Civil Eats

“You’re farming in Alaska?! What can you possibly grow there?” This was a common response when I told people I was moving to Alaska to be an AmeriCorps VISTA at Calypso Farm and Ecology Center in Ester, Alaska. To be honest, I myself wasn’t quite sure what to expect. When I arrived in April, the ground was still covered in ice, the fields covered in snow. Three months later, I’ve discovered the shocking truth. In Alaska, a food revolution is brewing, and it’s led by 12 year olds. Read More

I accepted an invitation from Derrick Kiyabu recently to visit MA’O Organic Farm where the path out of poverty starts with a walk down the farm’s vegetable rows. On the west side of the island of Oahu, just past Honolulu’s ocean view condos and the Pearl Harbor Naval Base I found myself on Highway 93 where a sign saying “Now Leaving Paradise, Welcome to Poverty” would be placed if tourist officials chose to acknowledge such things. But lacking what many vacationers are looking for in a tropical getaway, the Wai’anae Coast, as it is commonly known, can only offer fast-food joints, scruffy commercial buildings, and residential housing that rivals the worst of third-world Asia. Perhaps this is why the Lonely Planet guidebook refers to the region, almost quaintly, as “a little bit of Appalachia by the sea.” Read More

Seattle is where Asian America intersects with food and environmental justice, as I discovered when I spoke there recently as part of a “Sustainable Growth Summit” convened by the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Seattle embodies the diversity, contradictions and great talent that define our Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community: wealth and poverty, hunger and abundance, access or exclusion based on citizenship and English language proficiency. Read More

Thursday, August 4 is the final day for public comment on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) plan to limit mercury emissions from coal and oil-fired power plants. Two decades overdue, the proposed regulation would capture 91 percent of airborne mercury before it leaves the smokestack.

Despite widely available and proven technology, power-plant mercury currently floats unregulated beyond the reach of the Clean Air Act. While the utilities industry has delayed regulation through lobbying and court challenges, I have watched upwind construction of more than 20 new coal-fired generators over the past 20 years. Read More

Dan and Isabelle sit patiently on the folding metal chairs in the tastefully decorated waiting room of Seattle’s Ballard Food Bank. Intelligent, soft-spoken, and in his late 50s, Dan is a chronically underemployed architectural draftsman who barely managed to eke out three days of temporary work over the past week. His unemployment benefits have long since evaporated and he’s thinking about applying for food stamps, although he cringes as the words leave his mouth. With his shrunken income dedicated to keeping a roof over his head, he and Isabelle are two among 1,200 or so neighborhood residents who will request a shopping cart-full of food this week at the food bank. Read More

Deborah Kane is the Vice President of Food and Farms for Ecotrust, a Portland, Oregon-based conservation and economic development group that has their hands in a variety of powerful pots including a USDA-backed online service called FoodHub that helps connect farms of every size with schools, hospitals, caterers, restaurants, and distributors. Deborah is also the publisher of Edible Portland. She was invited to the White House a few weeks ago to brief President Obama on FoodHub, which she hopes will go national next year.

What issues have you been focused on?

I’m very focused on connecting producers to domestic markets. Read More

Thomas F. “Fred” Stokes was born and raised on a small diversified family farm in Kemper County, Mississippi. At the age of 17 he enlisted in the Army and later completed Infantry Officers Candidate School and received a commission. His 20 years of military service included two tours in Vietnam. He retired in 1972 as a Major. He returned to Mississippi and has been involved in the cattle business and active in agricultural and rural life issues ever since. Fred is deeply concerned about the disappearance of the family farm and ranch and the decay in rural America and is widely known as an outspoken critic of U. S. farm and trade policy. He was instrumental in founding Organization for Competitive Markets (OCM) and Coalition for a Prosperous America (CPA). He currently serves as the Executive Director of OCM and on the board of CPA. He and his wife of 50 plus years live on their small cattle farm in East Central Mississippi.

What issues have you been focused on?

