modeling and research. He’s dabbled in everything from farming to food-centered organizations—both in Canada and around the world. In 2011 Bomford joined the Yale Sustainable Food Project. He looks forward to deepening the impact and broadening the reach of the Project as it enters its second decade of playing a transformative role in the larger food system.

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After their plants died in 2010, David Neufeld (pictured) and Maggie Andres rediscovered that the herbicide Tordon 101 was used in nearby ditches. Photo by Maggie Andres.

Manitoba farmers grappling with impacts and legality of municipal herbicide use

By Larry Powell
The Dominion
Feb 19, 2013

Excerpt:

There, they became the first and only producers in the province at the time to market certified organic seedlings, such as tomatoes, peppers and medicinal herbs, to fellow growers. Over the years, their rural homestead became a gathering point for others who shared their passion for a simpler way of living.

While no longer officially certified as organic, the two were still producing their plants without the use of chemicals when tragedy struck in 2010. To their horror, as Neufeld put it, “Every single one of our plants curled up grotesquely and died!” He estimates this resulted in a revenue loss of $10,000.

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Tips for growing safely in the city and preventing childhood lead poisoning

University of Cincinnati Health and Medical News

Bill Menrath – Lead expert and Senior Research Associate, UC Department of Environmental Health

Nick Newman, DO – Director, Pediatric Environmental Health and Lead Clinic, cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

Lead experts from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center talk about ways to reduce the risk of lead exposure when gardening on city plots.

“We are excited to be aligned with Mayor Don Grebien’s Pawtucket Culinary Arts Initiative.”

By Ethan Shorey
The Valley Breeze
1/29/2013

Excerpt:

The New Urban Farmers started the Urban Food Lab for many reasons, mostly because we saw a need for a community food hub in Pawtucket. We wanted a place where people could learn about food and where our locally grown produce could go get ready for market or be processed into a value-added product.

We see the Urban Food Lab as the umbrella that covers all of what we do here at New Urban Farmers, from planting seeds to making sauerkraut. We feel it is important for all communities to have healthy and green places. We do it through farming. We see more food being grown locally and more people eating from those local harvests and benefiting from better health.

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2009 video showing Camden youngsters learning about nutrution. The state has given the garden’s operators until March 31, 2013 to remove all property from the Children’s Garden.

The nonprofit Camden Children’s Garden has two months to vacate most of its state-owned property before the land is transferred to the Adventure Aquarium next door.

By Claudia Vargas
Philly.com
January 25, 2013
Excerpts:

In a letter sent last week, the New Jersey Department of Treasury ordered Children’s Garden director Michael Devlin to remove all property – including the facility’s amusement rides, gazebo, and giant dinosaur – by March 31.

The garden has the option to sell its items to Herschend Family Entertainment, the private owner of the aquarium as well as amusement parks around the country.

The state, which owns the four-acre waterfront property, will allow the Children’s Garden to rent a small area to house office space and a greenhouse.

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A program that unites agriculture with community development, nutrition, and local economic development.

Kickstarter
Nov 9, 2012

Excerpt:

The city of Bryan has graciously granted access to vacant properties in, and around historic downtown for the testing of the distributed farm concept. These once unused plots will become beautiful attractions and valuable assets to city and community members alike.

Good Food – Nutrition Education

Once established, these gardens will be available to schools and organizations for hands-on nutrition education. We believe that much of our nation’s struggle with obesity comes from the severed relationship we have with our food system.

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Stony Brook Heights Rooftop Farm.

Now, hospitals are joining the trend too, adding farms to their rooftops to help provide patients with the freshest produce available.

Food, Nutrition and Science
From The Lempert Report
Oct 29, 2012

Excerpt:

One thriving rooftop garden is making headlines at Stony Brook University Hospital on Long Island. The Stony Brook Heights Rooftop Farm resides on the roof of the fourth floor of Stony Brook’s Health Science tower and is managed by staff nutritionists, dietetic interns and Sustainability Studies students from the University. This year’s crop produced more than 400 pounds with 33 varietals of vegetables and herbs harvested. And if that wasn’t impressive enough, the food that is grown here is served directly to hospital patients.

The farm has been so successful that it is currently serving as a model for each of the 10 community gardens throughout Suffolk County, which, like the Stony Brook Heights Rooftop Farm, are supported by the New York State Department of Health grant. There are plans to expand the program in 2013 to produce enough food to donate to organizations in need of fresh and healthy food.

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Merri Schwartz wants to make sustainable practices integral to living and cooking in Vancouver. Photograph by Joshua McVeity.

