The study confirms anecdotal evidence from hog farmers who’ve reported reproductive and digestive problems in pigs raised on GM feed. Those who were following this sort of news in 2011 will remember an open letter to the USDA from Dr. M. Huber, a professor at Purdue University, about an unknown organism in Roundup Ready crops causing miscarriages in farm animals.

A common complaint from critics of GM technology – often painted as “anti-science” by GM proponents – is that they’ve been inadequately studied. (Don’t think about that for too long – your first instinct is correct, it doesn’t make sense.) The European Union has long based its regulatory framework (and resultant slow adoption of GMOs) on the precautionary principle. And in fact, according to this study, most of the research on the health impacts of GMOs has either been short term (less than 90 days), performed on non-mammals or failed to examine multiple GM traits concurrently, despite that many new GM crops “stack” traits, and that many diets – of both animals and humans – include multiple types of GMOs.

The scientists behind the study report having chosen pigs as their subject for the similarity between their digestive systems and those of humans, and the mixed GM diet for its similarity to the real-life diets of both swine and humans, so this is really damning stuff. They also describe their findings as conservative, noting that even the control group is likely to have been exposed to GMOs in indirect ways they couldn’t avoid, such as trace amounts of GMOs in non-GM feed, and parents fed GM diets.

As one might expect, the scientists conclude their report with a call for more testing, particularly of whether the findings also apply to humans. Scientists at the Consumers Union go one further, saying that concerns raised by the study further underscore the need to label GMOs.

Will the government listen? Time will tell. It’s also  hard to predict the potential impact of this study on the US pork market – or on the prices of corn and soy. As we saw recently when Japan and South Korea canceled orders for US-produced wheat after the discovery of unapproved GM wheat in Oregon, not all countries take a laissez-faire approach to GMOs. And what about that merger/takeover of Smithfield Foods by Chinese-held Shuanghui, rumored to have been spurred in part by friction over the livestock drug ractopamine? For that matter, will American hog farmers – seeking rightly to avoid sickening their own hogs – seek non-GM feed from other countries?

For now, more questions than answers, but if the findings of this study are as serious as they look, American agriculture may be on the verge of paying a very dear price for a long roll in the hay with the biotech industry.

Originally published on EcoCenteric

After a short video (to be viewed from adorable fruit-themed stools) and a walk past the extremely cool Window Farms, where real food is actually growing, the exhibit  begins – aptly, given the state of our modern food system – in a cornfield. Through iconic staples (corn, cassava, bananas, eggs and more) the visitor is pushed to consider the concept of yield. Red junglefowl, the closest ancestor to the modern domestic chicken, lay between 10 and 15 eggs per year, as opposed to its counterpart’s 364, reads the display. But dramatic increases in yield don’t come for free: throughout the Growing section the visitor is presented with pros and cons associated with certain production methods, as well as “tradeoffs” marking the most controversial (genetic modification, overfishing, etc.).

In a section devoted to food waste, “leaks in the food pipeline” are identified along the farm-to-fork path (during agricultural production, post-harvest handling, processing/packaging, wholesale/retail and consumption) and dramatic examples demonstrate the differences between waste in rich countries to that in poor ones. For example, in rich nations like the US, much food waste occurs in the fields, simply because many fruits and vegetables are too small, too large or imperfectly shaped (first world problems, anyone?) but where farmers are unable to afford pesticides, insects may lay waste to large portions of the harvest. Likewise, in rich nations, food waste abounds at the consumer level, but people in poorer countries waste almost no food at all. This section also includes a giant sculpture of fake food waste, representing the vast waste created yearly by the average American family (spoiler: it’s huge).

If the meat of the exhibition is a celebratory exploration of food culture and flavor, at the end, it is sandwiched between big picture questions presented in a  thoughtful style.

