Civil Eats

Perhaps no one represented the American work ethic more than the dairy farmer. Early morning hours and hard physical labor, often conducted in solitude while ankle deep in muck. Families working together to get the job done. They have long proudly supplied a demand for their community, and like most farmers, are clearly not in it for the money.

Today however, the American dairy farmer also represents the frustration and economic hardship evident across our nation. Increasing volatility in the price of milk paid to farmers, higher feed costs, corporate consolidation in the supply chain, organic milk farms scaling up, and questionable government policies all have farmers shedding a few tears. The life is so unappealing that the number of American families remaining in milk farming has plummeted from roughly 165,000 20 years ago, to less than 50,000 today.

Behind the innocent glass of milk lies an intriguing story that’s not so black and white: Many farmers are losing money, organic milk is in short supply,  anti-trust lawsuits have been filed, and legislative reform is on the agenda. Farmers, processors, distributors, and retailers are engaged in conversations like never before. And cows. Don’t forget about the cows.

Please join us for the next Kitchen Table Talks in San Francisco on Tuesday, February 21 from 6:30 – 8:30 pm at 18 Reasons, as we discuss the current state of the organic dairy industry.

When: Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Time: Food and drink at 6:30. Discussion from 7 – 8:30 pm
Where: 18 Reasons (3674 18th St., San Francisco, 94110)
Tickets: $10 Brown Paper Tickets. NOTE: A limited number of sliding scale tickets will be available on a first come, first serve basis at 7 pm on the night of the event.

Joining us in conversation will be:

Leslie Butler, Department of Agricultural Economics at U.C. Davis. Leslie holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Michigan State University. He regularly testifies at state and national hearings regarding dairy policy, and has published numerous articles on dairy production and economics marketing and policy.

Mike Griffin, West Region Pool Manager, Organic Valley. Mike was born and raised in Petaluma, CA. After his first year of college, he began his journey into farming, and never looked back. His vast  experience over 30 years at Clover Stornetta as a truck driver, distribution foreman, plant manager and in public relations, ultimately led him to Organic Valley in 2011, the nation’s largest cooperative of organic farmers.

Richard Hughes, owner Westfield Jersey’s in Bodega, CA. Richard was a self-proclaimed “city boy,” until he turned 15 and a 4-H project began his life long journey and commitment to dairy farming.  In 1976, Richard and his wife purchased a 182-acre ranch just outside of Bodega. They currently have around 100 Jersey cows, have completed the transition to organic farming, and provide milk to Straus Family Creamery.

Bob McGee, CFO/COO Straus Family Creamery, Marshall, CA.

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of Civil Eats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Space is limited, so please RSVP. Seasonal snacks and refreshments generously provided by Bi-Rite Market and Shoe Shine Wine.

The California Assembly did not pass the Consumer Right To Know Act, AB 88, introduced by Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) and put to a vote earlier this year. This is too bad. It would have meant that food is “misbranded” if it is a genetically engineered fish or fish product, but its labeling does not conspicuously identify it as such. The timing of this measure is significant, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is reviewing the first-ever proposed commercialization of salmon genetically engineered (GE) to mature more quickly.

Honestly, I don’t get it. What’s wrong with labeling? Most other developed countries–the 15 nations in the European Union, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Russia and China–all have some sort of GE labeling requirements. And public opinion polls here in the U.S. have clearly and consistently shown that nearly all of us–over 90 percent in recent polls–want labeling of GE products.

“If you want to avoid sugar, aspartame, trans-fats, MSG, or just about anything else, you read the label,” Mark Bittman notes. So why not GMO’s–genetically modified organisms–why aren’t they listed?

Because they don’t have to be. In the Spring of 2000, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that labeling of GE foods would remain voluntary. Perversely, it is companies with GMO-free products that want to add “NON-GE” labels which have faced the tight regulations (and litigation challenges from industry). The agency argues that guaranteeing a product to be free of GMO material is virtually impossible.

It was 1992 when FDA cooked up this idea that GE foods need not be labeled because they were not “materially” different from other foods.  While the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act requires the FDA to prevent consumer deception by clarifying that a food label is misleading if it omits significant, “material” information, the Agency chose to limit what it considered “material” to only changes in food that could be noted by taste, smell, or other senses.  Since GE foods can’t be “sensed” in this way, FDA declared them to be “substantially equivalent” to conventionally produced foods, and no labeling was required.

Wow. Has anyone told the FDA about nanotechnology? We have entered a brave new world of 21st century food science, yet we’re using seriously outdated definitions of “material differences” and “substantially equivalent.”

Here’s my thinking on this: If I just made a better salmon, I’d want people to know about it. I’d want them to know that by adding just one gene from a Pacific Salmon to an Atlantic Salmon, I can bring you this GE salmon faster and cheaper and without overfishing its wild cousins.

I might spare everyone the part about how all the fish are infertile females, even if that’s how wild populations are safeguarded. It just might be more than what a customer will want to read on a label, but it makes for an interesting backstory, no?

I’m not an advocate for the GE-salmon, nor am I a frankenfood-phobe. We’ve got to feed the world somehow, and well-regulated aquaculture systems are likely to be a big part of the solution.

What I am for is labeling, and not just labeling “bads,” but labeling “goods” as well. Case in point–the term “organic” on the label means this is a good product which was responsibly produced (without GMOs by the way).

Let’s take the stigma out of labels and have them do what they do best–inform consumer choice. And while we’re setting in place a 21st century approach to genetically engineered food products, let’s settle on some suitably modern-day definitions.

They may taste, smell and look the same, but there is most definitely a “material difference” between a salmon genetically altered to grow at a rate 6-10 times faster than its wild counterpart. Oh, and the former can’t reproduce. If that’s not material, then what is?

Originally published on Huffington Post

Alison Cross and her older brother Alphonzo saw a vast need for fresh food in the Castleberry Hill neighborhood of Atlanta, where they’d spent time since they were kids. The community, which is adjacent to the Atlanta University Center, had seen both vibrance and decay, and was begging for transformation.

So the siblings decided to fill that need, and hatched a plan to open The Boxcar Grocer, a new food business. Alison, who studied architecture and worked as a video editor, and Alphonzo, with a background in fashion, describe the independent grocery store, which stocks local, organic, whole foods, as being at “the intersection of food justice and high-concept retail.”

And they’re right; it’s not your average corner store. The market looks modern, with lots of light, stainless steel, and wood. The shop, which had a “soft” opening in late October and celebrated its grand opening last Monday, sits in an area dotted with old railroad warehouses. African Americans own the majority of the storefront businesses. The neighborhood is undergoing a renaissance with small art galleries, graphic design firms, and a tattoo parlor that attract the typical urban mix of students, artists, and free thinkers.

Alison, 36, has also written about the personal inspiration for Boxcar (“This is Our Land“), the socioeconomic challenges of the food movement (“All the Foodies are Rich, All of the Farmers are White, But Some of Us are Still Cookin’“), and its shortcomings (“A Limited Engagement“) on the store’s blog.

I spoke with her recently about her hopes for the family business and the obstacles she and her brother have faced along the way.

Why did you decide to open a corner store in Atlanta?

For years we recognized a lack of stores in the area where we could get food we liked when we came to town. The space became vacant in May 2009 but we couldn’t find anyone willing to put in a store. So we researched, wrote a business plan, and started submitting to banks for financing.

In the meantime, I was working at The San Francisco Foundation part-time and part-time at Feldman Architecture, so I was getting this great vision of what could happen when social ideals merge with beautiful design. We felt no one had done that. And there were very few people actually creating something new in terms of for-profit business models for food access. We also figured if we were going to uproot our lives and move away from the Bay Area, it had to be for something extraordinary.

Did you run into any challenges?

Unfortunately, the economic crisis meant the process took us two years to complete. Banks flat-out weren’t lending, especially not commercial loans to novices. But we kept charging along. We applied to nine different banks and one foundation and all said no. All we needed was one yes, and that happened in March 2011.

Did you get support from the healthy corner store movement?

People we approached in the national food movement didn’t really take us seriously until we actually opened the store. Maybe it’s because we came out of nowhere. We were not involved in politics, nor did we run in foodie circles. We’d meet people at food movement events and when I mentioned opening a store I got the sense that people were dismissive.

What kind of response have you had from local residents?

We have had overwhelming support from the community. That’s a wonderful validation because for so long it was this thing rattling around in our heads and on paper. People have been amazingly patient with our mistakes. People are just so grateful to have a grocery store here after all these years. On opening day–which we tried to do quietly to work out the kinks–there was so much buzz about the business we had a line outside the door before we even opened. It was insanity.

Locating local farmers has been a discovery process–we thought we’d be dealing with rural farms–so to find such well-established urban farms as Truly Living Well, Metro Atlanta Urban Farm, HABESHA, and Patchwork City Farms right here in the inner city has been incredible. It’s allowed us to tap their network of supporters and access a knowledge base that is helping us learn about organic farm operations.

I spent last summer riding my bike from farmers’ market to farmers’ market meeting vendors, tasting food, and connecting with the producers.

What about some of the craft products in the store?

One couple make these phenomenal pulled pork sandwiches and organic barbecue sauce called The Heat Legend. A product like that speaks to our diverse community. It allows us to meet people where they are with their diet but offer a healthier option that is culturally appropriate. Another producer makes these kale salads with sun-dried tomatoes that people go bananas over. We can barely keep them in stock. It feels good to offer a healthy fast food that people can snack on.

What’s it like running a business with your brother?

It’s awesome. We’ve always been close and we’ve always wanted to work together. I’m in awe of his creativity, social nature, and energy. He appreciates the way I dig down in the details and my diligence in seeing things through. We respect each other’s visions and know that we get more done together than we do on our own because of our complementary skills.

Can you give us some background about your own relationship to food?

I was a notoriously picky eater as a child. Left to my own devices I’d consume nothing but Frosted Flakes and Kraft macaroni and cheese. Both my parents cooked. My mom made Cajun spiced red snapper, jambalaya, and gumbo, foods influenced by her mother, who was from Louisiana. My dad liked to cook us breakfast. We weren’t really allowed candy or lots of fast food, which was maybe a once-a-month treat. After my dad passed away in 2001, I went to Grenada, West Indies. It was the first time I was really surrounded by utterly fresh food. I was eating fruit right off the trees, vegetables directly from the ground, and seafood caught the same day it ended up on my plate. It was healing and cleansing and opened my eyes to what a difference food can make.

What does food justice mean to you?

It means approaching food access as an issue that is not reduced to a socioeconomic determinant. It means adding more faces to the cause so people can identify and desire to be part of a lifestyle shift. If Jay-Z and Kanye can create a lifestyle brand that people in urban and suburban areas aspire to, regardless of their actual income, why can’t we do that with organic food?

We have had family members and friends who are highly educated and in the middle class develop diseases directly related to the food they are eating. I like to tell people that we are not in competition with Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. We’re in competition with KFC, Burger King, and McDonald’s, who are marketing directly to people like me. The food [access] movement is looking at low-income people and telling them to eat better, but not necessarily including the people who CAN afford to eat better but don’t think it’s important or don’t connect with how it has been presented thus far.

What does the future hold for Boxcar?

We have always envisioned Boxcar as a national model. We wanted to be able to create something that would inspire other social entrepreneurs to replicate and hopefully get more healthy corner stores popping up in food deserts to show the demand is there for these businesses. What Alphonzo and I have done is an incredibly risky venture from a financial perspective. But we made a healthy gamble that was deeply rooted in the strength of our education, experience, work ethic, and commitment to seeing the model thrive in different incarnations across the country.

For now, we are focused on building this brand into a strong foundation. We would love Boxcar to be the Walgreen’s of healthy corner stores. We’d like to see at least another five to 10 stores like Boxcar in the next five years.

Originally published on Grist

Urban farmer. Heirloom. Food security. Methane digester. These are just a few of the terms you’ll find in the Lexicon of Sustainability, a series of portraits that speak the language of a growing movement.

