Civil Eats

Chelsea Clinton is so definitely getting married in Rhinebeck this weekend. All the signs point to it — like the one two miles down the road from Astor Courts (the presumed wedding locale), which reads: “Chelsea and Marc — congratulations from Rhinecliff’s Morton Memorial Library! Stop in for your wedding gift — your own free-for-life library card!!!” Read More

A recent report by the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) and Farmers Market Coalition (FMC) called “Real Food, Real Choice: Connecting SNAP Recipients with Farmers Markets,” gives detail to the economic, social and technological roadblocks that often prevent many Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants from buying fresh and healthy food at their  local, or not so local, farmers markets. Is the real issue access or affordability? Michel Nischan, CEO and President of Wholesome Wave, talks about how their innovative programs are helping to avert a national health care crisis. Read More

The drive down the gravel road to Sanders Field Farm in Sebastopol, CA leads me past an 80-year old apple orchard and into a sun-drenched clearing of strawberries, tomatoes, beans, eggplant, and sunflowers. Lowell Sheldon, the proprietor of Peter Lowell’s, meets me at the gate, hands covered in dirt after harvesting food from the farm for his Sonoma county restaurant.

Not far behind him are Daria Morrill and Tony Tugwell, whose 12-acre organic farm is off the grid, running only on solar power. With two acres under cultivation, the couple has designed a compact production scheme solely dedicated to the restaurant—kale, chard, baby lettuces, spring onions, snap peas, and broccoli glow in the afternoon light, set to become part of Peter Lowell’s menu of sustainably grown sustenance. Read More

With the dust from Portland’s Cochon 555 pork-sourcing brawl just barely settling, another sustainable meat controversy is brewing here in New York City. According to the press release, July’s massive festival Meatopia was meant to be a sustainable meat showcase where participating chefs would “partner with a local farmer who will provide locally raised, sustainable meat for their featured recipes.” In a few cases this actually happened: La Esquina’s Akhtar Nawab made tacos with pork shoulders from Fudge Farms (Alabama) and Boqueria’s Seamus Mullen cooked lamb from his parents’ Vermont farm. But ultimately most of the meat served at Meatopia came from conventional sources. So what happened to the Utopian vision for Meatopia? Read More

In 2008, the MacArthur Foundation awarded urban farming visionary Will Allen, CEO of Growing Power, a genius award. The announcement made Allen a food justice icon and fueled public interest in urban agriculture. With this interest in view, I will be profiling here, and at my blog envo, nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, and small farmers who are transforming the urban food landscape one plot, one market, and one community at a time. Read More

On a recent Tuesday evening, a group of thinkers and food lovers gathered to hear a farmer and a fisherman talk about water. The occasion was the latest in the Kitchen Table Talks series, and it took place in the basement of Viracocha in the Mission district. Contrary to the how the media often portrays such things, the farmer and the fisherman were in agreement. Read More

RSF Social Finance, a non-profit financial firm focused on using money as a force for good in the world, has announced the launch of a new Food & Agriculture Program-Related Investing (PRI) Fund. The idea is to encourage investors to support elements of the agricultural and food sectors that look beyond the bottom line to take the health of our environment and communities into account. Read More

On Tuesday, a House Agriculture Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy and Poultry held a meeting in the lead up to the 2012 Farm Bill that descended into a contentious complaint session by Democrats and Republicans alike over the new rules proposed by the USDA’s Grain Inspection Packers and Stockyards Administration (GIPSA). Many Ag Committee members take campaign donations from the industries that would be affected (in the 2010 cycle, House Agriculture Committee members have taken a combined $236,500 from the poultry and egg industry, and $281,611 from the livestock industry), and their reaction makes clear then that these rules could hold the potential for real reform. Read More

As an advocate for local, and for family farmers, I know that there is immense power in the experiential. When you have a direct relationship with a farmer, you just know that relationship is mutually beneficial. When you see four leggers on pasture instead of concrete, it only makes sense. But, do we have our talking points lined up on a deeper level? Are we ready for that serendipitous moment when online dating sets you up with an agribusiness ladder climber who wants to debate free trade two beers in? Or when it comes time to make policy recommendations or offer a zinger quote to a reporter? Despite being a career local foods non-profit staffer, I don’t always feel prepared when I leave the realm of the story for that of the concrete. Now that consumer awareness of the story of local has reached a critical mass, it is time to take our movement to the next level. Research. Organize. Speak out.

