Today in Oak Brook, Illinois the world’s most well-recognized purveyor of unhealthy food will hold its annual shareholders’ meeting. Usually a forum to showcase profits made at the expense of the public’s health, food advocates and health professionals will be giving the burger giant’s dog and pony show pause.

For a second straight year, shareholders will vote on a resolution requiring McDonald’s to publicly assess its impacts on the nation’s health. The resulting report would, no doubt, be damning. After all, no fast food corporation sells more high-fat, -salt, -sugar, and -calorie junk food worldwide. No fast food corporation spends more marketing its unhealthy offerings. And perhaps no food corporation has had a greater impact on how we eat or how food is grown.

As Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser puts it: even if you don’t eat McDonald’s-style fast food “you’re eating food produced by the same system.” In other words, McDonald’s, as the nation’s leading purchaser of staples like beef, pork, and potatoes, isn’t just putting unhealthy food on plastic trays, it’s shaping the unhealthy methods by which its produced. Factory farms, the overuse of pesticides–you name it–McDonald’s is in some way behind it, including the harm to animals, our drinking water, the environment, and our health an externality.

That’s why this first-of-its-kind resolution is so groundbreaking. It would give us a sense of what a Big Mac and fries truly costs. Not only that, it would give shareholders a sense of the financial risk the corporation could ultimately face for continuing to saddle the public with its externalized costs.

As recently documented in AdAge, McDonald’s brand image is out of sync with sales, with McDonald’s consistently ranking near the bottom of its industry in quality perception. Analysts warn if this trend continues the pendulum could well swing for the corporation’s profitability.

Dr. Andrew Bremer, a pediatric endocrinologist and professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, will speak to these points at the meeting. He is part of a growing network of more than 2500 health professionals  that are partnering with my organization, Corporate Accountability International, to compel industry-leader McDonald’s to change course as the corporation’s leadership changes hands. CEO Jim Skinner will be stepping down this month, with COO Don Thompson stepping in.

Corporate Accountability International and partners like Dr. Bremer see no reason to wait for the results of the resolution-sanctioned report to come in for the new CEO to reduce the corporation’s “health footprint.” For one, there is a growing body of research, including a recent Institute of Medicine study, highlighting the importance of limiting junk food marketing to children and adolescents in reducing disease rates. To this end the network has called for McDonald’s to stop marketing junk food to kids, helping compel the American Academy of Pediatrics to take an even more strident stance–an outright ban on junk food marketing to kids.

And most recently, the network called on hospital administrators to give McDonald’s franchises the boot. Cleveland Clinic led the charge–affirming it would not renew McDonald’s contract. A study in the journal Pediatrics has found that citing fast food in health care settings earns brands like McDonald’s an undeserved association with healthfulness. Needless to say, McDonald’s has long built brand loyalty by nutriwashing its image–a practice that needs to stop.

Grassroots pressure is only building. Since the initial introduction of the resolution at last year’s meeting, McDonald’s has made changes to its Happy Meals and competitors have scaled back their marketing to kids.

As these things go, resolutions are not expected to pass over the opposition of the Board. But bringing it to the floor before shareholders will again put the corporation on notice, compelling CEO Thompson to lend a more sympathetic ear to the concerns of health care providers and Civil Eats readers like you.

Click here to call on hospital administrators to give McDonald’s the boot.
Click here to call on McDonald’s CEO to stop marketing junk food to kids.

Corporate Accountability International (formerly Infact) is a membership organization that has, for the last 35 years, successfully advanced campaigns protecting health, the environment and human rights. Value [the] Meal is Corporate Accountability International’s campaign dedicated to reversing the global epidemic of diet-related disease by challenging the fast food industry to curb a range of abuses.

Chefs are artists. Good ones draw people in with their inspired plates and atmosphere–performance art meets flavor. While deliciousness at a restaurant is first and foremost, more patrons are now also making decisions about where to eat based on the values behind the food–like social justice for the workers, healthy growing practices, and support for local economies.

Last week in an interview with The New York Times, chefs Thomas Keller–who has received many awards for his creative approach to food at restaurants French Laundry and the Bouchon empire–and Andoni Luis Aduriz, of the restaurant Mugaritz in Spain, took the Damien Hirst approach to feeding people: It’s about the experience and whatever it takes to create radical and inspiring food is more important than the potential impact on the environment. “With the relatively small number of people I feed, is it really my responsibility to worry about carbon footprint?” remarked Keller.

Both chefs admitted that they buy local when they can, but didn’t want to focus on that as a practice. According to Aduriz, “to align yourself entirely with the idea of sustainability makes chefs complacent and limited.”

The good food movement would beg to differ. The proliferation of farm-to-table restaurants, farmers’ markets and small food businesses, and the increased visibility of food policy issues in the media all speak to a sea change under way.

Keller and Aduriz seem like dinosaurs when you compare them to younger chefs like René Redzepi of Noma, for example, who is proving that taking a local, values-driven approach to food can be inspiring, delicious and award-worthy. All three chefs’ restaurants are featured on the “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” list, but Noma is number one.

