LAND & SEA YOUTH CLUB

• Land & Sea Youth Club link - more info, links, and pix below, in posts Nov. 16 & 24

SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE UPDATES (updated 3/20/09) -
Tom Vilsack named as Secretary of Agriculture
While the Secretary of Agriculture is an important position, Under Secretaries may actually have more influence on the day to day workings of the agency than the Secretary.

Food Democracy Now! has created a list of 12 candidates
for the crucial Under Secretary positions that will stand up for family farms, safe food, clear air and water, animal welfare and soil preservation.

To read up on GMO's (AKA GE crops, crop Bioengineering and biotech) and cellulose and non-cellulose biofuels, check links at right).
Also:

• Support your local sustainable farmer.
• Write your President-elect, and government representatives.
• Educate your friends about biodiversity and crop safety.
• Endorse the Declaration For Healthy Food and Agriculture
  

Read more HERE.

U.S. SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE

THIS CABINET POSITION IS A CRUCIAL ONE.
How the US moves forward on food and farm policy is vitally important to the future of our country, and world.
(Updated 3/20/09)

CAN YOU MAKE A DIFFERENCE ABOUT THIS RIGHT NOW?
Yes, you can.

1. Write to the Obama transition team.
2. Write and call Rep. Rick Larsen, Senators Patty Murray, and Maria Cantwell.
3. READ AND VIEW MORE on this from Michael Pollan and Nicholas Kristof.

GOT TIME TO READ A BIT MORE ABOUT THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS DECISION?
Former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack has been chosen for this post. Vilsack has:

• Supported cloning of cows;
• Originated the seed pre-emption bill in 2005 which prohibited local governments' ability to regulate seeds - including the decision on where genetically engineered/modified (GE, GMO) crops would be grown, or having GMO/GE-free buffers, among other things;
  
• Vigorously supported genetically engineered(GE/GMO) crops and chemical and energy-intensive industrial agriculture; and
• Often traveled in Monsanto's jet.

Others said to have been under consideration were Rep.'s Charlie Stenholm, Dennis Wolff, Colin Peterson, and John Salazar, all unlikely to support reforms in the Dept. of Agriculture and the Farm Bureau.

LET YOUR VOICE BE HEARD!

NEWS regarding corn farmers - U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Brendan Shannon approved a process that would allow VeraSun Energy Corporation ten business days prior to delivery of corn, contracted with farmers, to cancel purchase contracts.
Keith Bolin, (corn and hog farmer from Bureau County, Ill., and one of the drafters of the Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture), Pres. American Corn Growers Association (ACGA), stated “There were only four real farmers and corn producers in the room.” and warned “this ruling leaves a lot of farm families in limbo, uncertain what their contracted bushels are worth and when they can actually sell them.” He added that VeraSun now has a captive supply of grain to 2011 with no guarantee of price. "If left unchecked, this debacle will erode the integrity of the markets and the rights of farmers.”
- Information from ACGA webpage. You can join the ACGA; (read about why), and you can write your government representatives today.

Cellulose based ethanol is not the best choice for future energy needs, or any fuels based on use of genetically modified crops or enzymes. Farmers pushed to grow crops for these needs should not be then left hanging.

To learn more about alternative energy, and genetically modified organisms (GMO's), scroll down to the right.

To Join Land and Sea/Slow Food USA, go here.

LAND & SEA SLOW FOOD YOUTH CLUB website link

Land & Sea Slow Food Youth Club's website master has got our website up - more detailed posts will be added in the future. Pictures from our last two trips are slideshows on the site. Click on pictures to enlarge, and to see descriptive comments below each picture!

LAND AND SEA YOUTH HIGH SCHOOL CLUB, SUNDAY AT LOCAL INGREDIENT COOKING SCHOOL!

The slide show at right (click on pictures to enlarge) is from our Land & Sea Slow Food Youth club trip this Sunday to Madden Surbaugh's wonderful Steps restaurant in Friday Harbor.

