Whaley takes issue with how I characterize the makeup and mission of the USFRA, writing:

Contrary to those who suggest, imply or state otherwise, USFRA is NOT a policy organization. USFRA is America’s farmers and ranchers who are committed to continuous improvement in how food is grown and raised to provide healthy choices for people everywhere. Our mission is to build consumer trust in today’s agriculture…all forms.

The farmer- and rancher-led organizations that are affiliates of USFRA have all sizes, shapes and production methods represented by their members. Small, medium, large; organic, natural, conventional.

To understand Whaley’s spin on who and what USFRA stands for, it might be helpful to share a little background on Whaley himself and how USFRA fits the mold of a common food-industry PR strategy.

For nearly 13 years, until March 2009, Whaley was an executive at the communications firm Osborn & Barr, founded in 1988 by former executives at Monsanto. While the company was its founding client, the firm has brought on other agricultural clients, including John Deere, United Soybean Board, the Cattlemen’s Beef Board/National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and the National Pork Board—all of which are current USFRA affiliates.

During Whaley’s tenure, Osborn & Barr helped to launch American Farmers for the Advancement and Conservation of Technology (AFACT). Like USFRA, AFACT describes itself as a group “organized by farmers.” In the case of AFACT it was allegedly created “to defend members’ right to use recombinant bovine somatotropin,” or rbST, Monsanto’s artificial growth hormone sold to dairy farmers under the brand name, Posilac.

Though it was presented as a group speaking for farmers, AFACT was created in part by Osborn & Barr, which had been handling the Posilac account since 2007. AFACT’s formation came at a time when Monsanto was reeling from campaigns by real farmers and consumer advocates against the artificial growth hormone. Responding to concerns that ranged from the health of dairy cows pumped with the hormone to possible human health effects rbGH, Yoplait, Dannon, Cabot Cheese, and other companies had by 2009 stopped sourcing milk produced with Posilac. Grocery chains had started to eliminate it from their store-label milk, according to Food & Water Watch.

Similar to the spin about AFACT, Whaley describes the U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance as “farmer- and rancher-led,” with affiliates of “all sizes, shapes and production methods.”

Yes, USFRA technically represents a range of farmers and ranchers, but only because much of its total budget—$11 million a year or $30 million depending on who you ask—comes from federal “check-off” commodity marketing programs. These programs, now covering 19 different commodities, compel all or most producers of these commodities, no matter the size, to pay into promotion programs. Beef ranchers for instance must pay $1 per head on domestic sales. The money adds up: In 2007, beef check-off programs spent more than $90 million.

You might not have heard of these programs, but you’ve probably seen their ads. Check-off dollars fund campaigns like “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner?” “Pork: The Other White Meat” as well as dubious marketing efforts like the 2010 dairy industry partnership with Domino’s Pizza to amp up cheese use on its pies.

So because USFRA gets a good chunk of its budget from the biggest commodity check-off programs—like beef, cotton, eggs, and pork—Whaley is technically accurate: Farmers of all sizes do pay into this marketing campaign, but whether the Alliance represents diverse interests is a different story.

When I asked Laura Batcha, the Vice President of the Organic Trade Association whether the Alliance reflects their members’ interests she said: “We don’t believe the Alliance is communicating the benefits of organic agriculture.”

The bottom line is the USFRA is being funded, in part, with organic producers’ money without their consent or participation, since many organic producers are required by law to pay into these check-off programs. “While organic producers and handlers have been paying into these check-offs for years, we have yet to see the funds be used to promote organic food and agriculture,” said Batcha. “It’s essentially taxation without representation.” In fact, sustainable and small-scale farmers have been fighting in the courts against the legality of check-off programs, for precisely this reason.

Fred Stokes, founder of the Organization for Competitive Markets and a cattle rancher in Mississippi, concurred. The Alliance doesn’t “‘represent all farmers and ranchers,’” he said, “These are the people who put family farmers and ranchers out of business! This is an alliance only of groups that preach ‘get-big-or-get-out’ and ‘efficiency through vertical integration.’”