While the list is not at the heart of discussions around food, the chefs that appear there do wield an influence far beyond the people they feed day in and day out at their restaurants. As the article in the Times points out, “While their restaurants may be accessible only to the world’s 0.1 percent, chefs at top restaurants influence the entire global food community with the way they think, write, tweet, and talk about food—not just the way they cook it.”

This is not the first time Keller has made the case for quality above values. Only now, it sounds even staler than the day-old bread at Bouchon Bakery.

Food preparation can be a creative pursuit, but at the end of the day, chefs are just feeding people. They create an experience of flavor, but the results end up in someone’s stomach. And in requiring an agricultural product for their creations, a chef is reliant on nature’s whims in a way that most artists are not. This is why the locavore movement is not a trend easily dismissed, but part of a greater paradigm shift around how we view and value resources.

While reactions to the Times story continued on Twitter, scientists, advocates, and food policy media gathered last week at the Monterey Bay Aquarium for the annual Sustainable Foods Institute, part of Cooking for Solutions. The purpose of the event, according to aquarium Executive Director Julie Packard, is to explore “how the food choices we make affect the health of our soil, water, and oceans.”

In contrast to the antiquated remarks put forth by Keller and Aduriz, James Beard Award winner and owner and chef of the restaurant Dressing Room in Westport, CT, Michel Nischan, was present to be honored as Chef of the Year. He is also known for his work as President and CEO of Wholesome Wave, an organization that seeks to increase access to healthy food. They have had huge success to date through doubling the value of SNAP–food stamps–used at farmers’ markets, resulting in $1 million more spent on produce in 2010.

While not every chef feels inspired to use their celebrity and time to start an organization to help people who would probably never set foot in their restaurant, Nischan couldn’t be more in line with the food Zeitgeist. A growing number of chefs are now taking part in the evolving conversation on how we value food.

Chef Alexandra Guarnaschelli of the restaurant Butter in New York City remarked last week on a panel focused on food waste that, “Chefs can convince people to eat things that they don’t know about or normally prize.” She was eager for people to eat sardines and other forage fish, saying, “Let’s just stop eating tuna for 300 years.”

As a presentation at Cooking for Solutions by Jonathan Foley, Director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Minnesota, demonstrated, chefs ignore the sustainability of their sources at their own peril.

“We’re running out of everything,” said Foley. “Agriculture uses up a planet’s worth of land, a planet’s worth of water and agriculture is the single biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. If you want to solve climate change you absolutely have to address agriculture and its emissions. It’s huge.”

Fixing this issue will require us to look beyond the next plate. Many great artists have produced world-renowned work within constraints. Similarly, chefs face a problem of resource scarcity that demands their creativity.

Photo: a recent plate at Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, by @ohgeffroy on Instagram.

HBO has a history of tackling serious American health-care crises. In recent years, the cable network has taken on addiction and Alzheimer’s to much critical acclaim. And now the network has turned its attention to another huge health problem: Obesity and its enormous economic, emotional, social, and health cost on individuals, families, communities, and the country at large.

As Americans have gained weight in recent years, rates of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and other obesity-related health problems have also skyrocketed. Rates of Type 2 diabetes (once known as “adult-onset diabetes”) are soaring among kids. And this is a generation of people that may well die at a younger age than their parents, largely because of medical concerns associated with excess weight.

These facts have become commonplace to those of us who have been paying attention. Still, The Weight of the Nation: Confronting America’s Obesity Epidemic serves as a clarion call to the country to take action — and fast — to combat this pernicious, complex problem that has myriad root causes.Despite the familiar territory, this viewer gives the filmmakers points for framing the issue in a fresh, visually compelling way through astute story selection. The first episode recounts The Bogalusa Heart Study in Louisiana — a landmark investigation which found that cardiovascular disease can begin in childhood. And in the final installment we meet a Nashville mayor trying to help his city get healthy and a Latino community in Santa Ana, Calif., whose members spend years advocating for a play space for their children.

At the current rate of increase, obesity-related health-care costs are projected to exceed $300 billion by 2018.

Bigger than individuals

Some critics (including those who have yet to watch the series) worry that The Weight of the Nation only fans fear, stereotypes fat folk, and doesn’t go after the real villain in the war against weight: the food and beverage industry. But from this critic’s perspective, the program doesn’t lay shame and blame at the feet of the overweight and obese people it features. On the contrary, it presents their struggles in a sympathetic and non-judgmental light, revealing how hard the body fights weight loss despite good intentions, and how current social, economic, and government systems sabotage Americans’ attempts to stay healthy.

Yes, there is the question of personal responsibility, and the films address physical inactivity and poor diet as key contributors to this problem. But there’s also healthy discussion of factors outside an individual’s control — including genetic makeup and evolutionary biology (we’re programmed for scarcity in a time of abundance), workplace changes, fast food marketing strategies, federal farm subsidies, changes in American food culture, and the ready availability of low-cost, high-calorie food.

The series also points a finger at the global corporations that are responsible for peddling the unhealthy, highly processed foods at the crux of the problem. It’s hard to imagine commercial television, hugely dependent on advertising by the makers of such food, taking on this topic in the first place.

