Flickr/bgottsab

really nice eggs

Someday you may just be able to eat fast food for breakfast in good conscience. The AP reports that fast food powerhouse Burger King announced today that as of 2017, all of its eggs and pork products will come from cage-free animals. The king is dead; long live the king, I guess.

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fishermansdaughter

Backyard Hive

Imagine a Sunday morning breakfast of a simple omelet with goat cheese and herbs, and a hunk of toasted bread drizzled with honey. How great would it be if you could ensure the freshness of those eggs and the quality of that honey by harvesting them yourself? If only you lived in a place where you had the space and ideal climate to fully realize this possibility. As it happens, you live in exactly such a place.

Last Saturday, 40 eager students gathered at the L.A. Arboretum to learn the basic logistics and concerns of raising backyard chickens and "fostering" a beehive. John Lyons of The Woven Garden offered ideas on getting started, tips on keeping your egg and honey producers happy, and troubleshooting from his years of experience keeping both chickens and bees.

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Anonymous

Pot + Wine

Roll up a towel, wedge it under the door, and put on a record -- Alice Coltrane or some pre-disco Bee Gees.  You may have to part the paisley curtains on your way in.  And find a comfy cushion to melt into.  Are we smoking weed?  Nah, we're drinking wine, man. According to a report in The Daily Beast late last week, it's the new thing.  

Michael Steinberger writes that marijuana-fermented wines are no longer a novelty but a full-blown trend, as more and more vintners throughout California's Central Coast and fertile northern valleys are combining two popular buzz-delivery systems in one bottle. Still sounds like a novelty to us, just a slightly less novel one -- now that The Daily Beast has blown up the spot like a straitlaced R.A. getting all vigilant on his rounds.

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Save Our Citrus

Infected trees, citrus, and the culprit -- Asian Citrus Psyllid

We knew it was only a matter of time. After watching Brazil's and Florida's citrus get decimated by Asian Citrus Psyllid (ACP) -- to the tune of billions of dollars -- we knew that despite rigorous agriculture checkpoints, testing and restrictions, California would probably be next. The bug, the carrier for the disease Huanglongbing (HLB), was spotted in Southern California a few years ago. And now the distinction of Patient Zero status rests in the backyard landscape of a single family home in Hacienda Heights, resulting in a 100 square mile quarantine of an area in eastern Los Angeles County. There is no treatment for HLB. Infected trees are dead trees, but not before the ACP has a chance to spread the disease. The potential damage to one of the state's largest and most lucrative agricultural crops could be devastating.

In response, California Department of Food and Agriculture biologists, entomologists and state and local officials are holding an open house-style info session tonight from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the Industry Hills Expo Center's Avalon Room. Visitors are welcome to stop by at any time during that window to ask questions and get information. What the quarantine means, and the app that will help you monitor the disease, after the jump.

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A. Scattergood

artichokes at the Santa Monica farmers market

Saturday is Good Food Day L.A.. We eat, therefore we travel. That's a given to Angelenos. We're always on the move, our senses honed to check out a taste we've never experienced before in a neighborhood unfamiliar to us. So in a sense we're always learning: about the city, about the people who make our food, and about what's out there and how we can enjoy it. So take the leap and use Good Food Day L.A. as a way to enlarge your sphere of local tastes/local issues. There's so much happening on March 31 that I have a whole separate document for you.

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Felicia Friesema

Chickens are nothing new to L.A. -- Highland Park has the white noise of the freeway juxtaposed with the crows of several competing roosters who live along the Arroyo. Then there are the famed Freeway Chickens of Los Angeles, who have been living under the Vineland off-ramp of the Hollywood Freeway since the early 1970s (there's a second colony two miles away at the Burbank off-ramp). Chickens have been our neighbors for a while now. What is new are the growing numbers of urban homesteaders and backyard farmers who are transforming their tiny tracts -- sometimes even balconies -- into mini-barnyards.

There is one inevitable dilemma faced by every backyard chicken keeper: Over time, birds stop laying, unwanted roosters crow their way into adulthood and urban flockers may start contemplating "table retirement" options in order to make room for more productive (and less annoying) livestock. Collecting eggs is easy, but going from coop to kitchen isn't something most L.A. urban farmers have grown up with. And it can tweak all sorts of hot buttons, from emotional to political. Market, meet class -- the Institute for Domestic Technology -- turning feminist-curdling Home Ec sensibilities into reputable home science with a sustainable twist -- is offering a new Coop to Kitchen course on Sunday, March 25, to help interested chicken folk responsibly and humanely manage their birds. No bird required. They've been carefully raising heritage breed chickens specifically for this class. Details after the jump.

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Outstanding in the Field

A field, where folks may be out, standing.

Outstanding in the Field is the Rolling Thunder Revue of underground suppers. Those who like table-to-farm eating as much as the farm-to-table sort will be stoked to learn that the organization has revealed its 2012 calendar and will begin selling tickets on Tuesday, March 20.

Beginning May 12 and continuing through the fall, Outstanding in the Field will wind its way to 29 California farms, including a handful in Southern California. For the uninitiated, Outstanding in the Field is a group of activists, artists and chefs steering an ancient bus to farms around the country where local chefs use each farm's products to cook lovely dinners. Diners capable of shelling out a few cool Benjamins get to kick back with the chefs and farmers.

Turn the page for the Southern California dates.

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We've consistently maintained that the best way to understand where your food comes from and to know what it is you are eating is to get to know your local farmers. Making that connection isn't difficult -- head to your local market and say hi, ask questions, develop relationships -- but it does require a little personal investment of time and interest. In our "there's an app for that" world, expediency often wins out over meaningful humantistic connections. So the California Agricultural Communications Coalition has come to your rescue with knowacaliforniafarmer.com, a website that allows you to forgoe the gooey mess of developing relationships and ostensibly get a better understanding of California farmers via a slew of catalogued video interviews.

It's a great idea, one we've been wanting for some time -- more on this in a minute -- to help us better put faces to fields. But it doesn't take much to sense the marketing machine churning in the background.

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Screenshot of PETA video

We like a juicy portion of propaganda about as much as we like a good dry-aged, grass-fed, sustainably raised steak. All the same, some of the most dedicated opponents of factory farming might blanch at the gruesome spectacle that is Sunny Acres Farms, the hell-hole that produces "happy meat" in PETA's latest video.

The work of Troma Entertainment's Lloyd Kaufman, creator of Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, the two-minute clip depicts human livestock fattened up in cramped cages, subjected to diseases, drugged mercilessly, stunned brutally and hung upside down with throats slit.

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LA Farm Girl/Judi Gerber

Iceland poppies for sale last year at the Tom T. Ishibashi farm stand in Torrance.

Writing about the closure of a farm within city limits has echoes of microfiche readings from the 1920s when L.A. invented the suburbia that swallowed up our giant orange groves. One farm -- the Tom T. Ishibashi Farm in Torrance -- had managed to survive the evolution from rural to urban until now, and has the sad distinction of being the last in a long string of farms in an urban area that have ceased to be.

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