Category Archives: Food

ECJ Green Drinks Paterson Area & Brunch for Bees Event

Bernie Sanders meets Green DrinksAugust Environment & Climate Justice Green Drinks Paterson Area
27 August 2015 at 12 noon
Sultan Restaurant
429 Crooks Ave, Paterson, New Jersey 07011

Everyone is welcome 🙂 and there’s never a meeting charge.
Mayor informaciĂłn – More information:
ejgreendrinks.org | 201-477-8711

ABOUT GREEN DRINKS
Green Drinks are gatherings where we discuss Environmental Justice, climate change and sustainable living issues in English and Spanish!

A lot of knowledge is shared around the table each month along with tasty food and good conversation. Come spend a couple interesting hours with the friendliest bunch of EJ nuts you’ll ever meet.

Please support our host venue by eating or drinking something while we chat.

Bee flyingAUGUST DISCUSSION AGENDA

  1. Brunch for the Bees – what are we eating and drinking that bees pollinate? What foods and drink don’t need pollinators?
  2. Delta incinerator company is trying to locate facility in Paterson. It needs to be stopped.
  3. The Wei Family is setting up a community garden. How can you help?
  4. Buying a home or property in Paterson as a community collective initiative to Occupy the City
  5. Pres. Obama’s Clean Power Plan

ORGANIZERS
Kimi Wei, Ivan Gomez Wei, Ariel Lopez Wei, Joseph Dunsay and Sally Gellert

JOIN GD MAILING LIST

SEPT 2015 NJECJ GREEN DRINKS SCHEDULE
Newark cancelled this month due to Labor Day
Hackensack WED 16 SEPT 7-9 PM
Paterson date TBA
(more at http://ejgreendrinks.org/)

Want to become a Palm Oil Action Leader and help stop cookies from destroying our world?

Conflict palm oil destructionI know it seems crazy, but the way some our favorite foods are grown and manufactured is doing fantastic harm to our world. Conflict palm oil is one product that harms the environment and is widely used in mass produced baked goods including crackers and GirlScout cookies … so the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) is putting together a coalition of leaders who will learn to lead a movement to protect rainforests, the ecosystems they are home to, the air they clean and orangutans. Maybe you’d like to sign on.

CONFLICT PALM OIL: Are your cookies causing orangutan extinction?

We may not be able to see it, but Conflict Palm Oil has become ubiquitous in our everyday lives. It is found in roughly half the packaged products sold in US grocery stores, including favorite snack foods like ice cream, cookies, crackers, chocolate products, cereals, doughnuts and potato chips. In fact, palm oil is likely present in some form in nearly every room of your home.

Demand for palm oil is skyrocketing worldwide. The recent spike in use by the US snack food industry is due in large part to Conflict Palm Oil being used as a replacement for controversial trans fats. The oil is extracted from the fruit of oil palms native to Africa, now grown primarily in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Conflict Palm Oil production is now one of the world’s leading causes of rainforest destruction. Unchecked expansion is pushing new plantations deep into the heart of some of the world’s most culturally and biologically diverse ecosystems. Irreplaceable wildlife species like the Sumatran Rhino, Sumatran Elephant and the Sumatran and Borneo orangutan are being driven to the brink of extinction.

But Conflict Palm Oil is not only a local problem. The clearing of rainforests and carbon-rich peatlands for new plantations is releasing globally significant carbon pollution, making Conflict Palm Oil a major driver of human induced climate change.

If this issue concerns you, maybe you’d like join RAN’s Palm Oil Action Team and learn how to take the lead in stopping rainforest destruction by the snack food industry.

Palm Oil Action Leaders: Building a Movement to Cut Conflict P…

Ever wonder how you can fight deforestation, human rights abuses, child and forced labor, and the extinction of iconic species like the orangutan in YOUR community? RAN's Palm Oil Action Team organizes in their communities and online, around the world, to pressure the biggest corporations on the world to cut Conflict Palm Oil. The Snack Food 20 corporations would hate it – and we would love it – if you joined the Palm Oil Action Team. Check out the video of some of our local leaders, then get involved at http://a.ran.org/a2N

Posted by Rainforest Action Network on Tuesday, 4 August 2015

An animal friend speaking through sign language to tell about his home needing protection from conflict palm oil destruction is Strawberry the Orangutan. There are only about 60,000 wild orangutans left.

Can demand for ethically produced chocolate reduce child labor on cacao-chocolate farms?

child harvesting huge cocoa bean
(Photo: Make Chocolate Fair U.K.)
Forced child labor is common in the agriculture industry, including in the United States where about half a million children often underage workers labor in harsh conditions. Forced child labor also happens on cacao farms, where the beans that make chocolate are grown. TakePart’s Food editor Willy Blackmore, reports:

Unlike many global commodity crops, cocoa is predominantly grown on smallholder farms, and sometimes the child labor abuse happens when a young family member is put to work for free instead of hiring a paid employee. And while that might seem relatively benign—and not all that different from how farm labor is treated in the United States—there are stories like Letiefesso’s, where children are trafficked into working in the industry, and others where children are doing highly risky labor.

As such, there’s a shifting definition for child labor that changes with age and the work being conducted. Children between five and 11 cannot work at all under International Labor Organization standards; children between 12 and 14 can do up to 14 hours of light work a week; the maximum number of hours climbs to 43 per week for kids between 15 and 17. Then there are the “worst forms of child labor,” the hazardous and forced-labor scenarios, which are disallowed for children of any age.

Until brutal and dangerous child labor can be put behind global civil society, Blackmore suggests actions which can help by creating more demand for ethically produced chocolate:

Look for single-origin or “bean-to-bar” chocolate, or chocolate bearing a label that promises ethical (and third-party-verified) production.

