Civil Eats

Having spent several years working to raise awareness about the problems created by factory farms, I’ve fielded a whole lot of questions about industrial livestock production–so many, in fact, that I’ve often considered publishing a pocketsize list of factory farm FAQs.  You know, a little something to inspire lighthearted cocktail party conversation or to use as an icebreaker during first dates.  Instant commercial success, guaranteed.  Anyway, at the top of the list would be the question, “where are these factory farms?” Read More

The Senate food safety bill, which has been inching towards passage the past few weeks, cleared a key procedural hurdle Monday, but Senate leaders put off two votes on amendments and the final vote on the bill to Tuesday morning. Read More

Michele Simon is a public health lawyer specializing in policy analysis, legal strategies, and countering corporate tactics. With 14 years of experience researching and writing about the food industry, she authored Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back. She is currently watchdogging the alcohol industry, as Marin Institute’s research and policy director. You can read her writing on her blog, and follow her on Twitter.

What issues have you been focused on?

My interests include nutrition policy and the role the food industry plays in marketing and obstructing policy to undermine public health. Read More

On Earth Day 2007, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled PlaNYC, his blueprint for city-wide sustainability. Conspicuously missing from this report was the role food could–and should–play in the City’s long-term sustainability. A little less than three years later, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer produced his FoodNYC report, a blueprint for food sustainability. And just this Monday, November 22, City Council Speaker Christin Quinn unveiled FoodWorks, the most comprehensive food report and blueprint the city has yet seen–a 59-point plan that cuts across the entire food system. Read More

Louisa Shafia is the author of Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life, a cookbook that focuses on the earth-friendly kitchen. Shafia is a teacher, she runs a catering company, and has cooked at restaurants like Aquavit and Pure Food and Wine in New York City, and Millennium and Roxanne’s in San Francisco. I got the chance to talk to her last week about Thanksgiving and the art of eco-eating. Read More

We all want our kids to be healthy. In the midst of hectic lives, we try our best. Sometimes, we have good days—an astounding victory for spinach, squash, and sparkling teeth. On bad days, convenience trumps health and teeth stay fuzzy. Such is life. But good or bad, there’s one thing I do every day: make my daughter Helen’s lunch.

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As Thanksgiving nears, and we turn our collective attention to the food we will be putting on the table, I have been thinking a great deal about a group of farmworkers I met earlier this month. As part of a Symposium on Food Systems and Sustainability, I had the opportunity to travel with a small group of students, professors, and advocates to Knights Landing, an unincorporated community northwest of Sacramento. There, in a community center normally dedicated to child care, language classes, and basic clinical services, we sat down with around a dozen men and women, who engage in the most labor-intensive piece of California’s agricultural puzzle. Read More

Since I started this holiday tips tradition a few years ago, the sustainable food movement continues to transform fields of corn, soy and CAFOs to more verdant, bountiful lands filled with organic produce, heirloom greens and pasture-raised livestock. Countless more school and community gardens have sprouted up. Hundreds of local groups are transforming food deserts by bringing in supermarkets and community gardens.  Thousands of people are gleaning public fruits for food pantries across the country. And there’s plenty more backyard farmers with their personal chicken coops, goat shelters, fruit trees and raised beds.

This is in light of the gloomy news that approximately two-thirds of all Americans are overweight or obese and 17 million households are food insecure (meaning they don’t have regular access to food). This year’s holiday tips offer more ways to make your Thanksgiving meal an opportunity to support sustainable agriculture, reduce your water use and go on a low carb(on) diet. Read More

We are preparing for the most thoroughly planned meal in America, and it’s not Thanksgiving dinner. It’s school lunch.

Once every five years school meals are put on the Congressional kitchen’s front burner through reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act. In the process of cooking up this legislation, school meals have been researched, reviewed, rallied for and railed against. And while the resulting stuffed turkey that is the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids’ Act, is not perfect, it’s pretty darn good.

Congress must stick a fork in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act during the lame-duck session, get it done and finally serve the kids. Read More

Many people consider Thanksgiving a marathon. For my large family who entertains all year long for the Jewish holidays, it’s more of a brief jog around the block. When I was a kid, my family of six often cooked and ate meals with my aunt, uncle and my four cousins who lived across the street. In my world, cooking a turkey feast for 20 is called Sunday Dinner.

You may think we are a family of trained chefs or, at the very least, had some extra help. But neither was the case. The adults realized early on that they had a crew of sous chefs already in-house. They may be barely three feet tall, but kids are often an incredible source of energy, creativity, and assistance in the kitchen. Read More

After a long day of debating–and waiting–Thursday, the Senate was at impasse over the details and politics surrounding the food safety bill.

