and other awesome photos from Slow Food Nation!

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TakePart at Slow Food Nation
Hungry for Change

Here are healthy eating tips from Slow Food Nation attendees:

From Diane Hatz of Sustainable Table

Alex Whitmore from Taza Chocolates

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The TakePart Top 10 Weekly Roundup is a compilation of the week’s most notable stories from our entertainment-meets-social-action blogging network. Check out some of our most popular stories of the week, as well as a few TakePart blogger favorites!

TakePart Gang:

Chasing the DNC Flame by Fonda Berosini

TakePart at Slow Food Nation by Wendy Cohen

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Nicole Hughes:

State Fair Having Trouble Keeping It Green

TOMS Wrap Boot: Shoe Addicts Saving Lives

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Andy Kondrat:

Mexican Gov Spends $16M to Save Endangered Porpoise

Wilco Offers Section on Website for Carpooling to Shows

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Jon Popham:

Portland Gym Utilizes Human Energy

Angkor Wat Threatened by Tourism Boom

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Gina Telaroli:

10 Powerful Women Using Their Power for Good

10 A+ Worthy Movie and TV Teachers

Over 40,000 people will descend on San Francisco this labor day weekend for an unprecedented celebration of sustainable, just and delicious food in America.  TakePart will be covering the conference and speaking with food enthusiasts, chefs, filmmakers and change makers about the biggest issues facing food policy and how we make a difference.

Hungry for Change? Read our exclusive coverage.

Yesterday afternoon, Joshua and I joined LA’s Best and some of their students from Main Street Elementary for a culinary excursion with famed chef, Neal Fraser. We started at the Hollywood Farmer’s Market to pick up some local, fresh produce for our private lunch at Chef Fraser’s LA restaurant, Grace.

We have videos and photos on the way but in the meantime, here is a taste of our delicious Sunday!

takepart with the Eat Well Guide and find wholesome, fresh, sustainable food in your area.

What is Earth Day?  Let these top 10 eco-heroes guide you to a better understanding of what it means to love Mother Nature and all it’s inhabitants.  These folks take first place in history for their dedication to bringing about awareness and action when it comes to our natural world. If this top 10 sampling from Newsweek’s excellent expose on patron saints of the environment isn’t enough to whet your eco-appetite, check out these 90+ more green campaigners from the Guardian UK. Happy (early) Earth Day!

1) John Muir is often referred to as the “father of national parks, and he helped Theodore Roosevelt to create Yosemite, Sequoia, Mount Rainer, Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon national parks. He also founded the Sierra Club in 1892, and served as president until his death in 1914.

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Barbie and I don’t have a lot in common. For one thing, I’m biodegradable and she’s not. But we do agree on one thing; math is hard. For example, how is it that Lisa Simpson’s been a vegetarian for thirteen years when she’s only 8 years old? Is it possible that an anti-oxidant-rich plant-based diet has the power not only to delay the aging process but actually reverse it?

But while eternal tweener Lisa’s the token treehugger in the Simpson household, it’s Bart who’s got the perfect prescription for how to cool Mother Nature’s fevered brow: don’t have a cow. Literally. The less meat you grill, the more you help the planet chill.

Now, before you dismiss me as some kinda free-range Chicken Little, clucking about the catastrophic consequences of our fossil-fueled food chain, you should know that I’m not the only one warning that burgers do more harm than Hummers.

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Oh, you car-crazy, meat-mad Americans, look what you’ve done now! Everybody else wants to live the way you do, wolfing down Whoppers behind the wheel. So they’re ripping up rainforests to grow more grains for cars and cows, and that’s just accelerating global warming, which is worsening the droughts that are ruining crops from Australia to Zimbabwe.

As Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, told NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday, the current global food crisis wasn’t caused by some sort of temporary setback such as crop failure, but rather “systemic change” due to increased worldwide demand for meat and the fool’s gold rush to produce more biofuels, which Brown cites as the proverbial last straw:

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Ah, politicians and dirt, that delightful duo. I’m talking horticulture, not whores. Forget about the soiled legacy of Eliot Spitzer; consider, rather, the contrasting agricultural approaches of Prince Charles and President Bush.

Prince Charles has been an organic farmer for decades; his Highgrove Estate farm provides some of the ingredients for Duchy Originals, the line of food products he founded in 1992. On Duchy’s 10th anniversary, Charles explained why he’d decided to get into the sustainable snack trade:

“I wanted to demonstrate that it was possible to produce food of the highest quality, working in harmony with the environment and nature, using the best ingredients and adding value through expert production. I also wanted to engender increasing funds for my Charitable Foundation, which receives all the profits through which I can then support an increasing number of worthwhile projects.”

President Bush’s 1600-acre Crawford ranch, bought in 1999, produces bumper crops of something called “brush,” which has no known culinary use in any culture’s cuisine. Bush has reportedly said that “the property is only good for grazing, and it’s pretty thin at that.”

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The secret to Jim Hightower’s success lies in a style of political commentary best described as “pleasantly apoplectic;” he’s mad as hell, but in an ultra-affable way. Who else could stoke a fire in the belly with so many belly laughs?

In our climate change crisis, Hightower’s a natural source of alternative energy. He’s got his own brand of windpower, fueled by blowhards and gasbags, of which the right seems to have an endless supply.

And then there’s the wave power he’s helping to generate with his new book, Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow. Swim Against the Current, co-authored by Susan DeMarco, provides heartening proof that citizen activists are turning the tide against the Powers That Be who’ve dragged our democracy through the muck.

If you subscribe to the “Yes-Things-Are-Awful-But-What-Can-I- Do-I’m-Just-One-Person” school of thought, I’m giving you an “F” for fatalism. I’ll change it to an “A” for attitude adjustment after you read this book and get off your apathetic ass and join the ranks of the grassroots greenies and grannies who are the heroes of Hightower’s book.

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