“We explored how we can help one another, as we’re impacted by food inequity in similar and distinct ways,” says Brown.

Heber Brown during a tour of Browntown Farms.

The ultimate goal is to build a sustainable, community-centered food system anchored by Black churches and Black food producers and led by those most directly affected by economic inequity. In both places, access to healthy, fresh, affordable food can be challenging due to what Brown and other activists call “food apartheid.”

“We feel that apolitical and ‘color-blind’ approaches to addressing food inequity fly in the face of the statistics, which clearly show that Black people are disproportionately impacted in a negative way by food apartheid, environmental racism, and discrimination in planning and public policy,” says Brown. “To ignore these realities in [so-called] food justice work is a gross miscalculation at best.”

The network provides guidance and ongoing support for people starting gardens on church-owned lands, finding and screening volunteers for those gardens, establishing pop-up produce stands before and after-church services in the Baltimore metro area, and connecting with Black farmers to stock those stands.

In this way, BCFSN operates outside of the charity model. Instead, it calls itself a “self-help” organization, intent on challenging what Brown describes as “the harmful and dehumanizing dynamics of initiatives that make it almost a requirement to be in a posture of subservience and dependence on the benevolence of those who have the resources.”

Since 2015, BCFSN has expanded to include 10 churches across greater Baltimore and five Black-owned farms in Baltimore, North Carolina, and Virginia. This year, as interest grows, it’s on track to double those numbers and expand the network into Washington, D.C. and Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

A Garden and an Uprising

BCFSN began with a garden and an uprising. Seven years ago, Brown, now 37, was a new pastor at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church. One day, as he was walking toward the church, contemplating how to help members of his congregation who had ended up in the hospital for diet-related problems, he had a vision of the front yard lawn transformed into a vegetable garden.

A senior member of Pleasant Hope Baptist Church works in Maxine’s Garden.

“The land wasn’t in regular use; it was just being cut and made presentable so the people walking or driving by could appreciate a well-manicured lawn,” says Brown. His idea was enthusiastically embraced by the congregation—particularly the seniors—and within a year, the land was tilled and transformed into a productive garden. Now, it produces upwards of 1,100 pounds of produce each year. For the first five years, the food was given away to church and community members. This model wasn’t financially sustainable and now they sell the produce at prices generally lower than local markets.

A few years after they started gardening, the city of Baltimore was embroiled in violence and chaos after Freddie Gray died while in police custody. The ensuing uprising, born of routine discrimination and abuse toward low-income Black residents at the hands of the Baltimore Police Department, shut down parts of the city, making it difficult for some residents to access food.

Food was already the calling card of the Pleasant Hope congregation. When the church started to receive pleas from hungry people, members jumped into action. Brown contacted Aleya Fraser, a farmer with the Black Dirt Farm Collective, and she and other farmer friends collected fresh produce for distribution. Pleasant Hope transformed into a command center where the food was processed, put on a truck, and driven to street corners across the city. With this, another vision was born: a “soil-to-sanctuary” program linking Black churches and Black farmers.

Church congregants at the Pleasant Hope Baptist Church monthly community market.

“While the nation saw images of bottles thrown and windows broken, the Black Church Food Security Network was being born,” says Brown.

Black Churches Countering Long-Running Discrimination

Brown hopes the network can respond to the many challenges Black farmers face—from land grabs in the South to systemic discrimination at the USDA to property passed informally to heirs without a will (the leading cause of Black involuntary land loss), and lack of access to capital. In 1910, 218,000 Black farmers were registered as owners of 15 million acres of land, but by 2007, that number had shrunk to 28,000. Black farmers on 2.9 million acres of land, according to the Center for Social Inclusion.

BCFSN presents a chance to offer Black farmers a sustainable business model by creating the infrastructure—such as farm stands—and consumer demand from within Black church congregations to support their businesses. And, in many ways, the demand was already there.

“Many of the communities where we are active have suffered under the political violence of food apartheid for years, and have been crying for something to be done,” says Brown.

Fifth-generation cotton farmer Julius Tillery.

Julius Tillery is a fifth-generation cotton and vegetable farmer in North Carolina who has partnered with BCFSN. The impact has already been tremendous, he says. “Many Black farmers have been burned by planting too much and then not having interested parties wanting to buy their products,” says Tillery. “[The network] has given Black rural farmers confidence that the institution will have their backs when they stretch themselves to plant as much as possible to sell.”

Tillery also sees the clear benefit for the customers, who have a new opportunity to build more intimate relationships with healthy, local food. “They are trusting that good food is better for them and their health, not because some academic says so, but because they can actually feel and taste the love in the food and see who produced it.”

The explicit emphasis on Black churches is intentional, says Brown. Even as private Black land owners were drained of their resources, Black churches continue to own property across the U.S. Longevity is another factor; some Black Christian congregations go back centuries, resilient in the face of an onslaught of traumas.

“They have lasted through two World Wars, the Great Depression, racist violence, and the lynching of our family members,” says Brown. “They have withstood fire-bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church—those little girls killed in Sunday school, and [the murder] of Pastor Clementa Pinckney in Charleston. I wanted to make sure that our organization was in the bosom of an institution that could stand the test of time.”

Black churches, he says, are a powerful cultural and socio-political force that has been overlooked in many food and environmental circles—they sit in a blind spot of the so-called Good Food Movement.

“I went to conferences where nobody was talking about African-American churches; they were not at the table,” he says. “Thankfully our work is helping to change that. There is a whole world out there, a whole universe, that we should be more sensitive to.”

Building Food Sovereignty in Black Communities

Maxine White, executive director of the Coalition for Healthier Eating lives by the motto, “The person who controls the food controls the mind and the wellness of the body.”

Her food hub in North Carolina was a stop on the Pleasant Hope day trip. White’s organization, which has trailers and other key food-distribution infrastructure, has partnered with BCFSN to get fresh vegetables, fruits, meat, poultry, and eggs produced by local Black producers to Black churches and community members along the East Coast.

“Prior to the whitewashing of food production, everything our ancestors produced was done in a healthy and sustainable way,” says White. “Black society then began to rely less on providing for ourselves, and more on what the big grocery store owners—most of whom are white—could provide us to feed ourselves. BCFSN is returning the old feeding ways back to our community. People are eating seasonally, preserving what is reasonable to preserve, and Black producers are producing almost year-round what comes to the table—on their own terms.”

Reverend Heber Brown returned from the trip to the Virginia farm and North Carolina food hub with produce, 65 dozen free-range eggs, and multiple cases of locally produced strawberry jam to sell at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church’s monthly community market, which targets African-Americans from diverse socio-economic backgrounds.

Over 100 people attended the market, which also included a vegan juicer, a bakery, herbal medicine and cooking workshops, and vending by farms such as The Greener Garden, a local, chemical-free urban farm. It was a rousing success; Brown said the eggs sold out within 45 minutes, followed closely by the produce.

“One of our urban farmers sold out of her produce in less than two hours, whereas she usually has to vend for six hours at the city’s farmers’ market and sometimes doesn’t even break even,” Brown says.

All signs point to the beginning of a national movement, says farmer Julius Tillery.

“I believe that Black economic development through food will build bridges for many Black people to be active in their churches and support small Black business again,” says Tillery. “In faith, I believe BCFSN will be leaders in that movement.”

All photos courtesy of BCFSN.

The post Black Churches, Powerful Cultural Forces, Set Their Sights on Food Security appeared first on Civil Eats.

Originally from Bangladesh, Kashem launched his farming career at Florida International University. When a lease on state-owned land didn’t pan out, he turned his attention to an overgrown four-acre piece of land owned by the church he had attended with his wife Erin since 2013. The 28-year-old asked the church’s vestry if he might farm the land.

At first, some of the elders balked, but they eventually agreed to allow Kashem to sign a three-year-lease, which he hopes to extend to 10 years. In exchange, he promised the church 15 percent of the farm’s profits along with outreach through farm-to-table dinners and cooking classes. Some of the church members even helped him pay to fence off the land.

“As a much younger person, it was challenging to convince a very old congregation to see the benefits of farming—a lot of them associated it with poverty,” says Kashem. “At first, I was very upset—I mean, this is a barren field, and I’m trying to make it profitable for the church. I had to do my best to show them this is what I love to do.”

Moses Kashem of St. Simons Farm. (Photo courtesy of The Urban Vegetable Project)

Across the nation and around the world, churches own untold millions of acres of land similar to the ones Kashem turned into St. Simons Farm. The Catholic Church alone owns an estimated 177 million acres globally, making it one of the largest nongovernmental landowners in the world. One Episcopal parish was revealed to own 14 acres of real estate in Manhattan, worth more than $2 billion, after a 2013 lawsuit forced the church’s council to become financially transparent.

But most church land holdings aren’t located in high-priced cities, they’re in countless rural locations from Maine to California—with land deeded over in wills by former parishioners or purchased over the years by church leaders.

“Religious bodies sit on a lot of legacy land,” says Reverend Nurya Love Parish, an Episcopal priest, sustainable food advocate, and a leader of a burgeoning Christian Food Movement. And yet, she points to the fact that, from a religious perspective, land “is part of Creation and needs to be managed with wisdom.”

In a sign that this movement is starting to gather steam, Parish, Kashem, and other members of a diverse array of religious communities gathered earlier this year at what is believed to be the first event focused on connecting farmers with land, in service to their communities.

The Interdenominational Movement to Connect Faith and Land

In March, 35 leaders from across the U.S. who are “working at the intersection of faith, ecological stewardship, and farming” gathered for the inaugural FaithLands event at Paicenes Ranch in California’s Central Valley. Within this ecosystem of faiths, the participants spent three days strategizing about how to inspire faith communities to use their land in ways that promote and strengthen ecological and human health, local and sustainable food and farming communities, and reparative justice.

“Nothing like this has happened before,” says Steve Schwartz, executive director of the Interfaith Sustainable Food Collaborative, and a member of FaithLand’s core organizing committee. “Sometimes when you see folks of different religions or denominations in the same room, they can’t avoid talking about where they differ. To lean in together to work on something we all care about—land stewardship and people making a living while feeding their neighbors—was a breath of fresh air.”

Attendees of the inaugural FaithLands event at Pacienes Ranch in California’s Central Valley. (Photo courtesy of The Greenhorns)

Schwartz has worked on solutions to the problem of land access since his days as the director of California FarmLink, which helps farmers—particularly beginning and immigrant farmers—gain access to land and financing. In 2017, he started to look into partnering farmers with faith-based organizations. Schwartz reached out to a longtime ally, Severine von Tscharner Fleming, director of The Greenhorns, a sustainable agriculture organization that advocates for young farmers.

“These partnerships were starting to form in various places, but the movement was missing infrastructure,” says Fleming. “We saw benefit in some sort of orientation, interpretation, sharing of stories, and networking.”

Fleming views churches as “untrained land trusts in biblical clothing,” in part because U.S. congregations, parishes, and dioceses aren’t required to pay taxes on their land.

As congregations across many faiths see their memberships get older—the average age of members of Anglican, Methodist, Episcopalian, and Presbyterian U.S. denominations is between 56 and 59—the question arises of what will happen to land owned by the church, especially in predominantly religious rural America, where the consolidation of agriculture has contributed to a shrinking economy and dwindling populations.

“As we experiment with new ways of stewarding, restoring, and accessing land, church-owned properties are a place for possibilities to unfold,” says Fleming.

The Greenhorns and Schwartz were joined in this effort by Reverend Nurya Love Parish, Kathy Ruhf from Land for Good, Andrew Kang Bartlett from the Presbyterian Hunger Program, and others.

“As a religious leader, it matters to me that we care about Creation,” says Parish. “We can’t do that without the help of scientists. We can’t do that without the help of people in the food equity, food access, and food sovereignty movements. We can’t do that by ourselves. These are tables we need to be at. Yet, too often [church leaders] isolate and silo ourselves from these wider robust and dynamic conversations.”

Nuraya Love Parish, co-founder and executive director at Plainsong Farm & Ministry. (Photo courtesy of Plainsong Farm.)

Three years ago, Parish created Plainsong Farm and Ministry with young farmers Mike and Bethany Edwardson on fallow acreage in Western Michigan. The land was owned by Parish’s family, but is sponsored by the church, and she’d like it to become a demonstration project for what’s possible on a wider scale. “It was 10 acres and a house,” she says. “The church has land like that hundreds and thousands of times over.”

Plainsong Farm focuses on one acre of bio-intensive and organic cultivation of vegetables, fruits, and herbs. In addition to a CSA, they host both secular public environmental education workshops and farm ministry programs. For Parish, the farm answers the question: “How do we tend our land as part of our natural growth in living into the values that we profess?” She’d also like to see religion renewed and reinvigorated by more direct engagement with land through food.

Bethany and Mike Edwardson, co-founders and farmers at Plainsong Farm & Ministry. (Photo courtesy of Plainsong Farm.)

“Our scripture starts with Genesis in the garden and ends with Revelation in a garden in the city—with Jesus in the middle inviting us to a meal,” says Parish. “If we’re seeking to transform our food system in a way that’s going to be beneficial not only for ourselves, but for our great grandchildren, how can the church put [its] land into service?”

Church Lands as Public Lands

Jillian Hishaw attended FaithLands as an agricultural law expert and is the founder of Family Agriculture Resource Management Services (FARMS), an organization dedicated to helping Black farmers stay on their land. She commends the gathering for uniting diverse voices from the faith and sustainable food communities. She also asks why some people were left out of the conversation entirely.

“There weren’t any Native folks or tribes there,” says Hishaw. “At the end of the day, they were the original land holders. Is the church willing to gift back some of those land holdings that were originally owned by Native people?”

In Hishaw’s view, the church is a public service entity, meaning church-owned land is for public use, not just for its members. So who truly owns the land? “Vacant church lots, land, and buildings held tight by hierarchy and doctrine is squeezing the life out of the church,” wrote Hishaw in a blog post. “There is an urgent need to help the church transition to a new life. Personally, this is what the [FaithLands] convening symbolized to me.”

At the same time, Hishaw has seen firsthand the complexities of working with churches. She warns that the process can be hindered by restrictions and long timeframes due to protocol and leadership.

FaithLands attendees left with a list of commitments to pursue. The Greenhorns are creating a guide to working with local churches, and they’ll present on the topic at upcoming EcoFarm and Biodynamic Association conferences. Inspired by the New York City-based 596 Acres, a group of Catholics committed to mapping Catholic Church-owned land that might be suitable for sustainable agriculture, a steering committee coalesced to articulate the shared values and theological principles (across faith groups) that inform and inspire the FaithLands movement. And farmers like Moses Kashem will coach other beginning farmers on forming fruitful land partnerships with churches, especially when it comes to securing long-term leases.

Regardless of what comes of FaithLands, Reverend Parish says she’s awed by what she’s seen so far. And she thinks the nascent movement could mark the beginning of an important set of shifts in the way faith-based groups see land use.

“This is something that’s wide and large,” she says. “Nobody has the answers yet. It’s a discovery.”

Top photo: A rural farm and church in Vermont. (Photo credit: Sean Pavone/iStock)

The post The Movement to Turn Church Land into Farmland appeared first on Civil Eats.

In October, the Tubbs Fire burned hot and fast through the preserve on its way to hopping the six-lane highway, leaving behind a scorched landscape of Himalayan blackberry roots and the black skeletons of wild plum trees and coyote bush. Yet, for the most part, the dogbane survived. In some formerly vegetation-choked areas of the preserve, the spindly plants are all that remain.

“The dogbane needs fire—that’s what makes it grow tall and strong,” says Willie, a native Pomo, Walaeki, and Wintu teacher and a core organizer of the Buckeye Gathering, an annual nature-based, paleo-technology meeting in Northern California. Researchers have found that dogbane sprouts quickly after fire and can become more abundant. Burning actually stimulates new, straight growth.

Edward Willie. (Photo © Leilani Clark)

Less than a mile away from the preserve, block after block of ruined homes, businesses, and cars stand as a reminder of the conflagration that wreaked havoc across three Northern California counties. Despite the scope of the tragedy, Willie sees regeneration and even radical hope in the region’s fire ecology.

“It’s a happy [dogbane] patch now,” he says, as he demonstrates how to peel the taut fibers from the plant’s stalk. “It’s filled with life. New sprouts are already coming up. It’s a California plant, a fire plant. It was made to survive this.”

There is no silver lining to a fire like those that struck Sonoma and Napa counties in October, or the still-burning Thomas Fire in Southern California, which has burned 281,900 acres to become the largest California wildfire in modern recorded history. But for people like Willie and Erik Ohlsen, an ecological designer and director of the Permaculture Skills Center in Sebastopol, the North Bay fires are a wake-up call, a chance to proactively address the way the plants and animals of Northern California, and most of the Golden State, have co-evolved with fire—and to rebuild these communities with fire in mind.

