Working For Jobs

By Michele Simon

Editor’s note: For another perspective on this series, see this post.

The Weight of the Nation — a four-part mini-series that ran this week on HBO (and online) — has received a lot of attention. Produced in coordination with several federal government agencies and paired with a major national conference, the show has been heralded as “groundbreaking” and “bold.” But it’s really just the same old story.

The Weight of the Nation trailer alone smacks of tired stereotypes, but colleagues implored me to watch the entire series, so I did. And it was even worse than I feared.

I’m all in favor of bringing more attention to the nation’s diet-related health crisis. But the HBO series distracts us with the usual scare tactics, dances around the hard political issues, and leaves the viewer with the misguided impression that if we all just worked harder in our own communities, we can fix this mess.

Fear the fat – more shaming and blaming

Many others have provided excellent explanations for why all the alarm-sounding over obesity should be questioned from a scientific perspective. For example, see Deb Burgard’s and Linda Bacon’s responses to the series, which both stem from the Health at Every Size movement, and aim to shift away from size and fat-shaming toward health and compassion.

Marilyn Wann also gives a historical overview and critique of the series and disputes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s claim that Weight of the Nation is “an unprecedented public health campaign.”

But even without getting into a debate over data, there’s clear evidence –- in the form of scientific research — that many people exhibit “obesity bias.” In other words, fat people have enough problems dealing with discrimination, bullying, and stigma, and shows like this make life even more difficult for them.

Indeed, the first two episodes were all about the sad people suffering from one malady or another, interspersed with health expert talking heads scaring us with statistics and images of organs and surgeries. There was not a peep about thin people’s risk for many of the same diet-related chronic diseases.

What The Weight of the Nation got right

The third segment, which focuses on children, did finally address junk food marketing, with excellent quotes from folks like Kelly Brownell of the Rudd Center on Obesity and Food Policy (he calls such marketing “powerful, pernicious, and predatory”), and Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “Marketing shapes kids’ choices, to foods that will kill them,” Wootan told the filmmakers. This segment also included good footage of a Congressional hearing on the marketing of processed food, the only foray into actual policymaking in the entire program.

Also helpful were segments on agricultural policies and the way our bodies are hard-wired to conserve fat. These were a clear attempt to shift the conversation away from personal responsibility. However, none of these discussions dove deeply enough into the politics. Overall, the show’s messages stayed safely in the realms of medicine, exercise, behavior change, and localized solutions.

Missed opportunities

The Weight of the Nation includes numerous examples of soda and junk food marketing to children, but spends far too little time on the powerful lobbying by the food, advertising, and media industries that undermine policymaking. And it’s not like such information isn’t readily available.

During a segment showing Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter wandering the streets of his city in search of healthy food, I thought: This would be a great time to talk about how the American Beverage Association lobbied to stop his soda tax proposal. (The group even donated $10 million to Philadelphia’s Children’s Hospital to ensure his silence.) But no, not a chance.

On a similar note, many of the experts on the show identified soft drinks as enemy No. 1. But none of the many scenes with New York City’s health commissioner Tom Farley mentioned that city’s attempt to restrict food stamp spending on soft drinks — another attempt at policy change that got heavy push-back from the soda industry.

I was hopeful during one segment when the talking heads admitted that exercise and physical activity were really far less important than food intake when it comes to addressing obesity, a point I’ve made related to children. (Kudos for the experts’ take-down of the awful show The Biggest Loser.)

But despite this, far too much emphasis was placed on exercise throughout the program and the only tangible policy ideas were for things like walking and bike paths.

Where are the policy solutions?

In fact, most disappointing was how the program offered no clear policy solutions. And not a single lawyer appeared to discuss litigation as a strategy to hold the food industry accountable. And what about the farm bill, which is up for renewal this year?

Nope, that’s all too edgy — even for HBO.

Of course the entire project was produced in collaboration with the federal Department of Health and Human Services, which isn’t exactly going to criticize the Obama administration for its failure to lead on numerous food issues. Also featured prominently was the Congressional advisory body, the Institute of Medicine, which released a set of recommendations last week, which are remarkably similar to those released seven years ago.

Obesity distracts from food system change

Continuing to focus on obesity is problematic for numerous reasons. As this program painfully demonstrates, it’s too easy to place the blame on individuals as the locus of change. Add to that how the food industry uses obesity as an excuse to market healthier foods (while they help fund playgrounds and exercise programs) and you have a smokescreen behind which the real issues are often obscured.

Instead of focusing on body size, let’s garner the political power we need to fix the food system. This approach is admittedly much more complex than calories in/calories out, but it’s also more compassionate. As Deb Burgard explains, the blame game is just too easy:

Blaming fatness keeps us from addressing the root causes of our problems and is clearly unfair to fat people. Many powerful people understand this but find it expedient to frame a problem in terms of fat in order to bring attention to it. They don’t think people will attend to the real issue unless they whip up the fat panic … I say, have the courage to make your argument about the real issues and stop doing it on the backs of fat people.

Doing so will take a concerted political movement — one that can’t be brought to you by cable television.

Filed under: Food

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By Rachel Cernansky

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When it comes to giving more people access to fresh, healthy food, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has turned a great deal of its focus in recent years toward farmers markets. And, more specifically, opening farmers markets up to Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) or  “food stamp” users.

In fact, the agency reports, spending at farmers markets under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has already jumped by 400 percent since 2008 — and that’s with less than a quarter of the country’s 7,000 markets participating in the program.

“That’s a huge transformation in the farmers market world, in terms of people being able to feel like they’re invited to the party,” USDA deputy secretary Kathleen Merrigan said in a phone interview.

Expanding SNAP at farmers markets is part of the agency’s broader approach to increasing healthy food access for low-income communities that lack adequate grocery stores and public transportation — areas known (if sometimes controversially so) as food deserts. So when this year’s budget talks came around, the USDA requested $4 million to expand the effort. (Cost is a major reason why more farmers markets don’t already participate: SNAP benefits are redeemed through the EBT system, which relies on wireless technology, and that doesn’t come free.)

Today, the USDA announced it will begin to allocate funds to states with the greatest numbers of EBT-less farmers markets. The states will then decide how best to spend the money for each market: Some may purchase just the wireless equipment, others may buy the equipment and hire someone to manage it, or make other investments that will help manage the program effectively.

Because of that variation, it’s not clear how many more markets will now start redeeming SNAP benefits, but Merrigan estimates that the machines could reach an additional 4,000 farmers markets.

She hopes those markets will help break some of the stereotypes that have developed around eating and cooking with fresh, local fruits and vegetables.

“Twenty years ago or more, people thought this was something for the elite. Clearly that’s not the case, and the expansion of farmers markets with EBT has really proven that,” Merrigan added. And she’s optimistic that more time spent at these markets can lead to other healthy lifestyle shifts as well. “Hopefully some of those people are going to farmers markets on their bikes and walking,” she said.

That said, use of SNAP at farmers markets isn’t going to be the solution that solves all the country’s food problems, and Merrigan recognizes that.

“There’s no silver bullet,” she added.

And because someone will be able to buy local kale or fiddlehead ferns using EBT doesn’t mean they’re going to have the time or experience to cook them. For that reason, Merrigan emphasizes SNAP as a piece of a broader, multi-pronged approach, which includes: “getting access to the food, figuring out what to do with it, and then understanding why it’s important.”

