In a three-part series, the Edible Schoolyard Project interviews the directors of sustainable agriculture and environmental stewardship programs at Center for Land-Based Learning.

The first interview with Nina Suzuki, Program Director of Student and Landowner Education and Watershed Stewardship (SLEWS), addresses the value of working with high school students and the long-term goals of Center for Land-based Learning. SLEWS engages California high school students in habitat restoration projects with a focus on classroom learning, leadership development, and hands-on environmental impact.

An introduction from Nina Suzuki

I was introduced to the Center for Land-Based Learning (CLBL) while I was studying Landscape Architecture and Landscape Restoration at UC Davis. For one of my classes, I was teamed up with CLBL and Audubon California to develop a farm conservation plan for their headquarters at the Farm on Putah Creek. Through that project I got to know the organization and staff. I stayed in touch and was really excited when they had an opening for the Sacramento Valley SLEWS Coordinator position. In this position, I would be able to plan and participate in habitat restoration (with lots of partners) while facilitating student engagement and learning in the process.

Edible Schoolyard Project: How did this program come about? Did it emerge from a need or a desire within the community?

NS: The SLEWS program emerged from our existing experience, a need, and a partnership. Our first program, FARMS Leadership, gave us experience working with teachers to plan year-long, field trip based programs for high school youth. The need came from landowners, mainly farmers and ranchers, who were interested in reintroducing native habitat on their property but didn’t have the expertise or manpower to plan or install such a project. And the partnership was with Audubon California, whose Landowner Stewardship Program was working with these landowners to plan and implement habitat projects, but wanted to include an educational component.

ESYP: Who is your target community and how large is it?

NS: We target high school students, primarily sophomores, for the SLEWS Program. About 700 students participate in the SLEWS program each year from our four SLEWS regions: Sacramento Valley, San Joaquin Valley, Napa, and Sonoma. SLEWS also recruits and trains about 70 natural resource professionals and college students as mentors each year. The program offers them the opportunity to share their knowledge with high school students and gain experience in environmental education and habitat restoration. They help SLEWS maintain a 5:1 adult-to-student ratio to ensure high quality experiences and restoration work, lead the same team of students for all their field days, and connect high school youth to related internships, majors, and careers.

ESYP: Why does SLEWS work with high school age children? What is the value of engaging high school students in habitat restoration?

NS: There are very few experiential programs for high school students. Additionally, high school students are at the time in their lives when they are thinking about college majors and careers. The SLEWS program connects high school students with graduate students and natural resource professionals, and teaches skills that a wildlife biologist or habitat restoration planner or water quality engineer would use every day. We hope to inspire these students to explore natural resource and agriculture careers and infuse those career fields with highly motivated, ethnically diverse young people. Another value of the SLEWS program is that the concepts we explore in SLEWS are in line with the California state science standards for high school biology. SLEWS is a way to teach those concepts in a real world, local setting that students connect with and understand.

ESYP: How is the program structured?

NS: Students participate in SLEWS for the length of their school year. SLEWS coordinators meet with the teacher and project team to develop the plan for the year including restoration tasks and learning activities that connect to classroom curriculum. The coordinator provides an in-class watershed presentation to prepare students for their field experience. Students make three to five, all day field trips to their adopted restoration project. The trips are spread out throughout the year, allowing for a variety of activities (since many are seasonal) and for students to develop a connection to their site. Most of the student training happens on-site by our staff, restoration partners, and mentors – although we also take advantage of the opportunity to teach in the classroom to prepare students before coming out into the field. Each field day includes team building, training, restoration work, science learning, and reflection elements.

ESYP: What are the most popular activities and projects?

NS: The most popular activity is planting trees and shrubs. There is a great sense of accomplishment and camaraderie when you get together with a group of friends and plant 300 trees in two hours. Students tell us, “The best part is looking back and being able to see what you’ve done, that you’ve made a difference.”

ESYP: How do you pick your restoration sites?

NS: We use a rubric of criteria when we’re looking at a new site. The primary considerations are: proximity to the school and coordinator, potential for long term success, scale of the project, accessibility, ecological significance, diversity of tasks, and involvement of the landowner and restoration planner.