Our issue is making the marketplace a fair game as it affects farmers and ranchers in rural America. Read More

Sue Ujcic is an innovative farmer and a champion of what’s possible when communities work together. She is as adept in connecting people to good food, good health, and good times as she is harvesting potatoes.

As co-owner of Helsing Junction Farm in Rochester, Washington, just outside of Olympia, Sue and her business partner, Anna Salafsky, have worked since 1992 with almost the same crew of 12 people to farm and grow 30 acres of organic vegetables, fruit, and flowers to serve their 800-member CSA program, one of the most established in the country. Much of their produce throughout the growing season is also donated to the local food bank where they deliver weekly CSA shares directly to recipients, a program funded by donations from their members, which they match.

What issues have you been focused on?

Linking low-income people with fresh organic produce. Read More

Helene York is both an educator and coach for Bon Appétit Management Company, the socially responsible food service company that operates more than 400 on-site cafés for universities, corporate employers, and museums in 31 states. She is also the director of the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation, whose mission is to educate chefs and consumers about how their food choices affect the global environment and to catalyze changes in the supply chain. Read More

Highland Hills is one of those down-and-out communities that’s allowed a glimpse of prosperity but never gets to taste it. The Dallas skyline looms large across the hazy north Texas horizon and is linked to this poverty-plagued neighborhood by a seven-mile ribbon of light-rail steel. Ledbetter Avenue crosses the train line passing vacant buildings, empty parking lots, and a dizzying array of “For Sale” and “For Jesus” signs. Named for the renowned guitar picker Lead Belly who did time in these parts–both in and out of prison–the Avenue speaks little in the way of promise, but wails the blues of poverty loud and clear. Read More

The food justice movement is alive–and growing–in Arizona. This, despite, or perhaps even due to, a political climate that, at least at this moment, is chilling.

For example, just last Thursday, when I was returning back to L.A., less than two months after Gabrielle Giffords was shot and nine people were killed in Tucson, the Arizona State Senate debated legislation that would allow students to bring guns into the classroom. When the measure was finally passed, the legislators decided to modify the bill to allow students to bring guns onto campus on the sidewalks and into the common areas but not yet into the classroom. “Sometimes you have to take baby steps,” Read More

Pam, who I was grateful to meet on an urban agriculture tour in New Orleans this past October, is the founder and Executive Director of the Women and Agriculture (WandA) Network, one of a group of organizations strategically thinking about food justice and women farmers in urban areas. She is the former Deputy Director of the New Orleans Food and Farm Network and currently tends a small, but vibrant urban farm called Sun Harvest Kitchen Garden located in the severely distressed Central City neighborhood of New Orleans.

Currently, she’s got an abundance of Asian greens, red leaf mustards, collards, spinach, onions, herbs that carried over from the summer like fennel, curry, basil, all kinds of mint, stevia, tarragon, rosemary. In the spring she hopes to make cucumbers, tomatoes, and parsley and green onions available to a neighboring senior center residence complex because they really want access to fresh seasonings. She also has a market garden portion that will grow for Café Reconcile, a nonprofit restaurant that serves as the primary training ground for “at-risk” students seeking to acquire skills in the food service industry. (They also make a sweet tea that made me cry and a crawfish bisque that’ll get you crawling back for more!)

What issues have you been focused on?

I have primarily been working across the city with interesting people and groups about the notion of creating a viable infrastructure for urban ag in NOLA. What does that mean?What’s the best approach to get us some concrete results? Read More

Driving around North Berkeley with Natasha Boissier is an educational experience; where others see a quiet residential area she sees streets lined with potential pickings and delights when she spots prospective bounty or familiar fruit.

Boissier is a part of a growing movement of urban gleaners who pick fruit from people’s yards (with permission) and donate this surplus produce to food banks, senior centers, and schools who can put this fresh food to good use.

Some residents view an abundant fruit tree as a problem but the 42-year-old clinical social worker sees a simple solution to excess bounty and a way to fill a community need. Read More

Michele Simon is a public health lawyer specializing in policy analysis, legal strategies, and countering corporate tactics. With 14 years of experience researching and writing about the food industry, she authored Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back. She is currently watchdogging the alcohol industry, as Marin Institute’s research and policy director. You can read her writing on her blog, and follow her on Twitter.

