We all know that “Every Day is Earth Day” and many environmentalists feel that their eating habits are their daily affirmation of a commitment to the planet. But what does it look like to take action for the environment, beyond the fork? There are many options, of course, but one particularly inspirational tactic manifested this past Earth Day in Albany, CA.

On April 22, a week after the International Day of Peasant Struggle, hundreds of Bay Area food sovereignty activists and community members broke the locks on a huge piece of urban agricultural land, tore up mustard weeds, and planted veggies. “Occupy the Farm” was organized as an occupy-style protest, including tent encampments and a “farmers assembly,” but with one very meaningful difference: This act of “moral obedience” (AKA civil disobedience) was the direct outgrowth of years of neighborhood organizing around the piece of land in question.

The “Gill Tract” is a 10-acre parcel that has been owned by University of California, Berkeley since 1928. The university’s founding as a land grant college made the purchase of this Class 1 agricultural land an obvious choice for experimentation, and for years much of the property was used for biological and chemical pest control research. By the late 1990s, however, the future of the site was unclear, and UC began seeking other uses.

Then came the formation of the Bay Area Coalition for Urban Agriculture (BACUA), composed of UC professors in the College of Natural Resources, food justice and sustainability organizations, and local citizens. They petitioned UC to consider a proposal to develop the site into a community-focused educational farm showcasing sustainable practices. According to their mission, “The center would conduct fundamental technical, economic, and sociological research and education into ways cities can create food systems that serve citizens and the environment well through localized, economically healthy and ecologically sustainable production and distribution.”

The UC administration completely ignored this effort (and many similar efforts: see here and here) and instead made plans to sell development rights to various interests, including Whole Foods Market and a for-profit home for the elderly. This move might be a surprise for someone under the impression that a public institution’s mandate is to serve the public, not private interests. But understanding the force of “neoliberalism” on governance in the past 40 years means that we instead can expect such acts: governments are now expected to solve societal problems with increasingly austere budgets, and to turn to entrepreneurship (like the sales or rental of their assets) to bolster those budgets. Privatization and the dismantling of public programs in favor of “public-private partnerships” are only logical outcomes of this condition. Austerity (seen in reduced state funding for UC and resulting tuition increases) combines with deregulation (which led to the most recent recession) and the consolidation of corporate power within the government to create the neoliberal framework.

“Occupy the Farm” poses an alternative framework: Food sovereignty. Instead of profit seeking as the ultimate factor in decision-making around land use, food sovereignty puts public benefit in the foreground. Instead of distant bureaucracies headed by neoliberal capitalist heroes like Richard Blum (i.e., the UC Regents), food sovereignty demands local and democratic control over our public institutions. And instead of a historically and logistically impossible division of “government” on one side and “markets” on the other, food sovereignty promotes a market that is accountable and humane because it is built up from the lives and decisions of those who are affected by it. This may all sound very theoretical, but land occupations like the effort to Take Back the Tract make these ideas real, immediate, tangible, and imaginable.

Discourses of “growth” and “development” on the world scale are mirrored in fights like the one over the Gill Tract. Like World Bank and IMF promotion of a constantly growing world economy and the supposed “trickle down” of benefits from neoliberal policies, UC apologists are likely to react to the Gill Tract takeover by arguing that selling the land is the most “reasonable” act, and one that will benefit the public…eventually.

They will demonize the protestors as much as they can, belittling their image, intent, or naiveté–much like neoliberals belittle “protectionist” or “socialist” government moves (see the Economist’s recent critique of Argentina renationalizing its previously privatized oil company). If neoliberalism myopically seeks to grow markets, its opponents push for real development: of democracy, equality, and environmental health, and yes, of markets which can coexist with these values. We could attempt, as the BACUA did, to petition those in command to support development over growth. But as the Occupy Farmers decided, waiting around for powerful people to “do the right thing” can be a fools’ errand and at times it takes people rising up in powerful acts of disobedient love to force the hand of defensive elites.

In this particular case, UC elites in question are already reeling from many recent losses of legitimacy: A massive student movement perpetually protests their fee increases and union busting; their mishandling of these protests with overly zealous police violence reaps world and official condemnation; reports on the Regents’ financial conflicts of interest breed further distrust; and the general occupy movement has put the one percent on the defensive. Combined with the thoughtful planning that went into the Earth Day action (and the clear community support for it), UC’s hands have been relatively tied, and its only retaliatory act thus far has been to shut off the new farm’s water supply. This is itself a powerful show of how an occupation can be daring, illegal, inspiring, and strategic; challenging the power of a delegitimized elite while building up power from below.

