The potential to improve our current food policy is currently being challenged by a select group of Senate and House agriculture committees who propose $23 billion in cuts to federal spending on some of the most important programs related to nutrition and the future of small-scale, local, and organic farming. The 2012 Farm Bill could be rewritten as early as November 23. It’s vital that these issues be debated in a public forum, not behind closed doors.

Take Action Today
There is still time to participate in the fight for reform that supports new farmers, provides infrastructure for regional and local food development, and protects our health and precious land.

Here are some ways you can get involved in influencing the 2012 Farm Bill:

Call. Take 30 seconds to call leaders of the House and Senate ag committees and say NO to the “Secret Farm Bill.” Over 27,000 people have done so already using the Food Democracy Now call script. You can also support the development of local and regional farms, farmers, and retail markets by asking your two senators and your representative to co-sponsor the Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act.
Meet. To date, there are over 7,000 farmers markets nationwide. Get to know your local farmers. Listen to their stories. Ask them questions about the Farm Bill. The more you understand about the challenges that small-scale farmers face, the larger your role can be in supporting their farms and marketplaces.

Explore. Find out about programs intended for inclusion in the 2012 Farm Bill. Learn about the new Beginning Farmer and Rancher Opportunity Act, which supports novice farmers by creating jobs, affordable farmland, and farmer training programs. Or read about the pre-existing Wetlands Reserve Program, which has improved watershed health and secured protection and restoration for 11,000 private landowners on 2.3 million acres of land over the past 20 years.

Review. Learn a brief history of the Farm Bill to understand key programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which currently represents more than two-thirds of the Farm Bill funding and faces multibillion-dollar cuts.

Originally published on Nourish

While the expression “vote with your fork” has become a slogan for the modern food movement, many advocates struggle with how to move from conscientious consumerism to engaged citizenship. Harnessing the groundswell of public interest in food to create lasting policy change was the subject of a recent San Francisco Kitchen Table Talks, a monthly conversation about food issues.

Richmond District Supervisor Eric Mar, San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance co-coordinator Eli Zigas, organizing expert Stephen Burdo, and 50 local food advocates gathered at 18 Reasons to discuss tactics and tools for activating the good food movement. Surrounded by street artist Zoltron’s images of a conflicted Ronald McDonald, the conversation focused on two successful campaigns that put San Francisco food policy on the national stage.

Supervisor Mar brought his perspective as a legislator and chief sponsor of the Healthy Meal Incentive Ordinance, passed last November. Misleadingly nicknamed the “Happy Meal Ban” by critics, the ordinance holds fast food restaurants accountable by placing limits on calories, sugar, and fat in kids’ meals served with toys.

Facing a fierce opposition from chains like McDonald’s, Mar credits the campaign’s success to uniting diverse community interests under the banner of public health. “Legislation is not the most important thing; it’s the process of empowering or disempowering people,” he said.

The campaign found allies in local community groups with interests in food access and children’s health, including the SEFA Food Guardians in Bayview Hunters Point, the Women’s Collective of La Raza Centro Legal, and Literacy for Environmental Justice. They also partnered with Corporate Accountability International, authors of the Retire Ronald and Value the Meal campaigns.

McDonald’s threw lobbying and advertising money into a strong counter-campaign, claiming that the regulations would hurt small businesses and take away parents’ right to choose. In response, the Healthy Meal campaign framed the issue as a public health concern, rallying pediatricians and parents groups behind the cause.

Eight supervisors’ votes were needed to override Mayor Gavin Newsom’s anticipated veto. The campaign put pressure on Supervisors Sophie Maxwell and Bevan Dufty by mobilizing parents and communities in their districts. The ordinance passed eight to three. By asserting local rights over the interests of multimillion-dollar food corporations, the groundbreaking legislation sent a powerful message. “It’s a small step forward but it’s a proud moment when you force corporations to make some changes,” said Mar. “We have to be revolutionaries in thinking about the food system, not only about what we do as individuals. It has to challenge the corporations that rip off and oppress our communities.”

From the Grassroots Up

From the citizen frontlines, Eli Zigas discussed how the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance (SFUAA) went about changing outdated zoning code, thereby empowering urban farmers to cultivate and sell their produce in the city. The initiative originated with two young urban farmers, Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway of Little City Gardens, a 3/4-acre farm in a residential neighborhood in the outer Mission district. When they decided they wanted to set up a farmstand and start marketing to restaurants, they ran up against city rules requiring an expensive conditional-use permit and a hearing before the S.F. Planning Commission.

They launched a campaign to revise the old law, backed by the newly formed SFUAA, who began sending letters to the mayor’s office. After an influential sympathizer wrote a letter of support, the mayor began to take notice.  Motivating many individual citizens to take action (grassroots), while simultaneously forming alliances with well-connected or well-respected champions (“grasstops”), were key ingredients in the campaign’s success. “Much of what we did was not about electronic activism,” said Zigas. “It was about old-school activism that used electronic tools in turning out people and sending in letters and making phone calls and turning out people again.”