But while this effort by the USDA won’t produce miracles, it will likely give more SNAP users — many of whom do cook at home — quicker, easier access to fresh produce. And that’s no small part of the battle. As Merrigan said, “Getting people to those markets is inviting them into really healthy eating.”

Filed under: Food, Locavore, Sustainable Food

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By Claire Thompson

Michael Twitty is about to embark on what he calls the “Southern Discomfort Tour” — a journey to follow his ancestors’ “foodsteps” through the American South.

This self-described writer, culinary historian, and Jewish educator from the Washington, D.C., area will be traveling with a small group for two months by car, from Maryland to Louisiana and back, covering almost 4,500 miles.

In addition to tracing his personal history, Twitty will be speaking, giving cooking demonstrations, and volunteering on farms and for food justice organizations over the course of the trip. He plans, as he puts it, to “make sure that organic, local and sustainable food in Southern communities — particularly that produced by farmers of color — is highlighted and supported.” He also plans to document the journey on his blog, The Cooking Gene.

Twitty’s roots go back through the segregated South to slavery in Virginia, and he also hopes to engage communities in conversation about the region’s fraught history, using the unique and beloved cuisine of the South as a medium for education and reconciliation. We caught up with Twitty as he was fundraising for the tour.

Q. Describe your approach to this project and what kinds of things you’ll be doing along the way.

A. I’ve been planning the road map [for this trip] for 25 out of my 35 years — learning about genealogy, African American history, and slavery. I really wanted to feel that I was not an armchair scholar. [To that end, Twitty has picked cotton and tobacco in the South.] I didn’t just want to do a project about my ancestors and slavery. The food thing makes it unique, because you can talk about it in regards to slavery, race, class, and power. It’s not just a cultural conversation about things that make people mad, it’s a way to do it that brings people together.

We’re going to be working with a couple different community garden groups, and working with African American farmers. And doing historic [cooking] demonstrations.

We’re going to be at a synagogue in Birmingham where there are black churches sharing the same street, and we’ll have this — hopefully — rich discussion about what identity means and how being Southern brings everybody together. I’m also looking for Chinese communities in Mississippi who have been blending Southern produce and African American food traditions with Chinese regional food traditions for years, and no one’s ever thought to ask them, “how do you make that collard green and crawfish stir fry?”

Q. What’s unique about Southern cuisine?

A. It’s the oldest verifiable, continuous American food tradition. Our food is this incredible blend of the earth, the sky, the water, native America, Africa, and Europe. And it just keeps on incorporating new elements, whether they’re Latino or they’re Asian.

Q. What’s the impact of race on how we eat, and how has that relationship evolved over history?

A. There is a really interesting, apocryphal anecdote [that] said that the only day black people were allowed to publicly eat vanilla ice cream was on the Fourth of July.

Food was a tool of control. To this day, there are certain overtones of food as a means to control. Also, I think people are uncomfortable with the notion that the mother of Southern cuisine is not just a black woman but an African woman. The image of this African woman coming from Senegal or Ghana, having to pick up those gadgets in a European American kitchen with those Native American foods and those African memories and make it work — that’s problematic because they don’t want the culinary DNA of the South to go back to Lucy.

Q. So food was a source of control as well as being a source of joy for African Americans. How does your project reflect that tension?

A. One of the elements of African American culture that people in the antebellum time struggled to understand was how can these people who are so oppressed feel such joy? How can they smile in the middle of hell? And isn’t that the story of the blues? Every element of Black culture [contains] that tension between pain and joy, between control and liberation. And you can use the food to liberate yourself, to figure out your identity. When I picked cotton for 16 hours, the only thing I had to eat was a hoe cake and some water. You don’t know shit about Southern cuisine or slavery until you’ve actually spent 16 hours in the fields sweating, running away from poisonous snakes, and getting your hands cut up by cotton. Then you find out what a hoe cake really meant.

Q. You wrote that “most of us are still enslaved to food systems that aren’t sustainable.” Can you elaborate?

A. We have serious addictions to things that we know aren’t good for us. But it’s not in everybody’s power to live the ideal. We’re blocked in by financial constraints, by lack of access. So there’s this idea of enslavement that comes into play — that I don’t have the ability to always make the best choices for myself or my family. I know that’s been my struggle in life several times over. People hear me talk a good game about organic, healthy, and sustainable food — but that’s not my complete life.

Q. Shouldn’t we all be more in touch with our food heritage? How can we go about doing that?

A. When you follow a family recipe, you have an opportunity to bring life to your family story. What sustained your ancestors and your parents? It becomes exciting because you can say, “This is what my so-and-so ate to celebrate the end of World War II.”

Q. Your Twitter handle is @koshersoul. What role does your faith play in your relationship to food? How do kosher food and soul food coexist?

A. I feel really blessed to come from two diasporas that circled the globe, and have touched every culture they’ve been a part of, especially on a culinary level. There are Jewish foods that incorporate some of the ingredients that you might find in the average southern kitchen. Black-eyed peas are eaten for good luck on Rosh Hashanah in the Sephardic Jewish tradition. But they’re also eaten by African Americans and Southerners on New Year’s for good luck.

For me, it’s like blending together Jewish soul food and Black soul food from all over the world and making it taste fantastic and having people go, “Wow, your identity is in this food.”

What’s your favorite non-your-background cuisine?

Q. I’m a fan of Vietnamese food.

A. I’m sure you’re a pho fanatic. That’s your identity cooking. You and other folks on the West Coast are on the Asia-Pacific rim, so how could that not be a part of who you are, no matter what color you are? People need to get over being locked in their ethnic boxes.

I don’t want people to read [the Southern Discomfort Tour] as a race thing. I am so humbled by the fact that so many people who are not of color have said, “This is something we’ve been waiting for, something we want to be a part of.” Knowing that makes me feel good.

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By Twilight Greenaway

1. FDA and antibiotics: If you’re confused, it’s not your fault

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the courts have recently told the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) it has to regulate several commonly used antibiotics if they can’t be proven safe. The ruling was the result of a long-running lawsuit by a group of environmental and public health advocates lead by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and gave many in the food movement a reason to feel cautiously optimistic.

Meanwhile, the FDA has been moving at a glacial pace on its expressed intention to put a voluntary control on antibiotics in place. And this week it finally put the rubber to the road, in the form of a major press effort and the release of a new set of guidelines for cooperating companies. (The two events are supposedly unrelated, but it’s not hard to see how FDA may want to distract attention away from a court order that requires it to play the bad cop, if it can play up and formalize its role as good cop.)

The agency’s press release is even called “FDA takes steps to protect public health,” and in it the agency promises to “promote the judicious use of medically important antibiotics in food-producing animals” [emphasis mine]. FDA also comes right out and acknowledges that “antimicrobial resistance occurs when bacteria or other microbes develop the ability to resist the effects of a drug. Once this occurs, a drug may no longer be as effective in treating various illnesses or infections.” In other words, the agency is talking. Whether it’ll do any walking to go along with it is yet to be seen.

At the center of the FDA’s narrative is the role of the veterinarian — who, the agency says, will “supervise” the use of antibiotics to “prevent, control and treat illness.” As The New York Times put it: “Farmers and ranchers will for the first time need a prescription from a veterinarian before using antibiotics in farm animals.”