ESYP: How is the program funded?

NS: SLEWS is funded primarily through our restoration partners and landowners who contract with Center for Land-Based Learning to include SLEWS students in the implementation of their restoration projects. We are also supported by grants from state agencies, local businesses, and foundations.

ESYP: Are there improvements that you wish to make to the programming?

NS: We are always revising and developing new elements of the program with feedback from our participants and partners. From surveys and other student and teacher feedback, we learned that students got really excited about wildlife. So we now include more wildlife lessons that connect to the restoration work students are doing. We are building up our kit of demonstration materials like example mammal tracks, skulls, and skins. Right now we are borrowing museum specimens, but eventually we’d like to have our own set of materials.

We’re also always trying to find new ways of connecting these learning experiences back to students’ communities, and encouraging them to take action back at home to improve their local environment. We recently received a small grant from Cornell’s Celebrate Urban Birds program to support Grant High School’s student garden in North Sacramento, provide native plants for birds in an urban setting, and have students gather data on urban birds as part of a citizen science program of Cornell. These students were planting native habitat on a ranch in the foothills of the Coast Range for their SLEWS project, and then they got to go back to their school and plant native plants to support birds right in their backyard. We would like to be able to do more of these “Community Action Projects” with our SLEWS classes, but it takes a significant amount of planning and time from the teachers and our staff to make a meaningful project happen.

ESYP: How do you measure success?

NS: We evaluate success with students in the SLEWS program by tracking participation, engagement at field days, responses to written prompts at field days, and the pre- and post-program survey. The Center for Land-Based Learning has worked extensively with faculty at the UC Davis School of Education to develop effective evaluation methods for our programs. The pre- and post-surveys were developed in collaboration with the UC Davis School of Education to assess changes in student knowledge, attitudes, and actions over the course of the school year. The survey also captures student activities in their own communities, interest in post-secondary education and/or careers in environmental science, and resource conservation – as well as interest in similar programs in the future.

After each field day we evaluate the restoration and education accomplishments of the day as well as student engagement with input from the project partners and teachers. This includes student quotes that demonstrate student learning and attitudes toward the environment. Key indicators include: developing a connection to the land, seeing their potential to affect positive change and understanding the need for and effects of restoration. We record this information in our Coordinator Field Day Assessment, a tool CLBL used in a three-year research study with UC Davis to evaluate effective experiential programming.

ESYP: What do you find is the greatest value of land-based learning?

NS: It amplifies student learning, brings concepts to life, makes learning real and meaningful. It connects students to something bigger than themselves and opens them to a new world of careers and interests. Most of the students in our programs are from urban schools, and most of them have never set foot in a creek or put their hands in soil. I think the beauty of our programs is that they work on so many levels of engagement. They start at the very basic level of getting people outside and exploring the wonders of nature. They progress to teaching science, inspiring students to take positive action back in their own communities, and they launch them on paths of higher learning. These experiences are relevant to all students even if they don’t want a career in wildlife biology or resource conservation – we are all invested in clean water, air, and healthy food.

Originally published on the Edible Schoolyard Project

If you live in the United States, you’re never far from a land-grant university.  There are more than 100 of these institutions, which go by names like Texas A&M, Iowa State University and the University of California.

This system of schools was initiated in 1862 with lofty goals in mind—elevating agriculture to the realm of science, offering the common citizen access to higher education, and pursuing research that helps farmers improve their fields and fatten their hens. The program was a major success, providing invaluable research that was freely shared with farmers, which revolutionized American agriculture.

Unfortunately, today these public institutions are increasingly serving private interests, not the public good. Hundreds of millions of dollars are now flowing from corporate agribusiness into the land-grant university to sponsor buildings, endow professorships and pay for research. One land-grant university, South Dakota State, is headed by a man who sits on Monsanto’s board of directors.  

The influence this money purchases is enormous. Corporate money shifts the public research agenda toward the ambitions of the private sector, whose profit motivations are often at odds with the public good. It strips our public research institutions of the time, resources and independence needed to pursue public-interest research that challenges the status quo of corporate control over our food system or that offers farmers alternative agricultural systems to monocultures and factory farms.

