by Slow Food USA intern Sara Hoffman 
The State of Vermont is going to court against a compost pile.
The Vermont Compost Company (VCC), started to meet the needs of farmers and amateur gardeners for high quality composts and soil mixes, has been served an $18,000 fine by the state. The Natural Resources Board says that owner […]

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The fact that undocumented workers are:
a) indispensible to several industries in this country, especially food and
b) working in horrible conditions
is becoming impossible to ignore, or at least one hopes.
Over here we’ve got agricultural workers dying of heatstroke out in the fields.
Over here the kosher meat supply is dwindling after an immigration raid, and the plant […]

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The mainstream media likes to make a lot out of what our presidential frontrunners eat (usually beginning with “As Brillat-Savarin once wrote, “You are what you eat…”  True, yes, but zzzzzzzzzzz).
We have shied away from this topic, because more interesting than the state fair corndogs they might eat (to seem down with the people) would […]

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To add to yesterday’s post about planting an edible garden on the White House lawn:
Roger Doiron, over at Kitchen Gardeners International (whom we wrote about earlier this year) also has a petition for you to sign, as well as a fleshed out plan for getting our next President to roll up his sleeves and find […]

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The main civic garden on our minds these days is the Victory Garden being planted on the front lawn of City Hall in San Francisco, for Slow Food Nation.  However, there’s a group out there that has its eyes on a bigger prize: the White House Lawn.*
Most interesting might be their PR tactics–in an effort […]

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Alas, we just found this call for applications to serve on the Standards Committee that will finalize a national standard for sustainable agriculture under the auspices of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).  The deadline is today.
This could be a fascinating process, and it will be very interesting to see the outcome–is “sustainable” something that […]

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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 Patrick Keeler
If the recent Farm Bill controversy wasn’t enough to roil us up, recent discussions via Tuft’s COMFOOD listserv in regards to the Women Infant & Children (WIC) Program have gotten many food activists like me in a veritable tizzy. It was there brought to my attention that in […]

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“Amazingly, there is very little attention being paid to what fundamentally underpins all of our food systems - biodiversity and the services provided by ecosystems, such as soil, water and resilience to disasters.” - Gonzalo Oviedo

As the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization convenes this week to discuss food security and rising food prices around the […]

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Yesterday the (Food and) Farm Bill passed in the House and is poised to pass in the Senate today. As we mentioned last week, Bush is ready to veto but the numbers in the House vote suggest that they will easily be able to override his veto.
For good coverage, see:

the San Francisco Chronicle
Grist
NY […]

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