After nearly seven months of meetings with city departments and supervisors, Supervisor David Chiu and Mayor Newsom introduced the new legislation, kicking off a larger public debate. As a volunteer-run effort, numbers were important, with some individuals being more or less involved. Participants showed up at hearings, circulated petitions, solicited businesses for support, got other groups to sign on, wrote letters, built a Web site, and presented to classes.

Timing and luck also played their part. Urban ag was experiencing a renaissance and public support was flourishing. In 2009, Mayor Newsom passed the Executive Directive for Healthy and Sustainable Food, which called for an increase in urban food production through an audit of unused public land, support from Rec & Park, and new marketing opportunities for local farmers. The SFUAA’s proposal was right in San Francisco’s sweet spot.

On April 12, 2010, the bill passed unanimously, raising the level of power and influence of farmers and gardeners in the city. “When it came down to it, the most important thing was packing 70 people into a City Hall hearing room, so much so that the police had to keep people out,” said Zigas. “That had an impact on everyone who saw that hearing.”

Tools of the Trade

Stephen Burdo, Political Director for Kathleen Russell Consulting, a strategic communications firm specializing in nonprofit and political campaigns, described the importance of blending tried-and-true traditional organizing methods with modern tools.

Prior to social media, some of history’s most successful movements, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized through word of mouth: church meetings, phone calls, knocking on doors. From the food movement playbook, federal food labeling requirements started with a group of California mothers who organized through PTA meetings, leading to the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990.

With the advent of social media tools, the rules for engagement have changed, but they haven’t replaced direct action; they’ve just maximized it. “Social media increases your ability to organize by 100 times,” Burdo says. An early example of social media organizing, Kitchen Gardeners International’s 2008 Eat the View campaign gathered 110,000 signatures through online channels, successfully urging the White House to plant a garden. The project reached a critical mass after months of campaigning when their petition jumped from 10,000 signatures to 20,000 in six days after it posted clever videos that went viral.

How can food activists successfully blend old-school tactics with modern technology to create real and lasting change?

Tell a story. The SFUAA’s campaign gained attention by presenting a simple, easily relatable story about two young gardeners who just wanted to sell their veggies. Create strong, clear messaging, and use voices, photos, and videos to bring your issue to life.

Get the word out. Know where your message is going. According to Burdo, 71 percent of Americans are on Facebook, making it the place to go to build and converse with supporters. Only 5 percent of the general public, but 90 percent of media professionals, use Twitter, making it less useful for grassroots organizing and more useful for framing the debate for reporters.

Seek grassroots and grasstops allies. Form coalitions to build numbers. Partner with community groups and organizations that share interests in public health, local development, and the environment. Don’t underestimate the power of sympathizers in high places, who can push your cause behind closed doors.

Use social media, but don’t overuse it. Clogging feeds and inboxes with e-blasts is no way to keep supporters. Be strategic in your communications. “Post no more than three to four times a week on Facebook,” said Burdo. “Organizing is about building a list and turning that list out.”

Keep momentum going. In drawn-out political campaigns—and most of them are—the worst thing you can do is let momentum fade, according to Burdo. To keep supporters engaged, provide concrete actions to participate in, such as meetings or rallies. Zigas agrees: “When you ask people to do something make it meaningful (don’t waste volunteers’ time), make it fun, and win.” Celebrate victories of all sizes, even if it’s just scoring a hearing date.

Make it personal. What about those chain-letter petitions that glut our inboxes? The panelists agreed that a personalized paper letter goes much further in getting a legislator’s attention than a boilerplate e-mail. Put time into your communications to elected officials, write from the heart, and create a meaningful connection.For the SFUAA, having online petitions, a Facebook page, and a MailChimp list helped keep their supporters informed, but they were just tools of the trade, not ends in themselves. “It’s not how many tweets you have, but how well your tweets and phone calls get people out to do tangible things,” said Zigas.

Further Reading

• Michael Pollan discusses how the good food movement is winning the culture war but making little progress with the political one. Read his article in The Nation.
• Online campaign strategist Michael Silberman summarizes the best articles about online organizing. Read his work at the Huffington Post.
• Frances Fox Piven describes the process of change through grassroots efforts in Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America.
• For an instructive take on the late 19th Century farmers’ insurgency, read Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Movement.
• Mark Bittman relates Occupy Wall Street to the modern food movement, calling for a systemic approach to change. Read his column at the New York Times.
• Want to get involved now? There are many opportunities to engage around the 2012 Farm Bill. Visit Food and Water Watch.

I have no illusion that my dinners are completely different from those of millions of Americans. Most people eat mainly processed food as a result of the billions of subsidy dollars diverted to industrial agriculture and the cheap food that is produced by it. The next Farm Bill is our best shot at fixing these flaws in our food system.

Good news: the Environmental Working Group (EWG) is fighting for better policies that would make local and organic dinners like mine the norm rather than the exception, including turning its attention to the 2012 Farm Bill.