The project began with Douglas Gayeton’s first book, Slow: Life in a Tuscan Town, which portrayed the principles of the Slow Food movement as expressed in rural Pistoia, Italy. While on his book tour in the United States, Douglas encountered people who longed to connect with those cultural traditions. “We’re a nation of immigrants,” he says. “And a lot of traditions that were tied to food haven’t carried on from one generation to the next.”

He decided, with his wife, Laura, to document and share what they saw as the roots of the sustainability movement in America. They started by photographing 100 thought-leaders, farmers, and food artisans and asking them to describe one key concept that defined what they did. Each portrait in the Lexicon consists of multiple photos seamlessly collaged, then carefully hand-lettered with detailed phrases selected from the interviews. “The people in the photographs often refer to the image as a collaboration, and for us, that’s the greatest compliment,” says Douglas. “They have sweated out all of the words. They’ve thought it all out.”

So far, the Lexicon team has created more than 175 of these “information art” photo collages, capturing national pioneers such as Will Allen, Alice Waters, and Joel Salatin, as well as farmers and artisans such as La Tercera Farm (pictured above), Marin Sun Farms, Knoll Farms, La Cocina, Cowgirl Creamery, Lagier Ranches, and Bariani Olive Oil. The project is also branching out into short films.

This year, the Lexicon Project takes the show on the road with pop-up exhibits around the country. Hosted in community venues like farmers markets, small grocery stores, and CSA pick-up spots, the goal is to engage people in the places where they think and talk about food. After each show, the prints are donated to a local school.

We caught up with Douglas, who had just returned from photographing alternative water and energy practices in Israel, to learn more about the Lexicon project.

Why did you chooseto focus on the language of sustainability?

Sustainability as an idea is very important, but as a term, it’s vague and often misused. People ask me, “How can you use the term sustainability for your project when it’s already been hijacked?” Part of the project is taking back the power of words from large companies. Look at the term cage-free. When people learned the term cage-free, they suddenly thought about where an egg came from and realized that a cage-free egg would probably taste better and was probably better for the chicken. Then, it turned out that cage-free was a weasel word, and it was replaced by free-range, which was also a weasel word. That led us to pasture-raised. The idea that terms have power to shift people’s consciousness and thereby shift the way industries do business is very real.

What have you learned about sustainability since starting the project?

Sustainability is best expressed by the people I’ve documented. One definition came to me from a Cherokee forager (pictured at right) in Washington State. He said that when he learned to forage, his grandmother and his great aunt took him out into the forest and showed him how the animals eat. They told him that an animal never eats all of something; an animal always leaves a little bit so that next season there is something more to eat, and it’ll be there every year. This is one definition of sustainability: to not use all of something, to use enough of something to satisfy your own needs, and to make sure there will be something left for the next person. Our logo for the Lexicon Project is an ouroboros, a snake that eats its tail and constantly rejuvenates and revitalizes itself. But I think there are many ways to express sustainability. People have a tendency to think in black-and-white terms—only eating what’s local, only eating 100 percent organic—but part of the project is illuminating that things are much more gray than black and white.

Why do we need a common language around food and sustainability?

Whenever I go to a conference about food, there ends up being someone who says we don’t know the difference between food sovereignty and food justice and food security, or we don’t understand the different principles related to egg production. We are activists who are deeply engaged in the conversation, and yet we don’t know the distinctions between all of these terms. This puts us at a great disadvantage because we can’t speak with a unified voice.

Somebody came up to me once and said, “You know, what you’re doing is diabolical, because if you can set the definition of something and get people to become disseminators, then you’ve planted thought bombs that they’ll never be able to get rid of. You’ve taken the power of those words back.” I firmly believe that words can save the world, and words are the building blocks for new ideas. If the most radical thing this project can do is help define what the words are, then we are perfectly comfortable with that.

You can view larger versions of some of these images at the Lexicon of Sustainability. 

Meet Douglas Gayeton and watch the short film “A Story of an Egg” at CUESA’s Beyond Cage-Free panel discussion on February 16. Learn more. 

Originally published on CUESA

When I wrote recently about the next generation of genetically engineered seeds, I was in truth referring to the next next generation. The fact is that the next actual generation of seeds is already out of the lab and poised for approval by the USDA.

And I’m not talking about Monsanto’s recently approved “drought-tolerant” seeds, which the USDA itself has observed are no more drought-tolerant than existing conventional hybrids.

No, the “exciting” new seeds are simply resistant to more than one kind of pesticide. Rather than resisting Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup alone, they will now also be resistant to Dow AgroScience’s pesticide 2,4-D.

“A new pesticide,“ you say. “How exciting!” Except 2,4-D, despite its catchy name, has been around since World War II. Not only is it one of the most commonly used pesticides in the world, but it came to further prominence in certain circles when it was incorporated as a main ingredient in Agent Orange.

Indeed, as with research into new antibiotics, research into new—potentially safer—pesticides has come to a virtual standstill. Like the drug pipeline, the pesticide pipeline has run dry. Instead, biotech companies are going back to the older, more toxic chemicals, like 2,4-D, for inspiration.

And while you’d expect opposition to these new products from the likes of Tom Philpott of Mother Jones or Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, one place you might not expect to see it is the pages of the influential, peer-reviewed journal BioScience.

And yet there it is! Led by David Mortensen, a team of scientists from Penn State, Montana State, and the University of New Hampshire published a paper that describes the effects on agriculture from an over-reliance on glyphosate and an overuse of Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds. It also discusses at length the risks of using new seeds that “stack” resistance to various pesticides into one genetically engineered package.

In short, they say that you can’t believe Monsanto and Dow when they hype gyphosate resistance plus 2,4-D resistance as two great tastes that taste great together. The two companies are promising to eliminate the growing superweed menace—the one that has caused farmers to abandon thousands of acres of prime farmland and to return to older, more toxic pesticides to protect their crops.

What these scientists conclude is that with so many weeds resistant to glyphosate already, it won’t take long for them to develop resistance to 2,4-D as well.  According to the study’s authors, almost half of the nearly 40 species of weeds that are already resistant to two pesticides have arisen since 2005 (i.e. since the Roundup Ready era began). In short, the crisis Monsanto and Dow are promising to head off is already here.

There are other problems with 2,4-D, such as a strong link to cancer and a much greater tendency to drift on the wind (and thus contaminate nearby fields and waterways)—problems that the development of the less toxic, less volatile glyphosate was supposed to have “solved.” Yet now, thanks to Big Ag’s over-reliance on these genetically engineered one-hit wonders, which encouraged farmers to use too much glyphosate too often, we’re back to square one—or rather to square toxic.

There is, however, an alternative—and one that doesn’t require a total transition to organic agriculture (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Mortensen and his team describe in detail a practice called Integrated Weed Management (IWM). Like its sibling, Integrated Pest Management (IPM), IWM does involve the use of chemical pesticides. But it’s a judicious use that can act as a last resort rather than a first line of defense. As the paper states:

IWM integrates tactics, such as crop rotation, cover crops, competitive crop cultivars, the judicious use of tillage, and targeted herbicide application, to reduce weed populations and selection pressures that drive the evolution of resistant weeds.

It’s designed for production agriculture and would most likely increase farmer profits, since farmers would get the benefit of reduced seed and pesticide costs and no real loss of productivity. But, as with the climate-friendly agriculture I discussed the other day, you’re unlikely to see IWM embraced by Big Ag any time soon.

The USDA, along with the entire large-scale agriculture economy, is built around the profits of pesticide and biotech companies. You need only watch the USDA approve new genetically engineered products—which the agency admits represents a threat to other forms of agriculture—to see how deep in the tank to these companies our government is.

Tom Philpott observed that with this latest development, agriculture is at “a crossroads.” I disagree. I would say that if the USDA approves this new multiple pesticide-resistant GMO seed as it’s expected to, large-scale agriculture in the country will have reached a true dead end.

Photo: Minnemom

New York City was among the earliest of the urban school districts to implement a consistent school lunch program in the United States. More than 50 years prior to its formal integration into city schools, New York City’s Children’s Aid Society began a school lunch program in 1853. These and other scattered volunteer and non-profit efforts were taken up nationwide by municipal school boards and integrated into the larger efforts to address the growing nutritional needs of America’s urban schoolchildren.

As a federally funded school food program evolved from its inception in the first half of the 20th century to become a permanent fixture in the educational landscape across the country, the NYC school food program became a leading influence in the country’s experiments, failures, and successes in school food service. School and city officials sorted through the wrong ingredients for school lunches and exposed the detrimental effects of decreased funding for school lunch programs. Eventually, engaging students in understanding the nutritious value of the food they consumed righted the relationship between children and their food and connected students to the source of their meals through school gardens and food education programming.

The National School Lunch Act was enacted in 1946 with the “basic purpose…to safeguard the health and well-being of the nation’s children by encourage them to eat more nutritious foods.” Yet by 1972, the New York Times deemed Americans “nutritional illiterates” and the cost of malnutrition had an estimated $30 billion annual price tag. Lack of nutritional awareness paired with the problems caused by the country’s dire economic situation. At this time doctors in NYC suggested nutrition education in schools as a method for improving health and nutritional awareness. However, more fundamental concerns for school security, the basic lack of food for residents across the City, and a lack of funding for such nutritional education programs meant that these suggestions were not made manifest.

In 1977, just two months after the report from the federal General Accounting Office revealed poor nutritional quality in large urban school districts across the country, NYC’s schools adopted the Energy Factor program. Rather than integrate nutritional education programs or involve students in the processes of bringing the food from the field to the lunch table, schools responded to the flash and glamour of the fast food industry that captured the attention of the whole country. Since hamburgers, hot dogs, and fried chicken were attractive to student consumers, they were served as options in the Energy Factor and considered healthy alternatives to “junk food, Twinkies, cupcakes, and the like.” Yet at the same time the NYC School Board implemented fast-food lunches in the three pilot schools, it also contemplated introducing salad bars into school food options. Two seemingly opposite food futures faced NYC students. They could choose hamburgers, which had risen to the status of a nutritionally superior lunch item – at least in comparison to what had been served on lunch trays or brought in brown paper bags from students’ homes previously. Or, on the other hand, there was a glimmer of an idea to provide them with fresh greens on a salad bar. Given heavy marketing efforts for the Energy Factor and continued lack of infrastructure to support healthy food education and school gardening, the future of salads as the preferred lunch choice was bleak.

While the Energy Factor was adopted with the support of school officials and promoted by the head school food administrator, Elizabeth Cagan, by 1980 the “nutritional message” of the program had become questionable. Cagan realized that student retention and and increased participation in the lunch program was not a sufficient goal if it meant a compromise on the healthfulness of the food . Cagan fought hard for the removal of all frozen food pack lunches (the equivalent of a TV dinner) and reduced the number of schools serving such meals from 400 to 100. Nutritional experts like Ann Cook, who promoted school lunch as “where the good food is now,” tried to combat the poverty and junk food stigmas formerly associated with the school lunch program.

In the early years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, rearranging the priorities and tactics of serving school meals in New York City came to a head. By 2010 a collaboration of the Mayor’s Fund, GrowNYC and other government agencies established the Citywide School Gardens Initiative, promoting garden and food education through funding, garden maintenance assistance, and coordinated educational tools and programs like the Garden-to-Café harvest events. A grant from the Fund for Public Health in New York City propelled the healthy food options in schools to include a salad bar at each lunchtime period, finally bringing the efforts of school food reformers in the 1980s to fruition.

The purpose of the Garden-to-Café program, which is administrated the New York City Department of Education’s Office of SchoolFood, is to help children connect the origin of their food with its related nutritional quality and fresh taste. During the 2011 spring harvest season, the program facilitated events at 19 schools throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. Throughout the 2010-2011 school year, the program partnered with 55 NYC public, charter, elementary, middle and high schools, in effect exposing more than 35,000 students throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn to the efforts of the Garden-to-Café program.

