Civil Eats

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

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

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

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

These facts have become commonplace to those of us who have been paying attention. Still, The Weight of the Nation: Confronting America’s Obesity Epidemic serves as a clarion call to the country to take action — and fast — to combat this pernicious, complex problem that has myriad root causes. Read More

Following on the heels of pink slime, mad cow disease (AKA bovine spongiform encephalopathy—or BSE) is back this week after a California dairy cow destined for a rendering plant that makes pet food was found to have the disease. So far, it looks like the beef industry is playing down the finding, hoping to dodge a loss in sales at home and abroad. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was quick to tell Americans that our food supply is entirely safe.

But the re-emergence of mad cow and the conversation around pink slime has re-opened questions about our food system. It has exposed how food safety falls inevitably through the cracks in a country where over 9 billion animals are being slaughtered per year and budgets for the departments that oversee these processes are being slashed. The incredible media coverage of both issues reflects a growing consumer interest in more transparency in what we’re eating and how it’s being produced.

While this is only the fourth case of mad cow in the U.S. to date, experts argue that finding it this time was a stroke of luck. Of the 34 million cows we slaughter annually in the U.S., 40,000 are being tested by USDA for the disease, down from nearly 500,000 in 2005—about one tenth of one percent. Read More

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

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

When it comes to the chemicals used in food packaging, there is much we still don’t know. After a recent U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) decision last month to not put further restrictions on bisphenol-A (BPA), a new report today in the Washington Post takes a closer look at studies that reveal that such endocrine-distrupting chemicals are not only ubiquitous, they might also be harmful at much lower doses than previously thought.  Read More

Hats off to this mother of three who got fed up and took charge. Thirteen years ago, Sofía Gatica’s newborn died of kidney failure after being exposed to pesticides in the womb. After the despair came anger, then a fierce determination to protect the children in her community and beyond.

Today, she’s one of six grassroots leaders from around the world receiving the Goldman Environmental Prize, in recognition of her courageous—and successful—efforts. Read More

The epidemic of autism in children in the United States may be linked to the typical American diet according to a new study published online in Clinical Epigenetics by Renee Dufault, et. al. The study explores how mineral deficiencies—affected by dietary factors like high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—could impact how the human body rids itself of common toxic chemicals like mercury and pesticides.

The release comes on the heels of a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that estimates the average rate of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among eight year olds is now 1 in 88, representing a 78 percent increase between 2002 and 2008. Among boys, the rate is nearly five times the prevalence found in girls.

“To better address the explosion of autism, it’s critical we consider how unhealthy diets interfere with the body’s ability to eliminate toxic chemicals, and ultimately our risk for developing long-term health problems like autism,” said Dr. David Wallinga, a study co-author and physician at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). Read More

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is currently deciding whether or not to approve an application by Dow Chemical for its controversial genetically engineered (GE) corn variety that is resistant to the hazardous herbicide 2,4-D. 2,4-D and the still more toxic 2,4,5-T formed Agent Orange, the defoliant used in the Vietnam War. After receiving pressure from organizations like the Center for Food Safety (CFS), the USDA extended its public comment period until April 27–just a few weeks from today. There is overwhelming public opposition to this crop. To date, 155,000 comments opposing approval of 2,4-D corn have been collected by environmental, health, and farm groups. Read More

To call McDonald’s latest advertising campaign aimed at children cynical doesn’t give enough credit to the fast food giant and its ad agency, Leo Burnett. The company says the new series of ads starting this month is part of McDonald’s “nutrition commitment to promote nutrition and/or active lifestyle messages in 100 percent of its national communications to kids.”

How will the purveyor of Big Macs, fries and Coke accomplish this lofty goal? Perhaps by explaining that McDonald’s is an occasional treat? Or that sharing home-cooked meals is one of the best ways for families to ensure good eating habits? Perhaps McDonald’s could educate kids about the federal MyPlate recommendations to make half your meal fruits and vegetables?