EWG helps families make healthier personal and environmental choices, moving consumer markets for good and winning policy battles. Many of us know their work from their handy shopping pocket guides. Recently the group released the seventh edition of its Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides in Produce with updated information on 53 fruits and vegetables and their total pesticide loads, featuring the catchy and accessible “Dirty Dozen” and “Clean 15.” In the new 2011 version, apples trumped celery for the most contaminated produce and cilantro made the Dirty Dozen list for the first time.

Curious about the impending 2012 bill, I’ve made several visits to EWG’s Farm Subsidy Database, which illustrates the imbalance in an agricultural system that pays $246.7 billion to farmers who grow commodity crops that we can’t really eat. It tracks top recipients of funding from 1995 to 2009, showing that 10 percent of farmers collected 74 percent of all payments. These large commodity farmers of corn, cotton, and soybeans make out like bandits, while our government shorts struggling small family farmers who grow food you’d want on your family’s table.

On May 25, the House Agriculture Appropriations committee announced $2.7 billion in cuts, mainly to conservation and sustainable agriculture. While there had been discussion of cutting or capping farm subsidies, the House saved subsidies at the last moment on Wednesday, cutting hunger programs instead.

I recently wrangled a ticket to EWG’s annual benefit “Turning the Farm Bill into the Food Bill,” which hosted 300 donors in foodie culture’s mecca, the soaring cathedral of light and highbrow food principles that is San Francisco’s Ferry Plaza Building. The sold out event’s glittering speaker line up included musician-cum-environmental activist Bonnie Raitt and integrative medicine icon Dr. Andrew Weil.

The evening was well curated, balancing thought-provoking environmental messages, deliciously responsible food, and world-class networking with EWG’s scientists and supporters.

I spotted my heroes Jim Cochran, of Swanton Berry Farms, fresh from winning NRCD’s Growing Green award; Dan Imhoff, editor of The CAFO Reader; and Michael Dimock, Executive Director of Roots of Change. Along with EWG, each of them is working to change the food system, tackling issues ranging from farmworker justice, to eliminating factory farms and strengthening regional food policy.

At my table were EWG Senior Analyst and long-term Farm Bill activist Kari Hamerschlag, who elatedly showed us a sneak preview of her upcoming Meat Eater’s Guide to Climate Change, and Seth Nickinson of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. Not much for light chatter, we debated dairy’s role in climate change and the benefits of methane digesters versus pastured cows with tablemates from the cooperative, Organic Valley, and explored farmworker justice awareness or lack thereof with UNFI’s marketing folks.

Hamerschlag waxed euphoric about EWG’s committed base and the prospect of real change. “Despite a tough budget year, we have people power on our side,” she said. “With one million EWG supporters and millions of others who care about good food, we can mobilize to force Congress to shift a portion of the billions of dollars spent on wasteful and inequitable commodity subsidies into healthy food for our kids. I believe we can build thriving local and regional food systems that support local farmers and create new jobs in our communities.”

I asked Nickinson what brought him to the event. He told me that among the serious issues facing the nation, the Farm Bill is critical. “EWG does a remarkably ambitious job of connecting a diverse set of issues to personal, community and environmental health. It’s important to work on pesticides, cosmetics and other toxins, but food is the number one thing we ingest. Food is not just a personal issue. It has incredibly broad societal impact.”

EWG’s Ken Cook took us on a sobering romp through the numbers, noting that our nation’s 6,000 farmers’ markets are dwarfed by our 257,000 fast food joints. He explained that the three-fourths of current farm bill dollars are allocated to nutrition; over five years, that translates to $314 billion  most of which goes food stamps. We spend the next highest chunk on crops that could never make it to the table as a healthy meal: $60 billion is allocated to subsidies in the form of crop insurance and commodity payments for a handful of industrial crops, such as corn, soybeans, and cotton which are the backbone of the industrial food system that makes too many Americans fat and sick.

More sobering still, $22 billion is allocated for “conservation” and a paltry $15 billion for “everything else” including organic agriculture and school food. I know these figures well but still feel despair every time I hear them.  Searching for an upbeat ending, Cook concluded with an inspiring picture of the Renegade Lunch Lady, Chef Ann Cooper, hovering over a salad bar with small group of healthy, happy, schoolgirls. He exhorted us to follow her example by working to make sure the Farm Bill helps put more fruits and vegetables on kids’ plates.

It was growing late and I had beans to soak for the next day’s dinner. Heading to the door, I was pleased to run into Jamie Dean, a Program Officer with the Packard Foundation, one of EWG’s funders. She had a strong opinion: “Without major reform, the Farm Bill has nothing at all to do with food or health. It benefits neither the average person nor the average farmer. It benefits industrial agriculture. Since food resonates with so many of us, the 2012 Farm Bill is an opportunity to re-frame the issue,“ she said.

EWG’s work should inspire and inform all of us: To think of the Farm Bill when we sit down to dinner with family and community and to join this organization and others in working for change.  Despite the challenges ahead, I am heartened at the prospect of converting the Farm Bill into the Food and Farm Bill.

Whatever you call him, Steve Ritz is an extraordinary example of how one person can make a difference.

