It was an overcast but hot and humid Sunday July afternoon when 50 volunteers arrived to clear a sizable lot of land at Phoenix Press in New Haven, Connecticut, underneath their wind turbine, that is soon to become New Haven Farms’ fifth farm site.

As a founding member of New Haven Farms, it is exciting to see our urban farm sites sprout up around the edges of Fair Haven, an historic area of New Haven and one that has been home to immigrant populations for over 100 years. The mission of New Haven Farms is to promote health and community development through urban agriculture and our goal is to establish and cultivate year-round urban farms that produce nutrient-dense vegetables and fruits, in collaboration with community members who are both within 200 percent of the federal poverty level and suffering from diabetes, pre-diabetes, or have at least two risk factors for diabetes. The organization is now partnering with the Fair Haven Community Health Center (FHCHC) to rigorously build farms in the lowest income neighborhoods of New Haven, and investigate the impact of increased exposure and consumption of fresh, local nutrient-dense foods on this underserved community’s health. Its CSA program began the first week of July–called the New Haven Farms Fresh Produce Prescription Program.

Looking at the barren, rocky site at Phoenix Press gave me a rush. It may look desolate now but I can visualize a farm here, and I can imagine all the green and luscious, nutritious produce that will rise forth out of this lot within a year’s time [with the help of a lot of compost!] So when the afternoon was over and the volunteers got back on their bus, I returned home and immediately opened Sarah Rich’s beautiful book, Urban Farms and allowed myself to be inspired and imagine what this new farm site can become. This book chronicles the urban agriculture movement through gorgeous photography and thoughtful essays that would inspire any good urbanite to pick up a shovel and find a nearby community garden.

With photographer Mathew Benson in tow, Rich has made pilgrimages to and lovingly captured the zeitgeist of many urban farms that now serve as catalysts for urban renewal and economic development, that offer nutritional safe havens to underserved communities who are in real need of fresh and healthy food, that strive to create job opportunities and improve environmental conditions in once isolated and perhaps forgotten about areas of many cities.

Strolling leisurely through her book I can’t help but smile looking at photos of Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a place that I know well from my own Commercial Urban Agriculture training there. There is a beautiful shot taken from the inside of one of their many hoop houses, displaying the long rows of early lettuces that pop up out of raised beds [minus lumber], fashioned simply from layers of wood chips and homegrown compost. Founder Will Allen has always said “it’s all about the soil.”

And then in my hometown of Chicago, I see breathtaking photos of Resource Center’s City Farm, something that has become a treasured institution, from a vantage point that shows off Chicago’s fabulous downtown high rises in the distance in a David and Goliath kind of way. City Farm sits on the very edge of Cabrini Green, a once infamous public housing project that has now turned itself around and has become a gleaming example of an ultra-modern SRO [Single Resident Occupancy], including wind turbines on the roof. Chicago was not known as a model of sustainably when I was growing up but now it boasts many state of the art urban farm and local food sites like Growing Power Chicago and Experimental Station in Hyde Park.

Then I see photos of farms that I dream of visiting myself someday–Novella Carpenter’s Ghost Town Farm in West Oakland, California, which has set the new standard for growing and butchering your own meat; Our School at Blair Grocery in New Orleans, run by fellow Growing Power graduate Nat Turner, who takes in neighborhood kids and shows them the ropes of growing and selling greens; and Earthworks Urban Farm in Detroit, Michigan, which after more than a century since Detroit mayor Hazen Pingree’s “Potato Patch Plan”, serves as one of Detroit’s largest urban farms.

But lest ye think this book is only for those wishing to salivate over the visuals, let me set the record straight. Urban Farms comes equipped with thoughtfully written portraits as well, giving insights into each farm’s history, its community and its food. And there are rich and zesty essays to chew on too that discuss the impact of urban farms beyond the food they grow. “Edible Education” by Allison Arieff, for instance, discusses how school gardens are becoming an invaluable resource, in and outside the classroom. And an essay by Rupal Sanghvi called “Growing Public Health” talks about the positive impact on dietary health of people who participate in urban agriculture.

Whenever I am looking for inspiration and a reason to feel good about life, I have Rich’s book close at hand for a refreshing reminder of what is possible if people come together and make it happen. Her book reminds me of community and commitment, of respect and determination, of a kind of grit and faith that people must certainly have to make these farm dreams come true. It’s not easy work, and it takes a community to keep these places alive. But it does come with its own rewards. Like when you see a little girl eat a radish fresh out of her CSA bag, that gives you a feeling of ultimate satisfaction–and peace.

Despite the efforts of many communities that are working hard to support local agriculture and improve nutrition standards, the majority of the food consumed in the USA is still highly processed, unhealthy and unsustainable. Mark Winne, the co-founder of Connecticut Food Policy Council, End Hunger Connecticut!, and the National Community Food Security Coalition and author of the recently published Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture talks about the myths of Big Agribusiness, the possible casualty of American democracy and how Food Citizenship can reclaim our dilapidated food system.

Industrial agriculture promises that it can feed the world.  Why don’t you buy that?

The industrial food system means factory style production, high technology and is capital intensive and we have seen a tremendous amount of harm that’s come from it. I mean, look at the growing resistance to antibiotics, look at the spread of genetically modified foods. We don’t even really know if GMOs are safe or what could be the long term consequences of such crop production. We also can see the way the industrial food system operates. It’s very powerful, it’s very well-heeled, and it has the best lobbyists in any state capital or at the Washington DC level. And it can pretty much control everything from labor practices to whether or not genetically modified food is accepted.

So what I’m saying is that the solution to feeding a hungry world doesn’t have to be about technology. It can be an engaged citizenry–but you, the consumer, need to participate.

In the first chapter of your book called “A Food Story for Our Times,” you have created a rather grim vision of our food future, a la Pottersville from It’s A Wonderful Life, which takes place in November 2020, just ten short years from now. The dairy industry has been nationalized, with a mega pipeline stretching across the country. All the soymilk is now produced by genetically modified growers and is sold by one big corporation called MongoPlant, and the Secretary of Agriculture has become the new authoritarian Food Czar. Can you really see this all happening in ten years or less?

