Civil Eats

Pam, who I was grateful to meet on an urban agriculture tour in New Orleans this past October, is the founder and Executive Director of the Women and Agriculture (WandA) Network, one of a group of organizations strategically thinking about food justice and women farmers in urban areas. She is the former Deputy Director of the New Orleans Food and Farm Network and currently tends a small, but vibrant urban farm called Sun Harvest Kitchen Garden located in the severely distressed Central City neighborhood of New Orleans.

Currently, she’s got an abundance of Asian greens, red leaf mustards, collards, spinach, onions, herbs that carried over from the summer like fennel, curry, basil, all kinds of mint, stevia, tarragon, rosemary. In the spring she hopes to make cucumbers, tomatoes, and parsley and green onions available to a neighboring senior center residence complex because they really want access to fresh seasonings. She also has a market garden portion that will grow for Café Reconcile, a nonprofit restaurant that serves as the primary training ground for “at-risk” students seeking to acquire skills in the food service industry. (They also make a sweet tea that made me cry and a crawfish bisque that’ll get you crawling back for more!)

What issues have you been focused on?

I have primarily been working across the city with interesting people and groups about the notion of creating a viable infrastructure for urban ag in NOLA. What does that mean?What’s the best approach to get us some concrete results? Read More

Big Ag is big business–and big profits. And when anyone raises questions about the billions of tax dollars lavished on the largest industrial growers of corn, soybeans and other commodity crops or points out the harm that these perverse incentives do to the environment, Big Ag’s lackeys lash out.

But bullying your critics and worried consumers is not always the best public relations strategy. Sometimes you need to cultivate the softer sell. Read More

Food and politics often come together in peculiar ways.  It’s not that their coming together at all is unusual – far from it.  Civilization and politics are both a direct result of agriculture.  But these days food’s impact on political discourse can lead to some odd sights, such as free pizza being delivered to protesters in Madison, paid for by sympathetic activists in Egypt. Read More

This past holiday weekend, hundreds of people gathered for a free conference, called Food Justice, hosted by the University of Oregon’s Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics. In the words of the conference organizers the purpose was to, “Explore the history and future of our food system with a focus on three themes: community, equity and sustainability.”

With a heavy hitters Fred Kirschenmann and Dr. Vandana Shiva offering inspiring plenaries and a host of academics and practitioners sharing their latest research and ideas, the event was as stimulating as it was frustrating. As Dr. Shiva so eloquently said in her closing plenary, “No other species has achieved the amazing success of depriving itself of food.” Read More

It’s hard to get behind any food movement (if it can even be categorized as such) these days. While I tend to eat healthy—spending roughly a third of my income (which as a graduate student isn’t very hard) on organic, local foodstuff (mostly bulk grains, vegetables, and fruit)—I can’t buy into any movement that freely throws around—without a hint of irony—terms like “locavore” or “foodie.” Read More

After 20 years promoting organic food and sustainable agriculture, I found myself becoming increasingly cynical about the broader impacts of the food-reform movement. So I closed down my business, sold off my belongings, put on my backpack, and headed to Asia, where I hoped to gain a broader perspective on the environmental and social issues enfolding our planet. It was time to bust myself out of the Bay Area eco-foodie bubble, to which I had grown so accustomed that I believed it wasn’t even a bubble. Read More

Last week, First Lady Michelle Obama told reporters that she would promote breast-feeding, particularly among African-American women, as part of her campaign to reduce childhood obesity. In response, the Internal Revenue Service announced that breast pumps would be eligible for tax breaks. Strangely enough, this simple notion to encourage breast-feeding—which has been shown in many studies to reduce the incidence of childhood obesity and could actually reduce government spending—is the latest idea to be attacked by conservatives. Read More

I’ve heard stories of making granola bars under the heat of the sun, and I’ve seen advertisements attempting to sell $250 solar ovens. But developed and developing countries alike are proving that a scaleable solution for widespread use and availability of the sun’s heat has the potential to greatly affect our daily cooking practices and the concepts behind food production. In America, restaurants are experimenting with solar panels for operational use, even though the cost is still high for harnessing the power of the sun. And in some developing countries, solar cooking has come to mean survival–its value as an energy resource is vital to human sustenance. Read More