Industry-funded research routinely produces results that are—surprise, surprise—favorable to industry. This “funder effect” produces a well-documented bias on research while weak conflict-of-interest policies throughout academia (including at many scientific journals, which don’t require full disclosure of funding source) mean agribusiness’s pervasive influence over public research is basically unchecked.

It also means that our nation’s regulators and policy makers—always clamoring for science-based rules and regulations—are making decisions about things like the safety of genetically engineered crops based on a body of research and science that is incomplete and, to some degree, biased.

So how do we weed out the agribusiness influence?  A good place to start would be increasing federal support for agriculture research—and directing this money to projects that serve the public interest.  This would go a long ways toward reducing land-grant university’s dependence on corporate funding and allow researchers more independence.

For more information about corporate influence on land-grant universities and recommendations for restoring more independent, objective academic research, read Food & Water Watch’s report Public Research, Private Gain: Corporate Influence Over University Agricultural Research

Graph note: Other government money–from states and non-USDA federal sources like the National Institutes of Health–comprises the remaining research funding. (See Endnote 29).

There is more interest in food now than at any point in our nation’s history. We have more standards with which to make conscious food choices than ever before. Yet while people want to know where their food is grown, how it’s grown, and when it was harvested, no one is really asking any questions beginning with “who”. Despite this tremendous interest in food, there is almost no interest in the people that pick it.

When I discovered these contradictions in my own life, I realized that I needed to make a film that would discuss these issues.

Farm workers have historically been amongst the most vulnerable people in America. Though the human rights issues are now mired in a debate on immigration status, farm workers have always been subjected to exploitation. From those who were Native Americans, European indentured servants and African slaves to sharecroppers, White migrants, Asians and now Latinos, farm workers have faced abuses ranging from verbal and sexual harassment to wage theft and slavery.

I saw these contradictions first hand last summer on a drive from Naples to Orlando, from one of the richest cities in the country, on roads that passed through some of the poorest. The segregation was striking. Latino towns of farmworkers had facilities equivalent to those African American towns had under Jim Crow. In fact, I learned, many of these farmworker towns were once predominantly African American. I could have very well been in 1911 rather than 2011.

Segregation is hardly an uncommon occurrence in our nation. What was striking was the fact that this segregation still existed in agriculture despite the level of consumer interest and awareness.

My realization was compounded by the fact that I was raised in the industry. My father was an executive at a large vegetable company and a plant breeder, and I spent summers on farms. I knew the where, whens and hows of the food industry. I couldn’t believe, though, that I of all people never asked “Who?”

My film, Food Chain, started in order to answer this question. Over eight months I traveled the U.S. with a crew of filmmakers to profile the people that pick our food. The more we learned of their stories and the regular exploitation they faced, the more we questioned our food system.

We met people who were freed from forced labor in Florida. We met a mother whose child was born without arms and legs because she was acutely exposed to pesticides while pregnant. We met workers whose bosses paid them less than half of the minimum wage for doing backbreaking work in 100 degree heat.

The deeper we explored the oppression, however, the more we became attracted by the possibilities of transformation. We began to meet a number of extremely powerful people in the farmworker community, workers that embraced their duty in the food chain while lashing back at the subjugation they experienced.

Some groups, like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, continue to change the structure of the food chain itself, going straight to consumers of the top purchasers like McDonalds and Trader Joe’s to demand an increase in wages and working conditions.

We learned that the policies of the large buyers, in particular the supermarkets, are at the heart of the problems workers face. Supermarkets are no different from other multibillion dollar corporations. They dominate agribusiness and either know of the violations at its base or enjoy a willful ignorance. Food justice begins with a transformation of the grocery industry.

With the help the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, the Florida Farmworkers Association, the UFW, Eric Schlosser, Dolores Huerta, Hilda Solis, Barbara Lee, Barry Estabrook, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others we found the answers we sought.

To change our food system, we don’t just need conscious consumers. We need conscious citizens. We need to organize and support worker-led movements like the CIW and demand structural changes of an industry that has resisted change for centuries.