Others go further, saying that poor planning and land management practices turned a natural feature of chaparral landscapes into a catastrophic force, leaving in its wake $3 billion in estimated damages. The city of Santa Rosa alone has already blown through $5 million from their general fund to fight the fires and the massive recovery effort has just begun.

Fight Fire with Fire

At a panel on Fire Resilient Landscapes and Management at the Sebastopol Grange in early November, Ohlsen told a group of farmers, land managers, and slow-food advocates that it was time for Californians to reckon with the relationship between humans, land, and fire. “It seems that as a culture we’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in a fire ecology,” he said at the event. “How can we avoid having such destructive wake-up calls?”

His assertion is shared by Sasha Berleman, a fire ecologist with the Audubon Canyon Ranch (ACR), an environmental conservation and education organization headquartered at Bouverie Preserve in the Sonoma County town of Glen Ellen. “All of our plant communities depend on fire as part of their life-cycle,” says Berleman. “Many of them depend on fire that occurs more frequently than we’ve allowed it to burn.”

Dogbane stalks. (Photo courtesy of Edward Willie.)

Native Americans knew this, Berleman says, and used fire to manage landscapes for food and textile production. As David Carle writes in Introduction to Fire in California, indigenous California tribes set fire to the landscape to reduce the threat of wildfires to their villages, to stimulate the sprouting of the stick-straight dogbane stems needed for basketry and tools, to control insects, fungus, and pathogens, and to encourage the growth of seeds.

Berleman was in the early stages of launching a fire ecology program at ACR when the Nuns Fire swept through the Bouverie Preserve on October 9, destroying 80 percent of the organization’s structures. A trained wildland firefighter, Berleman spent hours successfully defending architect David Bouverie’s former home along with the Last House, where famed cookbook author M.F.K. Fisher spent her final years. Last May, Berleman conducted a few initial small, prescribed burns to reduce the fuel load on grasslands on the preserve. An early, informal assessment showed that these areas burned less intensely than other parts, and helped moderate the fire’s progression.

“Fire can’t be prevented, it can only be postponed,” says Berleman. She advocates for two solutions to future fire threats. First, an “all hands on deck” cooperative approach to fuels treatments on private and public land: prescribed fire, broadcast burning, mechanical thinning, and grazing. Second, improved public education on the integral role of fire in California ecosystems. Recently, the state provided her funding to establish a highly trained, interagency fire crew to implement technically approved prescribed fuels treatments and controlled burns on private land in Sonoma County starting in the fall of 2018.

“We have a chance to reactivate our stewardship role,” she says. Now, she just needs to get fire-averse landowners and a smoke-wary public on board.

Grazing: Land Management’s Missing Link?

Marie Hoff, a sheep owner and grazer in Mendocino County, says that grazing is the missing link in managing rangelands for fire safety. For centuries, the California landscape was populated by large grazing animals like deer and elk, but those populations have severely declined with widespread human settlement.

“If you don’t graze, it creates tinder,” says Hoff.

Hoff shepherds 20 Ouessants, a primitive breed from France with a preference for dry, brushy environments. Hoff’s grazing operation has two distinct functions. Summer through fall, the sheep reduce fuel loads in hilly open rangeland. Come October and rain, they transition into weed abatement on agricultural land: vineyards, orchards, and farms. In the spring, Hoff breeds the sheep and processes their fleece into yarn.

Hoff’s sheep grazing in Sonoma County. (Photo courtesy of Capella Grazing)

With the fire recovery phase in full swing, Hoff is working to bring together stakeholders like University of California Cooperative Extension to position agrarians as a solution to managing for a fire ecology on public lands, open spaces, and regional parks. Her small flock, while not big enough to address the scope of the need, will provide a model for projects in Mendocino and Sonoma counties, followed by larger-scale grazing contracts based on mapping for high fire-prone areas.

“I’d like to get some of that off the ground this year, which will hopefully lead to state funding for contract grazing,” says Hoff. “The fire season, and all that comes with it, is going to be more and more of an issue in the future. We need to manage our landscape.”

Did Poor Planning Increase the Fire’s Devastation?

Fuels treatment, or a lack thereof, isn’t the only factor that’s been blamed for the 2017 wildfires’ catastrophic impacts. The question of land use and development in areas with high fire risk has also come up regularly. Gaye LeBaron, a columnist for the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, wrote in the Washington Post about how Santa Rosa ignored nature’s warning by developing thousands of homes within the same footprint as the infamous Hanly Fire of 1964. The difference, wrote LeBaron, is that back then, “there were very few houses in the area that burned. As the city limits extended and the population increased by 135,000, the open land in that earlier fire corridor became a destination for developers.”

Despite protests, certain land planning rules were overlooked, including a ridge-top ordinance that prohibited development on the hills above Santa Rosa—a debate that’s come back to haunt city planners and engineers. Did these large homes built on tight lots contribute to the fire’s intensity?

“Bigger homes, closer together is a recipe for more fuel on the landscape,” says Gregory L. Simon, an associate professor of geography and environmental sciences at the University of Colorado and author of Flame and Fortune in the American West. “In my opinion, we shouldn’t be building homes in areas of high fire risk at all. It’s not a matter of building fire-safe construction or zoning in certain ways. Simply because of the loss of life involved and the risk to first responders.

At the same time, Simon doesn’t foresee any reduction in the demand for new homes in the Bay Area, fire risk or not. What’s more, developed land is worth much more than undeveloped land, whether to developers, who can subdivide it, or to city and county governments that benefit from property taxes. So what can be done?

From extensive study of the Oakland/Berkeley Fire of 1991—formerly the most destructive fire, in terms of property damage in California history, but now outranked by the Tubbs Fire—Simon says homes rebuilt in fire risk zones should be constructed according to the most stringent standards, with the municipal infrastructure to handle wildfire events. Water pipes should be broad and able to accommodate the large amounts of water needed to fight a fire. Roads need to be wide enough to accommodate fire trucks. And above-ground, exposed power lines, which carry a host of hazards, from explosion to blocking roadways, should be moved underground.

The California State Public Utilities Commission has yet to identify what caused the Tubbs fire, but signs point to a malfunctioning power line, one owned either by Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) or a privately managed one, as the company contended in a November 2017 court filing. [Update: On Jan. 3, a report from state regulators detailed the proximity of damaged PG&E equipment to the places where the Napa and Sonoma county fires began.]

A group of residents in Ventura County, which was hard-hit by the Thomas Fire, filed a lawsuit in December alleging that Southern California Edison Co., the area’s largest electrical supplier, ”failed to maintain overhead electric and communications facilities,” which may have led, in part, to the ensuing firestorm.

“If we understand that an area has a fire risk, but, for whatever reason, the city wanted to develop that area, the least they should do is make sure that this municipal infrastructure components are fire-compatible,” says Simon.

For her part, fire ecologist Sasha Berleman says this is a crucial time for Californians to acknowledge the role of fire in the state’s ecology, wherever their home is located. Maybe it’s time to learn from the dogbane.

“We have an opportunity to change what happens next time,” says Berleman. “We live in a fire-adapted landscape and we need to make ourselves a fire-adapted people.”

Top photo © Leilani Clark.

The post Fire Ecology’s Lessons for a More Resilient Future appeared first on Civil Eats.

While the family fled to the nearby town of Windsor, the rental they had just moved into—at $1,850 per month, a bargain in pricey Sonoma County—burned to the ground. Their home was one of over 4,600 destroyed by the Tubbs Fire, the most devastating wildfire in California history.

And now, Vivienda—along with an estimated 38,500 other undocumented residents who have made homes in Sonoma County—finds himself back at square one: In addition to his home and belongings, the 45-year-old construction worker also lost his tools and his work truck in the fire.

“It takes tools to make money to support my family and it takes money to buy my tools,” says Vivienda. “Even though I would like my own place to live, this is my main priority so I can go back to work full-time.”

Sonoma County’s economy is built on industries that depend on immigrant labor. In addition to construction, which supports Vivienda’s family, Sonoma is famous for its wine, food, and hospitality. North Bay Jobs with Justice estimates that half of the area’s largest food processors rely on the 80-percent local and immigrant workforce. In the wake of the wildfires, the undocumented residents who were living an already-precarious existence now face even less certainty.

The most well-known relief funds have raised millions of dollars in the aftermath of the fires. Yet North Bay immigrant rights advocates worry that undocumented immigrants essential to Sonoma County’s economy will be left out. Some fire victims aren’t applying for help out of fear that information provided on Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) applications will be shared with immigration agents. Others don’t have the required identification to cash relief checks at the bank.

In response, a few short days after the fires began, a coalition of concerned organizations launched UndocuFund, a relief effort specifically for undocumented residents. They hope the collaborative effort will help Vivienda and others stay afloat during the long, difficult recovery period ahead.

The Scope of the Need

Some of the region’s most vulnerable are the farmworkers who worked in vineyards, and make up the backbone of the $600 million wine industry. According to the Sonoma County Farmworker Health Survey (FHS), the county’s agricultural sector employs between 4,000 and 6,000 permanent farmworkers each year—the majority of whom are Latino and undocumented.

Christy Lubin. (Photo © Roman Cho)

“The vineyards won’t get replanted until spring, after the ground thaws and they can put new plants in,” says Christy Lubin, director of the Graton Day Labor Center, which provides access to training, education, health care, and legal resources for Sonoma County’s immigrant workforce. That means the grapes won’t be ready to pick for three years. “Plus, there will be more competition for the jobs that do exist,” she adds.

In addition to being displaced by the fires, farmworkers already face a range of challenges. They experience higher rates of occupational injuries and a higher prevalence of chronic disease than other workers. A farmworker health survey found that a lack affordable housing options also has a negative impact on their health.

In addition to the lack of financial and social safety-net services that always complicate the lives of the undocumented, fears about immigration agents visiting evacuation shelters and shelter workers who insisted on seeing IDs for admittance have left many struggling to recover. But UndocuFund aims to provide wide-ranging aid to help people get back on their feet.

UndocuFund’s Roots in a Crisis

Like Vivienda and thousands of others in Santa Rosa, Mara Ventura, lead organizer at North Bay Jobs with Justice, was forced to evacuate her home early Monday morning as the fires began. After dropping bags at a friend’s house, she headed straight to the nearest shelter to offer assistance.

Right away, she noticed that Latino families weren’t getting the same attention as other fire victims, possibly because volunteers didn’t speak Spanish. Lubin echoed Ventura’s observations at other shelters. What’s more, a few Latino families, particularly those who are undocumented, had gone to nearby beaches to camp. The evacuees to the chilly coast needed camping gear—sleeping bags, lanterns, tents. Everyone needed food. And since most had run out of their houses with nothing but their pajamas on their backs, they needed money.

Lubin and Ventura quickly deployed Spanish-speaking volunteers to shelters, and the Day Labor Center became a hub to receive donations—from cash to food to sleeping bags and blankets. During that first chaotic week, Lubin handed out money for cell phone bills, gas, and other essentials, but soon she and Ventura discussed the need for a fund that would help undocumented immigrants—who might have trouble getting unemployment compensation and access to FEMA—get back on their feet over the longer term.

Rincon Valley firefighters rest in the archway and against the fireplace of a home on Wikiup Drive in Santa Rosa after the Tubbs firestorm swept through Oct. 8 and 9. (Photo credit: Anne Belden)

On Wednesday morning, as the fires still raged in Sonoma and Napa counties, they met with leaders from the North Bay Organizing Project, another grassroots community coalition that works with the immigrant community. Lubin reached out to a connection at Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees (GCIR), which agreed to be the fiscal agent. Less than 72 hours after the fires ignited, the coalition had launched UndocuFund.

“Christy’s leadership, her history, and her work in this community allowed for all of the most important people to be at the table right away,” says Ventura. “And we never would have been able to launch the fund within 48 hours if it weren’t for GCIR and Exchange Bank,” which expedited the process and made it possible for UndocuFund recipients to cash their checks without extra fees or government-issued identification by using a thumbprint and phone number.

Within a week, they’d also set up an advisory committee. “We wanted all of the decisions around applications, eligibility, how we would grant, and how much, to be decided by leaders in the undocumented community,” says Ventura.

“We hope that UndocuFund can provide a basic safety net,” says Davin Cardenas, lead organizer at North Bay Organizing Project. “But, overall, we hope that we can rebuild Sonoma County as a place where undocumented people—and working-class people—can not only survive, but thrive and raise healthy families. This is our opportunity to be courageous in the reconstruction of the county.”

Still, Cardenas points out that a truly equitable recovery would require that city and county officials and those involved in the reconstruction address the existing affordable housing crisis in the area—where a 1-percent vacancy rate has been seriously exacerbated by the loss of 5 percent of the housing stock to the fires. Before the devastation, some families in Coffey Park—a close-knit neighborhood of working- and middle-class families that burned to the ground—were living two and three to a house to make ends meet.

“I think disaster capitalists are looking at this moment as a chance to enact the policies they’ve been desiring for the last half-decade,” says Cardenas. “Unless we start thinking about affordable housing, and other protections in the rebuilding of our neighborhoods, we run a great risk of Sonoma County becoming a completely white playground for the rich, and losing our working-class population—especially our undocumented population—altogether.”

Reimagining Support Systems

On November 2, Omar Medina, the newly hired UndocuFund project coordinator, presented the first official relief check to a Santa Rosa family of six that lost everything. The vineyard where the sole wage earner worked was also destroyed in the fires. This rush emergency case provided the family, which includes three young children and a newborn, with a deposit for a low-income apartment.

It had already been a busy week. On Halloween, Medina coordinated a training for 21 intake workers and they were in the process of finalizing the process where needs would be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Intakes happened at the Day Labor Center and other places that serve immigrants. If need be, intake workers also visit people in their homes. The first official intake clinic on November 11 saw 115 families apply for assistance.

“Someone will meet with you, fill out the questions, and figure out what your needs are,” says Medina. “It could be financial. It could be connecting folks with resources they might not have tapped into.”

This is part of what makes UndocuFund unprecedented, Ventura says. It is not just a fire-relief fund, it’s also an opportunity to coordinate existing support systems for Sonoma County’s vulnerable undocumented. For example, UndocuFund has partnered with Operation Access, a grant-based organization that provides surgeries and specialty medical care for undocumented community members.

“Say, if you have a hernia; you don’t necessarily need to get money from [UndocuFund] to pay for that, we’ll connect you to Operation Access,” says Ventura. “Let’s look at the next real needs on your list. So people aren’t choosing between food and surgeries and paying their rent. We want to make sure we are pulling resources together as a hub for people to actually get long-term support.”

Nearly $2 million has been raised from a combination of individual donors and matching grants since UndocuFund’s launch. The organizers say $5 million is needed to have a real impact.

The Road Ahead

Seven weeks after the fire, Agustin Vivienda is still in survival mode. He’s applied for help from the North Bay Fire Relief Fund, which has raised over $16 million, but he hasn’t received funds yet. He’s also interested in applying to UndocuFund. His daughter is in her first semester at Sonoma State University and to help her settle in, he gave her most of his savings, just before the wildfire swept through. Either way, “it’s going to be twice as hard for a family like mine to get back on our feet again,” he says.

Without support, Vivienda and others may have no choice but to leave the area—uprooting their families and even further slowing the recovery of industries that rely on labor. And that’s where UndocuFund’s bigger ambition could play a key role in making the region’s recovery a success for everyone.

The post From Sonoma County’s Ashes, a Fund for Undocumented Immigrants Rises appeared first on Civil Eats.

But, take a closer look and you’ll see that these women are engaged in a quiet, often unrecognized, form of revolution: the act of propagating and preserving locally grown and adapted seeds with an eye towards food security for the surrounding community and future generations.

“We’re like the grandmothers, protecting the seed,” says Sara McCamant, who in her early 50s is the youngest of the three. McCamant is one of 10 core volunteers at the Community Seed Exchange, an all-volunteer organization dedicated to growing and giving away locally grown, open-pollinated seeds. Seeds, these grassroots activists say, are an overlooked link to building a resilient local food system.

For the last eight years, the seed exchange has steadily grown both as a repository of seed and a seed-saving network. They do this through work parties, workshops, and a library that offers—for free—about 200 varieties of 100 percent locally grown, open-pollinated seeds.

Sarah McCamant (left) and Liz Brown (right), founding volunteers with the Community Seed Exchange. (Photo credit: Michelle Feileacan)

On a recent visit, the shelves of the seed library are filled with jars of flower, vegetable, legume, and grain seeds, from bachelor’s buttons to barley. “These are all free?” one visitor asks, eyes flush with excitement as they portion palmfuls of Mayan lettuce and fennel seeds into small envelopes. It’s so against the norm in America—where anything that can be sold usually is—as to seem unreal.

“All free. This is the real sharing economy,” says McCamant.

