Civil Eats

Last week, when asked about his new trim physique, Bill Clinton stunned CNN’s Wolf Blitzer by revealing that he has lost 24 pounds eating a mostly “plant-based” diet.

The former President told Blitzer that he mostly eats beans, legumes, vegetables, and fruit and takes a protein supplement in his morning fruit and almond milk smoothie. Clinton underwent a quadruple bypass in 2004 and had two stents put in this past February after learning that one of his bypassed arteries was blocked again. While many commentators are hung up on his dramatic weight loss and the debate about the nutritional value of veganism, they are missing the most important story: Clinton’s change from a life-shortening Standard American Diet (SAD) to a plant-based diet of whole foods. Read More

It’s a schizophrenic time for food in America. On the one hand, everywhere I go I meet a canner, jammer, fermenter, or forager obsessed with perfecting these age-old crafts and sharing them with other urban homesteaders or selling their wares at farmers’ markets, pop-up stores, or underground dinners.

On the other hand, as Michael Pollan observed in a New York Times Magazine piece last year, people are cooking less but watching more.  Cooking shows, that is. Food preparation has become a spectator sport, a form of entertainment, but not something you actually do in the privacy of your own home. This sorry state of affairs was lamented by some of the biggest names in food writing, including Saveur founder Dorothy Kalins, at the recent Symposium for Professional Food Writers.

Guilty as charged: We make modest meals in my house and we’re addicted to MasterChef.

Some say the rise of celebrity chefs, the Food Network, indeed cooking programs on all the TV channels, have made Americans feel more intimidated and less at home behind a stove. Millions are disconnected from where and how their food is grown, and they have no idea what to do with raw, unprocessed ingredients or how to fix something good to eat.

Surely the time is ripe for a cookbook (or two) designed to entice people back into the kitchen. Read More

What if you were watching Chopped and you saw Ted Allen unload a bushel of Kiwi Berries from Kiwi Korners Farm in Danville, PA? Or if Ina Garten featured Lola ducks on her show and started raving about Hudson Valley Duck Farm? Don’t hold your breath quite yet, but executives at Food Network are pondering the prospect of sourcing from local, mid-sized farms for their studio kitchens and events. For such a high-profile entity, this move could help bring the sustainable food movement to the tipping point–depending on how Food Network spins it.

Read More

Sixty thousand chickens were found dead this week at a North Carolina factory farm, a result of a failed generator powering the facility’s ventilation system. This sort of tragedy is totally preventable, and, as we’ll see, the owners of this farm ought to be criminally prosecuted. Read More

Last month, an 11-year-old had much to say about the perils of the American food system. Speaking at a TED conference for young people called TEDx in Asheville, North Carolina, Birke Baehr discussed food irradiation, GMOs, CAFOs, farm run-off, the problem with marketing food to kids and more, all in five minutes. On the subject of paying more for better quality food, Baehr said, “With all the things I’m learning about the food system, it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer or pay the hospital.”

He also talked about his future aspirations. “Awhile back I wanted to be an NFL football player. Now, I’ve decided I’d rather be an organic farmer instead,” he said to the cheering audience. “That way I can have a greater impact on the world.” Read More

The food crisis of 2008 never really ended, it was instead ignored and forgotten. The rich and powerful are well fed; they had no food crisis, no shortage. So in the West, it was little more than a short lived sound bite, tragic but forgettable. To the poor in the developing world, whose ability to afford food is no better now than in 2008, the hunger continues.

Hunger can have many contributing factors; natural disaster, discrimination, war, poor infrastructure. So why, regardless of the situation, is high tech agriculture always assumed to be the only the solution? Read More

When then-governor Bush ran for president under the banner of “compassionate conservatism,” it seemed to me then (as it does now) that he did not know the meaning of either word.  I was reminded of this on Friday during Stephen Colbert’s congressional testimony before a House subcommittee on immigration, a gig he got because of his support for the UFW’s Take Our Jobs campaign.  The campaign’s purpose is to point out how vital migrant farm workers are to our food system, and how difficult the work is, while also demonstrating that they are not “taking jobs from Americans.”  Fact is most Americans won’t take those jobs for one (or both) of two reasons:  The hard work and the low pay. Read More

Jordan Treakle hails from the mountains of western North Carolina and recently graduated with a degree International Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a student he was a founding member of the UNC student group FLO (Fair, Local, Organic) Food. Jordan directed the organization’s goal of promoting institutional purchasing of sustainable foods in collaboration with the Carolina Dining Services (CDS) and helped build new supplier partnerships that promoted local food purchasing and consumption. His efforts have insured that FLO Food and CDS together are developing a successful model for sustainable food to be served at a flagship, public university. His work with the Real Food Challenge, a national student-led NGO working to build the youth sustainable food movement, has helped to establish working relationships with a range of local community groups and regional non-profit organizations in the Southeast as part as the RFC’s national campaign to increase direct farm-to-university links in the food chain. He is currently organizing farmers around hydraulic fracturing issues at the Rural Advancement Foundation International.