What issues have you been focused on?

My interests include nutrition policy and the role the food industry plays in marketing and obstructing policy to undermine public health. Read More

Jordan Treakle hails from the mountains of western North Carolina and recently graduated with a degree International Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. As a student he was a founding member of the UNC student group FLO (Fair, Local, Organic) Food. Jordan directed the organization’s goal of promoting institutional purchasing of sustainable foods in collaboration with the Carolina Dining Services (CDS) and helped build new supplier partnerships that promoted local food purchasing and consumption. His efforts have insured that FLO Food and CDS together are developing a successful model for sustainable food to be served at a flagship, public university. His work with the Real Food Challenge, a national student-led NGO working to build the youth sustainable food movement, has helped to establish working relationships with a range of local community groups and regional non-profit organizations in the Southeast as part as the RFC’s national campaign to increase direct farm-to-university links in the food chain. He is currently organizing farmers around hydraulic fracturing issues at the Rural Advancement Foundation International.

CE: What issues have you been focused on?

JT: For the past three years I’ve focused on student and youth organizing around agriculture issues in North Carolina and the Southeast. I initially became interested in industrial hog production in North Carolina and the effects it has on the land and the people in my home state. This led to analyzing the institutional food purchasing of my university and how students can advocate for universities to invest in sustainable food systems. Read More

Miles Gordon is the Founder and Project Coordinator for The Gardens Project of North Coast Opportunities which he started in 2007 in Ukiah, Mendocino County, California. His inspiration for The Gardens Project began 10 years ago as a result of a local hunger assessment. It revealed that Mendocino County needed more access to food which inspired Miles to help organize the Cleveland Community Garden – now Ukiah’s oldest and largest. As a former teacher who worked with school gardens, Miles noticed that some struggled, competing for resources. He saw a real need for two things: networking existing gardens so they could share resources and expertise while simultaneously, and rapidly, developing access to new gardens.

In the last three years, The Gardens Project has helped develop 16 new gardens and network over 65 in Mendocino County. These include gardens at schools, senior centers and those in the community at large. Miles and his wonderful Americorps VISTA volunteers also work on farmer development and rebuilding the food system on many levels.

CE: What issues have you been focused on?

MG: Empowerment. Read More

Urban farmer Annie Novak is farmer and co-founder of the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn, New York—a green roof turned vegetable farm built by Goode Green on top of a warehouse owned by Broadway Stages. In its second growing season, the farm has become a center of community, with a weekly market, a popular volunteer program, and farm talks on subjects like composting, artisanal food businesses, and chicken-raising. Annie also finds time to run an education program she founded called Growing Chefs and works as the Children’s Gardening Program Coordinator at the New York Botanical Gardens. And she can be seen zipping around town on a bike that she built herself.

She’s garnered loads of press for her work, including this Grist interview with our own Paula Crossfield.

CE: What issues have you been focused on?

AN: Food access. What ancient agricultural skills have we lost? Everything I do ties back to the soil and land itself. Where does good soil come from and what’s happened to it? Read More

Debra is one of the founders of FoodCorps and the Communications and Outreach Director of the National Farm to School Network, which is a program of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College. Debra is also an Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Food and Society Fellow. Debra’s previous non-profit work spans the globe in the humanitarian, conservation, sustainable agriculture, and food justice realms. She works from her fifth-generation family farm in Ohio, where she continues her passion for organic farming raising fruits and vegetables.

CE: What issues have you been focused on?

DE: It ranges from food policy, Farm to School, school gardens, school food, rural sociology, obesity, dairy policy, commodity policy, food justice… basically from seed to stomach. The whole gamut.

CE: What inspires you to do this work?

