Web 2.0 Training

Ask people in Berkeley what they had for lunch and put on your seatbelts…

The Art of Lunch from Amy Pyle on Vimeo.

USDA

Michael Pollan

Hank Shaw

Slow Food USA

Slow Food International

Des Moines Register

Jen Boulden

Not Eating Out NY

Check our clickable map to see where Michael Pollan is speaking publicly in the near future:

The Polyface farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia offers a lesson in sustainability. Producing 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork, 25,000 dozen eggs, 1,000 turkeys and 1,000 rabbits on just 100 acres is beside the point, according to owner Joel Salatin. The “eggmobile” that allows the chickens to follow the cattle, feasting on the maggots in their dung, also is beside the point. The point, he said, is living in tune with nature.

“We have this notion…that in order to have a healthy ecosystem, we have to sacrifice the economy and in order to have a healthy economy, we have to sacrifice the ecosystem,” Salatin told USA Today. “Part of my lunacy is that I really believe we can have both.”

The cows are moved daily, Salatin said, to “a new salad bar,” mimicking the grazing habits of their wilder cousins, such as the bison and buffalo.

“This can’t be done industrially,” he added, “it’s hands-on.”

Author Michael Pollan lives by a simple motto: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. He advocates that humans give up their self-important assumptions that consciousness means superiority. In some respects, his epiphany came as he watched a bee work the blossoms on his backyard apple tree as he prepared to plant potato seeds. His exercise had been a intellectual one: research seeds, buy seeds, improve soil, while the bee knew innately what to do. Which, therefore, was more effective: nature or nurture.

Pollan also cites an  example of the Lima bean, which when attacked by spider mites emits a chemical that attracts a spider mite competitor. “We have consciousness; they have biochemistry,” he says.

Perhaps his most telling observation involves the evolution at Polyface, a family farm in Virginia’s Shenendoah Valley. The farm has taken rotation to a new level, with a chicken mobile that follows the grazing cows, to munch on maggots in their dung and, in the process, both sterilize that dung and fertilize the grassland with their own nitrogen-rich manure. Joel Salatin, whose parents started Polyface in 1961, describes his farm as “a farm of many faces.”

“If you begin to take account of other species, take account of the soil…We can take the food we need from the earth and actually heal the earth in the process,” Pollan concludes.

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