The only requirement is that you take only what you need and leave behind plenty for the next person. It doesn’t surprise McCamant—or, for that matter, any other seed savers who’ve been at this for a long time—that free seeds astonish amateur backyard gardeners who’ve become accustomed to buying pretty seed packets from the store.

“We believe that seed is part of the commons,” says McCamant, taking down a jar of quinoa. “This quinoa is not something that I grew and is mine. This quinoa goes back 7,000 years and was developed by people in Peru and Bolivia. It’s not something I have any right to own.”

Everything grown in the seed garden is open-pollinated: Cascadia Sugar Snap Peas, Red Venture Celery, Detroit Red Beets, Cascade Corn, Ruby Valentine lettuce, Sonora White Wheat. The plants are selected for a host of reasons. The celery is a good producer and comes from Frank Morton, a famous Pacific Northwest plant breeder and staunch advocate for open-pollinated seeds and open-source seeds; the wheat is the oldest in California and grown for its historical significance; the lettuce is a heirloom sold by one small seed company and it stands a good chance of being lost if not cultivated. Eventually, these seeds will be harvested, sorted, cleaned, and added to the library’s inventory.

The one thing you won’t find in the Community Seed Garden are hybrid seeds. These are the seeds favored by Monsanto and other big agri-businesses in which one plant is crossed with another to create a whole new organism. Hybrids may guarantee higher yields and hardy plants for one season, but good luck saving the seed and planting them again next year. The seed will revert back to the traits of its parents, meaning you have no idea what you’re going to get or how it’s going to taste. In this way, the big seed companies have become more like landlords of seeds, renting to farmers and other growers year after year, and making billions in profit.

“If we really care about our local food system, then we really need to look at where our seed is coming from,” says McCamant. “If it’s being controlled by large corporations that are growing seed all over the world, then it’s like the food link to the food system is really missing. The question becomes: How do we localize it?”

That question is finding some answers with Steve Peters, a research and outreach associate for the Organic Seed Alliance (OSA), a Port Townsend, Washington-based nonprofit that is working to develop and improve seed production and marketing opportunities for seed growers. In the past, Peters has consulted with Bohemian Seeds, a small open-source seed business out of Occidental (you can find their seeds at the Sebastopol Farmers’ Market) and Eric George, a young farmer in Petaluma.

OSA recently launched a pilot project in California to build local seed hubs—for cleaning, processing, and storing seeds, and where growers can connect with commercial farmers. U.S. backyard gardeners, with their varied choices, are going to be okay, according to Peters. The true challenge lies in finding good quality, open source seeds that are worthy of the physical traits and germination needs desired by commercial growers.

“The goal is bring seed back to the forefront in agriculture because it’s been, in many ways, forgotten about,” says Peters. “A hundred years ago most farmers saved their seed and now very few do because it’s become a very specialized part of agriculture. That’s fine when you have a lot of choices and accessibility to material, but in the last 10 to 15 years, the industry has really consolidated. Very few people are actually growing seed. There are a lot of seed savers, but the commercial market is almost completely dominated by a few major players.”

With consolidation comes less choice. Plus, since the business model is to own the material you sell, severe patent restrictions have been placed on the products, meaning farmers can’t legally save seed and they definitely can’t use patented varieties to develop their own locally adapted versions. Still, modern hybrid varieties draw farmers in with their high, reliable yields. The problem arrives when they aren’t adapted to changing conditions and those record yields turn to nothing. “You’re really in trouble then,” says Peters.

And yet, locally adapted and resilient plant material are integral to handling a changing climate and the resulting floods, droughts, salinization, and viruses that are already happening or soon to arrive. “Many times, it’s the older varieties that have been held by communities for millennia,” says Peters. “Open-pollinated breeding allows the whole population to intermix so that you can choose the best, most resilient individuals out of the progeny. It really focuses on the future, on each subsequent generation, and continues to improve.”

In Petaluma, seedsman and farmer Eric George has been growing produce for projects that support the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI), a national organization dedicated to the cause of “freeing the seeds.” Originally developed for computer software, the open source model makes intellectual property— whether computer code or seeds—freely available for use and provides a way for that material to stay freely available in perpetuity.

Seed breeders that sign the OSSI pledge vow to keep their seeds free of patents, licenses, and other restrictions on freedom of use. OSSI stores a database of crop varieties that have been pledged as what they call “freed seed” and provides links on its website to where those seeds can be purchased, whether from seed companies or individual breeders and seed growers. They also build awareness of the importance of keeping seeds unencumbered from legal restrictions and free to be used, shared, saved, bred, and sold.

In 2015, George was invited to join OSSI’s partnership committee. At the age of 28, he’s the committee’s youngest member. Recently, George launched a new seed company, Coast Range Seeds. He first started thinking seriously about the power of seeds after reading First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology by Jack Kloppenburg. Inspired by the U.C. Berkeley agroecology program and from campesino field days in 2011 and 2012 with seedsmen in Nicaragua, he moved north to train in western Oregon, a modern epicenter for organic and open-source seed. He enrolled in the Rogue Farm Corps, apprenticed with seed producers, and in 2013 helped form the Southern Oregon Seed Growers Association.

Two years ago, George returned to the North Bay and dove into the consumer end of the supply chain, selling vegetables as a floor worker at Good Earth Natural Foods in Marin. He says it was a chance to observe the workings of the organic vegetable trade, tune in to what resonates with customers, and soak up the experience of a veteran produce team. He also began to notice opportunities to bring OSSI seeds and produce sales together. Now, as a seedsman, he’s working to bridge the two. Last year, he and Bolinas farmer Caymin Ackerman of Big Mesa Farm grew and delivered OSSI varieties “Candystick Dessert Delicata” and “Magma” mustard, to Good Earth, which, in turn, represented these crops to their customers.

George adds that doing a good job selling OSSI produce doesn’t just mean using the food as a vehicle for seeds awareness and education. Going full circle with “seed-to-shelf” produce asks how—without reinventing our normal food economy and shopping patterns—more food dollars might strengthen the economic viability of seed growing and breeding. “Done right, these breeders can continue to invest themselves in their work, and hopefully our region can create the kind of opportunities that attract and sustain the next generation, too.”

Back at the Community Seed Exchange, the biggest goal is to get home gardeners to think about where their seeds come from. On the last Saturday of the month, the volunteers open up the seed library to the public. They also host a work party in the seed garden, which offers an opportunity to get your hands dirty, and they offer free classes monthly on topics like seedsaving basics, wet and dry seed processing, and how to grow milkweed and nectar plants to lure monarchs to your garden. They’re always looking for more volunteers to spread the word about locally pollinated seeds versus their globe-trotting industrially farmed hybrid cousins.

“We tend to go in and look at a rack of packets in the store and say, ‘Oh, that looks cool!’ without thinking of the footprint of the seed,” says Sara McCamant. “If it’s not organic, then it’s been grown with tons of chemicals—seeds don’t have the same rules as food crops. Most likely they’ve been in the ground longer and double-dosed with chemicals. And you really don’t know where they’re coming from. If conventional, then probably the international market. Sometimes from Monsanto, which owns one of the biggest vegetable seed companies in the world. People don’t realize seed has its own footprint.”

This article originally appeared in Made Local Magazine and is reprinted with permission. All photos © Michelle Feileacan.

The post Seed Saving is the Original Sharing Economy appeared first on Civil Eats.

[Previous update: In February 2018, Assembly Bill 626 passed the California Assembly, one step further to passage. And at the same time, the homemade meal delivery company Josephine, which had advocated for the passage of the law, announced it is ending operations in the spring of 2018.]

A few years back, Christina Nelson, an office manager and student, craved a more meaningful life. She soon joined the Slow Food movement in San Diego, and began to experiment with cooking local and sustainable meals prepared in traditional ways. Eventually, she learned how to make naturally leavened bread using locally milled whole grains. She loved the whole process and decided to make a career out of baking.

“It was something I’d always thought about as a kid, [that] it would be fun to run a café,” Nelson said. She landed a job working in a commercial bakery in Los Angeles, but the grueling commute from her new home in Orange County curtailed that dream. Deciding to make a go of it on her own, Nelson rented space in a shared commercial kitchen. But the hourly rental fees added up quickly during her 12-hour baking shifts, making for little, if any, profit.

Fortunately, Nelson could apply for a cottage food permit, thanks to a 2012 California law allowing home cooks to sell some non-perishable foods—granola, candies, baked goods—out of their home kitchens. The process that took months, and included an inspection visit from a local health regulator, and once she was permitted, she launched Demeter Bread and Pastry, and began selling bread, cookies, and other baked goods at the Santa Ana farmers’ market.

Now, Nelson sees another business opportunity in selling hot, healthy, and locally sourced lunches at nearby business parks, but she can’t do that under the current law. But that could change. In February, California Assemblymember Eduardo Garcia introduced the Homemade Food Legislation Act (AB 626), which would permit the sale of prepared meals and other foods from small-scale home kitchen operations. Last week, AB 626 passed the state’s Health Committee with a vote of 12-0, with three members abstaining; the full Assembly is set to vote on the bill before May 26.

And while Garcia hopes the bill can be an “important lever of economic empowerment for immigrant, minority, and other vulnerable communities,” it’s not without its opponents. The Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC), the group that wrote the 2012 bill, worries that the new legislation could give web platforms like Josephine, and others tech companies like it on the horizon, too much power over home cook.

Reducing Barriers for Marginalized Cooks

“Many of my constituents have expressed their concerns and frustrations trying to work in compliance with the existing, overly complicated cottage food laws,” said Garcia in a press release. “This measure aims to knock down barriers and expand opportunities for marginalized populations who often lack access to the professional food world.”

Nelson, who has struggled to find the resources to expand her business beyond baked goods, hopes the legislation will allow her to have an additional source of income without a huge infusion of money. “It would make it a lot easier for me to expand without renting a commercial kitchen space.”

She is one of the state’s many home cooks, a significant percentage of whom are women and immigrants, who could benefit from the new legislation, which would legalize the small-scale sale of homemade foods like tamales and other hot foods. Last year, the hazards of participating in the informal food economy came to light when the story of Mariza Ruelas went viral. The Stockton mom of six was threatened by authorities for selling homemade ceviche through a private Facebook food swap group. Ruelas, no surprise, supports the new legislation.

Angela Janus, executive director of ShareKitchen and a consultant with the Coachella Valley Small Business Development Center, thinks the proposed law is great, especially if it means streamlining the permit process while empowering small business incubation for those who can’t operate legally under existing cottage food laws. When more people can legally start small food businesses at home, the idea goes, they’ll also have a legitimate stepping stone to successful catering or commercial food operations.

“There are a lot of traditional Hispanic foods being prepared in home kitchens and shared in local communities that are unregulated,” said Janus. She adds that the legislation could help to address current issues of safety, sanitation, equity, and zoning.

The Uberization of Homemade Food?

The homemade food legislation still has a long way to go. In its current form, it’s only a legislative declaration of intent or a “spot bill.” It doesn’t lay out any specifics about training requirements, or what the actual permit process and registration might look like.

“Essentially, the bill seeks to create a new registration or permit process that would allow home cooks to sell directly to customers while complying with a series of health, safety, sanitation, and education guidelines,” said Matt Jorgensen, the co-CEO of Josephine, an online food sales platform headquartered in Oakland. Josephine sponsored the new legislation after cooks in several Bay Area cities selling meals through its site received cease-and-desist orders from health regulators last summer. The company continues to operate in Oregon and Washington.

Josephine made the foray into the legislative process early last year, but the bill’s first iteration was killed on arrival, shot down by the California Conference of Directors of Environmental Health (CCDEH).

“We hadn’t worked with them to develop a policy. They told us that if there was going to be some sort of legitimization of this informal economy, then they needed to be part of it, and it needed to be a new permit process,” said Jorgensen.

Within months, the health regulators developed an ad hoc committee to develop the language of the legislation and permit process. At the same time, Josephine assembled a working group made up of home cooks, legal experts from the UCLA and Harvard Food Law Clinics, and other stakeholders including the California Food Policy Council, the Cottage Food Operator’s Association of America, and more.

Once the stakeholders were in place, Josephine’s representatives connected with Assemblymember Garcia, who had already expressed a desire to revisit homemade food laws as a way to develop his policy agenda of economic empowerment of minority populations.

Early on, Josephine also worked closely with SELC and Christina Oatfield, a policy director with the organization, who was a key architect of the 2012 Cottage Food Act. However, SELC recently stepped away from the new, expanded legislation, saying they were not comfortable with the potential “Uberization” of food posed by the participation of companies like Josephine.

According to Oatfield, SELC will only support further homemade food legislation if it ensures some form of community ownership of any web platforms involved in the sale of homemade foods. They’d like to see a provision that limits that ownership to cooks and/or eater-owned cooperatives, nonprofit organizations, or government agencies. The model they proposed is based on the way certified farmers’ markets are run in California.

“When you have a whole industry that’s operated by stakeholder groups—farmers, home cooks, nonprofit organization groups, local governments—it really changes the dynamic and changes the priorities for the industry—compared to tech companies that are for-profit and backed by venture capitalists out to make huge profits,” explained Oatfield.

It’s not yet clear how such a law would be enforced. It could be through individual court actions, or through a limit on the types of web platforms that receive permits from environmental health regulators at the county or city level.

What is clear is that a company like Josephine, as it’s currently structured, would not be allowed to operate legally under SELC’s proposal. At play, says Oatfield, are important questions about whether home cooks will be considered independent contractors, and whether they will have any protections under employment law. There are also questions about whether the cooks working with online platforms will be pressed to cook more food faster or with lower-quality ingredients, either of which could affect food safety.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen, but looking at other industries where tech has come in and shaken things up, we have a lot of reasons to be concerned,” added Oatfield.

“I like the idea of having an nonprofit or co-op model because our margins aren’t going to be big,” said Christina Nelson, the baker. Home kitchens aren’t set up to mass-produce, she points out. “It’s not like anyone is getting rich off of doing this in their home and if a for-profit company took a good chunk, it wouldn’t be worth doing.”

Last August, Jorgensen addressed some of these issues in a statement. As he explained it, Josephine takes a 10 percent cut of a cook’s sales. In addition, Josephine has established a Cook Council to act as a communication bridge between the company and the cooks; a representative from the council holds a seat on Josephine’s Board of Directors.

Josephine co-CEO Charley Wang has argued from the start that it’s possible for a for-profit tech company to empower and give agency to their providers rather than exploiting them for maximum output and profit. In exchange, cooks—some of whom lack the language and/or technology skills to market themselves—get an established platform that, in theory, gives access to the support and resources they need to sell their food to customers.

Others agree with Wang. A self-professed “great fan of cooperatives,” Peter Ruddock, a coordinator with California Food Policy Council and Slow Food California, says linking homemade food and cooperatives complicates the legislation without offering significant benefits. Furthermore, he says it was easy for Uber for commodify rides, which aren’t all that unique. It’ll be harder for a tech company to commodify homemade meals, which vary by geography, ingredients, and individual chefs.

Ultimately, Ruddock thinks we should welcome any opportunity to expand local food businesses. “This is one of many steps to reconnect with our food,” he said. “This [new homemade food legislation] is the next step in what is probably going to be a long-term process.”

In other states, some cooks have already turned to tech companies as support for their home cooking endeavors. In addition to Josephine, Meal Surfers, MyTable, and Umi Kitchen are hoping to engage home chefs in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, and beyond.

And the benefits are tangible where it’s working. Take Ramona Chitrakar-Walson, who immigrated to the U.S. from Nepal. Now a mother of two living in Seattle, Washington, Chitrakar-Walson uses the Josephine site to sell authentic Nepalese meals to fellow immigrants from Nepal and other curious eaters. She’d considered joining a cooking club or selling momos (Nepali dumplings) at the local farmers’ market, but she balked at the start-up costs and paperwork involved in starting her own business. The ready-to-go tech platform has allowed her to focus on cooking meals for her home and connecting with the local community instead

“I wouldn’t have been able to start anything like this on my own,” said Chitrakar-Walson.

Photos courtesy of Josephine.

The post A New Law Would Legalize Selling Home-Cooked Food in California appeared first on Civil Eats.

So what does the end of the drought in Northern California mean for the ongoing California water wars? Could the answer be found in the $11 billion Water Resources Development Act of 2016? Signed into law by former President Obama in December, the act—a product of two years of bipartisan congressional deliberation and revision—allots $558 million for water projects in California.

On the list: desalinization plants, flood control, watershed restoration, water recycling, water storage, and dam rehabilitation. The provisions for California were folded into a massive federal bill that includes $170 million in funding to address the lead-filled water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and money for ecological restoration and water infrastructure improvements across the country.