But just how hard such a prescription would be to get raises big questions. You see, livestock producers already often work with veterinarians to help craft their regimens of “subtherapeutic” antibiotics. And just because those veterinarians must now cut through more red tape doesn’t mean they’ll ultimately authorize fewer drugs in the animals’ feed.

The meat industry will always argue for the right to treat sick animals with antibiotics. Of course, the mere fact that those animals are kept in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs) means that if they don’t get a preventative course of antibiotics, they’re likely to need them later, when the pathogen-filled living conditions do eventually make them sick. And in the eyes of most industrial-scale farmers, there really is no difference between “preventative” dosing and dosing to make the animals grow faster.

As Tom Philpott has been pointing out over at Mother Jones, this gray area provides the industry with a “bull-size loophole.” He also points to a statement from a senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists who warns ominously:

The outlined process appears to give the companies the opportunity to relabel drugs currently slated for growth promotion for disease prevention instead. Such relabeling could allow them to sell the exact same drugs in the very same amounts.

Oh, and did we mention that the industry even has a full three years to do this relabeling? Not to sound too skeptical, but this might be more of a distraction tactic than meets the eye.

2. Another big egg factory gets cracked wide open

Still haven’t phased those really cheap eggs out of your diet yet? Well, the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) is working hard to ensure that the conditions inside America’s industrial egg farms stays on your radar. This week, HSUS released gruesome footage of hens in cramped, dark battery cages captured over a six-week period inside Pennsylvania’s Kreider Farms. The story got the attention of The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, as a convenient follow-up to his arsenic-in-chicken piece from the week before.

And we should probably watch video footage from inside CAFOs while it’s still being made, since the “ag-gag” bills (or bills that would make it illegal to capture such footage) appear to be coming back with a vengeance in farm states. But really — after years of this kind footage popping up, and the resulting attitude of business owners like Ron Kreider (who actually had the nerve to tell a reporter this week that “more than 80 percent of our chickens are housed in larger, modern cages”), it’s getting harder and harder not to generalize. In other words, if a farmer (or any other food production business for that matter) doesn’t want you to see what they’re doing, they’re probably not making anything you’d want to eat.

3. The wrong kind of spring blooms: Pollution from farms causing multi-billion-dollar algae problem

From the kind-of-boring-sounding-but-actually-very-important department, this week the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released a report on “nutrient overload” — the phenomenon that occurs when too much nitrogen from the synthetic fertilizer on large farms enters surrounding waterways. The report, which is titled “Troubled Waters,” focuses on the four states in the core of the Midwestern corn belt — Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin — and calculates that removing nitrate alone from drinking water costs taxpayers more than $4.8 billion a year.

Writing on their Farm Plate blog, EWG staffer Don Carr describes the impact on water in the area, saying:

The city of Des Moines, Iowa has one of the largest water treatment plants in the world to clean agricultural pollution. Toledo, Ohio, estimates that it costs an extra $2,000-to-$3,000 a day just to deal with agricultural pollutants in the city’s water.

He suggests that the answer is to tackle the problem at the source, literally, by ensuring that today’s farm subsidies are tied to conservation efforts (i.e. making sure big farms only get paid if they agree to do things like reduce fertilizer use or filter water through wetlands). Otherwise, Carr adds:

Taxpayers end up paying twice, once for the subsidies that encourage all-out production and again for the cleanup. Meanwhile, farm businesses reap year after year of high income and federal subsidies whether they are protecting or polluting drinking water.

4. EPA refuses to take a critical look at 2,4-D, Monsanto’s new favorite herbicide

A few months back, we reported on 2,4-D, the pesticide that sounds a little like a Star Wars character. The herbicide — which was used in Agent Orange — is generally sprayed on lawns and has been around since World War II. But the NRDC has been raising concern about the toxicity of 2,4-D, ever since Monsanto announced it was developing a new round of GMO seeds that would be bred to be resistant to the chemical. (Just to review, plants grown from resistant seeds can stay alive under near-biblical floods of pesticides while, in theory at least, everything else dies).

It’s also noteworthy that 2,4-D hasn’t often been used on corn fields. (Perhaps the plants weren’t quite resistant enough?)

Anyhow, the NRDC sued the EPA, in part to get a response to a 2008 petition to re-examine the chemical’s safety. The Center for Food Safety — which appears to be working closely with the NRDC — cites a scientist on its website who says that the use of the new GE 2,4-D corn “will trigger an astounding 30-fold increase in 2,4-D use on corn by the end of the decade, assuming widespread planting.”

On Monday, The New York Times reported that the EPA has decided the herbicide will remain on the market for now, saying it “found no cause for concern.” Meanwhile, the USDA is still taking comments until April 27 on the GE seeds.

Filed under: Factory Farms, Food, Food Safety, Industrial Agriculture, Locavore

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By Claire Thompson

As more people spend time thinking, writing, reading, and talking about food, the need for in-person forums to enhance the kinds of idea-sharing that already happen online only seems natural. The latest of these events will be aimed specifically at those whose love for reading rivals their interest in food. Elizabeth Thacker Jones, a graduate student in Food Studies at New York University, started thinking about creating a food-focused book fair over a year ago, and from May 4 to May 6 in Brooklyn, she’ll finally see it come to fruition.

For some, it’s a little hard to believe Food Book Fair 2012 is the first of its kind. “People react to say, ‘I can’t believe this hasn’t already happened,’” Jones said.

It won’t be a book fair in the strictly traditional sense. As Jones describes it on her website: “Permeating through art, design, fashion, architecture, activism and publishing, the Food Book Fair is a festival of food culture.” The panels she has planned speak to that, with titles like “Food + Design + Tech,” “Food + Cities,” and even “Food + Porn.” Celebrated figures in the food world like Marion Nestle, Tamar Adler, and Bryant Terry will give talks and book signings. Saturday evening, a “Foodieodicals” event will showcase over 10 independent zines and quarterlies, followed by a Pecha Kucha Night — a tradition started in Japan involving short slideshows, in this case of creative food projects. Sunday’s schedule includes a Hemingway-inspired literary dinner.

The fair is designed to offer something for everyone, not just those already deeply immersed and invested in food issues. “This word ‘foodie’ — there’s kind of a negative undertone to it,” Jones said. “[The book fair] is meant to challenge that concept. We want it to be accessible to everybody.”

To that end, interested parties who may not have the funds or time to commit to a weekend-long festival can pick and choose individual events to attend.

Jones has been working and learning in the food world for over a decade now; she’s had jobs doing everything from cooking, to farming sturgeon in California, to, most recently, working for New York’s Greenmarket farmers market organization. She’s also worked in publishing, so the Food Book Fair seems right up her alley. But Jones understands how far away the foodie world, with its elitist connotations, can seem from the reality of so many Americans. “My experience growing up was [that] we rarely ate as a family,” she said. “The microwave was how I cooked as a child.”

It wasn’t until a decade ago, when Jones moved to the Bay Area — a longtime “hub for food-systems thinking,” as she describes it — that she became drawn to the ways food, politics, and culture interact. “You can easily observe the overarching history of our country through the lines of the food system,” she said.

That kind of realization is happening all over the country now, sped along by influential works like Food, Inc. and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dielmma. The Food Book Fair offers a platform for the conservations it sparks, among people for whom “food is on the spectrum of what they feel passionate about, but maybe not the first thing they’re addressing,” Jones said.

