and now for the good news...

Food among the ruins of Detroit
First the bad news - good produce is tough to come by in Detroit these days. In the America's most depressed major city, supermarkets have become a rare sight. But Mark Dowie of Guernica Magazine has met some "intriguing visionaries" in Detroit - people who "imagine growing food among the ruins—chard and tomatoes on vacant lots, orchards on former school grounds, mushrooms in open basements, fish in abandoned factories, hydroponics in bankrupt department stores, livestock grazing on former golf courses, high-rise farms in old hotels, vermiculture, permaculture, hydroponics, aquaponics, waving wheat where cars were once test-driven, and winter greens sprouting inside the frames of single-story bungalows stripped of their skin and re-sided with Plexiglas—a homemade greenhouse."
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Healthy food goes to school
“All of a sudden I am not the fringe idiot trying to get everyone to serve peas and carrots that don’t come out of a can, like that’s the most radical idea they have ever heard of,” says nutrition activist Ann Cooper. Cooper was recently invited to the School Nutrition Association to discuss the "Lunch Box" - her system to "help school districts wean themselves from packaged, heavily processed food and begin cooking mostly local food from scratch." Food reform is on the rise in America's public schools. In this New York Times article, Kim Severson considers a few of the movement's most notable voices...
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