There are many problems we face in our nation that will be very very difficult to solve. We learned, however, that this is not one of them.

We hope you will join us by supporting our film Food Chain on Kickstarter.

Food Chain Teaser from Sanjay Rawal on Vimeo.

Three of Berkeley Unified School District‘s elementary schools–Malcolm X,  Rosa Parks, and Washington—are in jeopardy of losing their entire cooking and gardening program funds beginning in October this year.

Under existing guidelines, the schools will no longer qualify for federal funding because they have fewer than 50 percent of their students enrolled in the free and reduced-lunch program, according to Leah Sokolofski, who supervises the program for the district.

Berkeley has an international reputation for its edible schoolyards, where public school children of all economic means learn what it takes to grow a radish and sauté some chard. Such funding cuts to the program, whose total budget is $1.94 million a year, would represent a significant setback in the city’s pioneering efforts to date.

School gardening and cooking champion Alice Waters, whose Chez Panisse Foundation helped fund the Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, expressed dismay at the potential budget cuts to programs. “It’s inevitable cuts will come—people think these programs are dispensable and the state of California is in a financial crisis—but it’s a tragedy,” she said.

Waters recently raised over $500,000 to launch the Edible Schoolyard Project (ESP), an online resource that shares curriculum and best practice principles for garden and cooking programs with schools around the country. ESP has affiliate programs in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York. “We have to continue to make the case for why an edible education is so important to the health of every child and the health of the whole country,” she said.

BUSD school garden and cooking programs are funded through September 2012 through Network for a Healthy California, a state program that distributes federal monies to local school districts through a three-year grant. The network seeks to improve the health of low-income Californians through increased fruit and vegetable consumption and daily activity.

Changes to funding

Changes to the way school cooking and gardening programs are funded are coming down the track, however, following the passage of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act, which President Obama signed into law amid much fanfare in December 2010, with the goal of improving childhood nutrition.

“Until the new guidelines for eligibility are released we just don’t know what’s in store for our school programs,” said Sokolofski, who anticipates hearing later this month. “This is the biggest change in the funding for these programs in 11 years.”

Further complicating matters: The U.S. Farm Bill is up for reauthorization in 2012. Potential changes to funding priorities there may impact all the BUSD’s gardening and cooking programs as well. “The Farm Bill is yet another wild card because that’s the overall place where our funding comes from,” explained Sokolofski. “And any changes there could trump changes elsewhere. There are a lot of unknowns right now.”

While it’s possible that funding for these programs could remain intact, for now the immediate concern is the three schools who will likely not qualify for federal funds for the next school year, Sokolofski said.

Sokolofski has been sharing her concerns with school administrators, principals, parents, and teachers. A recent presentation at Malcolm X spurred dozens of parents to attend the March 7 BUSD board meeting, where they made a passionate case for protecting a program beloved of both students and adults.

Malcolm X parent and family doctor Shannon McCune, a Malcolm X alum herself, sees many young children in her practice and said she can immediately tell which of her patients have gardening at school. “They have a favorite vegetable and know why they’re good for you,” said McCune, whose daughter recently taught her mom how to make kale salad by massaging the leaves with oil, which eliminates the need for cooking the fibrous vegetable. “I would never have known how to do that if my daughter hadn’t shown me.”

Another physician-parent echoed McCune’s sentiment. Mickey Adams, a parent from Washington Elementary, talked about the challenges of working with adult patients who have obesity and other lifestyle diseases. “These people don’t know how to eat well and cook food—they’ve never been taught,” said Adams, whose children make recipes at home they’ve learned in school cooking classes. “These programs work and there will be so much damage done by cutting them and we’ll all pay on the other end.”

If kids grow and cook it they will eat their greens

As a school board member noted at the March 7 meeting, the value of such programs was measured in a recent UC Berkeley study, which found that young students routinely exposed to fruits and vegetables through cooking and gardening instruction ate 1.5 more servings of produce a day compared with kids with fewer opportunities to dig in the dirt and work the stove at school.