To produce The Weight of the Nation, HBO teamed up with some major government agencies battling this spreading epidemic — the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health — as well as the child-focused philanthropy Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and health-care giant Kaiser Permanente.

The series doesn’t sugarcoat matters, but makes it clear that obesity-related health problems will become an unprecedented crisis with dire consequences if left unchecked. They’re also incredibly expensive: At the current rate of increase, obesity-related health-care costs are projected to exceed $300 billion by 2018.

In conjunction with the series, HBO also launched a massive social media campaign to spread the word about what can be done about these health problems, and reached out to more than 40,000 community-based organizations across the country.

Take that, obesity epidemic. And yet, as John Hoffman, executive producer of the series, noted in a discussion after a recent screening in Oakland: One of the first steps that might put a serious dent in this problem would be addressing government subsidies for commodity crops, which have made ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup cheap, accessible, and ubiquitous. He suggested changing the date of the Iowa caucus — a step that would give this farm state considerably less political power. (Such creative thinking didn’t make it into the series. But it’s food for thought — as is the hormonal defect hypothesis, detailed in a Newsweek story last week, which argues that refined sugars and grains are the major players in a problem that no amount of dieting and exercise could correct.)

Chicken nuggets are served for school lunch in the Weight of the Nation.

For kids’ sake

Wendell Berry has said that eating is an agricultural act, but what about drinking beer? A thirst for fermented beverages may have inspired the world’s first farmers to plant crops some 13,000 years ago, yet today beer is rarely part of the larger conversation about where our food comes from.

A handful of California craft brewers are starting to tap into that primitive connection. Taking up the motto “Beer is agriculture,” Almanac Beer Co. works directly with local farmers to source specialty ingredients for their seasonal brews. “For most people, beer is what shows up in the bottle or can,” says Almanac brewer Damien Fagan. “We’re trying to create a foundation that beer is rooted deeply in agriculture.”

Fagan founded Almanac with fellow brewer and Beer & Nosh blogger Jesse Friedman last year, after they met in a home-brewing club, where they traded brewing experiments. (“I’d show up with a fig beer or a puréed turnip beer. Not always great ideas,” Fagan admits.) The two instantly bonded over their interest in San Francisco’s farm-to-table food culture. “We saw a real opening to think and talk about the brewing process using that same vocabulary and ideology,” says Friedman.

No stranger to farmers markets, Friedman launched SodaCraft last summer, offering naturally carbonated sodas using fresh produce from his fellow vendors at the Ferry Plaza. He has since sold the business to turn his attention to Almanac, where his sourcing and brewing ethos remains the same. “Both businesses were born out of the idea that you can take farmers market produce and make something special out of it,” says Friedman.

From the Farm to the Barrel

While the term terroir is usually reserved for fine wines, Almanac has found creative ways to “infuse a sense of time and place in each brew,” as Friedman says, by integrating fresh produce into the mash. Since last summer, Almanac has collaborated with Sebastopol Berry Farm, Twin Girls Farm, Hamada Farms, Marshall’s Farm Natural Honey, and most recently, Heirloom Organic Gardens. For each of their beers, made in small batches and released seasonally, Friedman and Fagan meet with the farmer, tour their farm, and feature it prominently on the bottle’s label and Almanac’s website.

Like the Farmers’ Almanac, each brew serves as a record of the season. The Autumn Farmhouse Pale Ale celebrated the last of Twin Girls Farm’s fall plums, while the Winter Wit preserved the end of December at Hamada Farms, with a mix of Cara Cara, navel, and new blood oranges. “If we’d brewed two weeks earlier or later, the mix of oranges would have been different,” Friedman notes.

Their most recent release, Bière de Mars (March beer), is a French-style farmhouse ale highlighting baby fennel from Heirloom Organic Gardens. While fennel might sound like an unexpected choice for beer, farmer Grant Brians thought it made a lot of sense when Almanac approached him. “The flavors in fennel are carried in an oil and slightly alkaline base,” he explains. “It’s perfect to mix into the brewing process.”

The goal with each brew is to provide a distinct but subtle accent that does not dominate the flavor profile, but adds depth and pairs well with seasonal dishes. “We want the ingredient to be an integrated part of the beer,” Friedman insists. “It should not be a fennel cocktail.”

How’s the finished result? “It’s good!” says Brians. “I’m generally a wine drinker, but I enjoy full-bodied and well-balanced flavors in beers. And it was nice to taste the end result of our collaboration.”

Bottlenecks for Local Brewers

While Almanac has sourced some local grains for their brews, including wheat from Massa Organics, brewing a truly Californian beer is fraught with challenges when it comes to hops and barley malt. “Unfortunately, the beer world is defined by the big American brewers,” says Friedman.

California was once home to a thriving hops industry, but by the 1950s, the mechanization of hops harvesting, outbreaks of downy mildew, and changing beer tastes wiped hops growers out. Today, the majority of U.S. hops are grown in Washington and Oregon.

