Posts Tagged ‘restaurants’

Garden Garlic

Mark your calendars for the phenomenal ‘Festival that Stinks,’ a fabulous celebration for the whole family. Looking for inspiration and practical skills to survive and thrive in tough economic times? At the North Quabbin Garlic and Arts Festival you can:

Support and enjoy the bounty of over 100 amazing artists, farmers and organizations; strengthen communities by purchasing locally grown and crafted. Gain skills for interdependence: learn to grow garlic, press cider, mill lumber, make paper, coil clay, grind grain, do tai chi, go solar. Nourish yourself through chef demos, fantastic food and the wondrous wood fired bread oven. Transform trash into compost (last year only three bags of garbage for 12,000 people)! Celebrate with friends old and new: enjoy rockin’ music and incredible entertainment on two solar powered stages, wonderful workshops and garlic games galore. There’s something for everyone you love, so bring your friends and the entire family.

On October 3 and 4, follow your nose to beautiful, historic Forster’s Farm, 60 Chestnut Hill Road, Orange, MA. Visit www.garlicandarts.org for directions, pet policy, and past years highlights. Inflation buster admission at $5.00 per day for adults, weekend pass $8.00, kids 12 and under free. Bike, hike, parachute or ride the Magic Bus–the free biodiesel shuttle from nearby parking lots. Wheelchair accessible parking and restroom facility provided. The 2009 schedule of vendors, music, entertainment and games, chef demos, renewable energy and healing arts workshops, and all you need to know to have a scent-sational time will be updated by July. Multiply the fun: enjoy CISA’s Eat the View and the Conway Festival of the Hills on this same glorious October weekend.

FOOD, INC.

How much do we know about the food we buy at our local supermarkets and serve to our families? Though our food appears the same-a tomato still looks like a tomato-it has been radically transformed.

In Food, Inc., producer-director Robert Kenner and investigative authors Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) lift the veil on the U.S. food industry – an industry that has often put profit ahead of consumer health, the livelihoods of American farmers, the safety of workers and our own environment.

With the use of animation and compelling graphics, the filmmakers expose the highly mechanized, Orwellian underbelly that’s been deliberately hidden from the American consumer.

They reveal how a handful of corporations control our nation’s food supply. Though the companies try to maintain the myth that our food still comes from farms with red barns and white picket fences, our food is actually raised on massive “factory farms” and processed in mega industrial plants.  The animals grow fatter faster and are designed to fit the machines that slaughter them.  Tomatoes are bred to be shipped without bruising and to stay edible for months. The system is highly productive, and Americans are spending less on food than ever before.  But at what cost?

Cattle are given feed that their bodies are not biologically designed to digest, resulting in new strains of the E. coli virus, which sicken roughly 73,000 Americans annually.  And because of the high proliferation of processed foods derived from corn, Americans are facing epidemic levels of diabetes among adults and alarming increases in obesity, especially among children.

And, surprisingly, all of it is happening right under the noses of our government’s regulatory agencies, the USDA and the FDA.  The film exposes a ”revolving door” of executives from giant food corporations in and out of Washington D.C. that has resulted in a lack of oversight and illuminates how this dysfunctional political system often operates at the expense of the American consumer.

In the nation’s heartland, farmers have been silenced – afraid to talk about what’s happening to the nation’s food supply for fear of retaliation and lawsuits from giant corporations.

Foodincmovie

Sustainability

Best Tequila is at Mama Iguana

Cinco de Mayo (Spanish for “fifth of May”) is a regional holiday in Mexico, primarily celebrated in the state of Puebla, with some limited recognition in other parts of Mexico.The holiday commemorates the Mexican army’s unlikely victory over French forces at the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, under the leadership of Mexican General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín.The outnumbered Mexicans defeated a much better-equipped French army that had not been defeated in almost 50 years. Cinco de Mayo is not “an obligatory federal holiday” in Mexico, but rather a holiday that can be observed voluntarily.
While Cinco de Mayo has limited significance nationwide in Mexico, the date is observed in the United States and other locations around the world as a celebration of Mexican heritage and pride.A common misconception in the United States is that Cinco de Mayo is Mexico’s Independence Day,which actually is September 16 (dieciséis de septiembre in Spanish),the most important national patriotic holiday in Mexico.