Land takeovers have been more common in parts of the global South, and Occupy the Farm was enacted in solidarity with La Via Campesina, an international peasant’s movement whose largest organizational member, the Landless Peasant Movement (MST) of Brazil, has settled over 150,000 families on land expropriated from that country’s largest landholders. The action can also be linked to the struggles of independent farmers in Honduras (who took land this past week, in a political move that ties in to their already-pressing concern for the reintroduction of their democratically elected president who was deposed in a coup 2 years ago).

The Berkeley occupation may seem anomalous for it having occurred in a first world country. People have said these kinds of actions couldn’t work here: After all, we lack the peasant population of most third world countries, and we are stricken with a deep cultural commitment to the sanctity of private property. Less than one percent of the U.S. population is full time farmers. Many Americans when they hear about the Gill Tract action will probably be incapable of seeing beyond “trespassing.”

Still, no matter how important property rights are to society, their primacy must be challenged if we are to achieve a sustainable future. With such extensive control of the global food system by profit-minded corporate conglomerates, it’s an act of faith to expect them to suddenly prioritize environmental, consumer, or worker concerns. It’s equally naïve to expect our public institutions to stand up to those corporate interests, considering how deeply vested the neoliberal ideology is, and how completely beholden elected officials are to moneyed interests.

Occupying the Farm is a valuable tactical next step for the Occupy Movement, the Food Movement, and all those who care about creating a just, sustainable, and democratic life for our children. Let’s continue to occupy the food system in creative, loving, challenging, and unexpected ways.

UPDATE: Occupy the Farm is having an open house April 28-29. More details here.

Photo: David Id

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

Foraging for food—whether it’s ferreting rare mushrooms in the woods, picking abundant lemons from an overlooked tree, or gathering berries from an abandoned lot—is all the rage among the culinary crowd and the D.I.Y. set, who share their finds with fellow food lovers in fancy restaurant meals or humble home suppers.

But an old-fashioned concept—gleaning for the greater good by harvesting unwanted or leftover produce from farms or family gardens—is also making a comeback during these continued lean economic times.

In cities, rural communities, and suburbs across the country, volunteer pickers join forces to collect bags and boxes of fruits and vegetables that find their way to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and food pantries, as well as senior centers, low-income homes, and school lunch programs.

Where some may see excess, others see opportunity—the chance to make a difference, feed the hungry, and avoid waste. It’s a win-win-win all round: Growers who have surplus or seconds find a good home for these edibles beyond the compost pile; financially strapped aid organizations get much-needed fresh food for free for their patrons; and the gleaners get to give back in their communities. “I’ve been surprised at how emotionally rewarding this is,” says Andrew Sigal, an avid gardener in Oakland, California, who started Food Pool last summer to share the abundance from his prolific 800-square-foot garden with local food pantries. “It’s one thing to give someone in need a dollar or a donation, but seeing someone get excited about beans from my backyard has been deeply fulfilling.”

Some gleaners have even made a national name for themselves. Take The Lemon Lady, aka Anna Chan, a stay-at-home mom who began collecting excess fruit in suburban Clayton, California, while driving her then-baby daughter around to nap. Chan, who knew hunger as a child and how it felt to wait in food lines for canned goods, was shocked to see so much fresh fruit—such as oranges, apricots, and apples—left rotting in her neighbors’ front yards. so she started a single-handed campaign to do something about it.

Three years on and hundreds of tons of produce later, Chan, who is now a regular fixture at local farmers’ markets where she collects unsold fruits and vegetables that she hauls to a local food pantry and Salvation Army site, has been featured in People, The Huffington Post, and Civil Eats. While the press attention has helped her cause, she keeps a laser-like focus on her mission to feed those in need. “Many people don’t know where their local food pantry is located and don’t realize that food banks will gladly take fresh produce,” says Chan, who encourages people to get started by picking excess fruits and veggies in their immediate area and passing it on.

From California to New York and places in between, communities are finding creative, local ways to get fresh food to the residents who have the most challenges accessing such food. Glean for the City in Washington, D.C., for example, has a three-pronged approach: picking surplus produce from regional farms, gathering leftover greens from farmers’ markets, and harvesting excess residential edibles.