Sourcing specialty malt poses another obstacle, since there are no malt houses in California, and out-of-state industrial malting facilities prefer to work with large brewers. “You can grow high-quality barley here, but the issue is malting,” says Ron Silberstein of Thirsty Bear Brewing Company. “Part of the problem is that local growers are competing with commodity growers who can grow and malt their barley very inexpensively.” Organic malt from locally grown barley is even rarer.

San Francisco’s first and only brewery to carry the California Certified Organic Farmers seal, Thirsty Bear experimented with brewing a 100-percent local and organic beer in 2010, collaborating with Eatwell Farm in Dixon and Hop-Meister in Clearlake. Since there are no local malt houses, Eatwell had to ship its barley to Colorado Malt Company, which hand-malts in small batches.

In launching the Locavore Ale, Silberstein had hoped to enlist more local craft brewers to commit to purchasing organic malting barley from Eatwell Farm, but the buy-in wasn’t there, and Eatwell has since abandoned the project.
“You have to get enough brewers who want to tell a story, who want to have an heirloom varietal of the barley, and who are willing to pay a premium for that,” Silberstein says. He is hoping to build momentum to start a small artisan malting facility, which would make local, small-batch malting more feasible.

While the process of reconnecting local brewers and beer drinkers with local farms still has a long way to go, Silberstein and Friedman are optimistic that the farm-to-bottle movement is growing. “We need to build larger systems to support local brewing, and that’s a challenge we’re excited to tackle,” says Friedman. “In the meantime, we’ve contented ourselves with highlighting specialty ingredients from local farms.”

You can find Almanac Beer on tap at Il Cane Rosso in the Ferry Building, as well as at Bi-Rite Market and other local sellers of fine beer.

Originally published by CUESA

As a little girl, I loved sitting on the kitchen counter while my mom cooked. While I kicked my feet against the cabinets, she taught me how to peel an onion efficiently and how to crack an egg and use my index fingers to get all the white out before tossing the shells into the compost bin. And I still vividly recall the excitement I felt over the beautiful, golden, sesame seed-studded  loaves of braided challah we baked in my second grade class at the Woodstock Children’s Center–they were like some kind of miracle. Childhood is such an important, impressionable time of life when the vast majority of our lifelong habits are formed, or at least pointed in the direction in which they’ll head. That’s why my husband and I want to introduce our son, Will, to growing and cooking food alongside us.

Will, who is just shy of three, watches and “helps” us with our container garden where we grow tomatoes, greens, peas, beans and herbs. At this point, it mostly means he digs in the dirt but he’s learning.

He had the heady experience of drinking cold, clear, slightly sweet maple sap straight from the spile (was this a new vocab word for you, too?) during our first foray into maple sugaring last winter.

And we brought him with us to forage for ramps a few weeks ago (although we confined his enthusiastic excavation efforts to a patch of ground that was not home to this fragile delicacy.) We’ve also gone strawberry, raspberry, blueberry and apple picking as a family–all activities we plan to repeat on a yearly basis.

My husband sometimes plans baking projects in their hours together. At this point, Will’s attention span is still remarkably short so he mostly just enjoys the idea of helping and participates in the “dumping” portion of the experience where he moves pre-measured amounts of flour, sugar, nuts, raisins, etc., into the mixing bowl. Then he gets bored, climbs down from his stool and runs off to do something else.We’ve taken him to local farms and friends’ houses to gather eggs so fresh you have to chase the hens off their nests to pick them up. In addition to teaching him where his food comes from, it’s a great way to kill an hour or so. We have not yet taught him about where the meat we eat comes from, both because we don’t have a great local source and we’re also both a little wimpy about exposing him to something so bloody at a tender age (or to being exposed to it, ourselves, at our not so tender ages…)

It takes about 2-3 times as long to bake something when Will is involved and is inevitably messier and more work but not only are we laying the groundwork for future cooking projects and appreciation of real food, we have also noticed that our notoriously picky eater is MUCH more likely to eat foods he has helped prepare in some way (score!).

Will also enjoys using the salad spinner to dry greens and cutting food (cucumbers and tofu are perfect!) with the adorable toddler knife Rahm got him recently after being inspired by this Slate magazine piece by Nicholas Day on the topic of cooking with pre-schoolers. And he LOVES sitting on the counter smelling and identifying spices (cinnamon is his favorite; cloves and star anise rank second and third.)

I recently made him a child-sized apron to help him feel at home in the kitchen and, hopefully, keep him slightly cleaner, though it’s a bit of a lost cause at this point in his life. I chose the fabric (called “Dig It” by Michael Miller, in case you’re curious) since he is 100 percentobsessed with digging and construction machines and I thought I should go with something he’s already into.

We figure that laying the groundwork now will not only encourage him to appreciate good food, eat more healthfully, and enjoy growing and cooking his own food from scratch someday, but if we’re really strategic about it, in a few years, we might even get him to cook meals for us! If you are shaking your head in disbelief, check out this New York Times piece by Leslie Kaufman, who got her two sons (ages 10 and 14) to each cook dinner for the family one night a week.