While groups like the Association of Water Agencies applauded the new legislation, others feared that the some of the provisions would pose a grave threat to already imperiled ecosystems. In particular, a “midnight rider” tacked onto the legislation right before it headed for a Senate vote on December 8. Authored by House Majority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) with the endorsement of California state senator Diane Feinstein (a long-time friend of corporate agriculture interests), the rider approves maximum pumping out the Bay Delta, the largest estuary on the Pacific coast.

The last minute maneuver has pitted Northern California sport and commercial fisherman, some Delta farmers, and environmental activists, against the multi-million ag industry to the south. Just a few days after giving a last farewell speech, retiring California state senator Barbara Boxer, who worked on the original legislation with Feinstein, returned to the floor to filibuster against the rider. She called the revised version a “devastating maneuver” and a “poison pill” designed to undermine the Endangered Species Act.

“Right now there is a real concern that the midnight rider will allow the Delta water projects to operate more aggressively and pump more water,” says Doug Obegi, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “This will further jeopardize the continued existence of endangered species, along with the jobs that are dependent on their health.”

In arguing for the rider, Feinstein said, “This water is for the tens of thousands of small farms that have gone bankrupt, like a melon farmer who sat in my office with tears in his eyes and told me how he lost a farm that he had struggled to pay for and that had been part of his family for generations.” But the Sacramento Bee later pointed out that Feinstein had her facts wrong. In fact, farm employment had actually grown during the worst of the drought.

Meanwhile environmentalists believe that the rider could ring the death knell for the Delta and San Francisco Bay fish populations. A new report by the Bay Institute documents cataclysmic declines in sharks, salmon, sturgeon, and smelt in the San Francisco Bay since large-scale diversion of water from the Delta began in 1975. This raises the specter of a potential loss of thousands of fishing jobs from Northern California up to Oregon and the continued decimation of an $1.4 billion salmon industry.

A Historic Battle

After being diverted by powerful pumps at the southern end of the Delta, near the mouth of the San Joaquin River, much of the water in the Delta is currently sent south, to fulfill contracts with water users in the Central Valley and the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies water to urban areas in Southern California. And yet, the when water is scarce, the tension is often framed chiefly as a battle between environmentalists and fishermen versus the agriculture industry.

In 2007, citing concerns about the sharp declines in species like smelt and salmon in the Delta, a court ruling declared that a Biological Opinion, established in 2007 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, would rule over the needs of water users. The Biological Opinion mandated that a certain amount of water must stay in the Delta especially during the prime season between January and June, when juvenile salmon—poor swimmers dependent on the Delta tides to push them out to sea where they grow into adults—are coming down the Sacramento River and heading out through the Golden Gate into the ocean. This means the pumps stay off, no matter what.

The corporate agricultural interests raised an uproar, and accused the powers-that-be of killing their businesses. They took the fight to overturn the Endangered Species Act to federal court in 2011, but ultimately lost.

“What we’re seeing now is, if you can’t win, you change the rules of the game,” says John McManus, longtime fisherman and the executive director of the Golden Gate Salmon Association, about the midnight rider. “Because they couldn’t get protections for fish thrown out by a judge, they’ve gone to Plan B.”

Obegi says that the Endangered Species Act (ESA), widely blamed for the inability to meet Central Valley irrigation needs, is a “red herring” in the fight. “Indeed, during the drought years of 2014 and 2015, there was very little water provided for endangered species, and both Salmon and Delta Smelt got hammered,” he adds, pointing to data from a Bay Institute report.

And the problem doesn’t really lie in urban water demands, which haven’t increased as much as you might think thanks to increased water usage efficiency. Instead, the bigger problem is that California has issued water rights far beyond the amount of surface water actually available in any given year. Or, put another way, there just isn’t enough water to keep doing things the way they’ve always been done. Combine this with the messy, archaic water rights system based on much lower population numbers, and you have a recipe for serious conflicts.

California passed the ESA in 1970 to protect threatened and endangered species. The California Department of Fish and Wildlife oversees the legislation, and monitors compliance. As of January 2017, the Bay Delta is home to multiple endangered species protected under both state (CESA) and federal (ESA) endangered species legislation, including Winter-run Chinook Salmon and the tiny Delta Smelt.

The “three-inch fish” became the central villain in a May 2016 campaign speech when Donald Trump blamed the smelt for the dry conditions on Central Valley farms. Soon after, the president-elect told the audience that “there is no drought,” and that state water officials were taking the water from the Bay Delta and “shoving it out to sea.”

Moving Forward

“Unfortunately, at times, this form of legislative action can lead to endless battles between different sectors, as though we are talking about two different sets of facts,” says Newsha Ajami, director of urban water policy at Stanford University. “That’s what really concerns me when it comes to the Endangered Species Act, environmental and ecosystem health and its relevance to both urban and agricultural water use, and the water needs of both Northern and Southern California.”

Take Jerry Maltby, a farmer form Williams, California. At Broken Box Ranch, his 1200-acre ranch 60 miles north of Sacramento, Maltby breeds Charolais cattle and grows organic rice. Water, for Maltby, is an essential, but vexing component of his job.

“There’s no one silver bullet,” says Maltby, who is also a former county supervisor and Family Water Alliance board member. The 72-year-old rancher has seen farms, and even entire towns in the Central Valley run dry. He says the heart of the problem lies in how water is currently managed. He’d like to see water storage increased, and views desalination plants, like the one in the north San Diego city of Carlsbad, as a key solution to Southern California’s water woes. He also supports increased pumping out of the Bay Delta.

“More pumping is essential to producing more food,” says Maltby, who feels a kinship with the Central Valley farmers to the south of him. “You know, there are hundreds of thousands of acres that sat fallow because they couldn’t get the water to it that they had water rights for.”

Nadine Bailey of the Family Water Alliance, which is based in a small town in the Sacramento Valley, and advocates for the private water and property rights of local farmers, is skeptical of the ESA, and calls salmon the “flavor-of-the-month,” pointing to the issues surrounding the endangered spotted owl.

As for “The Water Resources Development Act,” she says, “If this legislation doesn’t solve the problems and get people thinking about innovative ways to capture, store, and ship the water that we already have, then we are missing the mark.” She points to things like reuse and desalination on farmland, as well as groundwater recharge and more groundwater storage as potential solutions.

Groundwater recharge is a buzzword that applies to the way some farmers have been flooding their land this winter to help recharge groundwater. This is a way to store and capture abundant winter storm water underground, even in dry San Joaquin Valley, when the water is available.

These solutions may bolster the Delta’s supply in the long run, but it will likely be a few years before we’ll see the direct impacts from the midnight rider.

“Because we’re getting a lot of water right now, I think there’s a fair chance we won’t actually see harm from the legislation right now,” says McManus of the Golden Gate Salmon Association. But in dry years, the provisions in the rider might allow water users to override the ESA, fire up the pumps, and send the water south, despite the threat to the Delta ecosystem. “That’s when we really get into trouble,” says McManus.

Indeed, given the challenges of population growth and climate change, most agree that the state will need solutions that work for everyone from the fish to the farmers—especially as Northern California literally swims in water and Southern California continues to run dry. And the other elements of the Water Resources Development Act—such as better watershed restoration, water recycling, and water storage, for instance—could go some of the way in that direction.

But, as Stanford’s Ajami sees it, that will require an end to the fighting. “The reality is that this is a resource we all need, and requires that we must be thoughtful in the way we consume it,” she says.

The post As Drought Winds Down, CA Lawmakers Set Stage for Future Water Wars appeared first on Civil Eats.

For the last three years, the volunteer-run organization has received all their vegetable donations—an average of 383 pounds a week—through a Los Angeles nonprofit called Food Forward. Between April and June 2016, those donations added up to about 3,700 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables—all from vendors at the Hollywood Farmers’ Market, and all of which might otherwise have gone to waste.

According to Charles Dandino, a long-time volunteer with Food Not Bombs, Food Forward has streamlined the donation collection process, freeing up precious volunteer time for cooking and meal service.

Until recently, Food Not Bombs volunteers would solicit donations from each individual farmer, sometimes ending up with an imbalanced haul—say, 60 pounds of tomatoes and two heads of lettuce. Today, things are much different.

“Food Forward has centralized the food collection from farmers, weighing it out, and giving receipts so farmers can get a tax deduction,” says Dandino. “Plus, each organization gets a variety of produce. The record keeping is outstanding, and they’ve streamlined the entire process as the central hub.”

The Humble Beginnings

Food Forward started in 2009, during the recession, as a tiny volunteer gleaning group. At the time, professional photographer Rick Nahmias was on a walk in his San Fernando Valley neighborhood when he noticed the large amount of mature citrus trees in residents’ front and backyards, leftovers from the commercial citrus orchards that once blanketed the valley.

The remnants of the area’s agricultural history still produced tons of fruit each year, but most of it fell to the ground to rot, be carried off by squirrels, or worse, be tossed into the trash.

For Nahmias, the waste didn’t make sense, especially while people stood in line at the food pantry just a few blocks from his Valley Glen house. In Los Angeles, an estimated 1.4 million people are food-insecure, lacking regular access to healthy, affordable, nutritious food.

Nahmias started small, asking to glean the two tangerine and Naval orange trees in neighbor’s yard. The first day, he ended up with 85 pounds of tangerines, which he donated to a nearby food pantry. A subsequent glean in the same location produced 800 pounds of citrus.

“It was just kind of a watershed moment,” says Nahmias.

In California nearly six million tons of food products are dumped annually and food waste is the largest single source of waste. According to a 2014 study by the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, food comprises 18.1 percent of the state’s total waste stream or 5,591 tons a year.

Armed with information about the 1996 Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which allows anybody to donate food in good faith without fear of legal retaliation or liability issues, Nahmias founded Food Forward. The organization’s mission became to rescue fresh produce that would otherwise go to waste, connect the abundance with people in need, and inspire others to do the same.

Seven years later, the organization, powered by 7,000 registered volunteers and 18 paid employees, has donated more than 25 million pounds of produce from backyards, public spaces, farmers’ markets, and the downtown Los Angeles wholesale market. The donations supply 150 local hunger relief agencies and have fed almost 1.3 million people a year.

Expanding Programs

How did Food Forward scale up from 85 pounds of tangerines to the thousands of pounds of produce it recovers each week? Slowly, says Nahmias.

Food Forward began with the Backyard Harvest Program, which sends volunteers to more than 525 private and public properties in Los Angeles, Ventura, and Santa Barbara Counties to glean. Within 48 hours of collecting the produce, the volunteers deliver it to direct service agencies for free.

One of the first of its kind in Los Angeles, the Backyard Harvest program steadily grew in popularity. In 2011, Nahmias officially took the reins as paid executive director, a role he holds to this day, and hired a staff, which has since quadrupled to 18 people, to manage the expanding roster of programs.

In 2012, Food Forward took another step forward, launching the Farmers’ Market Recovery Model. Currently operating at two Ventura and 17 Los Angeles-based farmers’ markets, it is the only formal, market-endorsed system in Southern California for farmers that want to donate their unsold produce to hunger relief agencies. Food Forward volunteers canvass farmers at the end of the market day, collecting donations of unsold produce, fruits, nuts, and dried fruit.

“When farmers realized they could get a tax donation for the amount of pounds they donate, lighten their load driving back to the farm, and help people in need, it was a no brainer,” says Nahmias. “We were able to architect a reliable, professional system. We were there week in and week out, and we were transparent about where the food was going. We would tell them exactly how many pounds went to each agency, and all of the agencies were local. These were folks in the same neighborhood who were in need, and so it had a very low carbon footprint.”

Chelsea Frazee, 28, has volunteered with Food Forward for three years. She’s now a lead market coordinator at the Hollywood farmers’ market. Twice a month, the Venice resident coordinates volunteers, hands out boxes to farmers, weighs all the produce that comes in, and coordinates pick-ups by receiving agencies like Food Not Bombs.

Frazee estimates that she and the other volunteers have collected up to 3,000 pounds of food in one day. “The generosity of the farmers in pretty amazing,” she says. “And they are grateful for what we are doing. One farm in particular sends back everything they don’t sell with us. Last weekend, they donated thirty boxes of food.”

Thirty boxes of food is significant, but when compared to the millions of pounds of waste produced annually at a place like the Los Angeles wholesale produce market, one of the largest wholesale districts in the U.S., the magnitude of the problem really becomes clear.

For that reason, Food Forward launched their third flagship program, The Wholesale Recovery Program, in 2014. Through the program, Food Forward collects and distributes large, orphaned, surplus loads of viable produce from 56 participating wholesale vendors.

The first year the program was in place, with one half-time employee and a borrowed truck, they expected a yield of about 300,000 pounds of food, but received way more—4.3 million pounds in total. Now, a manager coordinates donations and pick-ups, which can run upwards of 15,000 pounds per truck.

One factor that enables Food Forward to rescue food so efficiently is its lack of infrastructure. Receiving agencies use their own refrigeration and distributing mechanisms to get the food out to the people who need it.

“We’re the broker, but we currently don’t take possession of the food for more than a short truck ride,” says Nahmias. “We have five large recipients near downtown Los Angeles, and they all have the ability to refrigerate and/or redistribute these huge loads to 20 to 50 agencies on their own.”

Still, as a young nonprofit, Food Forward deals with issues of capacity and sustainable funding. They want to expand into classrooms with curriculum that teaches kids about the downfalls of food waste.

Nahmias also sees many more opportunities to capture food waste. He estimates that Food Forward isn’t even hitting a fraction of the approximately one million residential fruit trees in Los Angeles. Then there are the 180 farmers’ markets in the region. And what about the immense amounts of edible produce still being thrown into the trash at the Los Angeles produce market?

Gleaning organizations with limited resources are scrambling to do what they can. “We’re still scratching the surface of everything,” Nahmias says.

Photo credits: Gunther Schulz, Food Not Bombs, Rachel Jacobson

The post In Los Angeles, a Band of Food Rescuers is Getting Produce to the People appeared first on Civil Eats.

It all started in 2009, when Zigas moved to San Francisco to be an urban farmer. A graduate of Grinnell College in Iowa, Zigas had worked on federal policy issues—clean energy and voting rights—but he yearned for a job rooted in the outdoors.

But here was one problem. “I quickly realized that I didn’t know how to farm,” he says with laugh.

Undaunted, Zigas started volunteering for Little City Gardens in San Francisco. When the farm’s founder ran into a zoning code issue, Zigas worked with them to change the urban agriculture laws in the city. In the process, he became the co-coordinator of the San Francisco Urban Agricultural Alliance. The (unpaid) work paid off. In 2011, Mayor Ed Lee signed one of the nation’s first Urban Agriculture Ordinance, an amendment to the zoning code that legalized urban farming in the city, and the sale of produce from those gardens.

The experience led to an awakening of sorts for Zigas, then in his late twenties. An increasing number of people were looking to get involved in agriculture and food-related projects, but there was no central organizing mechanism, neither from a nonprofit nor from the city’s government.

“I also realized that I like policy more than a lot of people do,” Zigas admits with another laugh. “Policy work is about changing the rules of the game.”

Zigas approached the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) as a potential partner. Zigas was equipped with a B.A. in policy studies from Grinnell, where he had also studied local food. The executive director gave the notion a green light and in 2011, Zigas was appointed as SPUR’s first Food and Agriculture Policy Director.

Zigas has since co-authored research about city support for urban agriculture, the benefits of strong regional food systems, and improving access to healthy food—all issues with a broad impact in the nine-county Bay Area, a complex web of urban, suburban, and rural areas steeped in agriculture.

In 2015, he was lead author on SPUR’s Healthy Food Within Reach survey, which took a comprehensive look at healthy food access in an area increasingly plagued by growing income inequality—and found that even in the progressive, local food-centric Bay Area, one in 10 adults struggle to consistently find three meals a day and more than half of all adults are overweight or obese.

The solution, says Zigas, lies partly in policy intervention around minimum wage, increases in public assistance, and healthy food incentives. Which leads Zigas to talk about his next a big project: He wants to help build political support for state or federal funding of matching public assistance dollars to low-income folks similar to the ones that have become popular at farmers markets around the country—but at grocery stores. It won’t be an easy task, but he’s applied for funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to launch a pilot grocery store program, based on a similar initiative in Michigan. He’ll find out in April whether the funds were approved.

The Bay Area food system may need major renovation, but Zigas sees bright spots. He points to efforts by school districts in nearby Oakland, California and elsewhere to institutionalize healthy food; a resurgence in local food manufacturing in cities; “pioneering” agricultural models like the Marin Carbon Project ; robust composting programs in many of the area’s cities; and, the young, motivated farmers behind The Farmer’s Guild.

“If there was ever a place that we could figure out how to make the food system better for both farmers and consumers, California is that place,” says Zigas. “We have such a strong agricultural economy and we have intense poverty. We are also a state that’s willing to do things that no one has ever done before.”

