Wow. I am finding it hard to keep up with the flurry of articles about projects and initiatives that are generating a new food landscape. Here are a few to catch up on over a cup of hot coco.

Oakland City Council approved a pilot project that will allow mobile food vendors to offer their creative concoctions in more areas around the city. In fact, we can look forward to a new year of food events through Oakland where caravans of food trucks (and bikes!) will huddle up to new areas, kind of like a lonchera flash mob. It will be fun to stay up to date and catch these hip events! Read more.

Now imagine if you will, a pod of mobile food vendors located adjacent to an Oakland urban farm abuzz with community members. If you need any inspiration as to what this could look like, read about this very thing unfolding in Brooklyn.

Wondering if this is pie in the sky thinking? Don’t think you can make this happen in your city? Well consider the District of Columbia’s “Food Production and Urban Gardens Program Act of 1986.” Read more about it here.

As usual, lots of exciting things going on in the wide world. In fact, for those of that believe in change, it does look like there is about to be some. Read a recent article about race politics and inequity…inequity, that words that keeps coming up. While the entire article is worth a read, I most liked the passage,

“The reason so many Americans are talking about inequality, is because we intend to actually drastically reduce or eliminate it. I am not opposed to working hard. But I am opposed to participating in an economy in which people like [Gene] Marks A) unilaterally set the rules and B) stack the deck against my community and pretend that the real problem is our “ignorance” of opportunities.”

That said, I am drawn to people and groups working to restructure our economic framework. Rock star attorneys, Janelle Orsi and Jenny Kassan, are doing just that. In fact, check out their article on Policies for a Shareable City: Food Sharing. Be prepared to be inspired.

“I’ll begin to sing of what keeps the wheat fields happy ….” Excellent post on the East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance site, check it out (clickety click)!

I did a talk a while back at Shaping SF. I presented with Ruby Blume of Institute of Urban Homesteading and Melinda Stone of the fun blog, How to Homestead. These are neat ladies, doing neat things! Worth the listen to gain inspiration and find out how to get involved in the changing landscape of food.

You can listen to the audio by clicking here and selecting October 26th 2011 on Urban Homesteading.

The Turner Environmental Law Clinic at the Emory University School of Law, in partnership with Georgia Organics, have released one of the most comprehensive looks at urban agriculture policy in the U.S. The study provides a look at urban agriculture policies implemented by many of Sustain Lane’s top ranking sustainable cities. Download the report here.

Winter provides us with a natural chance to slow down…one I rarely listen to but still it is a chance. Less grows and what does grows grows slower. Things die back and its too cold and, well, wintery to really travel far and wide with frequency. Though the solstice is not for another 17 days, I am starting the process. OK, in truth it is not without be prompted as I had a huge failure with my rabbit pelts.

Amidst several other things going on, I decided to just jump in and start the process of tanning my rabbit hides. Mostly I just needed to get them out of my freezer. So following the lead of a local friend of mine (I was trying to time it so we could work on them together), I placed the hides in a bucket with Aluminum Sulfate for a few days. Then I realized, ok wait, no, then I READ the actual article that this technique was based on and realized I had not added salt.

Fast forward a couple of weeks in which day after day I told myself, “tonight I’ll go home and start cleaning the skins…no really…tonight.”

Well the results of my not reading directions and trying to do too much are in, and they are not pretty:

That would be a pile of rotten pelts. Yep. Luckily there were not many.

For anyone hoping to tan their own, rest assured. The directions (if you read them) in the Mother Earth News article are excellent. Others that followed them have had great success. I have to say, I am starting to get superstitious about trying to work on hides in December. As I recall last year I had another hide fail.