The School Gardens Initiative and the Garden-to-Café program are the result of NYC’s commitment to bringing healthy food and nutritional education opportunities to its students. Wrestling with the disconnects between students and their food source; a lack of government funding and a need to feed schoolchildren; and fast food culture and a focus on health, the NYC school food program has ultimately provided substantial opportunities for healthy and local food education and continues to improve the quality of its meals for all students.

On January 25, amid much fanfare, First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack released the new school lunch regulations [PDF] which have been over three years in the making. Early hopes that the original proposed rules, which were based on recommendations from the Institute of Medicine, would dramatically change school lunches from the pizza/chicken nugget/french fries model so commonly seen in school cafeterias, to something looking a little more like, well, food, were dashed when Big Food lobbyists were able to force changes in Congress allowing plenty of potatoes, and continuing the longstanding tradition of counting the sauce on pizza as a vegetable. Still, there will be some improvements.

The best part of the new school lunch regulations is that for the first time, there is a maximum limit set on calories; previously there was only a minimum number of calories required, with no maximum. As a result, many schools in the past served foods high in sugar, such as canned fruit packed in heavy syrup rather than its own juice, or extra packages of crackers kids didn’t need, just to reach the required minimum number of calories. Now the old minimum has become the new maximum, so there is no longer any need for calorie inflation in school lunches. Other positive changes are requirements for larger servings and more varied kinds of vegetables, including dark orange and leafy greens, more fruit and whole grains.

On the downside, the six cents per lunch additional funding being offered is not enough to offset the increased cost, which has been estimated by the USDA as about 11 cents per meal. To compensate, there are regulations requiring schools to raise the price of paid lunches if they fall below the government reimbursement for a free lunch, as well as new regulations designed to drive more revenue from food sold a la carte in competition with the National School Lunch Program. There are also some changes to the way students are qualified for free meals, which could increase the number of kids eating school lunch.

For some districts, these changes will drive extra revenue, but for school districts like San Francisco, where the paid lunch price is already higher than the free lunch reimbursement, where most a la carte has already been eliminated in an attempt to dispel the stigma of eating school meals, and where most of the new methods for identifying students as qualified for free lunch are already in use, there is little additional revenue projected. Trying to charge students who pay for their lunch a substantially higher price than what the government pays for a free lunch is not going to balance the budget. Our schools will just have to absorb the shortfall, as they always have, driving the deficit for our Student Nutrition department even higher.

That nutrition department deficit, which in 2010-11 topped $3 million, has for years been covered by money from the school district’s general fund, leaving less money for teachers, textbooks, and other classroom needs. While meals served in SFUSD cafeterias already meet or exceed most of the new nutrition regulations, the higher cost of serving this more nutritious food has helped drive the deficit, along with the higher cost of labor in this high cost of living city. In the past, the Board of Education and district administration generously agreed to fund the higher cost, but it was their choice to do so, and there was always the possibility that the whole grains, fresh fruit, and salad bars might have to be scaled back to save money, as happened midway through the 2009-10 school year. Now, when the new regulations go into effect next school year, those improvements will be requirements, not forward-thinking extras subject to the budget knife. In other words, not only will the Student Nutrition deficit continue, or even grow, as a result of the new regulations, but the school district administration will have fewer options for fighting that deficit; most reductions in the quality of the food will be off-limits.

That’s the conundrum. We want healthy food served at school–including the larger servings of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains mandated by the new regulations–but should we have to pay for them with our children’s classroom funds? With school funding in California plummeting even under the best case state budget scenario, it’s hard to feel good about cementing healthy food upgrades at the expense of other educational priorities.

We are at a crossroads in this country–we must decide whether it is worth it to spend a little more money now to adequately fund school nutrition programs, so that children can learn to make healthy eating habits a way of life, or whether we want to kick that can down the road, scrimp on school meal funding now, but instead pay the much higher cost of healthcare and loss of productivity when those children grow up to be unhealthy adults dealing with type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and other weight-related disorders. It is an enormous disappointment that our Congress has chosen the “kick the can” solution.

When Jesse Kuhn started Marin Roots Farm at age 28, he already had dirt under his fingernails. He’d studied ag in college, managed a student farm, and worked as a landscaper. But when it came to succeeding financially in the farming business, he had a long way to go. “I was charging up my credit cards like crazy and bouncing balances back and forth,” he says. “I almost had to declare bankruptcy during the first year.”

Almost 10 years and many lessons later, Marin Roots is a well-established organic specialty produce business. “It’s a lot of people’s dream to live off the land, but the reality of it is, you have to have a plan for how you’re going to pay the bills,” says Kuhn.

His journey is not unlike that of many beginners who are eager to try their hand at farming but don’t yet have all the necessary skills and resources. In a recent report titled Building a Future with Farmers, the National Young Farmers’ Coalition (NYFC) surveyed 1,000 young and beginning farmers across the US and found that access to land, capital, health care, credit, and business training posed huge challenges.

“What’s different for young and first-career farmers is that they don’t have a lot of equity,” says Severine von Tscharner Fleming, a young farmer in New York’s Hudson Valley who is also co-chair of NYFC and director of The Greenhorns, a film and nonprofit organization that advocates for young farmers. “You see a lot of student debt. Farming is a high-capital industry—an industry that really needs us, but we’re walking in without any cash.” 

Green Thumbs To Greenhorn

Kuhn’s path to farming started as a child in San Geronimo, where he had little exposure to agriculture but picked up a passion for gardening from his grandmother. “She had two green thumbs for sure, and I learned from that,” says Kuhn. When he went to Humboldt State, he joined their new agriculture program and studied permaculture on the side. He also took time off from school to work at an organic soil company and contemplate career paths.

After college he started farming a small one-acre plot, using the model he’d learned on the student farm, but realized the operation was more like a hobby farm than a viable business. So he worked as a landscaper while farming small plots in friends’ backyards, which eventually helped him build the courage to take the leap into full-time farming.

He took out a “land wanted” ad in the Press Democrat and, after receiving a number of responses, settled on a 15-acre agricultural plot on a goat dairy ranch near Petaluma. But there were setbacks infrastructure-wise, such as having to install a new irrigation system, and Kuhn began charging up his credit cards. Right when he was about to declare bankruptcy, a low-interest beginning farmer loan through the USDA Farm Service Agency came through. He was able to buy a tractor, a delivery truck, and seeds.

Through much experimentation, Kuhn found his niche growing organic specialty crops such as baby greens, roots, beans, and summer squash for farmers markets and grocery stores, restaurants, and wholesalers. “A lot of the products I was selling weren’t standardized because I was doing open-pollinated varieties, but there was certainly a market for that,” he says. He now employs a handful of full-time market and field staff.

Kuhn has had to learn much through trial by fire, particularly the organizational side of growing a successful business. He’s found support in his family (his mother helps with accounting, and his father is on call as farm mechanic), as well as in other Marin farmers and the Bay Area farmers market community. “It’s definitely tough farming,” he says. “The farmers market has been a great support network for me, meeting up with the other farmers every week, bouncing ideas off each other, seeing what they’re bringing to market, and getting their advice.”

Growing Roots

Kuhn is still a young farmer by national standards, which place the average farmer at 57. The USDA estimates that 500,000 US farmers (about one-quarter) will retire by 2030, leaving a large gap for the next generation to fill. “We have ever older farmers and ever fewer people who are growing our food,” says Fleming. “I think young farmers are especially well poised to address food security and the re-regionalization of our food system.”

As a result of the Building a Future with Farmers study, the NYFC has proposed a policy agenda including recommendations such as improving credit and savings opportunities, addressing land access and affordability issues, legalizing farm apprenticeships, and expanding training programs. (For more about legal issues related to apprenticeships, see The Farm Intern Conundrum.)

The NYFC study underscores the viability of direct marketing as a start-up strategy for new farmers, with 61 percent of their respondents selling at farmers markets and 49 percent through CSAs. “Helping young farmers means reorienting our food systems so that we’re not just supporting producers who are growing commodity crops and abandoning the small- and medium-scale producers who are more than likely selling directly to the marketplace,” says Fleming.

For aspiring greenhorns, Kuhn recommends getting a job or volunteering on a farm in order to get to know the business. When taking the plunge into starting your own farm, he emphasizes finding the right piece of land, with infrastructure already in place, and developing a niche.

But despite the challenges he’s encountered along the way, Kuhn loves what he does. “Being able to wake up on the farm is incredible,” he says. “And it’s rewarding to go to the farmers market and meet the people who are going to be eating my food.”

Photo: Gary Yost. Chart by the National Young Farmers Coalition.

Originally published on CUESA

For too long, funding provided by the United States’ most far-reaching food and farm legislation has primarily benefited agri-business and large scale industrial-scale commodity farms that aren’t growing food.  Instead, they’re growing ingredients for animal feed, fuel and highly processed food—at a high cost to our nation’s health, environment and rural communities.

Meanwhile, only meager public resources have been invested smartly to build the kind of dynamic local food economies that support agricultural diversification and help link small- and mid-sized family farms to local and regional markets.

With the 2012 Farm Bill fast upon us, Congress has an opportunity to make smart, timely changes to help  fix our broken food and farm system by embracing a package of policy reforms outlined in the Local Farms, Food and Jobs bill. This legislation was recently introduced by Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and is co-sponsored by 63 representatives in the House and 9 in the Senate.

The Pingree-Brown bill includes a comprehensive package of cost-effective policy reforms that would boost farmers’ and ranchers’ incomes by helping them meet the growing demand for local and regional food.  The legislation also aims to make fresh, healthy and affordable food-especially fruits and vegetables- more accessible to consumers.  Given our nation’s costly epidemic of diet-related disease, small investments now that increase access and affordability of healthier food will save us billions of health-related dollars down the road.

Trends show people want fresh, healthy, local food

Demand for locally grown, sustainable food is growing in every corner of the country, with more than 100,000 growers now serving more than 160,000 outlets (pdf):

• In 2011, 7,175 farmers markets were open for business, more than double the number in 2002.
• An estimated 6000 Community Supported Agriculture programs are delivering food directly from the farm to consumers.
• More than 2,000 farm-to-school programs are up and running, a five-fold increase since 2004.
• More than 300 universities are involved with the Real Food Challenge and sourcing sustainable food locally.
• More than 360 hospitals have committed to sourcing more nutritious, locally grown food through the Healthy Food in Health Care pledge.
• The number of restaurants purchasing locally-grown food has skyrocketed; For the fourth year in a row, locally sourced food is the top restaurant food trend in 2012.
• More grocery stores are carrying food produced locally or from farms within the state–and labeling it for customers!

In 2008, the USDA valued this expanding market for local and regional foods at nearly $5 billion. The total will likely surpass $7 billion by the end of 2012, when the current farm bill expires.

This growth is particularly remarkable considering the tiny amounts of federal funding that have been invested in local and regional food system projects. Since 2008, funding has almost doubled but EWG estimates that still just a measly $100 million dollars of taxpayer money a year is being channeled to projects supporting increased local food production, distribution and consumption.

Compare that to roughly $12 billion in subsidies annually that go to industrial-scale growers of commodity crops who are enjoying record income year after year.

Farm Bill must help scale up local and regional food systems

While the recent expansion is impressive, local and regional food markets represented a mere two percent of gross farm sales in 2008. We desperately need the new investments and policy reforms outlined in the Pingree-Brown bill to help this burgeoning market grow and remove the many barriers farmers face in meeting existing demand from grocery stores, restaurants, schools, universities, hospitals and consumers. The Local Food bill has a  $100 million a year price tag, a small sum compared to its potential benefits.

The Local Farms, Food and Jobs bill will improve our broken food system by:

• Increasing support for local aggregation, processing and distribution so that farmers can more easily sell healthy food, including locally raised and processed meat, directly to schools, hospitals, stores and restaurants.

