List of recommended reading and viewing

Here’s an insightful article in the latest issue of Mother Earth News: Heirloom Vegetables: 6 Advantages Compared to Hybrids. "Heirloom vegetables deliver diverse colors, bright flavors, rich nutrition and fascinating history. Plus, they often cost less than hybrid vegetables, and you can save your own seeds from year to year..." Read more.

Take a look at what you can do with a small urban lot! Since the early 80’s the Dervaes family has slowly transformed their ordinary city lot into a self-sufficient urban homestead. View a short documentary about the Dervaes family experience, in Pasadena, CA.

MSNBC segment on the "growing" trend of home gardening in these recessionary times. As the economic downturn encourages people to get back to the basics, food from home gardens has become a recipe for success. NBC’s Chris Jansing reports.

60 Minutes interview with Alice Waters, March 15, 2009. An interview with the founder of the legendary Chez Panisse restaurant and the woman who started - back in the 1970s - the movement toward eating and cooking with locally grown, organic food.

Want to calculate your savings from growing your own vegetables at home? Read this interesting article by Kym Pokorny of The Oregonian, complete with an online calculator.

System Meltdown: It Could Happen to Our Food Supply, Too, The Oregonian.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan, launched a national conversation about the American way of eating. His sequel, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, shows us how to change it, one meal at a time. And here is Bill Moyers’ interview with Pollan to discuss what direction the U.S. should pursue in the often-overlooked question of food policy.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by Barbara Kingsolver chronicles the year that Kingsolver, along with her husband and two daughters, made a commitment to become locavores–those who eat only locally grown foods. This first entailed a move away from their home in non-food-producing Tuscon to a family farm in Virginia, where they got right down to the business of growing and raising their own food and supporting local farmers. For teens who grew up on supermarket offerings, the notion not only of growing one’s own produce but also of harvesting one’s own poultry was as foreign as the concept that different foods relate to different seasons. While the volume begins as an environmental treatise–the oil consumption related to transporting foodstuffs around the world is enormous–it ends, as the year ends, in a celebration of the food that physically nourishes even as the recipes and the memories of cooks and gardeners past nourish our hearts and souls.