Amy Halloran lives on six city lots in upstate New York with her husband and sons. She writes for regional and national outlets about the changing food landscape, and records dispatches from her family's gardening, cooking and chicken raising enterprises on her blog, amyhalloran.com. Along with photojournalist Ellie Markovitch, she launched Storycooking.com, a home for food based digital storytelling.
At the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York's annual winter conference in Saratoga Springs, about 40 farmers and farm workers packed a small conference room for a workshop on food safety. The session, titled "Food Safety: Best Practices for Farmers Markets and CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)" was listed on the schedule in both Spanish and English, and translators interpreted for...
Last Friday and Saturday, the crew at Roxbury Farm in New York's Hudson Valley prepared for the hurricane by stowing machinery and hay bales above the floodplain. Jean-Paul Courtens and his workers harvested ripe delicata squash, secured tomato plants against the wind, and pulled irrigation equipment from the Kinderhook Creek. However, there was no way to prepare for the floods...
As gardeners bring fresh produce indoors, questions of food safety may not be on their minds. Here is the hard-earned product of carefully nursed seedlings, plenty of mulching, watering and endless weeding. Tomatoes, zucchini, spinach and Swiss chard: if you grew these foods, you made be too blinded by pride to think that they could harm you. While dangers are...
The recent deal between the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and the United Egg Producers (UEP), more commonly known as adversaries, to improve egg-laying hens' living conditions struck many as surprising, for many different reasons.As reported earlier, cattle and pork producers are not pleased about the agreement, with the National Pork Producer's Council saying such proposal would take...
The nose is a confusing tool, especially when the mouth is involved. Durian fruit is a delicacy in Asian countries, where people say that it "smells like hell, and tastes like heaven." Kim chi has a strong odor, too, yet many people find it equally satisfying.So can one's nose be trusted to detect whether food is good or bad? "It's...
In the fall of 2004, more than 300 people were sickened in an outbreak of E. coli in Peru, New York. This cider-related incident led the NY Apple Association to push the state Legislature to pass the country's first mandatory cider pasteurization law.The law became effective in January 2006, but producers were given a year to get equipment ready to...
Ask meat vendors at a farmers' market what their biggest headache is, and they likely will say getting their animals processed. If those vendors are selling certified organic meat and poultry, the challenge is greater still.Although slaughterhouses aren't always close or available when farmers need them, there are efforts being made to address that, and resources to help small-scale meat...
Last weekend, I cooked dinner using entries from the Recipes for Healthy Kids competition, the joint venture by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move! campaign to improve school meals with more nutritious and kid-appealing food.The contest invited schools around the nation to submit entries in three categories: whole grains, dark green and orange vegetables,...
In 1943, 20 million households raised Victory Gardens, and all those vegetables weren't eaten fresh. Steel was directed to pressure-cooker production instead of munitions, and a massive effort was made to educate people in the skill of canning. "Department stores ran films and displays on canning, society ladies enrolled in classes on it, home economists lectured on it to ladies'...
New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo recently announced two state Senate confirmations, Darrel J. Aubertine as commissioner of the Department of Agriculture and Markets, and Kenneth Adams as president and CEO of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) and commissioner of the Department of Economic Development.Announcing the two events simultaneously was not coincidence, but part of a plan to build collaboration...
"Well, I'm the king of roadkill," laughed Paul Opel, a music instructor at Green Mountain College in Vermont. "I don't hunt at all but I love wild food so I'm always really happy to get it."Opel has been discovering this kind of road food for over 30 years. The habit began when he was in his twenties and a pheasant...
Interest in vegetable gardening is growing, thanks in part to rising food costs, ecological concerns and incidents of foodborne illness related to produce.Just how many backyards are becoming food gardens is hard to enumerate, but the American Community Gardening Association estimates there are now more than 18,000 community gardens in the United States and Canada.While many community gardens exist in...
Polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, were first discovered in Hudson River fish in 1975. General Electric had used the chemical mixtures in manufacturing capacitors at two upstate factories, and discharged approximately 1.1 million pounds of PCBs into the Hudson from 1947-1977.Contamination of the Hudson by these persistent, possibly carcinogenic compounds created the largest superfund site in the nation. To clean up...
Following the lead of Sedgwick, Maine to exempt itself from state and federal food safety regulations, three other towns in Hancock County are now poised to adopt similar "food sovereignty" measures. Titled "The Ordinance to Protect the Health and Integrity of the Local Food System," Sedgwick's four-page document invokes the town's right to self-governance, and states that local producers and processors...
A veteran soil scientist wrote a letter to U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack warning of what he says is a newly identified pathogen linked to the herbicide Roundup that might be implicated in livestock fertility problems, as well as diseased corn and soybean crops. Don Huber, plant pathologist and a professor emeritus from Purdue University, sent his letter (posted last Friday...
Copyright © Marler Clark
New York