He has two missions: The first is to get his Discovery High School students to grow and eat vegetables. The second is to ignite the Green Bronx Machine and get all of the borough residents to grow and eat healthy food. (Watch out for the soon-to-come Web site and meanwhile follow Green Bronx Machine on Facebook and Twitter.)

Ritz is fueled by the irony that although the Bronx is the distribution point for produce to all five boroughs, its residents have very little access to high quality, fresh vegetables.

“If my kids can’t buy good produce at the local supermarket, we’ll get them to grow it,” Ritz decides. And grow they do! Hundreds of pounds of it a year. Where? On the classroom walls.

Given a boost by the largesse of Boston-based Green Living Technologies, the students began growing vegetables on vertical shelves packed with earth. I saw the result last Friday when I attended a farmer’s market at the school.

Students, teachers, parents, and neighbors of the school were all shopping: bins were loaded with collards, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, scallions, and onions–and everyone was filling up their bags and heading to the front of the classroom to pay.

Have you ever seen a chalk board in front of a classroom listing vegetables and their prices? The sight gave me goosebumps. Can you imagine holding a weekly farmer’s market in classrooms all over the country?

The Discovery High School farmer’s market was a fantastic success. Steve Ritz wrote to me a few days after the event:

“We were very profitable, had over 500 visitors and folks from across NYC and NJ including State Senator Rivera and several other elected officials! Had we been able to have an EBT machine–we would have sold even more…

“All the kids went home with bags of produce and after school we went to a local soup kitchen to donate the rest. All the edible plants and seedlings also went to local high-need communities and gardens and the Green Bronx Machine helped plant thru the weekend.

“…Watch the ABC TV Special on June 18, 7 PM–Above and Beyond–which features our program and of course, I hope you can join us in Manhattan on June 22; 6-9 PM at Cafe Iguana for the formal launch of Green Bronx Machine.”

In case you aren’t already convinced that there’s a Pied Piper in the Bronx, here’s Steve telling us about his passion for greening the Bronx and providing math skills, community, and career alternatives for Bronx youths at the same time:

Now listen to one of Steve’s students, Netali Soriano, telling us how much he loves growing vegetables and how tomatoes and avocados have become a personal favorites. Take note of his Green Bronx Machine T-shirt!

Originally published on Lorna Sass At Large

This weekend (Friday, February 19 through Monday, February 21) the University of Oregon at Eugene is hosting a Food Justice conference, where Civil Eats’ editor Naomi Starkman and I will join Friends of Family Farmers’ Megan Fehrman on a panel on New Media and Food Activism, moderated by Michelle Branch. (Those who can make it to Eugene, you should – it promises to be a fantastic event, with keynotes from Vandana Shiva and Fred Kirschenmann, a staged reading of the play Salmon is Everything, a First Foods/Indigenous food politics panel and a FOOD: Art Exhibition.)

A few years ago, Naomi and I spoke on the subject at the Brooklyn Food Conference, where I haphazardly proclaimed emerging media our greatest hope for meaningful change in our food systems and for a more just democracy.  I still think this is mostly true (though the softie of inside me thinks it’s more about the better aspects of human nature, which of course drive the content we post to Twitter and Facebook-wink, wink).  My understanding of new media has deepened over time and I now worry more about net neutrality and lack thereof, especially regulations on mobile phones, since for many people, especially those who lack broadband access, smart phones are a primary mode of Internet access.  I worry about access in general, and I think more nowadays about who’s not taking part in the important conversations.  I worry about the idea of a shut-off switch.

Before I lead you too far down the net neutrality freak-out path, there are many inspiring examples of the use of new media to promote fairer food systems.  Consider the backlash to Andrew Breitbart’s unfair video edit of former USDA official Shirley Sherrod.  Consider Roger Doiron’s Eat the View campaign, which no doubt had a hand in convincing First Lady’s Michelle Obama to plant the White House garden. Consider the organization of rallies around the country by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.  Consider the work of the Real Food Challenge.

Are we building a better food justice movement with new and social media?  Without a doubt. But we need to think about who is not at the proverbial table; we also need to keep an eye on media policy, and we need to use new media nimbly, cleverly and locally.  I hear from many people who say they don’t have time for Twitter, and not every group or individual needs to be on Twitter, or Facebook, or Jumo, or whatever is next.  In fact, in preparing for this panel, I was reminded by Megan Fehrman that without laying the groundwork of forming relationships with the farmers she works with, they wouldn’t read the e-mails she sends them.  As much as we use new media to keep in touch with our networks and spread information rapidly, no digital tool will ever take the place of making those personal connections.

That said, I dream of a more personal Web, where local food enthusiasts use YouTube to document and share traditional foodways, where Groupon helps farmers find CSA (community supported agriculture) members and where the transmission of hundreds of thousands of e-mails against genetically modified alfalfa result in it actually not being approved by the USDA.

Throughout this weekend’s conference, Naomi and I will be videotaping and tweeting fellow attendees answering the question, “What does food justice mean to you?” But just because we’re not there holding a mobile phone camera in your face doesn’t mean you can’t weigh in, too.  We’ve asked friends and colleagues to help us gear up for our panel by jumping into the Tweet stream, and taking food justice messages to Facebook walls and the blogosphere.