In the middle of the exhibit, the visitor takes a break from the complicated and often troubling issues of food production and distribution with a fun look at different food cultures (some ancient, some modern; some exotic, some mundane) and the role played by our senses of taste and smell. Here, Whole Foods has donated a real working kitchen, where during the press event, a chef pressed apples from upstate New York into a delicious cider. Around the room, interactive displays explained how taste works. Nearby, visitors can push a button and smell different food scents and explore kitchen implements from across the ages.  A few paces away, there are models of dining rooms and typical foods not only tied to particular eras and places, but to specific historic notables, including Jane Austen (whose molded ice cream statue is worth a gander), Livia Drusilla and Kublai Kahn.

If the meat of the exhibition is a celebratory exploration of food culture and flavor, at the end, it is sandwiched between big picture questions presented in a  thoughtful style. At the “fork” end of the journey, visitors are presented with a huge display on malnutrition and obesity, mapping the frequency of each by country with graphs, factoids and photos of typical families from around the world (photographed in their kitchens with a week’s worth of food and a financial breakdown of the family’s weekly grocery bill, a la What the World Eats).

In all, I thought the museum’s curators did a great job of breaking down a radically complex — and controversial — topic, often by balancing two sides of a coin, and when that wasn’t possible, by using examples to make people think. Throughout my walk-through, however, one thing kept bugging me. I kept thinking back to the trip I took there with my nieces Madi and Paeton, who are eight and ten years old respectively. They adored the museum. But what would they think of the exhibit? In Our Global Kitchen, there was not much to compete with the dinosaur bones downstairs, the spiders next door or the shimmering bioluminescent exhibit. They do love to cook, though. When I got back to the office, I poked around the exhibit website and found that the working kitchen has daily samplings and activities, and a menu that will change every two weeks. On tap for the holidays: gingerbread houses. Well then, I predict the kids will eat this place up.

Originally published on Eco-Centric, a blog about food, water and energy.

On Thursday, Denver-based Chipotle Mexican Grill signed an agreement to join the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ Fair Food Program. Chipotle joins the ranks of McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Whole Foods and Subway as the 11th company to join the Program, which improves working conditions for farmworkers in a few major ways. Not only does it provide a wage increase (the famous penny-a-pound) but it also includes a code of conduct that allows workers a voice in matters concerning health and safety, worker-to-worker trainings around the protections included under the code, a complaint resolution procedure that protects workers from retaliation and a third-party audit system to ensure compliance from growers.

The agreement was a long time coming. The company–which has long staked its reputation on “Food with Integrity” (and to be fair, does much better than most other fast food chains in terms of sourcing regionally and providing mostly sustainably-produced meat and dairy products) had been a soft target of the Fair Food Campaign for years, during which the CIW and partner groups around the country would gently exert pressure in the form of thousands of letters to the management, while they focused more intently on grocery chains like Trader Joe’s (which joined the program in February 2012) and Dutch-held Ahold (which has yet to sign).

The situation between Chipotle and the CIW serves as an excellent case study for anyone interested in affecting change in our food systems – specifically, on labor and sustainability, though many of the lessons learned here could be applied to any social justice issue. Most interesting to me, the grassroots Coalition focuses exclusively on business – wisely capitalizing on consumers’ power in the marketplace, and the corporate sector’s role in creating change – as opposed to government, and makes it easy for any passerby to learn more and get involved.

In 2010, a colleague and I produced a video about the CIW’s Trader Joe’s campaign, and in the post I wrote to accompany the video, I only mentioned Chipotle in passing, but that mention prompted an Ecocentric reader to contact the chain. What followed was a long and confusing but well-played argument from a member of Chipotle’s PR team named Joe, which our reader pasted into the comments section of the post. At that time, Chipotle had gone around the CIW and signed an agreement with East Coast Growers–which had joined the Fair Food Program – and insisted that it was a better arrangement. But the setup cut workers from the equation entirely, and it was not long before East Coast was suspended from the Program. A lot of things happened before and after that, some of which is chronicled here. Basically, through a savvy public relations defense, Chipotle managed to convince most people they were already doing right by the farmworkers.

