Kerry Trueman: We demand a lot from our government agencies. We want them to be there for us when disaster strikes or disease breaks out. We want policies that protect us from danger and help us lead healthy lives.

But what happens when an agency has multiple agendas that conflict? Like, for example, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), whose mission is to help farmers turn a profit, while also promoting healthy eating habits. We end up with an agency whose agricultural policies actively encourage diseases that cost millions of lives and billions of dollars annually, even as its nutrition policies try to tackle those same largely preventable illnesses.

Academics, “good food” advocates, and health care experts have proposed that we break this vicious cycle by creating a national food policy agency that would adopt a more enlightened approach. Can you imagine such an agency?

Marion Nestle: Easily. I’m often asked what I would do if I were the boss of America’s food system. High on my action list would be reorganizing federal food and nutrition policies to get them all focused on preventing hunger, promoting health, and protecting the environment. In the United States, we have plenty of policies dealing with these goals, but responsibility for them is fragmented among multiple agencies, each with its own political leadership, constituency, and policy agenda. Each competes with the others for mandates and funding. And each attracts its own dedicated horde of stakeholder lobbyists.

A list is all you need to understand why current policies seem at cross purposes. I can think of 11 distinct categories of policies for agriculture, food, and nutrition. The USDA is in charge of most of them, but not all, and some of its functions overlap with those of other agencies. I realize that a table oversimplifies this situation, but I think it’s the easiest way to get a quick overview. See if you agree.

The explanation for a system this complicated is history—and politics, of course. The policies developed piecemeal, mostly during the twentieth century, in response to specific problems as they arose. Regulatory authority was assigned to whichever agency seemed most appropriate at the time. For some policy areas, oversight is split among several agencies—the antithesis of a systems approach.

U.S. Policy Areas Dealing with Agriculture, Food, and Nutrition

What a mess. The USDA, historically and by law a dedicated supporter of corporate industrial food production—Big Agriculture, Big Meat, Big Dairy—is also responsible for dietary guidelines and food guides that sometimes advise the public to eat less of what these enterprises produce.

How to clean up this mess? I like to tell the story of my disheartening experience teaching a course on the farm bill, the enormous and enormously complicated legislation that governs agricultural supports and food assistance in the United States. I didn’t know much about the bill when I decided to teach this course but could think of no better way to learn about it (hubris!). The high point came on the first day of class. I asked students to consider what a rational food policy might look like. They had no trouble coming up with desirable goals: make sure everyone has enough to eat at an affordable price; ensure a decent living for farmers; provide an adequate and safe livelihood for farm, restaurant, and slaughterhouse workers; protect farmers against the hazards of weather, pests, volatile markets, and climate change; produce a surplus for international trade and aid; and, most critically, promote health and protect the environment. On this last point, they thought the farm bill should encourage regional, seasonal, organic, and sustainable food production; promote conservation of soil, land, and forests; protect water and air quality, natural resources, and wildlife; and stipulate that farm animals be raised humanely.

OK, it’s a long list, but policies addressing such matters already exist. They just need to be refocused on health and environmental goals, and agencies need to work together to achieve them. The difficulty of making this happen, alas, is again best illustrated by the Government Accountability Office’s 40-year campaign for a single food safety agency.

In 2015, food journalists Mark Bittman and Michael Pollan, along with food policy leaders Ricardo Salvador and Olivier De Schutter, called for an overall national food policy that would directly link food production and consumption to public health and environmental protection. Given political realities, they did not recommend creation of a single agency to oversee the entire food system, but they came close. They suggested reconfiguring the USDA to become the U.S. Department of Food, Health, and Wellbeing, and appointing a National Food Policy Advisor to coordinate food policies across all government departments.

In my book Safe Food, I included the wildly complex organizational chart of the then–newly formed Department of Homeland Security, an entity cobbled together from about four dozen federal agencies. A single food agency would be much less complicated, but evidently less politically feasible. As for a National Food Policy Advisor? I want that job!

Running down the table, I’d make sure agricultural policies promote health and protect the environment. I’d make alcohol labels consistent with food labels, and stop booze companies from aiming their marketing at low-income and minority groups. I’d insist that environmental policies do what they are supposed to do, that federal agencies diligently track how we produce and consume food and the effects of both on our health, and that research agencies sponsor studies of how our food system can best be configured to promote regenerative (sustainable, replenishing, carbon-sequestering) agricultural practices, as well as human and animal health. I’d insist that food assistance policies make adequate, healthy diets accessible for all participants.

I would correct decades of exploitation of farm and restaurant workers who still suffer the effects of racist 1930s legislation excluding them from minimal wage requirements and protections. I’d ensure that they are compensated fairly and have safe working conditions. For those who are undocumented, I would insist on legal protections and a route to legal status.

I’d get rid of misleading health claims and obfuscating labels on food products and do for food packages what Chile and some other Latin American countries have done: put warning labels on ultra-processed foods and ban cartoons from junk foods marketed to kids. I’d demand that food companies take safety seriously and do more to prevent foodborne illness. I would see to it that we import healthy, sustainably produced foods, and export high-quality products. Completing the list, I’d make sure that dietary guidelines and food guides promote vegetables and discourage ultra-processed products, and say so explicitly. Above all, I would consider agriculture, health, labor, and environmental policies as a unit, and never deal with them in isolation. That’s a food-systems approach in a nutshell.

Reasonable? I think so. Possible? I would dearly love to see all this as an agenda for action. Whether or not such policy goals are currently feasible, they are well worth setting. We need clear objectives for improving tomorrow’s food system as a means to guide—and inspire—today’s advocacy agenda.

The post Marion Nestle Imagines an ‘Enlightened’ Approach to National Food Policy appeared first on Civil Eats.

With sales on the decline, the New York Times recently reported that Coca-Cola is pouring millions of dollars into a ‘science-based’ campaign to convince the public that the secret to achieving and maintaining a healthy weight is not avoiding excess calories, but getting more exercise. What’s the science on more exercise versus fewer calories?

Marion Nestle: When it comes to studies about the health effects of sugary drinks, the science, alas, depends on who pays for it. Studies paid for by government or private health foundations show that if you want to prevent obesity, [a combination of] eating less and moving more works every time.  

You can lose weight by eating less on its own. But you will have a much harder time doing that by increasing physical activity. This is because it takes lots of effort to compensate for excess calories. Eat two little Oreo cookies—100 calories—and you have to walk a mile to work them off. Drink a 20-ounce soda and you need to cover nearly three miles. This was the point of the New York City health department’s subway current poster campaign, which shows that you need to walk from Union Square in Manhattan to downtown Brooklyn to burn off 275 calories.  

The soda industry would love you to believe that the principal cause of obesity is lack of physical activity, and they put tons of money into research to discourage other ideas. They much prefer you to believe that all of their products can be part of an active, healthy lifestyle that includes balanced diets, proper hydration, and regular physical activity. I call the idea the “physical activity diversion.” It deflects attention from what really counts in obesity prevention: not eating huge amounts of junk foods, snack foods, and sodas.

Mind you, I’m greatly in favor of physical activity for its many benefits: physiological, social, psychological, and health. But there is a good reason for the outraged reaction to Coca-Cola’s video seemingly suggesting that all you have to do to burn off the 140 “happy calories” in a 12-ounce soft drink is to laugh out loud for 75 seconds. This is so far from the reality of calorie balance that several countries actually banned the commercial [in 2013].

Soda companies promote the primacy of physical activity in other clever ways. The Coca-Cola Foundation says that about one-third of its philanthropic contributions go to organizations working to counter obesity, especially through promotion of physical activity.

Both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo invest heavily in sponsorship of international sports teams. They put fortunes into recruiting sports celebrities as spokespersons. These investments accomplish two purposes: they influence fans to buy the products and shift the focus to physical activity. Obesity, these imply, is about what you do, not what you eat or drink. Public health advocates complain about how frequently young people—especially those of color or in low-income families—are exposed to advertising by professional athletes. The sponsored programs and celebrities never suggest that drinking less soda might be a useful health-promotion strategy.  

As a nutritionist and co-author of a book titled Why Calories Count, I thoroughly agree that balance, variety, and moderation are fundamental principles of healthful diets, and that weight gain is a result of calorie imbalance.

But soda companies distort these principles to distract from their marketing of sugary drinks and how overconsumption of these drinks overrides normal physiological controls of hunger and satiety. Independently funded research makes it abundantly clear that avoiding sodas is one of the best things you can do for your health.  

Sponsorship of research or research investigators by Coca-Cola or the American Beverage Association is reason alone for skepticism.

The post Let’s Ask Marion: Can Exercise Balance Out Soda Drinking? appeared first on Civil Eats.

Stories like this presumably lend new urgency to conferences like the one the James Beard Foundation hosted in New York City this week. Entitled “Health and Food: Is Better Food The Prescription For A Healthier America?,” the gathering brought all the usual suspects together to “make us think deeply about our values and the decisions we make about food.”

What comes after the deep thinking? After a day and a half of striving to connect the dots between health, nutrition, commerce, culture, politics, policy, inequality, and ecology, the conference unwittingly wandered into the murky terrain of Donald Rumsfeld’s “known knowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns.”

These are the things that we know that we know:

1. Nutritional wisdom hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years, as both New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle and New York Times columnist and author Mark Bittman (one of this year’s leadership honorees) pointed out. What has changed is the proliferation of processed food, the Paul Bunyon-esque portions, the loss of culinary know-how, and the shameful targeting of children and low-income communities by marketers.

As Bittman pointed out, food is supposed to be nutritious by definition. “A big chunk of what is called food could more accurately be called poison,” he told the crowd. “Real food does not make you sick.”

2. We’re eating too much of the bad stuff and not getting enough of our three agricultural amigos: fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Most of us don’t get enough exercise, either. As Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel observed in his keynote speech, inertia has its own kind of momentum. Habits are hard to change.

3. Food manufacturers intentionally formulate their unhealthy foods and beverages to make us crave and over-consume them. Factor that in and “personal responsibility” starts to sound like a sick joke. “Our palates have been destroyed,” Laurie David, the executive producer of “Fed Up,” noted. David fumed over the food industry’s willingness to knowingly undermine the health of the nation’s kids, saying “It’s not fair, it’s not a level playing field.”

In low-income communities inundated with cheap junk food, it’s more like a minefield. The young poets from the Bay Area-based Bigger Picture Campaign, a collaboration between the non-profit group Youth Speaks and the UCSF Department of Medicine’s Center for Vulnerable Populations, received a standing ovation from the crowd with their vivid, eloquent condemnations of a food chain that preys on inner-city residents.

At the James Beard Foundation leadership awards dinner held in conjunction with the conference, Oakland-based food justice activist and honoree Navina Khanna noted that while her city has a reputation for being plagued by violent crime, diet-related chronic disease remains the leading cause of death in low-income neighborhoods.

If there was a consensus among the “thought leaders spanning the culinary, medical, agriculture, and arts communities” in attendance, it could best be summed up by the words of another honoree, Ben Burkett, president of The National Family Farm Coalition. “Every human being on the face of the earth is entitled to clean food, fresh air, and fresh water.”

Ah, but how to achieve that laudable goal?

Here come the things that we know we don’t know:

1. Author and journalist (and also one of this year’s honorees) Michael Pollan asked: Can we fix our food and agricultural policies so that our federal agencies aren’t working at cross-purposes, simultaneously promoting healthy eating habits and unhealthy foods? Does processed food have to be so unhealthy?

2. Bittman asked: Could McDonald’s, Pepsi, et al. possibly make a profit selling healthy food?

3. Nestle asked: How can we teach the American public that larger portions have more calories?

4. A panel on “The Ubiquity of Sweeteners” also made it clear that most of us have no idea how much sugar we can safely eat in a day without destroying the mitochondria in our digestive tract. How many people have even heard of mitochondria?

5. Another panel, “Beyond Hospital Meals: Food and Healthcare Collaborations,” discussed the fact that, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, the health industry now has to insure everyone, regardless of how sick they are. This shift has made the industry much more motivated to prevent diet-related diseases through such innovative practices as prescriptions for fruits and vegetables. Doesn’t this prove that government can be a force for good? Why isn’t our media trumpeting the achievements of groundbreaking initiatives such as Health Bucks, Wholesome Wave and The Goldring Center for Culinary Medicine at Tulane University?