Since 1988, Friendship Donations Network in Ithaca, New York, has worked with local farmers to “rescue” thousands of pounds of produce that would otherwise go to waste and distribute it to low-wage workers, the elderly, and the young. Gleaned produce donated by the organization serves 24 programs that feed more than 2,000 people a week. The model just makes sense, says FDN program coordinator Meaghan Sheehan Rosen, who points out that there’s no reason perfectly good food should go uneaten if farmers are willing and people are needy.

Some gleaning efforts have grown out of religious organizations—not surprising, since the term has Biblical origins. In the Book of Ruth, for instance, the poor are permitted to pick grain leftover from the harvest. The Society of St. Andrews, based in Virginia, has gleaning groups in several states including Arkansas, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that have collectively gleaned millions of pounds of produce. Faith Feeds, a Lexington, Kentucky, gleaning group that grew out of a church meeting, has picked up more than 111,000 pounds of produce since the summer of 2010, from farmers’ markets, farms, and private residences. “It is not hard to feed the hungry,” says Jennifer Erena of Faith Feeds, an interfaith group not affiliated with any particular religion or church. “The word is spreading and there’s a wonderful energy among different people and organizations that is both collaborative and community oriented.”

There are gleaning programs that connect homeowners overwhelmed by an abundant harvest with volunteers willing to pick produce and take it to local food banks, such as Portland Fruit in Oregon. But many gleaning efforts are simply started by an individual who sees a need and wants to fill it. “I particularly like picking fruit for seniors, many of whom can no longer climb a ladder or aren’t able to do physical labor anymore,” says North Berkeley Harvest founder Natasha Boissier, who started solo but now works with a group of volunteers. “They come out and talk with me while I work, and I appreciate and respect their wisdom and experience, and hearing about the ups and downs of having lived life. These moments of connection have brought me—and I hope them—a great deal of unexpected joy.”

Bossier’s first stop with fresh food is often the local men’s shelter. “These men are often blamed for what’s wrong with them,” says the clinical social worker. “I see them early in the morning standing out in the cold after enduring a night of who knows what and I want to give them a piece of fruit to offer a moment’s respite from their pain and suffering. That’s my hope: To provide something tangible, simple, and sweet in their lives.”

Some gleaning programs have become an integral part of their community. Take the Novato Unified School District Gleaning Program. Every week for the past six years, parents, students, and members of this Marin County, California, community glean excess organic produce from a participating local farm. (There are about 15 in the program.) Through a partnership with Marin Organic, a cooperative association of local growers, that fresh chard picked by a volunteer on Monday finds it way into school pasta sauce later in the week. The gleaned fruits and vegetables now offsets up to 25 percent of the district’s weekly produce, according to Miguel Villarreal, the director of food and nutrition services for the small school district, where some 4,000 meals a day are dished up at 13 schools.

For Villarreal, who has worked in school food for 30 years and grew up helping pick crops with his parents in the fields, the program is a no-brainer. “There is so much beautiful abundance in this area and our school food program can use all the help it can get,” says Villarreal, who sees educational and community-building benefits to the program, as well.

Others raise some unexpected benefits of gleaning. Melita Love, of Farm to Pantry in Healdsburg, California, found a community of people in her new hometown when she started gleaning. Love has collaborated with local preservers to extend the shelf life of the bounty she and her crew harvest in such staples as applesauce and tomato sauce — think canning for a cause — that food pantry patrons can pick up along with gleaned fresh goods. She’s also worked with local groups to explain to patrons how to use produce that may be unfamiliar. “The first time we dropped off kale to a food pantry nobody took it because they didn’t know what to do with it,” says Love. “So we did cooking demos for kale salad, kale chips, and a winter soup with kale, and we handed out recipes, too. Education is an important part of any gleaning effort.”

Food Pool’s Sigal points out that a group of gardeners who share their backyard bounty with less fortunate folk in his community have gone a step further, funding and constructing a community garden at a local food pantry where there was once an unused piece of land. “A year ago, most of these people didn’t even know there was a food pantry there,” he says. “There’s this incredible value in creating community that goes beyond just sharing surplus fresh food.”

Top, Lemon trees often produce far more fruit than a single family can use. Photo credit: Marco Chiesa. Middle, Blackberries grow wild all over rural and, often, suburban areas. Photo credit: Alex Brown. Bottom, One of several varieties of kale, lacinato kale grows abundantly and can be used in numerous healthy dishes. Photo credit: Oriana Papadopulos. All photos used under Creative Commons license.