But the Coalition continued to capitalize on the company’s sustainability claims, building momentum over the years and finally ramping up their efforts in September, during Chipotle’s “Cultivate” festivals in Chicago and Denver. In Chicago, the CIW and partners set up tables nearby, personifying their exclusion from Chipotle’s vision of sustainability, illustrating the toil borne by farmworkers with stacks of buckets (so passersby could imagine filling and carrying that many pounds of tomatoes) and finally, giving festival attendees some easy ways to send a message to the company. Attendees who stopped by trickled into the festival carrying red balloons reading “No Farmworkers, No Integrity” and some attendees added a CIW tomato stamp to “passport” documents Chipotle used to entice attendees through a series of to visit “experience” tents (where they learned about the company’s sustainability efforts) in exchange for a free burrito. The CIW event culminated with music, actions and speeches. Just Harvest USA has more on the day’s actions, and some great photos, here. After the festivals, the Coalition kept up the pressure with an open letter to Chiopotle on behalf of the sustainable food movement, signed by some of its most famous players, including Francis Moore Lappe and her daughter Anna, Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser, Stuffed and Starved author Raj Patel and People’s Grocery’s Nikki Henderson.

It’s hard to believe that anyone’s vision of sustainable food would not include the people who grow it, but farmworkers–like slaughterhouse workers and others in the food chain–are mostly hidden from view, an “externality” in industry’s crush to keep prices artificially low. The CIW has given the public a glimpse into the fields, and they’ve established a strong program to right the wrongs there. On top of that, they’ve given us all a way to participate in a movement toward farmworker justice and true sustainability.

In the end, neither the Coalition nor Chipotle gave any sign of the years of struggle that led up to this moment on Thursday–in the press release announcing the agreement, CIW’s Gerardo Reyes graciously called it “a turning point in the sustainable food movement as a whole, whereby, thanks to Chipotle’s leadership, farmworkers are finally recognized as true partners–every bit as vital as farmers, chefs and restaurants–in bringing ‘good food’ to our tables.” In a world where change comes slowly and deals are often made by powerful players behind closed doors, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ successes are a bright shining light, proof that people—and corporations—can make real progress toward a more truly sustainable future.

Originally published on EcoCentric Blog

Recently, I attended an event at New York City’s famous James Beard House that took me back to Yellowstone National Park.

Around this time last summer, I was on a tour boat on Lake Yellowstone with my family, where we learned that lake trout, a non-native species introduced around 1995 (presumably by an angler), had grown extremely problematic for the ecosystem of the lake–in particular, for the prized cutthroat trout, which is easily preyed upon and out-competed by the larger lake trout.

Not only was there no fishing limit on lake trout but in fact,  the only rule about catching them was that if you weren’t going to eat them, you had to kill them before throwing them back. According to our tour guide, you could cart a fresh-caught lake trout to any of the park’s restaurants for professional cooking and earn a pat on the back from the chef and staff.

Why did my visit to the Manhattan-based James Beard House inspire me to recall that ecological factoid from my visit to the nation’s oldest national park? Recently, Kerry Heffernan, head chef for Central Park’s South Gate Restaurant, prepared a delectable feast based on four exotic invasive varieties of seafood: Green crab (known to most fisherfolk as bait for blackfish), Asian carp, lionfish, and blue tilapia.

The brainchild behind the event was Washington, D.C.- based Food & Water Watch, producers of the Smart Seafood Guide. In partnership with James Beard House, the watchdog organization had invited Chef Kerry to prepare the invasives Iron Chef-style–with a little more than a day’s notice. This isn’t much time to get acquainted with the four exotic new ingredients, but Heffernan managed the challenge admirably, at least, according to this amateur seafood lover.

I’ll be honest. I’d expected something that might challenge my sense of adventure a little more–something slimy, maybe–but all four dishes were delicious. Food porn isn’t my thing, so I’ll spare you the details and instead fill you in on what drew me to the event.