I do think that kind of nightmarish scenario is possible. Things could reach such a crisis level that we unequivocally place all of our trust in the industrial food system, because we are frightened, because we are told there is not going to be enough food to go around, that there are far too many people. And climate change will have taken such a toll on our ability to produce food that we have to resort to more extreme technological measures.

The worst fear to me is that we may voluntarily forfeit control of our food because it’s easier and we may not feel we have an alternative because circumstances have become so dire. And the first casualty in all of that will be democracy. I am trying to make it clear to people who are in the alternative food system that while a lot of good things are happening, they are still pretty small measures. We shouldn’t be so sanguine, we are still barely at the margins.

You speak about an alternative food system, one that is based on self reliance. But there’s no profit in self reliance. Can this really work?

In the book I talk about self reliance and individualism, about Ralph Waldo Emerson as the champion of individualism. And I do think that’s the other part of the story here. That is the antidote. Hundreds of thousands of people over the last 10 or 20 years have gotten into all manner of alternative food work.  And whether you’re a small organic farmer or you’ve created something like Stonyfield Yogurt–and you know, Stonyfield’s initial investment came from an order of nuns who made a socially responsible loan with a very low interest rate to Stonyfield, which launched the whole the Stonyfield enterprise–I think that it all has its roots in American individualism and self-reliance. And much of that has been profitable.

What does it mean to be a Food Citizen?

I often say that your hands are in the soil, your vegetables are on the cutting board and your voice is down at city hall. That is my little mantra. I use this term, “getting your heads above the plate”–meaning that we also need to start to become good food citizens. That means being aware of the political, environmental and economic issues of food. It gets pretty complicated and you might end up having indigestion. But what’s more important here is that we start to challenge each other more about all of those things. Shifting from food consumer to food citizen is an educational process, it’s about becoming more aware of these issues and then beginning to actually participate.

What about the idea of Food Citizenry as a force for community development? What steps can a community take to encourage more conscious food consumption?

I recommend two basic actions here: one is simple food production, whether its backyard gardening or community gardening, to broadening that out to a larger kind of commercial food production venture in our communities. And the second thing is education–we have to provide more educational opportunities in growing our own food. There is an excellent educational nutrition kitchen program in Austin, Texas that I talk about in the book called the Happy Kitchen which focuses on cooking and food purchasing and provides a good model to follow. Growing healthy local food also needs to be part of the public school curriculum. I think those are things that people can do. And they are doing them. We just need more.

You co-founded the Connecticut Food Policy Council back when no one knew what a food policy council was. What about today, are food policy councils on the rise?

It’s been huge lately. There are over 100 food policy councils in this country and especially in the last three to five years there has been a soaring demand for them. There are a couple of reasons for this: one is this huge new wave of interest in food that is taking over this country. And then with the last Farm Bill, there was this unprecedented interest in a much wider range of food and agriculture issues, and people who had not been interested in public policy work before came to see that there was a connection between food, health, agriculture and government. And so now with a food policy council, I think this is a perfect representation of a democratic institution at a local and state level where people and representatives of the food system can come together, where we can have open and transparent discussions about what’s going on and what the needs are and we can act accordingly. This allows all of us, as Food Citizens, to be involved, on the ground, in an ombudsman role.

What makes for an effective food policy council?

Number one, it needs to represent a wide variety of food interests and involve many sectors of the community. Secondly, it’s critical that it does actually influence policy, and that is has done things over time from research to public education to getting laws passed, to being able to influence the size of government budgets as they effect food, to simply putting food on the agenda. And that’s where food policy councils have been enormously effective–they have taken food and brought it before city councils, brought it before state legislators, before department heads in government and made them pay attention to the role that government can play in influencing the quality, the price, the availability of food. So that is what defines a successful food policy council. It’s fairly aggressive and it is representative of a broad number of food systems interests, it has a vision, but it has a practical way to implement that vision. It’s not starry eyed.

Where have you seen food policy councils have an impact of late?

The New Haven Food Policy Council was instrumental in getting the school food service to go private and independent, and bring in Tim Cipriano, who is now the new executive food service director of New Haven Public Schools. That was one of the more significant wins from a food policy council. It’s all part of the task of keeping food on the public agenda. I also advise food policy councils to just let your elected officials know all the time what your position is on the current issues so that every time something comes up, your position is out there. Take the recent salmonella poisoning in eggs–what should your community food policy council say about that? Maybe we can say the industrial food system and government regulation has failed and we probably should be looking for ways to support local agriculture. Or let’s look at our own health inspections in our city and in our state and see whether or not they are adequate. There are things happening in our food system all the time, big ticket items and the little things. I encourage the food policy councils to create a body of knowledge, a whole string of documentation of what their positions are, what their interests are and keep that in front of their policy makers, and when possible make it available to the public at large.

Click on the links to read an excerpt of Mark’s latest book, Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture or his last book, Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty.

A recent report by the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) and Farmers Market Coalition (FMC) called “Real Food, Real Choice: Connecting SNAP Recipients with Farmers Markets,” gives detail to the economic, social and technological roadblocks that often prevent many Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants from buying fresh and healthy food at their  local, or not so local, farmers markets. Is the real issue access or affordability? Michel Nischan, CEO and President of Wholesome Wave, talks about how their innovative programs are helping to avert a national health care crisis.

Q: If you had to use only one word to describe what Wholesome Wave does, what would you say?

A: That we catalyze. We basically fund markets that are accepting federal food assistance benefits, food stamps now called SNAP or WIC, but we need to have a funder that’s willing to support that particular market because we are not an endowed foundation.

For instance, look at our Double Value Incentive Program [DVCP]. We increase fruit and vegetable consumption for families that are on Federal Food Assistance who really don’t have the luxury of choice to buy fresh fruits and vegetables.  We could have been a local grass roots non-profit that only focuses on farmers markets in Connecticut and have DVCP as a marquee program, we could have found funders who would have been happy to fund us as an organization that does nothing but double the values of food assistance at farmers markets. But our end game really is finding market-based innovative approaches nationwide where there are feasible sources of ongoing funding that can be deployed that would have tremendous benefit to all tax payers. We seed the idea and then find the right non-profit that believes in these communities.