Madden is a strong supporter of our islands' farms, being a driving force behind the Islands Certified Local program, among many other great things too numerous to list here. We cooked with dairy and produce from the Heritage Farm CSA, & Layne Sundberg's Quail Croft goat cheese. We were fortunate to have Red Fife wheat grown by longtime farmers and educators Margaret and Joel Thorson (on Thousand Flower Farm on neighboring Waldron island) to grind into flower for lovely scones. Margaret and Joel traveled over on their boat from Waldron for the day, just to talk with us about their farm and their wheat. The story of Red Fife, and Margaret and Joel's experience with it, is fascinating and inspiring.

Our Land and Sea Youth members ground flour, made butter, roasted squash, and chopped, measured and mixed until we had a beautiful lunch of creamy roasted squash soup and savory scones. It was delicious.

Madden, Margaret, and Joel told us more about food grown on our islands, including local eggs and dairy and about eating locally (for us, much less than 100 miles - more like 5 miles!) We also talked a little more about our new youth farm worker training program, the Slow Food organization, and food activism. And about the webpage for our club, newly built by one of our members.

More info about our trips and meetings will be part of what will be available on that site, and a longer account of our trip today ( we learned a LOT!)
It was a wonderful day. Thanks Madden, Joel, and Margaret, for your time and generosity!

(More about our day at Margaret's Thousand Flower blog - Nov. 16th entry.)
To read more about our club, & our first meetings, see Nov. 15th blog entry, below.

For more links to San Juan islands farmers and producers, scroll down the list to the right.
Click here for Slow Food USA Youth Movement info.

JOIN US IN ASKING THE FDA TO PREVENT GENETICALLY ENGINEERED ANIMALS FROM ENTERING OUR FOOD SUPPLY.

The Food and Drug Administration is trying to approve genetically engineered animals for human consumption. Worst of all, these GE animal products won't have to be labeled, so consumers won’t know if the food they buy for their families was produced with this controversial technology.
ASK THE FDA TO PREVENT GENETICALLY ENGINEERED ANIMALS FROM ENTERING OUR FOOD SUPPLY.

LAND AND SEA HIGH SCHOOL CLUB - WELL UNDERWAY

This October we had the first meetings of the new FH Land and Sea Youth Slow Food high school club. We have fantastic, interested student members. Organizing along with Maureen and Linda, we are very happy to have Friday Harbor high school teacher Mr. Marc Vermeire as our staff advisor, and much advice and assistance also from farmer and educator Mrs. Margaret Thorson.
This weekend we'll have our 3rd meeting and second field trip event.

Our first event was was a trip to the Sesby's Heritage Farm. The kids learned about, and saw, milking with Christina, Jim and Eric at our state's 2nd certified raw milk dairy, talked with Tim about biodynamic farming, irrigation, composting, greenhouses, and walked through the vegetable garden and greenhouse, and heard from Jim about the chickens over at the Sesby's Coop de Ville.

We also visited the San Juan Food Co Op, and the Sesby's farm stand. We heard how to join the co-op and take part in a CSA (community supported agriculture) program. Then we walked next door to the Marinkovich's, cracked store bought eggs and compared them to our local farm grown, grass fed eggs. And after that, we had a delicious scrambled egg, potato and biscuit breakfast. We talked over bites about Slow Food USA and Slow Food international, the organizations and programs we are now a part of, food activism, WWOOF'ing, and the beginning of our Land and Sea Slow Food high school farmworker training program, among other things.

We also made plans for our next trip which we'll write more about this coming Sunday..

IT'S FALL!

And it's been a busy fall, so, Maureen and Linda are still putting together their notes and photos from the Congress - In the meantime...

We are happy the school's lunch program is underway and we're happy Land and Sea Slow Food convivium was there to help as major support to get it started.

And now we're ready to continue on with our Land and Sea Slow Food projects! :

The high school Land and Sea Slow Food Club is on track to have its first meeting next week, with Mr. Vermeire as staff advisor;

A gleaning crew is being assembled by Marian Melville to help farmers glean (more details in an upcoming post);

We've been talking about a simple way to start to survey the old fruit trees on the island (more details also in our next post).

