Civil Eats

Applying* a cancer-causing poison on California’s farm fields sounds like some dastardly plot hatched by a Batman super-villain. Unfortunately, reality is often scarier than fiction. In December 2010, the State of California approved the known carcinogen methyl iodide for use on the state’s farm fields. Yes, you read that right—a chemical that actually causes cancer was approved to be applied* on the fields that grow the Golden State’s most prized crops.

Earthjustice promptly filed a lawsuit in January challenging the state’s approval of the toxic pesticide. As a result of the lawsuit, Earthjustice recently obtained internal documents detailing dire warnings about methyl iodide from scientists at the California Department of Pesticide Regulation. Unfortunately, those dire warnings fell on deaf ears and then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger approved methyl iodide for use. Read More

When I first lost my job, we applied for emergency food assistance. Then, when I saw how little was provided for our family of five, I went into panic mode and bought the cheapest stuff I could find: a coffin-sized crate of ramen noodle packages, a box of Cheerios as big as an ottoman. No longer did I shop for the “best”—organic, free range, all natural—I was now shopping for the cheapest.

And I was not alone in trying to negotiate this shift from affluent foodie to poverty-level mom just trying to feed her family on next to nothing. Take a look at the numbers and be startled along with me. As you can see, there was an unprecedented jump in participants in the program after the Great Recession in 2008 began. Suddenly, families who were unaccustomed to financial struggle joined the ranks of the truly needy, and we didn’t know how to shop for it! And still, after a few years of this “New Poor” culture, we are looked at with derision when we try to maintain our values as careful consumers and healthy eaters.

Thankfully, however, there are ways to make a mountain (of produce) out of a molehill (of money.) Read More

Dozens of United States diplomatic cables released in the latest WikiLeaks dump last Wednesday reveal new details of the US effort to push foreign governments to approve  genetically engineered (GE) crops and promote the worldwide interests of agribusiness giants like Monsanto and DuPont. Read More

News flash: the chairman of the board of one of the largest food companies in the world—whose tripling in profits from 2009 to nearly $43 billion in 2010 was generating from selling mainly processed foods produced with inputs from industrial, chemical farms—is “skeptical” of organic food, reports FastCompany.com.

Don’t you think someone who made $10.7 million in 2010 from a company whose profit primarily depends on chemical agriculture might have a bias in the matter? Yes, it would be understandable to think Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of the Board of Nestlé, might. It also might be understandable to want to know what others, those without such a financial interest in the food status quo, think about the viability of non-industrial agriculture. But in the FastCompany.com article, like other press that pooh-poohs organic farming, those who disagree, if they’re mentioned at all, are portrayed as marginal or unqualified to speak to the issue.

In FastCompany.com, the other side is represented by unnamed (and unquoted) “nutrition professors and some food scientists.” No offense to nutrition professors and food scientists, but what if you had, instead, learned that the viability, efficiency, and safety of industrial agriculture is being questioned not only by professors and some food scientists but by countless agronomists, food security experts, economists, epidemiologists, public health experts all around the world? What if instead of “nutrition professors and some food scientists,” you heard about the numerous peer-reviewed and meta-studies that contradict Brabeck-Letmathe’s claims. Read More

“For folks who have cooked their whole lives, taking business into their own hands with their family by their sides, is a huge risk. But it provides potentially huge freedom,” said Caleb Zigas, director of San Francisco’s La Cocina culinary incubator summarizing the second National Street Food Conference at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

The conference, held August 21-22, united street food entrepreneurs and mobile vending policy makers from around the country to share experiences and insights around trends, marketing, and money. Conversations about freedom, daring, and risk wove throughout each session.  Read More

I’ve got a problem with the food system conversation in the U.S.  It neglects to include what I call the “first food”—breast milk—and emphasize the critical importance of breastfeeding. No conversation about equitable food systems can truly exist without including the first food and understanding how the racial and social inequities around breastfeeding adversely affect vulnerable populations.

If access to healthy food is a basic human right then doesn’t that right start at birth? Shouldn’t our smallest and most vulnerable citizens have fair and just access to the healthiest food for them?

Consider the facts: For the past 30 years, breastfeeding rates among black women, particularly those in underserved, food desert communities, have been significantly lower than all other ethnicities. In the U.S., African American infants are more than twice as likely to die before their first birthday than other infants. In some cities, the stats are even more sobering: Memphis, Tennessee ranks at the top of the list for infant deaths in American cities—where a baby dies every 43 hours. Read More

Earlier this summer, as I was hauling a bag of farmers market produce home 15 blocks and up four flights of stairs, sweating bullets, cursing my choice to buy a melon (they’re heavy!), I stopped mid-step.

“Does it really have to be this hard?” I asked myself.