1. I like seafood, but. ..
2. even with productions like Food & Water Watch’s Smart Seafood Guide , Blue Ocean Institute’s Seafood Guide,  and Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Guide , I still find the “rules” around seafood difficult to navigate, mostly because:
3. Seafood is often not well-labeled in supermarkets or restaurants.
4. Harvesting seafood takes a toll on the environment, and/or…
5. Popular varieties of seafood are often overfished, and/or…
6. The seafood industry is largely unsustainable because corporate fishing enterprises out-compete local fishermen, which may keep costs down but takes a valuable source of protein away from local populations and hurts smaller markets, and this doesn’t jibe with my values.
7. There are a few fish that I like and feel good about eating, like U.S. farmed catfish and oysters, but I still worry about health hazards related to consumption of seafood.

As I made my way through the famously small James Beard kitchen, up the stairs, (past the shower where Beard supposedly enjoyed showering outdoors), rubbing elbows with food writers, chefs, and staff from Food & Water Watch, while sampling Chef Kerry’s tasty creations, I got to feeling hopeful.

Aside from the Yellowstone example, there are many cases of invasive species wreaking havoc, on water and on land, on ecosystems around the globe. Eating them would seem not only to mitigate harm, but to actively improve those “invaded” ecosystems. With so many proverbial genies let out of so many proverbial bottles–is it possible to fish and market and eat our way out of a situation that, at least in part, we’ve fished and marketed and eaten our way into?

New York Times reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal suggests a cautious optimism, noting:

Scientists emphasize that human consumption is only part of what is needed to control invasive species and restore native fish populations, and that a comprehensive plan must include restoring fish predators to depleted habitats and erecting physical barriers to prevent further dissemination of the invaders.

“We are not going to be able to just eat our way out of the invasive species problem,” Dr. Kramer said. “On the other hand, there are places where this can be a very useful part of the strategy.”

Having written about quite a few of the perils of our modern food system, it makes sense to me that there are no silver bullets for the many invasive species scenarios. Surely, working solutions must be as nuanced, or nearly so, as the complex problems we face, on land and at sea. At local levels, though,  harvesting these species as food sources could help beat back some of these invasives, and might help local economies, too.

Food & Water Watch director Wenonah Hauter is enthusiastic about the potential benefits of marketing invasives, noting that in order to do so effectively, supply chains need revamping and some of the species may need some added sex appeal, in some cases, through re-naming.

Chef Kerry Heffernan filets a lionfish

At the event, Chef Kerry spoke to a “learning curve,” for himself and other chefs, but also acknowledges the role chefs can play in promoting more sustainable seafood choices. In true James Beard fashion, foundation vice president Mitchell Davis called this a “cutting edge” culinary trend, one that the foundation was happy to get behind.

Count me in. Below, some information on the seafood we sampled last week. Here’s to guilt-free seafood smorgasboards!

Asian carp

Actually a catch-all term for eight different varieties of carp, including the common goldfish and silver carp, known for their tendency to jump–high–when spooked by boats. Cultivated for over 1,000 years in China, the varieties of Asian carp generally referred to as invasive in the U.S. are grass, black, silver, and bighead carp. Over the last decade or so, Asian carp have been the subject of controversy and legislation, as many worry that some of these varieties will make their way into the Great Lakes. Asian carp are believed to be low in mercury, though the FDA has yet to evaluate them for contaminants. Prolific breeders, they can out-compete other fish for feed like algae and phytoplankton.

But how does it taste?

Chef Kerry describes them as sweet and mild, like whitefish.  He also noted that the large fish was difficult to debone, a likely reason that this fish has not caught on in the U.S.

Lionfish

Native to the Indo-Pacific, the aptly-named lionfish (also known as the scorpion fish or firefish) is believed to have been introduced to East Coast waters, including the Caribbean, by pet owners releasing aquarium fish into coastal waters. The lionfish is prey to no known predators, is a voracious eater, grows fast and reproduces year round. It is quite impressive with its spines, which can cause death in other sealife and major discomfort for unlucky swimmers of the human variety.

But how does it taste?

Chef Kerry couldn’t think of a counterpart and described it as a cross between John Dory and monkfish.

European green cab

Introduced on the East Coast in the early 1800s, likely as a castaway on a European ship, the European green crab was discovered on the West Coast as well during the late 1980s. The FDA has not performed testing on the green crab specifically, but it is considered likely to not contain high levels of mercury or PCBs because it is sensitive to these contaminants itself.