Jones plans to expand the event beyond New York. She hopes to host a Food Book Fair in San Francisco in early 2013, and maybe one in Chicago, too.

“The dialogue can continue to grow, and we can connect the dots,” she said.

Filed under: Food, media

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By Sarah Henry

Edible entrepreneur/video editor Dafna Kory is an ideal candidate for a food-focused Kickstarter campaign. Kory, founder of Inna Jam, an organic artisan preserves company in Berkeley, Calif., supplements her budding food business with commercial film, video, and web editing gigs and is well-acquainted with the crowd-funding platform. So, when it came time to expand her jam company this winter, she decided to give Kickstarter a whirl.

“It’s a very public thing — putting yourself out there like this — and it could have gone either way,” says Kory, who produced her own video for a campaign to renovate a commercial kitchen. The jammer already has some small business loans and didn’t want to take on any more debt. Kory, who just wrapped up her Kickstarter campaign, says it was by no means an easy endeavor. “I used every skill I have to make this campaign a success.”

Kickstarter, based in New York, earned its early reputation as the go-to place for up-and-coming filmmakers, gamers, and designers looking for funds. Increasingly, though, it’s become a hub for those involved in the sustainable, local food scene seeking capital for their creative pursuits as well. In the Kickstarter worldview, food artisans are artists too, whether they’re behind a community olive oil press in Berkeley, a beekeeping business in Brooklyn, or a Lebanese food truck in Asheville, N.C.

Starting an edible enterprise is expensive and risky, particularly in tough economic times. An infusion of cash via Kickstarter can be just the boost a food venture needs to go from fantasy project to viable business — with no loans to repay. A typical food project raises about $5,000. Kory, who began making jam commercially in 2010, sought $25,000 to buy equipment like convection ovens, cooking ranges, stainless steel work tables, and other tools of her trade. Her recent success, gathering nearly $28,000 from 474 backers, landed her on a list of the most funded Kickstarter food projects to date. “I’ve been truly humbled by the generosity,” she says.

Recent record donations for food projects

Kory’s windfall is by no means the biggest. That honor — tallying a whopping $257,307 last December — currently goes to Windowfarms, a Brooklyn-based vertical gardening enterprise, which allows people to grow herbs and produce in small spaces in the privacy of their own homes. Via video, Britta Riley, who runs the hyper-local company, essentially asked investors to pre-buy a product that hadn’t been manufactured yet. The company’s goal — in retrospect, a modest $50,000 — followed a successful initial Kickstarter campaign in 2010 that netted $28,000 for the new business (a record for its time too).

In second place for the most money raised to date: A Washington, D.C., public school kitchen ($60,000), and in the No. 3 slot, a meat-curing processing facility in Pennsylvania ($48, 000). Last year, 241 successful Kickstarter food projects netted over $2.8 million from more than 30,000 backers. The projects reflect recent food trends — think artisan brewing, mobile cupcakes, urban farms, edible education, vegan pop-ups, and community restaurants — and appeal directly to a generation that has grown up online.

Why do food projects do so well with this new fundraising mechanism? For starters, behind these appeals is a good story, and everyone loves a good story, note the Kickstarter crew. Creators who articulate clearly what they’re working to accomplish in a compelling way do well, says Kickstarter’s Justin Kazmark, as do campaigns that offer creative rewards or a behind-the-scenes view of the creative process.

But that’s not all. “There’s also an increased awareness in the importance of supporting local, independent businesses as a way to preserve the unique character of our communities,” says Elizabeth Ü of Finance for Food, who curates a page of food project favorites on Kickstarter. “These projects allow people to experience a sense of vicarious pride for those who turn their passions into a tangible project,” adds Ü, author of the forthcoming Raising Dough: The Complete Guide to Financing a Socially Responsible Food Business.

For those unclear on the concept: Kickstarter curates its site (projects are selected and must meet specific guidelines). A tiered reward system is set up based on the pledge amount. For instance, Kory offered pledgers who gave $25 or more a jar of her jam while those who gifted $50 or more will receive three jars, and so on. Anyone who donated $2,500 was guaranteed their moniker on a convection oven. (No takers.) In addition, locals were offered incentives such as a behind-the-scenes tour of the kitchen, an invitation to the grand opening, and tickets to Kory’s jam-making classes.

Unlike another internet-based fundraising platform, IndieGoGo, which includes food projects and allows creators to keep all the money they raise, Kickstarter has an all-or-nothing approach: People seeking support must meet their stated financial goal in a specific time frame, often 30 days, or they get none of the money pledged. On the plus side, this adds a sense of urgency to the campaigns — and a good deal of anxiety for those running them. Food projects have a higher success rate (56 percent), compared with all Kickstarter projects combined (47 percent), Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler told the Los Angeles Times.

Project creators must keep in mind that for successful campaigns, Kickstarter keeps a 5 percent cut of pledges, and an additional 3 to 5 percent comes off the top for Amazon Payments, which handles the monetary transactions. Recent changes to reporting requirements mean that these donations are now subject to taxes too, which was something of a grey area (gifts versus revenue?) in the past.

While there are many pluses to food-specific projects, there is one obvious drawback: Food products make great rewards for pledgers, but prospective funders can’t sample the merchandise via cyberspace, in the way they can, say, consume an art project or film trailer online. So there’s also a certain leap of faith required on the part of prospective funders.

Benefits beyond bankrolling a business

Kory believes there are benefits beyond bringing in the big bucks. “It’s been amazing publicity — just getting my product out there to a national audience,” says Kory, whose initial support came from family, friends, other food artisans, and customers. But as word spread, more pledges started coming in from people she didn’t know. “It’s also created this much larger community around what I do,” she adds. “When people get involved with a project in this way, they have a vested interest in seeing you succeed.”

The pair behind the popular sustainable food video series Perennial Plate, Minneapolis-based chef/filmmaker Daniel Klein and cameragal/co-producer Mirra Fine, used Kickstarter to fund their local series because it was the easiest web-based fundraising platform to use. It was also the best looking, and had garnered a lot of attention. “I think people are more likely to put their money into something that looks legitimate,” says Klein. The first time around, Perennial Plate raised over $10,000 for its Minnesota-focused weekly web series. In April of last year, for their road trip video tour across the country, they reeled in over $22,000.

It’s not enough, says Klein, to have an awesome project. “The key to a successful campaign is to have built a community that wants to support your work and values it,” he says. “Most people who give aren’t random browsers. They’re more likely to be someone you’ve engaged with online or met in real life.” His other advice: Make your video short, funny, and personable. “People make their videos too long.” He also points to the importance of appealing rewards. “People want something in return, whether it’s a DVD or T-shirt or whatever.”

What else brings in the bucks? It’s key that a project has a specific beginning and end, or is something that’s already in the works, and exudes an authentic approach that is more personable than professional (think cocktail party over job interview). Getting the nod from Kickstarter as a “project we love,” social media buzz, and traditional media coverage can make a difference too. Kory agrees with Klein’s advice and adds one more piece: Show your gratitude. She thanked every donor individually, and included an update of herself jumping for joy after reaching her goal on her Kickstarter page.