My story is particular to me, of course, but all over the country there are people trying to put food on the table and asking themselves “does it really have to be this hard?” Read More

I accepted an invitation from Derrick Kiyabu recently to visit MA’O Organic Farm where the path out of poverty starts with a walk down the farm’s vegetable rows. On the west side of the island of Oahu, just past Honolulu’s ocean view condos and the Pearl Harbor Naval Base I found myself on Highway 93 where a sign saying “Now Leaving Paradise, Welcome to Poverty” would be placed if tourist officials chose to acknowledge such things. But lacking what many vacationers are looking for in a tropical getaway, the Wai’anae Coast, as it is commonly known, can only offer fast-food joints, scruffy commercial buildings, and residential housing that rivals the worst of third-world Asia. Perhaps this is why the Lonely Planet guidebook refers to the region, almost quaintly, as “a little bit of Appalachia by the sea.” Read More

A recent recall of 36 million pounds of salmonella-contaminated turkey by the company Cargill reminded Americans once again about the failings of our food safety system. While the debt deal struck earlier this month puts funding for the Food Safety Modernization Act, which passed in 2010 and will help the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) improve the safety of our food, at risk, there is information that can empower consumers now. Below is a comprehensive info graphic by the Heath and Fitness Blog Greatist.com that explains what you need to know about shopping for, handling and cooking food more safely, as well as a briefing on the sources of food-borne illness. Read More

People seem to have an insatiable appetite for food matters right now. Case in point: the public tickets for Edible Education 101 at UC Berkeley were snapped up in 12 minutes on Monday, according to a tweet from Alice Waters, who played a key role in bringing the curriculum to the university.

The 13-week course, co-taught by J-school professor and The Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan, and Nikki Henderson, the executive director of People’s Grocery, a food justice organization in West Oakland, will examine the rise and future of the food movement. Student enrollment for the one-semester course also filled within minutes after it was listed online, as Berkeleyside reported earlier this month.

Why such interest? The class offers undergrads, grad students, and regular folk a chance to critique current food systems and dissect food politics with Pollan, Henderson, and Waters, as well as a slew of other big names in the food movement, including Marion Nestle and Eric Schlosser. The course kicks off with a lecture by Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini on August 30th. The class also coincides with the 40th anniversary celebration of Chez Panisse restaurant. Read More

At a compost bin that doubles as a podium, urban farming hero Will Allen faced the inaugural class of 50 FoodCorps service members—sitting together in Milwaukee but about to spin out to ten states around the country–giving them advice for the year of service they have ahead of them.

“There’s a lot of skill and knowledge existing in the communities you’re going into. You’ll bring stuff, and you’ll learn stuff. It’s a two-way street,” he said. “That’s how real sustainability works.” Read More

With all due respect, Nina Federoff’s New York Times op-ed reads like it was written two decades ago when the jury was still out about the potential of the biotech industry to reduce hunger, increase nutritional quality in foods, and decrease agriculture’s reliance on toxic chemicals and other expensive inputs that most of the world’s farmers can’t afford.

With more than 15 years of commercialized GMOs behind us, we know not to believe these promises any longer.

Around the world, from the Government Office of Science in the UK to the National Research Council in the United States, to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, there is consensus: in order to address the roots of hunger today and build a food system that will feed the future, we must invest in “sustainable intensification”—not expensive GMO technology that threatens biodiversity and locks us into dependence on fossil fuels, fossil water, and agrochemicals. And that’s never proven its superiority, even in yields. Read More

Very few people in Iowa have had a greater impact on the movement to protect real food than Diane Ott Whealy. Co-founder of Decorah’s Seed Savers Exchange, she is the author of a new memoir detailing a life obsessed with seeds and soil, farm and family. Read More

For a dozen years Greg Allen has been living in Harlem and thinking, “Someone should open a grocery store here.” He would goad the owner of the nearest corner store, telling him he’d be the richest man on the block if he would only stock fresh produce — but to no avail. Meanwhile, as a caseworker, Allen was becoming increasingly frustrated as he watched young people age out of the homeless youth program he worked for. Participants leave the program at the age of 24 never having held a job in their lives, so their prospects start out dismal and just worsen as time goes on. Then one day Allen put the two problems together and came up with a solution he’s calling the Sweetwork Project. Read More

Seattle is where Asian America intersects with food and environmental justice, as I discovered when I spoke there recently as part of a “Sustainable Growth Summit” convened by the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Seattle embodies the diversity, contradictions and great talent that define our Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community: wealth and poverty, hunger and abundance, access or exclusion based on citizenship and English language proficiency. Read More

When you think of Smucker’s, jelly and jams typically come to mind. But those commodities are just the tip of the iceberg. The J.M. Smucker Company is actually a leading distributor of Folgers and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee brands (who knew?), with coffee accounting for 40 percent of the company’s net sales and nearly half of its profits. That’s a whole lot of coffee, considering that the company sells and manufactures many other widely used household brands like Crisco, Jif, and Pillsbury. Read More

Next year, developers plan to apply for permits for the construction of America’s largest open-pit copper and gold mine, in the heart of Alaska’s most valuable salmon runs. It’s not too late for us to stop them if we act now. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently considering requests from stakeholders to use its power under the Clean Water Act to protect Bristol Bay. FRESH, Parent Earth and Trout Unlimited are combining grassroots forces to take action and I hope you’ll join us by signing the petition!

