The mission of the Sustainable Food Lab is to accelerate improvement in mainstream food and agriculture systems so we can sustain a high quality life on earth.

We define a sustainable food and agriculture system as one in which the fertility of our soil is maintained and improved; the availability and quality of water are protected and enhanced; our biodiversity is protected; farmers, farm workers, and all other actors in value chains have livable incomes; the food we eat is affordable and promotes our health; sustainable businesses can thrive; and the flow of energy and the discharge of waste, including greenhouse gas emissions, are within the capacity of the earth to absorb forever.

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You can almost hear the music

The former Beatle, Paul McCartney has called for “meat-free Mondays” according to the Press Association. You can almost hear how that would sound in lyrics to a song. Lifecycle assessments on food consistantly show that red meat from large animals is one of the most greenhouse gas-intensive of food choices available to us. Science News reviewed [...]

By Daniella June 24, 2008 Comments

finding local food

Cassandra wrote in to point out the Eat Well Guide, a way to search for farmer’s markets, restaurants, and others serving up local, sustainable food in the US and Canada. Might be handy for that road trip — if anyone’s going to be driving with the price of gas this summer.

By Chris Landry June 11, 2008 Comments

concerns about this year?s crops

In their latest article in an excellent series on the global food crisis, the New York Times reports that this growing season is off to a very shaky start. Too much rain in the American corn belt, too little rain elsewhere.

By Chris Landry June 10, 2008 Comments

tough talk in Rome

Word is that a commitment to halving hunger around the world has come out of the Rome Summit. FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf set the tone for the meetings by noting some of the disparities around the world (full speech here): But above all, nobody understands how: first, the OECD countries have created a distortion of world markets [...]

By Chris Landry June 5, 2008 Comments

Value chains, a growing area of interest

Increasingly, people are turning to food company value chains to help with the challenges of wealth distribution and better management of basic resources (soil, air, water, biodiversity). The FAO and the Ford Foundation have recently taken assertive steps in this direction. The FAO just completed a paper comparing, contrasting and exploring the two dominant practices in [...]

By Daniella May 5, 2008 Comments

Pineapples in the Philippines need standards

By Hal Hamilton Driving through fields of DelMonte pineapples in the Philippines, I felt an old familiar pain in my gut. Ever since being a farmer myself, I?ve never been able to see serious soil erosion without feeling a ill. I remember my own mistakes, plowing across a low place in a field where water crosses [...]

By Daniella March 7, 2008 Comments

Crackdown on illegal fishing

Things are really heating up in the fishing world. The end of January brought a series of New York Times articles the depletion of fish stocks, stolen fish and high levels of mercury in fish. See how Brian Halweil of Worldwatch connects the dots on these three aspects of the fishing industry. The European Union is [...]

By Daniella February 20, 2008 Comments

Presencing

My colleague Susan Sweitzer and I had the chance to speak about the Food Lab yesterday at a Presencing Institute led by Otto Scharmer, Arawana Hayashi, and Beth Jandernoa. Some seventy or so people from eighteen countries are in Cambridge all this week to learn about the U Process that is at the core [...]

By Chris Landry December 6, 2007 Comments

Restaurants think small is big and so is locally grown.

Once a year the National Restaurant Association (a different NRA) surveys over 1200 chefs of American Culinary Federation members to rate menu items as “hot,” “passé? or ?perennial favorites. Bite-size desserts, small plates, locally grown produce and organic products are the latest red-hot food items. Going out of style are low-carb dough, tofu, chai and foie [...]

By Daniella December 3, 2007 Comments

talking about sustainability

My friends over at Corporate Watchdog Radio (soon to have a new name) have posted a really terrific interview with Peter Senge and Joe Laur of the Society for Organizational Learning. It includes a very good discussion of the Food Lab and some specific examples of what companies are doing to change the ways [...]

By Chris Landry November 7, 2007 Comments

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