“Being public about financial struggles is kind of scary,” she says. “But I got so much positive feedback it was worth those anxious moments when I wasn’t sure I’d make my goal. I wasn’t prepared for how meaningful it would be to build a whole new community. You can’t put a price on that.”

Filed under: Food, Sustainable Food

View full post on Grist

By Jessica Kraft

Fast food joints offer a quick and easy fix for hungry, busy students on college campuses. But at the University of California, they’ve also become a target for student activists intent on shifting their schools’ large dining budgets away from less healthy, industrially produced food and toward more sustainable options.

“Focusing on food is how a lot of students get passionate about issues of sustainability, some of which aren’t that sexy,” says Matt St. Clair, a former student activist who now manages all aspects of sustainability for the UC system (see their comprehensive policy on sustainable practices [PDF]), which spans across 10 campuses and five medical schools. In addition to working on the less sexy aspects of the shift, like energy efficiency and waste reduction, St. Clair has put food at the top of the list. Along with students, staff, and administrators, he is working to prioritize local, organic, and fairly produced food, while creating a policy that could have a huge impact on their burgers, tacos, and stir fry — if it’s executed right.

By 2020, 20 percent of the purchases made in UC dining facilities and fast food franchises on all campuses must meet one or more of 16 sustainable food criteria set by the Real Food Challenge, a national activist network focused on steering American colleges and universities toward sustainability. The Real Food Challenge list includes criteria such as: USDA certified organic, cage-free, grass-fed, fair trade, Marine Stewardship Council, and other third-party sustainable certifications. It also prioritizes “locally grown” — a factor that doesn’t always mean that much on its own in California.

For that reason, Ryan Galt, assistant professor of Agricultural Sustainability and Society at UC Davis, takes issue with the “locally grown” designation. “It’s a watered down definition of sustainability,” he says. “In most of California, local is easy because you’re within 500 miles of the Central Valley, which supplies most of the fruits and vegetables for the whole country.” And “local” doesn’t dictate anything about environmental or working conditions, he adds.

But UC Santa Cruz educator and activist Tim Galarneau, who proposed the sustainable food goals back in 2004, sees the “local” criteria as a good place for conventional suppliers to start to engage larger environmental and labor issues. He believes that St. Clair and the sustainable food steering committee, which is still under development, will then be in a position to inch the bar higher.

The campus dining halls at Berkeley, Davis, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and San Diego have already exceeded the 20 percent goal in the past year, and many aim to get to 40 percent by 2020. In addition to some organic and fair trade ingredients, most of the shift has focused on local food. But all campuses have also made impressive strides in reducing food waste by ditching dining trays, which has led most diners to opt for less food per meal. Clint Jeffries, the green business manager at the UC Santa Cruz dining department, says that nixing the trays has not only reduced food waste by 35 percent and saved a million gallons of water each year, but “it has probably also helped some students avoid the freshman 15.”  (The trays weren’t wasted, either; they were donated to artists and schools.)

For all campuses the most formidable challenge will likely be getting fast food vendors like SUBWAY, Domino’s Pizza, Jamba Juice, Burger King, and Panda Express to follow the examples set by the dining halls. Most franchises are part of a much larger supply chain, a fact that begs the question: Can the UC system really force them to change their practices?

St. Clair is optimistic. “Of course there’s pushback, but the campus food managers haven’t opposed the policy, and they will have to negotiate these terms into contracts with vendors,” he says.

David Schwartz, campaign director for the Real Food Challenge, believes that the entire fast food industry will be moving toward sustainability in the coming decade because of consumer demand. If that’s the case, the UC policy can be seen as an opportunity for these restaurants to get ahead of the pack. “If Domino’s isn’t figuring this out now,” he says, “in 10 years they will be wishing they had.”

But others see a struggle down the road. Sue Hawkins, director of dining services at UC Santa Barbara, has already informed her fast food tenants about the new policy, and says that it’s likely they will start offering compostable containers to meet more aggressive waste reduction goals. Yet she’s doubtful about their ability to source fair trade, organic, or local produce for just a few locations. “Most of these companies have hundreds, if not thousands, of stores across the country.  The purchasing decisions they make are for all of their units, not just a couple,” she says.

Most fast food chains use third-party suppliers. So food service companies such as Sodexo and Aramark would be the real executors of the policy, should they choose to adhere to it. According to Galarneau, these companies have mutual back-scratching arrangements with big industrial suppliers who offer generous rebates in exchange for loyalty, making it hard for small, local producers to contract with a campus food service.

“We really need a big franchise partner to step up and say, ‘We want to make a difference,’” he says.

Jamba Juice is better poised than most chains to be that partner. While Domino’s, SUBWAY, and Burger King did not comment on the 2020 policy change for this article, Jamba Juice spokeswoman Janice Duis says that her company, which sources most oranges and wheatgrass locally and sells organic oats and granola, intends to work closely with the university to comply with the policy and remain on the five campuses where they currently have stores.

It’s possible that the 2020 policy could result in the mass exodus of corporate fast food from the University of California. But for the activists involved with the Real Food Challenge, that might not be such a bad thing. For one, it means that more campuses will start to resemble UC Santa Cruz. Smack in the middle of organic farming paradise, Santa Cruz has been able to eschew name-brand restaurants in favor of homegrown mom-and-pop shops that source their produce from local farmers co-ops. Galarneau says he would like to see, sprouting across the state like wildflowers, “new, regional-based franchises that cater to our vision and values.”

Filed under: Article, Food

View full post on Grist

by Twilight Greenaway.

When Slow Food came to the United States in 2000, it
appealed mainly to people who could already tell their arugula from their radicchio—those who knew both farmers
and chefs before the phrase “local food” implied anything more than the sum of
its parts.

In the late ‘90s, when chef and Slow Food New Orleans
chapter founder Poppy Tooker first got wind of the Italy-based organization,
which had formed in opposition to the globalizing fast food industry in the ‘80s,
she felt right at home. “When I read about this movement, I thought, this was
what my life’s work had always been about: preserving foodways,
valuing the food producers, closing the ties between chefs and farmers. And now
there was an international organization out there ready to help me!”

Cut to 12 years later. Slow Food USA has 225 chapters in
cities and rural communities across the nation. The term “slow food” has come
to be synonymous, in some cases, with a much broader philosophy of eating,
farming, and thinking about food. And the national organization has become a kind of conceptual hub for many divergent aspects of
today’s food movement.

That’s why the movement took notice recently when Chow.com ran an article titled “Cheap Drama
at Slow Food.” Author John Birdsall described a crisis at Slow Food USA (SFUSA):
“Its most prominent members—famous cookbook
authors, chefs, and leaders in the food movement—are embroiled in a bitter
squabble stoked by angry emails, hurt feelings, accusations.”

As a follow-up to Birdsall’s piece, a vocal group of SFUSA critics,
including Tooker, have published a document called “10 Things Slow Food
USA Can Do To Gain Direction as it Sees its Way Into 2012.” The group believes
the Brooklyn-based national office is too reliant on technology, not as
connected with its constituencies in other parts of the country, and no longer aligned with the core vision, mission, message, and activities of Slow Food International. They say they worry that the organization is moving away from biodiversity work and
direct support of farmers and artisan food producers by adopting a more populist big-tent approach and advocating national policies. And they point to a
recent round of layoffs at the Brooklyn headquarters
as proof that the organization is in trouble.