Originally published on Shareable

As a health writer who often talks about the links between what gets grown and what gets put on the plate, I consider myself an advocate. I want to see people eating good food in close proximity to their homes. It never occurred to me that walking to the store—no matter what you go there to get–could get you murdered. And as a person who cares about justice, I never thought that in 2012, our system would care so little about seeking justice for this boy. He was somebody’s son. As the mother of a young black male who often walks to the convenience store by our house, my heart is broken. 

As a person who wants equity and justice for everybody, I am just mad. But there is a teachable moment here. We who work hard in the food movement often work in the silos of our own passions and forget that justice and equity move across sectors. Place matters. Race matters. Humanity matters.

The other day a young woman I know who is righteous in the food and environmental movement was upset that organic produce wasn’t getting the media attention that she thought it deserved. She wanted me to write an expose on apples. She said that it was the real social justice issue of the year. And it was also an hour after I learned about Trayvon Martin. “Why aren’t you mad as hell about the fact that all the good organic food never makes it into poor communities?” she asked.

There are a lot of things I want to see happen. I want kids to have healthy meals at school and at their homes. I want them to be educated so that they can compete in the workforce. I want there to be places that offer workers a living wage and health benefits. I want kids to be able to walk to the store to get a snack and not get killed. I want law enforcement to care enough about all our kids to protect them—even when they buy Skittles. And, I want them to have access to apples.

I still might write about apples. But I also want folks in the food movement to care about the people we want to see eating those apples. I want people to see that equity and advocacy are bigger than an apple.

Over lots of conversations with folks who are trying to make a difference, whether it is through the food we eat, the wages we earn, or where we lay our heads at night, I have learned about the notion of being a change agent. I discovered that we all come to it on our own paths, sometimes deliberately and strategically and for others it is accidental and surprising. Some are trained and groomed for the work of change, others like Trayvon Martin end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sometimes, sadly, young black men can become change agents by walking to the wrong convenience store in the wrong city, at the wrong moment.

There is a lot of work for us all to do together. If the food movement  wants to make real progress, we must be vigilant in addressing the truly uncomfortable things that hold us all back. We have to tear down the silos to begin to deal with the constructs of poverty, racism, and inequities wherever we see them—in the food system or in a young man with a hoodie. It all matters.

The National Anti-Hunger Policy Conference in Washington last week brought to light some of the fundamental internal contradictions of the anti-hunger movement. Specifically, the movement’s financial reliance on corporations with poverty-causing labor practices, as well as their reluctance to advocate on the politically-charged root causes of hunger. 

Hosted by Feeding America and the Food Research Action Center, with funding from Walmart, Bank of America and the AARP Foundation, this year’s event featured, for the second year in a row, a prominent representative from Walmart as a plenary speaker. Tres Bailey, Walmart’s Senior Manager of Agriculture and Food, listed off the accomplishments the company has made in its first year of its $2 billion commitment to supporting anti-hunger efforts: 250 million pounds of food donated to food banks; $67 million in grants made; with another $13 million of nutrition education grants in the works.

This sounds impressive until one considers what Mr. Bailey did not mention: the fact that the average Walmart worker, of which there are 1.4 million in the US, earns $8.81 per hour. At this pay rate, a single parent with one child working full time would qualify for food stamps. The public is subsidizing Walmart billions of dollars annually to keep its employees productive, healthy and free of hunger through government food and healthcare programs, yet the company crows about the millions of dollars it distributes to anti-hunger causes. Upon closer examination, what appeared to be an impressive display of philanthropy is little more than Arkansas chutzpah.

At a subsequent workshop during the conference, Lisa Hamler Fugitt, the Executive Director of the Ohio Association of Second Harvest Food Banks (OASHFB), drove home the point that “hunger is directly related to poverty, and to end hunger requires policies that increase employment and wages and modest increases in federal nutrition programs.” Yet, OASHFB is one of the few food banks–or state food bank associations–that advocate on policies to reduce poverty, increase the minimum wage, or create jobs. Of the roughly 200 food banks in the Feeding America network, more than half don’t advocate at all, not even to support the renewal of the SNAP (food stamp) program.  Less than one in ten food banks report working on anti-poverty, health or community food security related advocacy.

In fact, there are more food banks with a Walmart employee on their Board of Directors (27) than there are food banks conducting anti-poverty advocacy (19).  Nor is Walmart an anomaly on food bank boards. One in two food bank board members work for a corporation, and one in six are employed at the 500 largest companies nationally or globally (Fortune 500 or Global 500).