Lastly, there are the things we don’t know we don’t know.

1. Nick Saul, the president and CEO of Community Food Centres Canada, noted during a panel entitled “Food, Health and Place: Why Equity Matters” that we “sometimes don’t recognize how poor people are. Good food is not an incidental.”

2. But how do we bring it to everyone in this era of ever-widening inequality? Urban ag pioneer and activist Karen Washington, another one of this year’s leadership honorees, had her own prescription. “Come into my neighborhood to work side by side with me, to share your resources and your help. This is what we need in lower income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color. I want to change the paradigm from a hand-out to a hand in.”

Ultimately, the question “Is Better Food the Prescription for a Healthier America?” seemed like a moot point. As Bittman pointed out, “You can’t change food in the U.S. without changing almost everything else.” It’s time to move past the “thinking deeply” phase and decide what each of us can do to help make that happen.

The post Movement Notes: Dispatch From the James Beard Foundation Conference appeared first on Civil Eats.

The city is a hotbed of innovative collaborations between government, philanthropy and the private sector. And when these public-private partnerships achieve their goals, the ripple effect is massive.

Consider the Union Square Greenmarket in downtown Manhattan, which helped spur the renaissance of farmers’ markets all over the country. Looking at it now, you’d never guess that in the mid-seventies, Union Square was a squalid, derelict park deemed unsafe after dark. It took the vision of the Greenmarket’s co-founders, Barry Benepe and Bob Lewis, to simultaneously reverse the decline of the park and boost the region’s small family farmers.

Now there’s the Green Cart Initiative. Launched in 2008 by several city offices in collaboration with the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, the program created a special permit for a new category of mobile fruit and vegetable vendors to set up shop in New York City neighborhoods where fresh produce is scarce. It also provided a wide range of assistance to the vendors in order to help them succeed.

Six years in, there’s evidence that those strategies have worked. Last week, Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs released a study that showed that initiative has made great strides towards getting fresh produce to underserved communities as well as providing entrepreneurs with a viable small business model.

According to the study, “more than 40 percent of Green Cart customers [earn] less than $25,000 a year and more than two-thirds earn less than $50,000, and roughly a fifth get public assistance.” Now 71 percent of customers said they ate more fresh fruits and vegetables thanks to the carts.

On the vendor’s side of things, there are promising numbers as well. Eighty percent of vendors say they’re turning a profit, 75 percent feel their Green Cart experience is equipping them to open a larger business. According to the researchers at Columbia – who sent out a team of people to conduct interviews in person over the course of a summer, the program is “providing entrepreneurial opportunities to vendors and is economically viable in the long term.”

There’s a David vs. Goliath aspect to this endeavor. The Green Cart vendors earn their living by selling highly perishable fresh produce–which also has a low profit margin–in neighborhoods dominated by government-subsidized (i.e., commodity crop-based) convenience foods, which are super cheap, ‘hyper-palatable’, highly profitable, and have a seemingly infinite shelf-life. How do you level that playing field?

It’s not easy. The Columbia study documents the trial-and-error that has enabled the Green Carts Program to provide access to good food while continually reevaluating where there’s room to improve. For one thing, collecting accurate data on the Green Cart vendors–where they’re located, which vendors are actually using their permits, which ones are not–has proven to be an ongoing problem. (The study was based on responses from the owners of 166 carts, but 491 permits have been assigned to vendors.) Of course, in this era of GPS mapping apps, this data dilemma shouldn’t be too hard to resolve.

And, thanks to the nothing succeeds like success phenomenon, the Green Cart vendors tend to cluster in certain neighborhoods with higher pedestrian traffic and proximity to subway and bus stops, leaving other communities for whom the Green Cart Initiative was intended, such as housing projects, still underserved. Program organizers are considering incentives to encourage vendors to venture into those neighborhoods.

Speaking of unequal distribution, the Green Cart vendors sell far more fruit than vegetables: 76 percent of the vendors sell only or mostly fruit, and just 24 percent also offer vegetables. The vendors are currently permitted to sell only whole fruits and vegetables, which presumably gives easy-to-eat apples, bananas, and grapes a big advantage over unwashed, uncut carrots and celery or other vegetables that need more prepping and cooking. If the vendors could expand their offerings to include other healthy foods such as nuts, or pre-cut and washed veggies, this imbalance might improve.

Ester R. Fuchs, one of the study’s authors describes the Green Cart Initiative as a “net gain for public health and a model program for densely populated urban areas elsewhere in the United States.” And it’s hard not to agree. All of this makes us wonder: How long will it be before other cities roll out the red carpet for Green Carts?

Photos by The Apple Pushers/50 Eggs.

The post When it Comes to Getting Produce Into Food Deserts, New York’s Green Carts Are Working appeared first on Civil Eats.

So, naturally, Katie Couric turned to David when she decided to make Fed Up, after decades of reporting on the epidemic of diet-related illnesses. Couric and David teamed up with director Stephanie Soechtig, director/producer of the highly acclaimed bottled water industry exposé Tapped, to debunk the conventional wisdom about what’s making Americans fat and sick.

Fed Up opens this Friday, May 9, but more than 10,000 people have already signed up to take the The Fed Up Challenge, the film’s companion campaign which encourages participants to go sugar free for 10 days. This Friday is also the day David’s new cookbook, The Family Cooks, comes out. It may seem incongruous to pair a hard-hitting documentary with a feel-good, good-for-you cookbook, but the two projects compliment each other perfectly. We sat down with David last week to discuss both.

The simultaneous release of Fed Up and The Family Cooks is a one-two punch to the face of Big Food. Is it deliberate strategy or just serendipity?

Totally deliberate strategy. There’s nothing more exciting than presenting a problem and at the same time presenting the solution. That’s what The Family Cooks is–the solution. My motto now is “cook or be cooked.” That’s my takeaway from Fed Up.

We have a huge problem with diabetes, cancer, obesity, but the solution is doable, tangible, it’s right there in your kitchen. How empowering is that? The myths that surround cooking–it’s hard, you don’t have time for it, it takes too long–this is marketing brainwashing to sell more products.

We’ve got to get people back in the kitchen and teach them some basic skills, so they can see for themselves how rewarding and fun and delicious this actually is. To not be cooking in your own home is to be missing one of the best parts of the day.

When politicians try to encourage healthier habits through legislation–like Bloomberg’s bans on trans fats and soda –the “nanny state” haters insist that our government has no business dictating how or what we eat. But don’t government policies already play a huge role in determining the way we eat?

First, we need to take the term “nanny” back. Nannies are supposed to be good people who care for our children. How about seat belts, were those a good thing? Are stop signs a good thing? The government comes up with ways to protect people, and obviously the American people need protecting, because we’ve got one in three kids in America overweight or obese, and by mid-century they’re saying one in three will have diabetes. You’re telling me that we shouldn’t have some government intervention on marketing to children? Or truth in advertising? Or labeling?

Fed Up shows how food companies intentionally formulate their products to reward the same neural pathways in our brains that are stimulated by drugs like cocaine. Does this shed a new, more insidious light on slogans like, “Betcha can’t eat just one?”

Absolutely. One of the most disturbing things I learned in the making of this movie was that the industry and the government have known for decades that we were eating too much sugar. They predicted 30 years ago the obesity epidemic we’re in right now. Nothing’s been done about it. And that was before the explosion of the snack food industry, the explosion of sugary beverages, energy drinks, granola bars. It’s crazy.

There’s a scene where Katie Couric gets Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to admit the absurdity of counting the tomato paste on school lunch pizzas as a vegetable. But isn’t that just one of many dubious concessions the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has made over the years to Big Food lobbyists?

Why is the USDA in the business of determining what our dietary guidelines should be when they’re promoting Big Ag? It’s an unbelievable conflict of interest; it makes no sense whatsoever.

You’ve expressed deep dismay over the decision by celebrities like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift to endorse soda. If you had the chance to sit down and talk with them, what would you say?

Where’s the parental backlash? It bothers me, too, that for 14 years American Idol has had a Coke cup on the desk of these beloved judges and no one’s complained about that.  We know that kids under a certain age–eight and younger–can’t tell the difference between that ad and the content.

When J. Lo’s drinking that, seven year-old kids think they want to be like her so they’re going drink Coke, too. It’s immoral, it’s unethical. I really hope that–as a result of people seeing Fed Up–within the next couple of years, you will not be able to find a celebrity who will do a soda ad.

Does Beyoncé understand the ramifications of endorsing a product that makes her fan base sick? I almost think the Taylor Swift endorsement was even more insidious, because her audience is tweens and diet soda has been linked to depression, to ADHD, and there’s research out that says it makes you hungrier.

The celebrities themselves, maybe they don’t know, but there’s about 30 people around them helping them make decisions, and someone should have said, “You know what? Maybe we don’t want to be pushing this on our young kids.”

At Arianna Huffington’s Thrive conference last week, you said that we’ve been “living in a food fog.” Your cookbook seems designed to be a beacon lighting the way back to our kitchens. Do you have any words of encouragement for the novice cook?

The single healthiest activity you can do with your family is cook and eat meals together. Discover the joy in the process; put music on, light a candle, make everyone participate. Then it’s not all on you, and everyone’s going to have fun doing it.

And you cannot cut a carrot and text with your other hand! Everyone needs a break from technology.  What a perfect place to take that break–by making dinner and sitting down to enjoy it.

We are outsourcing to corporations the most intimate, important thing we do, which is feeding ourselves and our families. We know that these people don’t care about our health the way a mom cooking for her kids is going to care. Who better to do that job than us? And if we don’t do that job, look what happens.

One of the most heartbreaking things in the movie is the way the kids you feature want so badly to lose the weight, but they’re up against so much.

It’s not a level playing field; that’s what really upset all the filmmakers involved. It’s not fair that people think they’re doing the right thing, and they’re misled. And then they can’t understand why they’re getting sick. It’s not right. I really hope the movie is a catalyst for an honest conversation in this country about what the hell we’re eating.

The post Laurie David Dishes About ‘Fed Up’ and Her New Cookbook appeared first on Civil Eats.

If you’re afraid to try growing fruits, flowers, herbs and vegetables from seed because you might fail, you’re depriving yourself of the chance to witness a wondrous evolution. It’s humbling and heartening to take part in a ritual so primal, and so essential to our survival. It’s even more gratifying when you realize that you can transform a packet of seeds into a patch of greens or flowers with just a little time and effort. And it’s easier to do that when you have savvy seed farmers like the folks at the Hudson Valley Seed Library (HVSL) reviving rare, choice varieties of seeds that are especially well-suited to your region.

Now in its tenth year the HVSL has inspired dozens of similar endeavors around the country, so that gardeners everywhere can find open-pollinated, non-GMO seeds that are native to their neck of the woods.

The HVSL has also made a name for itself by revitalizing another long-lost facet of the seed trade: seed packet art. Every year, to compliment its locally grown, regionally appropriate seed selections, the library commissions local artists to produce original art for a selection of seed packs. The artwork has become an event of its own. An annual exhibit called The Art of The Heirloom, was featured at this year’s Philadelphia Flower Show and is currently on display at the Horticultural Society of New York until March 21st.

The art packs employ an eclectic range of mediums: everything from paintings and illustrations to collage, ceramics, textiles, cut paper, etchings, mosaic, and wood. The style ranges from elegant to whimsical. And there’s bonus art along with more details about the artists and the seeds on the inside of each pack. The packs are lovingly designed and printed, so that you can save them to use for decoupage or other crafts projects.

Last year, when planting season rolled around, I grabbed a couple of HVSL seed packets I’d received as a gift: Sulphur Cosmos, and State Fair Zinnia. It only took ten minutes to scatter those seeds, but I basked in their reflective glory for months. The flowers started blooming their heads off in late spring and didn’t stop until fall gave way to winter. All summer long, whenever I sat on my porch, people walking by would say “I love your flowers!”