Often the non-profit comes to us and asks to get on board. And if there is a matching funder, we will provide them the training, the technical assistance, and then provide them the funding to kick it off. And in return, they have to provide the data that shows what happens with redemption rates, consumption, impact on the farmers, impact on the under-served community, etc. We’re now in 18 states and counting, and we watch how the program works everywhere because we are collecting information to build a case and say hey, no matter where we go, people in under-served communities want fruits and vegetables, they know what to do with them, and they just can’t afford them. So by being a catalyst for change, we see these ideas and so that we can show there is a broad indicator that can lead to a positive change.

Q: When it comes to increasing participation of federal nutrition program participants at farmers markets, is the issue about access or affordability?

A: It’s not as much of an access issue frankly as it is affordability. We’ve seen numerous farmers’ markets open near under-served communities. Many say that there’s a lack of demand. And it’s not a lack of demand, it’s a lack of affordability. A SNAP recipient receives an average of three dollars a day for food. So they made it through breakfast and lunch only because their kids are on the free breakfast and lunch programs at school—maybe they’d have two dollars for dinner. If you can get them to a grocery store—which is usually three bus transfers away–if you can get them there at all, if they can even afford the bus transfer which is actually more expensive than the SNAP dollars that they have, then you’re already putting them in a deficit just getting them to the store. But say they get there, and they have the two bucks, they look at a head of broccoli that’s $1.89 and a four pack of instant noodles that’s $1.69 – what are you going to put in front of your family? A quarter head of broccoli or four bowls of something hot? So it’s not Twinkies. It’s not Happy Meals. It’s a terrible, terrible misconception about what’s going on in these neighborhoods. It’s not like a lot of people make it out to be.

So when we double the coupons, yeah, ten to twenty dollars a week makes a huge difference for these families that have their backs against the wall. When you can provide them that affordability, because they have become so frugal and so expert at, at rubbing the pennies together, they will actually now put a cup of noodles in front of their family with a quarter head of broccoli and some fresh potatoes or some radishes or some roasted peppers, depending on what they buy at the Farmer’s Market. And now they’re getting a balanced meal instead of eating nothing but processed carbohydrates.

Q: Do you work out of Washington DC?

A: This is where Gus Schumacher [Wholesome Wave’s Executive Vice President] comes in. He is so brilliant and such a policy wonk—he created the Farmers Market Nutrition Program, which led to the cash vegetable vouchers, and the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition program. He’s amazing. We have a grant writing team and they help our partners leverage Specialty Crop block grant funding, farmers market promotion funding. Gus has worked in Washington DC at the administrative level of FNS, Food Nutrition Services [division of the USDA] AMS, [Agricultural Marketing Service] etc sharing the successes of these incentive programs, and he has succeeded in getting the demonstration pilot waivers eliminated, the alternative currency waivers and all of the data collection, just to accept SNAP, and now if you are a farmers market you can get approved and get an FNS number and get approved within 10 days when it used to take 45-90 days. All of these grant level and policy level changes have occurred as a result of this work.

We are not lobbyists, we don’t spend a dime, we don’t get paid to go to Washington DC. We figure out ways to rub nickels together. Gus goes in and gets people excited. And we see movement. Take Roots of Change, Michael Dimock’s program. He took over our program in San Diego and now we are serving 45 farmers market and 6 food sheds across California because he turned it into a state wide program with Gus’s assistance. Because of Gus there is soon to be a state wide program in Massachusetts and in Illinois.

Q: What’s the next big thing for Wholesome Wave?

A: The Fruit and Veggie Prescription Program is the next big one, and we believe it is a source of sustainable commercial funding eventually. Our lead partner in this is a Massachusetts-based organization called Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited (CAVU) along with Dr. Shikha Anand, in cooperation with Mass Farmers Market, and what we do is administer fruit and vegetable prescriptions to at-risk families so that they can increase their consumption significantly—a full serving of fruits and vegetables per day per person. And then as a result, because people get this free benefit as a prescription just like they would get their diabetes medicine, they have to come back every month to have their height, weight, blood pressure and BMI measured.

Our hope is to draw a direct correlation between increased access to the most vulnerable populations and increased consumption of these fruits and vegetables. There’s health reform now, it’s happening and it’s going to shift the system dramatically, from instead of rewarding health care providers and health care insurance companies to treat, it’s going to reward them to prevent. So when you can provide measurable prevention there’s an opportunity. So instead of getting $200 worth of Lipitor or Avandia or some other drug that week, you get $100 worth of fruits and vegetables for your family. The doctor will write you a prescription! And you’re getting a better health result.

In Native American reservations and in severely under-served rural and urban communities where people don’t have the access to healthy food, they are eating all these highly processed carbohydrates and they are becoming diabetic at an early age. And the peril of this, when you look at type 2 diabetes in children, those drugs that treat type 2 diabetes, have long term negative implications for human health, liver problems, all kinds of terrible, terrible side effects that weren’t an issue before. If you are 11 years old and you get diagnosed with type 2 diabetes and you have to take something which will cause your liver to fail in 25 years, well that’s a pretty big problem. So this can be prevented. The only reasoning why it’s happening is because the only thing these families can afford to feed their children are these highly processed, highly complex carbohydrates.

Q: What does it mean to you now that Wholesome Wave’s Double Value Coupon Program has been mentioned in the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity Report to the President as a program that increases SNAP and WIC use at farmers markets by 300%?

A: That we are on the right track, and that our partners are doing an excellent job. Washington DC understands what is going on, why we are so unhealthy, why health care is so screwed up and we are looking for innovative ways to move us in another direction. We’re identified within 75 potential recommendations that can help reduce childhood obesity by 2015.

Leafcutter ants engage in monoculture practices just like we do but with much stricter public health and safety guidelines that would put our own National Organic Program standards to shame. What do these ants know that we don’t? I spoke to Mark Moffett, Research Associate in Entomology at the Smithsonian Institute and author of Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari with a Cast of Trillions to find out.

You had an ant encounter in Ecuador that signified for you the very origin of agriculture – can you tell us about that?

