On Sunday, I attended the Just Food:CSA in NYC conference and I was impressed with the great turnout. The Meat and Egg Share workshops connected NYC CSAs with pasture-based farmers in the NYC region. The panelists and attendees discussed the logistics of getting the products from their farms to the various NYC CSAs – from the best refrigerated truck delivery service for the farmers to use down to how much product each CSA member could reasonably contain in their small NYC refrigerators. I had already been talking or emailing with many of the farmers at the conference and was so glad to be able to put faces to their voices and names. It was also great to put a face and voice to the blogging/emailing voice of Kerry Trueman from Eating Liberally. Thanks for stopping by the table Kerry.

Thanks also to everyone who signed up for our listserv. I’m so glad Just Food set up our table next to the wine tasting from Martha Clara Vineyard. It certainly made for a steady flow of attendees at the Animal Welfare Approved table. And to all of the farmers I met at the conference, I hope we’ll be in touch soon.

We just returned from an exciting day at the Stuart Family Farm in Bridgewater, Connecticut. We visited with Bill and Deb Stuart along with WPIX/CW Channel 11 News who wanted to see firsthand what an Animal Welfare Approved farm looks like and how the auditing process works. Arthur Ch’ien and his cameraman Jason Johnson spent three hours with us and took so much farm footage that they ran out of tape! And despite, both Arthur and Jason’s initial apprehension about getting up close and personal with the cows, they became fast friends with Urma and a few other heifers in the Stuarts’ grassfed herd.

The New York Times recently published a letter written by Michael Pollan to the next President of the United States. He begins by pointing out that this is the first time a U.S. President has had to deal with a national food crisis since the Nixon administration. However, the crisis is different this time [...]