It may seem like a trivial thing, but knowing that so many people were enjoying all those flowers cheered me up at a time when I was mourning the unexpected death of a young nephew. People are like plants; some of us flourish while others flounder. We all start out as seeds and end up as compost. Ideally, somewhere along the way we get to bloom and bear fruit, and bring some joy into this world. I rejoice every spring that I can count on the HVSL to provide me not only with the seeds I need to do that, but with their backstory, their cultural significance, and a thoughtful piece of art.

So, this year, in my nephew’s memory, I’ll scatter the seeds of the HVSL’s Marigold Medley in front of my fence. According to the packet, the marigold was the Aztec symbol of death, and it’s used to this day to decorate graves and altars. Dia de Los Meuertos festivals employ garlands and crosses made from thousands of marigold petals, and pathways are lined with the bright orange blossoms. The festivities also feature rows of cut paper banners called papel picado, which provided the inspiration for the exquisite artwork by paper cut artist Jenny Lee Fowler, which graces the cover of the pack. As the text inside notes, it’s a tribute to “the celebration of life and death which plays out in our gardens every year.” And in our lives, too.

Hudson Valley Seed Library Art Pack Slideshow

The post Gardener’s Delight: Seed Pack Art for Spring appeared first on Civil Eats.

Leonard dug in and earned the trust of enough willing folks (including Don Tyson, the late CEO of Tyson Foods) to give him a thorough account of a poultry power-grab that eventually spread to pork and beef. Meat Racket focuses mainly on Tyson because they pioneered the breakthroughs that largely drove this transformation.

As Meat Racket reveals, these efficiencies of scale have often come at the expense of farmers and consumers. But the dubious business practices that Leonard documents have largely escaped scrutiny until now, because this extraordinary consolidation of power took place in off-the-radar places like Waldron, Arkansas, a small town with a big Tyson plant.

We spoke with Leonard recently about vertical integration, Don Tyson’s laser-like approach to business, and the meat industry’s reaction to his book.

The book’s title may sound like hyperbole, but it turns out to be all too apt. While some of Tyson’s practices could be deemed merely unethical, you document others–such as cheating farmers by deliberately undercounting the weight of their chickens, or intentionally unloading unhealthy chicks on farmers who dared to speak up about such abuses–that seem downright criminal. Was any of this a surprise?

Actually, that’s where the book really started for me. In 2004, I was sent down to Waldron, Arkansas, where there’s a giant Tyson foods facility, and I was really shocked by the power this company had over the farmers and the whole town. These farmers were pretty independent people, independent business owners, in a certain sense. But, when you brought up the company’s name, they would just stoop their shoulders. People were afraid to talk about Tyson Foods in their own home, it was just an incredible power structure. Tyson is really emblematic of the meat system today, it’s not just one lone bad actor, if you will. The abuses seemed to just flow naturally from having outsized power.

Your book exposes a problem with the production method called “vertical integration.” Simply put, it’s when large corporations achieve dominance over the market by swallowing up the smaller mom-and-pop companies who make the necessary components for those products. This eliminates price negotiations and other forms of competition, leaving economic philosopher Adam Smith’s proverbial “invisible hand of the free market” more or less hogtied. Is this where capitalism and democracy collide?

Well, there’s an invisible hand at play, but it’s not the hand of the free market! It’s the hand of the big company. And it’s not just that age-old boom and bust cycle, where prices go down and the farmer gets paid less. We’re looking at a contract farming system that companies like Tyson invented in the 50s and 60s and really perfected. It systematically squeezes many farmers to the point where they have to declare bankruptcy.

One example of that is Tyson’s “tournament system” for paying its farmers. Instead of paying them based on a certain price per pound–like most farmers are paid–Tyson collects all the farmers in an area, and ranks them against each other based on how efficiently they did. The most efficient producers get a bonus, the bottom producers get paid far less.

You get a pool of farmers, half of whom will always do well, half will always get punished. So, even if they all do a great job, half of them will get money taken out of their pocket by the other half. It’s a way that companies like Tyson can divide and conquer rural communities. It systematically depresses farmers’ paychecks and keeps them very volatile.

You point out that the savings Tyson squeezes from its farmers don’t get passed on to the consumer, despite Tyson’s claims. What would Thomas Jefferson make of this model?

On paper, contract farming is very efficient. When one company owns the local slaughterhouse, the local feed mill, the local hatchery, it can create great efficiencies. As we industrialized this meat process, the inflation-adjusted price of meat really fell in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. But because these companies have been allowed to get so much of the market share, because they now so thoroughly dominate where meat is produced in rural America, they’ve changed the power structure of the societies in these towns.

Once Tyson realized that the actual raising of the chickens was the one area of production that wasn’t profitable, they offloaded the risks onto the farmers. But the deck seems so obviously stacked against the farmers from the get-go. How do they keep finding new farmers willing to assume so much debt?

You’d think a company could get away with doing this for five years, but then people would no longer participate. But there is a sentimental component to this, a human factor that’s really important to understand. These contract farmers love the community where they grew up with their friends and family, they remember what Main Street was like when they were kids and they’re really tied to this idea of being a farmer. It’s not like somebody who’s born in Chicago, with a menu of job choices.

These big chicken companies seek out economically marginal places, open up shop, and effectively keep those places economically marginal. And the company gives a really good pitch. It’s been pitching this system to farmers for decades as a way to have stability and more of a guaranteed income.

There are glossy brochures that make chicken farming look fantastic, Tyson has put up well-produced videos on its website talking about what a great gig this is. If you’re somebody who wants to believe this is true and wants to stay in their small town, they might sign up for a contract. I can’t tell you how many people I interviewed who signed up and just one or two years into it realized they’d signed up for something totally different than what they thought it was.

So, it looks good on paper and they sign off on huge loans to build these state-of-the-art chicken houses, with an apparent commitment from Tyson to supply them with chicks, and then they have the rug pulled out from under them. Isn’t that a kind of confidence game?

I never thought of that term before but it really is very apt. It is a confidence game and the tournament system is a concrete example. It sounds like a great incentive-based system. But in chicken farming, the main criteria for your success are the health of the chickens and the quality of the feed. And Tyson controls both of those elements.

The tournament constantly pressures farmers to compete against their neighbors and the only way they can hope to get higher in the tournament is to borrow more money from a bank to either build new chicken houses or upgrade their old ones..

You spent a lot of time talking to Don Tyson, the CEO who turned Tyson into the massive corporation it is today. You describe him as a genius. It’s a very sympathetic portrait of the man who may be more responsible than any other single individual for the proliferation of cheap, unhealthy food. Did you get the sense that he ever contemplated the dark side of his empire?

Don Tyson grew up in the depths of the depression, in a world where he knew that he could go out of business any day. Nobody gave Don Tyson anything. That spirit of trying to stay low cost, relentless and ruthless in business–if you signed a bad contract with Tyson, well, you know, that’s kind of on you, right? Nobody forced you to do it.

That’s the thinking that it took to turn this into the world’s biggest meat company. I do think he’s one of the great unknown geniuses in American business; he transformed an industry. But it’s sort of up to society to also have a say in this. Tyson is constructed right now to benefit its shareholders very well and those people are doing great.

But it’s at the expense of the American consumer, the environment, the livestock. He pioneered the treatment of animals as widgets, like, how can we squeeze these animals into ever tighter quarters, how can we breed bigger chickens faster, even though their health suffers as a consequence. Did he ever give those things a moment’s thought?

He was focused like a laser on his business. I’ve interviewed a lot of people who run factory farms and there’s a predominant mindset that the animals are food and they’re grazed in these barns shoulder to shoulder.

In President Obama’s first term, you depict his administration as having a genuine desire to reform the meat industry. But they failed to anticipate the fierce resistance they’d get from the industrial meat lobby. If the President of the United States can’t intervene on behalf of the many farmers, who can?

That’s a fantastic question and I want to reiterate here that Tyson is emblematic. Tyson’s one of the big four, and Tyson pioneered this system, but Cargill, JBS, Smithfield–they’re playing by the exact same playbook.

When Obama came in, there was a really aggressive reform agenda being pushed and it looked like real change was in the offing. My personal assessment from having talked to lots of people inside the USDA who worked on this, and people on the outside, is that the administration just did not have an appetite for this fight. The minute resistance started coming up, it was the administration’s impulse to start negotiating and retreating and going backward. They were sort of afraid to own the concept that sometimes anti-trust enforcement is good for the economy. It creates jobs. Increasing competition can help producers, it helps consumers, it helps economic growth.

I think that during the 70s and 80s, there was a general societal belief that as long as we had “good monopolies”–companies like Walmart that would take control of a market but deliver lower prices– that was OK. So as long as Tyson could show that they were making meat really cheap, regulators gave them a pass and let this industry become highly consolidated.

You do implicate the American consumer at one point, saying that we demand this cheap, plentiful meat. Do you think if more people knew these details they’d still be so comfortable buying this stuff?

I think they would not and that’s a huge thing. The criticism I give to consumers is just that they’re not paying attention. This stuff has all happened under the radar, and there’s too much of a mentality that if I walk into a store and the meat is there at an acceptable price, I don’t really care how it’s produced.

But that’s changing. I’ve been covering agribusiness since the late 1990s and people today realize that the production methods matter.

You note that when they started breeding for faster growth, bigger breasts and so on, the texture of the meat suffered, but no one cared because it was just going to get deep-fried anyway!

Without question, when you industrialize meat production–and we’ve seen it happen first to chickens, then to hogs and cattle–you’re not aiming for high quality, which brings high variability. You’re aiming for that predictable middle point of quality, to where you can get that piece of meat to Walmart 24 hours a day as cheap as you can get it.

So, consistent mediocrity is the goal?

That sounds like a criticism but it’s total reality, that is what they aim for and they’ve done a really great job with it.

Tyson, The American Meat Institute, and The National Chicken Council have all issued reactions to your book. You’ve had a few days to ruminate over their responses. How would you characterize their dismissals of your allegations?

I’ve been surprised at the platitudes that they are throwing out. I spent years reporting this book, it’s based on the company’s own documents, on litigation documents, and on-the-ground interviews with farmers and people who worked inside Tyson Foods. It’s specific.

And so far, the allegations have just been, “this is a hit piece,” or “this is anti food system.” They’re calling me nostalgic because I think competitive and transparent markets are a good thing! It’s been interesting to watch. A healthy debate about this stuff is good.

Do you think the tide is starting to turn? Do you think consumers are going to be willing to pay more for meat that they can feel better about?

Yes! Consumers are beginning to demand something different and I think that if you injected just a little bit more transparency and competition into this system, consumers would flock towards it. People care about their meat, they want it to be high quality, they want it to be affordable.

But lots of people don’t want to think that their pork came from a hog in a gestation crate who couldn’t move. And farmers will respond to that demand. Farmers want to make the best possible product that consumers will like. We need actual consumer choice and we need options, and then I think lots of these problems will start to solve themselves.

For those in the NYC area, Chris Leonard and New York Times reporter Michael Moss will be discussing The Meat Racket on Wednesday, March 5 at 6:30 pm at New America NYC at 199 Lafayette St Suite 3B. More information here.

The post Making a Racket: Christopher Leonard Goes Behind the Scenes in the American Meat Industry appeared first on Civil Eats.

Then Farm Aid’s founders–Dave Matthews, John Mellencamp, Willie Nelson, and Neil Young–joined Seeger in singing “This Land Is Your Land” with a bonus verse that ended “New York was meant to be frack-free!”

As Young noted several times during the day, “Farmers are on the front line of climate change.” They’re on the front line of the fracking debate, too. From the Marcellus Shale to the Monterey Shale, fracking threatens our most fertile farmlands. Gas industry reps, aka ‘land men,’ been waving dollar signs in the weathered faces of weary farmers who’ve leased their drilling rights only to find themselves screwed, as the unpleasant facts about fracking emerge.

Thinking, perhaps, of all those methane leaks and our apparent collective apathy about curbing them, Young opened his acoustic solo set with Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In The Wind,” and then blew his top over the way we’re abusing our topsoil:

He went from apoplectic to apocalyptic, alluding to Boulder’s biblical floods:

Colorado’s catastrophic flooding created an all-too-literal shitstorm, contaminating the local waterways with a bacteria-laden brew of feedlot feces, raw sewage and some 37,000 gallons of crude oil. Dan Kelly, vice president of Noble Energy, admitted that the sheer force of the flooding had moved the earth so violently that the foundations to some of his company’s tanks “actually washed out underneath them.”

