Mud Baron

In Washington DC the USDA's Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and locavore darling Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan take to the internets today at 10 a.m. local time (yep, now) to launch the USDA's new Know Your Farmer Know Your Food Compass.

Nearly a year after chef and activist Jamie Oliver visited LA and our schools' lunchrooms none other than Rush Limbaugh weighs in on our kids and their eating habits at LAUSD. Sounding more like Jonathan Swift sans irony, Limbaugh has responded on air to this weekend's LA Times piece on the new menu fail at the country's second largest school district.

"Shut your fucking mouth! We can lose you in here" becomes even more poignant as the constitutionally challenged National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 sits on President Obama's desk. As it currently stands, spokespeople for Obama have stated he would not veto it.

San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and New York have all had one (or two) and this weekend it's L.A.'s turn for the Green Festival. What may sound like a crunchy, west-of the-405-Earth-Day-redux is actually a bit of an organic-occupy-wall-street-social justice-in-bougie-hemp-fabric-neighborhood-gathering... at the LA Convention Center.

It's Food Day! But wait, we eat every day so why an actual "Food" day? According to the non-profit that is sponsoring this day as dialogue they have some fairly straightforward (okay, awesome) goals. Plus, a few ways for you to get involved in the local "good food" movement.

Occupy Wall Street has beget Occupy L.A. has beget Occupy LAUSD. The movement states "This is a call out to the 99% in the Los Angeles Unified School District. It is time we Reclaim Our Schools from the 1% wealthy." But what does "the man" have to do with huge class sizes, dirty classrooms, empty libraries, fallow gardens and laid off teachers?

Throw 400 growers and producers from 50 states with another 400 "investment" types onto the warehouse event space that is Fort Mason in SF and you get the third annual Slow Money Conference. Here's what some of our L.A. growers, yep Angelenos, are seeking.

Today marks the beginning of the 3rd National Gathering of Slow Money. Slow what? Think slow food first. Now think of the farmer that needed the loan to fix the barn where he milked the goats. Can you picture the farmer explaining artisanal goat cheese at the local Bank of America with Blossom and Buttercup in the lobby? Yeeeeah. Not so much?

Nobel prize winner and African Greenbelt Movement founder Professor Wangari Maathai, died this weekend while undergoing treatment for cancer. She was 71.

We talked with Good Food Festival producer Jim Slama about what the event is and what you can experience at the various demos, talks, and gatherings that are part of a celebration of the Santa Monica Farmers' Market and a larger dialogue about improving L.A.'s foodscape.

A couple of the little customers the LAUSD would not allow LAist to interact with today during their press event (Photo via KFINews/Twitpic) After months of kerfuffle with Jamie Oliver and local, community food and environmental activists, today the LAUSD board takes action on the dreaded pink milk. While pink milk is an atrocity (it has more sugar than Coca-Cola) in a school district with a childhood obesity epidemic, it calls into question the...

A couple of the little customers the LAUSD would not allow LAist to interact with today during their press event (Photo via KFINews/Twitpic) This morning the Los Angeles Unified School District put on a Food Service Division dog and pony show intended as an obvious response to the criticisms levied against them in last night's Season Two Premiere of the Emmy-award winning "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution." Major television press outlets, English and Spanish speaking,...