But how does it taste?

Chef Kerry notes that the green crab boasts more flavor than its blue counterpart, but that its small size makes for time-intensive meat-picking. He used it in a delicious crab soup and says he’s waiting for molting season to try it out as a soft-shell crab.

Blue tilapia

Native to Northern and Western Africa and the Middle East, also known as Israeli tilapia, blue tilapia (PDF) were, in some cases, intentionally introduced as weed control in Gulf state lakes, and are currently wreaking havoc in lakes in Florida, Texas, and Nevada.

But how does it taste?

Compared to its farmed counterpart (which, so long as it’s grown right–we like recirculating systems–are quite sustainable) blue lake tilapia has a less “muddy” flavor, according to Chef Kerry.

Watch video on actual footage of lionfish hunt for the tasting:

Originally published on Ecocentric

Photos: Jon Simon

Video: Atlantic Charters

Like many of the women I admire most, Joan Gussow has a bit of an edge to her.  One gets the impression that she doesn’t gladly suffer fools.  But as an avid gardener and longtime professor of nutrition at Columbia University’s Teachers College, she is also a world-class nurturer and a mentor to many, including Michael Pollan, whose quote on the back of Joan’s latest book, Growing, Older, reads:

Once in a while, I think I’ve had an original thought, then I look and read around and realize Joan said it first.

Joan is also a practice in dichotomy–though she bemoans new media for its “misinformation pollution” and is known best for her expertise in that old-timey tradition of subsistence farming (though on an extremely small scale), she is also an unrepentantly radical thinker and the first person I ever heard speak coherently about nanotechnology.

For the uninitiated, Joan Gussow is known as the matriarch of the local food movement.  She and her late husband Alan began growing most of their food in their backyard decades ago. She wrote a memoir about the experience that included recipes but also told the story of our broken food system—never too preciously—in a way that connected it to her life, but also couched it in the context of larger environmental and economic systems.

The first time I met her (in 2008, I think), Joan had agreed to host a group of food activists at her home.  I was thrilled to finally lay eyes on the garden I’d spent so much time picturing while reading her first book, This Organic Life, and I was struck by how close the reality of it was to my mental images—a testament to her descriptive prose. (We made a short video that day, you can view it here.)

One year ago this week, Joan’s garden was devastated by a massive storm and flood.  It wasn’t the first time; the garden, shaped like a bathtub and fenced in on each side, had flooded each year since she and Alan first broke ground on the edge of the Hudson River. The damage was more serious than ever before, but this time, she could rectify the situation. Her neighbor had torn down his house and had yet to build a new one, so for the first time since she’d owned the property, there existed a land-based route to her backyard that wouldn’t involve thousands of wheelbarrows full of dirt, and thus existed the potential to fill in the bathtub-ness, once and for all.
Maybe it’s Joan’s connection to the garden and its inhabitants, which, as she notes in this video, “always seem to hang in there.” Or maybe Joan Gussow is just a tough old bird (or more aptly, a phoenix) who really does have a bit of an edge to her.

After last year’s storm–and anyone who has ever tended a garden could guess this–Joan was devastated. Foodies rallied. To give people a way to show their support, my good friend Kerry Trueman and her husband Matt Rosenberg built this website, where monetary donations were accepted. Soon, Joan had the cash to buy soil and other supplies to rebuild her garden and raise it by several feet. Joan saved what she could of what was in the ground and hired a local man who’d helped with her garden before and had the machinery necessary for what was turning out to be a major undertaking. A skilled group came from the Stone Barns Center and in the style of an old-fashioned barn raising, put everything back.

Last fall, a few friends and I visited Joan and while we were there, she showed us a slide show of the devastation and subsequent rebirth of her beloved garden, and I offered to record her story and create this video.  At the time, the moral of the story I thought we were telling was one about how “many hands make light work.”  In a culture that has grown increasingly isolationist, I found it touching that people actually banded together and accomplished so much so quickly. (As you’ll see in the video, within two months of the storm, the season’s crops were thriving.)