Hundreds of oil and gas wells (as well as pipelines) have been shut down while authorities try to assess the damage–which may take months–and state officials warn people to ‘stay away from the water.’ Hard to do that if it’s flooding your house or farm, though.

The pro-fracking contingent is pooh-poohing environmentalists who think these poop-and-petroleum-polluted waterways should give us pause. “That’s like worrying about a single drop of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool,” according to Amy Oliver Cooke, director of the Energy Policy Center at Denver’s free-market Independence Institute.

The natural gas industry swaddles its toxic twaddle in the American flag–energy independence, yada, yada, yada. But their ostensibly “clean bridge to a renewable future” is a surprisingly dirty detour, a dead end that diverts us from the road to self-sufficiency through truly clean, homegrown renewable energy.

That’s not a pipeline-free pipe dream; we have the technology to transition to clean energy and lower our energy consumption through conservation and greater efficiency NOW. But the fossil fuel-funded gasbags who determine our energy policies are so petrified by a future without petroleum, they’ve turned the capital into a kind of La Brea Tar Pit on the Potomac.

If they were more animated, we could ship DC’s dyspeptic dystopians off to The Temple of Doom ride at Disneyland, where they’d fit right in with the other dinosaurs. One destination they won’t be heading to, clearly, is Tomorrowland. That attraction was designed to give folks “a vista into a world of wondrous ideas,” a chance to explore “new frontiers in science, adventure and ideals,” and, sadly, they don’t want to go there.

But millions of us do. We can imagine a future filled with homegrown, sustainable solutions to our food and energy needs. That vision infused Farm Aid, and I saw it again the next day at MakerFaire, the annual DIY extravaganza that drew some 70,000 kids and grown-ups to the New York Hall of Science in Queens last weekend. It’s a kind of county fair for tech geeks and crafters (and yes, Disney sponsored it–here’s to putting the tinker in Tinker Bell). The Maker movement is all about fostering a love of science, nature, innovation, creativity, and resourcefulness.

The Farm Hack booth at MakerFaire was where the Farm Aid and MakerFaire missions collide. After all, sustainable agriculture’s heirloom seeds–i.e., the kind you can save from year to year and share with friends, unlike Monsanto’s patented GMO seeds–are a lot like the open source software at the heart of the Maker culture. Both are freely shared resources, as opposed to jealously guarded intellectual property patented in the pursuit of private profit. And both can lead us to a more resilient and fertile future.

Farm Hack farmer Dorn Cox echoed Neil Young’s “solution-is-in-the-soil” theme, steering me to the work of The Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving our soil. Quivera co-founder Courtney White has written a series offering “short case studies of innovative practices that soak up carbon dioxide in soils, reduce energy use, sustainably intensify food production, and increase water quality and quantity.”

We’ve got the can-do, we’ve got the know-how, this land IS our land. The sun, wind and waves are out there, too, just waiting for us to harness them. In 1967, Buffalo Springfield recorded “Mr. Soul.” Who knew Neil Young would become Mr. Soil? Long may he–and his FarmAid allies, and the makers, and the farmers–run.

The post Farm Aid & MakerFaire: Go Forth & Be Fertile, Not Futile! appeared first on Civil Eats.

His young son Finn, meanwhile, had developed a fascination for seeds at the age of three, learning to write by copying the names of seed varieties from the Seed Savers Exchange catalogue. Finn, now six, shares the mathematical marvel contained in every seed: “Every time you just plant one seed, it grows into a plant and produces, like, thousands of seeds–it’s crazy!”

Finn’s wonder “filled me with wonder,” Seifert says. But when he saw images of Haitian farmers burning seeds that Monsanto had donated after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Seifert was filled with a darker wonder. What could compel people in such a devastated region to so vehemently reject this apparent offer of aid?

As Seifert came to understand the roots of the protest–the farmers’ rejection of hybrid seeds that would require them to abandon the centuries-old tradition of saving seeds from each year’s crop to plant the following season–he remarked that our own culture has unthinkingly relinquished that tradition:

“They were fighting for something that we had lost without even knowing that we were giving it up. They believe that the seeds of life are the common inheritance of all humanity, as numerous and diverse as the stars above, owned by none and shared by all.”

Seifert grew obsessed, and embarked–with his adorably tousled toddlers often in tow–on the fact-finding mission documented in GMO OMG. It’s hard not to get distracted by the trio of messy manes sported by Seifert, Finn and little brother Scout: not since A Hard Days’ Night has the world seen such an impressive crop of mop-tops. (Baby sister Pearl is relatively bald, by comparison, while wife and mother Jen’s perfectly fine head of hair is mostly pulled back into a ponytail, thereby relegated to a supporting role).

I’m not mocking Seifert and his family. I was moved by the earnestness with which Seifert approaches this incredibly complex and weighty subject, and his genuine desire to communicate the issues around GMOs in a simple–but not simplistic–way. That’s a tall order, and Seifert sometimes gets lost in the (super)weeds in his efforts to lighten things up with a little humor, most notably a misguided madcap romp through a field of GM corn that’s more Fab Four than Michael Moore. But donning hazmat suits to frolic amongst the stalks of GM feed corn, however tongue-in-cheek the scene was intended, plays into the hands of the pro-biotech boosters who point to this sort of thing as evidence that the anti-GMO crowd resorts to hyperbole and hysteria.

A more effective glimpse at the perils of biotech-based agriculture comes via a visit to a farmer who extolls the virtues of GMO crops while blithely pouring massive amounts of the highly toxic weed killer Atrazine (still the most widely used herbicide in the U.S., even though it’s banned in Europe) onto his fields. Atrazine is a suspected endocrine disruptor which seeps into our drinking water, in some places far exceeding supposedly safe levels of contamination. And, as GMO crops spur the growth of more and more herbicide-resistant weeds, farmers find themselves trapped in a vicious cycle requiring the application of even more herbicides.

Other engaging passages in the film include Seifert’s visits to those defiantly non-GMO farmers in Haiti, to Norway’s apocalyptic Global Seed Vault (built to protect the seeds for our food supply in the event of catastrophes), and to the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa, which preserves our own seed heritage. As the family drives up to the Seed Savers Exchange entrance–Finn’s own kind of magic kingdom–the giddy kid exclaims “I’ve been waiting for years to go to Seed Savers Exchange!”

And then there’s the obligatory pilgrimage to Monsanto’s Iowa headquarters, where Seifert gets shooed out of the lobby faster than you can say Roger and Me. He expresses bemusement that a company so proud of its products, from pesticides to herbicides to GM seeds, isn’t willing to even try to defend them on the record, or attempt to answer his questions.

But if there’s one thing Monsanto loves to suppress even more than weeds, it’s this question: does this food contain genetically modified ingredients? As more and more consumers demand labels, Monsanto pours more and more money–more than fifty million dollars, so far–into fighting the labeling laws that more than twenty states have already introduced to give consumers who have legitimate concerns about the health and environmental implications of GMOs the chance to make an informed choice.

So much for letting the free market decide. But there’s another kind of freedom at stake, one that’s even more fundamental to maintaining a food supply that includes foods free of genetically modified ingredients. And that’s the right of non-GMO farmers to not have their crops contaminated by cross-pollination from GM crops.

But since there’s no viable way to prevent such cross-pollination from occurring, whether by wind or by insect (or sabotage), non-GMO farmers have to live with the nightmare of seeing their crops rendered worthless by such contamination. Worse still, they may find themselves sued for theft in the event that such a trespass occurs, a ludicrous but all-too-common scenario brilliantly skewered by the Daily Show’s Aasif Mandvi recently.

The raging debate about the merits and hazards of GMO crops is too vast a topic to tackle in one film, much less one film review. There may well be biotech-based solutions to some agricultural problems, as Tom Philpott noted recently in Mother Jones. And, as Michael Pollan told Grist after getting into a digital dust-up about GMOs with New York Times reporter Amy Harmon, “I don’t think the technology itself is intrinsically evil. Part of the reason consumers are objecting to GM is that GM hasn’t offered consumers anything of value.”

But, as Donald Rumsfeld might say, when it comes to GMOs, there are just too many things that we now know we don’t know. Not to mention “the unknown unknowns,” i.e., the things we don’t know we don’t know.

And then there are the false unknowns–aka disinformation, propaganda, distortions, etc.–planted in our collective conscious, whether by corporations like Monsanto, or over-zealous activists. The practice of manipulating research and consumer sentiment is so pervasive in our culture now that there’s even a word for the study of it: agnotology, essentially, “the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.”

Food, Inc. director Robert Kenner has turned his lens on the doubt industry for his next feature, so stay tuned for that, but in the meantime, Jeremy Seifert’s GMO OMG offers a thoughtful, sincere exploration of the befuddling world of biotech for those of us who aren’t fluent in agricultural acronyms. Seifert may have a shaggy ‘do, but this is no shaggy dog story. More like a shaggy God story, in which monolithic corporations repeatedly try to trump Mother Nature. Any guesses who’s gonna win?

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The post GMO OMG: Mop Tops Take on Monsanto appeared first on Civil Eats.

Nestle handpicked over 250 of her favorite cartoons that make funny, succinct points about everything from food labeling to school lunch programs to our dubious dietary habits, and more. The cartoons accompany her concise, engaging essays on what ails our current food chain, and her suggestions for how to solve these critical problems. If you’d like a sneak peak, Rodale has a slide show of twenty-one of the cartoons with excerpts of the essays. And if you’re game to try your own hand at finding the funny in SAD (aka the Standard American Diet), there’s an Eat Drink Vote caption contest.

I asked Nestle to share some background on her new book and her observations about our sometimes comical, always complicated relationship with food.

Why did you want to do a book of food politics cartoons?

If truth be told, I’ve been wanting to do one for years. Cartoons are such a great way to engage audiences. Politics can be dreary. Cartoons make it fun. I’ve collected cartoons for years on everything about food and nutrition. I would have loved to do a book on nutrition in cartoons but getting permission to reprint them was too difficult and expensive. For the cartoons in my last book, Why Calories Count, I contacted the copyright holder, Sara Thaves, who represents the work of about 50 cartoonists. During our negotiations about how much they would cost, Sara asked if I might be interested in doing a book using Cartoonist Group cartoons. Would I ever!

Sara ended up sending me more than 1100 cartoons–all on food politics. I put them in categories and started writing. The only hard part was winnowing the drawings to a publishable number. But what a gorgeous book this turned out to be! The cartoons are in full color.

Has politics always had such a huge impact on the way we eat?

Of course it has. As long as we have had inequities between rich and poor, politics has made some people fat while others starved. Think, for example, of the sugar trade and slavery, the Boston tea party, or the role of stolen bread in Les Miserables. Bread riots and food fights are about politics.

But those events seem simple compared to what we deal with now, when no food issue seems too small to generate arguments about who wins or loses. Congressional insistence that the tomato paste on pizza counts as a vegetable serving is only the most recent case in point.

How do you reconcile the fact that what’s good for us as individuals–namely, eating less junk food–is bad for business?

I don’t think these facts are easily reconciled. They can only be observed and commented and acted upon. The job of the food industry is to produce products that will not only sell well, but will sell increasingly well over time, in order to produce growing returns to investors.

Reconciliation requires companies either to sell less (impossible from a business standpoint) or make up the difference with sales of healthier products. Unfortunately, the so-called healthier products—and whether they really are is debatable–rarely sell as well. In practice, companies touch all bases at once: they put most marketing efforts into their core products, they proliferate new “better-for-you” products, and they seek new customers for their products among the vast populations of the developing world—where, no surprise, the prevalence of obesity is increasing, along with its related diseases.

Do you think we have an obligation to choose our foods more wisely, given the astronomical costs of diet-related diseases in the U.S.?