For Zigas, carving out a niche in food and agriculture policy has meant tenacity, consistency, and a willingness to read (and write) the fine print. And he says others can do the same.

“Think about what you want to see changed locally,” he says. “Is it agricultural land preservation policy? Is it making it easier for food manufacturers and distributors to thrive in the city? Is it municipal composting? Making that change at the local level can be very satisfying and very accessible,” he adds.

This article originally appeared on the Food & Wine website, in partnership with Civil Eats.

The post Eli Zigas’s Food Policy Work is Changing the Rules of the Game appeared first on Civil Eats.

You see, public and private institutions spend billions of dollars each year on food. Schools, universities, hospitals, prisons, corporate cafeterias, and senior care facilities share one thing in common—they prepare, cook, and serve thousands of meals every day. Now, a rising national movement wants to persuade these institutions to source a higher percentage of food from regional producers—with an emphasis on farms, fishermen, and and ranches that follow ecologically sound, socially just, and humane practices. It’s called institutional food procurement, and, while it might not have quite as much romance as some other elements of today’s Good Food Movement, some say this follow-the-money strategy could hold the key to transforming the American food system.

A shift in institutional food buying has the potential for major impacts on not only the local economy, but on food access, according to Amanda Oborne, Vice President of Food and Farms at Ecotrust, an Oregon-based nonprofit that works to advance farm-to-institution initiatives in the Pacific Northwest.

“We put the focus on the buyers with multi-million dollar food procurement budgets because even if they just redirect a couple of percentage points of their budget into the region, that’s going to drive change all the way through the [local] supply chain,” says Oborne. In one example, chefs at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon can order whole hogs from local producers thanks to an innovative partnerships with a meat distribution company.

For Ecotrust, and other farm-to-institution groups across the nation, the goals are two-fold. First, they aim to sway large institutions with huge food budgets to leverage their purchasing power in support of small and mid-sized regional farmers, ranchers, and fisherman as a way to boost the local economies. And to pivot away from consolidated global distributors like Sysco. A second, and just as important goal, is to open up access to healthy, local, and sustainable food for the populations generally served by public institutions.

“A local tomato will provide just as much flavor and nutritive value to a low-income kindergartner as it will to a wealthy hedge fund manager,” says Nessa Richman, Metrics Project Manager with Farm to Institution New England (FINE). “Institutions … feed hundreds of thousands of economically distressed families and individuals every day.”

For the past five years, FINE has worked to connect local food distributors with institutions in the Northeast. Across the six New England states, institutions spend a total of more than $78 million per year on local food and an estimated 3.8 million people eat at institutions served by FINE. The organization has released the first in a series of reports focused on regional food distributors and food hubs—both the opportunities and barriers faced by small and large companies. According to those New England-based distributors FINE surveyed, together they moved over a billion dollars of food in 2012, of which $366 billion was sold to institutions. Nearly 90 percent believed sales of local food to institutions will continue to increase.

The farm-to-institution market holds more power to benefit farmers and fisherman than any other local food market, says Richman.

“When institutions make it a priority to buy local, they can spur unprecedented innovation and investment across the supply chain—and make a significant economic impact,” she says.

Scale Matters

Not all local farms are equipped to sell to institutions.

At 30 acres, Stoneboat Farm in Hillsboro, Oregon qualifies as a small farm. Jesse Nichols, who farms the land with his brother, says his business has benefited from partnerships with institutions. Currently, they supply about $5,000 a month in produce to the chefs at Intel Corporation, just five minutes down the road from the farm. Corporate cafeterias on the campus serve thousands of employees each day.

“Having an institutional client like this is really beneficial and makes things much more streamlined for us,” says Nichols. “It saves us a bunch of deliveries to smaller accounts and makes a big difference in our workloads.”

In the future, Stoneboat Farm would like to move into more institutional partnerships. So far, nascent attempts to connect with school food service programs haven’t resulted in much.

“It’s been difficult to partner with the larger institutions within the farm-to-school movement because of the sheer volume they need,” says Nichols. “You have to think differently to buy local. You have to understand the local climate, be able to expect price and availability fluctuations based on what farmers have available. You have to be flexible. We’re not a big distributor that can have cheap prices all of the time.”

That’s where mid-sized farms enter the picture. According to a new report published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, local purchasing has a huge impact. The study, which centered on Iowa, found that if 25 percent of the 22,000 institutions and “intermediate markets” in the state procured local food, over $800 million annually would be generated for the state’s economy. If at least half of these local purchases came from midsized farms, they would support over 4,259 farms and potentially 12,320 jobs.

Oborne, at Ecotrust, agrees with the importance of supporting midsized farms so that they can be “meaningful” partners to hospitals, schools, and other institutional buyers, and provide consistent quantities of food that institutional food service requires

“It’s that midscale operation that would be ideally suited to building a strong regional food economy,” says Oborne. “They’re a little bigger than the farmers’ market guys with bigger production, and a little more professional operations. Yet, the whole notion of ‘ag-in-the-middle’ in our country has been hollowed out.”

To that end, Ecotrust is in the process of creating an infrastructure hub in Oregon, where midsized farmers can find support for many aspects of their business, from marketing to business planning.

Logistics—mainly to make it smooth for food service directors at institutions to access to local foods—are another challenge.

“[Food service directors] can’t afford the labor to be slicing, dicing, and chopping,” says Oborne. “Their docks won’t allow for 50 different farmers in their own little vehicles to show up at any given time. They need huge volumes, consistently. Even the ones who are hyper-committed don’t really have the bandwidth to deal with these things.”

For this reason, Ecotrust helped to launch the Northwest Food Buyers Alliance, a peer-to-peer network of food service directors from all kinds of institutions: schools, hospitals, higher education, assisted living, corrections, and corporate cafes. Members go on farm and institutional kitchen tours, and meet quarterly to share strategies on how to source locally at institutional levels. Oborne calls these early adopters the “real heroes and champions.”

Swimming Upstream in a Time of Consolidation

Obviously, if institutional food purchasing is going to shift towards sustainable and local purchasing, more work remains. A report from John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future claims that the “vast purchasing power and educational opportunity provided by institutions for assisting in this transition remains to be tapped.”

Why all the untapped potential? According to the report’s authors, the concentration of the food service management market has played a significant role. The largest management companies—Compass Group, Aramark, and Sodexo—operate food services in about 45 percent of all North American institutional food service outlets to the tune of $33 billion in revenue. Food distribution is equally consolidated Sysco and US Foods Inc., the two largest “broadline” food distributors, bring in about $65 billion in combined annual revenue, and dominate 75 percent of the national market. In 2015, the Federal Trade Commission filed an administrative complaint complaining that proposed merger between Sysco and U.S. Foods, Inc. would violate anti-trust laws.

At the same time, the movement to reform institutional food procurement has seen measurable success in both the public and private realms. For example, Bon Appétit Management Co., one of Compass Group’s subsidiaries (and the company that runs the cafe at Willamette University), requires its chefs to buy at least 20 percent of its meat, vegetables, and other products within a 150-mile radius.

On a related note, Pie Ranch, an organic educational farm in California has begin partnering with private clients including Stanford University and Google to provide local produce for their employee meals. At Google alone that translates to daily meals for around 20,000 employees.

In the first installment of this series, we wrote about the Good Food Purchasing Policy in Los Angeles, where the largest public school district in California became the model for how to implement healthy, sustainable, and value-based procurement and serve over 650,000 meals a day. And the Center for Good Food Purchasing, led by Alexa Delwiche, wants to take the proven rigorous institutional food purchasing policy national.

But that’s not where it ends. A number of other schools and other public institutions are working to move the local produce dial. The National Farm to School Network and Healthcare Without Harm have been chipping away at changing institutional food procurement for years. And, last April, Nessa Richman of FINE convened more a dozen farm-to-institution practitioners and advocates from across the country in Washington, D.C. to launch the first national working group around the issue.

“With food system work, we’re swimming upstream on so many things, but I think this effort has the potential to make a giant measurable difference in the relatively near term,” says Ecotrust’s Oborne.

It’s certainly worth a try.

Photos by Shawn Linehan. From top: Jesse Nichols of Stoneboat Farm gives the food services directors from Willamette University a tour; Nichols with Andre Uribe, executive chef at Bon Appétit Management Co.’s Willamette University cafe.

The post Why Farm-to-Institution Sourcing is the Sleeping Giant of Local Food appeared first on Civil Eats.

“The food is nothing but fresh and healthy,” says Blackwood. “Before, the kids were able to eat whatever they wanted to; sodas were allowed in the schools, and the staff didn’t stress that they needed an item from all of the food groups. Now, the students have a meat, dairy, fruit—a well-balanced meal.”

Healthier food isn’t the only area of improvement. Blackwood, a union shop steward who helped unionize other Gold Star drivers in 2015, also says that labor practices at Gold Star have improved.

“Everyone is treated with respect, we’re making good wages now, our benefits are great, and every driver is now happy,” he says. “It’s a completely different place to work. We all feel secure because there is more transparency. The company makes it a point to tell us everything that’s going on.”

At first glance, improved conditions for the drivers and better food at LAUSD may not sound like they’re related, but both changes can be directly traced to something called the Good Food Purchasing Policy (GFPP). The policy directs tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds spent on institutional food to support five overarching values: local economies, environmental sustainability, fair labor practices, animal welfare, and healthy food. The policy was developed, with input from multiple stakeholders, by the Los Angeles Food Policy Council in 2012.

Most comprehensive policy in the country.

The council wasn’t the first group to draw the connection between the billions of dollars spent each year on food procurement by schools, hospitals, and other public institutions and the larger task of building a healthy, equitable, and sustainable food system. Nor were they the first to push for supply chain transparency from farm-to-fork. But the policy is the first to use a values-based, point-system rating (like LEED certification, but for food). It has been credited as the most comprehensive in the nation, and the only one to give equal weight to worker welfare.

Stephanie Ewing, vice-president at Gold Star Foods, says the adoption of the Good Food Purchasing Policy gave the company an opportunity to apply a “values-based approach” to purchasing. What’s more, they can quantify whether to work with producers using a clear set of metrics, goals, and benchmarks based on the policy’s guidelines.

The council developed the policy in 2012. In October of that year (on National Food Day), the Los Angeles mayor’s office and the city council pledged to uphold the policy, issuing an executive order to all city departments to follow the five values when buying food. Weeks later, the LAUSD school board signed on to the GFPP. It was a significant statement by the largest public school district in California, which serves upwards of 650,000 meals a day and spends $125 million on food every year.

“We know that school districts and other public institutions are buying billions of dollars worth of food in the U.S., which is just mind-boggling,” says Alexa Delwiche, executive director of the Center for Good Food Purchasing in Berkeley, and one of the authors of the original GFPP. “There is a public contracting process where elected officials are asked to approve contracts for large amounts of money—and they haven’t thought about the power they have in influencing supply chains. In Los Angeles, the school board and city council members had an a-ha moment where they realized they could make serious changes through the contracting process.”

Power of public contracts to shift purchases.

The power of the public contract became clear in early 2016 when LAUSD’s renewal of a five-year contract with Tyson to supply the district’s chicken came under scrutiny. Citing the GFPP, organizations like the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA) argued that Tyson did not meet the baseline value for employee welfare, and should not be awarded the multi-million dollar contract. They cited OSHA violations, and disregard for sustainability and the basic dignity of poultry workers. Eventually, the school board assigned the chicken contract to Gold Star, which had a better track record of working with food producers that met the GFPP baseline values.

“The policy is a tool to hold companies, like Tyson, that are hurting workers, communities, animals, and our planet accountable,” says Joann Lo, co-director of the FCWA and a co-chair of the working group that developed the GFPP. “These companies don’t deserve our tax dollars.”

In addition to new chicken contracts, the policy has resulted in an increase in purchases from local small and mid-sized farmers. Before, about 10 percent of the produce served in schools was sourced within 200 miles of the district. Today, that number ranges from 50 to 72 percent, depending on the season.

In one example, Gold Star partnered with Shepherd’s Grain to source wheat from Robinson Ranch, a family-owned sustainable wheat farm in Merced, California. The wheat is grown for LAUSD on the farm, milled in Los Angeles, and baked into 40 million dinner rolls, knotted buns, and other kinds of bread for the students. Robinson Ranch benefit, says Ewing, because they have a guaranteed customer in LAUSD, which buys about 160,000 bushels of wheat a year.

“The farmer knows that the food is already sold,” says Ewing. “They don’t have to hedge their bets.”

Challenges remain, but the model is being replicated.

Still, Delwiche acknowledges that implementing the policy at the nearly 1,100 schools in LAUSD, didn’t come without challenges. Initially, many school administrators didn’t understand what the GFPP was, not to mention why it was important, or how it worked. Plus, all five values—local, sustainable, humane, fair, and healthy—must hang together and cannot be separated for the sake of ease or simplicity. And all producers and distributors must be checked to verify that they meet (and continue to meet) the baseline in all five categories. This is a time-intensive prospect.

“When the policy was adopted in Los Angeles, we had not given any thought to implementation,” admits Delwiche. “The breakthrough was that we created a holistic vision. But, in reality, it’s way too complicated for anyone who is just trying to do their job, and might not have a food systems background.”

The Center for Good Food Purchasing developed in response to those early challenges. They act as a national clearinghouse for the GFPP, providing analysis, tools, and guidance to help schools and other institutions navigate the initial steps of signing on.

Los Angeles has become an example of what’s possible when values-based procurement becomes the norm. Now, food advocates in Long Beach are lobbying the city government to adopt the policy. And San Francisco Unified School District paid attention. At the end of May, the S.F. Board of Education voted unanimously to adopt the GFPP, becoming only the second school district in the country to do so.

“You see a lot of people who say they are going to do something, and there’s a lot of hype and promotion, and when it all goes away, they don’t do what they said they were going to do,” says Stephanie Ewing at Gold Star Foods. “If LAUSD is capable of doing this, then why can’t everybody else?”

Stay tuned for part two in this series, which examines how the Good Food Purchasing Policy and other institutional buying efforts are taking root all around the U.S.

Photos by Jorge Gil, senior graphic illustrator at the Los Angeles Unified School District Food Services Division.

The post How One Groundbreaking Set of Rules is Changing the Food in L.A. Schools and the System Behind It appeared first on Civil Eats.

In 2008, Jann Hedrick, a long haul trucker, went to a clinic for his biannual physical. He’d just finished a grueling round-trip drive between Florida and California and when the nurse took his blood pressure it was dangerously high. He faced hospitalization. Hedrick, then in his late 50’s, rested on a table and thought about how his job was beating him up physically every day. The stress, bad sleep, weight gain, unhealthy food, lack of exercise was exhausting—and worse—it had made him sick.

“I was taking home just under $5,000 a month, good money for those days,” says Hedrick, now 67, semi-retired, and living in Guerneville, California. “But, I called them up and said, I’m done. It wasn’t worth dying over.”

Hedrick still takes blood pressure medication daily. He remembers how, at least for the truckers he knew, the constant stress and need to stay alert triggered cravings for foods loaded with sugar and salt. His driving partner, a 30-year- veteran, subsisted on Subway sandwiches for the coast-to-coast drives. “It’s about calories, and comfort food, and lots of sugar,” recalls Hedrick.

Trucking is a high-risk occupation. According to a 2014 national survey, 69 percent of long-haul trucker drivers are obese; they are also twice as likely as other U.S. workers to be diagnosed with diabetes. And yet we as a nation rely heavily trucks to transport the food we eat and just about everything else we buy and sell, much to the detriment of the estimated 20 million people who work in and around the industry.

These facts are not lost on Caitlin Welby, 34, the CEO and president of RFX Forward, a transportation, trucking, and logistics company that has been owned by her family since 1952. A yoga and ayurveda teacher by training, Welby is conscious of the human and environmental toll the trucking industry takes. For years, she resisted a leadership position in the company, preferring to travel the world, attend art school, and practice ayurveda, yoga, and “vision” coaching. But, in 2013, she returned to the fold as a senior vice president of strategy, and by 2015 she had taken on the role as president and CEO, intent on transforming RFX into a company with a values-based mission.

In April, Welby and her team launched a new initiative they call Permatrucking. They describe it as a “movement” intent on transforming one of the America’s dirtiest industries using permaculture—a design philosophy employed worldwide (most often in farming and landscape design) based on observing and emulating natural systems. Permaculture’s central question is: What does nature to do solve problems?

Welby and her team hope to get like-minded truckers, producers, and shippers on board with the notion. The announcement followed the launch of Hither to Yonder, the new “artisanal logistics” branch of RFX, which aims to help companies, “who are putting a lot of love and passion into their artistry and goods,” to transport their products.

