Trueman: We produce more than enough food in the U.S. to feed every man, woman and child. In fact, we’ve got such a surplus that we throw away almost half of it. But more than 47 million Americans–including roughly 16 million kids–struggle with hunger.

And with budget cuts undermining our food stamp program, aka SNAP, this problem’s only getting worse. Who has the power to change this shameful state of affairs, and how?

Nestle: I’ve just seen A Place at the Table (a film in which I briefly appear), which lays out today’s hunger problem in a particularly poignant way. It was clear from the film that its low-income participants had to deal with what is now called “food insecurity,” meaning that they couldn’t count on a reliable supply of adequate food on a daily basis and sometimes didn’t have enough to eat. But they also had to deal with another problem: the food that they did get was mostly junk food. So the question really should be worded somewhat differently: How can we ensure that everyone in America can afford enough healthy food?

I’m guessing that the makers of A Place at the Table intended it to do for the 2013 version of food insecurity what the CBS television documentary, Hunger in America, did in 1968. That film showed footage of children so starved and listless that they might as well have come from countries at war or refugee camps.

What seems impossible to imagine in 2013 is the effect of that documentary. It shocked the nation. Viewers were outraged that American adults and children did not have enough to eat. Within that year, President Nixon called a White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health to recommend programs and policies to end hunger, and Congress appointed the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs (the McGovern committee) to develop legislation. This worked. Food assistance and other programs reduced poverty and hunger. Our present-day WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) and SNAP (food stamp) programs are the legacy of that outrage.

Where is that outrage today? Without it, Congress can ignore the millions of people who depend on SNAP benefits and view the nearly $80 billion cost of those benefits as an enticing target for budget cutting.

Who has the power to do something decent about hunger? In a word, Congress. Unlike the situation under presidents Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson—all of whom took decisive action to help the poor–hunger in America today is nothing but a pawn in Washington power politics. We have come to value personal responsibility at the expense of social responsibility. It’s hard for many Americans to think that we must be our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers when our own economic status feels at risk.

If we can’t count on Congress to do the right thing, we have to try to create our own local food security and engage communities in helping to care for one another. This means advocacy and coalition-building on two levels: national and local. On the national level, it means exercising democratic rights as citizens to lobby congressional representatives to address poverty and its consequences no matter how futile that may seem. On the local level, it means working with community residents to address their needs. It means engaging the media to get the word out.

That’s where Food Bloggers Against Hunger can help. Your job is to generate outrage and to encourage your readers to act. Go for it!

When his Times colleague David Rohde was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2008, Moss’s editors decided to bring Moss home and give him a safer beat: The processed food industry.

But in the terrorist-free terrain of Big Food’s boardrooms and Big Ag’s labs, Moss found himself once again reporting on body counts caused by a government agency’s failure to protect us. Only this time, the agents of death were salmonella and E. coli, not Al Qaeda. And the agencies in question were the FDA and USDA, not the Pentagon.

Of course, these deaths were the tragic result of negligence, incompetence, and greed, rather than an ideologically driven desire to murder innocent Americans. No food company would set out to fatally sicken anyone by intentionally contaminating its products with known toxins.

But Moss’s book raises the specter that some of them seem to be OK with engineering what is, essentially, a kind of chemical warfare. They’re well-acquainted with the studies Moss cites which suggest that salty, fatty, sugary foods reward the same pleasure sensors in our brains that drugs do. In fact, they don’t even bother to assemble focus groups to sample the latest snack foods and beverages anymore, because now they can bypass our subjective perceptions and just scan our brains directly to monitor how our taste buds are responding.

Moss reveals that food company executives–like the tobacco industry before them–have long been acutely aware of and worried about the health hazards presented by their products. And yet, despite those concerns about their culpability, processed food giants like Kraft, General Foods and Nestlé continue to launch an all-out assault on the American palate to convert us to “heavy users”–their term–of the salty, sugary, fatty processed foods that have proven so profitable for them and so harmful to us. They target especially vulnerable demographics: Impressionable children and low-income, low-information shoppers who lack the means and knowledge to make healthier food choices.

Their scientists and marketing mavens tinker endlessly with chemical formulas, and create branding and packaging that entice us to consume excessive quantities of the highly processed, calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods and beverages that are slowly poisoning Americans on a scale that terrorists could only dream of.

And they’ve been aided and abetted in this campaign by the tobacco industry, which responded to growing scrutiny about the hazards of its sole product by snapping up processed food companies in a bid to expand its portfolio and its profits. The same sleazy, disingenuous strategies that tobacco executives once used to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking are trotted out once again by the usual suspects, aka the Merchants of Doubt, to deceive the public about the perils of processed foods.

But don’t look to the USDA to counter those tactics in any meaningful way. As Moss notes, the USDA has the impossible job of simultaneously encouraging more wholesome eating habits while promoting the interests of industrial agriculture.

Any doubts about which of those mandates comes first? The USDA oversees the promotion of its agricultural agenda from its massive headquarters in the heart of Washington, D.C. But the branch of the USDA tasked with ensuring the public’s health, The Center For Nutritional Policy and Promotion, is located across the river on the outskirts of Alexandria, Virginia. To get there, Moss had to take the DC Metro, transfer to a bus, and then walk a third of a mile. And out of a total budget of some $146 billion, the center receives a pitiful $6.5 million dollars. Hardly enough to offset the astronomical sums of money the food industry spends to develop and market its junky convenience foods.

Moss spent several years combing through mountains of documents, including confidential memos, and conducted hundreds of interviews with industry insiders. He found a few disillusioned whistleblowers and a handful of individuals who genuinely wanted to provide consumers with more wholesome options. But their efforts to chip away at the horrendous quantities of salt, fats and sugars the industry relies on to mask the shortcomings of its cheap commodity crop ingredients invariably hit a deadend labeled “Wall Street.”