The event’s keynote speaker, David Shipler, author of The Working Poor, communicated essentially the same message as Ms. Hamler-Fugitt.  He noted that housing subsidies are a key strategy to reducing hunger, as low-income families often spend 50 percent to 75 percent of their income on rent. They typically cut back on the food budget to ensure that they can cover fixed costs such as heat, electricity, and transportation. As a result, Mr. Shipler noted that studies have found a correlation between the lack of housing subsidies and the incidence of underweight children. Therefore, affordable housing puts more money in the pockets of families to purchase food.

Yet, a close look at Feeding America’s advocacy record shows that they have refrained from weighing in on anti-poverty policy, such as housing subsidies, affordable health care, or minimum wage increases. Unlike other national anti-hunger organizations, Feeding America has failed to join the Save 4 All Campaign, a progressive platform which supports increasing the tax burden on the wealthy and corporations and proposes cuts to defense spending.

The national Feeding America’s Board of Directors has, as might be expected, an even higher degree of corporate penetration, with 11 of 19 members working for Fortune 500 companies (two of whom are executives at Walmart).

These statistics are interesting for what they show–the close ties between the corporate world and the charitable food sector–but also for what is not shown. The limited participation of food bank clients and non-profit activists on these Boards is an indicator of the minimal accountability that food banks have to the communities they serve.

Corporate participation on food bank boards is a double-edged sword. It reinforces the respectability of food banks, while providing access to corporations’ excess food and philanthropic largesse. These resources are essential to help food banks meet the increasing demand from those affected by the latest recession. The more mainstream a food bank becomes, the more it can raise to feed hungry people.

On the other hand, the policy changes needed to reduce or eliminate hunger are anathema to the wealthy and the corporations on food bank boards. These changes might result in increased operational costs or federal taxes for businesses. Thus, the high degree of corporate participation on food banks’ Boards serves as a prophylactic measure to these entities advocating for redistributive policies that go against the interests of the business sector, but provide a real solution for poverty reduction.

These relationships as embodied at the recent anti-hunger policy conference raise some vital questions for the anti-hunger movement: Who are its partners? Who shares the stage with them? Those who pay its salaries with their philanthropic greenwashing? Or those who support its goals through their actions?

It is going to take some real changes for the anti-hunger community to fully embrace the systemic analysis of ending hunger through addressing its root causes, articulated by Lisa Hamler-Fugitt and David Shipler among others. The movement’s leadership needs to start with the following steps, as well as many others:

• Increase the movement’s accountability to the poor through encouraging clients to be on food bank boards, increasing attendance of the grassroots at state and national conferences, and creating a new membership-based national anti-hunger coalition.
• Refuse money from corporations unless there are strings attached. Feeding America and FRAC should lead an effort to insist that their affiliates and partners will only lend their legitimacy to potential corporate donors by accepting their money, if the company commits to paying their employees and contractors a living wage with full benefits and allowing them to unionize.
• Engage in a soul-searching conversation at all levels of the movement about organizations’ and the movement’s goals, strategies, partners, and identity.

Without a concerted effort to regain its social justice footing through these steps and others like them, the anti-hunger movement may find its moral compass off kilter due to the magnetic pull of the corporate treasure chest.

Photo: Walmart via Shutterstock

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

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

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

What was the hardest part of going undercover?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What were your most miserable moments?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published on AlterNet

To divert attention away from its human right abuses and otherwise abysmal image that was deflating its bottom line, Walmart made a lot of lofty promises over the past couple years, including: run 100 percent on renewable energy, buy more produce from local farmers, and to open 300 stores in food deserts. Because of these public relations campaigns, some have started to look at the retail behemoth as a potential ally and are wondering how to harness Walmart’s power and influence to fix our broken food system. However, looking to Walmart to fix anything will not work, because Walmart is part of the problem, not the solution.

Walmart’s success is not just because of its size but is the result of several very specific factors in its business model. In addition to being fervently anti-union, Walmart’s logistics and distribution model is much different from other companies. Essentially, Walmart’s model boils down to sucking money out of the supply chain.

Walmart bases its logistical operations on shifting costs and responsibilities to suppliers. Walmart is so large that food processors cannot refuse demands that Walmart makes upon them. With Walmart as their biggest customer, suppliers have no choice but to comply. When Walmart makes a decision to change the way it does business, an entire industry will shift to keep up. And despite what Walmart would have the public believe, this decision is made with profits in mind. The company continually puts downward pressure on its suppliers, forcing them to cut costs. The company’s model drives consolidation; takes money away from farmers, workers, and processors; and pushes agriculture to get more industrialized.