It’s also an alliance, Stokes noted, that gets a healthy portion of its budget from big business, too. As members of USFRA’s “Premier Partner Advisors Group” Monsanto, John Deere, and chemical giant Dupont each have pledged $500,000 a year.

So what is the platform USFRA is pushing? Whaley says I missed the mark here, too, writing:

None of the issues discussed during the Food Dialogues can be answered strictly in black and white terms. That’s why continued dialogue is so important. Making grandiose (positive or negative) statements about any form of agriculture won’t achieve solutions or help Americans make sound and informed food decisions.

I agree with Whaley in one sense: Food systems are complex and more dialogue is certainly needed to figure out the best approaches to creating a safer, more affordable and sustainable food supply. But, I would argue that some food issues are black-and-white and taking a clear stand on these issues is the only way we will achieve such solutions.

To give several examples directly relevant to USFRA membership:

I believe everyone should have a right to know if the food they’re eating contains genetically engineered organisms (GMOs). So do most Americans who overwhelmingly want the right to know what’s in their food. Yet, USFRA’s industry partner Monsanto has been leading the fight against GMO labeling in this country, despite the fact that most other countries with commercialized GMOs require it, even China.

I believe we should be doing everything possible to protect the effectiveness of antibiotics—one of the most important tools in our public health toolbox. So do most Americans. Yet, as much as 80 percent of antibiotics in the U.S. are used not for human health but in factory farms, often for growth-promotion. A broad coalition is calling for restrictions on these non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics, citing mounting concerns about antibiotic resistance, while many USFRA affiliates have been spearheading the fight against such restrictions.

I believe we should be actively working to phase out the most toxic pesticides in agriculture, those known to cause cancer, disrupt hormones, or impair brain functioning. So do most Americans. Yet, members of the Alliance, including the National Cotton Council and the National Corn Growers Association, have been actively fighting against regulations that would help us move in that direction.

I believe our tax dollars should be incentivizing healthy food production and healthy food access. So do most Americans. Yet, members of the USFRA are among the key forces lobbying for payments to commodity producers, including those, like corn growers, that are not even producing food for people. Forty-four percent of corn last year went to ethanol production; nearly half was diverted to animal feed; much of the rest went to high-fructose corn syrup. (Thanks in part to the success of this lobbying, from 1995 to 2010 the 15 members of the board of the National Corn Growers Association—a USFRA board member—received subsidies totaling $12,048,167, while 62 percent of American farmers, and nearly all organic producers and fruit and vegetable growers, received no federal subsidies at all).

Finally, I believe that protecting our nation’s water is one of the most important issues of our time. So do most Americans. Yet, many in USFRA leadership roles are among the key players fighting federal policy that would promote tighter regulation of water pollution, especially from “conventional” agriculture’s  nitrogen fertilizer runoff and industrial livestock waste.

Many of USFRA’s board, including the American Farm Bureau Federation, National Pork Producers Council, Cattlemen’s Beef Board/Beef Checkoff, and the National Corn Growers Association, as well as USFRA partner, The Fertilizer Institute, work together under the auspices of the Waters Advisory Council. The Council may sound like an environmentally minded organization, but as The New York Times reports, it’s a “lobbying outfit” for some of the country’s “largest industrial and agricultural concerns.”

These are just some of food’s “black-and-white” issues. Without indication otherwise, we’re left to assume the USFRA’s position on these critical food issues reflects that of its membership—and is out of step with the real concerns of many, and in many cases most, Americans.

Whaley also suggests I misrepresented who was able to ask questions at the Food Dialogues at the four sites, noting:

Questions were taken for all four of our panels from in-person audience members, from people on Twitter and from questions posted on our two websites. It is really unfair to say questions for the event only came from industry. The questions represented many voices…

Questions may have come in from Twitter and Facebook, but, as I wrote in my original post, at the New York City event I attended, and where we in the media were asked to write down and hand in questions for the panel, only one person got to ask a question: He was a rep from the National Pork Council, a USFRA affiliate. Only one attendee got to ask a question from the D.C. event that was shown at our venue: It was Jay Vroom, head of the agrochemical trade group, CropLife America. Whaley may contend questions represented many voices; it didn’t seem that way to me. But see for yourself. The Food Dialogues are available online at http://www.fooddialogues.com.