“[In permaculture] you observe the system you’re in and not the idealized one you want to be in,” says Welby, over the phone from the RFX headquarters in Avon, Massachusetts. “This is the system were are in, and [trucking] is the primary mode of transporting food, goods, and all commodities across the United States.”

Welby started small in her initial attempts to shift the culture at RFX. She taught lunchtime yoga classes, and held weekly management meetings that began with gratitude circles and meditation. At town hall meetings, people were invited to chime in on issues while eating organic food. More recently, Welby initiated conversations about wages, health insurance, and nutrition with her fleet of 58 drivers.

During those discussions, she learned that the drivers often “feel left behind by the society they serve.” They also told her they want healthier food, and many are affected from the physical effects of sitting in a car for so many hours at a time. “They know that their backs and elbows and knees aren’t feeling like they should,” said Welby.

For starters, RFX plans to give each driver would a tablet loaded with logistical information along with tricks and tips for getting physical exercise and finding healthy foods such as eggs and oatmeal. The program, called “road hacks” is still in development, as Welby and her team want to ensure that the tablet is something drivers will actually use rather than tossing in the glove compartment. The plan is to keep the hacks simple, but “highly effective.” Tablets will be stocked with short videos that demonstrate an exercise, stretch, meditation, or breathing technique.  The title of the video will include the benefit of the exercise—such as energizing or stress reduction—so drivers know immediately how it might help them.

As Jann Hedrick sees it, getting experienced drivers to change their approach to food and wellness isn’t going to be easy. “You have to figure out a way to make drivers want to do it,” he says. “I’m guessing that almost all truck drivers are money-motivated, period. There is some pride to driving a truck, but most people are trying to earn money to send home.” He suggests a “nutrition bonus,” in which drivers would track wellness efforts, and maybe get a five percent bonus—or whatever the company is comfortable with—for their successes. “Make it easy for them,” he adds.

Welby admits that feeding drivers food that they want and is good for them on long rides will be a challenge. To this end, she often asks herself: “Where is the balance between getting live, spiritually light-filled foods out to everybody, and getting enough calories to people when they need them?”

Aside from food and wellness, Welby wants to apply permaculture principles to solving other vexing trucking industry problems. Toby Hemenway, a permaculture teacher and author of Gaia’s Garden and The Permaculture City says, he likes the the idea of applying permaculture to the trucking industry. But doing that might mean shifting away from cross-country transport in order to re-localize food systems. “If we could create more locally resilient trucking networks—where things are grown locally and shipped locally—truckers wouldn’t have to make such long hauls,” he says.

Welby agrees. She says she is in “absolute alignment with building locally resilient trucking networks”—for the benefit of the environment, but also for truckers who get to stay closer to their families, and consumers who might gain better access to local foods.

A recently announced partnership between RFX Forward and Daily Table—a nonprofit grocery store focused on providing under-served populations with food that might otherwise go to waste—could mark a move toward a more local focus for the company. Welby connected with Daily Table founder Doug Rauch at a conscious capitalism summit last year. Then, in April, RFX officially signed on as the “strategic” logistics partner to assist the grocery company by transporting foods like excess produce. The store is located about 16 miles from the RFX headquarters.

Welby acknowledges that the truck driver wellness programs and local logistics partnerships are only the beginning of a larger dialogue about the trucking industry—and about how permaculture principles might be used to solve larger problems.

“There are all sorts of issues with how goods move across the U.S.,” she says. “All of the healthiest foods, and all of the unhealthiest foods, get trucked around the U.S. Everything we consume, from a nutritional perspective, goes on a truck at some point. Even for that last mile of the farmer bringing his kale to the farmers’ market, it goes on a truck.”

The post Can This Millennial Yogi Transform the Trucking Industry from the Inside? appeared first on Civil Eats.

I was lucky. Many of the six million people working in the lowest-paying sector of the American economy—the restaurant industry—aren’t in a position to search for something better. In her new book, Forked: A New Standard for American Dining, Saru Jayaraman, cofounder of Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United and director of the Food Labor Research Center at University of California, Berkeley, shares no shortage of case studies about people trying to survive on meager wages in food service jobs with little or no mobility.

There’s April, a young, single mom from southwest Michigan, who works as a server at the Olive Garden. She tells Jayaraman that she has been sexually harassed by coworkers and customers and she has watched fellow employees without sick leave work through fevers, sneezing fits, and asthma attacks. April’s hourly pay is so low that she depends almost completely on tips. Without a guaranteed paycheck, she has been forced to move back in with her mother.

Or take the story of Sandy, a former Subway employee who never made more than $9 an hour, despite 16 years with the company and a managerial promotion. “Without child support from my ex-husband, I would have had to go on food stamps,” she says.

And these women are not alone. Eighty-six percent of food industry workers are earning either subminimum, poverty, or low wages. And 14 percent depend on public assistance to make ends meet. This dismal statistic would be a serious issue on its own, but as it stands, the restaurant industry is one of the fastest growing employment sectors. In a recession or an economic boom, Americans love going out to eat. Which begs the question: Why aren’t the workers who serve and prepare that food compensated accordingly?

Jayaraman is intimately familiar with bleak reality that April and Sandy share with so many other servers across the U.S. She’s a driving voice in the Fight for $15 campaign and the struggle against the lower, federal tipped minimum wage—frozen at $2.13 for two decades. In 2015, she came out publicly against tipping.

In the introduction, Jayaraman describes Forked as a “guide for anyone who eats out and anyone who wants to eat better and more ethically.” To that effect, Forked is divided into user-friendly chapters by restaurant type: family-style and casual, Mexican food, fine-dining, burger joints, sandwich shops, coffee shops, and diners. Each chapter dives into the history, origin, and current treatment of workers at one “low-road” restaurant (i.e., a business treating workers poorly) and one “high-road” restaurant (one treating them fairly).

The “high-road,” employers Jayaraman mentions include Chipotle, In-N-Out Burger, Tom Colicchio’s Craft restaurants, and Busboys and Poets. According to ROC research, these businesses pay a living wage, offer benefits and paid sick days, and provide opportunities for “internal mobility regardless of workers’ race or gender.”

Jayaraman calls out Darden Restaurants—the parent company of Olive Garden and the Capital Grille—in particular for low wages, policies that often result in sick employees showing up to work, and lax enforcement of sexual harassment policies.

“Sixty-six percent of the almost six million tipped workers in America are women; a large majority work in casual restaurants like the Olive Garden, Applebee’s, or IHOP. Tipped workers’ median wage is $9.08 an hour including tips; these women suffer three times the poverty rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce and use food stamps at double the rate of the rest of the U.S. workforce,” she writes.

Early on in Forked, Jayaraman takes a shallow dive into the history of tipping. Interestingly, after wealthy Americans brought the custom of tipping back from Europe, a strong anti-tipping movement railed against the practice, calling it “despicable” and “undemocratic.” But, the practice caught on, especially when American hospitality and railway companies fought in favor of tipping on the premise that they shouldn’t have to pay wages to their employees—many of which were former African-American slaves—because the workers were earning tips.

“The impetus for these industries to be able to hire workers and not pay them at all, arose in part from the nation’s history of subjugation based on race,” writes Jayaraman. Eventually, despite the fact that other countries moved away from tipping, it became entrenched by custom, law, and federal policy here in the U.S.

Jayaraman places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the National Restaurant Association (NRA), the federal lobbying group for the restaurant industry. Or the “other NRA,” as ROC puts it. The group has lobbied to “keep the minimum wage as low as possible,” she writes. In fact, congressional legislation passed in 1996, thanks to negotiation tactics by former NRA president and once-presidential candidate Herman Cain, froze the federal minimum wage for tipped workers at $2.13 an hour. It hasn’t increased since.

“When you are a tipped worker who receives between $2.13 and $5 an hour … your wage is so small it goes entirely to taxes, and you get a paystub with $0 that says, ‘This is not a paycheck,’” writes Jayaraman. “As a result, a vast majority of tipped workers in America live completely off their tips, which creates extraordinary economic instability. It’s a system, she says, that demands tax payers to subsidize low-road restaurants in two ways: by paying workers’ wages through tips, and by paying for those same workers’ economic survival through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicare.

A handful of states have bucked the trend and passed their own legislation raising, or in some instances, doing away with the tipped minimum wage. For decades, California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, Alaska, Nevada, and Minnesota, have had the same wages for tipped and non-tipped workers. Still, the restaurant service industry stands as the lowest-paying employer in the U.S. Not surprisingly, a dependence on tips has left employees, especially women, vulnerable to unwelcome advances from customers. Jayaraman recounts the many instances when women approached her after a book talk to tell their own stories of sexual harassment and assault while working as servers in restaurants.

Consumer power, Jayaraman argues in the book’s conclusion, is the best way to ensure higher wages, benefits and mobility for restaurant workers in the United States. To make it easier for diner’s to decide where to spend their money, ROC developed the Diners Guide to Ethical Eating app. The app rates the 100 most popular restaurant chains and points customers towards a few dozen “responsible restaurant employer partners.”

Unfortunately, the choices for “high-road” restaurants—aside from those with a larger presence like In-N-Out Burger and several of ROC’s own worker-owned restaurants—are pretty limited. That could change if more consumers start using the app. It also isn’t clear what customers should do if they are searching for high-road restaurants in their own towns. It’s one thing to suggest that we ask employees at our favorite restaurants, how they are treated, but it’s another to put that into action without feeling somewhat awkward. Still, it’s a start. In addition to using the app to find “high-road” restaurants to support, Jayaraman urges consumers to lobby their elected officials to end the two-tier wage system, to talk with restaurateurs about their values, and to hold low-road employers accountable through calls and emails.

“What’s hidden in plain sight as we talk and talk about food is the glaring mistreatment of people whose work makes restaurants such an integral part of the U.S. culture and economy,” writes Jayaraman. “Fair pay for the people who prepare and serve us our meals is the final frontier for the food service industry—and for a society that loves eating out.”

The post ‘Forked’ Tells the History of Tipped Labor and Offers a Guide to Dining Ethically appeared first on Civil Eats.

“Our target is everyday American families,” says Nick Green, Thrive’s co-founder and co-CEO, a duty he shares with serial entrepreneur Gunnar Lovelace. By “everyday”, he means middle-class Americans—mostly moms—who are shopping for the entire family, and “want to buy healthy choices on a budget.”

Imagine a kinder, gentler Amazon—without the drones or the third-party vendors. It’s a place where users pay a membership fee to buy organic and non-GMO products—packed in recycled materials—at a discount 24/7. And where every available product is tagged by one of dozens of values, and being certified carbon neutral gives you bragging rights.

When it launched late last year, Thrive Market joined the well-documented rise of organic foods, sales of which have grown exponentially in the last decade. According to the USDA, organic products are available in over 20,000 natural foods stores, and three out of four conventional stores. Yet, organics still only make up about 4 percent of total U.S. food sales. Thrive’s founders think they can push that number higher by combining the Internet’s wide reach with the old-fashioned concept of a buying club. In 2016, they plan to launch IOS and Android apps that will allow customers to shop by phone.  

Similar to Costco, but without the bulk quantities, Thrive Market members pay $60 a year to access 4,000 products. The membership fee, says Green, allows Thrive to charge wholesale prices for products by paying for operation and fulfillment costs. According to the company prices are typically 25 to 50 percent lower than your local supermarket.

Rapid Growth

Customer response, so far, shows Green and Lovelace could be onto something. They started the company in September 2014 with $8 million in seed money from “health and wellness influencers” like Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, Mark Sisson, and Jillian Michaels. Celebrity investors like Twilight actress Nikki Reed and her boyfriend Vampire Diaries star Ian Somerhalder, as well as model-turned-TV- host Molly Sims, evangelized about Thrive in interviews and blog posts. These early partnerships were “incredibly effective” at getting the word out, says Green.

By early 2015 Thrive’s membership had grown by the thousands. YouTube videos popped up of people (mostly women) enthusiastically unboxing their Thrive hauls—lots of coconut crisps, hemp hearts, organic chips, quinoa, and fair trade truffles.

Thrive grew again in July 2015 with $30 million in Series A funding. Lovelace says it was the largest early-stage amount ever raised by a Los Angeles-based e-commerce company. Backers included the parent company of the Food Network, Honest Company CEO Brian Lee, and Stonyfield Farms cofounder Gary Hirshberg. As of late 2015, Thrive Market was at an $80 million run-rate, with $40 million in total sales. The site has attracted over 2 million users since it launched and has 150,000 paid members. They’ve also given away an additional 150,000 memberships through Thrive Gives, a free membership program targeted at low-income families, students, teachers, and active military.

“We’ve grown five times faster than we expected,” says Green. For the first year, the company’s 40,000 square-foot warehouse in Commerce, California was its only fulfillment center—a fact that lead to complaints from customers who weren’t receiving orders fast enough. So Thrive used some of that investment money to open a 375,000 square-foot fulfillment center in Baseville, Indiana in November. They also amped up marketing with the launch of a magazine (featuring original articles and lots of ads for Thrive products) while expanding original wellness and recipe educational content on their website.

Curated Shopping

Demographically, 85 percent of Thrive customers are women, and most skew younger in age than the typical Costco shopper. In a nod to millennials’ desire for a customized and curated shopping experience, shoppers are encouraged to “shop by your values” in pre-determined categories such as vegan, raw, paleo, “healthy moms, ” and gluten-free. Users can also search by even more defined terms like: fair trade,  grass-fed, sustainably farmed, woman-owned, and “no antibiotics.” In all, products are pegged across 120 total categories.

“We take a really curated approach,” says Green. “A lot of our members are new to health and wellness. We are going for a removal of the choice overload. We’ve done all of the work for you.”  

The curated approach, led by Thrive’s team of four buyers, is an element that differentiates the site from competitors like Amazon and Jet. Rather than combing through tons of choices, Thrive customers get limited options in each category. Say, five almond butters rather than 15. And all are guaranteed non-GMO. But how do the prices compare? A recent search found that consumers would pay $4 more on Amazon than they would for a similar product at Thrive.

Seeking to Improve Access

Although Thrive also plays up their giving program, it’s clearly still a work in progress. Like Tom’s which gives away a pair of shoes for every pair a customer buys, Thrive hands out a free memberships to a low-income family for every paid membership, usually through third-party nonprofits like Blue Star and The Boys and Girls Club. But most of these free accounts, Green admits, have never been activated. The lackluster response forced the company to revisit this strategy.

In November, Thrive added a feature that allows people to apply directly through the website for a free membership. The use rates have risen, says Green, and are actually comparable to paid members. In late January, they plan to take the effort up a notch by adding three first purchase credits, which co-CEO Lovelace said in an email, “Can really move the needle for less fortunate families in creating new healthy habits.”

Thrive also recently partnered with True Sioux Hope Foundation to provide free memberships to all Pine Ridge residents, and free boxes of food and organic baby and household products to a limited number of families. But it remains to be seen whether giving programs like these might actually improve access to organic and non-GMO food for any significant number of food-insecure Americans.  

A stance on larger food system challenges and supply chain awareness must become part of Thrive’s business approach if the founders are to be successful at improving healthy food access, says Nina F. Ichikawa, Policy Director at the Berkeley Food Institute.

“Like any retail option, we hope this one will give fair prices and fair wages to workers that pick and ship the goods,” Ichikawa told Civil Eats. “That would truly make ‘healthy living accessible to everyone.’” She also points out that Thrive Market won’t be able to compete with grocery stores and farmers markets until it accepts SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits—or “food stamps.”

Green says the 170 workers in the two fulfillment centers receive the same benefits as Thrive’s executives and get paid “strong wages.” In regards to food stamps? Right now, online retailers can’t accept EBT benefits: The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) hasn’t built the functionality needed to make that happen. But, a pilot program through the USDA that would allow e-commerce platforms to accept SNAP benefits is in the works, and Thrive is vigorously campaigning to be in the first pilot cohort next year. The USDA didn’t respond to requests for comment.

According to Thrive’s founders, the company has the potential to fix three pressing issues currently facing the food system: the high cost of sustainably produced food, lack of access due to geographical limitations, and a lack of consumer education (hence the magazine, blog, and videos).  

“Consumer values are shifting,” says Green. “For the first time, in the last seventy-five years of the industrial food system, people are waking up to the fact that our food supply is functionally poisoned, that there are toxic ingredients, unnecessary processing, and real dangers to the diet we are eating. We see ourselves fitting in by making it more possible for people to act on that awareness by making healthy, non-GMO, organic options accessible to everyone.”

The post Can Thrive Market be a Kinder, Gentler Amazon for Organic Food? appeared first on Civil Eats.

In October, the state’s legislature passed the California Nutrition Incentives Act (AB 1321), a bill that could create a nutrition matching incentive program within the state’s Office of Farm to Fork.

The idea—pioneered on a national level and implemented in 33 states by the nonprofit organization Wholesome Wave—is a simple one. These programs encourage low-income shoppers to buy local produce at farmers’ markets by matching their “food stamps,” or federal supplemental nutrition (or SNAP), benefits dollar for dollar.

