Joe Merante's Blog

This past weekend, a few dozen people gathered in NYC to hack the Farm Bill.  Hackathons are gatherings of developers, designers and policy experts to collaboratively develop solutions to specific problems.  This year's International Open Data Hackathon took place on December 3 with events all over the world focused on topics like transportation, exposing government data and much more . Food+Tech Connect and Gojee organized the NYC event with the goal of engaging people with the farm bill by creating participatory apps, data visualizations and presentations to directly and indirectly affect our understanding of this important piece of legislation, renegotiated roughly every five years.  The bill affects everything from crop subsidization to federal nutritional programs to investment in farmers.  You can read more about the bill here , and find ways to get involved via Slow Food USA here . I participated on one of the teams to build Meatlessly.com,...

Pasted below from my review on GoodReads.com (which I've been really getting into lately, check it out!). Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money by Woody Tasch My rating: 3 of 5 stars In this book, Tasch proposes a new paradigm in investment and cultural literacy, beginning with the principle that agriculture led us into the industrial age and must be reassessed in order to get us out. He ties together many schools of thought as applied to the tension between industrial finance and agriculture, such as mathematics ("every formula is either complete and inconsistent, or consistent and incomplete"), economics ("either you are a true fiduciary or a false Malthusian'), environmentalism (recounting the destruction of our ecosystem during the 20th century in exchange for faster, cheaper and less wholesome food-- trading shelf life for quality), sociology (the contradictions that 21st century citizens must balance when facing these issues) and politics. As ...