Here, a few of my favorites so far:

Ever the early bird, Civil Eats editor Paula Crossfield (@CivilEater) tweeted Monday:

#foodjustice means that everyone has access to healthful (chemical and antibiotic-free), culturally appropriate, fairly produced food

And Bonnie Powell (@ethicurean), formerly known as the Dairy Queen:

Healthy, real food, prod fairly, for ALL > RT @naomistarkman: What does #foodjustice mean 2 u? @FoodJustice2011 conf http://bit.ly/ib3NM3

And Hank Herrera (@hankherrera):

@NaomiStarkman #foodjustice means ownership of the means of production and exchange of food by the people eating it. Fairness. Equity.

And friends from CUESA (@CUESA):

#foodjustice means small-scale family farmers can stay in business AND everyone can access healthy food (i.e. we have a way to go!)

And then our friends at Slow Food USA and Cooking Up a Story retweeted the question to their networks, which led to some great tweets from people we didn’t know before.

From @kmcdade:

@cookingupastory Enough food, good food, for everyone. #foodjustice

From @poundforpound:

RT @cookingupastory: Raj Patel: Food Sovereignty (vid) http://bit.ly/cju3Bk Country’s right to shape their own food & ag policy

From @foodinteg:

#foodjustice means transparency, where whistleblowers in the industry do not face retaliation for ensuring food integrity.

from @rjgiusti:

@SlowFoodUSA @naomistarkman #foodjustice = a food system that doesn’t abuse nature, while being healthy and tasty to humans

By the time I publish this post, surely, there will be more. We want to know: What does food justice mean to you?

Originally published on Ecocentric

Last month, an 11-year-old had much to say about the perils of the American food system. Speaking at a TED conference for young people called TEDx in Asheville, North Carolina, Birke Baehr discussed food irradiation, GMOs, CAFOs, farm run-off, the problem with marketing food to kids and more, all in five minutes. On the subject of paying more for better quality food, Baehr said, “With all the things I’m learning about the food system, it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer or pay the hospital.”

He also talked about his future aspirations. “Awhile back I wanted to be an NFL football player. Now, I’ve decided I’d rather be an organic farmer instead,” he said to the cheering audience. “That way I can have a greater impact on the world.”

Watch it here:

When Katie Stagliano was in third grade, she planted a cabbage in her family’s small garden. When it grew to an astounding 40 pounds, she donated it to a soup kitchen, where it was made into meals for 275 people (with the help of ham and rice). “I thought, ‘Wow, with that one cabbage I helped feed that many people?’” says Katie, now entering sixth grade. “I could do much more than that.”

So Katie started planting vegetable gardens as part of her nonprofit Katie’s Krops — she has six right now — including one the length of a football field at her school in her hometown of Summerville, S.C. Classmates, her family and other people in the community help plant and water, and Bonnie Plants donates seedlings. This past year, Katie took her commitment to a new level: she has given soup kitchens over 2,000 pounds of lettuce, tomatoes and other vegetables. Katie and her helpers are now harvesting the spring planting, and another 1,200 pounds will be donated by October.

“She just walks in like a proud little girl with her treasures in her arm,” says Sue Hanshaw, CEO of Tricounty Family Ministries, the soup kitchen in Charleston, S.C. where Katie first brought her 40-pound crucifer. “I love what she exudes, caring for others. It’s made a big impact on a lot of people.”

Says Elois Mackey, 49, a formerly homeless mother of two who has received a weekly vegetable delivery from Katie since September: “She is showing that you can help other people no matter how young you are. I love the vegetables she brings.”

Katie is a well-spoken 11-year-old who juggles the life of a school child with that of a world-changer. Swim practice, tennis matches, and studying (she has had the highest GPA of her class for the last four years) are sandwiched between daily waterings and tending.  “It makes me feel good,” says Katie. “I feel bad for those people who have to go to Palmetto house [a homeless shelter where she and residents recently planted a garden], but I feel good that I’m helping people.”

Katie’s desire to help as well as create sprouted early. “She’s always been very inquisitive and wants to go above and beyond,” says her mom, Stacy, 41. “It’s like, ‘What about this and why aren’t we doing this?”

Since the age of four, Katie has placed first in competitions that include inventing a toothbrush now on sale that teaches water conservation, for the Dr. Fresh company. “When you put the toothbrush in your mouth to brush,” says Katie, “it plays a rap song that says, ‘Turn off the water when you brush your teeth, and you can save eight gallons of water.’”

As a third grader, upset about a local drought, Katie decided her school, Pinewood Prep, needed to conserve water. Katie wrote the headmaster over Christmas break, suggesting how the school could better conserve. Soon after, the high school’s advanced placement environmental studies teacher called to meet with her and work on a water conservation project. Katie’s suggestions for rain barrels to catch water and other ideas were soon implemented throughout the school. “As a parent, I am so moved,” says Stacy. “I say to her, ‘I hope some day when you are a parent, you have a kid who is as amazing as you so you can see it from a mom’s perspective.’”