Walmart size enables it to exercise an unprecedented amount of power in all sectors of the economy, and food is no exception. When there is one player this large connecting food producers and food consumers, consumers are no longer the food industry’s customers–Walmart is. Walmart is so powerful that we can’t look to the government to keep Monsanto’s genetically engineered sweet corn out of our grocery aisles. We have to instead address what would ultimately be GE sweet corn’s biggest customer: Walmart.

Walmart is all about improving the bottom line, so it must continue to open new stores to increase sales. Since Walmart has already saturated rural and suburban areas, the only option left is to move into cities. However, Walmart has come up against organized resistance from urban communities. The various initiatives it has undertaken to ‘address’ nutrition and food access are nothing more than publicity stunts designed to improve their public image and thus lower resistance to plans for expansions. Plus, the company makes its suppliers pay for any sustainability or packaging changes while Walmart gets to reap the benefits to its public image. The latest goal of opening Supercenters in food deserts is just one more ploy to reduce resistance to its plan to move into urban areas.

As consumers and policy-makers continue to be bombarded with PR messages about Walmart’s efforts to help people live better, it is time to look at the impact that Walmart’s rise has had on our food system and to reconsider whether the Walmart model has any place in trying to fix it.

For more information, read Food & Water Watch’s report released this week: Why Walmart Can’t Fix the Food System.

In case you think pickling is just another excuse to put Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein in goofy wigs, think again. Along with products like jam, flour, and beef jerky, pickles count as “value-added” foods, and they’re at the core of what it will take for the local food movement to mature beyond an easily parodied trend.

You see, without these higher-value, less perishable products, farmers and ranchers working at a small, sustainable scale and selling their products locally can rarely make a real living. In addition to the home food preservation trend, small businesses are also working to fill the gaps that exist between heavily processed, industrial foods and local produce—and the result is often minimally processed “value-added products.” Such products allow farmers to extend their season, providing a way for locavore consumers to, say, eat peaches in February, and—perhaps more important—providing a product for farmers to sell long after peach season is gone.

Not that it’s easy to expand a farm operation in that way. It takes seed funding, market testing, and food safety chops to grow your business. That’s where—believe it or not—our government is trying to help.

On Friday, as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food effort, USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan announced the largest allotment of grants for value-added producers in recent history: nearly 300 grants across 44 states and Puerto Rico—to the tune of $44 million.

The Value Added Producer Grant Program has been around since 2000, and has seen increased funding with each successive farm bill since.

Merrigan announced the grants at The Many Faces of Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, a one-day conference hosted at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The event focused on “successful models, resources, strategies and opportunities for supporting, cultivating and growing local/regional food systems in the Midwest.”

Merrigan, whom I spoke with after the event, sees the grants as a critical piece of the concrete good USDA can do to make the local food movement stick.

“These grants are just some of the tools in USDA’s tool kits to help farmers. More value-added products increase their bottom lines,” she told me. “Like the kid who has a pumpkin operation, who grows up and develops a pumpkin puree product so there’s year-round business.”

The grants also went toward projects that educate value-added producers and provide them with infrastructure help, like Vermont Food Venture Center, a shared-use kitchen incubator for value-added and specialty food producers in Hardwick, Vt. Another example is the Food Innovation Center, where experts in the field conduct studies related to product development, packaging, shelf life, consumer acceptance, economic feasibility, and product marketing.

Jim Slama of Chicago-based Family Farmed attended Friday’s conference and has worked with just such USDA grants to train producers to enter the wholesale market, run a food distribution hub, and bridge the food safety gap for small producers who have often shouldered unfortunate burdens when it comes to the wholesale environment with the On-Farm Food Safety Project. He sees some of these less sexy elements of the local food to be just as crucial as seasonal eating and farmers markets.

“The local food movement really took off with most folks selling direct through farmers markets and CSAs, and that’s great,” says Slama, “and yet 97 percent of the food consumed in America goes through the wholesale markets. So if we’re really going to create new markets for family farmers and cut food miles, we have to figure out how to get into these markets.”

Photos: Top, psrobin. Bottom, USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan at the Fifth Generation Farms Fresh Market–a grant recipient–in Lake City, Fla. by Ellen Boukari/USDA.