I was on the shores of the Napo river in Ecuador, which is an enormous tributary of the Amazon, watching two enormous streams of ants flowing by, one on either side of me. One was a swarm of army ants, which are highly predatory, taking back to their camp all kinds of pray like scorpions and spiders. On the other side of me was a column of the leafcutter ants, which are entirely agricultural — they don’t eat any meat. This made me reflect on the fact that these are the two dominant groups of ants in the American tropics, each of which can have colonies in the millions, extremely successful, huge societies but with a completely different way of organizing their lives. Humans have shown the same kind of extremes over history, from nomadic herdsman to sedentary agriculture people. These ants have the same thing going on — the predatory army ants tend to be nomadic, they shift around a lot; while the leafcutters have huge well-set cities with complicated layouts to raise their crops. Most of us don’t think of the leafcutters as being agricultural because they are carrying leaves that they get from nature, but as it turns out they use these leaves to grow their crops.

And this crop would be…?

Fungus. They grow fungus, they are mushroom-loving ants…the modern leafcutter ants raise this fungus and are entirely dependent on it.

What does this fungus look like?

They turn the leaves into a mulch, it’s very soft stuff. A fungal garden can be the size of a human brain and about the same color, a sort of a gray cast with microscopic apple-like growths merging by the many thousands into a uniform gray fuzz that only the ants appreciate as food. The fungus has all the nutrients they require.

How many fungi does one colony need?

The number of ants in these colonies can go up to a few million, and they can have thousands of these chambers with these gardens in them going down 20 or even 30 feet into the ground. That’s a lot of ant miles. One colony’s worth of fungal gardens can weigh hundreds of pounds. They are huge monocultures, and the ants have domesticated this fungus so thoroughly that it cannot live in the wild.

This sounds like a large scale operation – do you consider this industrial farming?

Yes, this would be industrial farming. The earliest of these agricultural ants, before the leafcutters came along, would raise the fungi on manure. They had very simple, small societies. Their crops were healthy, they didn’t have disease problems, but they couldn’t grow them on a large scale. So the modern leafcutters, once they domesticated their crops 12 million years ago, could explode their populations into the millions much like humans did after we similarly invented mass agriculture. But like us the ants now have to constantly manage every aspect of their crops. The modern ants have a complete assembly line up the standards of Henry Ford, all these different sized ants in a colony do different things, some of them weed, some of them plant the new fungi, some feed the young. There is a whole assembly line as well in cutting the leaves, taking them back to the nest, chopping them, turning them into a mulch, adding them to the gardens, keeping the gardens healthy, replanting the gardens and then removing their waste. Everyone is doing a different task, it’s very, very organized, and it’s definitely like a factory.

But if they engage in industrial farming practices as we do, they must have similar industrial farming problems?

That’s why ants use pesticides — they grow some from their bodies, but they also grow a type of bacteria related to the penicillin bacteria that they then apply to their gardens. It knocks out the major diseases. The ant workers are moving pesticides around all the time.

So these pesticides are environmentally friendly?

They seem to have gotten a pretty biodegradable, healthy pesticide choice going on there.

With all the fungal gardens and the ants and the traffic, would you say these colonies suffer from a good degree of air pollution?

The huge colonies have to manage the airflow just right to get enough oxygen down to their gardens. Above ground they end up with these huge turrets — you walk into a rain forest and see these nests can be enormous, covering an area half the size of a tennis court with these turrets around their perimeters. If you put your face up to a turret, you can feel the hot air coming out. The ants actually organize the corridors down beneath the ground so that the hot air goes out of those exterior turrets, drawing cool air through the gardens to keeps everything cool and fresh.

So ants have been cultivating their own food for 50 millions of years, long before us, and they are surviving heartily today…what’s their secret?

If we compare ourselves to the ants, in terms of managing our environment and health – well, let me just say that if ants were in charge, there would be no giant oil spill off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The ants put a lot of effort into making sure their environment is very healthy in every way. I suspect their investment in environmental safety is ten times what humans put out. Of course we humans are just figuring out how critical public health issues are. So this is a word to the wise from nature: given similar problems and conditions, the ants have evolved a much more serious ability to deal with environmental issues at their small scale than we have at ours.

The gardens are precisely regulated, their temperature, the humidity, any weedy things that enter in to their system are removed instantly, any diseases are micromanaged. They do things that might be impractical for us, putting their gardens into hundreds of separate chambers so if any one of them has a problem the ants can cordon it off, and keep it separate from the rest of their society. Everything about their organization has a redundant fail safe to it.

You have said that humans are only recently learning the value of “green” investments that “have been the common currency of ants for millennia.” What should we know about these green investments?

Relative to their size, ants invest a huge amount in public health and safety, much more than humans do, especially these ants with their gardens. They have to be very cautious with big monocultures, as much as we do to protect ourselves from the next potato blight. Because what has happened with these ants is they have bred their cultivars so thoroughly that they have lost a lot of their genetic diversity, much as we have done with our modern crops, which means both our crops and theirs are very susceptible to disease. As a result the ants have to be very meticulous. They sow their crops, they weed them, they cull them, they manage their waste, they treat them with pesticides, they do everything a human farmer would do but often with far more care, particularly in terms of health issues. They have sanitation squads that remove every trace of a foreign weedy fungus from their gardens, including diseases, and isolate them in deep underground chambers used only for waste. And the workers that live in those chambers aren’t allowed to come back into regular society; they are full time waste managers doing a very dangerous job. Those chambers are the deepest in the ant colony, and can be a big enough that even a human could fit in one. You can only imagine how many centuries of ant hours are required to dig a chamber that huge, that far under ground by these little ants…

We have to start taking the health issues of crops and the environment more seriously. Ants have made more of it than we do, and they have survived in stable way with their crops for 50 million years. Humans are still in an up and down cycle, where food becomes scarce one year and adequate the next. We are still working out the kinks…through it all, ants have invested a lot more energy and time into their food in their daily lives than we humans do. We tend to take food for granted.

Currently, the National School Lunch Program feeds nearly 31 million students every day for $9.3 billion per year. At the end of February, President Barack Obama proposed a $1 billion a year increase ($10 billion over ten years) in funding for U.S. child nutrition programs including school lunches. Sounds like a lot. But $1 billion, it turns out, really only boils down to an extra twenty cents per school meal. Right now, the reimbursement rate per meal is $2.68, and less than a dollar of that goes towards actual food. The rest is spent on infrastructure. Many school food advocates believe that serving wholesome, nutritious meals for under $3 is just not possible and there has been a rallying cry for more – up to a $1 more per child’s meal.