Though Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said earlier this week he would, if necessary, keep the Senate in town over the weekend to finish the bill, sources on the Hill said it was more likely the legislation would not move forward until after Thanksgiving recess, which begins Monday. Read More

As if there weren’t enough conflicting nutrition information out there already, a professor of human nutrition decided to go on a Twinkie Diet. He then proceeded to lose weight, improve his cholesterol numbers, and make matters even more confusing for the general public. But while the media has taken the easy headline and run with it, I think this story deserves a closer look. Read More

It is countdown time for the USDA’s Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration, or GIPSA’s proposed rule that would protect small family livestock farmers and ranchers from the historical monopolies of the big four meat packers who control the market. You’d expect that pro-citizen groups and all enlightened meat consumers would be united in hot pursuit of fair market access for small farmers, pushing the USDA to allow the GIPSA rules to be enforced after the comment period ends on November 22nd. You’d be wrong. Read More

My dirty truth is that I have a collection of Coke bottles from around the world: one from Mexico, one with Arabic script, one covered in unrecognizable lettering and filled with Yugoslavian beach glass, and so on. I was a teenager when I amassed them and totally oblivious to the implications behind this international menagerie of emptied glass. This drink was everywhere, tailored slightly through variations in local water and variations in bottle size, but ultimately the same. I loved that I could find it anywhere.

Michael Blanding’s book, The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World’s Favorite Soft Drink aims to tell the real story behind that happy global picture of people who speak different languages, have different skin color, but happily drink Coke. His story begins in 1886, with Coke’s origin as a snake oil tonic, and extends all the way up to its present incarnation as a multinational beverage corporation. Read More

Not unlike their rural counterparts, urban farmers often make do without a secure relationship to the land they farm. Whether you’re in the city or in the country, being land-insecure makes planning the future nearly impossible. So, when the Oakland-based City Slicker Farms received $4 million earmarked precisely for acquiring land to grow food on, it came as a welcome surprise. The funding was awarded as part of a $5.4 billion state bond for projects involving water quality and access, park improvements, and natural resources and park preservation. And it’s more than a financial boost: it’s a game changer.

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As the Senate gears up to vote on a motion to limit debate and move the pending food safety bill forward today, interest groups are kicking into high gear to lobby for and against key amendments. Read More

Last week, Haven Bourque published an article here on Civil Eats about the contradictions she found at the recent Community Food Security Coalition conference in New Orleans. While she found the conference to be very informative and a great networking opportunity, she also noted that the presence of junk food at snack times and Sodexo’s sponsorship appeared to be contradictory to CFSC’s values.

As the Executive Director of CFSC, and the responsible party for some 20 conferences over the past 13 years, I was keenly interested in her comments. Read More

In 2004, Morgan Spurlock‘s documentary film Super Size Me debuted. In it, Spurlock eats McDonald’s food for 30 days straight. This extreme experiment sought to document the adverse health effects of the all-to-common practice of over-eating fast food, using himself as test subject. Indeed, Spurlock gained weight, scared his doctors when his liver went south, felt depressed, lost sexual function and more. But the film also became a sort of watershed moment, shocking general audiences and thereby playing a big role in spurring growth of the food movement. I met Spurlock recently while picking up my weekly farm share (we belong to the same local CSA), and he kindly agreed to talk about the food movement, changes in the fast food industry, and how his McDonald’s binge has affected his long-term health. Read More

Access to fresh, nutritious, affordable food is one of the most important factors in quality of life, personal well-being, and the overall health of a community. Areas in which there is limited access to wholesome food—often called “food deserts”—are starting to receive the attention they desperately need. Earlier this year, the Obama administration launched the $400 million Healthy Food Financing Initiative, but change is slow to come and requires action at the local level.

The Alliance for Healthy and Responsible Grocery Stores, a coalition of more than 30 community, faith, and labor leaders, is taking that action in Los Angeles. Sounding the alarm, they just released the first-ever Grocery Chain Scorecard. The report issues grades to grocery chains on three key areas: Food access, store quality, and job quality. Read More

For the next Kitchen Table Talks in San Francisco on Tuesday, December 7, 2010, we’re going beyond shiitakes and portabellas with a group of mushroom maestros as our guides to the little-known wonders of the mushroom world. They will give us an overview of the science, history and lore, dispel myths, and offer hands-on practical information.