Much of the thanks goes to Stacy and Katie’s devoted group of helpers, including her 7-year-old brother, John Michael, who has toiled in two of the gardens to plan pumpkin patches.

Since February of last year, master gardener Lisa Turocy has not only sat shoulder to shoulder with Katie planting and giving advice, she’s transformed her entire front yard into a garden with 600 seedlings. “If I can help her change the world,” says Turocy, “that’s awesome.”

Locals Linda and Bob Baker, golf professionals with 41 acres of farmland set along a rutted dirt road on the outskirts of Summerville, gave Katie some acreage for a garden. Bob lugged his John Deer tractor to Katie’s school to till the soil, and taught Katie how to drive the machine. Says Bob: “It makes you feel so good to see someone that young with that amount of compassion, step in there and really make a difference.”

As one of Katie’s best friends said, most kids their age mainly like to watch TV and play on computers; they don’t like to do what Katie does. Another friend, Anna Semar, 11, inspired by Katie to grow her own vegetable garden, says: “If there were more people like Katie the world would be a better place.”

Katie wants to get more kids across the country growing gardens to help others, so she’s holding a contest and offering the winners a grant. And, Katie will come and help start each garden. Click here to apply.

If you want to donate to Katie’s nonprofit, Katie’s Krops, she needs money for irrigation equipment, fertilizer and other supplies for her six gardens.

Originally published on Tonic

On a recent Sunday afternoon in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, over a hundred people gathered at the 6000-square foot Eagle Street Rooftop Farm to talk about the farm’s newest addition: six laying hens.

The farmer, Annie Novak, put together a panel that included Bronx urban gardener Karen Washington, Owen Taylor from the non-profit organization Just Food, and a thirteen year-old chicken enthusiast from Massachusetts named Orren Fox.

“I pretty much planned the event so that Orren would come down and see the farm,” Novak said. This comes as no surprise since she runs an organization called Growing Chefs, which educates youth about food on the farm and in the kitchen.

Fox has twenty-seven hens and four ducks in Newburyport, 35 miles north of Boston. Last year, he started O’s Eggs, a small farm business selling eggs for $5 a dozen.

That Sunday, he held one of Novak’s hens, which he used to discuss chicken anatomy. He pointed out the crop, where food goes to be digested with the aid of swallowed rocks, the comb (he suggested using Vaseline in winter to keep it from freezing) and tail, where the hen produces wax that she uses to clean her feathers. “If your hen looks like she doesn’t have a head, she is probably just cleaning herself,” he said to laughter.

His love of chickens started early. At age nine he was a volunteer cleaning chicken coops at a local farm, learning all he could about the birds. Then he adopted his own flock. After choosing chickens as the subject of a school research project, “I found out how horribly most hens in this country are raised,” he said. “I know chickens are smart, they have personalities, and opinions. I am not ok with what I consider mistreatment of these cool birds for cheap meat and eggs.”

Fox is one of a growing number of young people taking on big projects with the aim of changing the food system. Author Michael Pollan last year released a young reader’s edition of his bestselling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, to reach this growing audience.

“Food is a uniquely empowering issue, it’s something you can change without waiting for government to act, since you’ve got those three votes every day, and this particularly appeals to young people,” Pollan said. “I also wanted to reach them before they went out on their own and took control of their food choices.”

No longer satisfied with blindly eating chicken nuggets, middle-schoolers are raising backyard chickens instead. Or making movies.

New York City thirteen-year-olds Sadie Hope-Gund and Safiyah Riddle made the movie “What’s On Your Plate?” with filmmaker (and Sadie’s mom) Catherine Gund to explore how food gets from farm to plate. What inspired this jaunt through the farm fields of upstate New York, New York City school cafeterias and the Borough President’s office in Manhattan? A tomato.

Tasting that fresh tomato from a farmer’s market, said Hope-Gund, “made me realize that there was better stuff out there than what most people were getting, which didn’t make sense. If there was something better, everyone should get it.”

“We’re in the awkward position because we don’t have as much power as adults but we’re eating just as much as adults,” said Riddle. “I think we need to be more aware of where we stand in the food chain.”

The movie had a professional crew, but was largely directed by Ms. Hope-Gund and Ms. Riddle’s questions, for which they sought out experts to answer on film. In one scene, the girls are speaking to Jorge Collazo, executive chef of school food in New York City. Ms. Riddle starts by asking, “What was school food like when you were growing up?” a question that could only come from a young person, softening a hard conversation about changing school food.

The film also features the Angel’s, a Latino family renting land in Goshen, NY and selling their pesticide-free produce at the Greenmarket in Manhattan. After the film came out last February, Hope-Gund and Riddle helped the Angel family start a Community Supported Agriculture program, in which twenty-eight families paid in advance for a weekly box of produce from the farm. This year, the Angel’s will have three CSAs across the city, and have saved enough money for the down payment on ten acres of land. Their oldest daughter, Lizbeth, is now planning to study agriculture at college.

