Sustainable Food Laboratory

When Green Mountain Coffee Roasters decided to measure the impact of their CSR programs, they asked the Sustainable Food Lab and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) for help. Together, they went into producer communities to identify useful indicators (in partnership with the growers themselves) that would enable the company to assess the ability of coffee growers to make a living. What they didn’t expect was to confront los meses flacos, the thin months, the three or four months every year when many coffee growers and their families experience hunger. The case presents the approach the project team used to develop the indicators, and discusses the challenge of addressing poverty and hunger within something as large as the global coffee market.

The former Beatle, Paul McCartney has called for “meat-free Mondays” according to the Press Association. You can almost hear how that would sound in lyrics to a song.
Lifecycle assessments on food consistantly show that red meat from large animals is one of the most greenhouse gas-intensive of food choices available to us. Science News reviewed [...]

Word is that a commitment to halving hunger around the world has come out of the Rome Summit.
FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf set the tone for the meetings by noting some of the disparities around the world (full speech here):
But above all, nobody understands how: first, the OECD countries have created a distortion of world markets [...]

Once a year the National Restaurant Association (a different NRA) surveys over 1200 chefs of American Culinary Federation members to rate menu items as “hot,” “passé” or “perennial favorites.
Bite-size desserts, small plates, locally grown produce and organic products are the latest red-hot food items. Going out of style are low-carb dough, tofu, chai and foie [...]

This summer has brought hailstorm damage to about 30 percent of England’s commercial orchards already and the weather shows no signs of improving.
Waitrose, one of the countries leading retailers, has said it will buy the apples anyway and highlight on packaging the reasons for the less than perfect apperance.
Tom Richardson, Waitrose Fruit Buyer said, “We [...]

In his July 6 column, Gwynne Dyer posits that the era of cheap food is over. Cheap food, he says, lasted for only fifty years and this now is the end. For about that long, food took one tenth of the income of the global middle class. He predicts that it will take one quarter [...]

Heard of it?
Black char made by burning biomass w/o oxygen, that if buried turns out to dramatically (2-3x) increase crop growth.
At the same time it has potential to sequester carbon (helping to aleviate global warming) because the carbon thus buried stays fixed in the soil for a long time - all the while continuing to [...]

The USDA is set to add 38 non-organic ingredients to a list of items allowed in foods labelled organic.
Most of the items on the list are color additives, such as beet juice color extract, that would be allowable when organic versions of the product are not available. Some are more controversial.
The USDA proposes allowing [...]

The Food Climate Research Network just went live with a new website that is a tremendous resource. The site includes a large catalog of relevant recent research on a whole variety of topics related to the sustainability of food. Really handy!

And then, there’s the latest Michael Pollan article in the New York Times.
Fascinating. He makes the argument that unhealthy, fattening calories are categorically cheaper than healthy ones. And that this solves the mystery of why the most reliable predictor of obesity in America is a person’s wealth.
He points out that the farm bill should really [...]