Focus: food

A few gems recently arrived in my mailbox.


Never mind the sawdust – as I said; we’re renovating…

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: a year of food life by Barbara Kingsolver. I first heard about Barbara Kingsolver through Therese’s blog earth and living. After checking Kingsolver ( I actually thought her name was KingsLOVER up until now… Wouldn’t that be more fun?) out on Amazon I just knew I had to read her books. And this one will be the first. I’ve just skimmed through the index and read a few sentences here and there… Have to finish the one (ehm …three…) books I’m already reading first. Oh my, I cannot wait to sink my teeth into this book… It’s mainly about when her family moved to a farm and decided to become locavores; eating only locally grown food and growing as much of it themselves as possible. The book even has recipes and facts about different issues regarding food and food production, although it is essentially the story of her family’s journey and thoughts. I even love the book itself; the paper was nice, the cover was beautiful and textured, it was perfectly bendy, the whole feel of the book, the paper, the print – it’s just perfect. Yes, I kind of have a book fetish.

The other book is Seed to Seed: seed saving and growing techniques for vegetable gardeners by Suzanne Ashworth. It’s a very straightforward and good book about saving seeds. Good winter reading, because next spring will be my first attempt to grow a larger amount of vegetables. And seed saving is so important, so fragile, so magical and for most of us: a lost art. Something that everyone had to know and learn in order to survive just a few hundred years (or maybe even decades) ago; - today it is a professionalized and institutionalized craft that just a few people know much about.

And the dvd is The Future of Food by Deborah Koons. The first time I saw this film was at a permaculture course in England in 2006. The film “offers an in-depth investigation into the disturbing truth behind the unlabeled, patented, genetically engineered foods that have quietly filled U.S. grocery store shelves for the past decade.” And it seems that it’s maybe just a matter of time before these foods will quietly fill our shelves as well. Theoretically there are almost no GMO foods in Norwegian grocery stores. Rules are strict, and the chains generally don’t want to sell it and customers don’t want to buy it. Thank God(ess). But still; almost half the food samples being analyzed by the veterinary institute has GMO. And now our politicians wonder about allowing two types of GMO corn (link in Norwegian) after recommendations from scientists… This film is full of facts and numbers, and might feel a bit heavy from time to time, but it really is a mindblowing, shocking and eyeopening ride.