Linda is working with Grace Kelly on a project created by Maureen, photographing our island's farmers.(Linda drives; Grace photographs.) Grace is considering a future slide show for the benefit of farmers, and planning this photo project as a senior project. Our convivium is excited to provide the support for Grace on this lovely project, documenting an important part of our island life and economy;

And, we plan to get together with a few people from other Slow Food conviviums in our area - to meet, come up with new ideas, and maybe eat and laugh a little. Looks like after the winter holidays might be a good time for this!

Great things have come about on the island since our last general meeting this summer; soon it will be time for another general meeting where we can talk about all the above, and also new ideas and interests. We'll send notice as soon as a time and place is set.
To contact Land and Sea, write to slowfoodlandandsea@gmail.com.
or call Maureen Marinkovich 472-0880 or Linda Degnan Cobos 317-5890

Take a Small Action & Make a Big Difference for Farms, Farmers, & Everyone Who Eats

Can you take a look at this post from the Union of Concerned Scientists?

Call your senators today and urge them to support the full funding for conservation programs promised in the Food and Farm Bill.

These guys are smart, brave, and are recognizing the vital importance of sustainable farming practices. These guys are trying, and will make a difference, with your help.
Please take one minute to look at what they have to say -

the sweet taste of summer

We're finishing compiling our SF,SF Congress report, but, in the meantime, here on our island, what about the blackberries? The last hot days have made them ripe & sweet, and they're everywhere. It's great to spread them out on a cookie sheet, cover them with a sheet of wax paper, and freeze them, and then pour them, bouncing off each other like little wooden beads, back into freezer storage bags to defrost by the handful in the middle of winter.
Anybody want to organize a blackberry/raspberry/loganberry/marionberry (is that what they are?) pickers group? A guy could wear long sleeves, thick pants, and use a drop cloth to reach far into some of those brambles as you go. And those of us with freezer space could do a festival of freezing. Magically delicious! And how about those apples?
Time to learn about drying and preserving if we haven't already.

We're Back! and New Lunch Program Started Today!

We're back from the Slow Food Congress in San Francisco! It was quite incredible!
One of our first experiences was to stop in at the Museo ItaloAmericano in Fort Mason while documentary filmmaker/photographer Douglas Gayeton was hanging his show, "Slow: Life in a Tuscan Town", an exhibit of large sepia-tone images, each actually a composite of as many as one hundred photographs. This isn't what we first noticed about them, though. What we saw in these sepia mosaics were vibrant pictures of the people of Pistioa and their relationship with the food they produce - holding a clenched fist around radish tops or cupping a hand under more delicate eggs, their comments and local expressions and little notes about their daily lives written carefully in looping cursive along the edges, across the bottom, and inside the shapes of the people in the photographs. We happened into to the gallery the day before the show opened and looked at many of the photographs while they were still on the floor leaning against the wall. Douglas Gayeton was hanging the show with the Museo staff, and took time to talk to us. It was magical, like most of our experiences on this trip...
We're remembering and putting together a daily diary. We will be posting it in the next couple of days, with some photos, and we promise it will be interesting -
Right now we're off to eat some lunch at the the first day of the San Juan Island School District lunch program - When local healthy food is being served in our school, it is - A very happy day for us all!!
Linda

LINDA & MAUREEN AT SLOW FOOD NATION/CONGRESS IN SF

Thurs. 7:10 am - San Francisco, CA
Maureen & I are Slow Food delegates and observers at the Slow Food Congress Aug. 27 -31 in San Francisco. It is incredible!!!
We are talking about our SJI farmers, fisheries, and our new lunch program, and meeting all kinds of amazing people. We will write an update as soon as we can!
gotta go, I'm hungry!, Best wishes, Linda

Welcome New Members!

We are happy you have chosen to be a part of our local chapter of Slow Food USA. We are based on San Juan Island in Washington State. Look here for future posts and information regarding Slow Food Land and Sea. Please feel free to share this website with your friends. The easiest way to join our convivium is to go to http://www.slowfoodusa.org/ and sign up! There will be a spot to specify Slow Food Land and Sea. If you have any questions, please feel free to email slowfoodlandandsea@gmail.com.