Anna Lappé’s latest book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, investigates the intersection between the environmental crisis and the food system in more detail than any book that has come before it. Lappé’s rendering makes us realize the imperative of addressing these issues, and empowers us to do so by demystifying corporate spin, giving thorough examples of people making change, debunking the myths for maintaining the status quo, and more. Lappé talked to me last week about climate friendly farming, policy and the state of the food movement.

CIVIL EATS: Why do you think these issues, food and the environment, have remained separated for so long?

ANNA LAPPÉ: We already did know a lot about the impact food does have on the environment, but to learn what a key driver food and agriculture are in terms of deforestation, in terms of nitrous oxide and methane emissions, and overall that the food sector is contributing a third of greenhouse gas emissions — and yet we never hear about it. As we’ve seen agriculture become much more of an industrialized process, I think there has been a real consciousness shift where for many of us there isn’t a connection anymore between food and nature. I think its made sense politically that the biggest sectors contributing to climate change — energy and transport — have gotten most of the focus in terms of our understanding about climate change. But now that there’s even more understanding about how much we absolutely need to get emissions down, we are starting to realize that we need to widen the focus to all sectors that are contributing.

CE: Do you see environmental organizations coming around and starting to take food on as a cause?

AL: Food and agriculture use 70% of all the earth’s clean water sources, and when you look at the fact that its largely agricultural-chemical runoff that is contributing to dead zones in the gulf of Mexico, the Chesapeake Bay and all around the world, you could go down a long list of the environmental impacts of food, and you could say to yourself, shouldn’t all environmental groups have food as one of their key platforms? So I still don’t think we’re at a place where food is as central as I think it could and should be, but I do think its interesting to see how in the past couple of years many groups that have historically just focused on more traditional environmental issues are starting to develop campaigns that focus on food.

CE: When most people think about the environmental impact of food they often start talking about food miles. How does transportation of food rank in the overall picture of the impact of the food system on the environment?

AL: Food miles, the hundred mile diet, and the locavore movement have gotten a lot of press. Of course greenhouse gas emissions are just one piece of environmental impact, but if you look at those related to the food on our plate what you find is that transportation is actually a tiny percentage. What matters more is the production practices the farmer chose to use, whether synthetic fertilizers or agricultural chemicals were involved, and how well the soil was managed. What I’ve heard a lot of people say then is, “oh then local doesn’t matter.” But I think what is important is for us to develop a more sophisticated understanding of what we mean by local. The locavores that I know, they don’t just care about how many miles away their food is, but they are making that choice for local food because of a whole set of values.

CE: There seemed to be a real shift in the debate when the UN report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow” came out in 2006. Now they are considering revising the report. How you think this report could be improved upon or expanded?

AL: What I noticed when I was reading Livestock’s Long Shadow is a real honesty in the presentation of the data. I think its a very sophisticated report, but I think that they were also very clear [in saying] more research needs to be done. This is really trying to pin a flag on the board to say we need to be looking at the livestock sector. These are highly complicated systems that we are talking about, and they are also moving systems in the sense that things are constantly changing. I think that we shouldn’t get too focused on bickering over the percentages. To the extent that [Livestock’s Long Shadow and] the other studies that my book is based on put food and agriculture on the map is really important and the more we study them the more we’ll learn about what is causing this crisis and what we can do to address it.

CE: The healthcare bill has passed, and the Senate is pushing the climate change bill forward, but agriculture is largely left out. Is there is an obvious place for us to begin this debate again?