But in the end, what is extraordinary to me about this story is the fact that it happened at all. At Joan’s advanced age, even in spite of her long history and intense devotion to that small plot of land, one might expect her to throw up her hands and call it quits. In fact, this seems like a metaphor for many of the challenges we face today. For those who believe that climate change is real, and for those who believe that we ought to help take care of one another, it’s hard sometimes not to throw in the towel in the face of our current social/political/environmental predicament(s).  But in my few short years of activism I’ve noticed that the best-informed people—even those who endeavor to educate the public about some decidedly devastating facts—are the same people who refuse to give up.

Maybe it’s Joan’s connection to the garden and its inhabitants, which, as she notes in this video, “always seem to hang in there.” Or maybe Joan Gussow is just a tough old bird (or more aptly, a phoenix) who really does have a bit of an edge to her.

Before pronouncing her a tough old bird, I thought I should ask Joan what she thought of all this, so I emailed her yesterday with a link to the (almost) final cut of this video, and reiterated a few of the things I’ve heard her say about carrying on the good fight.  Here’s how she responded:

As for my keeping on keeping on, I do believe that we are in serious trouble—maybe fatal trouble, that is, maybe it’s too late to stop the express train we’ve been riding on—but as I say to my students, suppose it’s too late?  What are we going to do?  Lie around reading novels and eating bon-bons?  I think we should all try to live as responsibly as possible because it’s the right thing to do, and it’s what’s most likely to give our lives purpose.  Working in the garden makes me happy, and after the incredibly heavy rainstorms and flood warnings of the last week, I had no flooding!

As you can imagine, dear reader, having formed, over the last few years, my own attachment to Joan’s garden, I was happy to hear it.

Godspeed, Joan Gussow.

For those who loved This Organic Life as much as I did, Joan’s latest book doesn’t pick up where the former left off so much as it transcends the first, but still answers your most pressing questions—about the more intimate details of Joan’s family life, about (you guessed it) growing older—mostly in the familiar setting of that oft-imagined garden, and carries the reader into new conversations about the nature of relationships, the potential of hope and the meaning of purposeful work. I enthusiastically recommend it.

Originally published on Ecocentric

Photo courtesy of Susan Freiman of Nature Waltz Photos

(Note: All but four of the photos shown in the slideshow were taken by and are property of Susan Freiman. The other four were taken by Georgie Wells, Anthony Geathers, Mary Lukens and Leslie Hatfield. More of Susan’s wonderful photography can be found here.)

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.)

A few years ago, Naomi and I spoke on the subject at the Brooklyn Food Conference, where I haphazardly proclaimed emerging media our greatest hope for meaningful change in our food systems and for a more just democracy.  I still think this is mostly true (though the softie of inside me thinks it’s more about the better aspects of human nature, which of course drive the content we post to Twitter and Facebook-wink, wink).  My understanding of new media has deepened over time and I now worry more about net neutrality and lack thereof, especially regulations on mobile phones, since for many people, especially those who lack broadband access, smart phones are a primary mode of Internet access.  I worry about access in general, and I think more nowadays about who’s not taking part in the important conversations.  I worry about the idea of a shut-off switch.

Before I lead you too far down the net neutrality freak-out path, there are many inspiring examples of the use of new media to promote fairer food systems.  Consider the backlash to Andrew Breitbart’s unfair video edit of former USDA official Shirley Sherrod.  Consider Roger Doiron’s Eat the View campaign, which no doubt had a hand in convincing First Lady’s Michelle Obama to plant the White House garden. Consider the organization of rallies around the country by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.  Consider the work of the Real Food Challenge.

Are we building a better food justice movement with new and social media?  Without a doubt. But we need to think about who is not at the proverbial table; we also need to keep an eye on media policy, and we need to use new media nimbly, cleverly and locally.  I hear from many people who say they don’t have time for Twitter, and not every group or individual needs to be on Twitter, or Facebook, or Jumo, or whatever is next.  In fact, in preparing for this panel, I was reminded by Megan Fehrman that without laying the groundwork of forming relationships with the farmers she works with, they wouldn’t read the e-mails she sends them.  As much as we use new media to keep in touch with our networks and spread information rapidly, no digital tool will ever take the place of making those personal connections.