Pebble Mine would cover 20 square miles in the Bristol Bay watershed, and require the construction of the world’s largest earthen dam for a 10 square mile waste containment pond. Up to 10 billion tons of toxic mine wastes could be produced. Any release of these wastes could cause irreparable damage to the Bristol Bay salmon runs.

Even worse: while our wild salmon are under threat, genetically modified salmon may be introduced to the market any day. Here is exclusive footage with Paul Greenberg, best-selling author of Four Fish. He explains why hybrid Frankensalmon has no place on our tables, especially when we have an abundant, healthy alternative. Read More

By keeping the size, colors, and flavors of foods consistent, large-scale producers are elbowing out the fragile, juicy, and region-specific foods that used to make our fields and plates exciting. The U.S. Ark of Taste, a program of Slow Food USA, seeks to reverse this trend. The Ark is a growing list of foods that are flavorful, culturally rooted, and at risk of extinction. Slow Food members from around the country nominate foods to the Ark and mobilize volunteers to keep them in production.

Why is food diversity important? For one, interesting new flavors can entice even the pickiest of eaters to try more fruits and veggies. On an environmental scale, ecosystems thrive when they include a diversity of organisms. And while some genetic adaptations might not have immediately apparent benefits, preserving a deep gene pool is critical for long-term food security. Read More

In case you missed the announcement, this week is National Farmers Market Week. No matter. If you shop regularly at one of the more than 7,000 markets across the country, every week is farmers market week. That’s true in my neighborhood, where FreshFarm Markets started the first producer-only farmers market in Washington, D.C., 14 years ago. Read More

A young female farm worker picking fruit in Washington’s Yakima Valley came to see Dr. Matthew Keifer after pesticides being sprayed in an adjacent orchard wafted onto her. She arrived with red, swollen eyes and itchy, irritated skin—classic symptoms of exposure to Paraquat, a common weedkiller that can cause kidney, heart, and liver problems.

Keifer suspected the Paraquat had made her sick, but proving those suspicions was impossible: For many pesticides, no tests exist that would show, definitively, whether or not a person been has exposed to the chemical. Had a test existed, Keifer’s patient would have been able to to file a workers compensation claim that, if successful, would have covered the costs of her medical care and given her paid time off while she recovered. Instead, she went without. Read More

There’s a new study out purporting to show that, as this AP story puts it, “healthy eating is a privilege of the rich.” In many ways, this headline is meant to be a spear slicing deeply into the Achilles heel of the food movement. In one stroke, it seems to confirm the stereotype of the elitist, Alice Waters-loving, farmers-market-shopping locavore who demands we all drop the Doritos and start learning to love kale chips instead. It is, however, a bit of an overstatement.The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, is actually doing something a bit different from what the news coverage would lead you to believe. Read More

I recently attended a ranch field day at TomKat Ranch in Pescadero, California, hosted by the California Climate and Agriculture Network.  The focus was on the climate benefits of sustainable ranching-an overview of how properly managed rangelands (grasslands where animals graze) can sequester carbon dioxide (CO₂) in soils and help reduce greenhouse gas emission.  This is no easy task, and one that is the subject of much debate. Read More

Wal-Mart, the world’s largest corporation and food retailer, wants to remake its image. Its latest claim about its aggressive “food desert” strategy–that it plans to open more grocery stores in underserved areas–was made at a news conference where Michelle Obama spoke about the need to develop new sources of fresh and healthy food. At this press conference, Wal-Mart asserted that it was the biggest player on the block, having developed 218 stores in food desert areas between 2007 and 2011, with plans to build another 275-300 new stores in such areas by 2016.

How can one evaluate these assertions, given the problem of Wal-Mart’s long standing lack of transparency?  There are no maps of store locations with which to fact check Wal-Mart. Nor is there information about where and what products it sources for all its 8,970 stores around the world, including the more than 3,000 stores (2,900 of them huge supercenters) that sell groceries in the U.S. Read More

I wonder what was on the minds of the first 13 young Freedom Riders–six white and seven black–the day before they got on a Greyhound bus in D.C., headed to the South 50 years ago in spring 1961.  Were they nervous, for themselves and their future, that the law to desegregate interstate commerce wouldn’t uphold in a still-segregated South?  Did they feel any pride for their anticipated acts of non-violence, soon capturing the attention of the world and cementing themselves in the history of racial equality?

