Some Thursday links for your all:

Slow Food Nation’s Victory Garden is complete and it’s beautiful. And Alice Waters talks up the street food section of the event.
But can edible gardens save our broken food system?  Check out this very interesting article from one of the people who had his lawn transformed by artist Fritz Haeg’s […]

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Two interesting articles that highlight the ways in which the poor are being hit by escalating food prices–their pocketbooks, and their reputations.
1. This one from the NY Times, which discusses how food stamps aren’t going as far.
2. This one from Foreign Policy.com, which discusses how, in conversations about how meat eating in poor countries such […]

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by Slow Food USA staffer Jerusha Klemperer
Throughout March and April we covered the Island Grown Farmers Cooperative, in the San Juan Islands, and its USDA certified mobile slaughter facility. This week I traveled to Lopez Island where I had the opportunity to visit several members of the cooperative, see their pasture-grazing cows, sheep, […]

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While network television is rarely a topic of discussion here, Sunday night’s episode of “The Simpsons” proves that awareness of industrial agriculture practices might be growing in the minds of Americans. When Bart joins 4-H (it’s slogan on the show: “4-H: it’s still a thing”) in order to drive a combine, he finds himself caring […]

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A few weeks ago, we began to explore the concept of a mobile slaughter unit as the solution to small scale farmers having no place within driving distance to process their sustainable, grass-fed meat.
The Lopez Community Land Trust, on Lopez Island (in the San Juan islands), started a project called the Island Grown Farmers Cooperative […]

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A few recent stories got us thinking about this question of bedfellows. Can fast food be slow if it’s sourced locally and made with quality ingredients? Can a small producer sell itself to a corporate food giant and maintain its integrity?
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the latest small food company to hop […]

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We’ve been talking about meat a lot lately–mobile slaughter units, meat recalls, laptop butchershops–and we’re not the only ones.
Issue #3 of Meatpaper jut hit the stands and it’s the best one yet. They cover everything from the controversial presence of retail pork in Israel, to the hunt for roadside goat testicles in Tunisia.  And over […]

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Last week we began exploring the question of mobile slaughter units, and their ability to provide infrastructure to small and mid-sized meat producers. Examining the history of the first ever facility in the country, we hope to answer the question: is this replicable?
What does it take to be the first at something like this? To […]

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Slow Food USA Board member, Jim Braun, was one of the subjects of a documentary a few years back on the disappearance of the family farm. It’s a short, simple, and very effective film in three parts that discusses how small farmers in Iowa were squeezed out, with a focus on the small hog […]

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A few articles in the month of January on mobile slaughter units around the country caught our attention and got us asking questions. Why is there a need for mobile slaughter facilities? Could the answer lie somewhere in the nation’s largest beef recall? Where are their successful mobile slaughter facilities in this country? What did […]

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