DE: I am a dairy farmer’s daughter and given that there are fewer than 60,000 dairy farmers in the United States, not many people can really understand what that means. But, I grew up with a dairy chip on my shoulder, watching how working for this food system is hard work and when you see that it’s broken even after all of that hard work, that’s frustrating. Read More

Lisa Kivirist is a bonafide Farmer Jane in Wisconsin where she runs her family farm with the help of her husband and son Liam. Off grid and creative, she and her husband have figured out how to make a living in a rural place – something that’s not really easy to do. Lisa is also a Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow specializing in the role of women in agriculture and speaks on the subject frequently.

We are honored to share some of Lisa’s insights about why working in agriculture is the perfect fit for women entrepreneurs and ecopreneurs in this article within an article. Read on for some serious inspiration. Read More

Chef Kurt Michael Friese is the founding leader of Slow Food Iowa, serves on the Slow Food USA National Board of Directors, and is editor-in-chief and co-owner of the local food magazine Edible Iowa River Valley. A graduate and former Chef-Instructor at the New England Culinary Institute, he has been Chef and owner, with his wife Kim McWane Friese, of the Iowa City restaurant Devotay for 13 years. Devotay is a community leader in sustainable cuisine and supporting local farmers and food artisans. Friese is a freelance food writer and photographer, with regular columns in six local, regional and national newspapers and magazines, and his book, A Cook’s Journey: Slow Food in the Heartland has just been published by Ice Cube Press.

CE: What issues have you been focused on?

KMF: Lately a lot more on bringing the ideas about good food to a wider audience. It’s not just about good food, but good food for everybody. I work a lot with Slow Food and it’s been saddled with an elitist bag; and rather than yelling “uh uh” it’s easier to demonstrate with good works that good, clean and fair food isn’t just for upper class white folks, it’s for everybody. Read More

Jennifer Curtis is the principal of Curtis Consulting and Project Director for NC Choices, a Center for Environmental Farming Systems initiative. Since 1986, Jennifer has been working to improve the sustainability of food and farming systems. Jennifer is dedicated to facilitating change from the ground up—developing applied tools and programs to address agriculture’s economic and environmental challenges. Often an ambassador from the environmental to the farming community, she is skilled at building bridges and encouraging collaboration. Read More

Our North Berkeley neighborhood is a haven for chicken fanciers. I’ve counted at least six coops within a three-block radius of our house! And we’re fortunate enough to live right next to one of them. Our lovely back neighbors, Fran and Chip, have three young hens in their backyard. In addition to entertaining Will, who now says “buck, buck” and heads for the back door whenever we say “chicken”, we also receive delicious eggs with brilliant orange yolks from the girls next door. Read More

“Observe,” Chef Beto Pimentel said as he held the cacau fruit up for a moment of quiet admiration before slamming it against a cement wall. A popping noise brought a thin crack through the shell, we coaxed it open, and there it was, the science of cacau.

This was no ordinary cacau. Carved out in the heart of Salvador, Brazil’s third largest city and the capital of the state of Bahia, lives a refuge of native species. Some are rare and almost forgotten, others are more normally seen on large plantations. The guardian of this tropical orchard is Beto Pimentel, and guard he does – with zeal and dedication. Read More

Temra Costa is a sustainable food and farming advocate and author of Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat. Civil Eats will feature her profiles of some of America’s women farmers and food advocates over the coming weeks.

On the banks of the Sacramento River, farm crops are the beneficiaries of centuries of natural flooding that have added rich sediment to the soil’s fabric. The longest river within California, the Sacramento, stretches from Mount Shasta all the way down to the Delta, where it joins with the San Joaquin before splurging out into the Suisun Bay just north of the San Francisco. The story of the Sacramento is as rich as its soil as Native Americans traversed its banks long before Interstate 5 was put in. Read More

Anthony Flaccavento is an organic farmer near Abingdon in the heart of Appalachian Virginia, and is founder of SCALE Inc. (SCALE stands for, (Sequestering Carbon Accelerating Local Economies) which works with new and emerging sustainable ag projects. He has been working on community environmental and economic development in central Appalachia for the past 25 years.  In 1995, he founded Appalachian Sustainable Development, a nonprofit dedicated to developing healthy, diverse, and ecologically sound economic opportunities in southwestern Virginia and northeastern Tennessee, which has become a regional and national leader in sustainable economic development. Read More

Temra Costa is a sustainable food and farming advocate and author of Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat. Civil Eats will feature her profiles of some of America’s women farmers and food advocates over the coming weeks.