Campbell’s Soup, for instance, found that it could reduce the sodium content of some of its soups without sacrificing too much flavor if they added dried herbs to their recipes. But the herbs were deemed “too expensive.” And despite claims from all of these companies that they are committed to offering healthier products, the reality is that none of them wants to risk sacrificing market share–or, as they call it, “stomach share”–to their competitors. To cut back on salt, fat and sugar is, essentially, a form of disarmament. So, barring some sort of self-imposed or government-mandated unilateral disarmament, there’s not likely to be much improvement in the quality of processed foods anytime soon.

In his interviews with scientists, food company executives, and other food industry insiders, Moss found their reactions to the public health hazard they’ve helped to create ran the gamut from defiantly unrepentant to sincerely remorseful. He notes, too, that whether food company executives openly acknowledge the shortcomings of their nutritionally dubious foodstuffs or not, none of them actually eats or drinks their own company’s products.

Under the circumstances, Moss writes, we’d be well advised to “think of the grocery store as a battlefield, dotted with landmines itching to go off.” The Wall Street Journal‘s review of Moss’s book dismissed this statement as “unnecessary hyperbole,” a word they also used to dismiss the scientists’ claims that junk foods can be as addictive in their own way as cocaine.

But as Salt Sugar Fat shows, it’s not hyperbole; it’s just another inconvenient truth. In the new documentary A Place at the Table, another exposé of our screwed-up food chain from Participant Media, who brought us Food, Inc., the actor and longtime anti-hunger activist Jeff Bridges bemoans the collective failure of private enterprise and public policy to provide affordable wholesome foods to all Americans. Instead, we’ve got government-subsidized empty calories from commodity crops and a rapacious food industry that seems to regard children as fair game in their eternal quest for greater market share.

“If another country was doing this to our kids,” Bridges says, “we would be at war.” When you read Salt Sugar Fat, it’s hard not to conclude that we already are at war. After all, there’s a real body count.

When Moss was a war correspondent in the Middle East, he wrote an article outlining the rules of jihadi etiquette, which included the edicts that “you can kill bystanders without feeling a lot of guilt,” and “you can kill children, too, without needing to feel distress.” The food industry folks that Moss interviewed for Salt Sugar Fat didn’t offer any such clear-cut commandments about acceptable levels of collateral damage. And anyway, it’s not their fault if we fail to exercise the proverbial “personal responsibility” it requires to resist their strenuous efforts to tempt us to eat and drink ourselves sick. Besides, they’re just giving the public what it craves. And that, unlike salmonella and E. coli, is not by accident.

From the moment Beyoncé strapped on those stilettos to bounce around in the “Move Your Body” video, she’s been a wobbly spokesperson for Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move Campaign.” Now she’s signed a $50 million dollar deal with Pepsi, which will presumably entail her exhorting her millions of young fans to baste their bodies in bubbly high fructose corn syrup.

Apparently, she didn’t get the childhood obesity/diabetes epidemic memo. Do celebrities with Beyoncé’s massive influence on young kids have a moral obligation to consider the horrendous impact of excessive soda consumption in our culture when they mull over megabuck branding opportunities?

From my privileged position as a tenured, full-salaried faculty member at NYU, the answer is an unambiguous yes. Beyoncé will now be marketing sugar-sweetened beverages, products increasingly linked to childhood obesity, especially among minority children.

This linkage is not a coincidence. Pepsi and other makers of sugary sodas deliberately and systematically market their products to low-income, minority children.

Beyoncé will now be part of that targeted marketing campaign.

If Beyoncé’s mission is to inspire young people of any color to look gorgeous and rise to the top, as she has done, she is now telling them that the way to get there—and to get rich—is to drink Pepsi. This untrue suggestion is, on its own, unethical.

Pepsi must think that getting this message out, and putting Beyoncé’s photo on its soda cans, is well worth $50 million.

For PepsiCo, $50 million is trivial. According to Advertising Age (June 2012), PepsiCo sold $66.5 billion worth of products in 2011, for a profit of $6.4 billion. Pepsi sales in the U.S. accounted for $22 billion of that.

PepsiCo’s total advertising budget funneled through advertising agencies, and therefore reportable, was $944 million. Of that amount, $196 million was used to market Pepsi alone. The rest went for Gatorade ($105 million), Mountain Dew ($23 million) and PepsiCo’s many other Quaker and Frito-Lay products.

One other relevant point: half of PepsiCo’s annual sales are outside the United States. Like other multinational food companies, it is focusing marketing efforts on emerging economies. This means that Beyoncé will also be pushing sugary drinks on people in developing countries. PepsiCo just spent $72 million to sponsor cricket tournaments in India, for example.

Fifty million dollars seems like an unimaginable amount of money to me. If PepsiCo offered it to me, I would have to turn it down on the grounds of conflict of interest. But this is easy for me to say, because the scenario is so unlikely.

What $50 million means for Beyoncé I cannot know. Some sources estimate her net worth at $300 million. If so, $50 million adds a substantial percentage. And the Pepsi deal will give her phenomenal exposure.

But from where I sit, Beyoncé has crossed an ethical line. She is now pushing soft drinks on the very kids whose health is most at risk. And her partnership with Pepsi will make public health measures to counter obesity even more difficult.

This is a clear win for Pepsi. And a clear loss for public health.

Beyoncé has now become the world’s most prominent spokesperson for poor diets, obesity and its health consequences, and marketing targeted to the most vulnerable populations.

Sad.

Tracie McMillan’s The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table takes us on a vivid and poignant tour of a place we don’t really want to go: the mostly hidden, sometimes horrible world of the workers who form the backbone of our cheap, industrialized food chain. Sound grim? It is, at times, but McMillan’s lively narrative and evident empathy for the people she encounters make her sojourn into the bowels of Big Food and Big Ag a pleasure to read.