California already has a relatively large-scale matching program called Market Match, run by the Berkeley-based Ecology Center, and has seen matching incentives increase the redemption of nutrition benefits at farmers’ markets from 132 percent to 700 percent since 2009.

So why is the state getting involved? It all started last year when when U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced an unprecedented $100 million in competitive Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentive (FINI) grants, authorized by the 2014 Farm Bill, to be made available over the course of five years to fund healthy food incentive programs across the U.S.

In April 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the first round of awardees. Washington state received the largest funding, with a nearly $6 million FINI grant. Massachusetts, another state that had organized a coordinated effort to apply for the grant money, received nearly $4 million.  

Immediately, California food policy advocates asked why these two smaller states received more money than California, a state with a vast network of farmers’ markets, over 700 at last count, and 4 million people with inadequate access to safe, nutritious, affordable food.

“Government likes to give to government,” said Michael Dimock, president of the nonprofit Roots of Change, which co-sponsored and lobbied for AB 1321. The bill was the response to the missed opportunity, and Dimock and others hope it will improve California’s chances to receive bigger grants from the USDA.

A few existing organizations in California did actually receive some funding from the USDA grants after applying on their own. Market Match received $3.7 million over two years to expand their programs across the state. Mandela Marketplace, a food equity focused nonprofit based in Oakland, received $422,000.

But the state’s food policy advocates thought the number, especially when California’s size, population, and existing farmers’ market network was taken into account, should have been larger. Hence, AB 1321.

With legislation approved, the next step is to obtain actual funding for the program, which needs to match any USDA dollars it receives, says Sarah Hanson of the Office of Farm to Fork. And with a fiscally conservative governor at the helm, that won’t be easy. The state’s legislature approved a budget request for $5 million for this purpose during the last budget cycle, but then the governor cut it at the last minute, according to Dimock.

In addition to allowing the state to apply for federal funds, the new bill is only one of a handful of efforts in recent years to codify healthy food for SNAP recipients into state law.

In 2013, South Carolina’s governor Nikki Haley’s administration petitioned the USDA for a waiver that would allow only healthy foods to be purchased with food stamps. Another Republican lawmaker proposed similar legislation in Wisconsin. Unlike the previous examples, the new California legislation provides a placeholder for funds to expand healthy food incentives at farmers’ markets and local markets but does not limit what CalFresh users choose to buy at supermarkets.

Julia Pon directs the National Nutrition Incentive Network at Wholesome Wave. She says the new legislation shows that healthy food programs are gaining traction on a state-by-state basis, and establishes California as a leader.

“Even if AB 1321 just creates a placeholder for future funding … hopefully, Wholesome Wave can take this legislation and its language as an example to share with other states where we work, to help those groups have success implementing similar things,” says Pon.

Rebecca DeLaRosa, director of legislative affairs at the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California, another co-sponsor of AB 1321, also points to the symbolism inherent in the bill’s passage. It “symbolically recognizes that there is a model that works, one that emphasizes partnerships between local governments, farms, organizations, and foundations,” she says.

Still, unless the state legislature approves the funding next year, the legislation functions more as a pledge of good will than anything else. For that reason, AB 1321 isn’t a comprehensive solution to the problem of equitable healthy food access in California, but it is a starting point.

“The state is taking a more active role,” says DeLaRosa. And it’s a role which she says, “shows that California is committed to providing support for a healthy food system for all.”

The post California Wants to Help Low-Income Residents Buy More Fresh Produce appeared first on Civil Eats.

Gefen, a bioengineer and professor at Tel Aviv University, believes that lab-grown chicken could help satiate a growing global demand for meat at a time when livestock production is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, land degradation, water pollution, and biodiversity losses. Projecting into the near future, when land, water, and animal feed become less abundant, Gefen says, “resources for the animals will become so expensive that the end product—native meat—will be too expensive for most of the population to consume regularly. It is our duty as researchers to prepare for such a future.”

After learning about Gefen’s tissue-engineering work, the Modern Agriculture Foundation, an Israeli nonprofit with a lab-cultured meat agenda, offered him a $25,000 grant to create a commercially viable lab-grown chicken. The project launched earlier this year. Gefen and his colleagues chose chicken, in particular, because it’s a popular main course in Israel (and across the world), not because it would necessarily be easy to produce.

“It’s challenging to come up with the texture and consistency of a product that will resemble the muscle fiber structure of a native chicken breast,” Gefen says.

The process begins with a single chicken cell harvested from a living animal. This isn’t a vegan answer to chicken, yet, since cells and collagen for the serum are harvested from animals. With stimulation, the muscle cell divides into millions. Those cells are incubated in a serum made from collagen, though Gefen is searching out non-animal alternatives. Soon, the cells fuse together, forming muscle rryfibers. Through a complex process that involves replicating the conditions in a chicken’s body, the fibers end up in a form that the Modern Agriculture Foundation says is “identical in every way to the type of meat consumed today.”

Gefen isn’t the first to experiment with petri-dish meat. Dr. Mark Post debuted his in-vitro hamburger patty in 2013. And People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) held an in-vitro chicken contest a few years back offering $1 million to anyone who could come up with a chicken-meat product with the taste and texture of the real thing. Nobody won and the contest was scrapped in 2014. At least one journalist called out the animal rights organization for setting contest guidelines with bogus and unrealistic parameters.

Would chicken breast engineered in a lab be safe to eat? It would probably be much less likely to contain pathogens associated with foodborne illnesses, such as Listeria, E. coli, and Campylobacter, which are generally the product of raising animals in concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs. But, as the product of science that is above the heads of many consumers, test-tube meat could also be associated with genetically engineered or “GMO” foods, and prompt questions about long-term safety. Gefen resists that association, and insists that he isn’t tampering with DNA or genetics. “Essentially, we create chicken-body-like conditions for the cells to form muscle fibers without changing the genetic coding,” he says.

Of course all of this costs money. Post’s initial stab at a cultured beef patty cost $325,000 to produce, an amount bankrolled by Google cofounder Sergey Brin; it debuted in 2013 to mixed reviews, with the biggest challenge being the cost to produce. At this point, if the cultured hamburger were produced commercially it would sell for about $80 a pound. So even if lab-grown chicken ends up costing less to produce, it could be another decade or three before it would be available on a commercial scale, according to Shir Friedman of the Modern Agriculture Foundation.

Why not just encourage people to eat less meat, instead of expending so many resources and spending so much money on cultivating meat in a lab? The percentage of people willing to switch to a plant-based diet remains low, says to Isha Datar, CEO at New Harvest, a nonprofit group that has raised over $2 million to support scientists creating meat and dairy alternatives. One 2012 Gallup poll found that only five percent of the U.S. population identifies as vegetarian, down from six percent in 2001.

But even if everyone in the developed world stopped eating meat, Datar points out that the increasing demand for animal protein in developing countries due to the rising middle class and the spread of the Western-style diet, would more than make up the difference. “When 70 percent of agricultural land is devoted to animal agriculture, we need to try anything we can,” she adds. “We’re running out of planet.”

A 2011 study by the University of Oxford researchers, and funded by New Harvest, came to the conclusion that cultured meat might be produced with up to 96 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions, 99 percent lower land use, and 96 percent lower water use than conventional meat.

Dr. Robyn Metcalfe, the director of Food + City (formerly the Food Lab at the University of Austin), agrees with the imperative to explore alternative sources of food, to ensure an “ample and diverse food supply” in the future. Still, she says, there’s a long way to go, not only with the engineering of the meat itself, but also in getting people to accept cultured meat as appealing. “It’s difficult to provoke desire from a lab; doable, but complicated,” says Metcalfe. “Food cultures are less adaptive than imagined.”

And while many nutritionists and other health experts call for a return to whole, unprocessed foods, engineered meat is about as processed as you can get. According to Metcalfe, this is a conflict that will need to be resolved “either by new research that demonstrates that engineered meat is stunningly more sustainable—and tasty—or the processing of food has to become the norm for our food system.” And the latter would come with its own set of problems.

In the meantime, Gefen will continue working on the chicken breast, a process he says is more challenging than cultivating the lab-grown hamburger patty, where 20,000 tiny strips of cow muscle were gathered into a ground-beef-like texture.

If the initial reactions to the bland, dry, and pricey test-tube hamburger are any indication, scientists still have a long way to go before they’ll be able to produce commercially viable meat in a lab. Until then, those who prefer their protein to be less energy and resource-intensive might want to look towards plant-based “meat” made from soy and pea protein. Or just extend that Meatless Monday into Tuesday and Wednesday.

The post Move Over Test-Tube Burger, There’s a Lab-Grown Chicken Breast in the Works appeared first on Civil Eats.

Back then, the farm accounted for nearly 40 percent of California’s oyster production, and operated the last oyster cannery in the state. Notwithstanding legal proceedings litigated by a Koch Brothers-backed attorney, and support from Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Senator Dianne Feinstein, the National Park Service (NPS) did not extend the farm’s 40-year lease, and Drakes Bay Oyster Company closed in late 2014.

Journalist Summer Brennan stumbled onto the Drakes Bay Oyster Company fracas after being hired as a staff writer for the Point Reyes Light, a nearby local paper, in 2012. In short order, Brennan, a Point Reyes native who now lives in New York, was embroiled in the controversy, working late nights to discern fact from fiction, and clumsy science from sound policy.

“I found myself wedged between the National Park Service, wilderness advocates, and their defenders on one hand, and the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, the local agriculture, community and their supporters on the other . . .” she writes in her new book The Oyster War: The True Story of a Small Farm, Big Politics, and the Future of Wilderness in America.

Written in a style reminiscent of Rebecca Solnit—the San Francisco environmental writer with a keen ability for melding the poetic and the political—The Oyster War make for a fast-paced and dramatic read about a messy situation with no clear-cut “bad guy.” Geographically, the story’s action takes place on a tiny plot of land—Drakes Estero—in a semi-isolated, rural community in California. Still, it manages to raise questions of interest to anyone concerned with the erosion of wilderness in the U.S. (especially in favor of private business) and whether the natural world should be preserved despite the prospect of jobs and agricultural land.

Additionally fascinating is how an imported farmed food (in this case, Japanese oysters, which were renamed “Pacific” oysters during WWII) became an integral component of the Bay Area foodshed, to the point of being mistaken for, and even defended as, a wild and sustainable food.

The story began, in part, in early 1970, when Richard Nixon signed a bill approving funds for the National Park Service to purchase thousands of acres of land in Point Reyes—the future Point Reyes National Seashore—which included land managed by family-owned dairy and cattle ranches. The legislation was the fruit of a landmark collaboration between environmental activists, Point Reyes community members, and agricultural interests—all united in the desire to protect Point Reyes from rampant commercial development.

An oyster farm had also been established there in the 1930s; it was sold to Charlie and Makiko Johnson in 1957. In 1972, NPS purchased 71,028-acres of pristine wilderness directly north of San Francisco, on the stipulation that they would lease the land in the “pastoral zone” back to the families that had farmed it for generations. Johnson’s Oyster Company, as it was known at the time, was the only farm to receive a 40-year Reservation of Use and Occupancy, unlike the five to 10 year renewable leases given to the ranchers.

As Brennan writers, the oyster farm’s fate wasn’t necessarily sealed until the passing of the Point Reyes Wilderness Act of 1976, which designated all bodies of water, and land within certain boundaries in Point Reyes National Seashore, as wilderness or “potential wilderness.” Johnson’s Oyster Farm fell within these boundaries.

Brennan explains how, in 2005, Kevin Lunny, whose family had farmed in Point Reyes for years, bought the struggling and environmentally questionable oyster farm. Lunny outright refused to accept the terms of the lease with NPS. He wanted the lease to be extended, giving him an opportunity to “clean up the farm.”

Brennan writes that the decision set the stage for a battle that pitted sustainable food advocates and local economy boosters against environmentalists and wilderness supporters. One side worried what the loss of one of the largest oyster culturing farms on the West Coast, along with the 30 livelihoods it supported, would mean for the local foodshed. Wilderness advocates argued that if Lunny were allowed to extend his lease, other commercial operations would use the precedent to encroach on the rest of the 2.5 percent of lands designated as wilderness in the U.S.

One of the biggest arguments of the oyster farm came from those who believed the shellfish are a sustainable and integral part of the Bay Area foodshed. Notably, Brennan argues that oysters may not have been native to the San Francisco Bay Area. In painstaking detail, she relates the story of a Gold Rush entrepreneur John Stillwell Morgan’s obsessive search for native oysters on his arrival to the Bay Area. He searched the San Francisco Bay, Tomales, and surrounding areas. “In none of these places did John find oysters,” Brennan writes. “And there is nothing to indicate that his search was anything less than thorough.”

Guided by a firm belief that oysters would be big business in San Francisco, Morgan imported small oysters from Washington State, branding them “Olympias,” and launching a farm operation in the San Francisco Bay. He later went on to import baby oysters, by train, from the East Coast in a further attempt to expand his oyster empire. One hundred years later, the Johnsons raised Pacific oysters in Drake’s Estero, where they thrived despite the estuary’s muddy, soft bottom.

In all, The Oyster War is essential reading for anyone interested in a tumultuous chapter in the history of food systems and environmental activism in the U.S, stretching from Lunny’s 2005 refusal to accept the non-renewal of his lease, to the forced closure of the farm in 2014, a time when an honorable desire to protect wilderness ran headlong into local, sustainable aquaculture (although the verdict is still out on just how sustainable Drakes Bay Oyster farm really was).

In an early chapter, Brennan confesses to originally siding with the oyster farm. But, she continues: “The story I have written here is not the story I thought I would find when I set out to write it.” In the end, after much research, her sympathy began to erode and Brennan ended up understanding the National Park Service’ decision to close the farm. Mainly, because Lunny knew his lease wouldn’t be renewed when he bought the farm. The National Park Service was clear about that—even if other aspects of their handling of the case were questionable.

As a reader, I felt comfortable with Brennan’s conclusions, especially since the pages leading up to it are loaded with solid research, interviews, and deep dives into the historical and anthropological background of oysters. The fate of the oyster farm was most definitely a loss for local food lovers in the Bay Area (and the oyster workers who were employed there, some for decades), but the decision sets an important precedent. It marks a commitment to wilderness over private business—one that future generations will benefit from for many years to come.

The post ‘The Oyster War’: What Really Happened to Drakes Bay Oyster Farm appeared first on Civil Eats.

[Previous update: In February 2018, Assembly Bill 626 passed the California Assembly, one step further to passage. And at the same time, the homemade meal delivery company Josephine, which had advocated for the passage of the law, announced it is ending operations in the spring of 2018.]

On a Wednesday afternoon in late July, I sat in a stranger’s kitchen dipping a crispy papadum into a bowl of homemade lentil soup. No, I don’t burst into people’s houses, Goldilocks-style, demanding soup and crackers. I bought and paid for this particular meal ahead of time, through Josephine, a new website that aims to connect home cooks with hungry, local customers.

Truthfully, it felt awkward to approach an unfamiliar two-story house on a tree-lined street in Berkeley, California in search of my lunch. That is, until I spotted a sign advertising “Josephine.com–Home Cooked Meals.” A man standing at the top of the steps introduced himself as “Traci’s husband” and directed me back to the kitchen, where Traci Siegel constructed lamb shish-kebobs and dished out soup for people who had come to pick up their to-go “home cooked” meals.

Dressed casually in a grey T-shirt and jeans shorts, Siegel invited me to sit down to eat at a small table in her bright and airy kitchen. As we talked, her two teenage children rambled in and out, chatting as they ladled up lentils for themselves. Siegel works in marketing and doesn’t have a professional culinary background, but she’s been cooking for her family and friends for years. Now, thanks to Josephine, she’s also cooking for strangers—and getting paid for it.

The ‘Etsy of Food’

The premise behind Josephine is simple. Potential customers go online to peruse meals cooked by a stable of vetted home cooks on any given day of the week. Each cook posts a description of the meal, along with a photo, and the price per plate, ranging anywhere from $7 to $13. If you want a meal, just click to reserve a plate, and then use a credit card to pay ahead. Once the reservation is complete, Josephine sends you the cook’s home address.

When you’ve eaten, you can review the meal, much as you might review an apartment on Airbnb or a scarf on Etsy. The service is currently limited to residents of Oakland and Berkeley, but plans to expand to San Francisco later this year.

The company’s goal is two-fold, says Josephine’s 25-year-old CEO Charley Wang. In addition to providing nutritious home-cooked meals for people too busy or overwhelmed to cook, the company hopes to empower cooks who might find it difficult to find an entry point into the competitive food world.