Molly Rockamann (pictured: Karen, Molly, Vicki, Danielle) will forever be remembered as the apprentice at UC Santa Cruz’s Farm and Garden Program that made “Farm Grease, The Musical,” happen. This 28 year-old farmer grew up playing in the racks of her grandmother’s costume shop and with a family that made variety shows a priority at nearly all functions. So it’s not surprising that Molly continues to weave art, dance, and music into her farm in Ferguson, Missouri. Read More

Join Kitchen Table Talks and CUESA for a conversation about the contributions of women farmers, producers, advocates, and activists. Temra Costa will speak about the women she interviewed for her new book, Farmer Jane, and a panel of women who work in the food system including Sarajane Snyder from Green Gulch Farm and Il Cane Rosso’s Chef Lauren Kiino, will delve into ideas of women’s work, the joy of being in the dirt, and the ways women juggle home, family, community, and other endeavors as they plant, till, sell, and promote their wares.

We’ll gather Wednesday night, June 9, in the Port Commission Hearing Room at the Ferry Building, 2nd Floor at 6:30 pm. The event is free though donations are always appreciated. Please RSVP here to reserve your seat.

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of CivilEats 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. A $10 suggested donation is requested at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Farmers’ market-sourced food and refreshments will be provided, courtesy of Bi-Rite Market.

James Johnson-Piett is responsible for the overall management of operations and strategic vision for Urbane Development, a community and economic development firm based in Philadelphia. He specializes in neighborhood scale development and the revitalization of urban commercial and retail amenities. His work focuses on strengthening neighborhood commercial and retail enterprises by providing services and expertise that infuses principles of social entrepreneurship, sustainability, and technical acumen into the core of his client’s operations. He serves as Treasurer on the Board of Directors of the Community Food Security Coalition, is a co-convener of the Healthy Corner Stores Network, and a member of the Philadelphia Development Partnership’s Young Entrepreneur’s Advisory Board. James is an alumnus of Swarthmore College with a B.A. in Political Science and Environmental Studies. I sat down with James to ask him a few questions last week for our new series, Faces & Visions of the Food Movement. Read More

Sam Mogannam is the much-loved owner of San Francisco’s Bi-Rite Market, Bi-Rite Creamery, and founder of 18 Reasons, a community space that invites people to explore art, food, and community. According to a recent article in 7×7 about SF tastemakers, he’s also been called the Mayor of 18th Street on a number of occasions. With his market and his devotion to people, and farmers in particular, he’s brought back the family-owned grocery and created a renewed sense of community in this pocket of the Mission District (and also my neighborhood). I sat down with him in his office above the store recently to interview him as the first in a series of perspectives on folks around the country who are making a difference in the effort to transform our food system. Read More

Temra Costa is a sustainable food and farming advocate and author of Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat. Civil Eats will feature her profiles of some of America’s women farmers and food advocates over the coming weeks.

In a time when kids don’t know the difference between potatoes and rocks, it’s refreshing that grassroots organizations are working to rebuild their community’s food economy and teaching invaluable skills of food production and sustainability to our next generation of eaters. I feel sympathetic towards youth today, they have to juggle mixed messages about what to eat while our world goes streaming into cyber space. They are the ones that are charged with putting a new foot forward to solve our current challenges of industrial food and the obesity and diabetes epidemics. Organizations such as Growing Power in Milwaukee and Chicago, The Food Project, and our featured organization, The Massachusetts Avenue Project (MAP) in Buffalo, New York, are showing kids how food is grown and are simultaneously teaching them critical life lessons in health, nutrition, environment, and business.

This brings us to Zoe Holloman, an educator and organizer for MAP Read More