Meanwhile, SFUSA’s Executive Director Josh Viertel and his current staff say they are merely
keeping up with the times—and the changing food landscape. No matter how you
slice it, the conflict speaks volumes about the challenges that face every effort to build what Slow Food
calls a “good, clean, and fair” food system.

Change of course or evolution?

Viertel sees SFUSA as
work in progress. In many ways, when he talks about it, he sounds like he’s running
a start-up—a stance that inspires and invigorates a portion of his audience,
and no doubt alienates others. He doesn’t deny the organization has been financially stressed this year. While SFUSA’s membership has grown from 14,000
to 25,000 members during his tenure, he says “the gift amount has gone down.
Those who were giving us $60 gave $45, those who were giving us $45 gave $25,
and so on.” Since SFUSA receives half its revenue from members, he chalks up
the drop to the pain of a now-three-year-old recession. This year, he says, “it
was important to get out in front of it and get the organization in a stable
place.”

At the same time, SFUSA has begun reaching thousands more people via
email and social media; its mailing list expanded from 24,000 to 250,000 in the
last three years, and its very prolific Twitter feed now
reaches 200,000 followers.

Viertel has also worked toward creating an organization that can
function as an umbrella for the food movement in America—one that can “pick
up on all the energy, anger, frustration, etc. that people feel after reading
[Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma],” the book he sees as the Silent Spring of the food movement, “and turn that into actual power to make change.”

Viertel says he saw a groundswell of people who “wanted to find an
organization that would give them a pathway to do something about [their food
system]. That something could be working to get a garden planted in your kid’s
school, it could be getting connected to a farmer, or it could be getting
involved in a legislative fight to end farm subsidies.” While Slow Food has
long held “good, clean, and fair” as its motto, Viertel believes that SFUSA’s
recent emphasis on fairness has attracted a new following of enthusiastic food
novices eager to share recipes, talk about the challenges of food access, and
sign online petitions.

How political is too political?

It’s this last part—the fact that the organization has waded, swum,
and is now diving deep into advocacy—that most bothers Tooker.

“There’s really been a confusion of the message,” she says. For one,
the new SFUSA has been “trying so hard to redefine the identity and get rid
of this air of elitism they believed existed.” It also used its blog to talk
about food safety (including the giant egg recall linked to Jack
DeCoster’s Midwest CAFO dynasty in 2010), led a campaign against the
proposed ag-gag
bills, and sent out action alerts about last fall’s “Secret Farm Bill.” In
other words, the organization has adopted what Tooker calls “a political
stance.”

Meanwhile, she says, the current Brooklyn-based SFUSA office “doesn’t even have a kitchen!”

In 1999, while the World Trade Organization’s Seattle meeting faced
mass protests, Tooker heard Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini speak at an early
stateside gathering. “He said it was not our jobs to march in the streets and
protest. Carlo said the work of Slow
Food was in the kitchen. And over the long range we would eventually win this
fight with a smile in our hearts.”

Cheap for whom?

This mentality, and the organization’s
heavy focus on biodiversity and heirloom varieties, might never have changed if
it weren’t for Slow Food Nation—a 50,000-person event initiated by Chez Panisse chef and Slow Food matriarch Alice
Waters that took place in San Francisco in 2008. Not only did this event position
SFUSA as a leader, perhaps the leader,
of today’s sustainable food world, it also provided a brief but important
opportunity for food justice advocates to make their case to the Slow Foodies.

Some
advocates believe that a food-justice panel during Slow Food Nation that
Viertel attended helped move the issue onto his agenda. Hank Herrera,
an Oakland, Calif.-based food justice advocate, recalls: “We spoke plainly about the issue of food
justice and the exclusion of communities lacking access to healthy food and food justice. Josh took the challenges
seriously and from that point has worked vigilantly to bring food justice into
focus for Slow Food.”  

But to hear Viertel tell it, his interest in food justice
began much earlier. Before he began working in the food movement, Viertel farmed
vegetables. It was a
meager living, and he and his partner (now his fiancee) sold their produce at
farmers markets “to people who could pay a lot.”

“We didn’t think twice about charging what we did, because we knew the
work that went into it,” he recalls. “At the same time people would come to the
stand who were shopping with WIC [federal aid for women, infants and children] coupons
and we’d charge two for one.” That year, he and his partner earned only $12,000
between the two of them. He says he began to see “this false choice between
paying the farmer what they deserve and actually creating a world where both
[the eater and the farmer] can afford real food.”

That awareness was likely
part of the impetus for SFUSA’s recent $5 Challenge, a direct response to the fast
food industry intended to show a meal can be prepared using “Slow Food” or
sustainable ingredients bought directly from local farmers for under $5 per
person (roughly the cost of a value meal).  

Author and native foods expert Gary Paul Nabhan, a critic of Slow
Food USA who coauthored the “10 Things” document, takes issue with the $5
Challenge, which, he argues, does a disservice to food producers by discouraging
eaters from paying the “true cost of food.” In a recent essay on the Edible
Communities website, he suggested that efforts like the $5 Challenge “assum[e] that food
justice is only about aiding and empowering low-income consumers.” He asked:
“If food production costs have risen 20 to 40 percent for many grains,
vegetables, fruits, and meats over the last year, who should shoulder the costs: the producers, or the so-called ‘end-users’ of the food system?”  

Slow Food USA board member (and occasional Grist contributor) Kurt Michael Friese counters that $5 per person for ingredients is not very
cheap at all.

“You can pay the farmer a fair price and still make really
good food and have it be under $5 per portion. That doesn’t rule out heritage
breeds in any way. In fact it helps to support them. I think it’s fine for the
people who can afford to buy some expensive heritage turkey or some rare pig
breed. It’s important valuable stuff.
But it’s not the only way people can support Slow Food,” he says.

In response to accusations that efforts like the $5 Challenge don’t
support farmers, Viertel is adamant that a just food system include both ends
of the food chain: the eater and the producer.

“Talking to a dairy farmer in Vermont and a working parent in Queens
isn’t very different. They both have crushing debt. They both get up really
early in the morning. They both tend to have a hard time affording real food.
And they both are controlled by a really consolidated corporate food system,”
he says. From distribution to retail to corporations involved in meatpacking,
“there are a lot of companies that wedge themselves in between the producer and
the consumer. So the way this debate sets them up against one another is really
problematic.”

While Viertel sees Slow Food’s original work as important, he also
wants to serve those who can’t—by necessity—support heirloom varieties or
shop in farmers markets. “No movement I have ever seen can go forward without
the people who are hurt most at its core,” he says.

The biodiversity issue

Tooker has long been involved in the North American chapter of the Slow
Food USA’s Ark of Taste, the national portion of an international effort to
catalogue, bring attention to, and therefore preserve endangered heirloom and
place-based foods. Earlier this year,
she says the Ark of Taste committee was “given a stop work order,” and Tooker
worries about the future of the effort. One of the SFUSA staffers laid off in November was the last contact for
the Ark work, and she says, “If you were to propose a food to be accepted onto
the SFUSA Ark, there’s no methodology in place to do that right now.”

But Friese says it is alive and well, despite being put on hold briefly
this year for a reorganization. “We’ve turned the whole thing around from
being centrally located, with the work being run entirely from the national
office, to being something where we support what various chapters are doing
with native foods in their specific locations.” 

