Every year Blog Action Day brings together bloggers from around the world to blog on one specific topic. This year the topic is food.
Today is also World Food Day, which this year focusses on the issues of price and stability in the world food markets. You can find out more about that here. If you're in Edinburgh, there's still time to get along to this World Food Day celebration.
There are many environmental issues around food, including:
In the UK, many farmland birds are in decline, due to the use of chemicals in intensive farming. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) does a lot of work on making farming more wildlife friendly. You can read about their work here. They also have an interesting article about corvids caching food, which you can read here.
Organic farming bans the use of harmful chemicals. The Soil Association campaigns for organic farming across the UK and is a certification body for organic products. In Scotland, the largest certification body for organic food is SOPA. I sometimes wonder whether there is really a need for two certification bodies. I also know that many smaller farms are put off by the price and the length of the process of becoming a certified organic farm. At least two small food producers near Edinburgh produce food that is as close to organic as you can get, but they aren't organic purely because they can't afford to become so. Many other farms, whether organic or not, as Weaver of Grass points out in the comments, do their bit to help the wildlife on their land.
Today's poem on Bolts of Silk is about food, you can read it here.
And this seems like as good a time as ever to mention the Foreign Flavours anthology due to be published on 24 October by Writers Abroad. This anthology includes fiction and non-fiction about food and cooking abroad (including my piece 'From My Malawian Cookbook'). Proceeeds from the sales of the anthology go to the excellent Bookbus charity, which supports literacy in Africa and Latin America and recently had a book drive for Malawi.
A topic near and dear to my heart...
ReplyDeleteI do assure you that some of us although not organic, do try to encourage wild life to our farms - and try to do our bit in whatever way we can Juliet.
ReplyDeleteAn excellent and thought-provoking post Juliet. Every single person should have access to adequate, safe food and water. It should not be politicized, and it should not be yet another victim of profit-hungry individuals and institutions. That's in a perfect world. . .
ReplyDeleteVery good and thanks for sharing about Blog Action Day. I have been reading quite a few new ones and it is fascinating.
ReplyDeleteThank you for all the wonderful links. Blog Action Day and World Food Day give me hope that we are on the road to change. I pray for it!
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