A group of teenagers sits in a circle. Typical teenagers, they span the spectrum of race and ethnicity, ages and economic groups, dress and appearance. They are white, brown, black, and Asian; dressed in designer fashions, folded into slouchy sweats; straight, gay, closeted; distracted, focused; trying to stay off drugs, grieving, animated, fighting their parents, failing school, high-achieving, wishing they were somewhere else, excited that they’re here because they’ve been […]
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Ron Finley | Guerilla gardeners vs. food deserts
I live in South Central. This is South Central: liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots. So the city planners, they get together and they figure they’re going to change the name South Central to make it represent something else, so they change it to South Los Angeles, like this is going to fix what’s really going wrong in the city. This is South Los Angeles: liquor stores, fast food, vacant […]
Rowan Jacobsen | The Taste of Place
My neighbor Paul has a field that grows great carrots. That’s a good thing, because Paul makes his living off that field, but it’s also a bit of a surprise. At first glance, you wouldn’t expect it to grow great anything. It looks too high, too cold, and too poor. The soil is little more than ground-up schist. After a rain it looks like old pavement. Only after you’ve lived […]
Cary Fowler | The Future of Food
I’ve been fascinated with crop diversity for about thirty-five years now, ever since I stumbled across a fairly obscure academic article by a guy named Jack Harlan. He described diversity within crops — all the different kinds of wheat and rice and such — as a genetic resource. He said, “This genetic resource,” — and I’ll never forget the words — “stands between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale […]
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