Mud Baron

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...

In a low-profile attempt at armistice, newly appointed Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy joined food revolutionary Jamie Oliver on Jimmy Kimmel's show last night. Before the show even aired, the local "Revolution"-aries were cheering the end of flavored milk in L.A.'s public schools. However, that's not a done deal, and we're still wondering what's up with this sudden change of heart from the new head of the nation's second largest school district....

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,...

Shaded from the sun and 90 degree heat, about 300 gathered this afternoon under a sea of rain umbrellas for the "ground breaking" of California Medical Center's Hope Street Family Center. Billed as much-needed recreation space and home for wellness programs in the "underserved" neighborhood of South Park, the proposed project already has community engagement--at least judging by the excitement at the launch. The volume-knob-friendly DJ, the juice boxes, the face painting and even the...

The Milagro Allegro community garden at Avenue 56 and Figueroa hosted a garden giveaway this weekend. Advertised to start at noon, by 12:30 some 500 people had made a line that stretched down the block and around the corner. By 12:45 the trees were gone. That left 50,000 vegetable seedlings to make sure everyone ended up with something to plant at their school garden, in their neighborhood or yes, their backyard. According to Milli Macen-Moore,...