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What does hyperlocal mean to you – a look inside Vermont beer.

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“Do You Know Where Your Beer Is Brewed?” Soft guitar music played while clips of idyllic landscapes and sunrises peaking over breweries slid across the screen. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

The gentle voice of the narrator says, “With 12 breweries spread all across the United States, your next Budweiser is closer than you think.” Budweiser hangs its hat on the fact that it can produce the same beer at 12 facilities and it will always taste exactly the same no matter where you drink it. No small feat, to be sure.  But then the voice adds, “You might even say we’re America’s largest local brewer.”My eyes narrowed and my brow furrowed. ‘What in the heck is this?” I exclaimed. “That is our word!”

It took me a while to calm down from Budweiser’s blatant attempt to co-opt the word “local.” I was hot under the collar and wondered how Budweiser could justify this position…

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23 Photos of diverse folks and what they eat each day

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Photographers Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, traveled around the world and met people from all walks of life.  During their time with these people, they asked them to pose for photographs with their daily diets in front of them. 

The craziest part about the entire project is the caloric intake (and food value) difference between people of different walks of life.

Nutritional value of fruits, veggies is dwindling

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Nutritional value of fruits, veggies is dwindling

While we’ve been dutifully eating our fruits and vegetables all these years, a strange thing has been happening to our produce. It’s losing its nutrients. That’s right: Today’s conventionally grown produce isn’t as healthful as it was 30 years ago — and it’s only getting worse. The decline in fruits and vegetables was first reported more than 10 years ago by English researcher Anne-Marie Mayer, PhD, who looked at the dwindling mineral concentrations of 20 UK-based crops from the 1930s to the 1980s.

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Related:  Climate change threatens to undermine not only how much food can be grown but also the quality of that food as altered weather patterns lead to a less desirable harvest, according to a new study. Crops grown by many of the nation’s farmers have a lower nutritional content than they once did, according to the report by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Climate change to result in less nutritional food

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Yikes – common food additives & preservatives ‘grosser’ than pink slime:

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As meat prices soar, so-called pink slime — a processed meat byproduct that’s sprayed with ammonia (the conventional beef industry prefers the term “lean finely textured beef”) — is making a comeback , according to The Wall Street Journal. And while that surely grosses people out, it’s far from the only disgusting food additive your family is probably gobbling up in mass quantities. Others include…

– Secretions from a beaver’s butt – in cookies, cakes & ice cream

– Human and rodent hair – in baked goods and bread

– Fish bladders – in wine & beer

bon appétit!

Urban farming guru Jessie Banhazl is on Growing Business

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Urban farming guru Jessie Banhazl is on Growing Business

Jessie Banhazl of Green City Growers is on Growing Business, talking about urban farming, with Aaron Niederhelman and Lindsay Poole. Green City Growers is a framing initiative program, focusing on educating the public and helping to bring farming into urban areas.

Green City Growers is very active in the farming industry. They began in 2008 and now have farms on the rooftops of over 120 buildings in the greater Boston area. They install and help maintain rooftop farms both personal residences and businesses. They recently partnered with Be Good restaurant.

Jessie is excited about the future of Green City Growers. As a Mass Challenge finalist, they are now focused on having gardens on commercial and larger scale buildings. The bigger the building the more space to grow and therefore the more food. This is an exciting time for Jessie and Green City Growers and we are excited to watch them grow.

call-2-action: Tell the EPA to stop poisoning bees!

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call-2-action: Tell the EPA to stop poisoning bees!

Bees are essential for one out of three bites of food we eat. But they are being wiped out by the widespread use of certain chemicals – specifically systemic insecticides, like neonicotinoids (“neonics” for short). Despite numerous scientific studies showing that these systemic insecticides are harmful to bees, EPA is actually proposing to expand the use of two such bee-toxic pesticides – thiamethoxam and sulfoxaflor. 

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E.coli – just one of the many dangers of factory farming

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As many have heard – a recall of nearly 2 million pounds of ground beef potentially tainted with dangerous E. coli bacteria has expanded to include distributors to restaurants nationwide — but don’t expect to know which ones.  more…

Is it finally time to change the way meat is raised, slaughtered and consumed in America?  “We’re getting all too used to this out-of-control-broken-food-system recall,” said Goldstein, who holds a master’s in public health. “Unfortunately this sort of significant recall is all too common. As a society we must stop accepting that this is ‘normal’ and begin to make systemic changes.” says Rich Goldstein.

To make these changes, Goldstein thinks we first have to acknowledge what is broken. Four things the public needs to know about factory farmed meat:

1. E.coli

2. Antibiotics

3. Unnatural feed

4. Stress

So what does this all mean in the long run? As a society we must begin to aggressively address the costs of factory farming.  

Fat doesn’t make you fat – cheap food makes you fat!

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Fat doesn’t make you fat – cheap food makes you fat!

We hear a lot about Americans being fast food-addicted couch potatoes, and while that does play a role in the nation’s expanding waist lines, a new study concludes it’s not the driving force behind the obesity epidemic.  Instead all Americans – no matter what income level they have and no matter what neighborhood they live in – are getting bigger because food is cheaper than ever before, the study authors say. Simply put, we’re spending less of our total budget on food so we’re buying more.

Whole Foods takes over America

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Whole Foods takes over America

When Whole Foods went public in 1992 with 10 stores, co-founder and co-CEO John Mackey thought perhaps the chain could open 100 locations, and even that goal, he tells Fortune, was “outlandishly optimistic.” In December he upped Whole Foods’ projected U.S. store count to 1,200, from an earlier plan of 1,000. 

Whole Foods has borrowed from the playbook of traditional supermarkets while avoiding their pitfalls. It’s built out a successful, value-oriented private-label program but has maintained a stringent list of banned ingredients for the products it stocks. It has managed to keep its stores and inventory from being commoditized by localizing each location and perpetuating the novel idea that a visit to the grocery store can be not only painless but also pleasant. 

Whole Foods is expanding into new and unexpected markets – Boise! Newark! Detroit! – and changing the way the country eats, one kale smoothie at a time.

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Symposium evaluates how Climate change will affect food security…

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Led by Food Tank President Danielle Nierenberg, thought-leaders including Howard Buffett, Dan Glickman and Rajiv Shah meet this week to discuss the how climate change will impact food security in a growing world.

“With 80 million more mouths to feed each year and with increasing demand for grain-intensive livestock products, the rise in temperature only adds to the stress. If we continue with business as usual on the climate front, it is only a matter of time before what we [saw] in Russia becomes commonplace,” said symposium participant and President of Earth Policy Institute Lester Brown.