AL: Waxman-Markey [shows us] how agribusiness could lobby in the future in terms of the climate bill and the farm bill. They lobbied [House Agriculture Chairman] Collin Peterson to get into Waxman-Markey provisions that would have made it possible to get carbon offsets for chemical no-till farming, [and] would have [boosted] corn-based ethanol. I’m worried about are two things: first, that agriculture will be left out of the climate bill, and second, that it will be put in, but put in in the wrong way, that it will look like subsidizing more of the same agriculture that we already know is causing so much of the [climate] crisis and not helping us solve it.

CE: How do we convince farmers that climate-friendly farming is good for them, too — including their bottom line?

AL: Unfortunately, a lot of farmers are locked into a certain way of farming that relies heavily on fossil fuels because of policies that have been put in place over the years that have created a certain kind of infrastructure that caters to and benefits large-scale commodity and livestock factory farms, and really shuts out more diverse crop farming, smaller-scale farming and a more regionalized system. So I think that its not fair to say, farmers, you should just wake up all of a sudden and change your practices. In the same way that we think about the infrastructure changes that need to happen in the transportation and the energy sectors, we need to think about the same revolution in the food sector. I don’t think anyone would expect somebody living in a town without a bus system, subway system or high speed rail to take public transportation to work, and we certainly wouldn’t expect them to be digging the subway tunnel themselves, or putting in a high-speed rail line themselves. With bold changes to the food sector, you create opportunities for farmers who want to be farming in ways that are better for the environment, because you’ve actually built the infrastructure that they can tap into.

CE: You spend a large part of your book discussing the ‘spin’ in the debate around environmental issues in agriculture. Why was it important to you to deconstruct these ideas?

AL: I felt that it was so important to talk about greenwashing, because we’re seeing an incredible number of examples of companies rebranding themselves as a caretaker of the environment, without really actually substantively changing their practices. I think there’s two things that we can learn from that: First, if a company like BP is going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to rebrand itself as green, they’re only doing that because they actually think people care, and that to me in an odd way is kind of reassuring and positive. And second, we have to be more savvy about really assessing when companies are substantively changing their practices, and when they are just coming up with a logo and a new campaign slogan. And part of that savviness is understanding that there are some companies and there are some practices that by their very nature are not good for the environment.

CE: One of the questions you tackle head on in this book is whether sustainable agriculture has what it takes to feed the world. Why do you think the arguments about yield are not telling the whole story?

AL: Yield is this really crude figure that doesn’t tell us that much at all. For instance with chemical agriculture, it doesn’t express the cost of agricultural chemicals in terms of the price the farmers had to pay, or the costs of synthetic fertilizer in terms of the deterioration of the soil, or the impact of the chemical runoff from the fields as far as local water quality and public health. And yield is only just a snapshot of the moment. It doesn’t help us understand what the yield might be next year, the year after, or the year after that. There’s been some really good studies in some of the areas in India, farmers that were suppose to be the sort of proving ground of the high yield of chemical farming and the so-called green revolution, and what you find is that, if you look over time, and when I went to the Punjab I saw this first hand, is yes you had a spike in yield in the beginning of the introduction of these agricultural chemicals and these water-intensive industrial agricultural practices, but over the years you saw yield fall not just back to the levels before chemicals were introduced, but actually fall far below these levels. At the same time, you saw a total devastation of the local economy as farmers became indebted to the banks because they had to buy these chemicals. The second thing about yield is that I think there is some pretty compelling evidence, which I write about in the book, that if you look at organic agriculture that is done in a very knowledge-intensive way — by organic agriculture I don’t mean just take away the chemicals, I mean developing, honing, advancing practices working with nature for soil fertility, pest resistance, weed management — what you see is that yields can actually be comparable. Not to mention all the other benefits of the added soil health and the added human health of not being exposed to toxic chemicals, and of course the added benefit of farmers not having to pay for inputs.

CE: Some say that we should embrace the risks of biotechnology because we don’t have a choice. Why do you disagree?

