Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice: From Loncheras to Lobsta Love (Food, Health, and the Environment): Julian Agyeman, et. al.

Aspects of the urban food truck phenomenon, including community economic development, regulatory issues, and clashes between ethnic authenticity and local sustainability.

The food truck on the corner could be a brightly painted old-style lonchera offering tacos or an upscale mobile vendor serving lobster rolls. Customers range from gastro-tourists to construction workers, all eager for food that is delicious, authentic, and relatively inexpensive. Although some cities that host food trucks encourage their proliferation, others throw up regulatory roadblocks. This book examines the food truck phenomenon in North American cities from Los Angeles to Montreal, taking a novel perspective: social justice. It considers the motivating factors behind a city’s promotion or restriction of mobile food vending, and how these motivations might connect to or impede broad goals of social justice.

The contributors investigate the discriminatory implementation of rules, with gentrified hipsters often receiving preferential treatment over traditional immigrants; food trucks as part of community economic development; and food trucks’ role in cultural identity formation. They describe, among other things, mobile food vending in Portland, Oregon, where relaxed permitting encourages street food; the criminalization of food trucks by Los Angeles and New York City health codes; food as cultural currency in Montreal; social and spatial bifurcation of food trucks in Chicago and Durham, North Carolina; and food trucks as a part of Vancouver, Canada’s, self-branding as the “Greenest City.”

Contributors
Julian Agyeman, Sean Basinski, Jennifer Clark, Ana Croegaert, Kathleen Dunn, Renia Ehrenfeucht, Emma French, Matthew Gebhardt, Phoebe Godfrey, Amy Hanser, Robert Lemon, Nina Martin, Caitlin Matthews, Nathan McClintock, Alfonso Morales, Alan Nash, Katherine Alexandra Newman, Lenore Lauri Newman, Alex Novie, Matthew Shapiro, Hannah Sobel, Mark Vallianatos, Ginette Wessel, Edward Whittall, Mackenzie Wood.

About the author (2017)

Julian Agyeman is Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University. He is the coeditor of Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World (MIT Press) and other books.

Caitlin Matthews holds a Master of Arts in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning and a Master of Science in Agriculture, Food, and Environment from Tufts University.

Hannah Sobel holds a Master of Arts in Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning and a Master of Science in Food Policy and Applied Nutrition from Tufts University

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Food-matters

At Least 26 Animal Feeding Studies Show Adverse Effects From GMO’s by Sheldon Krimsky

The Real Truth About Health

Published on Jan 19, 2019
Eating genetically modified food is gambling with every bite. The biotech industry’s claim that genetically modified (GM) foods are safe is shattered in this lecture. This is for anyone wanting to understand GM technology, to learn how to protect themselves, or to share their concerns with others.

Sheldon Krimsky is Lenore Stern Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences in the Department of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning in the School of Arts & Sciences and Adjunct Professor of Public Health and Community Medicine in the School of Medicine at Tufts University. http://www.tufts.edu/~skrimsky. He received his BS and MS in physics from Brooklyn College, CUNY and Purdue University respectively, and an MA and PhD in philosophy at Boston University. His research focuses on the linkages between science/technology, ethics/values, and public policy. He has authored, co-authored or edited 14 books and published over 200 papers and reviews that have appeared in: JAMA, Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Medicine, NEJM, American Journal of Bioethics, PLOS ONE among others. His books include Genetic Alchemy; Agricultural Biotechnology & the Environment; Biotechnics & Society, Genetic Justice (Gold Medal winner from Independent Publishers); Hormonal Chaos: The Origins of the Environmental Endocrine Hypothesis and The GMO Deception. His latest book is titled Stem Cell Dialogues: A Philosophical and Scientific Inquiry into Medical Frontiers. Currently, he is completing a book on genetically engineered crops under contract with MIT Press.

Food-matters,

What Impact Is Climate Change Having On Agriculture And Our Food Supply? by Peter Wadhams

The Real Truth About Health
Published on Jan 19, 2019
The Arctic may be free of ice for the first time in 10,000 years. Wadhams shows how sea ice is the ‘canary in the mine’ of planetary climate change. He describes how it forms and the vital role it plays in reflecting solar heat back into space and providing an ‘air conditioning’ system for the planet.