Millennium Restaurant’s Executive Chef Eric Tucker will be whipping up a delicious mushroom snack for the audience and sharing his secrets on the best ways prepare all types of mushrooms and which are the tastiest. For the adventurous, mushroom cultivation instructor Ken Litchfield will invite daring audience members to join him in tasting a Death Cap! Read More

When the House returns to work this week they will likely be considering the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, twice extended as legislators struggled over the details. According to The Hill 80 percent of Americans support expansion of the act to “provide healthier food and cover more kids.” Yet in the current climate of economic crisis, finding the funding for this expansion has been a nearly insurmountable challenge. If this bill is not passed within the current lame-duck session, the new session of Congress will have to start over, perhaps with a diminished commitment to its expansion. In fact, there is reason to believe that there will be no work done the week after Thanksgiving, which means this week is make-or-break week for the bill. Read More

Does the term “white bread” say “all things ‘burby and bland,” to you? Don’t be fooled by this über-processed slice of whiteness. Beneath its pale golden crust, white bread whispers some dark truths about our values: we cherish convenience and shelf life above taste and texture; cheapness is next to godliness, wellness be damned; and man can always find a way to improve on nature.

Highly refined flour has only the wheat’s starchy endosperm, minus the nutritious–but more perishable–bran and germ. No nutrients? No problem! Just add a bunch of vitamins and minerals at the end of the process. Problem solved.

It’s whole grains that go against the grain in America. Too darned assertive, and so time-consuming to chew! Our allegiance to this Pillsbury-Doughboy-pokable/Play-Doh-pliable product symbolizes, above all, a culture that resists resistance, and has better things to do than chew. Read More

There’s so much buzz around the fledgling food business launched last year by two former University of California at Berkeley students, that you’d think they were pumping out premium honey. Read More

As shocking as the news is that the United States Department of Agriculture facilitated a cheese bailout with a $12 million marketing campaign to help sell Domino’s Pizza, I believe there is much more to the New York Times story as it affects average Americans and their ever-expanding waist lines.

The story makes a strong case for the correlation between saturated fat consumption and obesity. Michael Moss nails the issue of the USDA’s two-sided policy: promoting cheese consumption in the form of Domino’s Pizza, while simultaneously working to fight obesity by discouraging some of these very same foods.

But as I see it, cheese in itself is not the problem—the issues are deeper and more complex than that. Conventional wisdom says that saturated fat is bad and at the root of the American obesity and diabetes epidemics. The Times article says, “[O]ne slice contains as much as two-thirds of the day’s maximum recommended amount of saturated fat, which has been linked to heart disease.” But let’s look a little deeper at this claim. Read More

To reform our food system lastingly and effectively, we’re going to need a lot more authoritative research from valued institutions of higher learning. So there was cause for celebration last week, when the inaugural Stanford Food Summit brought together representatives from all seven of the university’s schools under the slogan, “Complex problems require multidisciplinary solutions.” Read More

When I stand at the gates of our 2.2 acre local urban community farm, I get asked a lot of questions. The number one inquiry: What will you do with the food you grow? The simple answer: We plan to share it with the people who planted it. We’ve had the honor to participate in one of the nation’s most progressive urban agriculture projects–a shining example of what happens when neighborhoods unite, governments experiment, and food justice proponents say, “Let’s try it.” Read More

In what is the most comprehensive analysis of fast food nutrition and marketing to date, the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity released a study Monday indicting fast food restaurants for aggressive marketing campaigns targeted to youth and other vulnerable groups, and a lack of readily available healthy options on their menus. Read More

She had her epiphany at the dinner table. It was just a year and a half ago now. Dessert was lone gone, but her kids were still at the table talking. She sat back in her chair, and realized: oh my gosh, this is the one thing I’ve done right as a parent. She reflected how it hadn’t happened by itself. It had been a conscious effort to create family dinner rituals at home. Perhaps, she wondered, she could share this with other people…

Laurie David, producer of the Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and author of The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming, is fired up about family dinners. She’s used her epiphany to write a wonderfully inspiring, and deeply enlightening book that demonstrates how family dinners have the potential–if we embrace them–to be so much more than just, “Hey Mom, what’s for dinner?” Read More

The theme of the 14th annual Community Food Security Coalition Conference (CFSC) was “The Gumbo That Unites Us All.”   I expected good food at the conference, especially in such a group of enlightened eaters. With sessions such as “Building Community through Food Security” and “Growing Abundance: Restoring Neighborhood Connections to Healthy Food” I knew I was in good hands. But I write about contradictions in the good food movement, so I trekked to New Orleans to attend the mother ship of food justice events to see if any contradictions would be revealed. Read More