• Enabling schools to use more of their federal food funding to buy fresh, local foods. Public schools could opt to use up to 15 percent of their school lunch commodity dollars for buying foods from local farmers and ranchers, instead of through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nationalized commodity food program.

• Improving the diets of food stamp recipients and low-income seniors by making it easier for them to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables at farmers markets, community supported agriculture programs, and other direct food marketing services, putting more money in the pockets of local farmers and generating additional economic activity in nearby business districts.

• Diversifying and increasing the production of healthy and sustainable food by increasing funding for the Specialty Crop Block Grant program and increasing access to credit, crop insurance, and other support for organic producers, diversified operations, smaller-scale and beginning farmers.

Together, these modest but effective investments will yield important, much-needed economic benefits. Farms that sell locally through shorter supply chains often keep a higher portion of the retail dollar, increasing profitability and potential for expansion and job creation.

According to a recent USDA analysis, farmers producing for local markets generally provide 1.3 full time jobs compared to 0.9 for farmers who sell through traditional wholesale markets.  And local food farmers grow higher value crops that generate greater sales per acre—$590 per acre versus $304 for the average farm. Local food markets also provide a critical pathway for new businesses, with beginning farmers accounting for 48% of local West Coast food producers.

Tough road ahead

Despite proven economic and public health benefits, getting this bill through the House agriculture committee may be challenging, given the panel’s hostility to the “Know Your Farmer” Program, the USDA’s comprehensive local and regional food initiative.

Pingree’s bill presents both a major opportunity and challenge for the highly decentralized local food and farming movement to work together in a unified, focused way to transform its considerable success at the local level into the political power needed to win support in the House and Senate agriculture committees.

With the stakes as high as they are, we believe that local farmers and the more than 180 hundred organizations that have endorsed the bill are up to the challenge.

Originally published on EWG

According to recent numbers, 80 percent of antibiotics on the market today are being administered to animals, much of which is given non-therapeutically to promote growth. A new report today on msnbc.com by Helena Bottemiller reveals that ractopamine hydrochloride, a growth promoting drug, has become the focus of an international trade dispute concerning its potential effects on human health.

“Although few Americans outside of the livestock industry have ever heard of ractopamine, the drug is controversial,” Bottemiller writes. “Fed to an estimated 60 to 80 percent of pigs in the United States, it has sickened or killed more of them than any other livestock drug on the market, Food and Drug Administration records show. Cattle and turkeys have also suffered high numbers of illnesses from the drug.”

According to the story, USDA meat inspectors have reported an increase in “downer pigs”–livestock that is unable to walk–who have been fed ractopamine. On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously voted down a California ban on “downer” livestock being used in the food supply, on the basis of a federal preemption.

Bottemiller explains that ractopomine acts like a stress hormone, increasing heart rate and relaxing blood vessels. Its use in livestock agriculture produces up to 10 percent more meat, raising profits $2 per head. Though the drug has not been considered for human use, it is administered up until slaughter, and minute traces have been found in meat.

While these amounts have not exceeded the threshold the FDA has deemed safe, there is no allowance for the drug in the E.U. and China, where 70 percent of the world’s pork is consumed, and where the drug is currently banned. Acceptance of meat from animals raised on ractopamine in world markets has become a focus for U.S. trade officials. Bottemiller writes: “Resolving the impasse is now a top agricultural trade priority for the Obama administration, which is trying to boost exports and help revive the economy.”

At the heart of the trade dispute lies questions about the safety of the drug. Elanco, the maker of ractopamine, sold under the name Paylean, conducted the studies considered before approval of the drug in 2000, and has reported “no averse effects were observed for any treatments.” However, within a few years of the drug’s approval, the FDA received hundreds of reports from farmers, veterinarians, and USDA inspectors of sickened pigs.

Now the issue remains at an impasse at the U.N.’s Codex Alimentarius Commission, which sets global food-safety guidelines. The commission has sought to set a standard for residue levels of ractopamine in meat. With such standards in place, Washington would be in a position to challenge countries with bans on ractopamine at the World Trade Organization. China and the E.U. are the main countries blocking the residue limit at Codex. In China, organ meats, which contain the highest traces of the drug, are popular fare, and in the E.U. officials do not want to risk public outcry by importing meat raised with growth-promoting drugs, which are illegal there.

Bottemiller reported this story in conjunction with the Food & Environment Reporting Network, the first and only independent, non-profit news organization that produces investigative journalism in the critically underreported areas of food, agriculture, and environmental health. This is the second story of the Food & Environment Reporting Network, previous stories can be found here. [Full disclosure: I am the Managing Editor of that venture.]

You can read the full report here at MSNBC.com. You can also find additional reporting here on testing of ractopamine as well as more details about the process underway at Codex here on the Food & Environment Reporting Network’s Web site.

A new article in the respected journal BioScience raises important concerns about the harmful influence of genetically engineered herbicide resistant crops on sustainable weed control. As many others have also noted, the excessive reliance on glyphosate-based herbicides, such as Roundup, has resulted in the emergence and spread of many harmful weeds that can no longer be controlled by glyphosate. These weeds now infest millions of acres of farmland the U.S., resulting in greater herbicide use.

But the new article goes well beyond most previous work by providing insight into the state of weed control for major crops in the U.S., and how the current use of engineered herbicide resistant crops is driving agriculture toward reduced sustainability.

The authors make several important points to support their thesis. First, because of widespread resistance of several important weeds to glyphosate, companies are now working to commercialize crops resistant to several other herbicides, including the old herbicides dicamba and 2, 4-D. Crops resistant to these two herbicides are likely to be widely used because the herbicides they are immune to are more effective than others. This is bad news, because these herbicides can cause a lot of collateral damage to other crops and nearby natural areas. And natural areas are important for fostering biodiversity, such as pollinators and organisms that control pests and reduce insecticide use.

Based in part on the pesticide/seed industry’s own analysis that both glyphosate and these other herbicides will be used together on engineered soybeans and corn, the authors of the article project total herbicide use to increase more than twofold over the next decade. Dicamba and 2, 4 – D are projected to increase almost tenfold.

And the likelihood of these herbicides moving off site and harming sensitive crops is much higher than for glyphosate—75 to 400 times greater in one comparison, although newer formulations may somewhat reduce this problem.  This spells trouble, especially when combined with several other factors that accompany herbicide-resistant crops, such as use of the herbicides later in the season when nearby susceptible crops and wild vegetation have leafed out and are more vulnerable to damage.

This in turn could lead to a further shift to the few crops that are resistant to these herbicides in an effort to avoid damage.

This kind of further simplification of agriculture is understood to be bad for the environment. And in parts of the country where corn and soybeans are widely grown, it could also impede the growing demand for fresh local foods that have positive effects on jobs.

Increased herbicide use will surely lead to even more resistant weeds, some with resistance to both glyphosate and 2,4-D or dicamba (or all three), leaving even fewer options for farmers.

The industry has argued to the contrary that it is unlikely that weeds will develop resistance to these herbicides for several reasons…which the article adroitly refutes.

It is troubling that the industry is taking this “head-in-the-sand” attitude because, to the extent it is accepted, it may lead to lax policy by the government and lax practice by growers—that is, too little effort to prevent resistance or to promote sustainable alternatives.

It is particularly troubling because we have heard these irresponsible arguments before from an industry bent on maximizing its sale of products at the expense of the environment. The current article points out how spurious arguments where similarly made that weeds would not develop resistance to glyphosate, where to the contrary, the dramatic increase in resistant weeds is the driving force behind the new crops engineered for dicamba and 2, 4 – D resistance. And I have noted that the industry is also trying to deny and downplay the potential importance of emerging resistance of corn rootworms to Bt.

The authors of the new article describe sustainable weed control practices that readers of this blog will find familiar—crop rotation, use of cover crops, crops and cropping practices that effectively compete with weeds, judicious use of tillage, and for non-organic systems, minimal and targeted use of herbicides.

These methods improve weed control and make it more sustainable, while reducing weed pressure.  That means that when herbicides are used, it is less likely that weeds will develop resistance to them. And organic systems, of course, don’t use herbicide at all.

So in the context of these better ways to control weeds, it is perhaps most troubling that the authors document the decline in, as they put it, “…the knowledge infrastructure needed to practice IWM [Integrated Weed Management] in the future…” And, I would add, harm to the research infrastructure that can improve IWM and make it even more efficient.

The authors document a shift in land grant institutions and USDA away from research on more sustainable types of agriculture, toward more emphasis on chemical controls and engineered crops. The dramatic shift of agricultural research funding from the public to the private sector, and the growing ties between academia and the biotech industry, also do not bode well for sustainable agriculture research and infrastructure.

The biotech and chemical industries have no interest in developing the kinds of knowledge- and ecology-based farming vital to a productive and sustainable agriculture that conserves resources and biodiversity, and which will be vital to confronting coming challenges of climate change and increasing population. The companies can’t sell this knowledge, so they are not interested in it.

The authors discuss several useful recommendations to make weed management more sustainable. These include mandatory herbicide resistance management imposed by EPA, which approves these chemicals (and I would add, by USDA, which approves herbicide resistant crops); fees on GE herbicide resistant crops and herbicides to discourage their overuse, and which could be plowed back into sustainable ag research; the fostering of partnerships between all stakeholders to develop better stewardship information for farmers and to advise them on sustainable agriculture practices; and more funding and incentives for sustainable agriculture research.

These important policies face a daunting uphill fight—one that UCS and our allies in the sustainable agriculture community will continue to wage. There is considerable resistance to this important agenda by the biotech and pesticide industry and its supporters in the government and academia.

The GE and pesticide industry have no inherent interest in promoting a truly sustainable farming system, and in fact such a system is antithetical to their narrow interests of selling as much herbicide and engineered herbicide-resistant seed as possible. The kinds of sustainable IWM supported in the article would greatly reduce the need for both herbicides and engineered seeds that these companies sell.

Instead, the strong public sector policies advocated by the authors will only come through ongoing and vigorous engagement to convince the public and its servants, who are lobbied heavily by these industries, that sustainable agriculture is critical to the health of our food supply, our environment, and rural communities.

Photo: Giant ragweed, one of the serious weeds that have developed resistance to glyphosate, by Peggy Greb.

Originally published on the Union of Concerned Scientists’ blog

After Novella Carpenter’s critically acclaimed memoir Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer came out, she and friend Willow Rosenthal, the founder of West Oakland gardening nonprofit City Slicker Farms, started talking about compiling a manual on urban gardening. “We always got these random emails like, ‘My chickens aren’t laying anymore!’” says Carpenter. So she and Rosenthal joked that they should write a book so they could reply: “Buy the book!”

Three years later, they can. Their new book, The Essential Urban Farmer, is a 500-page nuts-and-bolts guide to farming in the city–complete with sample garden designs, detailed illustrations, and photos of rabbit genitalia. Rosenthal, who is also a Waldorf School teacher and runs a small CSA in Berkeley, wrote the first two sections of the book: “Designing Your Urban Farm” and “Raising City Vegetables and Fruits.” Carpenter wrote the section called “Raising City Animals.” With advice on how to fix a chicken’s prolapsed “vent,” and a detailed how-to on eviscerating a chicken, it’s not for the squeamish. But then, neither is raising livestock.

I talked to Carpenter and Rosenthal recently about the guide, and got some tips about  how to create a thriving urban farm.

Willow Rosenthal

Why did you write this book?

Carpenter: We were both trial-and-error urban farmers. We would’ve loved to have had a guidebook that showed us best practices. So this is the book that we wished we’d had when we were starting out.

In the intro, you write that the average urban backyard can grow all the fruit and veggies for one person in 25 x 40 feet, and that it makes economic sense to garden if you have more time than money. Is this book geared, in part, towards low-income readers?  