We would certainly be better off if we ate more healthfully. I’m not sure about “obligation.” Food choices are enormously influenced by what’s advertised, most handy, eaten by peers, and cheap, and by how big the portions are. Right now, that food environment promotes eating too much of the wrong kinds of things. That’s why people concerned about public health policy want to change the food environment to make healthy choices the easy choices.

In Eat Drink Vote, you note that “it ought to be possible to enjoy the pleasures of food and eat healthfully at the same time.” Why does that ideal meal elude so many of us?

Because our food choices are so strongly influenced by the food environment. Given a large plate of food, for example, practically everyone will eat more from it than from a smaller portion.

And then there’s the cooking problem. For decades, Americans have been told that cooking is too much trouble and takes too much time. As a result, many people would rather order in and wait for it to arrive and get heated up again than to start from scratch. And healthy foods cost more than highly processed junk foods, and not only on the basis of calories. The government supports the production of corn and soybeans, for example, but not that of broccoli or carrots.

I should also mention that food companies get to deduct the cost of marketing, even marketing to children, from their taxes as legitimate business expenses.

On the subject of food and pleasure, you enjoy the occasional slice of pizza or scoop of ice cream, just as Michelle Obama loves her french fries. Do you subscribe to the “all things in moderation” philosophy, or are there some things you simply won’t eat, ever?

The only food I can think of that I won’t ever eat is brains, and that’s rarely a problem. And yes, I do subscribe to “everything in moderation” although it’s hard to admit it without irony. The phrase has been so misused by food companies and some of my fellow nutritionists to defend sales of junk foods and drinks.

There is no question that some foods are healthier to eat than others and we all would be better off eating more of the healthier ones and fewer of the less healthful foods. But “fewer” does not and should not mean “none.” And what’s wrong with pizza, pray tell? In my view, life is too short not to leave plenty of room for freshly baked pizza, toffee candy, real vanilla ice cream, and a crusty, yeasty white bread—all in moderation, of course.

And what a bonus to get to the end of the book and find that wonderful cartoon of yourself by Clay Bennett! How did that come about?

I know. I love it. Minutes before the book was being sent to press, my editor realized that there were a couple of blank pages at the end. And I didn’t have a bio in the book. Why not commission a cartoon? Clay Bennett is the only one of the cartoonists I’ve met–I went to a talk he gave in New York at the launch of another Cartoonist Group book–and I very much enjoy his work. He produced the cartoon over that weekend. I think it’s the perfect way to end the book.

The post Food Politics, Illustrated appeared first on Civil Eats.

Trueman: We produce more than enough food in the U.S. to feed every man, woman and child. In fact, we’ve got such a surplus that we throw away almost half of it. But more than 47 million Americans–including roughly 16 million kids–struggle with hunger.

And with budget cuts undermining our food stamp program, aka SNAP, this problem’s only getting worse. Who has the power to change this shameful state of affairs, and how?

Nestle: I’ve just seen A Place at the Table (a film in which I briefly appear), which lays out today’s hunger problem in a particularly poignant way. It was clear from the film that its low-income participants had to deal with what is now called “food insecurity,” meaning that they couldn’t count on a reliable supply of adequate food on a daily basis and sometimes didn’t have enough to eat. But they also had to deal with another problem: the food that they did get was mostly junk food. So the question really should be worded somewhat differently: How can we ensure that everyone in America can afford enough healthy food?

I’m guessing that the makers of A Place at the Table intended it to do for the 2013 version of food insecurity what the CBS television documentary, Hunger in America, did in 1968. That film showed footage of children so starved and listless that they might as well have come from countries at war or refugee camps.

What seems impossible to imagine in 2013 is the effect of that documentary. It shocked the nation. Viewers were outraged that American adults and children did not have enough to eat. Within that year, President Nixon called a White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health to recommend programs and policies to end hunger, and Congress appointed the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs (the McGovern committee) to develop legislation. This worked. Food assistance and other programs reduced poverty and hunger. Our present-day WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) and SNAP (food stamp) programs are the legacy of that outrage.

Where is that outrage today? Without it, Congress can ignore the millions of people who depend on SNAP benefits and view the nearly $80 billion cost of those benefits as an enticing target for budget cutting.

Who has the power to do something decent about hunger? In a word, Congress. Unlike the situation under presidents Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson—all of whom took decisive action to help the poor–hunger in America today is nothing but a pawn in Washington power politics. We have come to value personal responsibility at the expense of social responsibility. It’s hard for many Americans to think that we must be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers when our own economic status feels at risk.

If we can’t count on Congress to do the right thing, we have to try to create our own local food security and engage communities in helping to care for one another. This means advocacy and coalition-building on two levels: national and local. On the national level, it means exercising democratic rights as citizens to lobby congressional representatives to address poverty and its consequences no matter how futile that may seem. On the local level, it means working with community residents to address their needs. It means engaging the media to get the word out.

That’s where Food Bloggers Against Hunger can help. Your job is to generate outrage and to encourage your readers to act. Go for it!

The post Let’s Ask Marion Nestle: Who’s Got The Power to End Hunger in America? appeared first on Civil Eats.

When his Times colleague David Rohde was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008, Moss’s editors decided to bring Moss home and give him a safer beat: The processed food industry.

But in the terrorist-free terrain of Big Food’s boardrooms and Big Ag’s labs, Moss found himself once again reporting on body counts caused by a government agency’s failure to protect us. Only this time, the agents of death were salmonella and E. coli, not Al Qaeda. And the agencies in question were the FDA and USDA, not the Pentagon.

Of course, these deaths were the tragic result of negligence, incompetence, and greed, rather than an ideologically driven desire to murder innocent Americans. No food company would set out to fatally sicken anyone by intentionally contaminating its products with known toxins.

But Moss’s book raises the specter that some of them seem to be OK with engineering what is, essentially, a kind of chemical warfare. They’re well-acquainted with the studies Moss cites which suggest that salty, fatty, sugary foods reward the same pleasure sensors in our brains that drugs do. In fact, they don’t even bother to assemble focus groups to sample the latest snack foods and beverages anymore, because now they can bypass our subjective perceptions and just scan our brains directly to monitor how our taste buds are responding.

Moss reveals that food company executives–like the tobacco industry before them–have long been acutely aware of and worried about the health hazards presented by their products. And yet, despite those concerns about their culpability, processed food giants like Kraft, General Foods and Nestlé continue to launch an all-out assault on the American palate to convert us to “heavy users”–their term–of the salty, sugary, fatty processed foods that have proven so profitable for them and so harmful to us. They target especially vulnerable demographics: Impressionable children and low-income, low-information shoppers who lack the means and knowledge to make healthier food choices.

Their scientists and marketing mavens tinker endlessly with chemical formulas, and create branding and packaging that entice us to consume excessive quantities of the highly processed, calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods and beverages that are slowly poisoning Americans on a scale that terrorists could only dream of.

And they’ve been aided and abetted in this campaign by the tobacco industry, which responded to growing scrutiny about the hazards of its sole product by snapping up processed food companies in a bid to expand its portfolio and its profits. The same sleazy, disingenuous strategies that tobacco executives once used to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking are trotted out once again by the usual suspects, aka the Merchants of Doubt, to deceive the public about the perils of processed foods.

But don’t look to the USDA to counter those tactics in any meaningful way. As Moss notes, the USDA has the impossible job of simultaneously encouraging more wholesome eating habits while promoting the interests of industrial agriculture.

Any doubts about which of those mandates comes first? The USDA oversees the promotion of its agricultural agenda from its massive headquarters in the heart of Washington, D.C. But the branch of the USDA tasked with ensuring the public’s health, The Center For Nutritional Policy and Promotion, is located across the river on the outskirts of Alexandria, Virginia. To get there, Moss had to take the DC Metro, transfer to a bus, and then walk a third of a mile. And out of a total budget of some $146 billion, the center receives a pitiful $6.5 million dollars. Hardly enough to offset the astronomical sums of money the food industry spends to develop and market its junky convenience foods.

Moss spent several years combing through mountains of documents, including confidential memos, and conducted hundreds of interviews with industry insiders. He found a few disillusioned whistleblowers and a handful of individuals who genuinely wanted to provide consumers with more wholesome options. But their efforts to chip away at the horrendous quantities of salt, fats and sugars the industry relies on to mask the shortcomings of its cheap commodity crop ingredients invariably hit a deadend labeled “Wall Street.”

Campbell’s Soup, for instance, found that it could reduce the sodium content of some of its soups without sacrificing too much flavor if they added dried herbs to their recipes. But the herbs were deemed “too expensive.” And despite claims from all of these companies that they are committed to offering healthier products, the reality is that none of them wants to risk sacrificing market share–or, as they call it, “stomach share”–to their competitors. To cut back on salt, fat and sugar is, essentially, a form of disarmament. So, barring some sort of self-imposed or government-mandated unilateral disarmament, there’s not likely to be much improvement in the quality of processed foods anytime soon.

In his interviews with scientists, food company executives, and other food industry insiders, Moss found their reactions to the public health hazard they’ve helped to create ran the gamut from defiantly unrepentant to sincerely remorseful. He notes, too, that whether food company executives openly acknowledge the shortcomings of their nutritionally dubious foodstuffs or not, none of them actually eats or drinks their own company’s products.

Under the circumstances, Moss writes, we’d be well advised to “think of the grocery store as a battlefield, dotted with landmines itching to go off.” The Wall Street Journal‘s review of Moss’s book dismissed this statement as “unnecessary hyperbole,” a word they also used to dismiss the scientists’ claims that junk foods can be as addictive in their own way as cocaine.

But as Salt Sugar Fat shows, it’s not hyperbole; it’s just another inconvenient truth. In the new documentary A Place at the Table, another exposé of our screwed-up food chain from Participant Media, who brought us Food, Inc., the actor and longtime anti-hunger activist Jeff Bridges bemoans the collective failure of private enterprise and public policy to provide affordable wholesome foods to all Americans. Instead, we’ve got government-subsidized empty calories from commodity crops and a rapacious food industry that seems to regard children as fair game in their eternal quest for greater market share.

“If another country was doing this to our kids,” Bridges says, “we would be at war.” When you read Salt Sugar Fat, it’s hard not to conclude that we already are at war. After all, there’s a real body count.

When Moss was a war correspondent in the Middle East, he wrote an article outlining the rules of jihadi etiquette, which included the edicts that “you can kill bystanders without feeling a lot of guilt,” and “you can kill children, too, without needing to feel distress.” The food industry folks that Moss interviewed for Salt Sugar Fat didn’t offer any such clear-cut commandments about acceptable levels of collateral damage. And anyway, it’s not their fault if we fail to exercise the proverbial “personal responsibility” it requires to resist their strenuous efforts to tempt us to eat and drink ourselves sick. Besides, they’re just giving the public what it craves. And that, unlike salmonella and E. coli, is not by accident.

The post Pulitzer-Winning Reporter Digs into Our Processed Food Addiction appeared first on Civil Eats.

From the moment Beyoncé strapped on those stilettos to bounce around in the “Move Your Body” video, she’s been a wobbly spokesperson for Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move Campaign.” Now she’s signed a $50 million dollar deal with Pepsi, which will presumably entail her exhorting her millions of young fans to baste their bodies in bubbly high fructose corn syrup.

Apparently, she didn’t get the childhood obesity/diabetes epidemic memo. Do celebrities with Beyoncé’s massive influence on young kids have a moral obligation to consider the horrendous impact of excessive soda consumption in our culture when they mull over megabuck branding opportunities?

From my privileged position as a tenured, full-salaried faculty member at NYU, the answer is an unambiguous yes. Beyoncé will now be marketing sugar-sweetened beverages, products increasingly linked to childhood obesity, especially among minority children.

This linkage is not a coincidence. Pepsi and other makers of sugary sodas deliberately and systematically market their products to low-income, minority children.

Beyoncé will now be part of that targeted marketing campaign.

If Beyoncé’s mission is to inspire young people of any color to look gorgeous and rise to the top, as she has done, she is now telling them that the way to get there—and to get rich—is to drink Pepsi. This untrue suggestion is, on its own, unethical.

Pepsi must think that getting this message out, and putting Beyoncé’s photo on its soda cans, is well worth $50 million.