In celebration of its 25th year, Farm Aid, the longest running concert-for-a-cause, has published a report to help us make this push. Rebuilding America’s Economy with Family-Farm Centered Food Systems takes one of the more sensitive topics in the American psyche today, the economy, and convincingly demonstrates the bounty of opportunity that family farmers can bring to local and regional communities. Read More

When I volunteered in Haiti after the earthquake, it was glaringly obvious that we were standing in the midst of a failed food system that had been collapsing for decades.  Natural disasters strike annually all over the world.  Yet Haiti’s post-quake humanitarian crisis is the ultimate test case of the dangers of food dependence and an urban-factory based development model.  To truly get at the heart of how food affects the most vulnerable people and environments around the world, you must understand the Haitian story. Read More

Debra is one of the founders of FoodCorps and the Communications and Outreach Director of the National Farm to School Network, which is a program of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College. Debra is also an Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Food and Society Fellow. Debra’s previous non-profit work spans the globe in the humanitarian, conservation, sustainable agriculture, and food justice realms. She works from her fifth-generation family farm in Ohio, where she continues her passion for organic farming raising fruits and vegetables.

CE: What issues have you been focused on?

DE: It ranges from food policy, Farm to School, school gardens, school food, rural sociology, obesity, dairy policy, commodity policy, food justice… basically from seed to stomach. The whole gamut.

CE: What inspires you to do this work?

DE: I am a dairy farmer’s daughter and given that there are fewer than 60,000 dairy farmers in the United States, not many people can really understand what that means. But, I grew up with a dairy chip on my shoulder, watching how working for this food system is hard work and when you see that it’s broken even after all of that hard work, that’s frustrating. Read More

When Katie Stagliano was in third grade, she planted a cabbage in her family’s small garden. When it grew to an astounding 40 pounds, she donated it to a soup kitchen, where it was made into meals for 275 people (with the help of ham and rice). “I thought, ‘Wow, with that one cabbage I helped feed that many people?’” says Katie, now entering sixth grade. “I could do much more than that.”

So Katie started planting vegetable gardens as part of her nonprofit Katie’s Krops — she has six right now — including one the length of a football field at her school in her hometown of Summerville, S.C. Classmates, her family and other people in the community help plant and water, and Bonnie Plants donates seedlings. This past year, Katie took her commitment to a new level: she has given soup kitchens over 2,000 pounds of lettuce, tomatoes and other vegetables. Katie and her helpers are now harvesting the spring planting, and another 1,200 pounds will be donated by October. Read More

Gardening is hot, and I don’t mean just sweaty work in July while you hoe the purslane and harvest beans, squash, and zucchini.  Working the land is a trendy topic from web-rooted FarmVille to the White House to the written word.

Part of the reason for the new interest in the simple but yet so intensely complex act of growing food is that we have a clear problem and myriad solutions. The problem: obesity rates increased in 28 states in the past year. As recently reported in “F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2010,” obesity is one of the biggest public health challenges our country has faced. With 1 in 3 US children age 2-19 overweight or obese, we need to end this trend and fortunately, many organizations, initiatives, and resources aim to solve child obesity in a generation.

Part of the solution starts with students and a seed. Read More

The valet made me do it. We bared our souls and talked with each other about food. We did it in the middle of the tastefully decorated lobby of a reputable Cannery Row hotel in Monterey, CA. It began as a very unexpected moment, and has become one of my all-time favorite experiences talking about access to good food. Because it was a conversation not with a chef, foodie or expert. It was with a regular person who longs to connect to food and is somehow stuck, marooned on an island alone, full of latent desire.

The valet—let’s call him Paul—asked me the very question I yearn to hear, and with him I had the discussion that I never tire of. Paul had parked my car when I checked into the hotel, had smiled professionally at me and held the door three mornings in a row when I sashayed excitedly out into the sunlight. The cause of my excitement was a food issue conference hosted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. The Cooking for Solutions Sustainable Media Institute is an annual gathering of journalists and experts who cover food system issues ranging from sustainable seafood to GMOs. It is the highlight of my year, second only to the Ecological Farming Association annual meeting. Read More

The CAFO Reader – a new book featuring essays by farmers Wendell Berry, Becky Weed, and Fred Kirschenmann, Republican speech writer Matthew Scully, journalist Michael Pollan and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., among many others – gives a full picture of the environmental, social, and ethical implications of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, and includes a section of essays on “Putting the CAFO Out to Pasture.” A CAFO is an Environmental Protection Agency designation for a farming facility that keeps numerous animals raised for food in close confinement, with the potential to pollute. These facilities often produce extreme amounts of waste, which ends up in toxic lagoons, sprayed on the land, and eventually in the watershed; require the use of high doses of antibiotics, thereby adding to the growth of drug-resistant bacteria; and are exempt from most animal cruelty laws. I spoke with the editor of The CAFO Reader, Daniel Imhoff, who is also the cofounder, director, and publisher of Watershed Media, about recent legislation and the future of the CAFO.