Carpenter: Yeah, definitely. I’m low-income, Willow is probably low-income, too. People are like, “You should eat organic food,” but when you go to Whole Foods or the farmers’ market, it’s so expensive. So this was our DIY way to eat organic, healthy food. If you do it right, it can be cost effective.

Rosenthal: I wouldn’t say that it’s only geared towards low-income people, but toward people who are interested in making their own solutions. It’s not going to be as useful for people who want to purchase everything at the garden store or hire other people to do work in the garden. To make an impact on the way that the food system is structured for environmental good, it’s necessary for people of all walks of life to grow food in the city.

What mistakes did each of you make early on in your respective urban farms that you hope to prevent others from making with this book?

Carpenter: Well, I remember that Willow and I had built a chicken shed and we were raising pullets (adolescent chickens) and we didn’t realize that raccoons are really smart. They can use their little fingers to pry off staples (which we’d used to staple the chicken wire to the chicken shed). Over the course of four days, the raccoon would slowly pry off more. And then one night, it came in and killed every single pullet–I think there were 25 in there. It was massive carnage. The lesson here was don’t put the staples on the outside.

In terms of the garden, I would say my problem is not harvesting stuff. You can plant all these really beautiful vegetables and there’s a tendency to not want to harvest them because they look so beautiful. You need to have a harvest day, like Fridays or Thursdays, where you go out into the garden and harvest everything that’s ready and put it in your fridge. I can’t emphasize how genius this is.

Rosenthal: What mistakes didn’t I make?  (Laughter.) Farming is a process of trial and error. Each farm is its own unique entity. You do need to find your own way. Plants are always gonna die and you’re going to have to figure that out.

Rosenthal: Many landlords have an altruistic streak. When presented with something to do for the community that’s no skin off their back–they’re happy to do it. I think we tend to make a lot of assumptions about who people are. But it’s important to have an open mind. Maybe two out of 10 landlords don’t care at all about the community. But there are eight who do, so let’s get those people involved. You’re politicizing them in a way–you’re bringing them into this activist movement.

[Another] real perk is your thanks! I know that sounds cheesy, but you should focus on informing the landlord of what’s going on and thanking them. The mistake some people make is, “I got permission and now I can forget about it.” It’s a relationship you need to cultivate and not take for granted.

Starting an urban farm demands a lot of work–not to mention money. You need to pay for water, buy liability insurance, equipment, wood and nails for raised beds, maybe even hoop houses. Are there funds would-be gardeners can apply for if they don’t have enough of their own money?

Carpenter: If you’re doing a community garden, you can approach your city government. Pretty much every city has a community garden association. I know in Seattle it’s the P-Patch.

Rosenthal:  There are a couple of important resources. Master Gardener programs exist in every county in the United States–they are a subset of the agriculture extension services run by local universities. The USDA spends money through these agencies to support farmers. They were intended to support primarily commercial farmers. But this is changing as people in urban areas are actually using those services more. I always tell people, this is your tax dollars at work and you have every right to utilize them!

If you have a pest, you can take a sample of the plant and put them in a baggie and send them to a specialist and they will ID that for you–for free.

In some states, like California, you can now get services through the [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)] program to help you start a home garden. You can use food stamps for all sorts of special vouchers for gardening supplies.

Regional and citywide organizations can often provide a lot of technical assistance. Some of them may provide materials free of charge–City Slicker Farms does. The other way that home gardeners can make it affordable is by producing their own vegetable seedlings. When you go to the store to buy a cauliflower seedling and it’s $3 for a six-pack, you’re hardly saving money on your food bill. But if you’re buying a packet of seeds–100 seeds for two bucks. In our book we give an outline of a simple setup for using fluorescent lighting to start seedlings indoors.

Novella Carpenter with her goats.

The book does contain many tricks for saving money on construction: getting softwood pallets for free to use as compost bins or boxed beds, using old bathtubs as containers. What are some other tricks the two of you have used over time to save money on construction supplies?

Carpenter: One of the greatest fencing materials is really cheap: concrete reinforcement mesh.  But you can buy this mesh at any Home Depot or local lumber yard and it’s $12 for a giant sheet of it. You can use it for making quick and easy fences. It’ll even keep goats in!

Also for me, one of the great parts of living in a city is there is so much waste that you can feed to animals. You [also] never have to buy pots. You can usually find those at garden stores–they’re trying to get rid of the black plastic pots.

I found this guy who makes redwood sculptures of giant grizzly bears. And he has all these scrap pieces of redwood that he throws aside. I actually built a little chicken coop from those once. So you have to look at your resources and think how you can repurpose [them into] building materials.

Rosenthal: Get your building materials for free or cheap, but invest money in hardware. If the bolts that hold your boxes together are rated for outdoor use your boxes will last a long time.

In terms of getting free building materials: I was blessed because here in the East Bay we have a wonderful company called the ReUse People. They salvage whole houses–including a lot of the framing lumber–and they sell it for a very affordable price, already cleaned of nails and screws. So check your salvage yard.

Extremely valuable materials go into the garbage, such as hardwood pallets. Softwood pallets, unless you line them with something, can degrade pretty quickly. Hardwood pallets are an amazingly valuable resource.

My other favorite free material is old burlap sacks. They’re great containers for planting. They’ll degrade over time but they’re free and have structure to them. You can get them at coffee roasters or chocolate companies. A lot of times you can find them on Freecycle.org.

I was surprised to learn that you can farm on heavy-metal contaminated soil.  Have either of you done that? And if so, which precautions did you take?   

Rosenthal: There’s a lot of gray area when it comes to health, toxicity, and safety. Rather than saying “do this or just do that,” our hope is to educate people so they can make their own decisions.

With our backyard garden program at City Slicker Farms, the first thing we do is go into a resident’s garden and test their soil for lead and heavy metals. There were some situations where we said, “No, we don’t think you should have vegetable gardens unless we cap the soil and put in raised beds.” We follow stringent guidelines with people.

First we cover the soil with mulch–or put down layers of cardboard and mulch. Dilution has an effect. If you bring in an equal volume of compost and mix that in with your soil, you’ve already cut the level of lead in half.

You say that native soil is better than potting soil, but what if your soil has chemicals or toxins in it?  Where do you go about getting healthy native soil to amend your own?   

Rosenthal: That’s a good question. We live in such an “I can just buy whatever I need” culture. And a lot of the potting soil is actually toxic to plants.

It’s possible to get topsoil. You can sometimes go on Craigslist and find people who are doing construction projects and need to get rid of some dirt. But often they’re like, “We need to dump it today.” And you should take a sample to the lab and test it before you buy it.

You can buy topsoil, potting mix, and compost. But you want to be sure they’re testing these products. Talk to the employees at locally-owned gardening centers. They often know a lot about what different potting mix companies are doing. Not all materials are equal. Making your own compost is a great way to get a high quality product.

What about theft? A friend of mine in Portland recently had all of her (perfectly ripe) persimmons stolen from their backyard. Any tips on how to deal with this? 

Rosenthal: It does happen. My strategy has always been to try to communicate with these unknown people. It’s easy to victimize a faceless person, but if you put a sign on the front of your fence saying, “Hey, I know you might be tempted by these beautiful tomatoes, but if you want some, why don’t you just come knock on my door and I’d be happy to share.”

We are living in desperate times. It’s up to all of us to do what we can to help and not to take it personally. What we did at City Slicker Farms, we did have to lock our gardens at night so they wouldn’t get vandalized. So we just set up planter boxes outside of them and put up signs saying “Help yourself.”

Novella, you emphasize how important it is to check your city’s ordinances to see whether it’s legal to keep bees, chickens, goats, rabbits, etc. Can you say more about that?

Carpenter: Oakland has kind of lax laws and the ordinances were ambiguous. For instance, I can have goats but I can’t have a male goat. I think actually you can’t have pigs, it’s buried into some weird law. I think it’s legal in Portland to have goats. It is in Seattle as well. In the book, we’re talking about super ground-level things like, it’s illegal to keep chickens in some cities. But then it becomes a question of who is watching those laws. If you had a neighbor that doesn’t like you, who is calling the city every day to report you, that’s when you’re gonna run into a problem. In that case, you  want to cover your ass and make sure that you’re legal.

You say that bees are the “gateway urban farm animal.” Yet it sounds like it’s a fairly expensive operation. What’s the ballpark amount you spent buying hives, supplies, extractors, etc.? 

Carpenter: To get a beehive with bees and the queen and all that, you’re looking at $250. So, it is definitely a fairly nice Christmas present or birthday present. Or for some people, it’s a really nice pair of shoes. There are ways to do it more cheaply. If you’re handy, you can make your own frames. You can build your own boxes. But I’ve found that usually anything that I build is shit. I spend more money being frustrated.

To me, $250 seems expensive, but when you harvest your honey, you get six gallons, and you can sell it for $15 for half a quart or pint. And those boxes will last forever.

You write that overfeeding is one of the biggest problems with backyard chickens–people give them scraps and kitchen waste but then forget to reduce the amount of pelleted feed. And as you mention, overweight chickens not only have trouble laying eggs, they can die prematurely. What’s a general rule of thumb for how much chicken feed to give a full-grown chicken per day?

Carpenter: Some people think of their chickens as their pets. That’s fine if you can afford to—you can buy scratch and hydrated mealworms. You can really go crazy with snacks for the chickens!  But each chicken needs about a handful of feed a day. So it’s not a huge amount.  You supplement with greens, weeds, grass, and they’ll be totally healthy and fine.

You say rabbits are the new chickens. Is that really true? I’m not a vegetarian, but I just can’t get past the notion of slaughtering a bunny.

Carpenter: There is a pretty big trend of people who are new meat eaters and they want to raise their own turkeys and chickens and now rabbits. They can save money and have this great source of low-fat, hormone-free meat. Some people just use their manure, though. It’s so good and they poop so much!  It’s really balanced–not super high in nitrogen. I know a guy who grows a bucket of rabbit poop and sells it for $10 to people who grow marijuana.

Which animal was the most rewarding for you to raise/keep?

Carpenter: You love them all for different reasons. But the animals I will have forever are bees. Bees are so giving. And I bought all that expensive equipment, so I better keep at it! There’s also just something so amazing about bees. They are such hard workers and you have this connection to the seasons that is really intense.

Originally published on Grist

Paula Deen’s public admission that she has Type 2 diabetes and her follow-up announcement that she is also a paid spokesperson for the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, and its diabetes drug, Victoza, has sparked an interesting debate about the deeper issues surrounding our food system—especially the impact it has on the many people diagnosed with diabetes. And according to Deen’s comments on the Today show, she implies to her millions of fans, that the primary ways to deal with this largely diet-related disease are through personal responsibility and pharmaceuticals.

Indeed, when Al Roker, asks her if she is going to change the way she eats and the foods she cooks, Deen says, “Honey, I’m your cook, I’m not your doctor. You are going to have to be responsible for yourself.” Evading the question, Deen puts the onus back on the individual to decide what foods to eat or not, despite the fact that she promotes unhealthful and processed foods on TV. The one comment she does make about food choice is “moderation,” one of the most meaningless and confusing bits of nutrition advice. In fact, this is what the industry giants often use as their defense for harmful, unhealthful foods.

Personal responsibility and consumer choice are solutions heralded by conservatives and liberals alike—the idea being that ultimately good health comes down to what we choose to buy and eat. But it’s not that simple.

There are three main issues when it comes to the myth of personal responsibility about food choice and they get at the root of our nation’s health crisis: The public’s confusion about nutrition; the lack of time and knowledge about real home cooking; and the promotion of quick fixes like drugs, diet foods, and fads in lieu of addressing underlying causes. The Paula Deen diabetes story manages to hit on every single one of these issues.

Americans suffer from nutrition confusion, thanks to an array of conflicting and often inaccurate public health messages, misleading labels and claims on packaging, and a lack of nutrition knowledge by many doctors, dietitians, and other health care providers.