Not even close. McDonald’s idea of nutrition education is simple: just eat at McDonald’s. Read More

Dr. Marion Nestle and Dr. Malden Nesheim’s Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, is not a diet book selling you on the newest trend nor does it encourage you to count calories. Instead it does the seemingly impossible: It takes calories from the abstract to the concrete. Nestle and Nesheim explain the significance of the calorie not only in understandable scientific terms, but also in social terms with the explicit aim of helping their reader navigate the convoluted world of food labels and diet fads.

Nestle and Nesheim address frequently asked calorie-related questions like: Is there such a thing as negative calories and are some calories good and others bad? Chapters titles like “What is a Calorie?” belie the complex nature of the subject, but despite their respective PhD’s in molecular biology (Nestle) and nutrition (Nesheim) they manage to make the science of the calorie a personal and ultimately relatable subject.

And, not unlike Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” mantra, Nestle and Nesheim leave us with four simple charges when it comes to calories: “Get organized. Eat less. Move more. Get political.”

I spoke with Nestle about her motives behind writing the book, the impossibility of estimating calories by sight, and the reason she got into this field in the first place. Read More

Today, the Food & Environment Reporting Network–the first and only independent, non-profit, non-partisan news organization that produces investigative reporting on food, agriculture, and environmental health in partnership with local and national media outlets–published its third report, “Farming Communities Facing Crisis Over Nitrate Pollution, Study Says,” on msnbc.com. Reporter Stett Holbrook takes a deep dive into a new study by UC Davis that reveals that nitrate contamination is severe and getting worse for hundreds of thousands of people in California’s farming communities.

The most comprehensive assessment so far to date, the report also reveals that agriculture is the main source of 96 percent of nitrate pollution. The five counties in the study area–among the top 10 agricultural producing counties in the United States–include about 40 percent of California’s irrigated cropland and more than half of its dairy herds, representing a $13.7 billion slice of the state’s economy, Holbrook reports. Read More

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is currently deciding whether or not to approve an application by Dow Chemical for its controversial genetically engineered (GE) corn variety that is resistant to the highly toxic herbicide 2,4-D, one of the main ingredients in Agent Orange.

Today, the USDA extended the public comment period on this issue until the end of April 2012, largely due to pressure from the Center for Food Safety (CFS), the nation’s leading organization in the fight to regulate GE crops, and other allied organizations and groups. If approved, CFS has vowed to challenge USDA’s decision in court, as this novel GE crop provides no public benefit and will only cause serious harm to human health, the environment, and threaten American farms. Read More

Last spring, right on the heels of one of the biggest events in his life, his son’s wedding–and with the eyes of the world upon his family–Prince Charles came to the United States to deliver a speech at Georgetown University about the future of food.

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. Read More

When I wrote recently about the next generation of genetically engineered seeds, I was in truth referring to the next next generation. The fact is that the next actual generation of seeds is already out of the lab and poised for approval by the USDA.

And I’m not talking about Monsanto’s recently approved “drought-tolerant” seeds, which the USDA itself has observed are no more drought-tolerant than existing conventional hybrids.

No, the “exciting” new seeds are simply resistant to more than one kind of pesticide. Rather than resisting Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup alone, they will now also be resistant to Dow AgroScience’s pesticide 2,4-D.

“A new pesticide,“ you say. “How exciting!” Except 2,4-D, despite its catchy name, has been around since World War II. Not only is it one of the most commonly used pesticides in the world, but it came to further prominence in certain circles when it was incorporated as a main ingredient in Agent Orange. Read More

New York City was among the earliest of the urban school districts to implement a consistent school lunch program in the United States. More than 50 years prior to its formal integration into city schools, New York City’s Children’s Aid Society began a school lunch program in 1853. These and other scattered volunteer and non-profit efforts were taken up nationwide by municipal school boards and integrated into the larger efforts to address the growing nutritional needs of America’s urban schoolchildren.

