The Queens County Farm Museum was once just that — a nonworking farm where the poor, deprived children of New York City could experience agriculture without getting their hands dirty — but over the past year it’s evolved into a real farm that produces pork, poultry, and veggies for sale at the Union Square Greenmarket.

“Crops have been grown on the farm since the 17th century,” Annaliese Griffin writes in the NYT. “It’s the last trace of what was a bread basket for Manhattan until the 20th century.”

The farm is holding a benefit dinner with Slow Food on March 14th. I’ll be there!

When people ask about my nearly meatless diet, I say, “I’m doing an experiment in futuristic eating.  Eventually we’re all going to have to eat this way.  I figured I’d start now.”*

If you really want to go green, the conventional thinking goes, buy a hybrid. Practically speaking though, there is a faster and cheaper option: shift to a low-carbon diet. The meal plan of the average American family accounts for 2.8 tons of CO2 emitted annually, compared with 2.2 tons for driving. Worldwide agriculture contributes some 30% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, far more than transportation. So when it comes to cutting your carbon footprint today, the truth is that what you eat is as important as what you drive. “If you can’t buy a Prius,” says Jonathan Kaplan of the Natural Resources Defense Council, “you can certainly eat like one.” (Via whatonearth, susheela.)

* Don’t get me wrong.  I haven’t lost my taste for the good stuff.  Ten days ago, I ate foie gras, bone marrow, and something called face bacon at Blue Hill at Stone Barns — known for its low-carbon, farm-to-table ethic — and I’m eating homemade Andouille sausage tonight — but only because my boyfriend knows the guy who raised the pig.

Alice Waters and Katrina Heron make the case for a “government bailout” of the National School Lunch Program, which costs the United States Department of Agriculture about $9 billion a year, offers meals packed with ingredients found in fast food, and, as a result, is threatening the health of our children, particurlarly those from low-income families.

How much would it cost to feed 30 million American schoolchildren a wholesome meal? It could be done for about $5 per child, or roughly $27 billion a year, plus a one-time investment in real kitchens. Yes, that sounds expensive. But a healthy school lunch program would bring long-term savings and benefits in the areas of hunger, children’s health and dietary habits, food safety (contaminated peanuts have recently found their way into school lunches), environmental preservation and energy conservation.

Bananas are dying. The foodstuff, more heavily consumed even than rice or potatoes, has its own form of cancer. It is a fungus called Panama Disease, and it turns bananas brick-red and inedible.

There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon - in five, 10 or 30 years - the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist. The story of how the banana rose and fell can be seen a strange parable about the corporations that increasingly dominate the world - and where they are leading us.

Bananas seem at first like a lush product of nature, but this is a sweet illusion. In their current form, bananas were quite consciously created.