Deen’s cooking, and now her public diabetes announcement, only adds to this confusion. During the Today show interview she repeatedly mentions the amount of fat in her recipes, as do many in the media reporting on the story. “For 10 years, wielding slabs of cream cheese and mounds of mayonnaise,” a New York Times article begins, “Paula Deen has become television’s self-crowned queen of Southern cuisine.”

But real, unprocessed cream cheese and mayonnaise are not the problem. The issue that mainstream media has largely overlooked is that Deen uses the processed, packaged versions of these foods, which are full of chemicals, additives and trans-fats. Actual home cooking would require whipping these foods up herself in her kitchen using real ingredients. And that is the real story behind Deen’s diabetes diagnosis: Her health problems are largely due to her reliance on packaged, processed foods that are the foundation for many of her recipes.

Even though her cooking show is called Paula’s Home Cooking, there’s a lot going on in her kitchen that is as far removed from home cooking as you can get. Many of her recipes include “ingredients” like Krispy Kreme doughnuts, biscuit mixes, cans of mushroom soup, and sour-cream-and-onion flavored potato chips. This is processed food cooking, not home cooking.

Heaping the blame on all the “fat” she cooks with only serves to confuse the public further. A New York Daily News article also cites fat as one of the main culprits in Deen’s cooking and her diet. But the most recent research indicates that when it comes to diabetes, fat is not the problem. The problem foods are sugar, refined white flour, chemical additives, artificial sweeteners and flavors, trans-fats, and the various other chemicals and additives found in the processed foods that abound in Deen’s recipes.

Now Deen is pushing the idea that taking medicine is the real solution to diabetes. On the Today show, she says, “Here’s what I want to get across to people, I want them to first start by going to their doctor and asking to be tested for diabetes. Get on a program that works for you. I’m amazed at the people out there that are aware they’re diabetic but they’re not taking their medicine.”

According to Deen, the reason she waited three years to go public with her diagnosis was because she didn’t have anything to give her fans. “I could have walked out and said, ‘Hey ya’ll, I have been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.’ I had nothing to give to my fellow friends out there. I wanted to bring something to the table when I came forward.” So what is she bringing to the table? A sales pitch for a diabetes drug that costs $500 per month and has some seriously troubling side effects, including thyroid cancer, as Tom Philpott reports.

Just think of the kind of influence she could have wielded had she come out with a new cooking show that focused on using fresh, real food ingredients that cut way back on sugar and refined carbohydrates. In fact, if she had done so and eaten this way for the past three years she might have reversed her own diabetes diagnosis, which is entirely possible given the right diet.

But instead, Deen is getting paid to leave that task to a drug company. This isn’t her first corporate sponsorship (here she peddles Smithfield ham) and I doubt it will be her last. Diabetic and diet foods can’t be far behind in products she’ll attach to her name.

Alas, we can’t fairly discuss personal responsibility without taking into account the under-regulated advertising industry that pushes cheap, convenient, and processed foods on an overworked and cash-strapped population. Add to this the diminishing knowledge on how to shop for, cook, and prepare foods from scratch and we have a serious problem.

As Deen now joins the 25.8 million other Americans suffering with diabetes, she “brings to the table” the ideas of moderation, personal responsibility, and the drug Victoza as the solutions. She could do so much more with all the power she wields.

Anthony Bourdain put it squarely when he said of Deen, “If I were on at seven at night and loved by millions of people at every age, I would think twice before telling an already obese nation that it’s OK to eat food that is killing us.” And this was before her diabetes announcement. Bourdain has also said that Deen is the “worst, most dangerous person to America.” He might have a point.

Wouldn’t it be great if eight-year-olds immediately thought of a banana, instead of a bag of chips, when they wanted a snack? In the decade that I have been involved with school food here in San Francisco, we have added salad bars in all our middle and high schools, replaced juice with fresh fruit at breakfast, and added fresh fruit daily at lunch.

But it is still a hard sell to get some kids to take and eat the fresh produce, because it just isn’t in the mindset of many inner city kids, who may rarely if ever see a fresh vegetable or piece of fruit at home, or in the corner store. Meanwhile they see thousands of commercials a year for junk food, which is available everywhere.

A few months ago, my son Max Schreiber humored me and my obsession with healthy food for kids; we made a video, entered it in the USDA MyPlate Fresh Fruit & Veggies Video Challenge, and won first prize. We were excited to win and had high hopes that our little video might be used in some way to help encourage kids to eat more fruits and vegetables. That, after all, was the purported goal of the competition–to show how people could add more fresh produce to their diets in an affordable way.

But when I contacted the USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotions to ask if the videos would ever be shown anywhere apart from the Choose MyPlate website, I was told that while the videos would likely be used by other USDA departments, budget constraints prevented any further marketing efforts.

I mentioned this to a few of my fellow “eat better” advocates, including Chef Ann Cooper, currently nutrition services director for Boulder (CO) schools. She said, “Our children see over 10,000 commercials a year for junk food. Big Food spends $10-15 billion a year marketing junk food to kids. With that in mind, I strongly believe that the videos made for the MyPlate challenge should be as widely viewed as possible and used as positive food marketing for our children.”

Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at NYU, and author of the seminal work Food Politics, said “I am eagerly waiting to see how USDA uses the winning videos to promote MyPlate. There are loads of things USDA could be doing with them, and should.”

The proponents of healthy eating are vastly outmatched by Big Food’s spending. The above mentioned USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotions had a total budget of $6.5 million in 2010, and the National Cancer Foundation had less than $10 million to promote the 5 A Day campaign. That does not stack up well compared to the billions Chef Ann cites in the junk food marketers’ war chest.

Still, it seems like a no-brainer that when 142 lovingly crafted video entries encouraging people to eat more fruits and vegetables fell into the USDA’s lap, they would aggressively seek opportunities to promote those messages to the public as widely as possible.

It doesn’t have to be a budget buster, either. The National Association of Broadcasters says their member stations donate $7 billion a year in broadcasting time to public service announcements (PSAs), including promoting the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign in 2010-11.

Isn’t a public service announcement campaign a perfect fit for the USDA fresh fruit and veggie videos? The kids who really need to be carpet-bombed with the “eat healthier” message are not coming to the MyPlate website, but, as Chef Ann points out, they sure are watching TV commercials. Other outlets for PSAs include cable TV, movie theaters, in-flight entertainment, and in-store networks.

Although the issue of restrictions on the ability of government to advertise is murky, it’s not like using PSAs would be unprecedented. In spring 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Federal Reserve was placing public service announcements in movie theaters in 14 states hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis, to warn consumers about foreclosure rescue scams and show them how to get help free. The weeklong campaign cost just $9,000 to produce the PSAs and place them in theaters.

While foreclosure scams and fast food marketing may sound worlds apart, in fact the similarities are eerie. The WSJ described the foreclosure situation this way:

As the U.S. government pours hundreds of billions of dollars into housing rescues, state and federal agencies have struggled to stop predators from targeting homeowners….The Fed’s ads come against a flurry of infomercials, billboards and door-to-door marketing from firms trying to attract customers who are confused by their options. “They’re everywhere–prime time, late night, radio, English, Spanish,” said Patricia Garcia Duarte, president of the nonprofit Neighborhood Housing Services of Phoenix. “They’re very slick and they really know how to market to vulnerable people.”

“We don’t have the resources in the nonprofit sector to do the same level of advertising,” she said.

Am I dreaming to think that someday we could see this in the WSJ:

As the U.S. government pours hundreds of billions of dollars into healthcare, state and federal agencies have struggled to stop junk food advertisers from targeting children….The USDA’s ads come against a flurry of fast food commercials, billboards and movie tie-ins from food companies trying to attract children. “They’re everywhere–prime time, late night, radio, English, Spanish,” said school food advocate Dana Woldow, founder of PEACHSF. “They’re very slick and they really know how to market to kids.”

“We don’t have the resources in the nonprofit sector to do the same level of advertising,” she said.

I did mention the idea of public service announcements to the person I spoke with at the USDA and was happy to hear that it would be discussed at an upcoming staff meeting. Many of the videos from the competition feature engaging children, including one of my favorites. No superhero-loving kid could possibly resist this compelling message, but first they would have to see it.

As Bettina Elias Siegel, whose The Lunch Tray blog is one of the most widely read platforms about kids and food, put it, “Studies show that most children aren’t getting nearly enough servings of fruits and vegetables each day, and they’re bombarded with billions of dollars of advertising from the makers of fast food, sugary cereals, and sodas. So anything we can do to level that playing field is critical. It would be a shame to let some compelling health messages–already vetted and approved by experts–go unseen if we could otherwise get them in front of kids.”

Originally published on BeyondChron
 

This growing season there’s a new GMO in town: Monsanto’s GE sweet corn. This Roundup Ready product is the first GE corn for direct human consumption, and it has not been tested by the USDA and will not be labeled. If you’re unhappy about this, you’re not alone. The majority of consumers don’t want to eat genetically modified foods, and 95 percent feel strongly that they should be labeled.  Many retailers, including Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and General Mills, have already agreed to not use GE Sweet Corn in any of their products—but Walmart, the country’s largest grocer and self-proclaimed sustainability adherent, has yet to make such a promise.

In a campaign reminiscent of the  Starbucks rBGH campaign, (which ultimately culminated not only in a pledge by the java giant not to sell dairy from cows treated with rBGH, but also created a domino effect, causing most large retailers to make the same agreement) , Food and Water Watch has initiated a national campaign to pressure Walmart to do the right thing and to live up to their sustainability claims. Just last week, Walmart launched a brand new website called The Green Room to exhibit their green credentials. Over the past couple of years they’ve run public relations campaigns touting their support of local farming, healthier eating, and providing oases in food deserts.

Walmart sells $129 billion worth of food (taking a whopping 25 percent of grocery sales throughout the US, and much more in some areas) each year, making it the most powerful food retailer in the world. If Walmart agreed to not stock GE sweet corn, it is highly likely that other retailers would follow their lead. It would also relieve farmers of the economic pressure to plant the biotech seeds.

If you’re in the know about GMOs, you know there’s a lot we don’t know—and a lot to be wary of.  We don’t know the long term effects of GMOs on humans and  a new study suggests there is reason to worry. The potential environmental risks are many, including the rise of superweeds and resistant pests, the threat to biodiversity and the inevitability of crop contamination.  There are also the ethical and economic concerns associated with patenting of living organisms and the ownership of our food supply by corporations like Monsanto.

Since last fall, Food and Water Watch and their partners at the Center for Environmental Health, Center for Food Safety, CREDO Action, and Food Democracy Now! have been asking consumers to sign a petition saying that they would refuse to buy GE sweet corn and are asking retailers and food processors not to sell it. As of now, that petition has over a quarter million signatures.  Walmart is powerful, but consumers hold the ultimate power: all great social change starts from the bottom. Join the movement today.

Photo: Jamie Leo

Originally published on Ecocentric

The Just Label It campaign today launched a new video by Food, Inc. filmmaker Robert Kenner that empowers consumers to fight for their right to know what is in their food. The video, “Labels Matter,” is the result of collaboration between the Just Label It campaign and Kenner’s new project, FixFood, a social media platform that aims to empower Americans to take immediate action to create a more sustainable and democratic food system.

To date, more than 450 consumer, healthcare, environmental and farming organizations, manufacturers, retailers have joined the Just Label It campaign, which has generated more than 500,000 consumer comments calling on the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to label GE foods.  (We wrote about the launch of Just Label It here.) The video seeks to garner more consumer awareness and participation by galvanizing one million consumers to comment to the FDA by mid-April, the date that the FDA’s public comment period ends.

