Berkshire  Grown hosted a series of lectures “Edible Education: The Rise and Future of the Food Movement” coordinated by author Michael Pollan.

From Atlantic. com:  “This is a very powerful lineup such has never been accumulated for a single class,” Pollan told students in his introduction to the course. If you’re already asking questions about your food, it’s likely your favorite author-activist appears. For people learning about food systems for the first time, this class may be the very best place to start…

Watch here

THIS SATURDAY   DEC. 17:  10 to 2

Great Barrington and Williamstown

details here

Frederick Christmas Tree Farm

Mike Frederick

360 Washington Road (Route

Hinsdale, MA

413-655-8551 or fredchtr@vgernet.net

Choose-your-own trees

Justamere Tree Farm

J.P. and Marian Welch

248 Patterson Rd.

Worthington, MA

413-238-5902

Choose-and-cut trees or pre-cut trees available in a range of prices, open 9 to 4 pm weekends. Also fresh wreaths and swags made on the farm.

Photo from Justamere Tree Farm

Ioka Valley Farm

The Leab Family

3475 Route 43

Hancock, MA

413-738-5915

Cut-your-own of pre-cut trees. Five varieties of Christmas trees and a hayride in “Santa’s Cap” to the Christmas Tree Plantation. Open weekends from Thanksgiving to Dec. 19, 2010,

9:30 am-4:30 pm. Café open for breakfast.

Seekonk Tree Farm

Peter and Carol Sweet

32 Seekonk Cross Rd.

Great Barrington, MA

413-528-0050

Cut-your-own or pre-cut trees in six varieties. Open through Dec. 24th, Monday-Friday 12:30-5 pm and 9am-5pm on weekends, or by appointment.

Wednesday December 7th   at 7 pm at the Lecture Center, Bard College at Simon’s Rock      

Videotape of Alice Walters and Robert Reich

Alice Waters, chef, author, and the proprietor of Chez Panisse, is an American pioneer of a culinary philosophy that maintains that cooking should be based on the finest and freshest seasonal ingredients that are produced sustainably and locally. She is a passionate advocate for a food economy that is “good, clean, and fair.”

Over the course of forty years, Chez Panisse has helped create a community of local farmers and ranchers whose dedication to sustainable agriculture assures the restaurant a steady supply of fresh ingredients. In 1996, Waters’ commitment to education led to the creation of The Edible Schoolyard at Berkeley’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Middle School: a one-acre garden, and adjacent kitchen-classroom at a public middle school. Alice established the Chez Panisse Foundation in 1996 to support the Edible Schoolyard and encourage similar programs that use food traditions to teach, nurture, and empower youth. Waters is Vice President of Slow Food International and the author of nine books, including The Art of Simple Food: Notes and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution.

Robert Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He has written thirteen books, including The Work of Nations, Locked in the Cabinet, Supercapitalism, and his most recent book, Aftershock. His “Marketplace” commentaries can be found on publicradio.com and iTunes. He is also Common Cause’s board chairman.

November 16    7 pm The Lecture Center at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington        

“Feeding the World”

The international food complex has changed significantly over the last twenty years. How does the food economy shape countries’ access to good food?

Videotape of Raj Patel

Raj  Patel is a writer, activist and academic. He has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. He’s currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies, an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and is an Advisor to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, he regularly writes for The Guardian, and has contributed to the LA Times, NYTimes.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Mail on Sunday, and The Observer. His first book was Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and his latest, The Value of Nothing, is a New York Times best-seller.

October 19th

‘Perspectives on Race, Place, and Food’

ALEGRĺA DE LA CRUZ, Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment; REBECCA FLOURNOY, PolicyLink; YVONNE YEN LIU, Applied Research Center/Colorlines, Inc.

The Lecture Center at

Bard College at Simon’s Rock 7 pm

click here for more details

   Click here for details about workshops.

BG Board President Julie Michaels writes:   In his provocative front-page article Sunday (7.17.11), Berkshire Eagle reporter Ned Oliver asked a variety of people what they meant by “locally grown.” To Sheffield farmer Ted Dobson, it’s food grown within 50 miles of his farm. To the owners of the Berkshire Food Coop in Great Barrington, local is food that is grown within 100 miles of their store.

In an editorial on Wednesday, the Eagle decided to lay down its own definition of local, even as it chastised Berkshire Grown — an organization that has faithfully promoted the Berkshire region’s food and farmers for the past dozen years — for not supplying a rigid definition of its own.

Here is how the Berkshire Eagle defines local: ” ‘locally grown’ should be reserved for farm-fresh products grown in this county and the adjacent New York Route 22 corridor just across the state line running parallel to Berkshire CountyŠ.”

Bad luck to Mighty Food Farm, a Berkshire Grown member raising organic vegetables in Pownal, Vt. According to the Eagle, their tomatoes would not qualify as locally grown, even when purchased by a resident of Williamstown, just 10 miles away.

Ditto the yogurt produced by Side Hill Farm, another Berkshire Grown member in Ashfield, halfway between Dalton and Northampton.

We could supply numerous other examples of the false exclusivity such artificial boundaries impose. In fact, using the Eagle’s definition of

“locally grown,” a good percentage of the farms that sell their produce at the Great Barrington Farmers Market would be deemed ineligible for recognition.

We at Berkshire Grown believe that drawing artificial lines in the sand is petty stuff. Rather, our policy is to let each farm identify its location, as they do at the Great Barrington Farmers Market, and let buyers decide whether the produce meets their own definition of local. (This is the true sin of the Otis Poultry Farm; they are misleading their shoppers; in fact, lying to them about where their eggs are produced. We condemn this practice wholeheartedly.)

What most disturbs us about the Eagle’s editorial is that it misses the larger picture. We at Berkshire Grown are concerned about preserving the regional food shed for our community’s security and health.

The culprit is not a small farmer, 10 miles over the Berkshire County line; rather, it is corporate industrial agriculture that destroys the land with its pesticides, limits crop diversity, and undercuts small farmers by selling food at a discount. We want to see hundreds of farms blossom across the region, on this side of the Berkshire County line and on the other. Why?

Because the more farms we have in our region — be it in the Berkshires, in the Pioneer Valley, in Vermont, or even upstate New York — the more healthy food we’ll have to feed our children. Our community will be that much safer should our food supply be targeted by America’s enemies, and our landscape will remain open and rural — beautiful enough to draw the many visitors who come to the Berkshires every year, many of whom shop in our farmers markets.

Berkshire Grown’s mission is to “increase public awareness of eating locally and healthily through education and outreach; by encouraging supportive agricultural programs and public policies; by establishing local food and farm networks; and by promoting the growing and marketing of locally grown food.”

If the Berkshire Eagle truly cares about this mission, they might think about joining Berkshire Grown (community membership: $40) rather than attacking our organization on its editorial page.

Julie Michaels is President of the Board of Berkshire Grown.