Demand an organic farm bill

Join me in telling Congress, "I want an Organic Farm Bill" to help meet the serious challenges of the 21st century. It's time that U.S. agricultural policy in the farm bill shift from its focus of creating cheap commodities and artificially propping up income for farmers toward implementing best agricultural practices for sustainable and organic production. Share your ideas of how to make the Farm Bill better serve farmers, eaters and the environment!

Farmers need your voice today. Please spread the word.

http://action.fooddemocracynow.org/sign/your_organic_farm_bill/?referring_akid=.92252.M13cg7&source=mailto

Are you smarter than Congress?

On most things, I'm sure you probably are. Congress (collectively speaking) sets a pretty low bar, after all.

However, in this instance, this is actually not a rhetorical question, but a short quiz from American Jewish World Service to see how much you know about the Farm Bill, which is coming up for renewal later this year. Take it and see how you do, and then tell your friends to come visit my blog (which is very lonely out here in the abyss of cyberspace) and take the quiz themselves.

http://www.ajws.org/farmbillquiz

File this under the heading Stuff You Don't See Every Day

Photo by Peter Sagal via Twitter.

Yo-Yo Ma gets down with a wombat:

http://www.suntimes.com/9447566-417/yo-yo-ma-and-a-wombat-meet-on-a-bathroom-floor-seriously.html

Great Chanukah show this Sunday

Join me for a special Chanukah preview show this Sunday, 12/18, from 10-11am Pacific Time on the Portland Yiddish Hour on 90.7fm KBOO. I'll be playing really cool Chanukah tunes from Y-Love and Yasmin Levy. I'll also be featuring Chanukah songs from the Klezmatics' Woody Guthrie Chanukah album, which came out in 2006. If you have no idea how the Klezmatics tie in with Woody Guthrie, you can find out on Sunday! hint, hint...
The Klezmatics will be in town next Tuesday, 12/20, playing at the Aladdin Theatre, btw, and you might want to check out the show if you're in the Portland area. It's going to be a great start to Chanukah.

If you're outside Portland, you can stream the show live online at http://kboo.fm.

Hope you can tune in! Please send a link to this blog entry to everyone you know who might be interested.

Shameless self-promotion

Here's a link to my latest article in the Jewish Review, about my friend David Kominsky's new shul in my old neighborhood in SE Portland:

http://www.jewishreview.org/local/New-shul-grows-in-Southeast-Portland


Unfortunately they didn't use the exact title I proposed, A Shul Grows in Portland, a play on the book title, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Ah well.

Comments are welcome...hint, hint, hint...

More connections between food and the Occupy movements

Great post from Civil Eats. In response to many activists' question, "What does the Occupy Movement have to do with food?" some of my favorite answers:

• In the U.S. today, the richest one percent hold 40 percent of the wealth, while almost one in five Americans is on food stamps.  Rampant Wall Street speculation on commodities is driving up food costs, small farmers are being driven off their land, and agribusiness holds monopoly control of our seeds and stores.

• At the most obvious level, as the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy recently wrote, “Wall Street deregulation has not only made the stock market extremely volatile, it has increased prices and price volatility in agricultural markets.” That is, the relationship between government and Wall Street firms has turned food into commodity like any other, subject to the whims of the market. 


• In 2000, a wave of industry-backed deregulation raised and then removed these limits on speculation, which opened commodity markets to a flood of new players—these later included funds controlled by some of the biggest Wall Street firms looking for new investment opportunities after the housing bubble burst. Flooded with new investments unconnected to any direct stake in crop prices, in 2008, the commodity markets exploded, driving up grain prices worldwide. The grain price spikes were catastrophic for millions of people worldwide. Farmers, who sometimes benefit from high grain prices, mostly were no better off, because similarly skyrocketing energy prices also drove up prices of agricultural inputs.


• Wall Street firms aren’t just gambling on food prices, they have begun speculating on land as well. Alerted to the potential market in agriculture, investors are buying up huge parcels of farmland all over the world, displacing the occupants, and converting subsistence production to cash crops—or, worse, simply leaving the land fallow and waiting for its value to increase. 

Mark Bittman on the Occupy movement

Great column from Mark Bittman, the NYT's self-appointed "opinionator," about the Occupy movements and how they relate to food activism.