“Labels Matter” tells the story of three women who share a belief in the right to know, but for entirely different reasons. Heather Donatini is a pregnant woman who knows she is feeding her developing baby, as well as herself, with every bite. Luann Clark recently had heart surgery and has to closely monitor what she eats. Robyn O’Brien is a mother whose child developed an allergic reaction to breakfast. “As a mother of children with food allergies, the labeling of GE foods is especially important, as it would provide essential and possibly life-saving information for the food allergic population,” said O’Brien, founder, Allergy Kids Foundation. (We’ve written about Robyn’s important work here and here.)

As the video connects with each woman, Kenner shows how the U.S. compares to other developed nations, including the European Union, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Russia, and even China, where genetically engineered (GE) foods are labeled. The video notes that the vast majority of Americans (90 percent in most studies) believe GE foods should be labeled.

Gary Hirshberg, Chairman of Stonyfield and a founder of Just Label It, collaborated with Kenner to produce the video. “While the pros and cons of GE foods is debated, an entire generation is growing up consuming them,” he said. “Until we have no doubt that GE crops are safe to eat, consumers should have a choice about whether we want to eat them. GE foods must be labeled. Consumers need to know.” Hirshberg recently published “Label It Now,” the first consumer guide to GE foods available at online booksellers. All proceeds of the e-book go to the Just Label It campaign.

The drumbeat for mandatory GE labeling is getting louder, as the FDA decides whether to approve GE salmon and a proposal advances at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to deregulate corn engineered to be resistant to the herbicide 2,4-D, a major component in Agent Orange. You can join in asking the FDA to allow consumers the right to know what’s in their food.

Having saturated the rural landscape, shuttering local stores in small town America along the way, now, in the wake of stagnant sales and increased competition, Walmart desperately needs to expand into urban markets.

And what better urban market than one full of eight million people? While the big box retailer is eager to enter the Big Apple, challenges loom large. Given the negative reputation Walmart has earned for being hostile to workers among other problems, many New Yorkers are skeptical, to put it mildly.

To counter the opposition, Walmart is positioning itself as the solution to urban food deserts – areas where finding real food is next to impossible. But as Anna Lappé has eloquently argued, the big box chain isn’t the answer: “Let’s be clear, expanding into so-called food deserts is an expansion strategy for Walmart. It’s not a charitable move.”

Research Shows Walmart Kills Both Jobs and Food Access

Now a report released last month by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer concludes that not only would bringing Walmart to Harlem spell disaster for labor, but it could also make an already dire food access problemthere even worse.

Based on data from Chicago’s negative experience, the report found that within two years of a Walmart store opening in New York:

- Between 48 and 66 fresh food retailers could go out of business, representing a net loss of between 56,500 to 82,000 square feet of food retail within a one-mile radius;

- Closure of these stores would represent a loss of 50 to 57 percent of the fresh food retail square footage added in recent years by New York City’s incentive program;

- All of this would negate more than $4 million in public finance investment and four years of effort to improve fresh food access in the area.

As Stringer explained, Walmart shouldn’t be undermining city programs to improve fresh food availability: “Walmart would be a bane, not a boon, to the health food economy of Harlem – or any other New York City neighborhood.”

Moreover, previous economic analysis has shown that Walmart’s promise of jobs doesn’t pan out either. In a report from last summer called “The Walmartization of New York City,” researchers at the City University of New York concluded that, “despite Walmart’s promises of jobs and lower prices for the community, the longer term impact is actually the opposite.”

Assuming Walmart opened the 159 stores needed to reach 21 percent grocery market share in New York City (the same proportion the company enjoys nationally), the impact would be a net loss of almost 4,000 jobs, and a loss of more than $453 million in wages per year for all remaining workers.

What about the new Walmart jobs? According to the report, 4,279 new low-wage Walmart workers would have to “rely on social services to make ends meet, costing New York taxpayers over $4 million per year” in health care benefits alone. This, in a city where the mayor has asked for $2 billion in budget cuts.

Current Walmart Locations Confirm Bleak Outlook

Other areas of the country have already had real world experiences to back up these projected findings. According to New York’s Food for Thought report, of all the employers in Ohio, Walmart has the greatest number of associates and dependents enrolled in Medicaid, which in 2009 cost taxpayers $44.8 million.

Similarly, a 2004 study found that for each of California’s whopping 44,000 Walmart employees, taxpayers had to spend $730 on health care and $1,222 on other forms of state and federal assistance such as (ironically) food stamps.

In 2006, Walmart entered Chicago and recently convinced local officials to approve two additional locations, including (after a long battle) on the city’s South Side. How have things fared so far in the original Chicago location? Not so well.

A three-year study released by Loyola University Chicago in 2010 revealed that Walmart had not enhanced retail activity or even employment opportunities. In fact, “the probability of a local retailer going out of business during the study period was significantly higher for establishments close to Walmart’s location.” Specifically, researchers found that a nearby business had about a 40 percent chance of closing over a two-year period – not very good odds.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Buy Them

Of course Walmart paints an entirely different picture, and is spending a ton of money to hide these sobering facts in a massive PR campaign. According to the Walmartization report, in the first half of 2011 alone, the company spent $2.1 million lobbying in New York, as much as they spent there in the past four years combined. There’s even a dedicated website complete with a “fact-checker” and the heartwarming tagline, “Helping NYC Save Money and Live Better.”

Philanthropy is another time-honored corporate tactic, often used to buy silence from critics, curry favor with community leaders, or, in this case, grease the wheels to gain entry into a reluctant-but-lucrative market.

In December, Walmart announced a combined gift of $250,000 to five various New York City charities, including a home food delivery service and a soup kitchen. Of course $250K is chump change to a company whose net sales topped $405 billion in 2010, but to these five groups it no doubt means a lot. Moreover, in its press release, Walmart made sure to point out the company’s “more than $13 million” in donations in New York City since 2007. (Similarly, Walmart pledged to donate $20 million to Chicago charities.)

But Walmart will need a lot more than a few million dollars in tax-deductible contributions to make up for all the job losses, decrease in available fresh food (and even increased obesity) that could befall New Yorkers.

Other cities should also brace themselves, as the company is opening four stores in Washington, D.C. later this year, with additional area sites planned. Other locations on the agenda include Boston and San Francisco. But mostly the company is keeping quiet about its urban expansion agenda, at least publicly. Last year in Boston, the company was said to be “quietly chatting up city officials” while scouting neighborhoods.

I shudder to think of the consequences to American’s already suffering urban populations if Walmart succeeds in duplicating its rural retail takeover. What to do about it? Support the United Food and Commercial Workers, which has an important campaign called Making Change at Walmart. See also the Big Box Tool Kit, which is chock-full of news and practical resources. Communities can work together to fight back, we just have to act before it’s too late.

Originally published on Food Safety News

Scores of books depict farms as little slices of heaven on earth, where venison is smoked and butter is churned, and things seem perfect. But today’s farmers are far from unrealistic dreamers, longing for a Little House on the Prairie-esque pastoral ideal. They’re socially conscious doers. And when asked about books that inspire them, they cite writings that are practical, at times poetic, and that beckon them to rescue the land.

Here are some of the books that farmers are reading and getting inspiration from today.

The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry. “I had spent  seven or so years of my life as a ‘punk’ growing up in the the central NJ suburbs of NYC, disgruntled and disillusioned and looking for real meaning and ways to be in the world, and [Berry] was someone seemingly so disgruntled and disillusioned, yet incredibly intelligent and coherent, with a posited solution of sorts…. Challenges [were] laid forth to take full responsibility for our lives and to truly push against what our culture is feeding us, to move towards a society built around community, equality, a new free culture, and a cooperative economy in which we all work satisfying jobs in support of each other; ideals I cannot imagine any human being would deface. Farming could embrace these challenges and reconnect us with the land and each other like no other, I was convinced.” — Anthony Mecca, Great Song Farm

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. “I read The Good Earth when I was a child, I think I was ten or eleven. I read it again in my 20s, and again in my 30s…. It’s an inspiring novel about building a dream, perseverance. I think the best line is at the end of the novel when it says, ‘without land, you’re nothing.’ It’s a quote my father and mother used to repeat to us kids all the time. So that book always meant something for many reasons.” — Alexis Koefoed, Soul Food Farm

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. “I read it as a freshman in college. This was kind of a critical treatise in the ecological movement. It was not only a cry of protest, but a teaching document about the basic principles of ecology. [Carson] was drawing connections between the different layers that make up the environment… how the chemical sprays in the ground migrated into the trees. The book had layers—one layer was science, one was critique, and one was art—the art of protest. It was also very poetic—what do we cherish more than the sound of birds in the spring?And I thought the fusion of those things really appealed to me as a young woman, and guided what kinds of actions I would take in my life. “ — Severine von Tscharner-Fleming, farmer and founder of The Greenhorns.

How to Grow More Vegetables Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine by John Jeavons. “My copy of this one is missing its cover and several of the front pages and the binding has been chewed up by a dog. I like that John explains a complete farming system that minimizes the use of commercial and outside inputs that will work nearly worldwide.  He even looks at the calories produced, and includes fruit trees, and compost growing areas as part of the garden design and process… I wanted to farm because it is good honest work and it provides something that people truly need.  John Jeavons is telling people all over the world how they can farm and produce the food they need with very few tools, little money and fertilizer, and using open-pollinated seeds.” — Brenton Johnson, Johnson’s Backyard Garden

The Contrary Farmer by Gene Lodgson. “I read The Contrary Farmer about eight years ago.  I think this book really helped me formulate the idea about what it meant to be a farmer.  Lodgson painted a beautiful, yet realistic picture of the farming lifestyle and the sacrifices a farmer must make.  It brought me to the conclusion that I could achieve this lifestyle for myself and my family.” — Jacqueline Smith, Green Dirt Farm.

Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon by Pablo Neruda. “Judith [Winfrey] and I really did not come to farming in a direct fashion. Early on in our relationship we fell in love with food, travel, revolutionaries, ecology, and community.  The decision to farm seemed like a natural way to wed most of these fascinations… Neruda is amazing in all of his words, but his Odes really resonate with people who love food and its power to create interaction.  We still read “Ode to the Onion” once a year.” — Joe Reynolds, Gaia Gardens/Love is Love Farm.

Alternative Urban Futures: Planning for Sustainable Development in Cities throughout the World by Raquel Pinderhughs. “What motivated me most was that Raquel conveys a vision using practical models from around the world. She was my inspiration to take what would have been just a house and a garden and work to transform it into a living renewing system.” — Esperanza Pollana, Pluck and Feather Farm.

It’s a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the Big City for the (Not So) Simple Life by Keith Stewart. “This book provided a lot of inspiration while I was starting to farm … Not because it’s a perfect book, or because I agree with everything the author did or believes, but because it provides a very interesting story of becoming an organic farmer (with warts and all). The guy hadn’t farmed before and showed what he went through in setting up a farm and carving out a niche.” — Fred Hempel, Baia Nicchia

We Didn’t Have Much but We Sure Had Plenty: Rural Women in Their Own Words by Sherry Thomas. “I was originally inspired to farm because of the farms I grew up around in Skippack, PA.  But as farms left my community, I was left thinking it wasn’t a good career to get into.  Many things re-inspired me to start growing my own food in my early 20s, but [this] book stands out. it was a bunch of stories of women who worked their land as a job and for personal consumption. Most were very poor, but were able to tend to their nutritional needs because of farming/food preservation. It reminded me of the importance of simplifying life and just how vital feeding yourself from your own garden can be.” — Barbara Finnin, City Slicker Farm

The New Organic Grower: a Master’s Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener, by Eliot Coleman. “I got my first farming book back when I was 25 yrs. old in 1988, and [Coleman] continues to revise the book to stay current.  This is a basic how-to organic farm book, but it’s very inspiring and gives great information for the modern day gardener.  Elliot himself is an amazing grower, who invents unique farming tools and is always looking for new/better ways to grow vegetables.  This book is still my “go to” reference book and I use it to turn people on to growing food. Since I’m a New Englander and he is part of the Maine growing community he’s always appealed to me.” — Simon Richard,  Sonoma Farms (Bi-Rite Farms)

FoodCorps is growing—expanding the number of states we’ll be working in next year and expanding the number of service members who are creating community and creating change. We created FoodCorps with two goals in mind: Addressing a public health crisis and providing a training opportunity for all of growing interest in careers in food and agriculture. Becoming a FoodCorps service member is a way to launch your career in food and farming while helping kids get healthy.