For PepsiCo, $50 million is trivial. According to Advertising Age (June 2012), PepsiCo sold $66.5 billion worth of products in 2011, for a profit of $6.4 billion. Pepsi sales in the U.S. accounted for $22 billion of that.

PepsiCo’s total advertising budget funneled through advertising agencies, and therefore reportable, was $944 million. Of that amount, $196 million was used to market Pepsi alone. The rest went for Gatorade ($105 million), Mountain Dew ($23 million) and PepsiCo’s many other Quaker and Frito-Lay products.

One other relevant point: half of PepsiCo’s annual sales are outside the United States. Like other multinational food companies, it is focusing marketing efforts on emerging economies. This means that Beyoncé will also be pushing sugary drinks on people in developing countries. PepsiCo just spent $72 million to sponsor cricket tournaments in India, for example.

Fifty million dollars seems like an unimaginable amount of money to me. If PepsiCo offered it to me, I would have to turn it down on the grounds of conflict of interest. But this is easy for me to say, because the scenario is so unlikely.

What $50 million means for Beyoncé I cannot know. Some sources estimate her net worth at $300 million. If so, $50 million adds a substantial percentage. And the Pepsi deal will give her phenomenal exposure.

But from where I sit, Beyoncé has crossed an ethical line. She is now pushing soft drinks on the very kids whose health is most at risk. And her partnership with Pepsi will make public health measures to counter obesity even more difficult.

This is a clear win for Pepsi. And a clear loss for public health.

Beyoncé has now become the world’s most prominent spokesperson for poor diets, obesity and its health consequences, and marketing targeted to the most vulnerable populations.

Sad.

The post Beyoncé’s Bubbly Branding Falls Flat appeared first on Civil Eats.

Tracie McMillan’s The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table takes us on a vivid and poignant tour of a place we don’t really want to go: the mostly hidden, sometimes horrible world of the workers who form the backbone of our cheap, industrialized food chain. Sound grim? It is, at times, but McMillan’s lively narrative and evident empathy for the people she encounters make her sojourn into the bowels of Big Food and Big Ag a pleasure to read.

From the fields of California’s Central Valley to the produce aisle of a Michigan Walmart, and lastly, the kitchen of a Brooklyn Applebee’s, McMillan gives a firsthand account of the long hours, lousy wages and difficult conditions that are par for the course in these places. This is tricky terrain for a white, relatively privileged, middle-class American woman, and McMillan navigates it with grace and humility, remaining acutely aware of the pitfalls inherent in such a project.

I sat down with McMillan recently to chat about her populist odyssey and found her to be just as down-to-earth and plucky as her prose.

What was the hardest part of going undercover?

This was the first time I had gone undercover to do work like that, because I believe very strongly in the importance of being upfront with people about what you’re doing and who you are and I am not a good actress (laughs). So the place where I was culturally the least good of a fit, in the fields, I was really protected by the fact that I didn’t speak the language. I just seemed like a kind of dumb white girl, and that was really helpful.

The first thing was getting over my anxiety over doing that kind of project and coming to terms with it. It meant that I had to be dishonest with my coworkers. I don’t really care so much that I’m not honest with the companies. It’s very interesting, the same year that I was working at Walmart during the holiday season, Stephanie Rosenbloom at the New York Times went and worked for a day at a Walmart with the company’s permission, and she had a very different experience than I did.

And that’s why you do it. Companies and supervisors do not treat you the same, and coworkers won’t be as honest with you, or as open. I’ve come out of this very convinced that undercover work is worthwhile, but it’s a complicated thing. There’s a tendency to think “I can totally do this, and how else can I get this information?” but I also understand why people react badly to it sometimes.

So there was the undercover thing, and then there was finding the right balance between my narrative and talking about the people I was with. It’s not supposed to be about me as a white girl having that experience; the idea is that I can only tell my story and what I observed, but I’m using that to get to the stories of the other people around me.

You found that farm work in California’s Central Valley was extremely demanding, sometimes dangerous, and routinely underpaid. What do you think it would take to provide the people who pick our crops with better working conditions and paychecks that don’t deliberately shortchange them?

I was typically working alongside undocumented immigrants. You always hear the stories about how undocumented immigrants work for very low wages and how they get treated. It’s one thing to hear about it, it’s another thing to see how terrified everybody is, how unwilling they are to say anything.

They complained about it outside of work, we’d talk about how bad the wages were and the women were like, “Why don’t you say anything?” For me that was really awkward, because I wanted to say “That’s terrible, and I will march off and I will fix everything!” Which is not something you can do as an undercover reporter.

Even if you’re undocumented, you still have legal rights, but they don’t necessarily know that. And even the ones that do, it’s not like they have a guaranteed job, you could be hired or fired at any moment. There’s no job security. So, you keep working, and at least you have the stability of knowing that you will get your eight hours of work for which you’re paid $25 to $40.

How do you fix that? You enforce the existing labor laws. You don’t necessarily need new ones. I think it’s important not to stifle businesses’ ability to do their job, but I did observe when I was working in the fields that every week I was asked to sign a piece of paper stating that I had taken food safety training that I had never taken. One of the arguments around food safety is that farmers should be allowed to self-regulate that. I saw in my work that self-regulation wasn’t working.

And in terms of labor law enforcement, you need some sense that people are going to get in trouble if they cheat workers. The average fine levied under the Agricultural Worker Protection Act is about $350. During my time in the fields I was underpaid by about $500.

A farm advocate in Ohio explained to me that it’s cheaper to violate the law and pay when someone complains than it is to follow the law.

Can you even imagine how different conditions would have to be for it to not be an anomaly to have someone with your own background choosing that kind of work?

That’s called unionization and massive social change! Factory work in the early 20th century was really dangerous and it didn’t pay very well, but those became really good jobs because there was unionization and legislation to protect workers. My grandfather raised my mother and her two brothers and took care of my grandmother on the salary he earned working for Ford.

So, if you could figure out a way to make farm labor a better job in terms of wages and working conditions, more people would do it. The reason why people don’t do farm labor isn’t because they’re, like, “Oh, we’re too good to be in the fields,” it’s because it’s really hard work that often doesn’t pay minimum wage. Picking up garbage is a shitty job, too, but people still go do that, because it’s a decent gig.

What were your most miserable moments?

This belies my upwardly mobile aspirations (laughs). For me, what was the most emotionally miserable was working the night shift at Walmart. I didn’t see any daylight for the most part. That’s also really physical work, so I would move half a ton of sugar and a half ton of flour in a night, by myself. It’s isolated work, you’re in an aisle stocking by yourself, so there’s no social aspect to it.

But what I found most draining about it was that most of my coworkers, many of whom were married and had families, had been there for seven, 10, 15 years. One coworker was earning $11 an hour after working there for seven years, and she talked about how if you worked at Walmart for 15 years that’s actually really good because you get a lifetime discount card.

There’s something really sobering when what you’re aspiring to is that if you stick it out at $10, $11, $12 an hour you’re going to get a lifetime 10-percent discount card.

Walmart keeps touting its commitment to fresh healthy produce, but in your experience, they treated fresh fruits and vegetables just like any other non-perishable consumer good. Their blasé attitude toward the fresh produce engendered so much waste! How do you square that with their famous obsession for maximizing profit?

I was really shocked to be working at Walmart and to see how inefficient the place I was working was. I have no idea if that department was just an anomaly, or if that’s a broader problem.

Randy, the manager, was incredibly young, didn’t really know what he was doing, and didn’t particularly care. For that, I would fault the store management. It’s one thing to be really bad at your job, but why did somebody give you that job?

What was really upsetting to me was that one of my colleagues, I think I call him Sam in the book, who’s a black man, he had come to Walmart after the grocery store he worked at closed down. He had been working in produce for five years and knew a lot, so I could ask him anything, like “How do I tell if this is ripe?” Sam had applied for that job and they had given it to Randy instead. I have no idea who on the planet would have picked Randy over Sam, because Sam knew produce, whereas Randy had a background in electronics.

You write, “When cooking instruction is paired with basic nutrition education, Americans cook more and eat more healthfully–even when money is tight.” What’s your prescription for battling kitchen illiteracy?

Almost everything people are eating at home involves some degree of convenience foods. That kind of thing usually tends to have a lot of salt and preservatives in it. But it’s actually no more time-intensive to do a Hamburger Helper kind of thing from scratch, and it’s actually cheaper.

The thing that sucks about a box isn’t that it’s quick–it’s that if you don’t already know how to cook, you think you can’t make a cake without a box. We need to start thinking about cooking as a basic life skill, not something that’s optional. Incorporating that into public education to me seems like a smart idea. It can be a really great way to teach people other stuff. It’s great for math, right? And for reading comprehension. Or learning to write recipes. It’s an important survival skill.

I think one of the things you can support, no matter what your politics are, is that our schools should be teaching our kids how to be self-sufficient, how to take care of themselves and not to have to depend on large institutions. I would include in that not just government but also corporations.

We don’t want to be raising kids who depend on corporations to tell them what to eat and how to eat. That’s a really important part of American culture. People talk all the time about a nanny state, but there’s the corporate nanny, too. And I don’t like that either! If we want people to be self-sufficient, cooking and eating is a part of that. So, we need to include cooking as part of public school education. I also understand fully the difficulty of educational reform, but I think it’s an important point to start discussing.

Originally published on AlterNet

The post Going Undercover in the Belly of Our Beastly Food Chain appeared first on Civil Eats.

It’s been a long time since farmers congregated in downtown Manhattan–around 350 years, to be exact. The folks who populate Wall Street and rural America don’t cross paths much these days. It’s easy to forget that Wall Street used to be rural America; in 1644, the area contained so many cows that the Dutch colonists had to erect a cattle guard to keep them from straying. Livestock farmers literally established the boundaries of Wall Street.

Today, the bronze bull–that icon of the OWS movement–is the lone farm animal you’ll find in the financial district. And the barricades are back, but only to keep Zuccotti Park’s mic checkers in check. That surprisingly fertile concrete plaza has yielded a bumper crop of grassroots activists, to the discomfort of (most of) the 1 percent and the shills who bill them. But the voices of farmers–a.k.a. the 1 percent that grows the food that 100 percent of us eat–have been largely missing from this movement to reclaim our democracy, despite the fact that food has become a commodity that enriches a few at the expense of the many.

That all changed this past Sunday, though, when a group of farmers from around the country marched to Zuccotti Park accompanied by their allies: food justice activists, community gardeners, and other advocates for a more equitable, ecologically sound, re-localized food system.

The march, organized by Occupy Wall Street’s food justice committee and Food Democracy Now, began with a rally at La Plaza Cultural Community Garden in the East Village, where hundreds of folks gathered to hear fiddlers and drummers give the event a festive kickoff, followed by a panel of urban and rural farmers.

Speakers included: Karen Washington, urban farmer and the founder of City Farms Markets, who grew up just blocks away from the community garden; Mike Callicrate, a Colorado rancher and a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the world’s largest beef packer; Severine von Tscharner Fleming, the filmmaker behind Greenhorns and a farmer who’s worked tirelessly to promote the young farmer movement; Jalal Sabur, a founding member of the Freedom Food Alliance, which unites black urban communities with black rural farmers; renowned permaculture expert Andrew Faust; Jim Goodman, a Wisconsin dairy farmer who organized a “tractorcade” to Madison earlier this year to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation; and Jim Gerritsen, a Maine organic farmer who is president of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against Monsanto.

Gerritsen, who was recently named one of “25 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World” by Utne Reader, noted that he had “never had a reason” to come New York City before. Now, at age 56, he came to tell organizers that “Occupy Wall Street is the conscience of America,” adding that “rural America stands behind you.”

A movement that’s been denigrated by some as a motley mob of lazy, dirty hippies got a boost from hardworking Americans who’ve chosen one of the most demanding, least lucrative vocations imaginable–producing our food. Don’t tell these folks to get a job; the majority of small family farmers have to hold down at least two jobs just to make ends meet or get health care.

Jalal Sabar expressed his desire to foster a deeper awareness of the issues facing both urban and rural farmers:

A lot of times the farmer in Iowa doesn’t know that the kid in the hood is getting stopped and frisked every day … I understand that farmers can barely survive, that they have to work a job outside of the farm … We want to make sure that the foodies understand what the farmworkers go through.