AL: I think this idea that we have to embrace risk is total scaremongering on the part of the biotech industry. I mentioned studies in the book that are showing that we have these agro-ecological, natural ways to create farms and soils that are healthier, able to withstand drought [and] flooding that we know [are] going to become more extreme. I think we can look back historically at all the promises the biotech industry has made about what their crops are going to do and see that each one of those promises has fallen flat, and at the same time there’s been a lot of unintended consequences because of the release of these crops into the environment. I tend to take a precautionary principle approach, [which] tells us that if there is a potential of risk, that we should move forward cautiously.

CE: I was curious what your definition of climate-friendly farming is.

AL: There is so much contrast in what farming looks like. And I think similarly, climate friendly farming can apply to a lot of different practices, a lot of different scales. I think primarily I try to emphasize is the importance of farming practices that reduce the amount of fossil fuels used, reduce if not eliminate the reliance on synthetic fertilizers, reduce if not eliminate the use of petroleum based agricultural chemicals, and that is thinking about farming as part of a natural cycle — how to create a healthy water cycle, a healthy carbon cycle, a healthy nitrogen cycle. How do we do that with a farm? I think there are many, many examples around the world of farms that are providing abundant sources of food and doing it in a way that is creating a more healthy ecosystem without depleting it, creating healthier soil as opposed to depleting the soil. I was just reading Vandana Shiva’s book Soil Not Oil, and she gave this example of when a twig on a tree breaks, the tree can grow back that limb, but when a part in a car breaks, you’ve got to bring that car to the mechanic. Climate-friendly farming is about creating a kind of farm that can heal itself, can provide its own fertility and its own sources of pest resistance and weed management.

CE: You’ve managed to write a book that is about heavy subjects but is not depressing! What are some of the things that give you hope?

AL: Since my first book, Hope’s Edge, I’ve tried to redefine my own sense of hope. I’ve embraced the definition of hope that is not necessarily based on evidence of, say, whether we’re decreasing the amount of greenhouse gases or not. Hope really comes from an internal, endogenous energy source. You feel hope when you are taking action, [or] when you align yourself with ways of being in the world that you think really reflect your values. So I think that when you talk about food and climate change, it is hopeful in a sense that, first of all, connecting yourself with a sustainable food system is increasingly becoming something that more and more of us in this country can do. And the second thing that gives me hope is, as I researched the book, finding out about so many under-reported stories of people who are up against the huge power of agribusiness and yet are still able to create healthy farms, or work to bring healthy food into their communities and their schools.

CE: What are some of the best ways to engage people on these issues? What are the specific things that they can do that can be empowering?

AL: I think this question of what we can do, it really is about each of us tapping into what gets us most excited. When it comes to changing the food system, what is particularly exciting is that there are so many different entry points. Food is a public health issue, food is a family health issue. As a new mom, when I think about food that is good for the climate I also know that its food that is going to be good for my daughter. Food is also a social issue, its a human rights issue, and people can get engaged with it that way, asking the question why is it that certain communities in this country have no ability to access food that is both good for the climate and good for their bodies? I think that what is exciting to see is that as there has been essentially a stalemate on the international level in terms of binding agreements about how to reduce emissions and how to turn around the climate crisis, what we are seeing is communities and cities stepping up to take real leadership and say, look, we’re not going to wait for something to come down to us from the international level. What can we do right here, right now, in our own communities?

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.

On Saturday, 3,000 people gathered at John Jay public high school for the Brooklyn Food Conference, a grassroots, volunteer-organized discussion around the state of our food system, featuring keynote talks by Dan Barber, Anna Lappé, Raj Patel, and LaDonna Redmond.  Along with these talks were 70 workshops throughout the classrooms of the school, on subjects as varied as growing your own food, starting a co-op and the value of breastfeeding.

According to the accompanying bright yellow guide, one of the goals of this event was to “bring Brooklynites together to demand — and participate in creating — a vital, healthy, and just food system available to everyone.” By my assessment, that is just what’s begun to happen.