The internet has empowered this generation of young people with a platform and endless data: they maintain blogs, tweet, and consult Google for information on things like starting non-profits. Thirteen-year-old Koa Halpern, from Denver, Colorado, decided to start Fast Food Free, a non-profit with the goal of reducing the consumption of fast food, after researching the environmental and health impacts of the McDonald’s food chain.

“In twenty or so years kids will be in charge,” he said. “If we choose healthy habits at a young age, we are much more likely to choose healthy habits when we are older.  It all starts with kids getting the right message.”

That message might be coming from miles away, conducted over Twitter, which has become a new form of mentorship. In fact, it was through Twitter that I met Orren Fox, and that Fox came to know a circle of farmers, beekeepers and chicken owners in Brooklyn, and to be a panelist at the farm.

Like most of the other young people I spoke with, for Fox, taste was the bottom line. This past year, he started a Farm Club, which was the most popular extra-curricular activity at his school. “We all plant seeds, grow veggies and I take my birds to school so that kids understand what they are eating,” he said. “I always tell kids that good food just tastes better, forget that it is better for you.”

When was the last time you went to a conference that followed dinner with a rock, paper, scissors tournament among 150 participants?  At times the 2nd annual Southeast Youth Food Activist Summit (SYFAS) felt more like summer camp than a conference (in a good way).  Don’t be mistaken though; we got down to business.

SYFAS is the first of six Real Food Summits that will be happening over the next two months across the country as part of the Real Food Challenge, a student movement to increase the procurement of real (sustainably grown, fair, humane and local) food on college and university campuses, with the national goal of 20% real food by 2020.

The summit kicked off with a keynote address by Anna Lappé.  She spoke about how far student food activism has come and shared an anecdote about her activism in college, how she and fellow students convinced the campus dining service to trade individual cereal boxes for bulk cereal dispensers.  In contrast, the Real Food Challenge’s goal would direct an estimated one billion dollars annually in campus food spending toward real food by 2020.  In regards to this goal, Lappé asked a very real and pressing question.  “How do you get a school feeding 30,000 people transitioned to real food?”  There’s no easy answer to this but it was one of the major questions that the participants grappled with over the course of the summit.

UNC Chapel Hill’s FLO (Fair Local Orgainc) Food group, the hosts of the summit, have worked on increasing the availability of real food on campus for two and a half years.  They’ve established a good rapport with Carolina Dining Services (CDS), organized events to raise awareness about where our food comes from, and have managed to get cage free eggs and local grass fed beef into the dining halls.  One major challenge that they’ve faced is sourcing sustainable local meat and produce in the quantities that CDS would need to serve thousands of meals a day.  There are a multitude of sustainable small farms in the region but few that could produce in quantities large enough for CDS.  Of those even fewer are willing to sell at wholesale prices when they can get substantially more by selling retail through local farmers’ markets.

Scott Marlow, Director of Farm Sustainability at the Rural Advancement Foundation International who spoke at several sessions during the summit had an intriguing point of view:

As we grow local food we’re going to have to grow beyond the very small scale farms that pioneered local food into mid-scale agriculture.  Mid-scale agriculture is exactly where we’re losing farms, farmers and farmland the fastest.  So the big question is, how do we help the mid-scale farm transition to these new and exciting and rapidly growing markets fast enough before we lose them?

And what keeps the mid scale farms from transitioning to sustainable agriculture? He said, “[crop insurance is] the biggest barrier to the mid-scale farmers moving into higher value markets and higher value products that are represented by local foods…and these are the people that you need to sell into universities it’s not those small guys.”  They can’t get crop insurance on the higher value products and therefore they can’t get loans from the bank.  Scott will be the first to tell you that working on crop insurance isn’t sexy, but it’s important work if we want to see more sustainable local food in large institutions.

David Schwartz a member of the RFC’s National Administrative Team believes that “if the universities make the commitment [to procure real food], people will figure out how to fill the demand.” The whole University of California system in fact has committed to procuring 20% real food by 2020.  Iowa State University has set a goal of 35% real food by 2012.  For the purposes of the Real Food Challenge, the minimum standard to qualify as real food is that it meet one of the four criteria (sustainably grown, fair, humane and local) but preferably two.  This makes their goal feasible while still exerting pressure on the food service providers.  As they find success, they can increase their real food percentage goals and intensify their criteria.

In the mean time, it is great to see students continue to create alternatives to the centralized dining services with more flexibility to serve real food.  The Oberlin Student Cooperative Association (OSCA), a student run organization at Oberlin College, feeds 620 students in 9 different co-ops while Earthfoods Cafe at U-Mass Amherst is an example of a student run co-op restaurant, both of which offer affordable, healthy alternatives to the campus meal plans.

So I guess there’s no single answer to Anna Lappé’s question about transitioning these large institutions to real food.  There are a lot of strategies, angles, and pressure points that we can push to move in the direction we want to go.  The Real Food Summits are a great opportunity for folks to come together and share their strategies for creating change in the food system.  It doesn’t matter where you start;  Anna Lappé started with cereal boxes.  Start where you are.