From the fields of California’s Central Valley to the produce aisle of a Michigan Walmart, and lastly, the kitchen of a Brooklyn Applebee’s, McMillan gives a firsthand account of the long hours, lousy wages and difficult conditions that are par for the course in these places. This is tricky terrain for a white, relatively privileged, middle-class American woman, and McMillan navigates it with grace and humility, remaining acutely aware of the pitfalls inherent in such a project.

I sat down with McMillan recently to chat about her populist odyssey and found her to be just as down-to-earth and plucky as her prose.

What was the hardest part of going undercover?

This was the first time I had gone undercover to do work like that, because I believe very strongly in the importance of being upfront with people about what you’re doing and who you are and I am not a good actress (laughs). So the place where I was culturally the least good of a fit, in the fields, I was really protected by the fact that I didn’t speak the language. I just seemed like a kind of dumb white girl, and that was really helpful.

The first thing was getting over my anxiety over doing that kind of project and coming to terms with it. It meant that I had to be dishonest with my coworkers. I don’t really care so much that I’m not honest with the companies. It’s very interesting, the same year that I was working at Walmart during the holiday season, Stephanie Rosenbloom at the New York Times went and worked for a day at a Walmart with the company’s permission, and she had a very different experience than I did.

And that’s why you do it. Companies and supervisors do not treat you the same, and coworkers won’t be as honest with you, or as open. I’ve come out of this very convinced that undercover work is worthwhile, but it’s a complicated thing. There’s a tendency to think “I can totally do this, and how else can I get this information?” but I also understand why people react badly to it sometimes.

So there was the undercover thing, and then there was finding the right balance between my narrative and talking about the people I was with. It’s not supposed to be about me as a white girl having that experience; the idea is that I can only tell my story and what I observed, but I’m using that to get to the stories of the other people around me.

You found that farm work in California’s Central Valley was extremely demanding, sometimes dangerous, and routinely underpaid. What do you think it would take to provide the people who pick our crops with better working conditions and paychecks that don’t deliberately shortchange them?

I was typically working alongside undocumented immigrants. You always hear the stories about how undocumented immigrants work for very low wages and how they get treated. It’s one thing to hear about it, it’s another thing to see how terrified everybody is, how unwilling they are to say anything.

They complained about it outside of work, we’d talk about how bad the wages were and the women were like, “Why don’t you say anything?” For me that was really awkward, because I wanted to say “That’s terrible, and I will march off and I will fix everything!” Which is not something you can do as an undercover reporter.

Even if you’re undocumented, you still have legal rights, but they don’t necessarily know that. And even the ones that do, it’s not like they have a guaranteed job, you could be hired or fired at any moment. There’s no job security. So, you keep working, and at least you have the stability of knowing that you will get your eight hours of work for which you’re paid $25 to $40.

How do you fix that? You enforce the existing labor laws. You don’t necessarily need new ones. I think it’s important not to stifle businesses’ ability to do their job, but I did observe when I was working in the fields that every week I was asked to sign a piece of paper stating that I had taken food safety training that I had never taken. One of the arguments around food safety is that farmers should be allowed to self-regulate that. I saw in my work that self-regulation wasn’t working.

And in terms of labor law enforcement, you need some sense that people are going to get in trouble if they cheat workers. The average fine levied under the Agricultural Worker Protection Act is about $350. During my time in the fields I was underpaid by about $500.

A farm advocate in Ohio explained to me that it’s cheaper to violate the law and pay when someone complains than it is to follow the law.

Can you even imagine how different conditions would have to be for it to not be an anomaly to have someone with your own background choosing that kind of work?

That’s called unionization and massive social change! Factory work in the early 20th century was really dangerous and it didn’t pay very well, but those became really good jobs because there was unionization and legislation to protect workers. My grandfather raised my mother and her two brothers and took care of my grandmother on the salary he earned working for Ford.

So, if you could figure out a way to make farm labor a better job in terms of wages and working conditions, more people would do it. The reason why people don’t do farm labor isn’t because they’re, like, “Oh, we’re too good to be in the fields,” it’s because it’s really hard work that often doesn’t pay minimum wage. Picking up garbage is a shitty job, too, but people still go do that, because it’s a decent gig.

What were your most miserable moments?

This belies my upwardly mobile aspirations (laughs). For me, what was the most emotionally miserable was working the night shift at Walmart. I didn’t see any daylight for the most part. That’s also really physical work, so I would move half a ton of sugar and a half ton of flour in a night, by myself. It’s isolated work, you’re in an aisle stocking by yourself, so there’s no social aspect to it.

But what I found most draining about it was that most of my coworkers, many of whom were married and had families, had been there for seven, 10, 15 years. One coworker was earning $11 an hour after working there for seven years, and she talked about how if you worked at Walmart for 15 years that’s actually really good because you get a lifetime discount card.

There’s something really sobering when what you’re aspiring to is that if you stick it out at $10, $11, $12 an hour you’re going to get a lifetime 10-percent discount card.

Walmart keeps touting its commitment to fresh healthy produce, but in your experience, they treated fresh fruits and vegetables just like any other non-perishable consumer good. Their blasé attitude toward the fresh produce engendered so much waste! How do you square that with their famous obsession for maximizing profit?

I was really shocked to be working at Walmart and to see how inefficient the place I was working was. I have no idea if that department was just an anomaly, or if that’s a broader problem.

Randy, the manager, was incredibly young, didn’t really know what he was doing, and didn’t particularly care. For that, I would fault the store management. It’s one thing to be really bad at your job, but why did somebody give you that job?

