85% Positive and 15% Serious
We try to strike a balance between largely positive and select serious messages about challenges encountered when promoting a more sustainable food system. While we spend a lot of time focusing on the positive, possible, and delightful in the foodie experience, it’s not all puppies and rainbows. Powerful forces resistant to positive change press against those of us working to inspire a healthier and more delicious diet and experience with food and drink. We will push back against the industrial food system forces that would leave us with a chemical wasteland of American agriculture rather than a healthy landscape for growing good food.
The following excerpts provide a representative sample of the more serious posts we’ve published over the last three years.
Issue: Global Climate Change
As proponents of living in a more sustainable manner, we support foodie efforts to address global climate change, including incorporating solar cooking and other energy-saving practices for food preparation in the Central Coast and around the world.
“The great environmental blogger at Grist David Roberts helped finalize the name ‘Climate Hawk‘ to refer to those demanding substantial action to combat the enormous threat of climate change.” So writes Ohio-based artist Joe Immen, who kindly allowed us to feature his compelling design.
He was explaining how he came to create this strong design that blends patriotism and environmentalism in a visual call to action. Joe continues: “After reading his article and recognizing myself as a Climate Hawk, I thought about how to graphically represent the fledgling movement, and started sketching ideas for a logo. The angle of the hawk’s wings is similar to the line in graphs plotting the recent, steep rise of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. I used hot and cool colors as a simple way to indicate the problem of global warming.”
[button link=”http://centralcoastfoodie.com/are-you-a-climate-hawk” color=”red”]Read More about Climate Hawks [/button]
We really liked the “Climate Hawk” logo designed by fellow Midwesterner Joe Immen and the messaging about the rate of increasing in average global temperatures through hawk wing and color,
Issue: Ocean Health
Whether working against unsustainable fishing practices or the pressures from energy exploration interests who wish to exploit opportunities that would surely savage coastal marine life and human economies, we must remain vigilant in protecting our ever-more-rare natural resources.
The continued consumption of shark’s fin soup, traditionally served at weddings and banquets as a coded dish to announce the host’s elevated sense of status, risks compromising the health of the world’s shark population. Some quarters of this debate have descried the perceived cultural attack against shark’s fin soup enthusiasts.
In my opinion, one’s need to declare their status through gastronomic specialty and culinary rarity is not more important than the ocean’s need for a healthy shark population. If a market continues to exist for this particular animal product, then one day soon we will only experience sharks as stale cookies from a tourist trap on Cannery Row or a fake Jaws reenactment on a studio lot in Hollywood.
[button link=”http://centralcoastfoodie.com/the-fins-of-a-shark” color=”red”]Read More about the Shark Fin Ban [/button]
We’re pleased to report that Governor Jerry Brown signed the Shark Fin Ban legislation into law in 2011.
Issue: Label GMO$
The Gettles and Baker Creek are an inspiration for us on so many levels, from their heirloom food-inspired travel to their committed efforts toward education and preserving delicious edible plant history, through seeds. It’s one of the perks of this media position we’ve created for ourselves: we get to meet some interesting personalities in the food movement locally and from around the world.
Jere and Emilee Gettle and the folks at Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds have planned and produced the National Heirloom Expo for the past three years. Their goal is twofold: to celebrate heirloom/heritage plants and animals as well as defend our human and civil rights to choose to eat GMO-free plant and animal organisms, especially plants engineered to resist toxic weed killers dispersed with abandon on conventionally-grown crops.
Whether at their Baker Creek home base near Mansfield, Missouri; the Petaluma Seed Bank in Petaluma, California; or Comstock, Ferre & Co.in Wethersfield, Connecticut, the pure food advocates of Baker Creek wear period clothing from a pre-industrial agriculture era to help reconnect citizen-consumers with an earlier time when families could feed themselves with produce grown with seed saved from decades and centuries of selection.
[button link=”http://centralcoastfoodie.com/g-m-no-thanks-yes-to-our-right-to-know” color=”red”]Read More about Efforts to Label GMO$ [/button]
