by David Frey | Sep 1, 2009 | Food & Farm
Jerome Osentowski plucks a ripe fig from a branch and hands it to me. I peel it open and smear the sweet, pulpy mass in my mouth. It’s a sensual experience, made even more decadent because of where I’m standing. This fig tree is growing at 7,200 feet in the Rockies. The Mediterranean is nowhere in view, but falling snow is.
“We have four months of fig season here. It’s incredible,” says Osentowski, winding his way through one of four greenhouses he maintains at his Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute. The alternative agriculture demonstration center, perched on the flanks of Basalt Mountain, could revolutionize the way we think about eating locally.
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by David Frey | Jul 3, 2009 | Food & Farm
Courtesy photo.
The latest salvo against the nation’s agricultural-industrial complex is on the big screen.
Food, Inc., a documentary by filmmaker Robert Kenner, is a forceful indictment of concentrated cattle ghettos, squalid chicken factories and cornfield deserts. At the film’s core is this thesis: the way we eat has changed more in the past 50 years than in the previous 10,000, and not for the better.
Sure, our shopping cart loads are getting cheaper, but our health, the environment, the animals and the people who handle them pay the price, Kenner argues.
“We spend less of our paycheck on our food than anytime, but it comes at a heavy cost,” Kenner told a crowd at the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Ideas Festival, after a screening of the film. (more…)