What was really upsetting to me was that one of my colleagues, I think I call him Sam in the book, who’s a black man, he had come to Walmart after the grocery store he worked at closed down. He had been working in produce for five years and knew a lot, so I could ask him anything, like “How do I tell if this is ripe?” Sam had applied for that job and they had given it to Randy instead. I have no idea who on the planet would have picked Randy over Sam, because Sam knew produce, whereas Randy had a background in electronics.

You write, “When cooking instruction is paired with basic nutrition education, Americans cook more and eat more healthfully–even when money is tight.” What’s your prescription for battling kitchen illiteracy?

Almost everything people are eating at home involves some degree of convenience foods. That kind of thing usually tends to have a lot of salt and preservatives in it. But it’s actually no more time-intensive to do a Hamburger Helper kind of thing from scratch, and it’s actually cheaper.

The thing that sucks about a box isn’t that it’s quick–it’s that if you don’t already know how to cook, you think you can’t make a cake without a box. We need to start thinking about cooking as a basic life skill, not something that’s optional. Incorporating that into public education to me seems like a smart idea. It can be a really great way to teach people other stuff. It’s great for math, right? And for reading comprehension. Or learning to write recipes. It’s an important survival skill.

I think one of the things you can support, no matter what your politics are, is that our schools should be teaching our kids how to be self-sufficient, how to take care of themselves and not to have to depend on large institutions. I would include in that not just government but also corporations.

We don’t want to be raising kids who depend on corporations to tell them what to eat and how to eat. That’s a really important part of American culture. People talk all the time about a nanny state, but there’s the corporate nanny, too. And I don’t like that either! If we want people to be self-sufficient, cooking and eating is a part of that. So, we need to include cooking as part of public school education. I also understand fully the difficulty of educational reform, but I think it’s an important point to start discussing.

Originally published on AlterNet

It’s been a long time since farmers congregated in downtown Manhattan–around 350 years, to be exact. The folks who populate Wall Street and rural America don’t cross paths much these days. It’s easy to forget that Wall Street used to be rural America; in 1644, the area contained so many cows that the Dutch colonists had to erect a cattle guard to keep them from straying. Livestock farmers literally established the boundaries of Wall Street.

Today, the bronze bull–that icon of the OWS movement–is the lone farm animal you’ll find in the financial district. And the barricades are back, but only to keep Zuccotti Park’s mic checkers in check. That surprisingly fertile concrete plaza has yielded a bumper crop of grassroots activists, to the discomfort of (most of) the 1 percent and the shills who bill them. But the voices of farmers–a.k.a. the 1 percent that grows the food that 100 percent of us eat–have been largely missing from this movement to reclaim our democracy, despite the fact that food has become a commodity that enriches a few at the expense of the many.

That all changed this past Sunday, though, when a group of farmers from around the country marched to Zuccotti Park accompanied by their allies: food justice activists, community gardeners, and other advocates for a more equitable, ecologically sound, re-localized food system.

The march, organized by Occupy Wall Street’s food justice committee and Food Democracy Now, began with a rally at La Plaza Cultural Community Garden in the East Village, where hundreds of folks gathered to hear fiddlers and drummers give the event a festive kickoff, followed by a panel of urban and rural farmers.

Speakers included: Karen Washington, urban farmer and the founder of City Farms Markets, who grew up just blocks away from the community garden; Mike Callicrate, a Colorado rancher and a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the world’s largest beef packer; Severine von Tscharner Fleming, the filmmaker behind Greenhorns and a farmer who’s worked tirelessly to promote the young farmer movement; Jalal Sabur, a founding member of the Freedom Food Alliance, which unites black urban communities with black rural farmers; renowned permaculture expert Andrew Faust; Jim Goodman, a Wisconsin dairy farmer who organized a “tractorcade” to Madison earlier this year to protest Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-union legislation; and Jim Gerritsen, a Maine organic farmer who is president of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association and the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against Monsanto.

Gerritsen, who was recently named one of “25 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World” by Utne Reader, noted that he had “never had a reason” to come New York City before. Now, at age 56, he came to tell organizers that “Occupy Wall Street is the conscience of America,” adding that “rural America stands behind you.”

A movement that’s been denigrated by some as a motley mob of lazy, dirty hippies got a boost from hardworking Americans who’ve chosen one of the most demanding, least lucrative vocations imaginable–producing our food. Don’t tell these folks to get a job; the majority of small family farmers have to hold down at least two jobs just to make ends meet or get health care.

Jalal Sabar expressed his desire to foster a deeper awareness of the issues facing both urban and rural farmers:

A lot of times the farmer in Iowa doesn’t know that the kid in the hood is getting stopped and frisked every day … I understand that farmers can barely survive, that they have to work a job outside of the farm … We want to make sure that the foodies understand what the farmworkers go through.

Sabar also pointed out that land grabs, a problem seen as occurring mainly in developing nations, are happening here as well. He cited the recent raid on the Morning Glory Community Garden in the South Bronx by the NYC Department of Housing Preservation & Development. (On Saturday, a protest by Occupy The Bronx at the site of the ransacked garden resulted in several arrests.)

Severine von Tscharner Fleming addressed another kind of land grab that’s threatening our farmlands: fracking. In the wake of Hurricane Irene, which destroyed many local New York state crops, von Tscharner Fleming described the way representatives from natural gas companies had turned up promptly, checkbooks in hand, pressuring desperate farmers to lease their drilling rights. She echoed last week’s devastating New York Times exposé, “Learning Too Late of the Perils in Gas Well Leases,” by saying:

Those of us who are running farms in different parts of the region are having to compete with the drillers and are then surrounded by the tanks and the effluent and the pipelines and the huge rigs of trucks, the millions of gallons of contaminated, radioactive water that are pumped out of these wells and the fumes that are in the wind and when you’re trying to grow gorgeous produce it’s not so wonderful.