One thing I love about Kaufman’s article is that she does not gloss over the challenges inherent in giving up control in the kitchen–she squirms in discomfort when a flame is left on too long for her taste and has to repeatedly battle her impulse to step in–something she unthinkingly does early on in the experiment that backfires. Her son storms off to his room and misses the meal he’d prepared altogether, despite her apology.

As a perfectionist (fine, I’ll just say it, I’m anal) who views cooking as somewhat of a devotional, semi-meditative practice–I like to clean up as I go and put everything in its place so that there’s no mess left at the end–this is HARD for me! I think it’s good to be realistic about the fact that this is not an easy process–it requires a lot of patience, faith in your child, and a willingness to spend more time and do more cleaning up than you would if you just handled it all on your own. But the end result should be worth it.

If this sounds appealing to you, I’ve compiled some resources to help you in this journey.

• Kitchen Tools For Little Hands - beware, you may want to buy everything… it’s all so cute!
• Four Great Kids’ Cookbooks - a few excellent cookbooks to help you get started. Some are great for pre-schoolers (complete with pictorial recipes/instructions they can follow easily) and some will take you into the older years.
• Twenty Top Shelf Kids’ Books About Growing, Cooking and Eating Food - a big round up of all our family’s favorites plus some great recommendations from friends.

Please add your own thoughts and any recommendations you have on approach, books, tools, etc., via comments.

Originally published on The Garden of Eating

I grew up planting pumpkins in the backyard with my mom and dad.  With names like “Big Max,” “Atlantic Giant,” and “King Jack,” I always hoped come fall I might end up like James and the Giant Peach.  Each spring I would eagerly plant my seeds, carefully cover them with soil, and do my best to nurse them through the sweltering Nebraska summers.  Evil squash bugs and ever-looming drought aside, I usually ended up with at least one pumpkin that weighed more than I did.

Even though soccer practices (and later, girlfriends) kept me away from the garden for a few years, I’ve always had that experience to show me the importance of growing food.  Whether it was the magic of a tiny seed growing into something so huge (unfortunately, never like James’ peach) or the extra responsibility I felt for caring for another living thing, I understood that this was something essential.  However, it wasn’t until I traveled over 12,000 miles across the country for my film, Growing Cities, that I realized how lucky I was.

I became interested in urban farming while working at Zenger Farm in Portland, Oregon during college.  Through this experience I realized all of the amazing things people were doing with growing food in the city and yearned to learn more. Fresh out of college and having nothing but time, I formulated a plan to visit urban farmers across the country.  I spoke with my childhood friend (and filmmaker) Andrew Monbouquette about my idea and he said, “We have to make this into a movie.”  And that was the beginning of Growing Cities.

We have all heard about the problems in agriculture, from GMOs to CAFOs, but what all these acronyms don’t add up to is change.  So, we figured it was time to show off the people on the ground who were doing something positive, right in their own backyards.  And this is what Growing Cities is all about.

The film follows Andrew and me as we visit the folks who are challenging the way this country grows and distributes its food one vacant city lot and backyard chicken coop at a time. We’ve done everything from milking backyard goats to getting stung by urban bees, all in an effort to understand how much potential these activities have to revitalize our cities and change the way we eat.

We found urban agriculture has remarkable power on many different levels—it connects people to their food, strengthens communities, creates jobs, revitalizes blighted areas, and much more.  Yet, what’s most exciting to me is that it allows people to re-imagine what’s possible in cities. City farms challenge us to get beyond the urban/rural divide and really think about how we can all be producers in a society that is driven by consumption.  I think it’s this quality that is capturing so many people’s hearts and minds, especially during this rough economic time.

Critics of urban farming say it never will produce very much food.  To this I could counter with countless examples of how it already is doing so—just one, residents of Havana, Cuba produce more than 70 percent of fruits and vegetables consumed within their city.  But instead of presenting them a laundry list, I would say these “critics”  are missing the point.  On our trip we found there are way too many children who don’t know that apples grow on trees or tomatoes on a vine; kids who never have the opportunity to care for plants or even a chance to play outside.  So what?

This generation is projected to have a shorter lifespan than their parents. One third of them are projected to get diabetes (half if they are a minority).  And nearly 20 percent are obese.  And don’t tell me an average of 50 hours of electronics per week and not knowing how a carrot grows is not part of this.  We may not train the next generation of farmers in the city, but given that we need millions of new farmers and that we are predominantly an urban population, it’s worth a try.  At the very least we can educate a generation of eaters who understand how food gets to the table.

I don’t mean to say urban farming will solve all of our cities’ problems. It won’t. We are working against hundreds of years of unfair policies, social and economic inequality, rampant disinvestment in our inner cities, and so much more.  But I do think it’s a place to start.  A conversation—“Hey, you have chickens in your backyard?  Wow, my grandparents had them back on the farm.”  A journey—go out and meet people in your city who are doing this, you’ll be surprised how amazing and kind they are.  And a place to start a movement—we met or know of someone of every age, race, class, and economic situation who is growing food in the city for as diverse reasons as they are people. This is not a hippie (or hipster) movement, although there are plenty of each.  This movement is for anyone and everyone, whether you have a window, a rooftop, a pickup truck, or a backyard.  As Eugene Cook, an urban farmer from Atlanta, told us, “We’re not asking you to grow everything.  We’re saying grow something…grow where you are.”

