Green Grid Radio returns to the topic of food. This time, we go all the way back to the farm, and to the promise of the tractor. The tractor that promised to make life for farmers easier and our farms more productive.
In today’s episode, however, we meet a man who shares a story about the true impact the tractor had on farmers, and ultimately on our ability to grow food.
Hosted by Diane Wu, produced by Erik Olesund and featuring Matt Rothe.
Music used in this piece:
This week we have a special guest contribution from Stanford student Christina Morrisset. Christina took the Your American Life course this Winter (along with our producers Mallory, Erik, and Shara), and chose to tell a story about identity, transformation, and . . . fish.
Women of Taku River Reds, Stanford Dining’s salmon supplier. Photo from http://www.takurr.net/.
We’ll let her fill in the details.
Listen here:
Like Christina, we also learned a bunch from the book Four Fish, and for more on fisheries and aquaculture check out S3E4: Overfished or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Cocaine Cowboy Fisheries and Love Catch Shares.
Coming up (very) soon: Stanford has divested from coal! We get an insider’s peek at the process behind the decision with an interview with Fossil Free Stanford member Krishna Dasaratha. Tune in at 6 PM tonight at KZSU 90.1 FM, stream it online catch it later this week right here.
This week we returned to the topic of meat production and food systems, exploring political and economic barriers to change in the U.S. and abroad, ways to move toward a less environmentally and socially destructive food system, and our own thoughts and perspectives on these critical issues. Like last week, we followed the wisdom of one of our guests, Dan Blumstein, and experimented with talking about food over food; Green Grid Radio team members Mallory, Adam, Erik and Diane discussed politics, education, climate change and energy, the world food economy, interconnections in the food system, local food, diversification, American eating habits and social norms, top-down versus bottom-up change, and more!
Image attributed to Meriwether, American Meat (2013)
Guests include: Stanford undergraduate student Caroline Hodge; Matt Rothe, Fellow at the Institute of Design at Stanford; Environmental Earth System Science Professor Rosamond Naylor, of the Center on Food Security and the Environment; Graham Meriwether, Director of the documentary American Meat; Eli Zigas, Food Systems and Urban Agriculture Program Manager at San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association; UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Professor Dan Blumstein, author of Eating Our Way to Civility; Professor Christopher Gardner of the Stanford School of Medicine; Vasile Stanescu, Stanford PhD candidate in the Program of Modern Thought and Literature; and Debra Dunn, co-founder of FEED Collaborative and Professor at the Institute of Design at Stanford.
Hosted by Mallory Smith and Erik Olesund.
Resources mentioned in this podcast: the American “Farm Bill“; “Quinoa’s Global Success Creates Quandary at Home,” from the New York Times (2011); “High-yield agriculture slows pace of global warming, say Stanford researchers,” from Stanford News (2010); Carnegie Mellon study comparing carbon emission reductions of eating local versus reducing meat consumption (2008); American Meat documentary.
Music featured by James Pants, Candlegravity, Dexter Britain, Sycamore Drive, Podington Bear, and Gable.
After we aired our ocean privatization episode a few weeks ago, I picked up “Four Fish” by Paul Greenberg. If you want to learn more about fisheries management, the development of aquaculture (so much fascinating science and history), read this book! Greenberg takes us from his childhood fishing haunts to an Alaskan fishing village, from deep off the coast of Hawaii to the Sinai peninsula. We zip back in time to when the Greeks named sea bass, take a peek at the peak and demise of the whaling industry, and get a thoughtful glimpse at different paths for the future of fish.
Image attributed to Greenberg/Penguin Books, (2011)
Perfect for reading on the beach this summer.
In this week’s episode, we’re covering food waste!! Listen below for some myth busting on expiration dates and the real story of what’s happening to those compostable forks.
A picture from our tour of the Newby Island Resource Recovery Park’s compost facility. This is a compost windrow before it gets filtered. Photograph by Diane Wu.
Guests include Stanford student Nicole Gaetjens; Julie Muir, Community Relations Manager at Peninsula Sanitary Service, Inc; Dana Gunders, Project Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council; and Elena Stamatakos and Mahta Baghoolizadeh, volunteers with the Stanford Project on Hunger.
Hosted by Diane Wu and Mallory Smith.
Resources mentioned in this podcast include stilltasty.com (Is your leftover pizza still good?), American Wasteland (Want to read a whole book about this?), and this NRDC report (here are the highlights). Here’s more on the Good Samaritan Food Donation Act.
Music featured, in chronological order, by Bad Bats, Abe Sada, Cranston, The LibraryAnns, Mark Neil, Krackatoa.
GGR Producers Adam Pearson, Erik Olesund and guests Debra Dunn, Sarah Triolo (photograph by Diane Wu).
As Earth Day approaches on the Stanford campus, Green Grid Radio and other environmentally-minded affiliates on campus are reaching out to the broader Stanford community for engagement. Wednesday in White Plaza featured Green Grid Radio broadcasting live during the Stanford Energy Club’s Energy Showcase event. With technical assistance from producer Diane Wu and KZSU engineer Mark Lawrence, Green Grid Radio brought a solar-powered (literally– see our photo below!) episode with an appropriate lunch-time focus on food systems.
Solar-powered radio (photograph by Diane Wu).
We had a great, lengthy discussion with our guests this week, Ms. Debra Dunn and Sarah Triolo. Sarah recommended this supplemental reading from the New York Times on some of the “nasty things happening in our food system” today. Thanks to all the audience input and for the support out in White Plaza. Take a listen below, and see you next week!
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