Fred Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture and President of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, once told me if the USDA did nothing else than change the food served in schools, then he would be happy because “to change the school lunch program, USDA Secretary Vilsack will have to change the infrastructure that delivers the food to our schools and that will change the food system because it will provide many new opportunities for farmers to get food they produce to consumers, and I think that will encourage more of our young want-to-bes to begin farming.”

That statement seems fairly profound – that by changing our school food we could actually change this nation’s agricultural system by empowering local farms with local school dollars. So how exactly would an increase, if it actually happened, in the National School Lunch Program change or impact local farm production? Would biodiversity increase? Would commodity crops disappear to make room for more fruit and vegetables? How would the relationship between the schools and the farmers change?

Here are a few answers to those questions from leaders in the school food movement:

Chef Timothy Cipriano:

Yes, if schools trend to purchase more local seasonal products, I think this will shift the emphasis from corporate farms to more local farms. American public schools feed 31.5 million school lunches annually, this accounts for A LOT of food. This past year we already increased our local farm purchases to 48,000 pounds which includes things like 300 cases of apples (that’s 12,000 lbs or 36,000 apples), 300 cases of pears, 75 cases of peaches, 100 cases of green beans, 100 cases of potatoes, and more than 6500 pounds of butternut squash, 400 pounds of tomatoes, 135 bags of corn, and quite a few cases of miscellaneous items such as cukes, eggplant, green and yellow squash, peppers, kale, and cabbage. We are working collaboratively with local community groups to start our own farm which will be split into a 5 acre educational farm where the students will grow whatever they want, and a 35-40 acre production farm where we will grow vegetables to serve in our schools. We will start with basic ingredients like tomatoes, onions, peppers, herbs, etc. to produce marinara sauce and salsa while we work with local processors to produce these in bulk for us to use in our schools. We are also looking to market and sell the marinara sauce and salsas in local stores to generate revenue for the farm. Currently we buy a lot from Connecticut farms but I would like to see more greenhouse crops offered year round. We could, with proper storage, move to serving exclusively local products, albeit processed and frozen. In addition, this $1 increase would also allow us the opportunity to run our business more efficiently, with up to date equipment that is Energy star rated or more green at least and utilizes less gas, electricity, etc. The payoff in the end is healthier children, cleaner air and a system that is not broken. I feel strongly that we are in the best shape ever when it comes to seeing real change happen with the USDA, The White House, and Congress all on a path to change. With the support of many organizations including School Nutrition Association, Food Research & Action Center, School Food Focus and others all working together as a team, we will see a real change very soon.

Tim Cipriano is the Executive Director of Food Services for New Haven Public Schools in New Haven, Connecticut and was just in Washington DC to attend the School Nutrition Association’s Legislative Action Conference, and met with USDA Under Secretary Kevin Concannon and Chef Sam Kass, the Assistant Chef and Food Initiative Coordinator for The White House who is working directly with the First Lady on the Let’s Move campaign.

Chef Ann Cooper:

History and experience tells me that we really need this additional $1 per child meal. The reimbursement rate is $2.86 but most of that goes for labor and equipment and only 90 cents or so is left, in LA its 96 cents. The extra $1 will put us at $3.70 per meal.

I have always advocated for fresh foods. Fresh foods, whole grains, kids need these things, whether it’s a fresh mango in Florida or a fresh garbanzo bean in Minnesota. One major impact on farming will be that we will be taking commodity crops out of production and instead plant real food. The five top commodity crops in this country, corn, soy, wheat, rice and cotton, we don’t eat most of that. We need to grow more crops that we can actually eat. This $1 per child meal increase will most definitely increase biodiversity and increase the amount of crop land dedicated to real foods.

We won’t be putting any farmer out of business who currently is growing all commodity crops. Farmers will be doing business in different ways. And we will be giving new opportunities to small farmers. Here in Boulder, Colorado, we are hoping to work with a farm that has 40 acres of productive land. We have 28,000 kids here, so 40 acres would make a huge difference and will produce a tremendous amount of what we need. Farmers often tell me we helped to save their farms. In New York, you have a more limited growing season but schools could help fill the gap from what a small farmer can earn at a farmers market. He or she can still participate in the farmers market but for instance the schools could buy that last 500 pounds of potatoes or carrots at the end of the season instead of going to waste.

Ann Cooper is the Renegade Lunch Lady, interim director of nutrition services at the Boulder Valley School District in Colorado and is the founder of TheLunchBox.org, a Web site that advocates healthier school lunches.

Debra Eschmeyer:

School meals are a vehicle for a healthier and wiser tomorrow exemplified by the Farm to School programs growing nationwide. Farm to school provides a snap shot of what our future food system should look like, not just local sustainable foods in the cafeteria, but complementary food, agriculture, and garden-based education within the classroom and community teaching children lifelong healthy eating habits. Currently, in the Child Nutrition Reauthorization, we have strong bills in the Senate, S. 3123, and House, H.R. 4710, to support that would create a competitive Farm to School grant program, so more schools could start programs. As Representative Holt says, “Farm to school programs exemplify the best use of federal school lunch dollars.

Debra Eschmeyer is the Marketing & Media Manager of the National Farm to School Network and the Center for Food & Justice and works from a fifth-generation family farm in Ohio. She recently wrote about School Lunch Reform in The Huffington Post.

Anthony Geraci:

I’ve already made a commitment to buy locally — we are the first place to spend $1.5 million dollars this year on local produce, which is up from $25,000 last year. I buy local bread, I buy local milk, so combined I already spend $5.5 million on local foods total. I’d like to spend the other $8-10 million on protein like chickens. So waiting on someone in Washington to change the infrastructure for us, well we have decided to change it ourselves. They will be watching us very closely to see how we are doing it. We have great farms, we have great farmers. We want to put our dollars to use here, empower an atmosphere of biodiversity. Instead of just talking about things we want to do, we actually do them. And we have been doing them, and that is the story of success in the Baltimore program. It can’t be perfect so let’s just move forward with it and stop blaming it on everyone else. 1 in 3 kids born after the year 2000 will get diabetes type 2, 1 in 2 African American kids will get it. That is staggering. We can’t keep pumping them full of fat and sugar and expect it to go away.