As a federally funded school food program evolved from its inception in the first half of the 20th century to become a permanent fixture in the educational landscape across the country, the NYC school food program became a leading influence in the country’s experiments, failures, and successes in school food service. School and city officials sorted through the wrong ingredients for school lunches and exposed the detrimental effects of decreased funding for school lunch programs. Read More

On January 25, amid much fanfare, First Lady Michelle Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack released the new school lunch regulations [PDF] which have been over three years in the making. Early hopes that the original proposed rules, which were based on recommendations from the Institute of Medicine, would dramatically change school lunches from the pizza/chicken nugget/french fries model so commonly seen in school cafeterias, to something looking a little more like, well, food, were dashed when Big Food lobbyists were able to force changes in Congress allowing plenty of potatoes, and continuing the longstanding tradition of counting the sauce on pizza as a vegetable. Still, there will be some improvements. Read More

Wouldn’t it be great if eight-year-olds immediately thought of a banana, instead of a bag of chips, when they wanted a snack? In the decade that I have been involved with school food here in San Francisco, we have added salad bars in all our middle and high schools, replaced juice with fresh fruit at breakfast, and added fresh fruit daily at lunch.

But it is still a hard sell to get some kids to take and eat the fresh produce, because it just isn’t in the mindset of many inner city kids, who may rarely if ever see a fresh vegetable or piece of fruit at home, or in the corner store. Meanwhile they see thousands of commercials a year for junk food, which is available everywhere. Read More

This growing season there’s a new GMO in town: Monsanto’s GE sweet corn. This Roundup Ready product is the first GE corn for direct human consumption, and it has not been tested by the USDA and will not be labeled. If you’re unhappy about this, you’re not alone. The majority of consumers don’t want to eat genetically modified foods, and 95 percent feel strongly that they should be labeled.  Many retailers, including Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and General Mills, have already agreed to not use GE Sweet Corn in any of their products—but Walmart, the country’s largest grocer and self-proclaimed sustainability adherent, has yet to make such a promise. Read More

FoodCorps is growing—expanding the number of states we’ll be working in next year and expanding the number of service members who are creating community and creating change. We created FoodCorps with two goals in mind: Addressing a public health crisis and providing a training opportunity for all of growing interest in careers in food and agriculture. Becoming a FoodCorps service member is a way to launch your career in food and farming while helping kids get healthy.

Rachel is one of 50 future food systems leaders who started their terms of service this past August as the first ever class of FoodCorps service members. So far this year, these service members have reached over 20,000 children in 10 states. They are addressing the nation’s painful and costly childhood obesity epidemic using our three recipe ingredient for change: Hands-on nutrition education, growing and tending school gardens, and getting healthy local food onto school cafeteria trays. Read More

Every now and then, a story appears in the media gushing about a “school food miracle worker” apparently serving healthier, higher quality food than usually found in school lunch programs, and costing no more than what a typical school district spends on a less healthy meal. The reader is left wondering why all schools don’t just do what the “miracle worker” does.

It will come as a surprise to no one to learn that things are not always as they appear in the media. The “miracle worker” who seems to do more with less is usually doing more with more. Additional funding, student demographics, labor issues, and facilities are just some of the factors that can make or break a pilot innovation, and which get short shrift in media gushfests.

How can you tell if your school can do what the “miracle” school does? You need to determine whether an innovation is replicable (can it be easily reproduced in any community?), scalable (does it work just as well for 30,000 students as it does for 300?) and sustainable (is it financially self-supporting?), because if it is not all three, it may be something that can only succeed in that one place. Everything doesn’t work everywhere. Read More

Given all the defeats and set-backs this year due to powerful food industry lobbying, the good food movement should by now be collectively shouting: I am mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.

If you feel that way, I have two words of advice: get political.

I don’t mean to ignore the very real successes: increases in farmers markets, innovative and inspiring programs such as Food Corps, and an increasingly diverse food justice movement, just to name a few. But lately, at least when it comes to kids and junk food, we’ve been getting our butts kicked. Read More

An effort to get American children to eat more fruits and vegetables should, even in hyper-polarized Washington, be a no-brainer.  Last week, Congress declared pizza sauce to be a vegetable in school lunches.  Now, major food manufacturers are escalating their attacks against healthy food calling proposed food marketing guidelines “job killers” that will devastate the American economy.   Read More

If we’re such a “family values”-friendly nation, why are we so willing to let our kids be abused for the sake of making money?

According to the allegations in the Penn State scandal, a pedophile was allowed to brutally assault/molest numerous young boys because no one dared to upset the very lucrative apple cart that is college sports.