Cut 20 cherry tomatoes in just 5 seconds!

cut cherry tomatoesIf you like to cook AND save time, you better subscribe to Handimania’s Youtube channel. I did.

Check out their instructions for cutting a plateful of cherry tomatoes in just 5 seconds: put a second plate over the tomatoes and slice through the opening between the two plates.

One of those things that’s so wonderfully easy when you know how :p. Now you know how, but watch the video anyway – it’s fun.

Hat tip to Paterson BOE member Dr. Jonathan Hodges for the Handimania introduction

Resources for saving & exchanging traditional seeds

handfuls of seedsBookmark this post and visit to see future additions.

Seed Saver’s Exchange

“A Handful of Seeds” publication on seed saving and seed study for educators, a 91 page full color illustrated guide with lessons linked to California Educational Standards, practical information on seed saving in the school garden, seed history and lore. By the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center School Garden Program.

Please add to this list by sharing a resource you know in a comment.

Free Farmer’s Market: fresh veggies all summer long in Newark

PACTS & grow a rowPACTS brings America’s Grow-A-Row program back to Newark this season. It’s not too late to sign up for the free veggies Farmer’s Market! Just come to the first distribution event on Saturday July 11 at 10am.

Please note that the America’s Grow-A-Row program is completely free, but PACTS charges a $10 registration fee to cover the costs of administering the program. Participants are also required to put down a $5 “service” deposit. The entire $5 will be refunded if during the course of the summer, you volunteer 4 hours of service at either the market or farm.

Your free weekly Farmer’s Market goodies include:

  • Free bags of produce every week mid-July through November
  • Reusable grocery bags
  • A summer bus ride to the farm to pick your own veggies
  • At the June 14 orientation, master farmers gave presentations on growing your own crops in urban areas and how to eat healthy on a limited budget

PACTS Farmer’s Market Opening
Saturday 11 July 2015 @ 10am
Franklin-St John’s United Methodist Church
124 Maple Avenue (corner of Keer Ave)
Newark, NJ

The unfortunate case of the disappearing Black farmer

dad-john-fredwatkins
John Boyd was interviewed by Grist writer Madeleine Thomas on the state of Black farmers in America. Mr. Boyd has been a driving force in the movement to procure support for Black farmers – and even funding to help cover the personal and community cost of Black farmers being denied USDA support that was made readily available to Caucasians.

Boyd’s work helped spark a landmark legal case in 1997. In the class-action lawsuit Pigford v. Glickman, 400 black farmers alleged that the United States Department of Agriculture had denied them loans based on racial discrimination. The decision eventually awarded thousands of black farmers payments up to $50,000 for discrimination claims. In 2010, President Obama announced an additional $1.25 billion settlement, known as Pigford II, to fund any additional unfiled claims. Native American, female, and Latino farmers were also eventually awarded similar settlements, too.

…What has happened is that a lot of family farms have been left to the next generation, and they’re really not set up to continue farming. That has created a huge challenge for black people in this country as far as being agriculturalists and maintaining and contributing to America’s fabric, which is why black people were brought into this country in the first place. We were brought to this country to work the land and we’ve done it for hundreds of years for scot-free. Here we are hundreds of years later, barely holding on here.

Mr. Boyd advises taking back control over our connection to land and food by investing in back gardening, small scale farming and even larger scale farming. On the particular subject of land, he shares this wisdom:

We need people to become concerned that God doesn’t make any more land. They make a new Cadillac and a new Mercedes-Benz every day, but the actual land, once it gets away from you and your family loses that land, it’s very difficult to go back and buy it from a white farmer because they’re not going to sell it back to you. We can’t continue to give our land away for pennies on the dollar and move to suburbs and condominiums. That’s a real problem.

…As my grandfather said, “I can’t leave my PhD to my children, but I can leave my raggedy farm to them.”

Farmers are watering the crops we eat with fracking waste

California farmers are buying fracking waste liquid from the natural gas extraction companies that use high-pressure liquid cocktails – mixed with massive amounts of potable water – to get natural gas out of shale deposits and sell the gas overseas. What are they doing with that radioactive waste? The LA Times reports: watering their crops with it, that’s what.

Oh yeah, the crops we eat. Some farmers are using fracking waste for as much as half of their ‘water’ supply. But this picture of fracking waste looks nothing like water, does it?

Fracking pit

A scientist who sometimes consults for the EPA took fracking liquid samples at 10 sites over an 8 mile canal where it’s channelled to farmers and found,

The samples (Scott) Smith collected contained acetone and methylene chloride, solvents used to degrease equipment or soften thick crude oil, at concentrations higher than he said he had seen at oil spill disaster sites. The water also contained C20 and C34, hydrocarbons found in oil, according to ALS Environmental, the lab that analyzed Smith’s samples.

Methylene chloride and acetone are used as solvents in many industrial settings. Methylene chloride is classified as a potential carcinogen.

The farmers seem to think none of this is a problem, but then again, these are the same people that for years have taking 80% of drought-ridden California’s potable water supply to grow commercial crops. How much can their judgement be trusted?

“But on the plus side,” as Facebooker Ben Ogden points out, “all the veggies will be easier to find in the dark…”

I like one Grist reporter’s comment on the story. Now, I can’t wait until June 15 rolls around and the American public gets to learn exactly what nefarious chemicals are in fracking liquid.

There’s a certain amount of WTF to all this — because we don’t even know what’s in this fracking waste, at least not until June 15. That’s when California’s fracking regulations kick in and force oil companies to disclose the chemicals they are using. I mean, maybe just wait to find that out before using it to water our cherries?

Thanks William Rivers Pitt for making me aware of this disturbing, but important, news.