So here’s the deal, let’s take chicken for example. The government gives you the commodity in lieu of cash, chicken instead of money. By the time I can use it, it actually costs more than the local chicken. There are more chickens than people in the state of Maryland. Why am I buying chicken from Arkansas and having it shipped across the country, why can’t I buy local chickens? I just left a meeting with the USDA and we are working on a project called Maryland’s Best Brand, taking 5 crops that we grow well here – corn, green beans, tomatoes, peas, carrots. Rather than us putting money into shipping the food out of state, we are going to contract the farmers to grow our stuff. The farmer benefits and we create jobs around processing, we lower our operating costs and the tax dollars stay local. That’s happening with or without the federal money. I caution my colleagues to not sit around and wait for money, it might not come. Our kids are hungry, so let’s get off our butts and start working with our resources that we have right now, and if the money comes, that’s awesome.

As Director of Food and Nutrition of Baltimore City Public Schools, Tony Geraci has ensured that more than 80,000 Baltimore students now have access to fresh fruits and vegetables every school day and founded the Great Kids Farm, a working organic farm and education center that trains future urban farmers and provides food for the school system’s cafeterias.

Frederick Kirschenmann:

The industrial food system is now so concentrated and centralized that it makes it very difficult for farmers to obtain a fair share of the food dollar.  Farmers are essentially raw-material suppliers into a food chain that demands that food be “cheap.”  But we do not have a cheap food policy; we have a cheap labor and raw materials policy.  And since farmers have no market power they always get squeezed at the end of the chain.  But the new emerging food demand is whole, fresh, food, produced in an environmentally sustainable manner and one which consumers have access to and can have a trusting relationship with.  A new infrastructure that would serve our school lunch programs would provide young farmers with a new opportunity to enter such relationships and be part of a new food system that gave the growing number of consumers what want to know where their food comes from what they want.

One of the big problems facing young farmers who want to grow food for people is transaction costs—the costs involved in getting food from field to table.   Right now there is little infrastructure in place to provide such services in an efficient manner.   Almost all infrastructure in place today is designed for undifferentiated commodity production—farmers can deliver bulk grain or livestock to grain elevators, or livestock sale barns or packing plants.  But there is little to no infrastructure for farmers to deliver food produced locally, and virtually no delivery system which could aggregate their production to deliver efficiently.   Farmers Markets and CSA’s are their only options.   Food distribution companies like SYSCO are designed to deliver large quantities of food that can be picked up and delivered at centralized facilities. Some experiments are taking place to develop more localized distribution systems but the demand at the moment does not justify large expenditures.   So if the public school system were to develop such infrastructures farmers could then piggy-back on to them.   Of course, farmers would also need to aggregate by forming cooperatives or other business relationships and pool their production so that distribution companies could pick up product from one location instead of going to every farm—which becomes cost-prohibitive for them.  Increasingly health care institutions, like hospitals, are interested in buying fresher, whole foods from local farmers, but the distribution system is not in place for them to do so efficiently.

Fred Kirschenmann is the Distinguished Fellow of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, President of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and a third-generation organic farmer, who grew up on a farm in North Dakota and whose childhood diet subsisted on foods grown on their property.

Chef Bill Telepan:

It would be better than it is now — more farmers in the Northeast will stick around and not sell their land. I think the small farms will become the medium farms, and that’s a good thing cause then there is more land being farmed. If we have more diverse products we wouldn’t have these giant agrifarms that grow lettuce that gets bagged and shipped across the country. Really, we could use more colorful vegetables. When you think about the spectrum of colors, the different vegetables that are so colorful, you aren’t seeing that in schools. So getting turnips, beets, celery root, veggies that kids don’t know, would be huge. Why not Swiss chard or collard greens? Oh, and fresh corn. Even different kinds of potatoes — in fact, fresh potatoes would be a good start, not frozen French fries.

If we could get a dollar more per meal, I believe it would allow schools to have their suppliers buy more locally with more diversity. I really hope they can do something about the meat. Especially the beef. I would just love to see a real hamburger, for instance, that’s not processed. A grass fed beef hamburger on a real bun and the kids would love it. Right now in school cafeterias, the meat they buy, in order to get a better yield out of it, they’ll add cheaper stuff to it. So they’ll make chicken nuggets with corn syrup and soy protein. The beef has soy protein added to it. So when you have a 3 oz hamburger you are actually only getting 1.5 oz of meat and the rest is filler. It’s ok to use regular chicken, it doesn’t have to be organic chicken, as long as it’s just chicken and not ground up with processed stuff. I’d like to see more things on the menu that are healthy and simple – and serving a protein, a vegetable, a salad and a starch that are all made from scratch.

Bill Telepan, the Owner and Chef of Telepan restaurant in New York City and Board Member of Wellness in Schools, recently visited Washington DC as a member of NYC Alliance for CNR, asking members of Congress to consider an increase in the reimbursement rate for The National School Lunch Program.

Josh Viertel:

Nationwide, our schools serve more than 7 billion meals per year. That’s enormous, unparalleled purchasing power. Just imagine if 10 percent of schools had the resources to make meals from unprocessed ingredients bought directly from local farms. That’s an economic stimulus package that would completely transform farm economies and rural communities.

If Congress allocated $1 more per meal, schools would be able to buy more of the foods we see at farmer’s markets: vegetables, fruit, pasture-raised meat and dairy. In addition to funding, we also need incentives so schools use their funds to buy real food.  With these incentives in place, farmers would be asked to grow more apples, carrots, lettuce, sweet potatoes – the kind of vegetables that are easy to cook in large quantities and that kids like to eat.

Increasing funding would enable more schools to cook meals from scratch and use whole ingredients. As a result, we’d see an increase in demand to grow the diverse mix of fruits and vegetables that make up a healthy diet and kids would change their behavior and appreciation of these foods over time.

If schools consistently bought locally grown food, farmers would be able to take advantage of this substantial market for their crops – and in some cases, wouldn’t have to go through big national distributors. They’d have the security of knowing their crops will be sold, and the added benefit of saving money on marketing and retail packaging. In particular, this would be a boon for mid-sized farms that have the capacity to work with local school cafeterias and grow crops that match their needs.

Right now, farmers make about 19 cents of every dollar spent on food. The rest goes to marketing, distribution and processing. A farmer who sells directly to a school (or joins a cooperative that handles some of the distribution) will see a much bigger percentage of that dollar, because there are no middlemen.

