Over the past two years, we’ve tried to keep you up-to-date on the Urban and Rural Reserves process for the Metro region, which will determine how rural lands are protected at the edges of our Urban Growth Boundary. As the final votes on Washington County Reserves quickly approach, we share this message from our partners [...]

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Photo: Adelante Mujeres
This week, The Oregonian ran a short article about an exciting pilot program taking off in Forest Grove. The new program - which is run by the Hispanic women’s development group Adelante Mujeres -  provides and farm land and training to Latinos who’d like to practice organic agriculture. While Latinos make up an [...]

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Photo shared under a Creative Commons license by cafemama
James McWilliams, food movement skeptic and author of the new book, Just Food: Where Locavores Get it Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, recently took his argument to the New York Times, where he blogged about his feeling that local eating might be elitist. In [...]

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Peanuts. Pistachios. Popcorn seasoning. Cookie Dough. Greens. Beef. Beef. Beef. Wide-scale outbreaks of foodborne illness of slammed our country this year, leaving legislators scrambling to come up with an appropriate response. Over the last month or so, we’ve begun to see the first steps towards new regulations and laws, but real change has yet to [...]

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Not to be outdone by her husband’s remarks to the American Medical Association, the First Lady held her very own press conference from the White House Kitchen Garden, just a few days after the President spoke about the connection between healthy eating and healthcare. Her speech - ostensibly a thank-you-and-stick-with-it message to the Bancroft students [...]

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When the USDA adopted an official “organic” label, the decision was a bittersweet mixture of successes and setbacks for the real food movement. On one hand, the glossy sticker on organic produce has provided a visual shorthand for harried eaters to make smarter food purchases. However, the trade-off for that easy recognition and broad reach [...]

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Updated 5/15 - Steve Cohen of the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability gives credit to the many volunteers involved
Updated 5/5 - Portland Mercury reports on the planting ceremony with photos

All around town, gardeners’ spring sprouts are pushing through the soil and, as first reported in last week’s Oregonian, Portland City Hall will be joining in [...]

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Photo courtesy of Flickr user chalkdog
If you want proof that kids already know right from wrong, just look to Madison, Wisconsin, where fourth-grade students organized to take a stand against the poor school lunch program. As told by Slow Food USA, the students of Nuestro Mundo Elementary School planned to share a home-cooked meal as [...]

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It’s not very often that we post about Italy here on the Slow Food Portland blog. While we love our Italian founders (and we’re quite partial to Italian cooking), we feel that American eating deserves just as much attention. We might be young here, but we’re pretty scrappy, and we have our own, unique culture [...]

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If you follow along with updates from COMFOOD or any similar food policy listservs, you’ve probably been understandably shocked to find an email in your inbox screaming: “OUTLAW ORGANIC FARMING!”  The panicky claims have been so widespread as to earn them an entry on the Snopes rumor database. HR 875 - the bill in question [...]

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