School gardening teacher Joy Moore doesn’t need data to know the benefits such programs can bring. This kind of instruction gives young people alternative and innovative ways to learn, along with “skills for life,” said the long-time school food advocate.

School board president John Selawsky promised parents that the board will “see what it can do,” while acknowledging the challenging fiscal constraints already impacting the school district.

For now, Berkeley schools are researching ways to sustain these threatened programs. “We’ve been looking at the possibility of grant funding, but most of the grants available are small and aimed at schools just starting a garden plot,” said Alexander Hunt, principal of Malcolm X. “We haven’t been able to find anything comparable to the $135,000 we stand to lose.”

Despite serving a growing group of children in need, Malcolm X’s free and reduced school lunch numbers stand at 46 percent of its student body. “Materials can’t replace the quality of programming currently being provided by our staff,” said Hunt. “It’s wonderful how these classes engage students in learning at the same time they impart the benefits of health and nutrition. They’re key to our students’ education.”

The Malcolm X PTA is also exploring whether a large corporation, local merchants, philanthropic individuals, or some other benefactor may step in to fill the void. It is also in the early stages of discussions with other PTAs about a collaborative effort to secure contributions. “The garden and cooking program at Malcolm X is beloved by the school community and the community at large,” added Hunt. “It’s sad to see that in the place where this school food movement started, we’re now going backwards trying to sustain these valuable programs.”

Sense of urgency

Malcolm X parent Marian Mabel noted a sense of urgency to secure funding for next year, which must be identified by June 30, when the school district’s budget is finalized. In addition, Mabel pointed out that not all the city’s schools currently offer these programs—Berkeley Arts Magnet, Cragmont, Jefferson, and Oxford don’t receive any federal funds for such instruction. These schools rely on parent volunteers, PTA funds, and other sources to fund programs at their sites, if they have them at all.

“Short term, these three schools need to fill these funding gaps,” said Mabel, “but long term we want to find ways to make these programs available and sustainable to every public school student in Berkeley.”

As for Waters, another ESP program is in the planning stages for Sacramento, a strategic move, she said, so that she would be “under the noses” of state legislators. Waters, whose foundation has gifted about $10 million to BUSD, mostly to the Edible Schoolyard at King, also hopes that the governor will convene a taskforce for edible education soon to address the healthcare crisis among school children.

A parent-led meeting open to the community to update interested parties about the problem and brainstorm ideas about potential solutions is scheduled for today, Monday, March 26, at the Malcolm X library at 7 p.m. Malcolm X is at 1731 Prince Street. Parents will also prepare public comments for the school board meeting on Wednesday March 28, where they intend to keep this issue on the minds of school board members.

Watch “The Whole World in a Small Seed,” a Lunch Love Community video on the Malcolm X school garden program run by Rivka Mason.

Originally published on Berkeleyside

Photo: Middle, sharing the pleasures of an outdoor table at Berkeley’s Malcolm X Elementary School. Below, Malcolm X’s school under the sky teaches more than just how to grow good food.

We know we’ve struck a chord with the Just Label It campaign, as Americans are responding in record-breaking numbers. As of today, more than 900,000 people have submitted comments to the FDA in favor of labeling genetically engineered (GE) foods. (I’ve written about the campaign before here and here.) But this campaign has always been about more than just the numbers. It’s about spreading the word about our right to have GE foods labeled.

We’re excited to now introduce this new infographic, which visually explains why the FDA should Just Label It. Designed to clearly show the need for labeling of GE foods, this educational tool includes a link to the Just Label It website where consumers can submit a comment to the FDA. Convenient for sharing on-line and via social media, the infographic is being distributed nationally by Just Label It’s 500 diverse partner organizations.

Whether it’s salmon genetically engineered to grow at twice its natural rate or herbicide-resistant corn that encourages the use of more chemicals in our food supply, we have a right to know what’s in our food.

Already, more than 40 countries–including China and Russia–require labels on genetically engineered food. As Americans, we deserve the same opportunity to make informed decisions about what we eat.