And now comes word that Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee have torpedoed the USDA’s attempts to reduce the amount of pizza, french fries, and salt that our kids consume at school. Why? Because the frozen pizza companies, the salt industry, and potato growers asked them to. Really. It’s that simple. Read More

Over the last couple of days, news outlets have been having a field day with a proposal from Congress that pizza sauce be considered a vegetable to qualify for the National School Lunch program. Headlines like this one were typical: “Is Pizza Sauce a Vegetable? Congress says Yes.” (The blogs were a tad more childish; for example LA Weekly: Congress to USDA: Pizza is So a Vegetable, Nah Nah Nah Nah Nah Nah.)

Most reporters, pressed for time and resources, tend to simplify complex stories and this was no exception. In one camp, so the stories went, are nutrition advocates who want healthier school meals, while Republicans are saying the feds shouldn’t be making such decisions. Read More

How much do you know about your Thanksgiving turkey? If you buy your turkey from a typical grocery store–and most Americans do–you might not realize that the approximately 46 million turkeys consumed every year come from a factory farm.

But if Thanksgiving is truly about offering gratitude for what we have, it seems fitting to also be grateful to the turkey that many of us will eat for dinner. We ought to think about how that turkey lived before ending up on our tables. Read More

Arnell Hinkle, the founding executive director of CANFIT (which stands for Communities, Adolescents, Nutrition, and Fitness) may be based in downtown Berkeley, but her work to improve the lives of low-income youth of color takes her across the country and around the globe. Read More

It starts with a distant, unmistakable whine, like a fly in another room you’ve been too lazy to swat. As the sound grows, I make sure the dog is inside, then grab the camera and head to the pasture.

Planes spraying fungicides have interrupted several quiet weekends on our small farm this summer. They’re hard to ignore–the buzz of their loud propellers is deafening, especially when they fly above our house to turn around. Over the corn fields they soar, sometimes only a few feet about the tips of the tassels, with white mist trailing nefariously behind. Depending on the direction of the breeze, I can often smell the chemicals from inside the house.

I hate every minute of it. Read More

Though it has dropped from the headlines recently, the bisphenol A discussion continues to rage. California is one Jerry Brown signature away from a partial ban of the chemical, which is used in everything from canned goods to PVC plastic to cash register receipts. There is ample evidence that BPA, an endocrine disruptor, has been linked to various ills, including diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. Some scientists are even raising questions about the damage it’s doing to our oceans.

And, despite FDA footdragging on the issue, the government is worried. The National Institutes of Health recently initiated a $30 million research program (though not without some controversy) to examine the growing risks and make a final call on BPA’s safety.

Now, a new study by U.S. government scientists purports to debunk the entire BPA threat. It claims that BPA poses no risk whatsoever and goes so far as to conclude that every previous study that found otherwise was fundamentally flawed. Read More

After five years and millions of dollars spent by the chemical industry to lobby against protecting California’s children from baby bottles and sippy cups containing the dangerous chemical Bisphenol-A, known as BPA, the Toxin-Free Infants and Toddlers Act or AB 1319 has been sent to Governor Jerry Brown for a signature. Brown has until Monday, October 3 to sign the bill into law, which he should do, as California lags behind ten other states, as well as Canada, China, and the European Union in banning BPA in baby bottles.

BPA is widely used in shatter-proof plastic baby bottles, sippy cups, and the lining of formula cans and leaches out of these containers into food. Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports, has long warned of the dangers of BPA in food containers, particularly for fetuses, infants, and small children. Our precautionary advice to consumers is based on more than 200 scientific studies that show clear links between tiny amounts of exposure to BPA and subsequent increased risk of cancer, diabetes, reproductive, neurological, and developmental disorders. Read More

Across the United States, farmworkers are having difficulty getting enough to eat. And they’re not alone: Rural communities as a whole are poorer and less able to feed themselves than their urban counterparts. In regions where our food is being grown, access to it is limited and the people who grow it are unable to afford it when it is available. Lack of transportation, fear, and other social issues increase farmworkers’ isolation and limit their food choices even more. The food security movement, working to increase access for communities at risk of hunger, tends to overlook rural people–and especially those who work in the fields. Read More