CE: What issues have you been focused on?

JT: For the past three years I’ve focused on student and youth organizing around agriculture issues in North Carolina and the Southeast. I initially became interested in industrial hog production in North Carolina and the effects it has on the land and the people in my home state. This led to analyzing the institutional food purchasing of my university and how students can advocate for universities to invest in sustainable food systems. Read More

Mark Bittman has been cooking and writing about food for four decades, including creating simple recipes for his weekly column at the New York Times, The Minimalist. Simple, because they don’t require difficult-to-find ingredients (and if they do, he gives alternatives) or an elaborate process to get a delicious and often impressive meal on the table. He has challenged his readers to travel across cultures, try things they thought were really difficult to prepare, and to rethink the tools in their kitchen repertoire (last week’s Minimalist, for example, breathed new life into the food processor).

Bittman has also emerged as a sane voice in the discussion around food policy, penning excellent reporting on industrial meat production, sustainable fish, and organics, to name a few stories. In addition, he digests news on the food system, writes about his cooking exploits and publishes the work of other food writers (full disclosure: I’m one of them) on his site, markbittman.com. In his recent book, Food Matters, he discussed why we should cut out the junk food and cut down on the amount of meat we eat for our own health and for the well-being of the planet. Building on the success of that work comes the Food Matters Cookbook, with 500 recipes for inspired “less-meatarians.” I spoke with him this week about his new cookbook and the state of the discussion around food politics. Read More

Here in San Francisco, we expect cold, foggy summers. I’m sure you’ve heard the ubiquitous quote wrongly attributed to Mark Twain, “The coldest winter I ever spent was the summer I spent in San Francisco.” Though no one is quite sure who authored this line, truer words have never been spoken. This summer took the cake though. While the rest of the country was blistering under oppressive 100˚ plus heat, we Friscans were wrapped in blankets contemplating using the fireplace in the middle of July. I promised my daughter that I would take her to the pool every day that surpassed 75˚. We went swimming twice. And the fog! It’s been like a lingering chest cold, hanging on long past its due course. In our neighborhood, we’ve hovered at a balmy 61˚ throughout the entire season. Cue tiny violins.

With such dreary weather, we had little hope for the garden producing much. Read More

In a blockbuster-worthy hearing, complete with partisan bickering, a photo slideshow, and a witness pleading the Fifth, Congress yesterday grilled the executives responsible for two Iowa egg farms linked to over 1,600 illnesses.

Though Jack DeCoster, who owns the company at the center of the investigation, apologized to anyone “who may have been sickened by eating our eggs,” he and his son, Peter, who now runs the Iowa facility, were met with tough questioning from lawmakers. Read More

Right now people are a little fearful of eggs, and who can blame them? The recent salmonella outbreak that resulted in the recall of half-a-billion eggs and sickened more than a thousand people across the country has left people wondering just how safe our food supply is. As a nutritionist, people ask me about this a lot—and what’s most important to understand is that all eggs are not created equal. The industrial food industry has taken our foods and made many of them unsafe. Not only this, but the nutritional value of our foods is intricately tied into this same industry. Which leads to another question I often hear: What are the healthiest foods? This should be an easy question to answer, but with the industrial food complex wrecking havoc on our food supply, things have become far more complicated. Read More

Despite a flurry of rumors to the contrary, the food safety bill pending in the Senate does not appear to moving anywhere fast.

Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) “hotlined” the bipartisan bill yesterday, notifying senators that the legislation is ready to be considered under unanimous consent, a critical step forward, if no one objects to the guidelines for debate and amendments.

But Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) made it clear yesterday he still objects to the bill, citing $1.4 billion in additional spending and “burdensome new regulations.” Read More

Mexico and the United States have a lot more in common than a border.  Their agricultural and rural policies have strikingly similar flaws–and present parallel opportunities for reform and revitalization.