As more Americans know about GE foods, more pressure will build on the FDA to label them. This new infographic will help do just that and it’s easy to share with friends and family, so everyone can be afforded the right to make informed decisions about the food they eat as well. So please help share this cool new tool online, on Twitter, and Facebook. Together, we’ll continue to raise awareness and make our collected voices heard!

Originally published by Just Label It

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

There’s nothing like sitting in an audience and getting goose bumps listening to a great visionary tell it the way it is. They say lightening doesn’t strike twice, but when I heard Prince Charles’s speech that day, I felt the same kind of jolt I got the first time I saw Al Gore’s slide show on global warming. Gore’s power point stood out because it was the clearest, most concise explanation of our climate crisis I had ever heard.

Now, another elder statesman, Prince Charles, is boldly speaking out about another crisis that we urgently need to address. With eloquent words, clarity and heartfelt passion, the prince explained, what’s gone so terribly wrong with our food chain–and what we can do to make it right.

The prince’s speech was both terrifying and uplifting. Terrifying, because we really have screwed up our food system and our food system is, as a result, screwing us up our health, our environment, our climate.

But the speech was ultimately uplifting because, as the prince noted, “There are alternative ways to grow our food … which would go a very long way to resolving some of the problems we face.”

It was truly impressive to see Prince Charles use his considerable clout to promote a vision for a more ecologically enlightened food system. He has been living and breathing these issues for decades, a brave public voice against massive, aggressive interests. I was so inspired that I wanted to help the prince’s speech find a wider audience. Happily, the folks at Rodale Books, assisted by the Grace Foundation and Patrick Holden, shared my enthusiasm and helped publish it.

The Prince’s Speech is actually more of a booklet–just 48 pages, even counting the moving forward from Wendell Berry and an equally inspiring afterward from Will Allen and Eric Schlosser.

It’s a lovely paperback with a cover that manages to evoke both Michael Pollan and Peter Rabbit (thank you, Kelly Doe). You could breeze through it on your lunch break or read it in an evening, and you’d be up to speed on all the ways you can support a saner, less fossil-fueled food chain and as Prince Charles declares, “put Nature back at the heart of the equation.”

It won’t be easy. But, as The Prince’s Speech emphasizes, we can still do this, we do not have to continue to do things the same old way, especially since we can clearly see it is unsustainable. This booklet is truly a labor of love, so I think it’s only fitting that its official publication date is Valentine’s Day. As a friend said to me recently, “I like that it’s being released on February 14, because it’s like a love poem to the future.”

Please read this booklet, share it with friends and family, tweet, talk, and blog about it, buy copies and hand them out, do whatever you can to help spread the word. Because the future of food is the future of us all. Learn more at OnTheFutureofFood.org.

Originally published on Huffington Post

In the past year, protesters have become a common sight at Trader Joe’s locations across the country in response to the chain’s refusal to sign the agreement. Chains like Taco Bell, McDonald’s, Burger King and Whole Foods all signed the agreement years ago.

“This is nearly a 50 percent raise for the workers,” Barry Estabrook, the writer behind PoliticsOfThePlate.com and author of the book “Tomatoland” (about large-scale tomato agriculture), told The Huffington Post. “These are desperately poor people.”

“We are truly happy today to welcome Trader Joe’s aboard the Fair Food Program,” said Gerardo Reyes of the CIW, in a joint press release issued by the coalition and Trader Joe’s. “Trader Joe’s is cherished by its customers for a number of reasons, but high on that list is the company’s commitment to ethical purchasing practices. With this agreement, Trader Joe’s reaffirms that commitment and sends a strong–and timely–message of support to the Florida growers who are choosing to do the right thing, investing in improved labor standards, despite the challenges of a difficult marketplace and tough economic times.”

Although jointly issued, the press release did not have a comment directly from Trader Joe’s. The grocery chain wrote via email that it had nothing further to say beyond the release.

Estabrook, who last spoke to Trader Joe’s in the fall of 2011, said he found the company’s attitude to be “almost belligerent” when a group of religious leaders tried to present it with a petition in October of last year. But the CIW had a 40-city protest planned for this past weekend, and Trader Joe’s may have felt compelled to finally sign on, he said. The protests were canceled.