Originally published on Grist

Perhaps no one represented the American work ethic more than the dairy farmer. Early morning hours and hard physical labor, often conducted in solitude while ankle deep in muck. Families working together to get the job done. They have long proudly supplied a demand for their community, and like most farmers, are clearly not in it for the money.

Today however, the American dairy farmer also represents the frustration and economic hardship evident across our nation. Increasing volatility in the price of milk paid to farmers, higher feed costs, corporate consolidation in the supply chain, organic milk farms scaling up, and questionable government policies all have farmers shedding a few tears. The life is so unappealing that the number of American families remaining in milk farming has plummeted from roughly 165,000 20 years ago, to less than 50,000 today.

Behind the innocent glass of milk lies an intriguing story that’s not so black and white: Many farmers are losing money, organic milk is in short supply,  anti-trust lawsuits have been filed, and legislative reform is on the agenda. Farmers, processors, distributors, and retailers are engaged in conversations like never before. And cows. Don’t forget about the cows.

Please join us for the next Kitchen Table Talks in San Francisco on Tuesday, February 21 from 6:30 – 8:30 pm at 18 Reasons, as we discuss the current state of the organic dairy industry.

When: Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Time: Food and drink at 6:30. Discussion from 7 – 8:30 pm
Where: 18 Reasons (3674 18th St., San Francisco, 94110)
Tickets: $10 Brown Paper Tickets. NOTE: A limited number of sliding scale tickets will be available on a first come, first serve basis at 7 pm on the night of the event.

Joining us in conversation will be:

Leslie Butler, Department of Agricultural Economics at U.C. Davis. Leslie holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Michigan State University. He regularly testifies at state and national hearings regarding dairy policy, and has published numerous articles on dairy production and economics marketing and policy.

Mike Griffin, West Region Pool Manager, Organic Valley. Mike was born and raised in Petaluma, CA. After his first year of college, he began his journey into farming, and never looked back. His vast  experience over 30 years at Clover Stornetta as a truck driver, distribution foreman, plant manager and in public relations, ultimately led him to Organic Valley in 2011, the nation’s largest cooperative of organic farmers.

Richard Hughes, owner Westfield Jersey’s in Bodega, CA. Richard was a self-proclaimed “city boy,” until he turned 15 and a 4-H project began his life long journey and commitment to dairy farming.  In 1976, Richard and his wife purchased a 182-acre ranch just outside of Bodega. They currently have around 100 Jersey cows, have completed the transition to organic farming, and provide milk to Straus Family Creamery.

Bob McGee, CFO/COO Straus Family Creamery, Marshall, CA.

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of Civil Eats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Space is limited, so please RSVP. Seasonal snacks and refreshments generously provided by Bi-Rite Market and Shoe Shine Wine.

Alison Cross and her older brother Alphonzo saw a vast need for fresh food in the Castleberry Hill neighborhood of Atlanta, where they’d spent time since they were kids. The community, which is adjacent to the Atlanta University Center, had seen both vibrance and decay, and was begging for transformation.

So the siblings decided to fill that need, and hatched a plan to open The Boxcar Grocer, a new food business. Alison, who studied architecture and worked as a video editor, and Alphonzo, with a background in fashion, describe the independent grocery store, which stocks local, organic, whole foods, as being at “the intersection of food justice and high-concept retail.”

And they’re right; it’s not your average corner store. The market looks modern, with lots of light, stainless steel, and wood. The shop, which had a “soft” opening in late October and celebrated its grand opening last Monday, sits in an area dotted with old railroad warehouses. African Americans own the majority of the storefront businesses. The neighborhood is undergoing a renaissance with small art galleries, graphic design firms, and a tattoo parlor that attract the typical urban mix of students, artists, and free thinkers.

Alison, 36, has also written about the personal inspiration for Boxcar (“This is Our Land“), the socioeconomic challenges of the food movement (“All the Foodies are Rich, All of the Farmers are White, But Some of Us are Still Cookin’“), and its shortcomings (“A Limited Engagement“) on the store’s blog.

I spoke with her recently about her hopes for the family business and the obstacles she and her brother have faced along the way.

Why did you decide to open a corner store in Atlanta?

For years we recognized a lack of stores in the area where we could get food we liked when we came to town. The space became vacant in May 2009 but we couldn’t find anyone willing to put in a store. So we researched, wrote a business plan, and started submitting to banks for financing.

