Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
by Marion Nestle
Jan
30
2016
Weekend Reading: From Farm to Canal Street
Valerie Inbruce. From Farm to Canal Street: Chinatown’s Alternative Food Network in the Global Marketplace. Cornell University Press, 2015.
I live in downtown Manhattan, love to wander through the open-air food markets in Chinatown, and have always wondered how the extraordinarily fresh and exotic vegetables and fruits get there. Who grows them, and where?
The answers: supply chains based on family connections (of course), in Florida, Honduras, and Guatemala.
Inbruce views the supply chains as an alternative to industrial food systems, one that provides vegetables of outstanding quality at low cost, while supporting small farmers.
Instructors of courses in food systems: this book belongs in your syllabus. It is essential reading for anyone interested in who produces food for urban areas and how it gets into cities.