Kicking off the day, Dan Barber gave a chef’s perspective on sustainability (speech text here) through a story about two fish he has served, each labeled ‘sustainable.’ He found out the first fish was receiving chicken in its feed, which the grower thought sustainable because they were taking advantage of the waste produced by the chicken industry. Grossed out, Barber began to use the second instead, which grew as a part of the recuperation of an entire ecosystem, “a farm that doesn’t feed its animals and measures its success by the health of its predators.” He warned, “We are on the verge of an ecological credit crisis, and it’s going to make this economic credit crisis a walk in the park.” In order to reverse this, he seemed to say, we have to rebuild farms and communities.

The next speaker was Raj Patel, (speech text here) who was not at all shy about talking about the possible relationship between Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and swine flu:

CAFO doesn’t really do justice to what was going on there. In this sort of feedlot and slaughterhouse, 950,000 swine a year are killed. 950,000. Of course, 950,000 pigs produce a ton of waste. And that waste was very poorly regulated, and the people in the city near this pork-processing facility fell ill. About 60% of them came down with mysterious flu-like symptoms about three weeks ago. The Mexican press covered it. Of course, the US press didn’t.

He laid some of the blame on NAFTA:

NAFTA made it safe for Smithfield to have its large factory in Mexico. NAFTA displaced farmers into the cities, but NAFTA also made it safe for large corporations to come in and start marketing their processed food products very heavily to Mexicans. And that’s why today the world’s second most obese country is Mexico. And the closer you get to the US border, the fatter Mexican teenagers, for example, are likely to be. That is a consequence of NAFTA.

Patel proposed that the answer to these problems is political — to take back our food system and in order to do this, to take back our politics. He accused many of us of thinking of our new president as “the pizza delivery dude of change” — as in, we are sitting at home waiting for a delivery of “hot, fresh, steaming change.” But as Patel is wont to do, he left us with something positive. He had just come from Mexico, where he was visiting a group of people who were wearing masks, but not because of swine flu. They were Zapitistas. He highlighted this group because of their good governance councils, where residents rotate on and off the council every week. They even have a sign when you enter their territory: “Welcome to Zapatista territory. Here the people lead and the government listens.”

Rounding out the morning, LaDonna Redmond came to the stage to remind us that our current unjust food system was built on the backs of individuals — through slavery and exploitation of Native Americans, African Americans and now Mexican immigrants. Furthermore, she said, we have never had a just food system. “Our unjust food system hides the faces of those it doesn’t want you to see,” she said, like the factory farm workers, the slaughterhouse workers, and those harvesting our food. She spoke about defining green jobs as those that pay a living wage, have a career ladder and protect the environment at the same time.  She also pushed us to redefine agriculture a green job before we demand that Van Jones allocate money for farming. (Later on she even read a poem about recovering from previous ways of thinking, which was beautiful and inspiring — is there anything this woman can’t do? I doubt it.)

Following these inspiring talks were the workshops. Unfortunately, I could only choose three workshops — and honestly, I would have enjoyed going to most of these sessions — but there was only so much time. I’d love to hear about your experiences and read your notes from workshops like Climate Change and the World’s Food Supply; Challenging Big Food: How Food Transnationals Harm Our Health and Environment and How to Fight Back; Food Sovereignty North and South: People’s Control Over Their Own Food; Food Rebellions; The Perils of a Globalized Food Supply: Trade Policy and How to Change It; Passing the Hoe: Our New Farmers Share Stories and Experiences — you get the idea, there were lots of great workshops to sit in on. The downside to so many great workshops besides choosing only three was almost missing lunch and totally missing the expos, which were filled with interesting people doing a variety of things to change the food system. Next time, my suggestion to BFC organizers is to have keynotes, lunch and expos fill conference day one, and to move the workshops to a separate day or convert them into weekly ‘salons’ to discuss all of these pressing topics.