In the meantime, I was working at The San Francisco Foundation part-time and part-time at Feldman Architecture, so I was getting this great vision of what could happen when social ideals merge with beautiful design. We felt no one had done that. And there were very few people actually creating something new in terms of for-profit business models for food access. We also figured if we were going to uproot our lives and move away from the Bay Area, it had to be for something extraordinary.

Did you run into any challenges?

Unfortunately, the economic crisis meant the process took us two years to complete. Banks flat-out weren’t lending, especially not commercial loans to novices. But we kept charging along. We applied to nine different banks and one foundation and all said no. All we needed was one yes, and that happened in March 2011.

Did you get support from the healthy corner store movement?

People we approached in the national food movement didn’t really take us seriously until we actually opened the store. Maybe it’s because we came out of nowhere. We were not involved in politics, nor did we run in foodie circles. We’d meet people at food movement events and when I mentioned opening a store I got the sense that people were dismissive.

What kind of response have you had from local residents?

We have had overwhelming support from the community. That’s a wonderful validation because for so long it was this thing rattling around in our heads and on paper. People have been amazingly patient with our mistakes. People are just so grateful to have a grocery store here after all these years. On opening day–which we tried to do quietly to work out the kinks–there was so much buzz about the business we had a line outside the door before we even opened. It was insanity.

Locating local farmers has been a discovery process–we thought we’d be dealing with rural farms–so to find such well-established urban farms as Truly Living Well, Metro Atlanta Urban Farm, HABESHA, and Patchwork City Farms right here in the inner city has been incredible. It’s allowed us to tap their network of supporters and access a knowledge base that is helping us learn about organic farm operations.

I spent last summer riding my bike from farmers’ market to farmers’ market meeting vendors, tasting food, and connecting with the producers.

What about some of the craft products in the store?

One couple make these phenomenal pulled pork sandwiches and organic barbecue sauce called The Heat Legend. A product like that speaks to our diverse community. It allows us to meet people where they are with their diet but offer a healthier option that is culturally appropriate. Another producer makes these kale salads with sun-dried tomatoes that people go bananas over. We can barely keep them in stock. It feels good to offer a healthy fast food that people can snack on.

What’s it like running a business with your brother?

It’s awesome. We’ve always been close and we’ve always wanted to work together. I’m in awe of his creativity, social nature, and energy. He appreciates the way I dig down in the details and my diligence in seeing things through. We respect each other’s visions and know that we get more done together than we do on our own because of our complementary skills.

Can you give us some background about your own relationship to food?

I was a notoriously picky eater as a child. Left to my own devices I’d consume nothing but Frosted Flakes and Kraft macaroni and cheese. Both my parents cooked. My mom made Cajun spiced red snapper, jambalaya, and gumbo, foods influenced by her mother, who was from Louisiana. My dad liked to cook us breakfast. We weren’t really allowed candy or lots of fast food, which was maybe a once-a-month treat. After my dad passed away in 2001, I went to Grenada, West Indies. It was the first time I was really surrounded by utterly fresh food. I was eating fruit right off the trees, vegetables directly from the ground, and seafood caught the same day it ended up on my plate. It was healing and cleansing and opened my eyes to what a difference food can make.

What does food justice mean to you?

It means approaching food access as an issue that is not reduced to a socioeconomic determinant. It means adding more faces to the cause so people can identify and desire to be part of a lifestyle shift. If Jay-Z and Kanye can create a lifestyle brand that people in urban and suburban areas aspire to, regardless of their actual income, why can’t we do that with organic food?

We have had family members and friends who are highly educated and in the middle class develop diseases directly related to the food they are eating. I like to tell people that we are not in competition with Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. We’re in competition with KFC, Burger King, and McDonald’s, who are marketing directly to people like me. The food [access] movement is looking at low-income people and telling them to eat better, but not necessarily including the people who CAN afford to eat better but don’t think it’s important or don’t connect with how it has been presented thus far.

What does the future hold for Boxcar?

We have always envisioned Boxcar as a national model. We wanted to be able to create something that would inspire other social entrepreneurs to replicate and hopefully get more healthy corner stores popping up in food deserts to show the demand is there for these businesses. What Alphonzo and I have done is an incredibly risky venture from a financial perspective. But we made a healthy gamble that was deeply rooted in the strength of our education, experience, work ethic, and commitment to seeing the model thrive in different incarnations across the country.

For now, we are focused on building this brand into a strong foundation. We would love Boxcar to be the Walgreen’s of healthy corner stores. We’d like to see at least another five to 10 stores like Boxcar in the next five years.

Originally published on Grist