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After watching the video, if you would like to sign the Petition to ask Mayor Bloomberg for a vegetable garden in front of City Hall, please see: http://www.PeoplesGardenNYC.org

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After watching the video, if you would like to sign the Petition to ask Mayor Bloomberg for a vegetable garden in front of City Hall, you can visit this site: http://www.PeoplesGardenNYC.org

by Leslie Boden, Community Health & Sustainable Food Systems Planner

What lies at the very foundation of food production? Healthy soil. Dirt. Teeming with myriad forms of life, generative and renewable, essential for plant growth and sustainable ecosystems. And yet, all over the world, it is under attack by industrial agriculture’s methods, which deplete fertile topsoil and produce climate change-contributing greenhouse gases. Common Ground Media’s Dirt! The Movie describes the importance and vulnerability of dirt and the devastating global effects on agricultural production and our adaptability to climate change that will result from the continued assault on it.  It also highlights instances of hopeful actions large and small that are being taken to halt the destruction and replenish soil worldwide.  The movie features Vandana Shiva (physicist and environmental activist) and Wangari Maathai (Nobel Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement), both of whom addressed the recent NYC Food & Climate Summit. 

by Leslie Boden The Glynwood Center, a Food Systems Network member in Cold Spring, NY, is working to build a thriving regional food system by reviving farming and revitalizing farm communities throughout the Northeast. Filmmaker and FSNYC member Sara Grady’s beautiful new film about Glynwood illustrates the challenges—high costs, low profits, land use development pressures, and inadequate infrastructure among them--that Hudson Valley farmers face, as well as the value that farms bring to their own communities, and the tremendous importance of those farms for an environmentally sustainable regional food system. Glynwood, it becomes clear, plays a critical and respected role in empowering communities to support farming and conserve farmland. Glynwood recently announced the 2009 recipients of its Harvest Awards, which honor farmers, organizations, and businesses from across the United States for innovation and leadership in sustainable agriculture and regional food systems. For more information about Glynwood and this year’s award recipients, click here. Glynwood Vision Statement: "Glynwood envisions a revival of farming and a revitalization of rural communities throughout the Northeast. We foresee harmonious working farmscapes supporting energetic local economies and vibrant communities. We anticipate that consumers throughout the region will have ready access to fresh, healthful food produced by local farmers who practice good land stewardship and environmentally sustainable agriculture. We intend to continue exerting thoughtful and energetic leadership in helping communities to realize this vision." For a higher quality viewing experience, visit Sara's website: http://www.saragrady.net/glynwood.php

Posted by Leslie Boden   The Glynwood Center, a Food Systems Network member in Cold Spring, NY, is working to build a thriving regional food system by reviving farming and revitalizing farm communities throughout the Northeast.  Filmmaker and FSNYC member Sara Grady’s beautiful new film about Glynwood illustrates the challenges—high costs, low profits, land use development pressures, and inadequate infrastructure among them--that Hudson Valley farmers face, as well as the value that farms bring to their own communities, and the tremendous importance of those farms for an environmentally sustainable regional food system.  Glynwood, it becomes clear, plays a critical and

Introduction by Leslie Boden

Long before Henry Hudson and the crew of his ship, the Half Moon, arrived four hundred years ago on the shores of the river that would eventually bear his name, the Lenape people made their home on the small, lush, and ecologically diverse island they called Mannahatta.

This video chronicles the America's Best High School Chef competition held in April at Monroe College.  Check it out to see high schoolers excited about preparing great food.

http://www.monroecollege.edu/aboutmonroe/news-videos-abhsc

Keeping in close step with this month's seasonal feature on urban gardening, we've selected a well done news broadcast by New Tang Dynasty Television covering Rooftop Farms in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. You can read about Paula Crossfield's experience volunteering at Rooftop Farms here.

The city was abuzz with bee-related developments during Pollinator Week last month. As part of a campaign to legalize beekeeping in New York City, Just Food--with partners Slow Food NYC, Greenmarket, Stone Barns, and a number of NYC beekeeping groups--held a rally at City Hall, pressed the City Council Health Committee to schedule a hearing that’s needed to allow licensing legislation to move forward, and urged the NYC Department of Health to review the sections of its Health Code that keep beekeeping illegal. All that AND a tour of secret hives, a mead tasting, and the celebratory Beekeepers’ Ball-- Sweet!

While you can sow many seeds directly now that May has come, it's not too late to nourish some starts. Watch this informative video from Kerry Trueman, Retrovore.com and eatingliberally.org. 
Retrovore is a new website dedicated to promoting the joys of farmers
markets, homegrown food, and kitchen gardening. It features The Union
Square Market Report, a weekly podcast of interviews with farmers from
the Greenmarket, as well as resources/tips on growing your own food!
Check it out!

Posted by Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberally

The fine folks at Arts Engine, who brought us The Media That Matters: Good Food Festival back in 2006, premiered this year’s Media That Matters Film Festival on May 28th at the Independent Film Center in NYC. The festival featured a dozen films created to engage and inspire us on a wide range of issues, everything from the impact of globalization on Tibetan nomads to the slow rebirth of post-Katrina New Orleans to the empowerment of factory workers in Argentina. What the films all have in common is that they “spark debate and action in 12 minutes or less.”

The one food-related film in this year’s festival is Every Third Bite, a bittersweet documentary about colony collapse disorder, the mysterious malady that’s decimating our honeybees. Our hyper-industrialized system of agriculture depends on these fuzzy little farm workers to pollinate about $15 billion dollars worth of fruit, nut and vegetable crops each season, or roughly one third of our nation’s food supply.

Mary Woltz, one of the small scale beekeepers profiled in Every Third Bite, notes that commercial beekeepers, in order to survive, have to harvest all the honey from their hives, leaving none for the bees, who are fed high fructose corn syrup instead. Woltz, by contrast, sets aside enough of the honey from her hives to feed her bees in the winter and spring.