Food Day 2012

…is October 24. Food should have it's own day and so it does. This is definitely an item for Everybody Eats. iCreate too as well as community gardens and farmers markets. Check out the many partner organizations, no government or industry funding accepted, and start panning a Food Day event. Get the word out.

Food Day is a celebration of real food and a campaign to help solve food-related problems in our homes, on our farms, in our schools and in our communities. We want food to be healthy, affordable, and produced with care for the environment, animals, and the women and men who grow, harvest, and serve it.

Food has gotten cheaper — but at what cost?

Those great bargains at the big box markets may not be as good as they look. Money is not the only cost. When calculating those, factor in health, environment, jobs, wages, working conditions, and even (maybe especially) the unquantifiable social and psychic costs of factory farming.  Tom Laskawy at Grist writes, 

I’ve noticed that quite a few Grist readers have been struck by our coverage of shockingly high food prices in Inuit communities in Canada’s far north. It’s less a story of life in extreme lands than the culmination of a historical destruction of indigenous peoples’ traditional foodways combined with a conservative government’s unwillingness to help them adapt. Photo by Nick Castonguay.


How appropriate then that NPR’s Planet Money, as part of its Graphing America series, should look at how America’s food spending has changed over the last 30 years. The headline figure — the one Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack is proudest of — is that we spend just under 9 percent of our income on food, about 30 percent less than we did in 1982.