The first workshop I attended focused on Organizing in the Obama Era, featuring Leslie Hatfield, editor of the Green Fork, as moderator, Winton Wedderburn, organizer of social media for the Brooklyn Food Conference, Naomi Starkman, editor here at Civil Eats and media maven for Consumers Union, and Natasha Chart, editor of Change.org’s Sustainable Food blog. The workshop operated like a crash course, discussing the tools helping to build this movement online, from action alerts to the power of blogs, Facebook and Twitter. We sort of take the internet for granted these days, but Hatfield reminded us that “the internet is the greatest hope for solving the problems we face”– in our food system, our environment and more, no other tool has the potential to organize so many so quickly into coalitions.

The second workshop I attended was titled Our Meat Industrial Complex: Hazardous to Our Health and Our Environment. Moderated by Kerry Trueman of Eating Liberally, the panel featured Brigid Sweeney, the farmer outreach coordinator for the Animal Welfare Approved program, Gowri Koneswaran, who works for the US Humane Society on animal agricultural impacts, farmer and physician Ken Jaffe of Slope Farms, and Alex Patton from Food & Water Watch.  This informative panel focused on all you need to know about CAFOs: the pollution they produce, the unavoidable mistreatment of animals in these unwieldy settings and how you can play a role in changing bad practices. The session was great whether you were new to these topics, as Koneswaran gave a spectacular overview with a powerpoint presentation and Sweeney filled in the blanks with an equally interesting powerpoint on labeling sustainble meat, or you were more advanced, Jaffe spoke in more detail about the science behind corn in a rumen stomach.

The third workshop I attended was Defending Against Genetically Engineered Food: Saving Seeds, featuring Ken Greene of the Hudson Valley Seed Library, writer and producer of the Bioneers conference, J.P. Harpignies, Howard Brandstein, co-founder of SOS Food and Executive Director of Sixth Street Community Center (Home to my CSA share!), and Bazelais Jean-Baptiste, and agronomist for Seeds for Haiti. In this talk, we got an overview from Harpignies of the issues behind the use of genetically modified seeds, notably a question of what belongs to everyone and what should be privatized — seeds having been a fundamental community right for centuries before big agriculture came along and patented them. The panel focused on what to do about the issue, with Brandstein focusing on a campaign to erradicate GMOs, and to have them labeled, Jean-Baptiste talking about Haiti’s plight trying to become once again food secure, and Greene discussing his seed library, where members take part in seed saving, which the Hudson Valley Seed Library also teaches. What was most inspiring for me was the fact that 40 people were crowded into the Old Stone House in Park Slope to talk about GMOs.  I think the tide is shifting, and as Monsanto and others have begun out of fear of losing their bottom line to try to expand their PR campaign to the comment sections of this and other blogs, we will continue to inform and dessiminate appropriate information about GMOs and the roles these companies play in tainting and controlling the world food supply.

Some of the other goals of this conference included: to “create an agenda and constituent base for legislating food democracy in Brooklyn; organize neighborhood meetings; influence public policy by educating officials and showing them the depth and diversity of public interest; create a useful, cross-referenced directory of attendees; help partner organizations grow their constituencies by offering attendees avenues for action.” Sadly, I missed all of the sessions with politicians, where consumers were given a chance to be heard — but this was an important way to make change on that same day.  The Brooklyn Food Conference ended Saturday night, but before parting coordinator Nancy Romer announced a series of “neighborhood meetings” in two weeks, which will be detailed on the Brooklyn Food Conference website by the end of this week, to form coalitions and to follow-up on the conference. I for one will be in attendance at one of these neighborhood meetings, and will keep you updated on how New York City is doing on its food system.

Closing the conference, a pregnant Anna Lappé asked, “where is the outrage,” referring to her pregnancy books outlining the diet an expectant mother should adhere to, including fish without mercury. She asked, “Why aren’t we asking, ‘Why is there mercury in our fish?’” I think by connecting us to each other, mobilizing our minds to focus on the variety of important topics we now face, bringing our representatives to hear about these issues, and by following up with neighborhood meetings, this community organized event should be a model for future events, and could be the beginning of a real change to our food system.