Dairyman Jim Goodman availed himself of the peoples’ microphone to explain his motivation to attend the march:

“We were told in the ’60s that there comes a time when the machinery becomes so odious … that you have to throw yourself into the machinery and make it stop.

They tell me I must feed the world. But I’m not going to. I want to feed you. I want the world to feed itself. And they can. They’ve been farming longer than we have. They’re smarter, they’re younger, they’re stronger, they’re women, they’re people of color.

The corporations want them out, they want the good land. They give them the poor land. And then they say, “See? They can’t feed themselves.” A self-fulfilling prophecy.

… Take the power away from Wall Street! Remake Washington.”

The rally culminated in a seed swap with farmers and gardeners exchanging packets of heirloom, open-pollinated seeds, including some donated by the Hudson Valley Seed Library founders, who’ve done so much to revitalize New York’s regional seed trade and inspired similar endeavors around the country.

Kneeling on the pavement there at Zuccotti Park, sorting through the seeds under the glow of the twinkly holiday lights, we couldn’t help feeling that the Farmers’ March was marking the beginning of a greater affinity between city and country folks. Here’s hoping the farmers won’t wait another few centuries to come back to our neck of the woods.

According to the allegations in the Penn State scandal, a pedophile was allowed to brutally assault/molest numerous young boys because no one dared to upset the very lucrative apple cart that is college sports.

And now comes word that Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee have torpedoed the USDA’s attempts to reduce the amount of pizza, french fries, and salt that our kids consume at school. Why? Because the frozen pizza companies, the salt industry, and potato growers asked them to. Really. It’s that simple.

The USDA wasn’t looking to ban any of these foods, but rather to increase the ratio of non-starchy vegetables and whole grains. This would be a step in the right direction, instead of using our resources to make our kids sicker and fatter. But such a shift would also make a dent in some very lucrative government contracts. So, no go.

There’s more going on here than simple greed, though. Because the politicians who do the food industry’s bidding are showing as much contempt for the expert opinion of nutritionists as they do towards the science of climate change. As Tom Philpott notes over at Mother Jones, the evidence that we need to feed our kids less of this stuff is solid: “Eat Your Greens, or Your Gut Gets It.”

But who needs experts, anyway? Not the GOP. Their ideal nominee should evidently be a blowhard ignoramus with a moral compass that’s shiftier than the San Andreas fault line, and at least as deeply cracked.

Take Herman Cain. When the pizza mogul/motivational speaker/alleged serial groper was asked if he could define a man by the kind of pizza he prefers, he declared that “A manly man don’t want it piled high with vegetables! He would call that a sissy pizza.”

And so goes the ongoing conservative war against vegetables, served up with a side of machismo. We can’t let the First Lady instill a love of broccoli in our kids! And isn’t Obamacare just a sneaky plot to open the door for legislation that would crucify Americans who reject cruciferous vegetables?

I guess those retired war generals over at Mission Readiness didn’t get the memo about the sissifying powers of vegetables. Why are these military experts up in arms over the USDA’s caving in to Big Food? Maybe because “Obesity is the leading medical disqualifier for military service, and children get up to 40 percent of their daily calories during the school day?”

As Amy Dawson Taggart, Mission Readiness’s director, noted “This new effort to undermine school nutrition regulations raises national security concerns.”

It should also raise questions about what kind of culture turns a blind eye to kids being brutalized and turns our children into vessels for commodity crop crap because it protects the revenues of some high powered institutions and politicians. What warped brand of capitalism have we created that permits our kids to be treated as collateral damage?

Well, yes. And it’s a logical move, if they don’t want to see their legacy (or their democracy) go down the toilet. After all, as Mario Batali once pointed out on CBS Sunday Morning, “When you think about it, all my greatest work is poop, tomorrow.”Ah, but not all excrement is created equal. On the one hand, intensive pork production’s given us vast pools of lethally toxic pig shit known as manure lagoons, more akin to radioactive waste than organic manure. On the other hand, there are worm castings, the highly fertile poop extruded by earthworms that looks like coffee grounds and smells pleasantly earthy.

The respective hazards and merits of various manures has not, historically, been the province of the JBF. This highly influential culinary center, founded after the legendary chef and cookbook author James Beard’s death in 1985 at the age of 81, is better known for its awards honoring outstanding chefs, restaurateurs, and writers.

But with the current American diet in such a dire state, the JBF folks are not content to simply celebrate culinary and literary excellence. Eager to play a more proactive role in reshaping our food system, the JBF has come down squarely in favor of a future that features more worm castings and fewer manure lagoons.

The JBF promoted that vision last week with its second annual JBF Food Conference, How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats. In conjunction with the conference, the JBF also held its inaugural JBF Leadership Awards [PDF], which honored 10 “visionaries in the business, government and education sectors responsible for creating a healthier, safer, and more sustainable food world.”

Fittingly, one of the honorees was vermicomposting genius Will Allen, whose internationally acclaimed nonprofit Growing Power flourishes on a foundation of worm poop.

And while the JBF’s newfound fervor to reform our food chain may seem like a radical departure, it’s really more like a homecoming. James Beard, whose influence led Julia Child to declare him “the Dean of American Cuisine,” was advocating pure, regional, seasonally based home cooking half a century before Alice Waters and Michael Pollan sought to popularize that ideal.

Beard despised the prepackaged convenience foods that had already begun to displace real meals in his heyday. In a letter to his friend Helen Evans Brown in September of 1954, he wrote:

The food editors’ conference is going full tilt and we hear the results are horrifying. Soon, we are told, there will be no fresh foods on the market — just canned or frozen (this came from the lips of the Secretary of Agriculture).