Growing Chefs! program pairs volunteer chefs with elementary school classrooms

By Fred Lee
Vancouver Courier
October 26, 2012

Excerpt:

How did a pastry chef get interested in what kids eat?

I was lucky enough to be raised by amazing parents-back to the land hippies who grew huge gardens and made everything from scratch. So many kids don’t have that privilege. When I started working in fine dining, I became aware of this vast store of knowledge among chefs about sustainability, nutrition, agriculture. and no way to share it. I wanted to provide a way for chefs to engage with the community and share what they knew, and working with kids only made sense. It’s not only an effective way to create lasting change, but it’s so much fun!

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Lunchtime cricket. Photo by FAO.

120 farmers to breed house crickets, weaver ants and palm weevils (common edible insects of choice among Laotians)

IRIN
Oct 3, 2012

Excerpt:

VIENTIANE, – Promoting consumption of edible insects in Laos may help boost protein-anaemic diets, say health experts trying to create regional health standards for insect production, harvesting and consumption.

Working with the Laotian Health Ministry, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) launched an “edible insects project” in Laos in 2010 with a two-year budget of US$475,000 to boost insect production and harvesting for consumption.

Scheduled to end in April 2013, the project aims to provide poor households with an affordable, culturally-acceptable, protein-rich food complement. It has trained 120 farmers to breed house crickets, weaver ants and palm weevils (common edible insects of choice among Laotians), as well as mealworms which had only been used as animal feed but FAO now wants to introduce as human food.

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Mamans Lumières from the municipality of Moron teach other local mothers about healthy child nutrition. Photo FAO/C. Deligia.

Haiti’s “Mamans Lumières” cast a light over the shadow of malnutrition

FAO
25/09/2012

Excerpt:

In the municipality of Moron, situated in the isolated Grand’Anse Department of Haiti, a group of women are making their way towards their shared community garden – a space that has been set up with the help of FAO and its partners, including the French NGO Médecins du Monde, the German Red Cross and various local NGOs.

The community garden has become a neighborhood hub — buzzing with activity — where the women farm together, but also regularly attend classes, workshops and practical trainings on how to make informed nutritional choices and improve their production of crops and small livestock.

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Schoolchildren line up to thresh rice on the grounds of Choongmoo Elementary School in central Seoul, Monday. Last year, the school started a project to have students grow crops and vegetables to learn to respect life and help eliminate bullying. Korea Times photo by Kim Bo-eun.

Farming activities have been cited as preventing bullying and violence in schools, which has become more frequent of late.

By Kim Bo-eun
Korea Times
Oct 10, 2012

Excerpt:

Fall is the joyous time of harvests. And although the nation’s urban centers are devoid of harvesting, in Choongmoo Elementary School, central Seoul, there is an initiative to bring back some of the season’s associated joys.

Its school grounds were filled with the sound of blades cutting crops and threshing machines, as well as laughter, Monday, as students helped to harvest the rice crops they planted in the spring.

“Everything is fascinating and fun,” exclaimed second-grader Lee Min-so, who was evidently excited about the activities. “It’s great that we can experience farming at our school.”

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Homeowners who keep chickens in their backyards have little way of knowing whether their eggs might be contaminated unless they have them tested themselves. Photo by Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times.

“It just takes a microscopic amount of lead to poison a child.”

By Julie Scelfo
New York Times
October 8, 2012

Excerpt:

To the long list of food conundrums, add this one: new research has found elevated levels of lead in eggs from chickens in New York City’s public neighborhood gardens.

Preliminary results from a New York State Health Department study show that more than half of the eggs tested from chickens kept in community gardens in Brooklyn, Bronx and Queens had detectable levels of lead, unlike their store-bought counterparts. While lead is a naturally occurring element that is ingested in a variety of ways, it has been well established to be harmful to humans, even in very low quantities.

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Chef of restaurant Rumi, Ali Ashtiani, left, and restaurant co-owner Husayn Friedmann, right, go through the McGill University Edible Campus Garden to choose ingredients for their dish for the iron chef competition. The Rumi restaurant team won the best spirit award. Photo by Dario Ayala.

A dish featuring vegetables fresh from the earth

By Susan Schwartz
The Gazette
September 11, 2012

Excerpt:

The challenge for each team was to prepare a dish featuring vegetables fresh from the earth, a dish that reflected their culinary sensibilities and their creativity, and a dish created and executed in under an hour. The event was held at Santropol Roulant’s Edible Campus Garden, located on McGill University’s lower campus. The garden is brimming this time of year with produce — from green beans to silver thyme, celery to dinosaur kale.

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