a GREAT resource

The Community Food Security Coalition is up to all the right stuff. Check them out. Their list of publications is especially impressive.

And as long as I'm at it, I also caught this article on urban food deserts, involving a study of London, Ontario Canada. Ok ok, so I'm not the most timely blogger (the study came out in mid-April). But it is fascinating stuff, and, I'm sure, still highly relevant. What especially catches my eye is that the question at play is NOT that the number of supermarkets substantially fewer. Rather, at issue is that suburban giant supermarkets make access to food difficult - it has everything to do with access questions: transportation issues and how neighborhoods incentivize development (for which people and businesses and where). And of course: walking and public transit determine access to grocery stores for the poor - not cars.

Magic Mushrooms: oil-spill clean-ups

My kitchen is almost never caught without mushrooms in the fridge. I love all sorts of ugly mushrooms, with all their goofy-looking gills and super juicy, earthy flavors. But recently I've discovered some things about fungi that make me even more of a fan: Oyster mushrooms (which retail for about $12-18/lb) are being applied in phytoremediation - or should I say, mycoremediation. That is, they have the amazing ability to uptake toxins, from soil or water, and to not become toxic themselves.

The deal is this: Mushrooms need a substrate in order to have their mycelium thrive - and a certain about of light, adequate temperature, and humidity. But once they've got these basic conditions (which are not at all difficult to accomplish - you can even grow oyster mushrooms on coffee beans in your own apartment!) the mushrooms will grow, and flourish.

In the Ecuadorian Amazon, the guys who write at the Fungal Jungle blog successfully used mushrooms to clean up an oil spill and talk about the whole process. An oil spill recently happened in the San Francisco Bay (see here for the oil spill story) and... you guessed it - mushrooms - with a growing substrate of human hair mats (yes, human hair... bet you didn't guess that part!) are being used in some experimental sites for cleaning it up. Kudos to the folks at Matter of Trust for collecting human hair for just this purpose. The YouTube video about the clean-up is worth checking out.

I'm all for supporting cancer research and wigs for those treated for cancer, like the Locks of Love and Pantene program of using hair for wigs. But next time I chop off my locks, Matter of Trust is getting my donation; it'll be my little contribution back to the fungi kingdom, and the Earth.

Soup and Jane Addams

An old community organizing mantra goes something like this:
Give them food, and they will come.
This worked in social-work pioneer Jane Addams' time, as she promoted women's rights, children's well-being, and mediated labor disputes in Chicago at one of the nations first settlement houses. And now it's back in vogue, and again thriving at the Hull House:

Hull-House Kitchen: Rethinking Soup
Every Tuesday
Noon-1:30
Residents' Dining Hall
800 S. Halsted St., Chicago
312.413.5353

FREE
(donations from $.01 to $1,000,000 gladly accepted)

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The Hull-House Kitchen will reopen on Tuesday, August 19th for Rethinking Soup from noon to 1:30. We hope you will come and find out what your fellow community members have been up to during the hiatus.

The day's program will include a special listening session with short audio-docs about food and other enticing subjects chosen with help from Third Coast International Audio Festival.

Gather every Tuesday to eat delicious, healthy soup and have fresh, organic conversation about many of the urgent social, cultural, economic, and environmental food issues facing us all.

Please join us in the historic Residents' Dining Hall, where Upton Sinclair, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B.DuBois, Gertrude Stein and other important social reformers met to share meals and ideals, debate one another, and conspire to change the world. Activists, farmers, doctors, economists, artists, and guest chefs will join us each week to present their ideas and projects.

The Fruit and Labor of Love