Read More

The Food and Climate Connection: From Heating the Planet to Healing It, an excellent new short film produced by WHY Hunger and Anna Lappé, highlights how climate change is affecting farmers around the world (rural and urban), and how our industrial food system is itself one of the greatest contributors to climate change.  Farmers, especially in the developing world,  are being challenged by heavy rains, extreme drought/desertification, and unpredictable weather. As Monsanto and the like co-opt the sustainability message and present technological solutions to mitigating extreme weather—”change the seeds, that’ll do it!”–the experts in this film (including Lappé, Rodale Institute’s  Timothy LaSalle, Molly Anderson of Food Systems Integrity and various community farmers) urge us to examine biological solutions instead. Responsible farming practices can be part of a path forward. Read More

Don’t judge a book by its cover, they say. Well, I’m guilty. When I first glanced at Janet A. Flammang’s The Taste for Civilization, I was simultaneously smitten by the lovely image of a few leaves of arugula caught on a fork, roots and soil still clinging to the slender green leaves, and daunted by the subtitle: “Food, Politics and Civil Society”. Having been engaged in just those three topics for the past several years in a number of capacities—as a teacher, farmer, garden program designer, national program advocate and traveler, to name a few—I had a hard time imagining how one slim volume would tackle, much less try to build a cohesive argument while engaging with, the entire complex web of our food system. I turned the page and began reading, and almost immediately I saw that I had in fact, for once, correctly judged a book by its cover. Read More

Spencer Wells’ sprawling new book Pandora’s Seed, which ruffled Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s feathers a few weeks ago, is ripe with fascinating theories and intriguing claims. The overarching theme of the book is the climate crisis we now face and what we as a species are going to do to survive. To get to this point, Wells takes the reader on an epic journey starting with an understanding of our Paleolithic ancestors and the transitions and adaptations we’ve made. In Wells’ view this hasn’t been a linear march forward — instead he argues that with all of our technology and progress we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves and are careening down a path towards devastation. Wells believes that the pace of our human innovation and progress has been so fast — speaking in evolutionary terms — that our biology has simply not had time to adapt to the changes in our diet and lifestyle. This, he says, has its root in the advent of agriculture some 10,000 years ago — a mere blink of the eye in the scope of human history. Read More

Sour foods really appealed to Alex Hozven as she battled brutal pregnancy-induced nausea with her first son.

Nothing unusual there, right? Millions of women crave pickles to combat morning (or all-day) sickness. But Hozven’s obsession with fermented foods didn’t end once her baby was born.

Instead, she set out to master making naturally fermented foods (no vinegar, water, or heat) like sauerkraut, kim chee, and kombucha with a locavore sensibility and seasonal twist –  and built a thriving business that now supports a family of four. Read More

If correctly identifying your problems is the first step to solving them, I’m afraid we’ll all be peeling tar balls off our heels before we get a handle on the BP blowout.

“Please stop calling it a leak!” Bill KcKibben pleaded at the Slow Money conference in Shelburne, Vermont last month. A leak, after all, suggests a kind of dribble. A spill sounds like something you might mop up with a towel.

“We’ve punched a hole in the bottom of the ocean,” McKibben added. “Is a knife wound a ‘blood leak?’”

We’re hitting some fundamental limits, he added, citing the ‘thousand year’ storms that seem to come every four or five years now, and the fact that we’re facing the hottest year on record, so far (and that was before the heat wave that hit the whole Eastern seaboard this past week).

Yes, we need to plug that hole in the ocean floor before the entire Gulf becomes one gigantic dead zone. But there’s an onshore contaminant threatening our future, too, and it’s called fast money. Read More

If film–and documentaries in particular–reflect trends in general and popular culture, then it’s no surprise that a growing crop of films have emerged in recent years that mirror our growing awareness about how and where our food comes from. On the other end of the spectrum are movies that in their attempt to consciously avoid any political or social message, might best be described as food porn. So why, given the obvious merits of the first and culinary indulgence of the latter, do most of these films still leave me hungry?

