Reprinted with permission From the September, 2009 issue of the Ester Republic.

Out of the blue. Thats what I thought when I heard the news that Obama’s justice department has launched a broadly-scaled antitrust investigation of ‘Big Ag’. How can they manage this new front in what is an ongoing ideological battle between the ‘left’ and the ‘right’, I wondered, embroiled as they are within healthcare reform and economic troubles? For the most part, Obama’s administration has been unwilling to take on additional big issues until it can put the healthcare and the economy to bed. Education, for instance, has stayed off the radar despite the looming renewal of “No Child Left Behind.” Obama is already being hammered by some for taking on too much too soon (though arguably this comes from those who would just as quickly criticize him for doing too little if circumstances were different). But to Obama’s credit, news of this new initiative slipped off of the news desks as quietly and as quickly as it slipped on, obscured, no doubt, by the healthcare firestorm and all but missed by the talking heads. (more…)

“What happens when a vegetarian moves to the last frontier?” This may sound like the introduction to a wry joke, but in this case the answer I am looking for is not “they become fair game like the rest of the herbivores.” Rather, this is the question that filmmaker Ellen Frankenstein uses to frame her latest documentary, “Eating Alaska,” a semi-autobiographical film about a reforming vegetarian and Alaska transplant learning to eat locally and connect with her new neighbors. A self-described “former city dweller now living on an island in Alaska, married to a fisherman and deer hunter,” Frankenstein’s latest film tells of her journey into the lifestyle that epitomizes all we love about life in this fine territory. She takes us on a culinary tour of Alaska, and introduces us to all manner of fine people, in her attempt to answer one question: how best to eat in the state, in moral as well as nutritious and economic terms. (more…)

As my wife and I got ready to mount a return trek to Alaska from our sojourn into the desert, I found that there was one final dispatch I wanted to record in my Ester Republic column, ‘Outpost Agriculture,’ one lesson that I had repeatedly missed, though it was regularly (and quite literally) staring me right in the face. (reprinted here from the April 09 issue of the Ester Republic).

“… That lesson is the practical elegance of raising chickens. Many people here in the Southwest raise their own chickens, especially across the border, where roosters generally roam free through the streets of the small Ejidos. And this is not a uniquely rural enterprise—friends here report that many people raise chickens in the dense residential areas of Tucson, keeping a small coop with two to four chickens behind a garage or beside a swingset in their humble backyards. Indeed, households with chickens were so common a part of my experience in Mexico that I completely overlooked the phenomenon’s relevance.

Why wouldn’t a family raise chickens? It is easy, cost-effective, and provides a degree of food security you certainly cannot obtain at Fred Meyer. (more…)

As much as we might hope otherwise, we here in the Interior will not, at least anytime soon, be growing all of our food. I report this finding following a truly excellent presentation given last month by soon-to-be-Dr. Alison Meadow, of the UAF Anthropology Department. Alison has put together some truly cutting edge research on the Fairbanks North Star Borough food system, part of which estimates that it would take just under 30,000 acres of new crop land to meet the caloric requirements of our population on a diet of just potatoes, closer to 80,000 acres to provide a more realistic, nutritionally-sound, and far less boring menu. There is indeed sufficient arable land available, but the complete social, economic, and ecological transformations that would be necessary to realize such a thing are almost too radical to imagine. Whatever the future of our food system will look like, Alison reminds us, it will only come about through frank and open discussion and debate. After all, these radical dreams that many of us have for the future of food are as steeped in world view and ideas about morality as are the notions of food preference and entitlement that drive so many others to eat foods that are not sustainable, and nourish neither their bodies nor their souls. (more…)