Dafna Kory discovered the delights of jalapeno jam during pre-dinner nibbles at a Thanksgiving gathering. She went out to buy a jar, couldn’t find the mighty spicy condiment anywhere, so she began experimenting with making her own. It became an instant hit among her posse. Read More

The Portland Meat Collective (PMC) has its origins in a bavette, dined on in a steakhouse in Portland, Oregon, which led founder Camas Davis to France. Following two months of pure contact with knife and animal, cutting and slicing with a family of butchers in France, Camas now strives to teach Portland her approach to butchery, through classes and interactive training. Read More

On Valentines Day, while most people fretted about dinner reservations or flowers, a coalition of livestock producers, agriculture groups, and consumers took time out to show a little love for fair food by participating in a national call-in day to the White House. Over 2,000 confirmed calls were placed throughout the country to the White House to ask the Obama administration to finalize and implement fair livestock marketing rules. Read More

Last weekend at TEDxManhattan, over twenty speakers covered a wide range of issues under the mantle Changing the Way We Eat. While the TED and TEDx events have focused on food politics before (you can see some of our favorites here), this was the first TEDx event dedicated solely to the issue. Read More

This weekend (Friday, February 19 through Monday, February 21) the University of Oregon at Eugene is hosting a Food Justice conference, where Civil Eats’ editor Naomi Starkman and I will join Friends of Family Farmers’ Megan Fehrman on a panel on New Media and Food Activism, moderated by Michelle Branch. (Those who can make it to Eugene, you should – it promises to be a fantastic event, with keynotes from Vandana Shiva and Fred Kirschenmann, a staged reading of the play Salmon is Everything, a First Foods/Indigenous food politics panel and a FOOD: Art Exhibition.) Read More

The founder and president of the Human League, Nick Cooney, has two tasks as the author of Change of Heart, a book that dissects the interplay between psychology and effective advocacy work. His argument must compel his readers—draw them in through persuasion and confident presentation—and encourage advocates to use his tools to affect the greatest good for humanity. He successfully does both things by offering concrete research on advocacy and a how-to approach (supported by tools for successful campaigning). Cooney’s objective to enact the greatest good for animals is already familiar to many readers, but his theory is relevant to all fields of advocacy and should be viewed as a guide for action. Read More

The successes—and shortcomings—of the Berkeley Unified School District’s revamped school food program received equal billing at yesterday’s premiere screening of short films collectively known as the Lunch Love Community Documentary Project. Read More

Retired City of Berkeley health outreach worker Joy Moore, 59, is anything but retired.

A long-time local food activist, Moore has played a key role in community efforts to reform school lunch in the Berkeley Unified School District, co-founded Farm Fresh Choice, which brings quality, affordable produce to people of lesser means, and was a member of the Berkeley Food Policy Council, a coalition of community and city groups founded in 1999 to increase community food access and improve health for all the city’s residents. Read More

Every year, in a tradition dating to the 1940s, thousands gather in the Spanish town of Buñol for La Tomatina, a giant “food fight,” in which participants gleefully pelt each other with tomatoes and get very, very messy. There’s blood in the streets, but it belongs to the tomatoes. However, according to a study in the prestigious journal, Science, and two in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), we are about to experience food fights of a very different, more deadly type. Read More

Let’s not confuse “agriculture” with “agrarianism” says Steven McFadden in his new book, The Call of the Land: An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century. Then we might think more deeply about our relationship to the earth. Read More

Driving around North Berkeley with Natasha Boissier is an educational experience; where others see a quiet residential area she sees streets lined with potential pickings and delights when she spots prospective bounty or familiar fruit.

Boissier is a part of a growing movement of urban gleaners who pick fruit from people’s yards (with permission) and donate this surplus produce to food banks, senior centers, and schools who can put this fresh food to good use.

Some residents view an abundant fruit tree as a problem but the 42-year-old clinical social worker sees a simple solution to excess bounty and a way to fill a community need. Read More

Last Friday, the USDA announced the partial deregulation of genetically modified sugar beets, defying a court order to complete an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) in advance of a decision. This move follows on the heels of the full deregulation late last month of genetically modified (GM) alfalfa, the fourth most common row crop in the United States, which is most often used as feed for cattle.

If you eat beef, or take milk and sugar in your coffee (and even if you don’t), here is why you should care: The move could put organic foods at risk for contamination and make it more expensive. Read More

One year ago this week, the Obama administration launched Let’s Move, an initiative to solve the problem of childhood obesity within a generation.  It’s an ambitious–but critically important–goal.

