Sustainability is all the rage.

Last week I boarded a bus with 30 professionals, grad students and other food politic wonks to explore the pieceses of an ever-increasing sustainable food system here in Oregon. Coined “The Oregon Sustainability Experience,” the week-long adventure drove us all over, visiting multiple participants and benefactors to the evolving sustainable food systems across Oregon. From Portland to Hillsboro to Monmouth to Corvallis to Philomath to Tangent to Junction City to Salem to Brooks to Woodburn and then back to Portland, we invested 40+ hours to investigation, analysis, reflection and immense discussion on the various topics that be.

Over the next several weeks and maybe months, I will post entries on each of our visits. We dined with plant breeders, toured small, medium and large organic farms, geared up in white gowns to see processing facilities, and of course ventured among heritage breed pigs and chickens, and at one point blew our minds in an dialogue with migrant farm workers. Suffice to say, we ran the gambit on sustainable agriculture in the Northwest.

You will be happy to know that I also took loads of pictures! I know that this blog lacks the creative efforts of my photo-friendly eye, and so I intend on showing the reader some of the sites we saw on our trip. Aside from the informative lens of who, what, where, when and how, I look forward to divulging some of the why questions that rang deep inside throughout this experience. Some of the thoughts that still linger in my brain include:

• Do we want to sustain a global food system, or move towards a sustainable localized food system?
• Is ‘sustainability’ an inherently liberal issue?
• The battle between local and organic in the context of sustainability
• Peak oil, climate change and the future of sustainable trends
• Sustainability – a class concern?

With so much to share, I’m still weighing the idea of posting regularly on this trip, i.e. several times a week or once every couple weeks, etc. At the same time, with so much to say and the desire to write more often, I can see posting many entries in the near future. As I mentioned a moment ago, beyond a news report, I really aim to engage some of the deeper issues I uncovered during the week-long conference.

For all my previous posts on food politics and eating seasonally and teaching food literacy, I think the theme of sustainability loomed in the background. Here is an opportunity to go that much deeper into an increasingly important issue.

Related posts:

1. Good Man Eats Takes a Break
2. Burgerville – Fast Food for Ethical Foodies
3. Local Food Movement Gains Serious Support
4. The Urban Farming Revolution
5. The 100-Mile Diet vs. World Hunger (part 3)

Tags: Food Politics, local food movement, NW cuisine, portland, seasonal eating