In a September 1st seminar in Mexico City, a range of international participants concluded that both countries have bloated government subsidy programs whose benefits are captured disproportionately by a few states, individuals and large farms.  As a result, little governmental money is left over for research, market development, infrastructure and credit–key elements for stimulating lagging rural economies and bolstering production of healthy, sustainable and affordable food for local and domestic markets.  Worse, subsidy programs that dole out cash based on acreage encourage industrial-scale farming, exacerbating social injustice and environmental damage. Read More

The genetically modified salmon called AquAdvantage was discussed on Monday in front of the Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee, which will help the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decide whether or not to approve the fish for commercial production. The meeting comes after an unusually short 14-day period of public comment on the “new animal drug.” Read More

Last week, right in time for fall harvest, I found myself in the company of Will Allen, an urban farming pioneer, Annie Novak,  co-founder of the country’s first commercial rooftop farm, Fritz Haeg, an edible landscaper, and 1,500 others at the first international urban and small farm conference. The weekend was hosted by Will Allen and his organization Growing Power, an educational farm organization that he founded in a food-desert neighborhood of Milwaukee 18 years ago.

Retracing my steps to Milwaukee: a few months ago, in time for spring planting, I had seen the same three urban-agriculturalists speak in New York City. I had left that evening with the strongest desire to change the world that I had ever felt: All I had to do was plant something green. Read More

According to legend, from the 16th to 18th centuries, Sonoma County appeared on European maps as a mythical kingdom called “Quivira” whose streets were said to be paved with gold. Today, the Quivira Estate, located in the Dry Creek Valley of Healdsburg, spins its Demeter-certified Biodynamic and organic wine into gold, guided by a deeply held belief of careful stewardship of the land. Read More

Food safety legislation that had picked up steam in the wake of a massive egg recall has hit a major snag.  On the Senate floor yesterday, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said Sen. Tom Coburn’s objection to the bill’s price tag meant the Senate was unlikely to take up the measure before the contentious midterm election season. Read More

On Thursday, at a press conference and rally outside of the White House, the Center for Food Safety, Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth, and the CEO of Ben & Jerry’s demanded the Obama Administration halt FDA approval of the first genetically engineered (GE) food animal. The FDA is expected to decide whether to approve the controversial GE salmon, created by a company called AquaBounty, at a series of hearings this Sunday through Monday. Read More

On Monday, domestic policy wonk Ezra Klein published a short piece over at his Washington Post blog entitled “Industrial Farms are the Future,” in which he challenged the idea that the local food movement is doing anything but informing the big players in their marketing strategy. Further, he wondered aloud whether there was ever a major industry that “went from small, decentralized production methods to large, scaled industrial production–and then back again.”

Tom Philpott over at Grist took down the evidence Klein quotes in the piece, and which inspired its title. Klein bit back, addressing the issue again and pointing to the growth of industrial agriculture in China, India, and particularly Brazil as a case in point about the inevitability of growth in agriculture. I thought I would attempt to challenge Klein’s assumptions once again. Read More

Tonight in Washington, DC, a provocative ad tying fast food consumption to heart disease produced by the organization Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) will air during The Daily Show and the local news. The spot features a woman crying over a dead man in a morgue, and in his hand is a hamburger. “I was lovin’ it,” appears on the screen, a play on McDonald’s slogan, and the voice over says, “High cholesterol, high blood pressure, heart attacks. Tonight, make it vegetarian.”

According to the PCRM, the city has the second-highest death rate in the nation from heart disease, killing 1,500 annually. In addition, DC has more fast food restaurants per square mile than eight other similarly sized cities. The group hopes to leverage these facts to push for a moratorium on the building of new fast food restaurants in DC.

After tonight’s debut, the group hopes to air the ad in cities like Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and Memphis. Take a look: Read More

If you can’t beat ‘em…confuse them. That seems to be the new motto of our good friends at the Corn Refiners Association, the lobbying group and manufacturing association that represents makers of high-fructose corn syrup. The AP is reporting that the group has petitioned the FDA for permission to identify high-fructose corn syrup on food packaging as–wait for it–”corn sugar.”

After all, HFCS sales are at a 20-year low. More and more, science is indicating that the body metabolizes HFCS differently from table sugar in a way that increases the risk of diabetes, liver disease, and obesity. (Yes, we consume too many sweeteners of all kinds, but as I wrote in this recent post, there is evidence that this industrially extracted combination of fructose and glucose has more health consequences than the ones that humans have been consuming for far longer.) Read More

One way of improving the United States food system has more to do with business practices than it has to do with food.