Rather than host a committee that votes on which foods are worth
preserving, SFUSA will allow local chapters to put forward food they’re excited
about in a more “open-source” manner, and SFUSA will give them a platform to do
that work.

The organization has moved in a similar direction with disaster
funding. After Katrina, SFUSA set up a disaster fund that was
administered by a national committee, but they now plan to support individual
chapters that rally around farmers in their area. “The idea is to be able to
point our growing network toward their effort and help them fundraise,” says
Viertel.

The food justice
generation?

Viertel says he has never intended to do away with the group’s
biodiversity work. And given its history, it’s unlikely that SFUSA will ever
become a full-fledged food justice organization, says People’s Grocery Director Nikki Henderson.

But Henderson isn’t
surprised that Viertel and the younger generation of SFUSA staffers see food in
an inherently political light.

“The last 30 years have wreaked havoc, and I
feel like those of us who grew up in that don’t feel as separate from those who
are struggling in the streets every day. Our generation is sicker, poorer, and
more diverse that any generation in recent history—so of course we’re going
to feel that way!”

And while Viertel is clearly uneasy about all the attention this conflict
has brought to the organization, Henderson thinks it’s about time the food
movement recognize SFUSA for being brave enough to attempt to make space for two efforts that
can appear contradictory at times.

“SFUSA has tried to negotiate a mine field,” she says. “And they’re setting off mines. That’s not a bad thing.”

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View full post on Grist.org – the latest from Grist

by Twilight Greenaway.

We continue digesting this year’s food politics coverage below — only this time we take account of the things that didn’t go so well. (Tired of bad news? See the year’s good food news instead.)

1.  Food prices have gone up, and more people need
help feeding their families

The fact that 46 million people
– about a seventh of the U.S. population — now receive food stamps (i.e.
help from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)) should be
enough to tell us that something is wrong with America’s food system. But
thanks to the way public food assistance is now set up, the
problem is all but invisible to the rest of us.

Why are so many Americans using food stamps? Beyond our collective
economic woes, a large part of the problem lies in the cost
of food itself, which rose considerably in the last few years. Then
there’s the speculation
market, which drives up the cost of commodity crops. Ethanol
doesn’t help, either.

2. The food we can afford could make us sick (or even kill us)

2011 saw the largest
Class 1 (i.e. potentially lethal) meat recall in history, involving 36
million pounds of Cargill turkey tainted with multi-drug resistant Salmonella.

The listeria outbreak in cantaloupes
was also the deadliest U.S. foodborne illness outbreak in 100 years.

Germany’s E. coli outbreak over the
summer was also the deadliest on record — anywhere.

What happened to last winter’s Food
Safety Modernization Act — the much-debated legislation that might have updated
the regulations that would stop outbreaks like these? Well, to make a long story short, it was
never funded. Who’s hungry now?

3. GMOs aren’t going anywhere

Take a deep breath: 2011 began with the approval
of GMO alfalfa (which could permanently change the organic
milk industry for the worse). Less than two weeks later, the United States
Department of Agriculture (USDA) defied a court order and partially
deregulated GMO sugar beets without completing an environmental impact assessment.

Meanwhile, concern about “superweeds,” which are resistant to
Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, raised red flags beyond the foodie
and environmentalist communities; now big
business is also worried. And our six-legged friends have outsmarted Monsanto too; an insect
called the corn rootworm has become resistant to the company’s Bt corn (which is supposed to be engineered to produce its own
pesticides).

GMO business got especially fishy this year, as well: GMO
salmon may also be inching toward commercial approval. The “frankenfish” appeared
to be fast-tracked for Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval during the
first half of 2010, which would have made it the first genetically engineered
animal food on the market. But in June, the
House of Representatives blocked the FDA from spending money to approve the
salmon. This seemed like a good sign, but in October, the USDA gave
Aquabounty, the company looking to produce the salmon, a research grant — meaning this fish is far from out of the picture.

4. Pesticides: Also here to stay for now

Eaters may have plenty of evidence to suggest that
agriculture should involve fewer pesticides (example: this
recent piece about the weed killer atrazine in the rural water supply), but big
agribusiness vehemently disagrees. 

Last December’s approval
of methyl iodide (a known carcinogen) for use in strawberry fields in
California has many advocates concerned about farmworkers, nearby communities, and water tables. Small bright spot: It has yet to be adopted widely, so many in the state are still working to make the short- and long-term consequences known. Some advocates are even calling for an
end to all
fumigants.

In May, we covered the fight
in Congress to restrict the EPA’s ability to regulate pesticides –
specifically when it comes to spraying near streams and waterways — and the issue has yet to be put to sleep.

Meanwhile, there is now clear
evidence linking a
class of pesticides called neonicotinoids to recent honeybee die-offs, but top
USDA scientists still refuse to recommend a ban. To make matters
worse, honeybees aren’t the only type of bee that’s disappearing: Bumblebees are going missing, too.

5. Extreme
weather is messing with our food

Between the drought
in the Southwest, which wreaked havoc on farms and ranches in both the U.S.
and Mexico, and Hurricane Irene, which
hit the East Coast at the worst possible moment (peak
harvest for farmers in New York state and elsewhere), 2011 was a terrible weather
year. The result? Fewer
pumpkins for Halloween, and a
costlier Thanksgiving, to start with. But this year was also a reminder of
the ways a shifting climate could make food production especially unpredictable in the future.

6. The American meat
industry is still run by a small handful of huge companies

For a while it seemed that one of the more positive food
policy developments of 2011 might have come in the way of important changes to
the Grain Inspection, Packers & Stockyard Administration
(GIPSA) — a wonky set of rules that essentially set the terms for competition
in the meat industry. Then, in November, we reported that the USDA
removed all parts of the rule that would have upset the current — highly
consolidated — meat industry. Whereas new rules would have
truly leveled
the playing field for small producers, business as usual will mean that four
companies still control 90 percent of all beef processing, while an equally small handful of companies control 70 percent of all pork processing, and nearly 60
percent of poultry processing.

On a related note: Remember how California voters opted for
more humane standards for egg producers a few years back? Well, this year, Idaho
lawmakers have been easing their regulations to make way for what they hope
will be a wave of companies moving in from California to build confined animal
feeding operations (CAFOS) when the rules go into effect. Thanks a lot, Idaho.

7. Fracking is bad for farming

One of the most
well-known results of hydraulic fracturing, the process of drilling for natural
gas known as “fracking,” is the wastewater that appears as a by-product.
But not everyone knows about how that wastewater affects farms. In May, we ran
a story about the impact
fracking has on ranching: Cows in upstate New York were getting sick
and dying after coming into contact with chlorine, barium, magnesium, and other
radioactive elements. But that’s not where it ends; earlier in the year, wastewater actually flooded
a series of farms in Pennsylvania.

8. BPA is lurking

On the bright side,
the endocrine disruptor bisphenol-A was banned from use in
baby bottles in California this fall. But national efforts to get it out of
canned food (even the FDA itself detected it in can liners) haven’t happened yet.

The FDA is dragging its feet, but the National Institutes of Health recently
initiated a $30
million research program to examine the growing risks and make a final call
on BPA’s safety. Then, in September, we
reported on a fishy government study that purported
to debunk the entire BPA threat all together. And predictably, corporations are behaving irresponsibly even when apprised of
the danger. For example, in the spring,
we reported that Coca-Cola shareholders voted by a 3-to-1 margin to continue
using BPA in the lining of its soft-drink cans.