The JBF Food Conference, co-hosted by Good Housekeeping at their conference facility in the LEED gold certified Hearst Tower, brought together chefs, scholars, entrepreneurs, economists, writers, advocates, and representatives from nonprofits and corporations to examine the financial underpinnings of our food system and the media’s role in shaping our food choices.

The goal was to find common ground among people with diverse agendas, and “establish a set of guiding principles around which we can organize and move forward together,” as the conference’s facilitator, Joseph McIntyre, announced at the outset.

McIntyre, president of the California-based think/do tank Ag Innovations Network, came to town a few days early to make a pilgrimage to Zuccotti Park.

I wanted to go down there and see what was going on. And you know what they were talking about? Money and media. I would argue that our friends in the Tea Party are talking about the same things. Underneath the great debate in America today about food, about finance, underneath the polarized positions between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, lie common aspirations for the future. How many of you do not want a world that’s better for your children?

The JBF’s Leadership Awards, which offer prestige but no monetary prize, personified the paradoxes that bedevil the good food movement. Michelle Obama, Alice Waters, and the aforementioned Will Allen were obvious shoo-ins, as was Fedele Bauccio, whose Bon Appétit Management Company has been the gold standard when it comes to sustainability in the food service industry.

Other honorees whose bona fides were impeccable included Debra Eschmeyer, the dynamic co-founder of the just-launched FoodCorps; the venerable Fred Kirschenmann, of the Leopold Center For Sustainable Agriculture and Stone Barns; and author/professor Janet Poppendieck, whose books Sweet Charity and Free For All: Fixing School Food in America offer thoughtful analyses on the root causes of hunger in our society and how to reform our shoddy school lunch program.

But the inclusion of executives from Costco, Unilever, and Sysco no doubt surprised some folks. Forbes writer Nadia Arumugam was pleased to see them included. She said:

… witnessing three high-level executives from three large corporations receive awards for their tangible and results-driven efforts to further the sustainable food movement, was surprising, but extremely heartening.

This is where the pragmatists and the purists collide. As Naomi Klein told Civil Eats, “The food movement is inherently anti-corporate and it is inherently about rebuilding a real economy.”

In honoring corporations who are making incremental changes that merit our support, the JBF challenges that assumption. And what are we to make of the partnerships that two of the honorees, Michelle Obama and Will Allen, have forged with Walmart?

It’s a dilemma that James Beard would have understood. As David Kamp noted in The United States of Arugula, Beard labeled himself a “gastronomic whore” after entering into an endorsement deal with Green Giant to tout their Corn Niblets and wax beans in his recipes:

In his heart, Beard knew that lending his name to processed foods was a betrayal of his core beliefs in seasonality and regionality … but his cooking school required a lot of money to operate, and his ever-increasing number of writing commitments required a full-time retinue of testers and ghostwriters.

Where does compromise end and co-option begin? As Walt Whitman famously said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Originally posted on Grist

Poor Uncle Sam’s got a lot on his plate these days: a curdled economy, an overcooked climate, a soured populace. It’s enough to give a national icon a capital case of indigestion. Anti-government sentiment is running so high that half the country seems ready to swap his stars and stripes for tar and feathers.

Sure, Uncle Sam’s always been kind of a drag, with his stern face and wagging finger. But to “nanny-state” haters, he’s a Beltway busybody in drag, democracy’s Mrs. Doubtfire, a Maryland Mary Poppins. If you believe that government is always the problem, never the solution, then you have no use for, say, more stringent food safety regulations, or Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign to combat obesity.

But the new exhibit “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government’s Effect on the American Diet” at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. offers an intriguing display of documents, posters, photos and other artifacts dating from the Revolutionary War to the late 1900s which serve to remind us that our government has long played a crucial role in determining how safe, nutritious and affordable our food supply is.

So, after all this government-mandated meddling with our meals, do we eat better now than we did 100 years ago? Curator Alice Kamps didn’t set out to provide a definitive answer to that question. Her intent was simply to “add to the conversation” that we’re currently having about how Americans eat.

Kamps gives us plenty of fodder for discussion, if not heated debate; the exhibit, which runs until January 3, 2012, treads gingerly around hot-button topics like crop subsidies and factory farming. And it sidesteps the food stamp land mine entirely in an era when the very word “entitlements” is enough to make some folks’ heads explode.

That’s a shame, because there’s a little-known aspect to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), aka food stamps, that encourages self-sufficiency and complements the kitchen garden revival that gets a shout-out in this exhibit, thanks to Michelle Obama and White House chef Sam Kass.

The 1973 Farm Bill included an amendment to the Food Stamp Act that enabled food stamp recipients to use their stamps to buy seeds or vegetable plants. As any gardener knows, a few dollars worth of seeds can yield a return of $50 or even $100 worth of food. Senator James Allen of Alabama, who proposed the amendment, noted that “the recipients of food stamps would thus be able to use their own initiative to produce fruits and vegetables needed to provide variety and nutritional value for their diets.”

The program continues to this day, but remains largely unknown, so few food stamp recipients avail themselves of this chance to literally grow their benefits at no extra cost to Uncle Sam.

Missed opportunities aside, “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” does a fine job of documenting just how consistent our issues with our food chain have stayed even as the way we eat has changed radically over the past century. Consider the following nugget of dietary wisdom from the first federally funded nutrition research, launched in the 1890s. Wilbur Olin Atwater, special agent in charge of nutrition investigations in the Office of Experiment Stations, concluded:

“The evils of overeating may not be felt at once, but sooner or later they are sure to appear–perhaps in an excessive amount of fatty tissue, perhaps in general debility, perhaps in actual disease.”

We knew it then, we know it now. And yet, we eat more than ever, egged on by a schizophrenic USDA whose dual missions–encouraging healthier eating habits and promoting the interests of the food industry–are in eternal conflict.

