Category — Nutrition

Roadside vegetable market, Nr. Kampala, Uganda. Photo by Mike Gadd.

Trial at five contaminated urban agriculture sites in Kampala City, Uganda

By G. Nabulo, C.R. Black, J. Craigon, S.D. Young
School of Biosciences, University of Nottingham
Online: 28 December 2011.
Environmental Pollution
Volume 162, March 2012, Pages 389-398

Abstract

Concentrations of potentially toxic elements were measured in soils and five contrasting tropical leafy vegetables grown in a replicated field trial at five contaminated urban agriculture sites in Kampala City, Uganda. Soil contamination at each site could be tentatively ascribed to known waste disposal practices. There was considerable variation in metal uptake between vegetable types. Washing leafy vegetables reduced chromium and lead concentrations but exogenous contamination of leaves also depended on vegetable type, withGynandropsis gynandraL. showing a marked tendency to accumulate Pb and Cr.

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A Manual For Teachers, Parents And Communities

Kraisid Tontisirin, Director,
Food and Nutrition Division
Mahmoud Solh, Director,
Plant Production and Protection Division
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
Rome © FAO 2005
198 pages

Foreword

The keys to the development of children and their future livelihoods are adequate nutrition and education. These priorities are reflected in the first and second Millennium Development Goals. The reality facing millions of children, however, is that these goals are far from being met.

Children who go to school hungry cannot learn well. They have decreased physical activity, diminished cognitive abilities, and reduced resistance to infections. Their school performance is often poor and they may drop out of school early. In the long term, chronic malnutrition decreases individual potential and has adverse affects on productivity, incomes and national development. Thus, a country’s future hinges on its children and youth.

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At TEDxManhattan Dr. Melony Samuels talks about using urban farming to empower low-income families to take control of their diets.

Dr. Melony Samuels is the Founder and Director of the Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger. She not only helps provide food to low-income families in Brooklyn, she’s started an urban farm to help residents get the healthiest, freshest food possible.

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Watch the video here.

Fears about food safety have prompted some young Chinese professionals to try growing their own

By Martin Patience
BBC News, Beijing
Aug 3, 2011

Excerpt:

Juggling their iPhones with spades, a group of young professionals are getting their hands dirty – digging vegetables.

During the week, they are teachers, PR consultants, and computer programmers. But at the weekend, these city slickers return to the soil.

“We’re worried about food safety,” says He Liying, explaining why they grow vegetables.

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Josh Bunker, executive director of Grow Annapolis (left), Sharon New (center), and Deborah Dramby (right), the three panelists at Thursday’s seminar.

The panelists at the latest Quiet Waters environmental lecture series said community gardens could be the answer to many of today’s health and environmental problems.

By Frank Smith
Greater Annapolis Patch
June 21, 2011

Excerpt:

The final panelist was University of Maryland student Deborah Dramby who showed how students have created a community garden with grant funding. The goal of their garden is to be completely self-sustaining.

They were given a small patch of land on campus that was weed-ridden. Instead of using harmful pesticides, their solution was to bring in a few goats.

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Mang Khan Zam, left, and Whitney Sewell transplant seedlings to their beds on the land they are farming on Folsom Avenue in St. Louis. The farm is part of the International Institute’s Global Farms Initiative that is designed to teach immigrants and refugees organic farming skills that they can develop into careers as farmers. Photo by David Carson.

“We’re trying to get them to eat familiar foods that they can grow instead of going to fast food places.”

By Doug Moore
SLT Today
April 15, 2011

Excerpt:

The urban agriculture program, run by the International Institute of St. Louis, is one of 19 across the country that have been funded by grants from the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services. The grants this year total $1 million nationwide, with typical local awards of about $75,000.

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A Girl Chopping Collected wild mushroom. Photo by Tika Ram Aryal.

Mushroom poisoning is a great problem in Nepal

Tika Ram Aryal
Department of Science and Environment Education, Tribhuwan University, Prithivi Narayan Campus,
Pokhara, Nepal
E-mail:tikaramaryal2000 (at) yahoo.com

Abstract

Mushroom poisoning is a great problem in Nepal. Every year dozens of people died and hundred of people fall sick due to consumption of poisonous wild mushroom. Local people have been using wild mushroom in their diet as well as a source of income, but they do not have proper scientific knowledge about the identification of edible and poisoning mushrooms. This practice has caused severe poisoning and even death. Here is no any responsible organization to reduce the death of due to consumption of wild mushroom. An effort has been made with the aim to reduce casualty of people due to consumption of wild mushroom through different awareness programmes, training, and brochure distribution at the most vulnerable parts of Nepal which were identified from the published report in various national newspapers in 2008 and 2009.

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US First Lady Michelle Obama harvests vegetables from her garden June 4, 2010 at the White House. The First Lady recruited chefs from across to join her anti-obesity campaign and help schools serve healthier, tastier meals. Mrs. Obama is calling on the chefs to partner with individual schools and work with teachers and parents to help educate kids about food and nutrition. She said healthy meals at schools are more important than ever because many children get most of their calories at school. AFP Photo by Paul J. Richards.

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Joyce Dixon examines her spearmint. Photo by Matthew Kelly.

“This garden teaches us to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables”

By Matthew Kelly
Brooklynink
August 15, 2010
The Brooklyn Ink is devoted to news and features from the borough of Kings. The staff of the Ink, composed entirely of students at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism , works tirelessly to bring you breaking news, multimedia and longer features five days a week.

Excerpt:

Standing over her garden, Joyce Dixon leaned down to weed the soil, tending to her patch of young tomato plants. The summer air was thick and sticky with 90-degree heat. Dixon stood up to wipe the dark skin of her brow, she shook the dirt off her t-shirt and gave a smile.

“I grew up on a farm as a little one,” she said, “and this brings me back.”