Dan & Andrew are currently running a Kickstarter campaign and need to raise $35,000 in 30 days to complete their film.  Watch their trailer below (and make a pledge) here.

You can also follow their journey on their website, www.growingcitiesmovie.com, or on Facebook.  

Photo: A city plot in Chicago, IL

When modern living encroaches on pastoral land, open space and local food access aren’t the only things at stake. What happens to the generations-old land practices that once thrived there? Are they lost forever? What about the people who depend on land for their livelihoods?

The David Brower Center’s current art exhibition features two artists at the forefront of a global resurgence in sustaining farming and shepherding traditions. Land, Use: Works by Amy Franceschini and Fernando García-Dory brings together individual works by each artist–as well as featuring a first-time collaboration for San Francisco Victory Gardens Founder Franceschini and Madrid-based García-Dory. The exhibition runs in The Brower Center’s Hazel Wolf Gallery through May 9.

For both artists, art is social practice. The artists explore modern technologies, organized education, interaction and aesthetics as an answer to revitalizing historically oral teachings. Through these means, they facilitate agrarian knowledge transfer to the next generation. They engage shepherds and farmers, document these interactions, and use these representations to spark new conversations. As such, their work is reflective of a key objective of the David Brower Center—to raise awareness about social and environmental issues through powerful artistic mediums.

The exhibition includes images of projects such as Franceschini’s This is Not a Trojan Horse, in which she constructed a human-powered wooden horse and moved it through the Abruzzo region of Italy for 12 days, inviting farmers and producers to cover the horse’s skin–chalkboards–with their perspectives on the changing rural landscape. Key works by García-Dory include documentation of his project A World Gathering of Nomadic Peoples, through which shepherds around the world met for the first time to develop shared strategies for advocacy.

García-Dory’s A Shepherds School as a Micro-kingdom of Utopia brings young people to apprentice with seasoned shepherds, sharing quarters in mountain cabins, shepherding goats, sheep and cows. They learn cheese-making techniques ranging from cave-aging to utilizing modern structures and technologies built by García-Dory. These facilities ease some of the challenges and frustrations inherent in ancient processes even for the experienced cheese-makers. And these structures create options necessary to make the craft more attractive to the next generation.

Together, the artists collaborated on Shepherd’s Wagon, A Blueprint consisting of a sculptural, makeshift meeting place, a participatory event, and a map charting the outcomes of a facilitated discussion. Wooden surfaces and canvas material folds out from the wall to create shelter, a table and benches. Franceschini and García-Dory invited land use experts, agriculture activists, and young farmers including the Greenhorns, to congregate here for constructive dialogue about contemporary land issues.

The Brower Center’s Hazel Wolf Gallery–indeed the entire Center–was built for collaboration. As such, this space requires flexibility. Conferences, gatherings, and structured group discussions regularly take place in the gallery, so it is important that sculpture be modular and accommodate multi-use of the space. This challenge presented Franceschini and García-Dory with an opportunity in expression: Shepherd’s Wagon, A Blueprint reflects nomadic, temporary treatments of space. In thinking how an artist interfaces with politics around land use, and urban agriculture in particular, Franceschini says this piece reflects the advantages of mobility and dynamism in advocacy for change. “Infrastructure can sometimes weigh things down. This [Shepherd’s Wagon] evokes temporary architecture that can move, change shape, have some flexibility to it.”

By blurring the lines between organizing, action, art, and new media, and drawing parallels between what is happening on the ground in communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and Spain, the artists make the invisible visual and put these issues in the international spotlight of a tech-driven world. Their work transmits an infectious respect for land and food practices that resonate so much more deeply with the human spirit and our relationship to the natural world than the “modern” life we’ve come to accept as normal. The exhibit also raises powerful questions about the role aesthetics play, and should play, in engaging contemporary, urban audiences.

For the Brower Center as a physical gathering space, the themes of this show resonate deeply. The Brower Center feels that bringing people together for face-to-face dialogue is more important than ever, and is dedicated to providing a forum not only for activists, but for the community as a whole. In addition, they believe that high-quality art and the educational opportunities that surround it should be accessible to all.

The show also features García-Dory’s first solo show in the United States. Here is more info, including hours and location.

About the artists:

Amy Franceschini (San Francisco, CA) founded Futurefarmers, an artist collective and design studio, and in 2004 she co-founded the international artist collective Free Soil.  She initiates and participates in cross-disciplinary projects that incorporate cultural, agricultural and social practices.  Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Whitney Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Fernando García-Dory (Madrid, Spain) studied Fine Art and Rural Sociology in Madrid, Spain and is currently working on a Ph.D in Art and Agroecology.  His work explores relationships between culture and nature in contemporary life.  His international exhibitions include those at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona; Tate Britain, London; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Part history text, part socio-political commentary and part call to action, Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill offers something for everyone from the seasoned agriculture advocate to the newcomer on the food systems scene. The newly re-issued book by Dan Imhoff comes just as the federal debate over the 2012 Farm Bill is heating up.