I’ll soon find out.  It’s the day before I get on a bus in Birmingham, Alabama with 12 other young folk from across the country of all different backgrounds to seek another form of Civil Rights.  The Freedom Riders sought racial justice.  We are seeking real food justice. We’re changing the food system in our own communities and meeting others who are doing the same, whether it’s increasing access to affordable healthy food for low-income communities, getting better conditions for food chain workers, or reclaiming traditional food cultures. Read More

In the last year, international food prices have reached record peaks. In many countries, high food prices have contributed to unrest, instability, violence and increasing inequality and poverty. While volatile food prices impact everyone, the impacts vary across the globe with the poorest and most vulnerable people often getting the shortest end of the stick.

To shed more light on the impacts of food price spikes, Oxfam has created an interactive map of Food Price Volatility Pressure Points. This map shows the impacts of price spikes in some of the countries where food prices have complicated the lives of poor people and offers a chance to take action on to help address price volatility.

The map shows are areas that are highly vulnerable to price spikes, countries that have had extreme weather events contribute to global price hikes and places that have seen price spikes contribute to violence or unrest that has shaken the foundation of global stability. While this map alone does not tell the full story of how price spikes have impacted our world, it offers a global snapshot to give us a better understanding of what is happening in communities near and far. Read More

Cargill announced Wednesday it is recalling almost 36 million pounds of ground turkey products that may be contaminated with a multi-drug resistant strain of Salmonella Heidelberg, a pathogen linked to at least 76 illnesses across the United States and one death in California.

The recalled meat came from a single processing facility in Springdale, Arkansas, but ended up in dozens of different ground turkey products sold nationwide under a variety of brand names including Honeysuckle White, Shady Brook Farms, Riverside, Aldi’s Fit and Active Fresh, Spartan, Giant Eagle, Kroger and Safeway. Read More

It’s an unlikely story: A vegan chef and his vegetarian wife open a butcher shop that becomes a commercial hit and an industry game-changer. It all started thanks to that omnivore gateway meat, bacon, which for years was Jessica Applestone’s one vegetarian exception. When she started craving more meat she searched for meat that aligned with her ethics: Something raised with respect for the animal and for the environment. But she found meat labels confusing.

She concluded her best option was to buy a whole steer from a farmer, but how to deal with a whole animal when she was the only meat-eater in the family? Jessica’s dilemma revealed a gap in the market: Butcher shops that break down whole, well-raised animals for the average home cook. Her husband Joshua saw an opportunity and the couple began the painstaking training and groundwork that eventually became Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats in Kingston, New York. Read More

When Brandon Sheard brings his knife across the throat of a sheep, his movements are swift and precise.  The sheep, lying calmly on her side in the pasture on which she has lived her whole life, gently closes her eyes.  Brandon rests his hand on her throat and offers a prayer of gratitude to affirm the sacrifice of her life.

Brandon and his wife Lauren are the proprietors of Farmstead Meatsmith, a small business on Vashon Island, WA, that provides the services of slaughter, butchery, and charcuterie to small farmers in the Puget Sound region, as well as classes in slaughter and butchery. Read More

Thursday, August 4 is the final day for public comment on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) plan to limit mercury emissions from coal and oil-fired power plants. Two decades overdue, the proposed regulation would capture 91 percent of airborne mercury before it leaves the smokestack.

Despite widely available and proven technology, power-plant mercury currently floats unregulated beyond the reach of the Clean Air Act. While the utilities industry has delayed regulation through lobbying and court challenges, I have watched upwind construction of more than 20 new coal-fired generators over the past 20 years. Read More

I think we can all agree that the sedative power of television provides escape; much like any number of self-numbing tools we may choose to consume one way or another. I fully admit to administering a daily dose of TV at the end of a long day, just enough to blur the mind space and glaze the eyes until I drag myself to bed a short hour or two later. I’m not very proud of it, I know there are countless more productive things I could be doing during that time. But the whole seduction is just that…television takes away the need to be productive. It is a glossy, other world of fantasy, adventure, and illusion. Why else do we find ourselves saturated in this “reality” TV culture? The lives of others takes us outside of our own, an episode of someone’s experience gives us respite from the banality of our day to day. Sometimes, however, there are occasions when some genuine truth seeps in. And if we can discipline our channel surfing thumbs to the right place, the content that sneaks into our brains can actually present some positive, constructive, and educational information.

Real Food Real Kitchens is a new PBS cooking show that is just that: Real. Far from the patina falseness of Rachel Ray’s shiny kitchen set, this show portrays actual homes and documents a person making a family recipe. It is at once a look at community, at culture, at health, and at food. And, in a time when we are so far removed from all of these things in this country, it is a welcome change from the usual Food Network lineup. Read More