As President of Slow Food USA, Josh Viertel launched Time For Lunch which asks citizens to sign their petition, contact their legislators and join Eat-In protest/potlucks across the country, demanding a good, clean, and fair food system for kids.

[All interviews have been condensed and edited.]

Bees have been dying off in record numbers over the past few years — some American beekeepers have lost anywhere from 30 to 90% of their bees.  The situation, termed Colony Collapse Disorder [CCD], has wreaked havoc on American agriculture and the $15 billion worth of crops pollinated by honeybees every year.

So I did what San Francisco State University biologist Gretchen LeBeun, creator of the Great Sunflower Project, has asked. I planted a Lemon Queen sunflower. And then I stood there watching for bees. I timed the first arrival, 7 minutes, 33 seconds. I stood in my front yard for over twenty minutes watching bees circle the new plant, doing loops around the Cone flowers and the Tickseed and circling back. Gretchen has asked us sunflower-planter participants to time how long it takes five bees to find this grand dame plant and then to send in this data via their website, to be included in their big research project on the honeybee disappearing act, the most mysterious and disturbing event in the world of agriculture today.

Recently, I saw Ted Jones, expert bee-wrangler, owner of Jones’ Apiaries in Farmington, Connecticut, and President of Connecticut Beekeepers, running around town with a truck bed full of hives and buzzing bees. With over 400 colonies of honeybees, Ted stays very busy renting hives to neighboring restaurants, farms and stores. Less than 10% of bees remain in the wild today and most farmers must rely on commercial beekeepers to keep their crops pollinated.

Ted says work has really picked up and that he hardly has a day off. “It used to be that you just dropped off the hives at the beginning of the season and then you come to pick them up at the end. But no more.” Now Ted needs to visit the hives every two to three weeks to make sure all is well.

Ted says that the bees this year, however, seem to be doing better, that the bees’ survival rate has improved and that they “are holding their own.” Not coming back full swing, mind you, but holding up just ok. The Apiary Inspectors of America (AIA) and USDA-ARS Beltsville Honey Bee Lab conducted a survey between September 2008 and early April 2009 and discovered that managed bee colonies have suffered a total loss of 28.6% out of the U.S’s estimated 2.3 million colonies. That is less than 31% and higher from the previous years, but this lesser loss still remains unsustainable.

Some scientists say it’s because of cell phones. Others say it’s related to the Bt-spliced GMO crops. Then there are the confirmed believers who attribute this global demise to a natural foe, the Varroa mite. And then there are the ubiquitous pesticides, herbicides and fungicides that we humans use to continually douse our fruits, grains and vegetables. Yet what is most mysterious of all is not why this is happening but rather why is it taking so long to find out? Is there no research being funded for this?

Other countries are finding explanations. Take Germany and the Bayer AG insecticide known as clothianidin. Many insecticides used against soybean aphids are highly toxic to bees and beekeepers do whatever they can to keep their bees away from this one in particular. In June 2008, Germany banned clothianidin and the CEO of Bayer AG and one other top ranking executive have been accused by the group Coalition Against Bayer Dangers of “knowingly polluting the environment.”

And yet, as devastating as this honeybee loss is, and as toxic as pesticides seem to be to these bees and as damning as the evidence is that links pesticides directly to the demise of honeybees, our own government has been reluctant to put their money where their honey is. That is, until now.

Last year, the Natural Resources Defense Council looked into the impact of pesticides on honeybee populations in the US and began to suspect the US government was keeping vital information from the public. Since the EPA refused to cooperate with the NRDC’s Freedom of Information Act request for agency records on the toxicity of pesticides to bees, the NRDC was left with no choice and filed a lawsuit against the EPA in August 2008.

Congress in its infinite wisdom has come to finally recognize CCD as a threat, and the Food, Conservation and Energy Act has provided the USDA with emergency funds of $20 million a year from 2008 to 2012 for honey bee research. BUT, as of May 8 of this year, Executive Director of Pollinator Partnership Laurie Davies Adams, submitted a letter signed also by the American Bee Federation and Häagen-Dazs to Chairman Herb Kohl and Ranking Member Sam House from the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies, calling the USDA’s efforts “stagnant” and asking them to please stop neglecting this critical pollinator research.

Then someone must have put a bee in someone’s bonnet at the USDA. U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack signed a proclamation designating a 2009 National Pollinator Week which took place from June 22 – 28 and a Congressional Pollinator Briefing was held on Friday, June 26. According to Tom Van Arsdall, Director of Public Affairs for Pollinator Partnership, this Briefing “was instrumental in leading to major action.” For one, Representative Alcee L. Hastings (D-FL) saw to it that $5 million for CCD and pollinator research was added into the Agriculture Appropriations bill for Fiscal Year 10 (FY10) on the House floor. Häagen-Dazs, Burt’s Bees, and the almond industry’s foundation have also become big contributors to honeybee research. So maybe something really is happening or will be very soon.

But the UK may have beat us to it. Beyond Pesticides Daily News Blog reports back in April that a Pollinator Initiative has been created under the Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) partnership including the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the Wellcome Trust and the Scottish Government. Beyond Pesticides quotes Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust: “It is extremely important that we move swiftly to understand and try to reverse the decline in the populations of bees and other pollinating insects. The devastating effect that this decline may have on our environment would almost certainly have a serious impact on our health and well being. Without pollinating insects, many important crops and native plants would be severely harmed.”

As far as the EPA now goes, they have come back to the table, bee helmet in hand, and have offered a Pollinator Protection Strategic Plan which will help structure the EPA’s work in this pollinator arena in the future. This fall in October, they will be hosting the International meeting of the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign (NAPPC) at EPA’s Headquarters in Washington DC. They are also participating in NAPPC’s pesticide task force work to develop educational materials for pesticide applicators and facilitating NAPPC’s participation in the August 11-13, 2009, annual conference of the North American Pesticide Safety Educators (NAPSE) in Charleston, SC.

So bee-wranglers, while you are waiting for your honeybees to come back to the hive, perhaps some wrangling work can be had over yonder on Capital Hill. Contact your Senators and urge them to ensure that funding for honey bee and pollinator research be added to Ag Appropriations on the Senate floor. Get bee-sy today.