The book is divided into three sections: Why the Farm Bill Matters; Wedge Issues; and Turning the Tables. To set the context, Imhoff summarizes the early history of the farm bill, describing the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and the overproduction of crops that led to its creation as a cornerstone of the New Deal. The history lesson continues with a short summary of the impact of the Green Revolution on farm bill policy, as well as the story of how the bill came to include hunger and nutrition programs, and the ebb and flow of conservation programs to incentivize environmental stewardship on the nation’s farms and ranches. And because no discussion on the farm bill would be complete without discussing commodity subsidies, that’s covered too.

After laying down the foundation, he devotes the rest of the book to strategic topics. He lays out a number of “wedge issues” that could change the terms of the farm bill debate—government deficits, the increasingly apparent impacts of climate change on agriculture, and other emerging ecological crises, the rise of the local food movement, food security concerns, and more.

The last few pages of the book are devoted to “Turning the Tables” and Imhoff offers a checklist of 25 ideas whose time has come—an aspirational menu for American agriculture. Finally, he provides a succinct activist tool kit with tips on organizing and a resource list of organizations across the country engaged in progressive advocacy on the farm bill and related issues.

Perhaps my favorite quote from the book—maybe because I can relate to it–is this: “I confess, I am a reluctant policy wonk. But these are the issues of our times. If Americans don’t weigh in on the Farm Bill, the agribusiness lobbyists will be more than happy to draft the next one for us as they have done for at least 30 years.”

The book is available online at Watershed Media where you can also see a number of other of Imhoff’s books. You can also order it on the action-oriented Food Fight site that features farm bill-related events, news and a “what you can do” section.

Recently pesticide manufacturer Arysta LifeScience agreed to stop selling the cancer-causing strawberry pesticide methyl iodide in the United States. It was a tremendous victory for the 200,000+ farmworkers, farmers, rural residents and environmentalists that worked over the past several years to pull a chemical that one scientist called “one of the most toxic chemicals on earth” off the market.

One of the central figures of this battle from the get-go, both behind the scenes and in the media spotlight, has been Paul Towers, Organizing & Media Director for Pesticide Action Network (PAN).

For the past decade, Paul has worked to protect communities from hazardous pesticides in their food, air, soil and water. He’s worked side-by-side with people that bear the brunt of industrial agriculture, and helped share their stories, grounded in science, with elected officials and policymakers. It hasn’t been easy. He’s gone up against the likes of pesticide and biotech corporations, oil and gas interests, and industrial food companies.

Highlighting food and environmental injustices has been a priority for Paul from an early age. He grew up in Tucson, Arizona, a state where the five C’s were imprinted on young schoolchildren: copper, cattle, cotton, citrus and climate. It didn’t take long to see that many of these industries, coupled with explosive growth, were incompatible with the desert.

Over the years, Paul has come to see his work on pesticides, food and agriculture as a means of unraveling the larger issues of building democracy and diminishing corporate control and influence. He’s focused a lot on breaking down the pesticide treadmill–the trap that farmers get caught on as they are forced to use more (and increasingly toxic) chemicals to control insects and weeds that develop resistance to pesticides.

Paul recently moved from Sacramento to the San Francisco Bay Area, but still remains connected to neighborhoods and issues in the political hub of the state. Paul was a key leader of a multi-year effort in Sacramento aptly entitled CLUCK (Campaign to Legalize Urban Chicken Keeping) which eventually legalized keeping egg-laying hens in the city. He continues to be involved in efforts to create more local farmers markets in underserved neighborhoods, spur more urban gardening and strengthen community organizations that collect and deliver social services.

Every one of these efforts required building political pressure to put new policies in place to allow people to grow safe, healthy and local food.

What issues have you been focused on?

Bees and strawberries have been the main focus in recent months.

First, a word about bees. It’s widely understood that one in every three bites of food we eat is reliant on bees. In working with beekeepers across the country, including some of the largest commercial operations, I’ve learned about the dramatic losses they’re experiencing–over 30 percent of their hives each year. These losses are often termed colony collapse disorder. This is bad for all of us, especially if you like to eat things that require pollination like almonds, cherries, and blueberries–and dozens of other crops.

Increasingly, science points to this newer class of systemic pesticides called neonicotinoids as a critical factor in CCD. We filed a legal petition with over two-dozen beekeepers last month urging EPA to take action on these neonicotinoids. As you can imagine, pesticide corporations like Bayer are pushing back, trying to confuse the science.

Strawberries have been a big focus too. With strawberry season now upon us in California, many of us are getting excited to eat our share of the fruit. While the controversial fumigant pesticide methyl iodide is off the shelf, other strawberry pesticides are still widely used in California and across the country. Many rural residents and farmworkers are on the front lines of exposure, with these gaseous pesticides drifting into their homes and bodies. Many fumigants are known to be cancer-causing, neurotoxins and reproductive toxins. So we’re working with people across the country to bring their case to local, state and federal officials to phase out the use of these chemicals and invest in green, safe and cutting-edge agriculture.

What inspires you to do this work?

A lot of things inspire me to strive for an ecologically sound and socially just food system.