In the last 30 years, the percentage of American children who are overweight or obese has tripled. Diet-related disease, diminished academic performance and a shortened life expectancy threaten the future of our kids. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one in three American children born in the year 2000 is on a path toward Type II diabetes. Among children of color, the figure approaches one in two. Retired Generals describe a coming crisis of national security: already, 27 percent of 17-24 year olds are ineligible for military service because of excess body fat.

This administration has placed a strong emphasis on healthy futures for our children, and rightly so: America’s sweeping epidemic of childhood obesity requires us to martial a national response. Read More

Chocolate. For many of us, the sight, aroma and tongue coating decadence are enough to send the brain’s pleasure receptors into overdrive. Seemingly always prized, it has been used over hundreds of years as an offering in religious ceremonies, a currency, and often reserved for the ruling elite. Interest in chocolate often borders on obsession, so much so, that the botanical name for the cacao plant, Theobroma cacao, means “food of the Gods.” Those who testified to the chocolate gospel helped spread it around the world and it has since come to bring simple pleasure to citizens far and wide, high and low across the planet.

Sadly, however, there is a dark side to chocolate that many consumers are often blissfully unaware of, or deliberately chose to ignore. Cacao is grown predominantly on small family farms in a narrow tropical band around the equator. While a handful of massive global corporations control and profit handsomely from the worldwide chocolate trade, millions of cacao farmers and their families toil in poverty year after year and deforestation is widespread. Worse still, child slavery tragically persists, despite reputable international reports that surfaced over a decade ago–in particular highlighting the world’s largest exporter of cocoa, the Ivory Coast. Read More

The USDA released a new set of dietary guidelines this week and the updated guidelines were enough to put nutritionist Marion Nestle in “shock”:

I never would have believed they could pull this off.  The new guidelines recognize that obesity is the number one public health nutrition problem in America and actually give good advice about what to do about it: eat less and eat better. For the first time, the guidelines make it clear that eating less is as priority.

She did criticize the guidelines for talking about “food” when it came to things you needed more of (such as vegetables) and “nutrients” when it was time to talk about cutting back (less saturated fat instead of less meat).

But to be honest, I don’t really want to talk about the dietary guidelines. Read More

Every five years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) publishes dietary guidelines for Americans. The 2010 dietary guidelines are in and to spare you the trouble of reading the 95-page report, here are the key points: Enjoy your food, but eat less; avoid oversized portions; make half of your plate fruits and vegetables; switch to fat-free or low-fat (one percent) milk; compare sodium in foods like soup, bread and frozen meals and choose the food with lower numbers; drink water instead of sugary drinks.

These are decent and reasonable guidelines for the most part, and in general, the response from experts has been subdued—no one is jumping for joy, but no one is up in arms either. Read More

Trading a comfortable job in a big city for a labor job on a small farm is no longer a novelty. I joined the trend this past season, leaving an editing job in Manhattan to intern at Waterpenny Farm, an ecological vegetable farm in rural Virginia. My intentions were simple: learn how to grow the food I spent half my paycheck on at Whole Foods. Read More

At the beginning of last December, the basement of Viracocha Gallery was brimming with some of the most exotic, rare, delicious, and even deadly mushrooms in the Bay Area. The astonishing array of fungi weren’t growing there–they were brought in by four pioneers in cultivating, cooking, and foraging mushrooms, who gathered to speak to a packed house for the last Kitchen Table Talks of 2010. Read More

Proponents of The Dream Act argued in a debate this past December that young people who were in the U.S. “illegally, but through no fault of their own” (that is, they were not part of making such a decision since they were so young) should ultimately be de facto citizens since they had grown up “American” and were fulfilling an essential American purpose of striving to achieve and succeed, as college students or members of the military. To deny them eventual citizenship would be, according to UC Berkeley President Robert Birgeneau, “a terrible waste of young talent—talent that this country desperately needs.”

But does the notion of “talent that this country desperately needs” have to be limited to the focus on young people in higher education and the military? We would argue that it can be–and should be–an argument of those who advocate for a healthier, more sustainable, more equitable, more just, and more diverse food system. Immigrants and food are joined in the fields and at the plate; they represent an essential connection for how the food system can be changed. Read More