The now-popular idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) dictates that businesses should take it upon themselves to forgo profits their shareholders demand so they can address social problems. But, as Aneel Karnani posits in a recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, the reasoning behind CSR is flawed. Publicly traded companies, including those that produce the lion’s share of our food, are required by law to prioritize maximizing profits to satisfy their shareholders, who are generally taken to desire profit above all else. Read More

When the FDA announced it found the genetically engineered AquAdvantage salmon safe just before Labor Day, news headlines and even Alaska Senator Mark Begich called it a “frankenfish.” A closer look at AquAdvantage makes it seem unlikely that Mary Shelley could have ever dreamed up anything as wild as the fast growing GE salmon. Even more worrisome is the science used to justify the salmon’s safety, which Consumers Union senior scientist Michael Hansen calls “sloppy,” “misleading,” and “woefully inadequate.”

If approved, AquAdvantage will be the first genetically engineered animal to directly enter the U.S. food supply — a fact that raises the stakes of the FDA’s approval process, as it sets a precedent for all future GE animals. Read More

Miles Gordon is the Founder and Project Coordinator for The Gardens Project of North Coast Opportunities which he started in 2007 in Ukiah, Mendocino County, California. His inspiration for The Gardens Project began 10 years ago as a result of a local hunger assessment. It revealed that Mendocino County needed more access to food which inspired Miles to help organize the Cleveland Community Garden – now Ukiah’s oldest and largest. As a former teacher who worked with school gardens, Miles noticed that some struggled, competing for resources. He saw a real need for two things: networking existing gardens so they could share resources and expertise while simultaneously, and rapidly, developing access to new gardens.

In the last three years, The Gardens Project has helped develop 16 new gardens and network over 65 in Mendocino County. These include gardens at schools, senior centers and those in the community at large. Miles and his wonderful Americorps VISTA volunteers also work on farmer development and rebuilding the food system on many levels.

CE: What issues have you been focused on?

MG: Empowerment. Read More

On recent foggy morning, I drove with two food activist companions down a long dusty road in Salinas, CA towards a hotbed of contradictions. In the salad bowl of the nation, sustainable farming thrives alongside conventional farming. We were on our way to visit one of the beacons of creativity and success for the sustainable farming movement: ALBA, the Agriculture & Land-Based Training Association, which trains farm workers and aspiring farmers on 300-plus acres on two working farms to grow and market organic crops. Read More

With beehives, chicken coops, and rooftop farms popping up all over Brooklyn, it’s high time us city folks revived that end of summer ritual, the county fair. After all, the county of Brooklyn–Kings County, to be precise–is a hotbed of horticultural happenings. Why should blue ribbon pies, pickles, and produce be limited to rural regions when we’re growing great stuff and baking up a storm right here in our neck of the not-so-woodsy woods? Read More

It’s a figurative time of reckoning for global biodiversity. In 2002, 188 hopeful nations gathered together for the Convention on Biological Diversity and launched a global initiative to set biodiversity targets for the next eight years. The countries assembled in response to the relentless loss of life, now well documented, across many biological kingdoms, and gathered as a concerned community with the noblest of goals: to reduce the alarming rate of biodiversity loss as “a contribution to poverty alleviation and for the greater benefit of all life on Earth.” In a similar vein, in 2006, the United Nations General Assembly, declared 2010 the “International Year of Biodiversity.”

How effective has all of that attention by the global community been the past few years? Read More

This isn’t your typical egg farm. In Elkhart, Iowa, about 70 miles south of Wright County Egg–the mega-farm at the center of a 550 million egg recall tied to almost 1,500 Salmonella illnesses–colorful hens are milling around Foxhollow Farm. Lyric-less rock music is playing in the hen house, and it’s for the hens. The head rooster, a five-year-old Black Cochin Bantam named Shadow who appears to run the place, is friendly and strutting for the camera.

In many ways, Foxhollow Farm represents the antithesis of large-scale egg production in Iowa, which produces more than twice as many eggs as any other state. Read More

If you’re like anything like me, one of the main draws for heading to the farmers market each week is the abundance of fresh, seasonal, local food. And we farmers’ market shoppers assume that we’re doing business with local family farmers practicing sustainable methods.

In most cases that’s probably the case – but not always. Sometimes the mythology of farmers markets is not matched by the reality. Many California farmers markets, for instance, allow vendors to sell eggs produced by hens crammed into the insufferable cage confinement systems just like those involved in the recent egg recall – the largest in U.S. history

Not only is this intensive confinement inhumane and unsustainable, it also poses a real threat to food safety. Cramming birds into cages exacerbates the risk of Salmonella contamination. In fact, every one of the last ten studies comparing cage to cage-free systems found higher Salmonella rates in cage systems, including a 2010 study that found 20 times greater odds of Salmonella infection in caged flocks. Read More