Check out the USDA’s 1945 Food Group Poster (a precursor to the Food Pyramid, which debuted in 1992). A pie chart lays out “The Basic 7″ food groups we should eat from each day for optimal health. Below it lies the message, “In addition to the basic 7, eat any other foods you want.”

No wonder Uncle Sam looks so pained; he’s been getting his arm twisted by lobbyists for nearly 100 years. Take the case of the seed giveaway program Congress created in 1839. The original purpose of the program was to expand the range of foods our farmers grew and encourage them to test rare plant varieties. By 1897, the USDA was distributing 1.1 billion free seed packets to farmers, many of them more common vegetable and flower varieties.

The program was wildly popular with farmers, but a thorn in the side of the growing commercial seed industry. So, in 1929, after intense lobbying from the American Seed Trade Association, Congress scrapped the seed giveaway.

The exhibit does highlight Uncle Sam’s more laudable legacies, such as the passage in 1906 of the Pure Food and Drugs Act and Meat Inspection Act, and the establishment of the School Lunch Program in 1946, which has since become “one of the most popular social welfare programs in our nation’s history,” according to the exhibit catalog. Geez, if that’s how we fund our most popular programs, I’d hate to see what kind of resources we allocate to the ones we like least.

“What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” strikes a nice balance between the wonky, somber food policy and safety segments and more lighthearted elements such as White House menus featuring favorite presidential recipes and those classic wartime propaganda posters encouraging us to can, garden and conserve. Other visual treats include the beautiful botanical illustrations commissioned by the USDA in the late 1800s to document the discoveries of the plant hunters we dispatched to far-off lands in pursuit of new fruit and vegetable varieties.

One of our more notable agricultural explorers, the intrepid, fur-hatted Frank N. Meyer, introduced us to some 2,500 new plants, including the lemon that bears his name. Meyer walked hundreds of miles through China at the turn of the century in his quest to “skim the earth in search of things good for man.”

Now, we outsource the task of finding horticultural breakthroughs to corporations whose motto could be “to scorch the earth in search of things bad for man.” Uncle Sam doesn’t commission botanical illustrations or promote rare seeds anymore, either; for that, I have to rely on my friends at the Hudson Valley Seed Library. Kicky propaganda posters? Back to the private sector–see Joe Seppi’s brilliant Victory Garden of Tomorrow posters on Etsy.

Uncle Sam hasn’t got the time or the budget for such extracurricular activities these days. He’s got his hands full just trying to maintain our food chain’s mediocre status quo. As Mark Bittman noted, Republicans are on a tear to gut vital food safety and nutrition programs in the name of deficit reduction. Nevermind that the programs in question actually save us billions of dollars in health care costs in the long run. What’s cooking, Uncle Sam? Off the record, he’d probably tell you that what’s cooking is our goose.

Originally published by AlterNet

If there’s one thing Michelle Obama and Glenn Beck can agree on, it’s the notion that growing some of your own food is a good idea (though I suspect the Obamas get their seeds from sources other than Beck’s shifty, grifty seed bank sponsor).

You might think that level of bipartisan support would light a fire under our collective (gr)ass. But the much-ballyhooed kitchen garden revival has yet to make a dent in the bentgrass. As NASA reported in 2005, lawns now constitute “the single largest irrigated crop in America,” taking up at least three times the acreage we devote to irrigated corn. Has any nation in the history of mankind ever squandered so many resources to cultivate so much vegetation of such dubious value?

Meanwhile, we currently grow less than 2 percent of our own food.

“This,” Michele Owens declares in her just-published Grow the Good Life: Why a Vegetable Garden Will Make You Happy, Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise, “is not yet enough of a revolution to satisfy me.”

Owens, who cofounded and contributes regularly to the uber-popular, highly respected GardenRant blog, is a self-taught amateur gardener. And that may be why her book is one of the best manifesto/memoirs so far this century on growing your own veggies.

With nearly two decades of experience under her own backyard greenbelt, Owens makes the case that the simple act of growing food is just that–simple. “Years of vegetable gardening have turned me into a complete minimalist who uses nothing besides shovel, seeds and mulch.”

Finally, a Bittman for the backyard! Owens also manages to distill the essence of vegetable gardening into a breezy precept that carries just a whiff of Eau de Pollan: “…give your crops lots of sun, fertile soil, and sufficient water.”

Of course, this kind of admirably concise advice is so simple, Owens admits, that it’s “hardly enough to fill a page or two, let alone a book.”

But, just as the Minimalist has filled multiple massive tomes with recipes short and sweet (or savory), and Pollan has created an apparently infinite franchise around the seven words, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” Owens has no trouble weaving a compelling read from the thread of her Twitter-length thesis. Grow The Good Life begins with an incisive analysis of why so few Americans garden, then rolls full steam ahead into a cheerful campaign to recruit more of her fellow citizens into the cause of homeland (food) security.

Owens knows a thing or two about how to rally the troops; she’s a former speechwriter for, among others, governors William F. Weld and Mario Cuomo. Her day job clearly helped her hone her instincts about what inspires people, as well as what turns them off.

One factor that discourages folks from planting a kitchen garden, Owens believes, is “the incredibly off-putting literature of vegetable gardening,” which she credits with “driving so many would-be gardeners into scrapbooking instead.”

So many gardening how-to’s dwell on all the potential pitfalls a gardener might encounter that “a beginner might reasonably conclude that growing food is nothing but a series of problems.” Problems for which plenty of companies want to sell you solutions, as Owens notes. She’d love to overthrow the military-industrial-horticultural complex that promotes gardening as a form of chemical warfare requiring frequent trips to the gardening aisles of Lowes or Home Depot for reinforcements. If guerrilla gardeners needed a general, I’d nominate Owens.

