There is so much happening in food nowadays that when you hear the latest cool idea, it’s hard to resist the urge to feel you should up sticks and move wherever it is. Halifax is one such place, where the new farmers market has made a little history by greening its power supply: after recent winds here in Victoria I am green with envy over their new wind turbines.

Rick passed along this nice article about making butter from scratch.

My alma mater is offering a very cool course of study in sustainability and food policies with instructors who include some of the food world’s demi-gods: Tim Lang, Vandana Shiva and Carlo Petrini. Partly online, it concludes with face-to-face time at Terra Madre, in Turin this October. Applications are being taken until May 31.

This course of study is designed as no ordinary learning opportunity, where you walk away with fond memories and a bit of paper to frame, but in true ambitious Slow Food style, aims

“to produce a guideline document per area addressed to stakeholders (governments, companies, NGOs, institutions) keen to adopt food policies encompassing the latest analyses on ecological, economic, social and sensory sustainability.”

The coursework builds on the contributions of the subject matter experts, and they aim to have a document completed by the end of Terra Madre, October 25, ready to present to policy-makers worldwide after final publication in time for Terra Madre day on December 10.

I don’t have a television, but I do (obviously) have an internet connection. And it gave me some pleasure to come across one of Jamie Oliver‘s programs (in 8 pieces): Jamie Oliver – Eat To Save Your Life will show you many interesting things you don’t see every day, including a quick look at how sugar, salt and fat have been added to the modern diet; how an extra latte and a bowl of crisps each day can add about 40 lbs to a woman’s weight over a year; what fitness looks like internally; where your organs go and what happens to their size if displaced by a fatty liver.

I like the tone of this (despite its moments of over-the-top silliness) – brutally frank but kind and positive – and the constructive social purpose at the heart of it. It covers much of the same ground as Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, but does it more efficiently and intelligently. It certainly shows up the stylistic differences between British and North American tv.

Being as I am in North America, I am so grateful to have given up tv during the era of reality television which has no social or technical virtues and is to me entirely unwatchable; on the other hand, perhaps I should be grateful for reality television, since it was the pointlessness and pervasiveness of this kind of North American programming that made giving up tv possible!

My English friends tell me constantly that the quality of British television has declined drastically over the years I’ve been away, but maybe that’s ok too. (You can always turn it off and pick up a book?!) Gone are the days when fewer channels meant more common ground, and television was more truly a shared cultural experience. Sonny, in my day, when I first moved to England, we had four channels and something to talk about.

However. I am cheered to hear a lot of people here talking about Food Revolution. Which, being for Americans, has been presented in the American reality tv style. Although its irritating soundtrack, staged dilemmas, ponderous pace and trying-too-hard laughs would drive me up the wall, it does indisputably have a positive social purpose, targets the “food” that is fed to children, and is generating some unifying interest: so perhaps he’s even striking a small revolutionary blow for television as well. (But I still don’t want one.)