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

Slow Food USA’s Time For Lunch campaign aims to bring real food back to our schools. The campaign is part of a National Day of Action on Labor Day, September 7th, enlisting folks all over the country to host hundreds of “Eat-Ins”—potluck-style community events bringing people together to share a meal and show their support for school lunches comprised of wholesome, minimally processed foods, not commodity crop slop.

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Nora Ephron’s effervescent Julie & Julia has evidently sparked a mad dash to snap up Child’s epic Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Butter’s back, and margarine’s been marginalized. Three cheers for real food! After all, as Joan Gussow says, “I trust cows more than chemists.”
Any film (or book) that gets Americans psyched about cooking [...]

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Reusable shopping bags and compact fluorescent light bulbs are an easy place to start, once you’ve resolved to curb your carbon footprint. But why not go for some low hanging fruit that you could actually pick? Growing food in your front yard is a simple and tasty way to combat climate change.
Maintaining a lawn, on [...]

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Today, the Bed-Stuy Farm is a stellar example of urban agriculture that produces 7,000 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables annually. Tomorrow? If the developer has its way, the Bed-Stuy Farm may soon be plowed under and paved over.

“The intent was always to do affordable housing on this site,” Housing Preservation and Development Department official Margaret Sheffer told the New York Daily News last week. “The garden had essentially come in as a squatter.” The HPD wants to sell the lot in order to pay off a debt of roughly $275,000 incurred by the developer, Neighborhood Partnership Housing Development/Direct Building Management.

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Did you know that energy conservation is the root cause of our obesity epidemic? We may be fossil-fuelish, and we’re pretty careless with our kilowatts, too. But there’s one unit of energy we’re happy to hoard: the calorie. We routinely consume more calories than we need, but we’re so fearful of physical exertion that we’ll bend over backwards to avoid bending over backwards.

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Bottled water offers the illusion of purity, and it’s proven to be a tremendously successful marketing ploy, preying on our fears that our tap water isn’t safe. And, unfortunately, while tap water is, in fact, more strictly regulated than bottled, it’s got its own dirty laundry list of potential contaminants.

We like to think that the lack of clean, safe drinking water is a problem primarily for underdeveloped nations, but we’ve got plenty of water woes right here at home, including (but not limited to): rivers and streams clogged with toxic debris from mountain top mining removal; mercury emissions from coal-powered plants; pesticides, fertilizers, hormones, and antibiotics from industrial agriculture; and the residue of the prescription drugs we gobble like M&M’s to cure all our self-inflicted modern maladies.

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If you think type 2 diabetes and obesity are the two biggest health care crises Americans face these days, you’re missing the forest for the trees–literally. Because the roots of all this diet-induced disease lie in two less publicized but even more pernicious epidemics: nature deficit disorder and kitchen illiteracy.
The symptoms include a woeful lack [...]

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This 4th of July, let’s declare our freedom from the “pharmo-petro- chemico-military-industrial-agribusiness” food chain, exemplified by Stephen Colbert’s funny but creepy Carlyle-like Prescott Group. Give your patriotic picnics and potlucks a truly independent flavor; serve foods grown “locally, deliciously, and sustainably,” as the Food Independence Day campaign is calling on all of us to do–including [...]

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England and America have historically enjoyed a “special friendship” exemplified by a friendly rivalry and a rich cultural exchange: silly sitcoms, shameless reality shows, cheery and cheesy chick lit, Hollywood’s Los Anglo-cized adaptations of Jane Austen, and so on. They’ve got Nigella Lawson; we’ve got Rachel Ray (hey, no fair! can we trade?) They’ve got [...]

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Food, Inc. exposes the dark side of the American diet in a compelling–and surprisingly entertaining–way. Will you lose your appetite for factory farmed foods after you’ve seen it? I hope so. But its stated goal is to leave you “hungry for change,” the kind of change that’s transforming the way we think about how–and where–our food is grown.

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