That said, I dream of a more personal Web, where local food enthusiasts use YouTube to document and share traditional foodways, where Groupon helps farmers find CSA (community supported agriculture) members and where the transmission of hundreds of thousands of e-mails against genetically modified alfalfa result in it actually not being approved by the USDA.

Throughout this weekend’s conference, Naomi and I will be videotaping and tweeting fellow attendees answering the question, “What does food justice mean to you?” But just because we’re not there holding a mobile phone camera in your face doesn’t mean you can’t weigh in, too.  We’ve asked friends and colleagues to help us gear up for our panel by jumping into the Tweet stream, and taking food justice messages to Facebook walls and the blogosphere.

Here, a few of my favorites so far:

Ever the early bird, Civil Eats editor Paula Crossfield (@CivilEater) tweeted Monday:

#foodjustice means that everyone has access to healthful (chemical and antibiotic-free), culturally appropriate, fairly produced food

And Bonnie Powell (@ethicurean), formerly known as the Dairy Queen:

Healthy, real food, prod fairly, for ALL > RT @naomistarkman: What does #foodjustice mean 2 u? @FoodJustice2011 conf http://bit.ly/ib3NM3

And Hank Herrera (@hankherrera):

@NaomiStarkman #foodjustice means ownership of the means of production and exchange of food by the people eating it. Fairness. Equity.

And friends from CUESA (@CUESA):

#foodjustice means small-scale family farmers can stay in business AND everyone can access healthy food (i.e. we have a way to go!)

And then our friends at Slow Food USA and Cooking Up a Story retweeted the question to their networks, which led to some great tweets from people we didn’t know before.

From @kmcdade:

@cookingupastory Enough food, good food, for everyone. #foodjustice

From @poundforpound:

RT @cookingupastory: Raj Patel: Food Sovereignty (vid) http://bit.ly/cju3Bk Country’s right to shape their own food & ag policy

From @foodinteg:

#foodjustice means transparency, where whistleblowers in the industry do not face retaliation for ensuring food integrity.

from @rjgiusti:

@SlowFoodUSA @naomistarkman #foodjustice = a food system that doesn’t abuse nature, while being healthy and tasty to humans

By the time I publish this post, surely, there will be more. We want to know: What does food justice mean to you?

Originally published on Ecocentric

Trader Joe’s, along with Publix, Kroger, and Dutch-held Ahold grocery chains (which include Giant, Stop & Shop, Martin’s and Peapod), are the most recent targets of CIW’s Fair Food Campaign. Over the last nine years the Coalition, together with partner organizations like the Student/Farmworker Alliance, has managed, through well-organized consumer campaigns and sometimes boycotts, to convince some of the food industry’s largest corporations (including Taco Bell/Yum Brands, McDonald’s, Subway, Whole Foods and Compass) to agree to the tenets of Fair Food: an extra penny a pound for tomatoes (nearly doubling the wages for pickers, who’ve not seen a raise since the mid-1970s), a labor Code of Conduct, greater transparency in the supply chain and incentives for growers that respect human rights.

The major fast food wins the Coalition has enjoyed have not come without a fight – in 2007, Burger King hired private investigators to spy on the Student/Farmworker Alliance and vice president Stephen Grover was caught using his daughter’s online alias to smear the group virtually. Chipotle, a chain built on promises of “food with integrity,” is the highest-profile holdout, and has spent the last few years dodging the Coalition. But they’ve made much greater strides with restaurants than with the grocery chains – only Whole Foods, which like Chipotle built its reputation on ethically-sound food, has managed to sidestep the bad publicity that heel-dragging retailers have experienced.