Clearly, activism plays a necessary and critical role in galvanizing and educating people about one of the most fundamental issues facing us today: the inhumane and economically and environmentally unsustainable industrialization of our food supply. What better tool than the camera to expose, enlighten, inspire, and show that there is a better way? But good art and activism often don’t mix well. Many of the ag-oriented films I have seen have only reinforced my existing beliefs; rather than spark a dialogue, these food-related film events felt more like a smug and self-congratulatory group hug. I want art, and especially film, to challenge me without hitting me over the head. Alternatively, I also don’t want to watch a film with no artistic merit other than the fact that it happens to be about food. Read More

Leafcutter ants engage in monoculture practices just like we do but with much stricter public health and safety guidelines that would put our own National Organic Program standards to shame. What do these ants know that we don’t? I spoke to Mark Moffett, Research Associate in Entomology at the Smithsonian Institute and author of Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions to find out. Read More

Deborah Madison’s books — including The Greens Cookbook, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, and her latest, Seasonal Fruit Desserts — have inspired multi generations in the art of preparing delicious, seasonal food. Now a chef and bestselling cookbook author, Madison was the founding chef of Greens Restaurant and has received the M.F.K. Fisher Award, the International Association of Culinary Professional’s Julia Child Cookbook of the Year award, and three James Beard awards. In addition to writing on food and farming, she has long been active in Slow Food and other groups involved in local food issues.

I just had the pleasure of sharing a potluck meal prepared for her, hosted by 18 Reasons at Omnivore Books, and featuring dishes from her recipe collection. (Full disclosure: I’m a board member of 18 Reasons.) We chatted about recipes, home cooking, and the importance of saving seeds. Read More

Interest in how our food is grown has been rekindled in recent years, with particular focus on sustainable agriculture. But what exactly is sustainable agriculture? Recently, everyone from certifiers like the Food Alliance, to resource groups like the National Center for Appropriate Technology, to producer groups like the California Farm Bureau Federation, to multi-stakeholder efforts like the Keystone Alliance for Sustainable Agriculture have been clamoring for authority on the matter, framing up widely varying definitions and criteria to steer the national dialogue.

Last week, the National Research Council (NRC) upped the ante with the publication of Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems for the 21st Century. The report will surely be an important milestone on the path toward agricultural sustainability. Read More

Leadership at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) made it abundantly clear last week that the low-dose usage of antibiotics in food animals, simply to promote growth or improve feed efficiency, needlessly contributes to the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria and poses a serious threat to public health. Despite the fact that the FDA is taking a hard-line stance on the issue, I find it frustrating to see that the agency appears to be hamstrung from taking the necessary steps to mandate industry to end the risky practice. Read More

After months of signature gathering in Ohio for a proposed ballot measure that would improve conditions for farm animals in the state, Buckeye animal advocates achieved early progress on animal welfare reforms that few people would have thought possible in Ohio. To be honest, many of us working on the campaign wouldn’t have imagined this outcome even just a few short weeks ago.

With prospects looming for a November vote on the ballot measure,  Ohioans for Humane Farms, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, The Humane Society of the United States, and the Ohio Farm Bureau agreed to implement a broad range of important animal welfare reforms in the state. Read More

Sara Remington is the kind of photog that can make a bunch of radishes look beautiful. And she’s able to do it with the minimum of propping, gadgets or digital tinkering.

Clearly there’s art, a good eye, and a bit of magic to her elegant images of everything edible.

Remington, who works out of a light-filled studio in Emeryville, just east of San Francisco, is in constant demand for her food and farming frames and her portraits of food folk. Awarded a 30 under 30 honor for emerging photographers in 2006 by Photo District News, her long and growing list of book credits and editorial clients speaks for itself. Read More

With summer here, and the influx of both wild and planted harvestables gaining momentum, I am taking pause to compare season’s past with now.  Aside from what we’ve chosen for our garden, my typical food foraging generally takes place on my own property, harvesting native wild blackberries, volunteer plums, and miner’s lettuce and wild arugula for supple spring salads.  We’re also fortunate to have access to some prime mushroom hunting, and usually pull in a few pounds of porcini and chanterelles each year.

But this year is weird. Read More

Lisa Kivirist is a bonafide Farmer Jane in Wisconsin where she runs her family farm with the help of her husband and son Liam. Off grid and creative, she and her husband have figured out how to make a living in a rural place – something that’s not really easy to do. Lisa is also a Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow specializing in the role of women in agriculture and speaks on the subject frequently.

We are honored to share some of Lisa’s insights about why working in agriculture is the perfect fit for women entrepreneurs and ecopreneurs in this article within an article. Read on for some serious inspiration. Read More

With the documentary movie Gasland making its national debut on HBO just last week, the nation is now more aware of the environmental issues natural gas fracking poses. What you might not have heard is that many farmers in upstate New York fear the impact that natural gas drilling will have on our grasslands and water, and ultimately our livelihoods. It is an issue that could threaten New York City’s food shed but many do not realize what is at stake. Read More