Quick takes and interesting links to food and agriculture in the Northwest
A story from the New West website caught my eye this morning. Factory farming and the loss of agricultural infrastructure was the topic at the recent annual meeting of the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a conservation group based in Sheridan, Wyoming. Mike Callicrate, a rancher and critic of factory farming said in a...
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(GH: Long before “locavore” was a word, Northwesterners have harvested the local bounty by hunting for it. Here’s a link to a recent radio story produced by The Northwest News Network and broadcast on Northwest Public Radio): Every five years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service counts how many Americans hunt. That number has...
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I’d only just stumbled onto the odd little things. They sat in their basket like malformed mangos or stunted bananas, all frog-green and unfamiliar. I’d heard the name paw paw but couldn’t remember where; nor did I know this native American fruit had a taste as close to the tropics as your likely to...
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A little cosmic convergence of potato news: Last night, PBS ran it’s ambitious 2 hour program “Botany of Desire,” based on Michael Pollan’s popular book about the evolutionary relationship of plants and humans. In the section of the show profiling potatoes (all shot in Idaho), Pollan “points up the peril of trying to control...
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You’ve heard of micro-breweries. How about “micro-canneries?” They specialize in locally-caught, hand-packed albacore and salmon. A growing number of commercial fishing families are choosing to can their catch themselves. They can’t begin to compete with supermarket prices. But some of the custom-canned fish is reaching farmers markets, mail order catalogs, food co-ops, and the...
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(GH: In light of the New York Times’ withering report Sunday on lax food-safety enforcement in America’s industrial beef industry, Seattle writer and NYT’s contributor Timothy Egan wonders “how this diet of ours became so disconnected from simple sources.” YAKIMA, Wa. — The apples look like Christmas tree ornaments, wearing a blush of dew at...
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(GH: In the last of a three-part radio series called “The Crush” the Northwest News Network looks into how the wine industry is adjusting to the new economy. Here’s a link to the third story of the series): If you want to see stars outside of Hollywood, head to a Northwest winery. Across the...
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