Prof. Peter Wadhams is the UK’s most experienced sea ice scientist, with 48 years of research on sea ice and ocean processes in the Arctic and the Antarctic. This has focused on expeditions and measurements in the field, which has involved more than 50 expeditions to both polar regions, working from ice camps, icebreakers, aircraft, and, uniquely, Royal Navy submarines (6 submerged voyages to the North Pole ). His research group in Cambridge has been the only UK group with the capacity to carry out fieldwork on sea ice.

He is Emeritus Professor of Ocean Physics and is the author of numerous publications on dynamics and thermodynamics of sea ice, sea ice thickness, waves in ice, icebergs, ocean convection and kindred topics. The current main topics of research in the group are sea ice properties, dynamics, and distributions in thickness and concentration. He is also a pioneer in the use of AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles) under sea ice, using multibeam sonar to map bottom features, work which he has also been done from UK nuclear submarines.

He began his research career at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge University, where he rose to become Director. He moved to DAMTP in 2001. He has also held visiting professorships in Tokyo (National Institute of Polar Research), Monterey (US Naval Postgraduate School), Seattle (University of Washington) and La Jolla (Green Scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography).

He was the coordinator of several European Union Arctic flagship projects (ESOP, GreenICE, CONVECTION, and others) and is currently on the Steering Committee of the EU ICE-ARC project as well as a major US Office of Naval Research initiative in the Arctic. He served eight years on the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency and had served on panels of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

In 1990 he received the Italgas Prize for Environmental Sciences, and he has also been awarded the Polar Medal (UK) (1987) and the W.S. Bruce Prize of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. As well as being Professor at Cambridge he is an Associate Professor at the Laboratoire d’Océanographie de Villefranche, run by Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, and is a Professor at the Università Politecnica Delle Marche, Ancona. He is a Member of the Finnish Academy and is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

His most recent book, “A Farewell to Ice”, documents the ways in which the retreat of sea ice in the Arctic generates feedbacks which impact the entire global climate system, accelerating the rate of warming, the rate of sea level rise, the emission of methane from the offshore, and the occurrence of weather extremes affecting food production. He contends that catastrophic consequences cannot be avoided without making an all-out effort to develop ways of directly capturing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Food-matters,

The Native American Reservation That Could Block Trump’s Wall

Journeyman Pictures

Published on Jan 19, 2019

Securing the Arizona Border: Trump’s border wall is proving to be the greatest hurdle of his presidency, as the government shutdown raises the stakes day-on-day, pinning the president’s credibility to his ability to get the wall built. But besides the Democrats, many obstacles stand in the way of the southern border wall – including a native American reservation straddling the Mexico-US border.

Winter Storm Harper Will Intensify as it Tracks From the Midwest to the Northeast This Weekend With Heavy Snow, Sleet and Ice | The Weather Channel

Impacts from Winter Storm Harper

Winter Storm Harper is bringing snow and ice across a wide area this weekend.

At a Glance

• A significant winter storm will hammer parts of the Midwest and East this weekend.
• Heavy snow and whiteout conditions are possible Saturday in parts of the Midwest.
• The heaviest snow is likely in parts of the Northeast this weekend.
• Ice accumulation and power outages are also concerns.
• Moderate coastal flooding is possible on the Massachusetts coast.

Winter Storm Harper will spread its mess of snow, ice and wind across parts of the Midwest and into Northeast this weekend after already pummelling parts of the West and Plains.

Harper’s heaviest snow, so far, has been in the Sierra Nevada of California. Early Thursday morning, Lone Pine, California, reported 5 inches of snow had fallen in just 2 hours.

…(read more).

The River in the Sky: A Poem: Clive James

“Few people read Poetry any more, but I still wish to write its seedlings down, if only for the lull of gathering: no less a harvest season for being the last time,” writes Clive James in his epic poem, The River in the Sky. What emerges from this lamentation is a soaring epic of exceptional depth and overwhelming feeling, all the more extraordinary given its appearance in an age when the heroic poem seems to have disappeared from contemporary literature.

Among James’s many talents is his uncanny ability to juxtapose references to early twentieth-century poets with “offbeat humor and flyaway cultural observations” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), or allusions to the adagio of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony contrasted with references to “YouTube’s vast cosmopolis.”

Whether recalling his Australian childhood or his father’s “clean white headstone” in a Hong Kong cemetery, James’s autobiographical epic ultimately helps us define the meaning of life.

See:

• Clive James | The New Yorker | FROM “THE RIVER IN THE SKY”