“Trader Joe’s presents an image of friendliness and fairness. When you’re doing that, you can’t very well have a group of people demonstrating in front of your stores,” Estabrook said. The CIW now plans to focus its attention on the major supermarket chain Publix, and has a six-day fast planned for next month.

Trader Joe’s opened its first Florida store in Naples on Friday, one day after signing the CIW agreement. In a weird twist of fate, the store is located on Immokalee Road.

A version of this article originally published on Huffington Post

Paula Deen’s public admission that she has Type 2 diabetes and her follow-up announcement that she is also a paid spokesperson for the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, and its diabetes drug, Victoza, has sparked an interesting debate about the deeper issues surrounding our food system—especially the impact it has on the many people diagnosed with diabetes. And according to Deen’s comments on the Today show, she implies to her millions of fans, that the primary ways to deal with this largely diet-related disease are through personal responsibility and pharmaceuticals.

Indeed, when Al Roker, asks her if she is going to change the way she eats and the foods she cooks, Deen says, “Honey, I’m your cook, I’m not your doctor. You are going to have to be responsible for yourself.” Evading the question, Deen puts the onus back on the individual to decide what foods to eat or not, despite the fact that she promotes unhealthful and processed foods on TV. The one comment she does make about food choice is “moderation,” one of the most meaningless and confusing bits of nutrition advice. In fact, this is what the industry giants often use as their defense for harmful, unhealthful foods.

Personal responsibility and consumer choice are solutions heralded by conservatives and liberals alike—the idea being that ultimately good health comes down to what we choose to buy and eat. But it’s not that simple.

There are three main issues when it comes to the myth of personal responsibility about food choice and they get at the root of our nation’s health crisis: The public’s confusion about nutrition; the lack of time and knowledge about real home cooking; and the promotion of quick fixes like drugs, diet foods, and fads in lieu of addressing underlying causes. The Paula Deen diabetes story manages to hit on every single one of these issues.

Americans suffer from nutrition confusion, thanks to an array of conflicting and often inaccurate public health messages, misleading labels and claims on packaging, and a lack of nutrition knowledge by many doctors, dietitians, and other health care providers.

Deen’s cooking, and now her public diabetes announcement, only adds to this confusion. During the Today show interview she repeatedly mentions the amount of fat in her recipes, as do many in the media reporting on the story. “For 10 years, wielding slabs of cream cheese and mounds of mayonnaise,” a New York Times article begins, “Paula Deen has become television’s self-crowned queen of Southern cuisine.”

But real, unprocessed cream cheese and mayonnaise are not the problem. The issue that mainstream media has largely overlooked is that Deen uses the processed, packaged versions of these foods, which are full of chemicals, additives and trans-fats. Actual home cooking would require whipping these foods up herself in her kitchen using real ingredients. And that is the real story behind Deen’s diabetes diagnosis: Her health problems are largely due to her reliance on packaged, processed foods that are the foundation for many of her recipes.

Even though her cooking show is called Paula’s Home Cooking, there’s a lot going on in her kitchen that is as far removed from home cooking as you can get. Many of her recipes include “ingredients” like Krispy Kreme doughnuts, biscuit mixes, cans of mushroom soup, and sour-cream-and-onion flavored potato chips. This is processed food cooking, not home cooking.

Heaping the blame on all the “fat” she cooks with only serves to confuse the public further. A New York Daily News article also cites fat as one of the main culprits in Deen’s cooking and her diet. But the most recent research indicates that when it comes to diabetes, fat is not the problem. The problem foods are sugar, refined white flour, chemical additives, artificial sweeteners and flavors, trans-fats, and the various other chemicals and additives found in the processed foods that abound in Deen’s recipes.

Now Deen is pushing the idea that taking medicine is the real solution to diabetes. On the Today show, she says, “Here’s what I want to get across to people, I want them to first start by going to their doctor and asking to be tested for diabetes. Get on a program that works for you. I’m amazed at the people out there that are aware they’re diabetic but they’re not taking their medicine.”