Like Whole Foods and Chipotle, Trader Joe’s attracts a decidedly progressive league of shoppers, but has managed, at least until recently, to avoid much scrutiny, in part perhaps through what CNN Money recently dubbed its “obsessively secretive” behavior. The chain has not escaped controversy entirely – two years ago, when 17-year-old Maria Vasquez suffered fatal heat stroke in a California vineyard that grew grapes for Charles Shaw wine, also known as Two Buck Chuck, which is sold by the chain, labor activists were quick to pressure Trader Joe’s to push its suppliers for stricter adherence to labor regulations. But if Joe is feeling the heat, he’s not showing it. My email to the company was left unanswered, and Chelsea Now reporters Bonnie Rosenstock and Scott Stiffler received an evasive response from TJ’s publicist, Alison Mochizuki:

“At Trader Joe’s, we work with reputable suppliers that have a strong record of providing safe and healthy work environments and we will continue to make certain that our vendors are meeting if not exceeding government standards throughout all aspects of their businesses.”

A few weeks before the Trader Joe’s rally, Karen and I met before work (to shoot the video below) at Middle Collegiate Church in the East Village, where the CIW’s mobile Modern-Day Slavery Museum had set up shop for the day to educate passers-by about six of the seven cases of slavery prosecuted on behalf of farmworkers in recent years. The museum, housed in a cargo truck similar to the one that held enslaved workers in one of the cases, puts these modern abuses into historical perspective, documenting Florida’s checkered past from the days of Spanish chattel slavery, through its use as a hub for importing African slaves and the creation of systems of state-sanctioned slavery, like the convict-lease program of the late 1800′s, through which the state would actually rent out African-American men, often convicted on questionable charges, to farm owners. It points out the fact that farm laborers were specifically left out of Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1935, and have still never been awarded rights that were extended to other kinds of workers 75 years ago, including the right to bargain collectively. Since then, the most common form of labor abuses entail “debt peonage,” often using a “company store” set up, sometimes withholding wages so that workers lack cash to buy food and other goods anywhere but from the employer, who sells them to employees at radically inflated prices.

But the six cases of modern slavery on display are a radical departure even from these abuses and hearken back to the days when slavery was a way of life in the American South. Prosecuted and won between 1997 and 2008, the cases involved forced, underpaid and even unpaid labor, physical violence and in some cases, kidnapping and imprisonment. The Coalition was instrumental in the uncovering and investigation of each of these six cases, and it was out of this work that the Fair Food Campaign was born.

Often, farmworkers are especially vulnerable because they are undocumented and in fear of being deported – and the blame for engaging in illegal work always falls on them, rather than on the growers, distributors, restaurateurs and retailers who profit from their cheap labor (and whose punishment, if it comes, tends toward the wrist-slapping variety). Florida’s most recent case of slavery, indictments for which came down in July, is an excellent example – Haitian nationals were allegedly lured to Florida with promises of decent jobs, had their passports taken from them upon arrival and were basically imprisoned, barely fed and in one case, raped by her captor. And just yesterday, in what the FBI is calling the largest case of human trafficking ever brought to court in the US, six were charged – including four from labor contractor Global Horizons – allegedly involved a similar bait-and-switch, as well as passport withholding.

Even for those among us who are shocked and appalled by these sorts of abuses, it is easy to turn a blind eye and believe company spokespeople who seek to assure us that they would never do business with growers who would abuse the rights of their workers. But without a much greater level of transparency in our food system, and without giving workers the right to bargain collectively, how are retailers or their patrons ever to know where corners may be getting cut to provide us with the low prices we crave? Most Americans, particularly those with no ties to agriculture, have no clue that such abuses still happen, let alone that they may be complicit in such exploitation through their purchases, which is why the Modern-Day Slavery Museum is such a powerful vehicle.

If you eat a tomato this Labor Day – or even if you hate tomatoes – try to honor the holiday by thinking about who picked it. If, like those of us in New York, you’ve been suffering an uncommonly hot summer, consider what it might be like to pick two tons of tomatoes a day under the Florida sun, all to earn $50 or $60. Ask yourself if you’d want to earn a more livable wage, to be assured things like access to water and shade and protection from pesticide spray, and to have a voice in the circumstances under which you went to work. I would.

Trader Joe’s takes comments here, Chipotle here, Ahold here.

Originally published at Ecocentric