Shared by Amalia Smith Hale
On Tuesday, we posted a piece about migrant farmworkers in Vermont, many of whom come from the Oaxaca region of Mexico. In celebration of the culinary traditions of that region, (which many UVM students explore through the Oaxaca Study Abroad food systems track), we share the following recipe: Continue reading
By Amalia Smith Hale
When I moved to Burlington in September 2013, I remember being blown away by the idyllic serenity and beauty of the Vermont landscape. I took a four-day bike ride with my family through the country roads that meandered through the endless rolling hills. Every day, we chose a local farm to stop at for lunch and enjoyed an abundance of fresh, local and organically produced fruits, veggies and dairy products. It was easy to get swept up by the perfection of it all. I had never lived in a place with so much public attention on food! I was experiencing a new sensation of pleasure about food, a connectedness to the origins of what I was eating. No longer was my food anonymous, and this instilled in me a strong sense of place and belonging. I was interested to know the story behind this perfection. Is it really as flawless and utopic as it all seems? Is it possible that Vermont has fully distanced itself from the harmful production, distribution and consumption practices that prevail in the rest of the country? Continue reading
What ought we eat? This is among the preeminent questions of our time, one asked by policy wonks, diet gurus, and, of course, consumers. People imbue a wide array of values into their dietary choices, including impacts on their health, cost, and environmental impacts, among others. The question of what to eat generates a particularly generous array of fireworks when it pits plant eaters—vegans and vegetarians—against consumers of animal flesh. I do life cycle energy audits within the agricultural sector and have accumulated enough data to see a fascinating story emerge regarding one particular aspect of food production: its energy intensity. In this essay I’ll present data on the energy intensity of animal- and plant-derived foods, and hopefully contribute to a constructive dialog about what we ought to eat and how we ought to be producing it. Continue reading
By David Zuckerman
On May 8, 2014, Governor Shumlin signed into law H.112, AN ACT RELATING TO THE LABELING OF FOOD PRODUCED WITH GENETIC ENGINEERING. This is the first law in the U.S. to require foods that contain genetically engineered (GE) ingredients be labeled. It will also restrict the terms “natural,” “all natural,” and other similar terms for being used on food products that contain GE ingredients. Continue reading
By Kristyn Achilich
This year, my research, under the direction of Linda Berlin, provided me with an opportunity to investigate the varying degrees of readiness that six communities across the Northeast exhibited in their preparedness to increase their access to fresh, whole, healthy food. These communities span geographic and socioeconomic boundaries, from a very small rural community with a population of 1200, to an urban center. During my research, I interviewed several individuals from each community and gathered information on how each person perceived their community’s support for an increased presence of fresh food in the local corner store, schools, and city policy. After four interviews with food leaders in one particular community, a city broken up into diverse socioeconomic neighborhoods, I stumbled upon a terminology divergence—here, food safety means something very different than what I was teaching in the lab for NFS 203: Food Microbiology, a course for the nutrition and dietetics undergraduate majors at UVM. Continue reading