In an industry where imitating a working model is encouraged, and nearly everyone describes their startup as “like Facebook/Google/Instagram, but for music/food/photos,” Wang is very cautious about the comparisons he uses. “Our goal is not to be the next Uber of food,” he said, in a conversation at the downtown Oakland co-working space where Josephine is headquartered. In fact, Josephine hopes to become the Etsy of food.

“We want to empower people, through support, marketing, technology, software and education, to build their cooking brand,” he says. Future plans include individual online storefronts for each home cook, similar to Etsy’s craftsperson pages.

Aspiring Josephine cooks apply online. If they look promising, they are invited to cook a meal for a Josephine team member, in their own home. If the cook’s food, personality, community reach, and kitchen cleanliness passes muster, the next step is to get a California food handler’s license (Josephine pays for this). If the first meal goes well, the cook receives full access to the Josephine platform. Cooks receive 90 percent of the revenue from each meal and Josephine takes 10 percent for software tools, community support, and the training component.

Each cook is considered an independent contractor, with creative license in pricing, meal planning, shopping, and marketing. On average, though the number can vary, the cooks shop and prep for 30 to 40 portions, and make about $200 profit, according to Wang. According to Siegel, she receives payment promptly the day after her Wednesday meals. There are currently 40 cooks on the platform.

“There are tons of people who have a passion for food, but who can’t make a living at it because they don’t have access to the business skills or the capital,” says Wang.

The biggest challenge for Siegel, who had never cooked commercially before, was figuring out just how much to prepare. In the beginning, she often found herself with leftovers. Recently, in attempt to streamline, she hired a local high school student, part-time, to help with prep.

The seed for Josephine appeared in early 2014. After uprooting from tech jobs in Los Angeles, Wang and co-founder Tal Safran moved to the Bay Area. Feeling nostalgia for home-cooked food, they set out to find an entry point into the food tech world. For eight months, they cooked and sold meals out of a rental home in Oakland, as they attempted to discover what people wanted out of an online “home-cooking” experience.

What they found, says Wang, is that their early customers, most of whom were parents of young children, turned to Josephine instead of other services because of the experience itself, not necessarily because the food was healthier or better than restaurant fare. They craved the experience of getting a “home-cooked meal,” even if it wasn’t one cooked in their own home.

Defining Home Cooking

Home-cooking by Americans, or the lack thereof, has garnered much attention of late. New York Times columnist Mark Bittman has spent the last decade trying to convince people that cooking at home is easier than we think. Journalist and author Michael Pollan has also spent several years arguing for the value of home cooking, beginning with his iconic 2009 New York Times Magazine essay and continuing with his 2013 nonfiction book, Cooked.

But it’s not just the food movement leaders who are talking about home cooking. A 2014 study published in the journal Public Health Nutrition found that people who cook tend to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, and get significantly more fiber, fewer carbohydrates, and less sugar than those who rely heavily on restaurants and pre-prepared foods.

But does buying home-cooked meals from someone else count? Julia Wolfson, one of the study’s authors and a researcher in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Civil Eats that the Josephine.com model seems like an innovative alternative that can help people have access to freshly prepared—and perhaps healthier—meal options.

“However, people tend to associate home cooking with an investment of one’s own time, effort, creativity, and love,” Wolfson added via email. In other words, she doesn’t necessarily think buying meals others are cooking on a large scale in their homes necessarily counts as “home cooking.”

Sara Bleich, another author of the John Hopkins University study, says that the service could provide the same benefits of cooking at home, but that it also raises food safety questions since the food and kitchens will not be regulated in the way that restaurants and other commercial food outlets generally are.

With their January launch, Josephine.com entered into an increasingly crowded food tech start-up landscape. Companies like Sprig, Munchery, and Spoon Rocket are working to replace pizza delivery with whole foods-based, chef-prepared meals, and meal kits. Feastly, which raised over $1 million in seed funding last year, uses a similar peer-to-peer model where people can reserve a spot at a high-end homemade dinner.

Two Kinds of Sharing

Wang says it would be easy to lump Josephine.com in with the slew of companies that want a cut of the $8 billion food industry, but he insists the company has a soul. “We’re working within a capitalist infrastructure, we’re taking money from our angel investors, and we have the same kind of aggressive growth model,” he acknowledged. At the same time, he said, the newbie food tech company lies at the convergence of three different movements based in the Bay Area: the “sharing economy,” a newly legitimate California cottage food industry, and the food justice movement.

The Princeton graduate sees Josephine.com as more “mission-driven” than companies like Uber, which started by staking a claim in the “sharing economy,” but have profited mightily from the exploitation of independent contractors. In a recent op-ed published on Medium, Wang argued that Josephine falls squarely on the “teach someone to fish” side of the scalable sharing economy business model.

The company has raised $600,000 in angel funding since it launched, though Wang says he has been very selective about applying for venture funding in an effort to pursue the company’s people-centric mission.

“Instead of having white people rolling a food truck into West Oakland saying, ‘hey, eat more salads,’ you can use Josephine, and find the entrepreneurs and the cooks—who are already [community] pillars and cooking culturally relevant food—and empower them to increase their reach and better their local community,” he said in a later conversation.

As I finished the last of my soup, Traci Siegel told me that, by offering an online marketplace for cooks who don’t necessarily have formal training, Josephine has “elevated” home-cooking. Another benefit? She’s made connections with people in the community—and other cooks—she wouldn’t have met otherwise.

“Maybe people don’t have time to make dinner themselves, but it gives them the chance to have that experience,” she says. “The [home-cooked meal] has been lost and this is a way to get it back.”

The post Josephine Wants to Bring the Sharing Economy to Your Kitchen appeared first on Civil Eats.

Dozens of diet books with “superfood” in the title have been published over the last decade. Some so-called superfoods are common: Beans, apples, tea, broccoli. There are also the imported “miracle” berries and roots: açaí, goji, maca. More recently, dragonfruit, breadfruit, and mangosteen were declared nutritional miracle foods. The label often leads to a sales bump; in 2011, the top-selling superfruits brought in more than $205 million. That’s a lot of money spent on nutrient-rich foods that flaunt a label with no official definition.

Are some fruits and vegetable really far superior to the rest? The answer depends on who you ask. Marion Nestle, the author of What to Eat and a professor of nutrition at New York University, told the Washington Post that she doesn’t believe in superfoods. On her blog, Nestle denounced the MonaVie brand that was selling acai juice for $40 a bottle in 2009. “The bottom line: all juices have antioxidants and most are a lot cheaper than MonaVie,” wrote Nestle.

Registered dietician Andy Bellatti agrees that the superfoods label is all about marketing.

“The field of nutrition is primed for these gimmicks because manufacturers know there are a lot of people looking for silver bullets,” says Bellatti. “The term ‘superfood’ as we know it today is silly because it is basically code for ‘grown 15,000 miles away in a remote mountain range and sold at a premium.’ As far as I am concerned, all whole, minimally processed, plant-based foods are superfoods. Are goji berries healthy? Sure. So is an orange.”

The origin of the superfoods label is as murky as the scientific evidence for their nutritional superiority. The label’s first use has most often been attributed to Michael Van Straten, an alternative medicine practitioner and author of Superfoods, an out-of-print cookbook from 1990. Others point to SuperFoods Rx: Fourteen Foods That Will Change Your Life, a 2003 best-selling book by Dr. Steven Pratt.

A recent article in Slate chronicled how, in the early 20th century, the United Fruit Co. transformed the banana into a weight-loss promoting superfruit through relentless marketing. The bananas and milk diet might have gone the way of flapper dresses, but is that fad diet really so different than drinking a daily goji berry smoothie?

Like the “natural” label, the superfoods designation is unregulated, meaning the label can be slapped onto just about any product. Indeed, there is no official or legal definition of superfoods. In 2007 the European Union (EU) banned the use of superfood on product labels for just this reason. Now, foods can only sport that label there if sellers can provide a specific, authorized health claim that explains to consumers exactly how the product can benefit their health.

In the U.S., where the label remains unregulated, food marketers’ efforts to stay ahead of the curve verge on comical. In anticipation that kale chips would jump the shark, one snack food company recently debuted a new line of chips made from purple corn, which they claimed had more “antioxidant power than blueberries, acai berries, and pomegranate juice.” And while this may be true, it might not mean what some consumers think it does.

Ten years ago, sales of acai berry juice skyrocketed, mostly due to claims that the tiny purple fruit from South America contains impressively high antioxidant levels. And yet, in 2012, the anti-aging and disease-fighting benefits of antioxidants, particularly in supplement form, were called into question. In a surprising turn of events, some nutritional intervention trials have found that certain antioxidants have no obvious effect in preventing certain cancers, and in some cases, can actually aggravate them. “Blueberries best be eaten [sic] because they taste good, not because their consumption will lead to less cancer,” writes Nobel Laureate Professor James Watson in a controversial paper published by The Royal Society.

None of that stopped the demand for acai products. In 2013, Sambazon, the Southern California-based company credited with popularizing acai drinks in the U.S., was worth over $100 million in retail sales. Nor did it stop exaggerated health claims by sneaky diet profiteers.

At the same time, the popularity–and sales–of superfoods have benefited from the support of some big names. Dr. Mark Hyman, Director of the Cleveland Clinic Center of Functional Medicine and author of eight best-selling books on diet and nutrition, views the superfoods label in a positive light.

“Plants are filled with phytochemicals that have profound biologic effects,” he told Civil Eats. “‘Superfood’ is a new way to talk about the healing [power] in nutrient-dense food that goes beyond vitamins, minerals, fats, carbohydrates, and protein.”

Certain foods, especially those with organic labels, benefit from a “health halo,” according to a 2013 study by researchers at the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab. In consumer trials, consumers credit these foods with more nutrients and better flavor, in turn leading individuals to report a willingness to pay higher prices for such foods. Brian Wansink, Ph.D and director of the Food and Brand Lab, says that the apparent halo around superfoods may also be misleading  for other reasons too.

“Blueberry sales certainly do benefit from functional scientific claims, but the ‘health halo’ effect becomes dangerous when foods that are less clearly healthy for you are associated with something considered healthy–like muffins made with organic flour,” he says.

Most experts seem to point to the idea that fruits and vegetables–super or not–are what constitute a healthy diet. “If you genuinely enjoy mangosteen, by all means eat some,” says Bellatti. “But don’t fool yourself into thinking that a mangosteen is superior to a blackberry or a pear.”

The post Are ‘Superfoods’ Over? appeared first on Civil Eats.

It took two years, and thousands of pounds of potatoes, to find the right organic variety of potato for fresh-cut french fries cooked in sunflower oil. “Most businesses would go to a company and buy a bunch of frozen potatoes,” says John Paneno, Director of Sourcing at Amy’s Kitchen. “Amy’s started from scratch. We hired experts who could find the best varieties that met our sensory requirements. We had to figure out where they grew best and who is the best farmer to process them. We’re not taking any shortcuts.”

In late June, the meticulously sourced french fries will debut at the official launch of the first Amy’s Drive Thru.

Customers have asked the company’s owners to enter into the restaurant business for two decades, says co-founder and co-CEO Andy Berliner, who oversees the company with his wife, Rachel.

“About four years ago, we decided to do more of a traditional drive-through restaurant, but with organic, vegetarian, pesticide-free, and GMO-free food,” Berliner tells Civil Eats. The menu, which the company says is made with around 95 percent certified organic ingredients, will be familiar to fast food fans: burritos, pizza, shakes, chili, salads, and, of course, French fries.

Creating organic and good-tasting menu items has taken an inordinate amount of work. A task only compounded by the fact that all menu items will be available in regular, gluten-free, dairy-free, and vegan configurations.

The price point is higher than most fast food, but inline with fast casual chains like Chipotle and Panera. Customers will be able to buy a meal for under $9 and have it delivered within three-and-a-half minutes, a key to drive-thru success.

It’s important to note that the Berliners avoid the term “healthy fast food.” “We’re not calling it healthy because we do use salt and oil,” says Rachel Berliner. “It wouldn’t sell if we weren’t frying it in oil. You have to reach a medium. It just tastes good and it’s clean.”

“Better-for-you,” is how her husband Andy puts it.

The couple started Amy’s Kitchen in 1987 when they developed a frozen vegetarian pot pie out of their kitchen in Petaluma, California, a Northern California town that remains the company’s headquarters. Twenty-seven years later, the company has grown an average of 30 percent a year, according to Andy Berliner.

With processing plants in Oregon, Santa Rosa, and Idaho, and nearly 2,000 employees, it has evolved into one of the biggest selling frozen food and canned soup companies in the U.S. Since Amy’s Kitchen isn’t publicly traded, and is family-owned and operated, exact sales figures aren’t public knowledge. But on a 2012 episode of How I Made My Millions, the Berliners said the company earned upwards of $300 million in sales that year. Three years later, that number has shot up to $500 million according to a senior manager in communications.

At a time when other companies are working hard to remove genetically engineered and other highly processed ingredients from their menus, Amy’s Drive Thru, by virtue of the parent company’s history, has an upper hand. “We haven’t changed. Organic, vegetarian and non-GMO is who we are,” says Berliner.

As consumer demand for local and organic food continues to skyrocket, the time has never been better for a venture into “clean” fast food. McDonald’s may have changed their tune about kale, but fast food won’t shake its reputation for industrially produced meat, low-quality produce, and large quantities of of fat, sodium, and sugar anytime soon. Now a new breed of restaurants aim to clean up fast food’s reputation–and change the eating habits for legions of Americans along the way. Indeed, Amy’s Drive Thru is part of a larger trend taking place throughout the U.S.

Chains like Burgerville and Shake Shack fill their menus with antibiotic-free hamburgers, fresh-cut fries, and shakes made from local strawberries. In the Bay Area, high-profile chefs Roy Choi and Daniel Patterson are readying for the fall launch of Loco’l, a fast food joint that will use quality, organic ingredients while maintaining the taste, convenience, and price point of traditional fast food. (Some menu items may cost as little as 99-cents.) In a touch you won’t find at Wendy’s, the hamburgers at Loco’l are tucked between whole-grain buns created by Chad Robertson of the notorious San Francisco-based Tartine Bakery.

“Right now, we have a whole society that’s been eating preservatives and processed food, that’s being brainwashed by billions of dollars of industry, and we can’t just say, ‘Yo, eat this kale,’” Choi told Paper. “So what we have to do is pick food in a structure that makes sense. But then inside the structure is real food. So, for example, there are chicken nuggets [on our menu], but those chicken nuggets are made using really good birds, using rice flour to coat it, making a sauce out of real tomatoes and soybean and fermented chili paste. But they don’t know any of this; they just think it’s chicken nuggets.”

While Choi appears to be targeting eaters who don’t go looking for “better-for-you” options, and easing them into changing their habits, Amy’s benefits from a brand that has wide recognition among the health food crowd. Now, the location of the first Amy’s Drive Thru will allow the company to source local produce from farms like Bloomfield Organics and other small growers. Paneno says their sourcing philosophy is to “start local and work our way out.”

“We’re blessed to be in California,” he adds, fresh off a morning of sampling cucumbers, straight from the fields, to be turned into pickles for the drive-thru. Still, the restaurant needs to ensure supply, which will likely mean sourcing to the north or south if the demand arises.

According to Paneno, Amy’s ag field reps monitor all stages of the growing process and ag managers work through the soil-management, harvesting, and clean-up of the food products, until they arrive for processing at the Amy’s plant or kitchen.

As the Berliners see it, all of these locally sourced and pesticide-free foods don’t really matter if restaurant employees work in abysmal conditions for poverty wages.

“We’ll be paying more than anyone else in the market,” says Andy Berliner, when asked about entry-level wages for Amy’s Drive Thru. Employees will receive a starting wage of $12 an hour, lower than demands for a $15 an hour living wage in Sonoma County, but higher than the statewide minimum wage of $9 an hour. Employees will also receive medical benefits through a company-owned health center, and vacation days.

Only time can tell whether sustainably minded fast food joints like Amy’s Drive-Thru and Loco’l will thrive in the face of competition from established fast food giants (the first Amy’s Drive-Thru will be located down the street from a wildly popular In-N-Out Burger).

If this pioneer attempt is successful, expansion is a definite possibility, says Andy Berliner. They’ll take the process slow, and expand when ready, he adds. But, signs point to a sea change in consumer demands when it comes to fast food. In the face of declining sales profits as food-savvy millennials defect to new fast-casual establishments, McDonald’s recently set out out to redefine itself as a “modern, progressive burger company.”

Rachel Berliner recounts how a post about the restaurant’s launch on an anti-GMO website led to hundreds of letters from all over the country.

“People were writing in to ask when Amy’s Drive Thru was coming to their town,” Berliner says. “My feeling is that the restaurant is something that’s really needed.”

The post From Soup to Fries: Amy’s Joins the “Clean” Fast Food Club appeared first on Civil Eats.