Sabar also pointed out that land grabs, a problem seen as occurring mainly in developing nations, are happening here as well. He cited the recent raid on the Morning Glory Community Garden in the South Bronx by the NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development. (On Saturday, a protest by Occupy The Bronx at the site of the ransacked garden resulted in several arrests.)

Severine von Tscharner Fleming addressed another kind of land grab that’s threatening our farmlands: fracking. In the wake of Hurricane Irene, which destroyed many local New York state crops, von Tscharner Fleming described the way representatives from natural gas companies had turned up promptly, checkbooks in hand, pressuring desperate farmers to lease their drilling rights. She echoed last week’s devastating New York Times exposé, “Learning Too Late of the Perils in Gas Well Leases,” by saying:

Those of us who are running farms in different parts of the region are having to compete with the drillers and are then surrounded by the tanks and the effluent and the pipelines and the huge rigs of trucks, the millions of gallons of contaminated, radioactive water that are pumped out of these wells and the fumes that are in the wind and when you’re trying to grow gorgeous produce it’s not so wonderful.

Dairyman Jim Goodman availed himself of the peoples’ microphone to explain his motivation to attend the march:

“We were told in the ’60s that there comes a time when the machinery becomes so odious … that you have to throw yourself into the machinery and make it stop.

They tell me I must feed the world. But I’m not going to. I want to feed you. I want the world to feed itself. And they can. They’ve been farming longer than we have. They’re smarter, they’re younger, they’re stronger, they’re women, they’re people of color.

The corporations want them out, they want the good land. They give them the poor land. And then they say, “See? They can’t feed themselves.” A self-fulfilling prophecy.

… Take the power away from Wall Street! Remake Washington.”

The rally culminated in a seed swap with farmers and gardeners exchanging packets of heirloom, open-pollinated seeds, including some donated by the Hudson Valley Seed Library founders, who’ve done so much to revitalize New York’s regional seed trade and inspired similar endeavors around the country.

Kneeling on the pavement there at Zuccotti Park, sorting through the seeds under the glow of the twinkly holiday lights, we couldn’t help feeling that the Farmers’ March was marking the beginning of a greater affinity between city and country folks. Here’s hoping the farmers won’t wait another few centuries to come back to our neck of the woods.

The post Sow Seeds, Not Greed: Farmers Gather on Wall Street appeared first on Civil Eats.

According to the allegations in the Penn State scandal, a pedophile was allowed to brutally assault/molest numerous young boys because no one dared to upset the very lucrative apple cart that is college sports.

And now comes word that Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee have torpedoed the USDA’s attempts to reduce the amount of pizza, french fries, and salt that our kids consume at school. Why? Because the frozen pizza companies, the salt industry, and potato growers asked them to. Really. It’s that simple.

The USDA wasn’t looking to ban any of these foods, but rather to increase the ratio of non-starchy vegetables and whole grains. This would be a step in the right direction, instead of using our resources to make our kids sicker and fatter. But such a shift would also make a dent in some very lucrative government contracts. So, no go.

There’s more going on here than simple greed, though. Because the politicians who do the food industry’s bidding are showing as much contempt for the expert opinion of nutritionists as they do towards the science of climate change. As Tom Philpott notes over at Mother Jones, the evidence that we need to feed our kids less of this stuff is solid: “Eat Your Greens, or Your Gut Gets It.”

But who needs experts, anyway? Not the GOP. Their ideal nominee should evidently be a blowhard ignoramus with a moral compass that’s shiftier than the San Andreas fault line, and at least as deeply cracked.

Take Herman Cain. When the pizza mogul/motivational speaker/alleged serial groper was asked if he could define a man by the kind of pizza he prefers, he declared that “A manly man don’t want it piled high with vegetables! He would call that a sissy pizza.”

And so goes the ongoing conservative war against vegetables, served up with a side of machismo. We can’t let the First Lady instill a love of broccoli in our kids! And isn’t Obamacare just a sneaky plot to open the door for legislation that would crucify Americans who reject cruciferous vegetables?

I guess those retired war generals over at Mission Readiness didn’t get the memo about the sissifying powers of vegetables. Why are these military experts up in arms over the USDA’s caving in to Big Food? Maybe because “Obesity is the leading medical disqualifier for military service, and children get up to 40 percent of their daily calories during the school day?”

As Amy Dawson Taggart, Mission Readiness’s director, noted “This new effort to undermine school nutrition regulations raises national security concerns.”

It should also raise questions about what kind of culture turns a blind eye to kids being brutalized and turns our children into vessels for commodity crop crap because it protects the revenues of some high powered institutions and politicians. What warped brand of capitalism have we created that permits our kids to be treated as collateral damage?

The post Our Children On The Front Line In The War Against Vegetables appeared first on Civil Eats.

Well, yes. And it’s a logical move, if they don’t want to see their legacy (or their democracy) go down the toilet. After all, as Mario Batali once pointed out on CBS Sunday Morning, “When you think about it, all my greatest work is poop, tomorrow.”Ah, but not all excrement is created equal. On the one hand, intensive pork production’s given us vast pools of lethally toxic pig shit known as manure lagoons, more akin to radioactive waste than organic manure. On the other hand, there are worm castings, the highly fertile poop extruded by earthworms that looks like coffee grounds and smells pleasantly earthy.

The respective hazards and merits of various manures has not, historically, been the province of the JBF. This highly influential culinary center, founded after the legendary chef and cookbook author James Beard’s death in 1985 at the age of 81, is better known for its awards honoring outstanding chefs, restaurateurs, and writers.

But with the current American diet in such a dire state, the JBF folks are not content to simply celebrate culinary and literary excellence. Eager to play a more proactive role in reshaping our food system, the JBF has come down squarely in favor of a future that features more worm castings and fewer manure lagoons.

The JBF promoted that vision last week with its second annual JBF Food Conference, How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats. In conjunction with the conference, the JBF also held its inaugural JBF Leadership Awards [PDF], which honored 10 “visionaries in the business, government and education sectors responsible for creating a healthier, safer, and more sustainable food world.”

Fittingly, one of the honorees was vermicomposting genius Will Allen, whose internationally acclaimed nonprofit Growing Power flourishes on a foundation of worm poop.

And while the JBF’s newfound fervor to reform our food chain may seem like a radical departure, it’s really more like a homecoming. James Beard, whose influence led Julia Child to declare him “the Dean of American Cuisine,” was advocating pure, regional, seasonally based home cooking half a century before Alice Waters and Michael Pollan sought to popularize that ideal.

Beard despised the prepackaged convenience foods that had already begun to displace real meals in his heyday. In a letter to his friend Helen Evans Brown in September of 1954, he wrote:

The food editors’ conference is going full tilt and we hear the results are horrifying. Soon, we are told, there will be no fresh foods on the market — just canned or frozen (this came from the lips of the Secretary of Agriculture).

The JBF Food Conference, co-hosted by Good Housekeeping at their conference facility in the LEED gold certified Hearst Tower, brought together chefs, scholars, entrepreneurs, economists, writers, advocates, and representatives from nonprofits and corporations to examine the financial underpinnings of our food system and the media’s role in shaping our food choices.

The goal was to find common ground among people with diverse agendas, and “establish a set of guiding principles around which we can organize and move forward together,” as the conference’s facilitator, Joseph McIntyre, announced at the outset.

McIntyre, president of the California-based think/do tank Ag Innovations Network, came to town a few days early to make a pilgrimage to Zuccotti Park.

I wanted to go down there and see what was going on. And you know what they were talking about? Money and media. I would argue that our friends in the Tea Party are talking about the same things. Underneath the great debate in America today about food, about finance, underneath the polarized positions between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, lie common aspirations for the future. How many of you do not want a world that’s better for your children?

The JBF’s Leadership Awards, which offer prestige but no monetary prize, personified the paradoxes that bedevil the good food movement. Michelle Obama, Alice Waters, and the aforementioned Will Allen were obvious shoo-ins, as was Fedele Bauccio, whose Bon Appétit Management Company has been the gold standard when it comes to sustainability in the food service industry.

Other honorees whose bona fides were impeccable included Debra Eschmeyer, the dynamic co-founder of the just-launched FoodCorps; the venerable Fred Kirschenmann, of the Leopold Center For Sustainable Agriculture and Stone Barns; and author/professor Janet Poppendieck, whose books Sweet Charity and Free For All: Fixing School Food in America offer thoughtful analyses on the root causes of hunger in our society and how to reform our shoddy school lunch program.

But the inclusion of executives from Costco, Unilever, and Sysco no doubt surprised some folks. Forbes writer Nadia Arumugam was pleased to see them included. She said:

… witnessing three high-level executives from three large corporations receive awards for their tangible and results-driven efforts to further the sustainable food movement, was surprising, but extremely heartening.

This is where the pragmatists and the purists collide. As Naomi Klein told Civil Eats, “The food movement is inherently anti-corporate and it is inherently about rebuilding a real economy.”

In honoring corporations who are making incremental changes that merit our support, the JBF challenges that assumption. And what are we to make of the partnerships that two of the honorees, Michelle Obama and Will Allen, have forged with Walmart?

It’s a dilemma that James Beard would have understood. As David Kamp noted in The United States of Arugula, Beard labeled himself a “gastronomic whore” after entering into an endorsement deal with Green Giant to tout their Corn Niblets and wax beans in his recipes:

In his heart, Beard knew that lending his name to processed foods was a betrayal of his core beliefs in seasonality and regionality … but his cooking school required a lot of money to operate, and his ever-increasing number of writing commitments required a full-time retinue of testers and ghostwriters.

Where does compromise end and co-option begin? As Walt Whitman famously said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Originally posted on Grist

The post Haute Cuisine Gone Green: James Beard Foundation Focuses on Sustainability appeared first on Civil Eats.

Poor Uncle Sam’s got a lot on his plate these days: a curdled economy, an overcooked climate, a soured populace. It’s enough to give a national icon a capital case of indigestion. Anti-government sentiment is running so high that half the country seems ready to swap his stars and stripes for tar and feathers.

Sure, Uncle Sam’s always been kind of a drag, with his stern face and wagging finger. But to “nanny-state” haters, he’s a Beltway busybody in drag, democracy’s Mrs. Doubtfire, a Maryland Mary Poppins. If you believe that government is always the problem, never the solution, then you have no use for, say, more stringent food safety regulations, or Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign to combat obesity.

But the new exhibit “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government’s Effect on the American Diet” at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. offers an intriguing display of documents, posters, photos and other artifacts dating from the Revolutionary War to the late 1900s which serve to remind us that our government has long played a crucial role in determining how safe, nutritious and affordable our food supply is.

So, after all this government-mandated meddling with our meals, do we eat better now than we did 100 years ago? Curator Alice Kamps didn’t set out to provide a definitive answer to that question. Her intent was simply to “add to the conversation” that we’re currently having about how Americans eat.

Kamps gives us plenty of fodder for discussion, if not heated debate; the exhibit, which runs until January 3, 2012, treads gingerly around hot-button topics like crop subsidies and factory farming. And it sidesteps the food stamp land mine entirely in an era when the very word “entitlements” is enough to make some folks’ heads explode.

That’s a shame, because there’s a little-known aspect to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), aka food stamps, that encourages self-sufficiency and complements the kitchen garden revival that gets a shout-out in this exhibit, thanks to Michelle Obama and White House chef Sam Kass.

The 1973 Farm Bill included an amendment to the Food Stamp Act that enabled food stamp recipients to use their stamps to buy seeds or vegetable plants. As any gardener knows, a few dollars worth of seeds can yield a return of $50 or even $100 worth of food. Senator James Allen of Alabama, who proposed the amendment, noted that “the recipients of food stamps would thus be able to use their own initiative to produce fruits and vegetables needed to provide variety and nutritional value for their diets.”

The program continues to this day, but remains largely unknown, so few food stamp recipients avail themselves of this chance to literally grow their benefits at no extra cost to Uncle Sam.