Photo: cproppe

Alice Waters is taking a lot of heat in blogger land of late. From The Feedbag’s question “Has the locavore taliban finally been checked?” to NPR’s Monkey See blogger Todd Kliman noting Alice’s “inflexible brand of gastronomical correctness” to Anthony Bourdain’s equating her with the Khmer Rouge (I mean, can you see Alice carrying an 8.5 pound AK 47 when she couldn’t even do the Heimlich maneuver on Joan Nathan?) Alice is getting shredded in the Cuisinart of the Anti-Politically Correct. And some people would say, rightly so. Apparently, her local food obsessive-slightly fascistic behavior and precious organic-y grandeur has rubbed the wrong kind of salt into the wrong people’s wounded sense of self-righteous apathy.

In an article in the Washington Post this past Sunday, Jane Black, who wrote rather glowingly about the Kumbaya-ness of the Slow Food Nation event that took place in San Francisco back in August 2008, now seems to have turned a more specious eye upon the pre-inaugural dinners organized by Alice Waters in Washington DC. Thrown by private citizens in private homes, celebrity chefs (such as Daniel Boulud, Tom Colicchio, Lidia Bastianich, Floyd Cardoz, Nancy Silverton, Rick Bayless, José Andrés, Dan Barber) came in from around the country to cook on the Monday night before the Inauguration as a way to raise much needed funds for two Washington soup kitchens, Martha’s Table and DC Central Kitchen, and also FRESHFARM Markets, the organization that supports farmers’ markets in the Washington DC region. The dinners have received criticism for being at best irrelevant, at worst, down right elitist.

Patrick Martins, founder of Heritage Foods USA, who was at the infamous Joan Nathan dinner (and no, he didn’t see Colicchio perform the Heimlich maneuver on Ms. Nathan), just shakes his head upon hearing these petty Alice criticisms. “Whoever is saying these things, they should take a good look in the mirror and ask themselves, can they do better? No one else is stepping up to the plate.”

In the Wa Po article “Go Slow Foodies. It’s the Way to Win,” Black started the ball rolling by asking: “Can the combination of Barack Obama and a $500-a-plate meal of grass-fed beef in a rustic guajillo chili sauce and a warm tart of local apples and pears change the world? Or at least the way America eats?”

Can you guess what I am going to write next? Yes It Can!

On WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show, editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine Ruth Reichl and food writer for the New York Times Kim Severson discussed the implications, ramifications and machinations of the Alice Waters Inaugural Dinners.

Reichl was part of the committee, or “kitchen cabinet” as like might call themselves, (along with Waters and Danny Meyer) that organized these dinners and was happy to go on Leonard’s show if for no other reason than to tell the naysayers who cry “Elitism!” that eating good food is not an elitist act, that good food should be had by all, and the best way to get that message across is to take it to the kitchens of Washington DC.

Reichl said on the air: “When I started writing about food in this country, nobody seemed to care. And so it’s very exciting that people now care.”

So who cares? And what does that mean? It is easy to dismiss these green apple gelee and celery root remoulade glorified meals as oh so rococo and, to some cynics, a bit Marie Antoinette-ish, but at their heart (sunchoked if you will) there is substance to these dinners that can’t be blithely washed away with a decent bottle of ‘93 Hermitage.

In fact, a good many people of influence, media and otherwise were at these parties (Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Mora Liason, Rachel Maddow just to name a few) along with Obama-ites like Zeke Emmanuel, Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel’s older brother and Chair of the Department of Bioethics at the NIH who came straight from celebrating with the Obamas to sit next to Reichl at Nancy Silverton’s dinner. Presumably these dinners, which received quite a bit of media attention, have started a conversation about food in this country that might now be on the radars of mainstream media in the future.

So if people care, then what are they going to do about it? Reichl asks that elephant-in-the-room question of the day: “how can we change things in this country so it’s not something that happens to rich people but is instead a prerogative for everyone in the country?”

Per Black’s article, the complaints continue: “They don’t have a central, core message,” says James Thurber, an expert on lobbying and the director of American University’s Center on Congressional and Presidential Studies. “What policy are they trying to change?”

Reichl’s answer: “We want to change it all! Who doesn’t think obesity is a problem or pesticides is a problem and social justice for farm workers is a problem — these are all things that need to be changed and many feel that the opportunity is finally in sight.”

Liz Falk, DC markets manager of FRESHFARM Markets, one of the recipients of the funds raised that evening, said this: “Recognizing that the lack of focus of the local food movement is understandable since food is so ubiquitous at every level, from policy, society and fair access issues, to business and support of small family farms, to the environmental impact… it is difficult to know where to start. And as such, we should want a whole lot more than validation from the White House and President Obama.”

Back on The Lopate Show, Kim Severson commented that she feels a larger food movement is afoot, “a second food revolution is in the air. Everything he [Obama] eats has been scrutinized. They all think Obama is their guy. I think they are overly optimistic but I know a lot of progress has been made.”

Reichl made a pass at one specific change this fall by supporting a letter written by Alice Waters last fall asking the Obamas to consider a change of guard in the White House kitchen. Both she and Waters and others were asking for a chef that uses local and organic foods. But the Obamas decided to stay with the chef already in the White House kitchen, Cristeta Comerford, and, as it turns out, Comerford has been cooking with organic foods all along for the Bushes. Oops.

Much bru-ha-ha has since been made that Reichl and the Gang were, to quote former White House Executive Chef Walter Scheib, treating Comerford like “so many pounds of chopped liver.”

Reichl had her chance to respond on the show.

“No one is beating up on her. The point of the letter was not that she wasn’t a great chef but that the position should be rethought, that it should be redefined as a bully pulpit who can talk about good food….They didn’t talk about the Bush’s eating organic food … They hid it and that’s the point. They were afraid they would be seen as elitist… This is a country that feeds their children pure junk while the President eats organic food. He didn’t want to say he was eating so much better than anyone else.”

And just yesterday, New York Times writer Marian Burros came out with the surprise announcement that yes indeed, Sam Kass, the 28 year old founder of Inevitable Table, a private chef service in Chicago, has joined the White House kitchen. His work with local, sustainable food should please even someone as picky as Alice Waters.

So as for the Bush’s Let-Them-Eat-Industrialized, Mercury-Tainted-High-Fructose-Corn Syrup-Cake philosophy, let’s hope the Obamas request the cake be made with organic flour.

Photo: JonBauer