- Author: Alec Rosenberg
A Food Blog post last week highlighted the great work of UC CalFresh, the UC Cooperative Extension nutrition education program that reaches more than 220,000 people a year, helping low-income families make healthy food choices, stretch food dollars and increase consumption of California’s agricultural products.
The University of California has an array of healthy living outreach efforts. In addition to CalFresh, one program that you might not expect involves the UC Davis School of Medicine. The Communities and Health Professionals...
- Author: Diane Nelson
The USDA is gearing up for the 2012 Census of Agriculture, the complete count it makes every five years of U.S. farms and ranches and the people who operate them. The agricultural census provides a fascinating look at farming demographics: How old are they? Where do they live? What do they grow?
Most experts believe the census will show a trend towards the green – not just green as in sustainable, local and small-scale - but also green as in greenhorn. It seems more people from non-farming families are seeking farming careers. (
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
To meet the needs of today’s time-pressed consumers, UC Cooperative Extension nutrition, family and consumer sciences advisors collected the most pertinent food budgeting and healthy eating concepts together in a new curriculum that can be presented in four one-hour sessions. The curriculum is taught by UC CalFresh, a nutrition education program that helps recipients of federal food assistance (formerly called Food Stamps) make the most of their benefits.
Typically, participants are offered an eight-session course called “Eating Smart Being Active.” The UC advisors realized the audience couldn’t always devote that much time to nutrition education, said
- Author: Ann Brody Guy
Adapted from an article by Eileen Ecklund in Breakthroughs magazine.
Scaling up — that’s always the sticking point with organic farming when it faces the question of whether it can feed the world’s hungry millions.
But a group of UC Berkeley scientists say that continuing on our current path of industrial agriculture is simply not sustainable, given its enormous water, energy and chemical inputs, together with the new challenges posed by climate change, such as temperature and precipitation extremes.
With the launch of the interdisciplinary
- Author: Eve Hightower
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) – a way of buying fresh produce and other foods directly from farmers – is growing rapidly in California’s Central Valley, according to a newly published study in the California Agriculture journal.
Membership in the CSAs surveyed for the study increased from an estimated 672 in 1990 to 32,938 in 2010.
The growth in Central Valley CSAs is one part of a bigger movement toward stronger direct relationships between farmers and consumers, said Ryan Galt, UC Davis assistant professor in the Department of Human and Community Development and co-author of