Dixon’s farm was on the island of Jamaica, but now it is in the East New York section of Brooklyn. She’s 65 years old and is a volunteer gardener at East New York Farms!, which is a program of the United Community Center. On Saturdays, she tends her patch at the youth farm behind the center, where interns help volunteer gardeners.

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Roasted Beet Salad. We pulled the first of our beets from the ground (a candy-cane type) and roasted them in the oven with carrots, green onions, and garlic scapes.

Our attempt to organically grow 1 ton of food on our urban city lot!

By Kate n Daniel Vickery

From their blog:

Can you grow the majority of the food you eat?

Thinking about trying to grow a ton of food on our urban lot recently led us to a discussion of how much food we eat in a year. According to the USDA the average american adult eats about 4.7 lbs of food a day. So in a year the average person is eating 1717 pounds of food! That means if my wife and I are “average americans” we will consume a combined 3434 pounds of food.

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Members of the Brickstone self-help group at their urban farming demonstration plot in Mathare, Nairobi. Photo by Salla Himberg/IRIN

Bag a farm

By IRIN: Humanitarian news and analysis.
A project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
NAIROBI, 18 February 2010

Excerpt:

Faced with high food prices, low income and barely a patch of arable land, hundreds of residents of Nairobi’s densely populated slums have adopted a novel form of intensive agriculture: a farm in a sack.

Ex-convict John King’ori is hoping the project, run by Italian NGO COOPI, will help him go straight after eight years behind bars for a violent robbery.

King’ori chairs the Juja Road Self-Help Group, whose 76 members, also mostly former prisoners, are among the 1,000 households in Mathare and Huruma hoping their sacks will provide a sustainable source of vegetables such as kale, spinach, capsicum and onions.

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Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food.

TED Talk
February 2010

Transcript:

Sadly, in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat, four Americans that are alive will be dead from the food that they eat.

My name’s Jamie Oliver. I’m 34 years old. I’m from Essex in England and for the last seven years I’ve worked fairly tirelessly to save lives in my own way. I’m not a doctor. I’m a chef; I don’t have expensive equipment or medicine. I use information, education.

I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life. We have an awful, awful reality right now. America, you’re at the top of your game. This is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world.

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Jesse Kurtz-Nicholl’s Interview with Urban Ag High School Student, Ana Araujo

Center for Livable Future
Dec 18, 2009

Excerpt:

In October 2009, Jesse Kurtz-Nicholl sat down with Ana Araujo to discuss the Urban Agriculture and Food Systems class she participated in at Richmond High School in 2008/2009. The class was a pilot program, which gave the students graduation credit and was centered around the creation of a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and direct sale of produce from a middle school farm and the school garden at Richmond High. 10 families received a bi-weekly box of produce for $5, which was planted, tended and grown completely by Richmond High students.

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See larger photo here. Photo by Michael Levenston

Our garden veggies and fruit go to West Side Family Place

Head gardener Sharon Slack drives five minutes from the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden to donate freshly harvested organic food to Family Place.

West Side Family Place in Kitsilano is a resource centre dedicated to supporting families with young children. It is a place to meet new friends, gain a sense of community, and to receive ongoing assistance that helps families to raise healthy, happy children.

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Watch higher quality video by clicking on the YouTube icon.

Bronwyn picks some Russian kale leaves at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden and walks us through the steps to make her unique muffins. She created this recipe last summer while working on an organic farm where there was nothing to eat but kale.

Kale-Carrot Muffins

Ingredients:
½ cup vegetable or grape seed oil
½ cup honey
1 egg, slightly beaten
½ cup milk
1 tsp almond flavouring
½ cup carrots, shredded
1 cup young kale leaves, (when steamed and pureed with 1-2 tbsp of milk, it produces approximately ½ cup of puree)

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Click on the YouTube icon to get a higher quality video.

We grow lots of garlic at the Vancouver Compost Garden. But not many people know about scapes, the flowering stems that appear in June about three weeks before the bulbs are harvested.

Maria picked some of our scapes and prepared a quick and easy recipe for delicious pesto sauce.

Photo: “Wild Girl” Becky Lerner
Both the white and blue flowers in the photo above are camas. The white one will kill you, but the blue one is food. The native people of the Portland area considered blue camas root a staple. It took three days of cooking in underground fire pits to make it edible. The bulb is said to taste like a sugary, sweet potato.

From May 24 through May 30, local “Wild Girl” Becky Lerner will be eating an entirely wild diet as she forages from sidewalks, parks, wilderness areas and yards in Portland. There will be no dumpster diving or mooching off gardens – Lerner will be surviving on wild edibles only.

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PowerPoint presentation by Dr. Thilak T. Ranasinghe (See next page.)

Sri Lanka National Agriculture Policy Documents

Statement – 29 (2003)
Implement a special urban agriculture promotion
program designed to ensure supply of home
consumption needs and environmental protection.

Statement – 17 (2007)
17.1 Promote home-gardening and urban agriculture
to enhance household nutrition and income
17.2 Promote women’s participation in home-gardening.

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Photo: Nyandarva boarding primary school in Kenya, Rift Valley Province.
© 2004 Didier Ruef

“Over 20,000 children and young people, 400 teachers, with many families and communities (we estimate about 50,000 people in total) in four continents in four continents have participated in garden-based teaching and learning and community action and have come to generate new ways of learning about, and living in, an uncertain modern world.”

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Harvesting Satina Potatoes at City Farmer from Mike Levenston on Vimeo. You can follow the links above and watch this video in HD (High Definition).
Also see alternative HD High Definition version on YouTube.

Maria pulls up a large harvest of delicious Satina potatoes at the Vancouver Compost Demonstration Garden. We’ve boiled and baked these and made potato salad – all delicious dishes.