According to Deen, the reason she waited three years to go public with her diagnosis was because she didn’t have anything to give her fans. “I could have walked out and said, ‘Hey ya’ll, I have been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.’ I had nothing to give to my fellow friends out there. I wanted to bring something to the table when I came forward.” So what is she bringing to the table? A sales pitch for a diabetes drug that costs $500 per month and has some seriously troubling side effects, including thyroid cancer, as Tom Philpott reports.

Just think of the kind of influence she could have wielded had she come out with a new cooking show that focused on using fresh, real food ingredients that cut way back on sugar and refined carbohydrates. In fact, if she had done so and eaten this way for the past three years she might have reversed her own diabetes diagnosis, which is entirely possible given the right diet.

But instead, Deen is getting paid to leave that task to a drug company. This isn’t her first corporate sponsorship (here she peddles Smithfield ham) and I doubt it will be her last. Diabetic and diet foods can’t be far behind in products she’ll attach to her name.

Alas, we can’t fairly discuss personal responsibility without taking into account the under-regulated advertising industry that pushes cheap, convenient, and processed foods on an overworked and cash-strapped population. Add to this the diminishing knowledge on how to shop for, cook, and prepare foods from scratch and we have a serious problem.

As Deen now joins the 25.8 million other Americans suffering with diabetes, she “brings to the table” the ideas of moderation, personal responsibility, and the drug Victoza as the solutions. She could do so much more with all the power she wields.

Anthony Bourdain put it squarely when he said of Deen, “If I were on at seven at night and loved by millions of people at every age, I would think twice before telling an already obese nation that it’s OK to eat food that is killing us.” And this was before her diabetes announcement. Bourdain has also said that Deen is the “worst, most dangerous person to America.” He might have a point.

The Just Label It campaign today launched a new video by Food, Inc. filmmaker Robert Kenner that empowers consumers to fight for their right to know what is in their food. The video, “Labels Matter,” is the result of collaboration between the Just Label It campaign and Kenner’s new project, FixFood, a social media platform that aims to empower Americans to take immediate action to create a more sustainable and democratic food system.

To date, more than 450 consumer, healthcare, environmental and farming organizations, manufacturers, retailers have joined the Just Label It campaign, which has generated more than 500,000 consumer comments calling on the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to label GE foods.  (We wrote about the launch of Just Label It here.) The video seeks to garner more consumer awareness and participation by galvanizing one million consumers to comment to the FDA by mid-April, the date that the FDA’s public comment period ends.

“Labels Matter” tells the story of three women who share a belief in the right to know, but for entirely different reasons. Heather Donatini is a pregnant woman who knows she is feeding her developing baby, as well as herself, with every bite. Luann Clark recently had heart surgery and has to closely monitor what she eats. Robyn O’Brien is a mother whose child developed an allergic reaction to breakfast. “As a mother of children with food allergies, the labeling of GE foods is especially important, as it would provide essential and possibly life-saving information for the food allergic population,” said O’Brien, founder, Allergy Kids Foundation. (We’ve written about Robyn’s important work here and here.)

As the video connects with each woman, Kenner shows how the U.S. compares to other developed nations, including the European Union, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Russia, and even China, where genetically engineered (GE) foods are labeled. The video notes that the vast majority of Americans (90 percent in most studies) believe GE foods should be labeled.

Gary Hirshberg, Chairman of Stonyfield and a founder of Just Label It, collaborated with Kenner to produce the video. “While the pros and cons of GE foods is debated, an entire generation is growing up consuming them,” he said. “Until we have no doubt that GE crops are safe to eat, consumers should have a choice about whether we want to eat them. GE foods must be labeled. Consumers need to know.” Hirshberg recently published “Label It Now,” the first consumer guide to GE foods available at online booksellers. All proceeds of the e-book go to the Just Label It campaign.

The drumbeat for mandatory GE labeling is getting louder, as the FDA decides whether to approve GE salmon and a proposal advances at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to deregulate corn engineered to be resistant to the herbicide 2,4-D, a major component in Agent Orange. You can join in asking the FDA to allow consumers the right to know what’s in their food.