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LITTLE ROCK — Food. Everybody needs it.
Everybody wants it. We think about it every day. We often plan our days
around it. And many of our favorite TV shows are all about it.
With that in mind Arkansas Farm Bureau launches its “Taste Arkansas – from Farm to Table” blog site (tastearkansas.com) today.
Despite all of the time spent thinking about, preparing and
eating it, relatively few of us really truly understands where our food
comes from. Who raises it? How is it grown? How is it raised? How is
it processed? How is it stored and packaged to eliminate worry about
whether or not it’s safe to eat?
“I’m pretty excited that we’re answering these questions on
our new blog site,” said Arkansas Farm Bureau Executive Vice President
Ewell Welch. “It’s all about food.”
The site features a new recipe weekly and will include
complete holiday meal recipes two weeks prior to Thanksgiving and
Christmas respectively. Profiles of Arkansas farmers who grow and raise
your food will appear monthly, and the site will also include updates
on the latest food-related news. There’s even an opportunity for site
visitors to post thoughts about food or share a favorite recipe.
“It’s critical to tell the story and importance of
agriculture in today’s world and the farmer’s role in the food
production process,” Welch added. “Agriculture’s relevancy to a growing
world population has never been more important than it is today.
The blog site’s development is a direct result of Arkansas
Farm Bureau’s new five-year strategic plan launched earlier this year.
That plan recognizes that consumers, technology and agriculture are all
changing and the importance of using the latest communications
technology to tell the farming/food story to consumers.
“It’s part of our mission to advocate the interests of
agriculture in the public arena, as well as to disseminate information
concerning the value and importance of agriculture. The “Taste Arkansas” blog site is one of the technology vehicles we’ll use to do it,” Welch said.
For every mouth fed in the United States by American agriculture, 19 more people are fed worldwide by those efforts.
“What Saudi Arabia is to worldwide oil production, the U.S. is to worldwide food production,” Welch said. “We feed the world.
“The efficiencies improving agriculture during the past
century are staggering in the benefits provided worldwide. However,
public understanding often lags behind their support for the
difficulties and trials farm families now face,” Welch added. “Recent
success of books and films like “Food Inc.,” “Fast Food Nation,” “King Corn” and “Omnivore’s Dilemma” should be a wake-up call that not everyone holds farming in high regard.
“Public opinion can be fickle and easily swayed, whether by
current events of deliberative manipulative propaganda pieces. The
public’s attitude towards farmers is mostly positive, but most people
don’t believe that “mainstream” farming is really farming,” Welch
explained. “’Taste Arkansas’ will help tell the story of agriculture and food in Arkansas.”
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