Missed opportunities aside, “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” does a fine job of documenting just how consistent our issues with our food chain have stayed even as the way we eat has changed radically over the past century. Consider the following nugget of dietary wisdom from the first federally funded nutrition research, launched in the 1890s. Wilbur Olin Atwater, special agent in charge of nutrition investigations in the Office of Experiment Stations, concluded:

“The evils of overeating may not be felt at once, but sooner or later they are sure to appear–perhaps in an excessive amount of fatty tissue, perhaps in general debility, perhaps in actual disease.”

We knew it then, we know it now. And yet, we eat more than ever, egged on by a schizophrenic USDA whose dual missions–encouraging healthier eating habits and promoting the interests of the food industry–are in eternal conflict.

Check out the USDA’s 1945 Food Group Poster (a precursor to the Food Pyramid, which debuted in 1992). A pie chart lays out “The Basic 7” food groups we should eat from each day for optimal health. Below it lies the message, “In addition to the basic 7, eat any other foods you want.”

No wonder Uncle Sam looks so pained; he’s been getting his arm twisted by lobbyists for nearly 100 years. Take the case of the seed giveaway program Congress created in 1839. The original purpose of the program was to expand the range of foods our farmers grew and encourage them to test rare plant varieties. By 1897, the USDA was distributing 1.1 billion free seed packets to farmers, many of them more common vegetable and flower varieties.

The program was wildly popular with farmers, but a thorn in the side of the growing commercial seed industry. So, in 1929, after intense lobbying from the American Seed Trade Association, Congress scrapped the seed giveaway.

The exhibit does highlight Uncle Sam’s more laudable legacies, such as the passage in 1906 of the Pure Food and Drugs Act and Meat Inspection Act, and the establishment of the School Lunch Program in 1946, which has since become “one of the most popular social welfare programs in our nation’s history,” according to the exhibit catalog. Geez, if that’s how we fund our most popular programs, I’d hate to see what kind of resources we allocate to the ones we like least.

“What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” strikes a nice balance between the wonky, somber food policy and safety segments and more lighthearted elements such as White House menus featuring favorite presidential recipes and those classic wartime propaganda posters encouraging us to can, garden and conserve. Other visual treats include the beautiful botanical illustrations commissioned by the USDA in the late 1800s to document the discoveries of the plant hunters we dispatched to far-off lands in pursuit of new fruit and vegetable varieties.

One of our more notable agricultural explorers, the intrepid, fur-hatted Frank N. Meyer, introduced us to some 2,500 new plants, including the lemon that bears his name. Meyer walked hundreds of miles through China at the turn of the century in his quest to “skim the earth in search of things good for man.”

Now, we outsource the task of finding horticultural breakthroughs to corporations whose motto could be “to scorch the earth in search of things bad for man.” Uncle Sam doesn’t commission botanical illustrations or promote rare seeds anymore, either; for that, I have to rely on my friends at the Hudson Valley Seed Library. Kicky propaganda posters? Back to the private sector–see Joe Seppi’s brilliant Victory Garden of Tomorrow posters on Etsy.

Uncle Sam hasn’t got the time or the budget for such extracurricular activities these days. He’s got his hands full just trying to maintain our food chain’s mediocre status quo. As Mark Bittman noted, Republicans are on a tear to gut vital food safety and nutrition programs in the name of deficit reduction. Nevermind that the programs in question actually save us billions of dollars in health care costs in the long run. What’s cooking, Uncle Sam? Off the record, he’d probably tell you that what’s cooking is our goose.

Originally published by AlterNet

The post What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam? Government and the American Diet appeared first on Civil Eats.

If there’s one thing Michelle Obama and Glenn Beck can agree on, it’s the notion that growing some of your own food is a good idea (though I suspect the Obamas get their seeds from sources other than Beck’s shifty, grifty seed bank sponsor).

You might think that level of bipartisan support would light a fire under our collective (gr)ass. But the much-ballyhooed kitchen garden revival has yet to make a dent in the bentgrass. As NASA reported in 2005, lawns now constitute “the single largest irrigated crop in America,” taking up at least three times the acreage we devote to irrigated corn. Has any nation in the history of mankind ever squandered so many resources to cultivate so much vegetation of such dubious value?

Meanwhile, we currently grow less than 2 percent of our own food.

“This,” Michele Owens declares in her just-published Grow the Good Life: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise, “is not yet enough of a revolution to satisfy me.”

Owens, who cofounded and contributes regularly to the uber-popular, highly respected GardenRant blog, is a self-taught amateur gardener. And that may be why her book is one of the best manifesto/memoirs so far this century on growing your own veggies.

With nearly two decades of experience under her own backyard greenbelt, Owens makes the case that the simple act of growing food is just that–simple. “Years of vegetable gardening have turned me into a complete minimalist who uses nothing besides shovel, seeds and mulch.”

Finally, a Bittman for the backyard! Owens also manages to distill the essence of vegetable gardening into a breezy precept that carries just a whiff of Eau de Pollan: “…give your crops lots of sun, fertile soil, and sufficient water.”

Of course, this kind of admirably concise advice is so simple, Owens admits, that it’s “hardly enough to fill a page or two, let alone a book.”

But, just as the Minimalist has filled multiple massive tomes with recipes short and sweet (or savory), and Pollan has created an apparently infinite franchise around the seven words, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” Owens has no trouble weaving a compelling read from the thread of her Twitter-length thesis. Grow The Good Life begins with an incisive analysis of why so few Americans garden, then rolls full steam ahead into a cheerful campaign to recruit more of her fellow citizens into the cause of homeland (food) security.

Owens knows a thing or two about how to rally the troops; she’s a former speechwriter for, among others, governors William F. Weld and Mario Cuomo. Her day job clearly helped her hone her instincts about what inspires people, as well as what turns them off.

One factor that discourages folks from planting a kitchen garden, Owens believes, is “the incredibly off-putting literature of vegetable gardening,” which she credits with “driving so many would-be gardeners into scrapbooking instead.”

So many gardening how-to’s dwell on all the potential pitfalls a gardener might encounter that “a beginner might reasonably conclude that growing food is nothing but a series of problems.” Problems for which plenty of companies want to sell you solutions, as Owens notes. She’d love to overthrow the military-industrial-horticultural complex that promotes gardening as a form of chemical warfare requiring frequent trips to the gardening aisles of Lowes or Home Depot for reinforcements. If guerrilla gardeners needed a general, I’d nominate Owens.

But she’s equally underwhelmed by the tree-hugging bat guano boosters at the other end of the spectrum (like me) who stockpile their own artisanal arsenals of finely crafted specialty tools and exotic dung from far-flung places.

No bit of conventional gardening wisdom is too sacred to be shredded. In her chipper fashion, she makes mulch of such nuggets as “send your soil off to a lab to be tested”:

…as if the vegetable garden were a delicate chemistry experiment rather than a partnership with nature that’s generally proved successful for the last 10,000 years. By all means, test your soil if you suspect lead or industrial waste–but otherwise? I know a lot of serious gardeners and not a single one has ever had his or her soil tested.

And what of the deeply entrenched notion that you need to double-dig your vegetable beds? Don’t think twice, it’s not right. Aside from being ludicrously labor intensive, it actually messes up the soil’s structure and gives old weed seeds a new lease on life by exposing them to light.

The best way to make a bed your veggies will thrive in, Owens says, is also the easiest–quite simply, to employ the no-dig method known as sheet mulching or lasagna gardening.

Not that Owens has anything against working up a sweat; on the contrary, she notes that gardening gives you a workout that’s as good–or better–any routine you could do at the gym. And as a bonus, you’ll be rewarded with good things to eat and a nicer yard.

“When I’m done cleaning out a flower bed, I’ll sit back and admire my work,” a doctor who studies the effects of gardening on aging told Owens. “If I’ve done 30 minutes on a treadmill, I don’t stand there admiring the treadmill.”

Owens’ common sense stance that you don’t need a garden expert to show you how food grows echoes the refrain that “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” But though Dylan would presumably prefer not to be the inspiration for the bomb-building revolutionaries who took their name from his song, I suspect Owens wouldn’t mind terribly if her book ignited an explosion of homegrown terroirists and seed bombers.

Grow The Good Life is less a breath of fresh air than a blast of gale force gumption. Gardening newbies, seasoned seedsters and the somewhere-in-betweensters will all find much to enjoy in Owen’s eloquent, witty and empowering guide, which redefines the joy of gardening for our fraught and fractious times:

…in a world where so much is beyond the control of any one of us–as much as I’d like to, I cannot personally rid us of the internal combustion engine and replace it with something less noisy or dirty or less likely to turn a beautiful landscape into a field of asphalt–there is a lot of pleasure to be had in reshaping the little piece of earth that is under our control. Thanks to my garden, I can take a small stand against everything I find witless, lazy, and ugly in our civilization and propose my own more lively alternative.

I’d love to see Owens offered a spot on Oprah’s sofa, but at the very least, Grow The Good Life deserves a slot on the bookshelf of every dreamer who’s got visions of sugar-sweet plum tomatoes dancing in his or her head. This is the book that could bring those dreams to fruition.

Originally published on AlterNet

The post <em>Grow the Good Life</em>: A Manifesto for Uncomplicated Gardening appeared first on Civil Eats.

For a self-proclaimed minimalist with a minuscule kitchen, Mark Bittman’s had maximum impact. He’s the digital dervish of the New York Times Dining section: his recipes ricochet around the blogosphere, his cooking videos go viral, he’s constantly tweaking his How To Cook Everything app, he tweets and blogs regularly.

And, he pens op-eds exhorting us to eat less meat and embrace a plant-based diet. So, it wasn’t exactly a shock to hear that the Minimalist is moving on, departing from Dining and bringing his “lessmeatatarian,” ‘go-vegan-till-six’ advocacy to the Times op-ed page.

It’s a natural progression, in fact, because Bittman’s actually been touting tatsoi and pushing purslane for more than a decade. His How To Cook Everything books may be a kitchen bookshelf staple, but the Bittman book I reach for most often–and the one that transformed the way I eat–is a tattered, soy sauce-splashed paperback from 1995 called Leafy Greens: An A-To-Z Guide to 30 Types of Greens Plus 200 Delicious Recipes.

The introduction begins, “It’s no secret that vegetables, grains and fruits are the future of the American diet.”

No, but it seems to be a secret that Bittman ever wrote this book! It’s been out-of-print for ages, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why Macmillan doesn’t reprint Leafy Greens, because it’s simply the best guide to greens that I’ve seen to this day. It demystifies obscure greens and celebrates overlooked ones.

I stumbled across it at the Strand bookstore in NYC when it first came out and was intrigued by the recipes featuring exotic Asian greens, sea vegetables, and common garden weeds–none of which were then in my culinary repertoire.

The recipes are classic Bittman: a few basic ingredients that you can adapt to suit your fancy and your pantry. Don’t have kale? Let collards or mustard greens pinch hit. Can’t find cress? Make do with mizuna. Virtually every recipe in the book offers alternative suggestions.

Leafy Greens introduced me to the whole family of sweet, crunchy Asian cabbages and spicy mustard greens. It taught me that beet greens and swiss chard are interchangeable.

Bittman also inspired me to grow amaranth, orach, and cultivated strains of purslane, dandelions and watercress in my garden, and to harvest their wild cousins instead of composting them. In a “Note to the Gardener” at the end of the book, he declares, “Everyone who has a bit of dirt should grow greens,” and lists his favorite seed sources.

As an advocate for Meatless Mondays and the axis of eat well– i.e., fruits, veggies, and whole grains–I’ve been delighted to see Bittman use his tremendous influence to encourage folks to become more ecologically enlightened eaters. As Slow Food USA President Josh Viertel once declared at an Earth Institute conference hosted by Jeffrey Sachs–who sadly subscribes to the notion that industrial agriculture is the only solution to world hunger–“We don’t need another Green Revolution. What we need is a Leafy Green Revolution!”

I couldn’t agree more, and I know just who to put in charge of it. If only we could get Macmillan to reprint the manifesto.

Originally published on Huffington Post

Photo: Evan Sung

The post Mark Bittman: Leafy Green Revolutionary? appeared first on Civil Eats.