Rachel is one of 50 future food systems leaders who started their terms of service this past August as the first ever class of FoodCorps service members. So far this year, these service members have reached over 20,000 children in 10 states. They are addressing the nation’s painful and costly childhood obesity epidemic using our three recipe ingredient for change: Hands-on nutrition education, growing and tending school gardens, and getting healthy local food onto school cafeteria trays.

Here is what Rachel had to say about her experience this year:

Being the new “garden lady” at a school in small town is cause enough for conversation. Add in the University of Georgia logos that emblazen the coffee thermos I take to school with me every day, and I stick out even more in the sea of Arkansas Razorback gear that comes standard for most of the students and teachers at my school. Serving for FoodCorps has brought me to the town of Marshall, Arkansas, where I spend my days gardening with students from Marshall middle and elementary schools.  The school is a part of the Delta Garden Study, a childhood obesity prevention research project based out of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute.

When teaching outside, it is important for me to begin by getting a grasp on what the day will hold. My morning starts with a garden walk-through and a meeting with my garden program specialist to plan what garden work we will tackle with our classes for the day. Rolling with the punches does not even start to describe the level of flexibility you need as a FoodCorps Service Member. Your greenhouse will flood, grasshoppers will eat your newly planted kale seedlings, and snow might cover your leaf lettuces in less than an hour. Overcoming these and other challenges have proven to be learning experiences for me and my students over the course of my service term.

If a tasting is on the agenda, I collect my cooking supplies and ingredients before the start of classes for the day. The sight of students gathered around a folding table helping to prepare braised greens, salad, pesto, or even corn and squash fritters is a common one in our classes. Hands-on nutrition education is just as important as the act of gardening.

After talking with my supervisor about the activities of the day, we head to our first class. When my school became a part of the Delta Garden Study, they agreed to adopt a garden-based science curriculum for their middle school science courses. Between sixth, seventh, and eight grades, I work with eleven classes of students. My supervisor and I work with our science teachers to strike the balance between in class science instruction and the outside garden and nutrition connections.

As the “garden lady,” I try to help my students think about learning in a different way, and I get to see firsthand the need to devote more time in our school day to discussing topics like healthy eating. Thanks to FoodCorps I have the opportunity to be a part of that dialogue on a daily basis. My service has given me the privilege of being a part of my students’ lives. Every time we work together in the garden, whether it is to plant, harvest, cook, or even winterize our greenhouse, we illustrate to students that food–where it comes from and how you cook it–is central to health.

Sitting in my organic chemistry class during undergrad, I never envisioned that I would soon become an expert in hosing off kids’ boots at the end of muddy garden work session, explaining the nutritional benefits of pesto over the din of my food processor, or reinforcing the concept of density by making balsamic vinaigrette. But at the end of every day, I am astounded at how lucky I am to experience alongside my students the wonderment that comes with growing and cooking food.

Recruitment for next year’s class begins this week. You can read more at our Web site: www.foodcorps.org or watch our video (produced by Ian Cheney, co-creator of King Corn) on YouTube here.

A few months ago my wife gave me a home brewing kit. Home brewing is a fun activity and something I’ve done with greater (and lesser) success over the years. While I do enjoy it, I also drink more beer than I brew, so I tend to sample my share of beers made by others.

And there’s a lot of different beer being brewed, as other bloggers have explained (here and here). Domestically-produced American beers, called craft beer or microbrews, have started a revolution in terms of quality, variety and flavor. Art, science and the marketplace have combined to make better beers blissfully commonplace on store shelves around the country. And the proof is showing up in bottom lines—in spite of the overall shrinking of the beer market, the craft beer segment has thrived. What’s more, this better beer movement challenges decades of perception (and reality) of the lowly American beer.

And this change in American beer starts at home, or nearly so, as craft beer really is a “local beer” phenomenon. This shift in consumer preferences and support for local craft beer is perfectly representing in a nanobrewery start-up called Community Beer Works(CBW) in Buffalo, NY. The CBW founders are using Kickstarter, social media and other fund raising techniques to make their brewery

an integral part of our city and the neighborhood our brewery is located in. We are planning partnerships with local urban farmers and gardeners to create a network of hop gardens that can be used in specialty beers as well as to dispose of our grain in ecologically friendly, mutually beneficial manner. Our goal is to foster a sense of community and place, enriching our hometown through the production of damn good beer.

What is “new to us” about this project is the clear articulation of its goal–strengthening local community through microbrewing. And CBW is not alone. This powerful message is resonant with the good food movement and underscores the values that foodies and craft beer adherents share, especially over the return to local. Below are some characteristics (most of which also apply to the good food movement) of the better beer movement, particularly as it concerns local production and consumption.

One of beer’s greatest attributes is the amazing variety of flavor that can be derived from four ingredients: grain malt (typically barley), hops, yeast and water. Even given this simplicity, microbrewers and enthusiasts–like their locavore cousins–are eager to have locally-sourced ingredients in the product. Such is the case for the recently released BSA Harvest from Notch Sessions Brewery, which features New England-raised grains. The same is true further south in Durham, NC, where Fullsteam puts out a seasonal craft beer employing many local ingredients, from persimmons to sweet potatoes. In Fullsteam’s endeavor to promote “radical, farm-focused brewing,” a nearby farmer has set aside one acre dedicated to hop cultivation.

Owing to my environmental specialty, I can’t resist pointing out that virtually all brewers, large to small, use one local ingredient: water. The importance of water is openly acknowledged by Cathy Erway, Communications Director for Brooklyn-based, Sixpoint Craft Ales.

New York City tap water is among the best drinking water in the country, and we proudly use it in our beer. It’s one of the reasons we chose this city to open the brewery in.

Clean water that is not inundated with chemicals and has a balanced level of TDS that provide good texture and taste is equally as important as the other flashier ingredients. So the next time you tip one back, don’t forget a toast to your local water provider and watershed manager for a (hopefully) job well done. (And for you hopheads out there, don’t hesitate to quaff my favorite Sixpointer, the Bengali Tiger.)

In many cases, microbrewers are eco-leaders in their communities, proving that sustainability is more a matter of practice than a trendy buzzword. The list of breweries that incorporate sustainability into their products and operations is long and getting longer.

Many craft brewers and drinkers are strong supporters of sustainable and organic farming practices and reflect that in their beer. Organic beer, still a small segment of the market, got a shot in the arm when the USDA required organic hops in order to label a brew organic (this seems obvious, but let’s just move on). This requirement, coupled with growing demand for organic beer, means that organic hops farming is expanding in the United States, potentially overtaking New Zealand as the world’s leading grower.

Beyond ingredients, craft breweries are demonstrating sustainable business practices in other aspects of production, too. Alaskan Brewing Company’s was the first craft brewery to recycle naturally occurring CO2 from the fermentation process, offsetting 1.5 millions gallons of fuel-oil with spent grain heating, and using proceeds to found an ocean health nonprofit organization, Coastal Code, among other activities. For another sustainable use of spent brewing grain (not to mention farm-to-table menus), look no further than Triumph Brewing and its three PA and NJ locations, where they share the spent grain with local farmers for livestock feed. And California’s well known Sierra Nevada Brewery has an entire sustainability program complete with real-time power generation reporting for their large solar power arrays, and natural/biogas fuel cells. And big ups to Central Waters Brewing Company in Amherst, WI for maintaining the state’s first solar-hot water system complete with radiant floor heating, estimated to save $1.4 to $1.5 million in energy costs over its lifetime.

As defined by the Brewers Association , the foremost microbrew experts, an “American craft brewer is small, independent and traditional.” Under this definition, almost 98 percent of the over 1,700 breweries in the United States meet that criteria, although craft breweries have captured less than seven percent of total market sales. Still, the sheer number of smaller-sized breweries not owned by Industro-Brewers is impressive. It also means that the brewing techniques used to brew the flagship beers are “malt-based” and don’t contain as many “adjuncts” (added rice, corn, etc.) as their industrial counterparts do, which often result in weak-tasting beer. (To sip a pint of tradition, head to Circle Brewing Company in Austin, TX for beer that conforms to the German purity code dating from 1516 that permits only the customary foursome of malt, hops, yeast and water.)

While craft brewing stays committed to traditional artisanship, innovation is strongly encouraged. Many never-before-experienced flavor profiles have been created using different ingredients from varietal malt to chocolate to chilies, not to mention the most common method: adding tons of hops. (Take a look at the unique selections that Clipper City Brewing Co. is producing in Baltimore.) Innovation extends outside of unusual taste sensations to unusual business models. For Northern California’s Bison Brewery, the formation of a streamlined, vertically-integrated farm-to-brewery structure guarantees the flow of organic ingredients from local and regional farmers, thereby lowering the cost of their organic beers to the cost of most non-organic craft beers.

In the beginning there was beer. Rather, there was beer as soon as there was agriculture, as evidenced by ancient Sumerian brewing that occurred about 6,000 years ago. Over the centuries and across many cultures, beer was almost literally considered to be daily bread. Skip several thousand years to pre-Colonial America and you’ll find that the Pilgrims craved beer so much that the Mayflower was outfitted to carry a precious supply of suds. George Washington was a noted beer lover and home brewer (check out his recipe). In America, the flow of beer and the flow of immigration took the same multitude of routes, with small breweries springing up everywhere linking new homesteads with old, culturally-distinctive styles.

Then Prohibition struck. America’s post-Prohibition brewing culture and history is sadly fallow not only because of Prohibition, but what happened after. Just as with Big Ag, Industro-Brew companies wiped out smaller, domestic beer competition through consolidation and turned the beer industry into a monoculture of taste and culture. The last remnants of beer diversity in the late 20th century were the regional breweries that provided a sense of cultural identity and independence apart from the homogenized. With people proudly rallying around them, regional brewers like Washington State’s Olympia and Baltimore’s National Bohemian fought to survive, but eventually were gulped up by the Pabst/Metropoulos Co., which is actually an equity firm. Even though the two beers are brewed far away, they remain “community symbols” bound up in local identity. Witness the 2011 marriage of long-time National Bohemian mascot, Natty Boh boy, to another Mid-Atlantic cultural icon, the Utz potato chip girl.

Like any product, beer consumers want quality, choice and the opportunity to connect with local communities, making the better beer movement both similar and complementary to the food movement. As Sixpoint’s Cathy Erway states:

We appreciate craft beer and the important role it’s played in numerous societies throughout time, as well as new waves in the last few decades in the U.S. What we’re doing is an example of what brewers did in cities and towns all over, which is use the best of our creativity, resources and community to create great beers–and continue to innovate with new techniques and ingredients.

Being informed by the past and innovating for the future, all while drawing on the local character and flavors, are major reasons for craft beer’s success. No doubt the Community Beer Works crew has figured this out and hopes to promote not only their local brews, but also the distinctive character of their city, with their conscious attention to local ringing true for many other microbrewers around the country. And just like with food, conscientious consumers are willing to pay a little more for better quality and for the local connection. Microbrewers use these advantageous attributes to encourage strong and vibrant communities, keeping customers coming back for more. In fact, it seems that in today’s uncertain and flagging America, one sign of community prosperity and revitalization is a microbrewery or brewpub in town. So one small way to encourage an economic recovery while holding to your values is to say cheers to local, sustainable beers!

Editors Note: Kai will appear on Beer Sessions Radio at 5pm on February 21st , 2012, to talk more about the local beer phenomenon.

Originally published on EcoCentric