The Green Fork is the official blog of the Eat Well Guide. Click here to Find Good Food.

With 25 teams of chefs and farmers from the Ottawa region, Canadian Organic Growers’ 5th annual Feast of Fields hosted this tremendous gastronomical delight along the Rideau River in Vincent Massey Park. In two quick hours of meeting farmer and chef teams from the region and sampling their creations, guests tasted some of the best the Ottawa Valley has to offer.

[Read more →]

The Baltimore City Public School system is about to become the first fully Meatless Monday school system in the U.S. They’re joining a growing international movement of individuals, organizations, communities and cities making the commitment to lower meat consumption and enjoy a plant-based diet on Mondays.

[Read more →]

USDA Left Schoolkids Vulnerable The Government Accountability Office has found that the USDA didn’t tell public schools of food safety recalls quickly and may have caused school cafeterias to inadvertently serve tainted foods.
Municipal Water Systems A-gush “Major blowouts” in local water systems are on the rise in cities like LA and Baltimore, hinting at an [...]

[Read more →]

Last week, at the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn, a small audience gathered for the screening of H2 Worker. The film, which opened the coop’s monthly film series on food issues, is an award-winning documentary released in 1990 on the exploitation of Jamaican sugar cane harvesters working in Florida. Shot clandestinely in the cane fields and the workers’ barracks, the film exposed the plight of thousands of Caribbean men who came to Florida every year to work in conditions reminiscent of the days of slavery on sugar plantations. Working long hours under the scathing sun, cutting the cane by hand with rudimentary machetes, living in overcrowded barracks, poorly fed, denied medical treatment for on-site injuries and frequently cheated out of wages, these workers paid the human cost of a global system that perpetuated their exploitation.

[Read more →]

I’m always amazed by the number of folks who think that most of Central Park is some kind of natural habitat of indigenous plants, a pristine terrain onto which we plunked our bike paths, boathouses and pretzel vendors.

[Read more →]

The beginning of autumn marks the point when many of our favorite fruits and vegetables are ripe for the picking. This year, harvest has become a national affair. Michelle Obama’s famed White House garden is in bloom and ready to offer its bounty to a country hungry for nutritional guidance. Food columnist and author Mark Bittman recently journeyed to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to discover what the Obamas can teach us about healthful eating.

[Read more →]

USDA is Loco for Local: Everyone’s excited about the new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative (henceforth to be known as KYFx2) the USDA rolled out this week, which includes a focus on rural development and direct marketing, the opening of the new farmers’ market near the White House and funds for farm-to-school programs and community food projects. Tom Philpott brings us back down to earth.

[Read more →]

Noting the problems associated with large scale consumption of bottled water, the Take Back the Tap campaign asks people to choose tap water over bottled water, but a recent New York Times article by Charles Duhigg, Toxic Waters: Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering, might give some people the impression that tap water is not always safe. Before consumers rush to fill their pantries with bottle water, however, there are a few important points to consider.

[Read more →]

With great excitement about the USDA’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, which rolled out this week, and particular joy over the White House farmers’ market, which opens today, here is an inspirational video from our friends at Cooking Up a Story. This one is about a farmer who’s helping build his local economy while feeding local schoolchildren more nutritious food. Farm to School networks, like farmers’ markets, are excellent methods by which we can rebuild our local economies and our local food distribution systems.

[Read more →]

“The Fertile Well,” “A Flooded Future,” and “Half Full/Half Empty,” tell stories, respectively, about the falaj, an ancient Arabic freshwater delivery system in Oman; the proposed damming and subsequent flooding of a Turkish town on the Tigris called Hasankeyf and the life-altering ramifications for its residents; and finally, the story of a Palestinian farmer and an Israeli agronomist who both think that freshwater distribution for agriculture needs to be administered better at top levels of government.

[Read more →]