But more than anything it’s the injustices I see and the people who are taking incredibly courage steps to counter them. It’s the people I meet from all over the country–from Alaska to Florida, Illinois to California–who are working to ensure that their communities are safe and healthy. Last week, I had a chance to meet with a diverse group of Hawaiians who are actively working to take their food system back from pesticide and biotech corporations and the plantation system.

I’m also an expecting father. It is likely that our child is already being exposed to pesticides and other chemicals in utero. And that makes me angry. So I work to create protections and find solutions to ensure our child isn’t saddled with a toxic legacy of pollution.

As I look toward the upcoming adventure of fatherhood, the health and future of my child–very literally–is a big part of what inspires me to keep doing this work.

What’s your overall vision?

In the not so distant future, my vision is that we re-build our food and farming system to create a sustainable form of agriculture and lift up human rights to food, justice and self-determination.

What books and/or blogs are you reading right now?

I don’t spend nearly enough time reading books, including those on my nightstand. I do consume a lot of news, including newspapers and magazines from all over the country. I’m especially impressed by blogs by folks like Tom Philpott at Mother Jones, Twilight Greenaway and Tom Laskawy at Grist, Barry Estabrook, and so many others.

Who’s in your community?

Our community is large–we’ve got “network” in our name. It’s international and it’s farmers, beekeepers, farmworkers, rural residents, and everyone in between. PAN has five regional centers based in the major continents, representing tens of thousands of people and organizations. I am honored to be part of this global community of concerned and committed citizen activists.

On a day-to-day basis, I work closely with lots of people involved in coalitions like Californians for Pesticide Reform, the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition and Californians for a Healthy and Green Economy.

What are your commitments?

I’m committed to science, justice, and people, across the globe.

What are your goals?

Personally, I want my artichoke plants to thrive this year. Professionally, I want to be part of fixing our food and farming system to protect farmers, workers, communities–and children, include my own. Both are challenging, but of different magnitudes.

What does change look like to you?

It’s what Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers did and do, what Lois Gibbs and the Center for Health and Environmental Justice did and do and its what Luke Cole at the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment did and do.

Change means organized, coordinated people pressuring elected officials and decision makers–including corporate leaders–to take steps to protect health and the environment, while advancing safe solutions. The good news is that people want their communities and environment to be healthy–we just need to reach decisionmakers with our collective voice.

Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

The success of our international network over the past 30 years has taught us a few things, especially as we’ve helped broker new protections through international treaties. Change requires organizing. Organizing people and partners requires patience, time and commitment. It requires online and offline engagement, meeting people where they are and creating collaborative opportunities to advance a shared vision.

What projects are affiliated with yours?

I already described my work around safe strawberries and healthy pollinators. I also work with PAN to hold the “Big 6” pesticide and biotech corporations–Monsanto, Bayer, BASF, Dow, Dupont, and Syngenta–accountable for human rights abuses. We concluded an international trial late last year in India, documenting harms to live, health and livelihood. And the final verdict should be issued soon, so this work will continue to unfold. In addition, we’re continuing to document the harm to Midwest communities from water contaminated by the Syngenta’s gender-bending atrazine, an herbicide commonly used in corn fields.

What projects and people have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

I’m impressed by so many people and organizations. I respect organizations that shine a spotlight on the broken industrial agricultural system, finding policy solutions, and those that are helping us get out of it. Off the top of my head, I respect organizations like the Center for Food Safety, United Farm Workers and Food & Water Watch are doing a great job of advocating for change. I also deeply respect organizations like ALBA and the California Farm Academy, who are training the next generation of farmers with cutting-edge, green agriculture.

Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next 5-10 years? Is real policy change a real possibility? 

Farmers, rural residents, and consumers are demanding something different–whether it’s labeling of genetically engineered crops and products, phasing out the use of hazardous pesticides or investing in sustainable agriculture. We are in a moment of real possibility for a real shift in direction on our agriculture and food policies.

What does the food movement need to do, be or have to be more effective?

Political and organized. The challenges before us are large and profound, including the power of pesticide and biotech corporations. These corporations exert undue influence in the elections, lobbying, and through the revolving door with government regulators. So we, as a movement must gather our voices and be determined, creative and persistent. We can’t afford to be anything but political and organized.

What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

Anything my wife cooks. She’s got a real knack for pulling things together, including fresh ingredients from our yard and weekly finds at farmers markets. And she’d probably wrap it up in a fresh tortilla, a nod to those I use to get fresh off the line at the spot across the street after school growing up.

In the event of a nuclear disaster, zombies taking over the planet, or industrial food collapse, you’d want to be friends with the subject of our latest film. It’s a meditation on survival and the beauty of doing things that are no longer necessary, but still worth doing. It takes place on a fall day in Andalusia, Alabama where we (The Perennial Plate crew) collected invasive Corbicula Clams with Jimmy and Sierra Stiles. After wading in the river looking for the creatures, we cooked them over a fire… made by hand. Watch:

Fire Starter: Episode 98 of The Perennial Plate from Daniel Klein on Vimeo.

Originally published at The Perennial Plate