9. School lunch: still in bad shape

We reported on the Republican
attack on school lunch that began last summer, when the Obama
administration proposed new USDA guidelines for school lunches
that would have replaced French fries with healthier options like whole grains,
orange and green veggies, and low-fat milk.

Then, just last month, thanks to a
concerted effort by Big Food lobbyists, Congress unveiled a final plan that
rejected the proposed changes and allowed pizza to be counted as a vegetable.

Meanwhile, new facts surfaced that contradict a common assumption — namely, that including big food processing companies in the
school-lunch chain is always a better deal. In fact, doing so
may cost nearly as much as cooking from scratch and do much more harm to local
communities.

10. The next Farm Bill probably won’t change the food system

The Farm Bill — that giant piece of legislation that gets
updated every five years and impacts everything from food stamps to farm
funding to crop insurance — came awfully close to getting crafted in a hurry
this fall as part of the debt-slashing congressional supercommittee process.
The supercommittee ultimately failed, putting an end the so-called Secret
Farm Bill.

And while we can now look forward to a more traditional,
transparent congressional process, it looks like the draft Farm Bill that was
drawn up in November will still provide
the framework for this year’s process. This is unfortunate news
because the draft bill included significant cuts to conservation programs (despite
a great deal of opposition) while dishing out large subsidies to
industrial-sized commodity growers (just
in a slightly different form). We’re still hoping for a miracle, but it’s looking like the
very bill food reformers have put so much hope into for the last five years might turn out
to be business as usual, or worse.

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably feeling like a real Debbie Downer. Don’t worry; 2011 was full of good news, too. Go read about it now!

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View full post on Grist.org – the latest from Grist

by Tracie McMillan.

Construction workers may not be the most obvious
constituency for a preacher of the locavore gospel. Yet in the airy stretches
of Austin’s Pecan Springs neighborhood, Kandace Vallejo is making inroads from
her perch in a bright blue building set on two acres. As membership programs coordinator at the Worker’s Defense
Project (WDP), a worker’s center founded in 2002 to help construction
workers—many of them undocumented immigrants—battle against rampant under- and
non-payment of wages, Vallejo launched a food-themed education project for the
children of WDP’s members in early 2010. Drawing on experience with the Student
Farmworker Alliance and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in south Florida—and
with support from a hyper-competitive Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Food and Community Fellowship—Vallejo
is building a compelling case for the idea that everyone cares about
their meals. I caught up with Vallejo recently to hear
how a pitch for local food plays with the children of day laborers.

Q. What made you decide to bring food justice education
to a group of construction workers?

A. Our membership asked us to. We bought a building in 2009 with
a couple acres of land, and when our membership voted on what they wanted to
see happen here, having a garden was one of the top priorities. In terms of
doing youth programming around food issues, it just became apparent that it was
something kids could really grasp because food is something that everybody
interacts with. You can use it to talk about issues of access and economic
inequality with a high schooler, and for a five-year-old we can talk about why
it’s not fair that they don’t have a grocery stores in their neighborhood.
That’s one way to talk about food. Another way is to get kids to appreciate
their own cultural practice and use that appreciation to see and appreciate
other cultural practices. It’s a good way to teach kids about difference.

Q. What are the biggest challenges around food faced by
your group’s members?

A. The folks we’re working with definitely have issues with
food access. Construction workers in Austin tend to work 10- to 14-hour days,
and usually get paid a daily rate of anywhere from $60 to $90. Other folks are
paid a weekly rate of $150 or $200, on the high end. So we know it’s drastically
below minimum wage. And most of the folks we serve live in east Austin: a
predominantly low-income, historically African-American and Latino or immigrant
[neighborhood]. One of my first nights in the youth program, we were busting
out some snacks for the kids—crackers and peanut butter—and I was asking
if they had eaten dinner yet, and one of the kids said, “We don’t eat dinner.”
And I was thinking, “Is that [because of] a religious practice”? And
he said, “My dad has been out of work so we just don’t eat dinner, we
don’t have money for that.”

East of I-35 [which bisects the city] there are just three
grocery stores, and none of them are very well served; they’ve got produce
that’s fallen off the back of the truck, and pretty small fresh food sections.
Most of east Austin is considered a food desert by the USDA, and the closest
food access points tend to be gas stations or Dairy Queens.

So, there’s access in terms of what they’re able to afford,
but also access based on where they live.

It’s also a problem of time. If you’re working two jobs, it
becomes even harder to find the time to go to another neighborhood to get healthy
fresh food for your children and cook it. And the kids don’t have a lot of
places where they’re learning about good food habits, or places where they can
see those things being consumed by other people; the messages they are getting
about food [are] coming from animals on television singing about neon-colored food
products.

Q. You recently took your students on a field trip to
Hyde Park, an upper-middle-class neighborhood known for its restaurants—and for
having a Central Market, a high-end chain grocer. Why did you take the kids
there, and what did they say after the trip?

A. We took students to two different neighborhoods. One group
of kids went to Hyde Park, an upper-middle-class community, and the other went
to the neighborhood around our community center, Pecan Springs. We chose them
to illustrate the links between property size and appearance and what kinds of
cars people drive, houses, things like that, and what kind of food options are
available—so that we could highlight the connections between economic
inequity and food.

One of the things the kids said was that the stores in [Hyde
Park] had a lot more variety than the ones in their part of town, and both
[groups] asked the same question at the end, which was Why? And they’ve
begun to kind of explore this question … and they’ve also started to recognize
that knowing this is the first step to making alternative options possible.

Q. There’s a lot of talk these days about how to make
good, fresh food something everyone wants to eat. Some people argue that
it’s a problem of changing food culture and preference; other people take a
more structural approach. Where does your work fall on that continuum?

A. Talking about changing people’s cultural habits or
preferences is a real slippery slope. We tend to imagine that we have a ton of
answers; so many of us [in the food movement] have had access to great
education and a lot of knowledge. Those things combined with the structural
privileges that we’ve had access to put us in an interesting position when
trying to recommend solutions for other people’s problems.

[Our members] are not saying they prefer to be obese and
have diabetes and have heart disease in their family. What folks are saying
here is they don’t have money. There’s no grocery stores. They would love to
garden but they don’t have the land because they live in a trailer or a shared
apartment … their kids are eating whatever is being given to them in free or
reduced lunch in the school system. When we asked what they wanted, they wanted
a community garden and cooking classes.

Q. What kind of food do members eat at WDP?

A. Last weekend, we had our Christmas party, and we had vegan
posole alongside a traditional pork-based posole, and tamales and chips and
salsa. We also had greens and quinoa. And when we have [that kind of food],
people eat it. They are very interested in the different vegetables, and that
curiosity leads them to want to try them—but they don’t know where to buy them
or how to cook them. I just harvested a bunch of collards and chard and beets
and some peas and the last few little tomatoes from our garden and gave them to
a couple of members, and they said, “We’d eat them, but we don’t know how
to cook them.” So I gave them a recipe for caldo gallego, a Cuban
soup that features collard greens. One member said he’d bring the leftovers. I
need to ask him about it.

Related Links:

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The good food news of 2011

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