Before I go, I would be remiss not to mention the food at the food summit. Attendees enjoyed two amazing dinners catered by Vimala Rajendran featuring local greens, sweet potatoes, and butternut squash from Eastern Carolina Organics and pastured pork from Cane Creek Farm.  Vimala has hosted weekly community dinners out of her home for over 13 years that routinely draw over 150 people (including many students) and are sustained by a pay-what-you-can donation system.  Folks in North Carolina should keep their eyes peeled because after years of prodding by fans, Vimala has plans to open a restaurant called the Curry Blossom Cafe in downtown Chapel Hill a short walk from campus.

Jake came down with flu-like symptoms in January 2009. We cared for him as such until we noticed blood in his diarrhea. We took him to the pediatrician who dutifully ran tests of his stool sample. As we waited for the lab results we were encouraged by the pediatrician’s office to give him food if he would eat it and keep it down. We were given the green light by our doctor for him to eat his favorite comfort snack food: Austin Toasty Crackers with Peanut Butter, manufactured by Kellogg.

Jake was sick for 11 days and eventually got better; but we were devastated to find out thereafter that while he was sick, we had unknowingly been continuing to feed him the very food that had poisoned him. It was not until 15 days after he became ill that we found out that he had become one of the more than 700 Americans from 46 states to be sickened by a major outbreak of Salmonella-contaminated peanut products from the Peanut Corporation of America (PCA)-which ultimately killed at least nine people.

Over time, we came to find out the outbreak was not just a random occurrence, but a part of a pattern of outbreaks impacting tens of millions of Americans every year. Like many Americans who are impacted by foodborne illness, I was shocked to find out that the nation’s food-safety system is based, in large part, on century-old laws. Furthermore, the agency charged with overseeing about 80 percent of the U.S. food supply–the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–inspects domestic food-processing facilities on average only once every 10 years. In the area of inspections, as well as other components of our food-safety system, the laws and regulations are severely lacking and simply unsatisfactory in successfully managing what has evolved into a complex global food supply.

Americans were alarmed by the peanut product outbreak. Over 3,000 products were recalled–one of the largest single food recalls in U.S. history. Outraged lawmakers convened hearings and promised to implement meaningful food-safety reforms. President Barack Obama and Congressional leaders from both parties have called for action. According to a bipartisan poll commissioned by The Pew Charitable Trusts, nine out of 10 Americans favor legislation to strengthen our food-safety laws. Yet, here we are, one year after the outbreak was identified, and Americans are still waiting for Congress to enact comprehensive FDA food-safety legislation.

Since Jake’s illness, we have become food-safety advocates. Last year, Jake and I testified at the PCA Congressional hearing. We later returned to D.C. to meet with Congressmen Walden and Schrader to discuss and lobby for the House of Representatives’ Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009 (H.R. 2749). The House has since passed this bill. Jake and I then returned to D.C. for a third time to meet with Oregon’s Senators Merkley and Wyden’s staff to push for the passage of the Senate’s version of the bill, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510). We’re headed to D.C. next week to lobby for food-safety reform–again.

Recently, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions unanimously approved S. 510. This bill is strongly supported by Senators on both sides of the aisle–something that is not often seen in Washington these days. This says to me that the time has come to make food safety a priority and enact sweeping changes to the nation’s food oversight system.

Last month–on the anniversary of the peanut butter outbreak–many of the victims of food borne illness, including myself, wrote a letter to lawmakers, asking them to keep their promise of reform. My son’s firsthand account is a painful reminder that despite continued outbreaks–from peanut butter, hazelnuts, fresh fruits and vegetables, to cookie dough, and many other foods–Congress has yet to pass food-safety legislation.

Had legislation been in place a year ago, things could have been different for Jake and for tens of thousands of other Americans. The legislation under consideration shifts the FDA’s regulatory approach from reaction to prevention, establishes minimum inspection frequencies for processing plants and requires processors to establish food-safety plans. If these measures had been in effect, PCA would have been required to develop a food-safety plan and FDA would have been inspecting its plants more frequently. Instead, hundreds were sickened, dozens will have life long health issues, and nine families have lost a loved one.

It is outrageous that a company and its employees could knowingly allow tainted product to go out the door and into the nation’s food supply, as it appears PCA did. We need to strengthen the FDA and its ability to oversee our food supply. Without doing so, the outbreaks of contaminated food are sure to continue, causing millions more Americans to suffer the devastating and sometimes fatal consequences. We were lucky–it could have been very different for us. On behalf of all Americans, our whole family, Jake and I ask that our government be given the power to put our public health and food-safety first. The American people deserve better; as a nation, we cannot continue to let this happen.

Historic reform to protect Americans is in sight. I am asking my Senators Merkley and Wyden to urge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to bring S. 510 to the floor for a vote as soon possible. I’m asking you do the same with your senators. The longer it takes Congress to pass this comprehensive legislation, the more consumer confidence in our food supply will erode, and the more people will get sick.

Originally published on Huffington Post