But she’s equally underwhelmed by the tree-hugging bat guano boosters at the other end of the spectrum (like me) who stockpile their own artisanal arsenals of finely crafted specialty tools and exotic dung from far-flung places.

No bit of conventional gardening wisdom is too sacred to be shredded. In her chipper fashion, she makes mulch of such nuggets as “send your soil off to a lab to be tested”:

…as if the vegetable garden were a delicate chemistry experiment rather than a partnership with nature that’s generally proved successful for the last 10,000 years. By all means, test your soil if you suspect lead or industrial waste–but otherwise? I know a lot of serious gardeners and not a single one has ever had his or her soil tested.

And what of the deeply entrenched notion that you need to double-dig your vegetable beds? Don’t think twice, it’s not right. Aside from being ludicrously labor intensive, it actually messes up the soil’s structure and gives old weed seeds a new lease on life by exposing them to light.

The best way to make a bed your veggies will thrive in, Owens says, is also the easiest–quite simply, to employ the no-dig method known as sheet mulching or lasagna gardening.

Not that Owens has anything against working up a sweat; on the contrary, she notes that gardening gives you a workout that’s as good–or better–any routine you could do at the gym. And as a bonus, you’ll be rewarded with good things to eat and a nicer yard.

“When I’m done cleaning out a flower bed, I’ll sit back and admire my work,” a doctor who studies the effects of gardening on aging told Owens. “If I’ve done 30 minutes on a treadmill, I don’t stand there admiring the treadmill.”

Owens’ common sense stance that you don’t need a garden expert to show you how food grows echoes the refrain that “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” But though Dylan would presumably prefer not to be the inspiration for the bomb-building revolutionaries who took their name from his song, I suspect Owens wouldn’t mind terribly if her book ignited an explosion of homegrown terroirists and seed bombers.

Grow The Good Life is less a breath of fresh air than a blast of gale force gumption. Gardening newbies, seasoned seedsters and the somewhere-in-betweensters will all find much to enjoy in Owen’s eloquent, witty and empowering guide, which redefines the joy of gardening for our fraught and fractious times:

…in a world where so much is beyond the control of any one of us–as much as I’d like to, I cannot personally rid us of the internal combustion engine and replace it with something less noisy or dirty or less likely to turn a beautiful landscape into a field of asphalt–there is a lot of pleasure to be had in reshaping the little piece of earth that is under our control. Thanks to my garden, I can take a small stand against everything I find witless, lazy, and ugly in our civilization and propose my own more lively alternative.

I’d love to see Owens offered a spot on Oprah’s sofa, but at the very least, Grow The Good Life deserves a slot on the bookshelf of every dreamer who’s got visions of sugar-sweet plum tomatoes dancing in his or her head. This is the book that could bring those dreams to fruition.

Originally published on AlterNet

For a self-proclaimed minimalist with a minuscule kitchen, Mark Bittman’s had maximum impact. He’s the digital dervish of the New York Times Dining section: his recipes ricochet around the blogosphere, his cooking videos go viral, he’s constantly tweaking his How To Cook Everything app, he tweets and blogs regularly.

And, he pens op-eds exhorting us to eat less meat and embrace a plant-based diet. So, it wasn’t exactly a shock to hear that the Minimalist is moving on, departing from Dining and bringing his “lessmeatatarian,” ‘go-vegan-till-six’ advocacy to the Times op-ed page.

It’s a natural progression, in fact, because Bittman’s actually been touting tatsoi and pushing purslane for more than a decade. His How To Cook Everything books may be a kitchen bookshelf staple, but the Bittman book I reach for most often–and the one that transformed the way I eat–is a tattered, soy sauce-splashed paperback from 1995 called Leafy Greens: An A-To-Z Guide to 30 Types of Greens Plus 200 Delicious Recipes.

The introduction begins, “It’s no secret that vegetables, grains and fruits are the future of the American diet.”

No, but it seems to be a secret that Bittman ever wrote this book! It’s been out-of-print for ages, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why Macmillan doesn’t reprint Leafy Greens, because it’s simply the best guide to greens that I’ve seen to this day. It demystifies obscure greens and celebrates overlooked ones.

I stumbled across it at the Strand bookstore in NYC when it first came out and was intrigued by the recipes featuring exotic Asian greens, sea vegetables, and common garden weeds–none of which were then in my culinary repertoire.

The recipes are classic Bittman: a few basic ingredients that you can adapt to suit your fancy and your pantry. Don’t have kale? Let collards or mustard greens pinch hit. Can’t find cress? Make do with mizuna. Virtually every recipe in the book offers alternative suggestions.

Leafy Greens introduced me to the whole family of sweet, crunchy Asian cabbages and spicy mustard greens. It taught me that beet greens and swiss chard are interchangeable.

Bittman also inspired me to grow amaranth, orach, and cultivated strains of purslane, dandelions and watercress in my garden, and to harvest their wild cousins instead of composting them. In a “Note to the Gardener” at the end of the book, he declares, “Everyone who has a bit of dirt should grow greens,” and lists his favorite seed sources.

As an advocate for Meatless Mondays and the axis of eat well– i.e., fruits, veggies, and whole grains–I’ve been delighted to see Bittman use his tremendous influence to encourage folks to become more ecologically enlightened eaters. As Slow Food USA President Josh Viertel once declared at an Earth Institute conference hosted by Jeffrey Sachs–who sadly subscribes to the notion that industrial agriculture is the only solution to world hunger–”We don’t need another Green Revolution. What we need is a Leafy Green Revolution!”

I couldn’t agree more, and I know just who to put in charge of it. If only we could get Macmillan to reprint the manifesto.

Originally published on Huffington Post

Photo: Evan Sung