Tag Archives: food autonomy

This month’s Partisan Gardens is all about the Farmer’s Almanac, specifically the 2022 Earthbound Farmer’s Almanac. Our listeners are probably familiar with the old farmer’s almanac, with its planting charts, weather forecasts and random tidbits of folksy wisdom and jokes. It’s an artifact of an earlier time, probably not the first place our listeners go to decide what to plant …

This month, we spoke to Susanne Wengle, a professor at Notre Dame who researches post-Soviet political and economic transformation in Russia.  Her second book is Black Earth, White Bread; a Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food. We were eager to hear her perspective on the history of agriculture in Russia and Ukraine and the current war’s ripple effects on food systems …

This week, we speak with a group of grassroots labor organizers formerly employed at No Evil Foods, a socialist-themed vegan foods company.  They describe their efforts to organize a union at the company’s Asheville manufacturing plant, and No Evil’s subsequent efforts to bust the union – leveraging the COVID crisis – and eventually outsource their work in order to close …

This month’s Partisan Gardens is all about the Farmer’s Almanac, specifically the 2021 Earthbound Farmer’s Almanac. Our listeners are probably familiar with the old farmer’s almanac, with its planting charts, weather forecasts and random tidbits of folksy wisdom and jokes. It’s an artifact of an earlier time, probably not the first place our listeners go to decide what to plant …

The pawpaw is an incredible, temperate, semi-forgotten fruit.  It’s existence is a real exception on many levels: it is the only member of a tropical genus to survive this far north in most of the continent; it is nutrient and protein rich beyond most fruit; and pawpaws are exceptionally fragile, pushing them outside of economic distribution.  Their skin and flesh …

The global pandemic has exacerbated an already-simmering crisis of food insecurity, itself rooted in growing populations pushed outside of formal labor markets.  This exclusion, often implemented along racial lines, leads to precarity and a struggle for survival, which has only grown more bleak with the pressures of COVID-19.  The economy simply cannot produce enough jobs, and even those existing jobs …

For our second episode, we visited the small city of Carbondale, Illinois. Carbondale is a shrinking college town at the southern edge of the state, with a long history of racist segregation.  Since winter 2019, though, a broad range of residents has made a wager on a different future.  Grasping climate change and white supremacy by the horns, they’ve laid …