Civil Eats

As Campaign Manager for Food Day, a project led by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Lilia Smelkova has a lot to do before the October 24 debut of this nationwide effort that hopes to advance the momentum of the food movement.

Good thing this isn’t her first time at the rodeo. Read More

As consumers, we all know and try to live the mantra “vote with your fork.” But as citizens, voting with our forks can only get us so far. Standing up for real change in our food system requires getting informed, involved, and activated. As the political season heats up, please join us for Kitchen Table Talks on Tuesday, September 20 to hear how ordinary people made extraordinary improvements in our community and learn the tools of political engagement. It will be the first KTT in the new 18 Reasons location, across the street from Bi-Rite Market.

We encourage participants to take their newly learned skills the following week to a free San Francisco mayoral candidate forum on Monday, September 26, sponsored by the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance, San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance, and Bay Area Water Stewards. There you can engage candidates on their perspectives on issues related to urban agriculture, schoolyard greening, and the City’s management of water resources.

When: Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Where: 18 Reasons, 3674 18th Street (@ Dolores), San Francisco

Food and drink at 6:30 pm; Discussion at 7:00 pm

Read More

Like many social movements, the so-called “good food movement” relies heavily on young people for their vision, energy, and idealism. And yet, when Naomi Starkman, one of the organizers behind the Kitchen Table Talks series, invited six young leaders to speak at a panel called Next Gen Food Activists, she pinpointed just what sets them apart.

“This group is interested in rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty,” said Starkman from a podium at the UC Berkeley Journalism School, which co-hosted the panel. “They’re also one of the most technologically connected generations, using social tools and the internet to organize.”

Indeed, as the discussion illuminated, the young men and women present have succeeded in ways that have seamlessly blended the online and offline worlds. They also represented multiple lenses on the edible world: from food justice to green business, to the “delicious revolution.” Read More

In late January, the U.S. Department of Agriculture deregulated genetically engineered (GE) alfalfa and sugar beets.  These products will now enter the food stream for animals and people.  Who cares about these developments?  Organic farmers certainly care, because of the risk of contamination of their non-GE crops through drift of the GE seeds onto their non-GE land.  Well-informed and true-believing food advocates care.  They do not want to GE food products, on principle and for fear of harm to living creatures.  Stated more broadly and clearly, people want to know—indeed deserve to know—that they eat safe food, not contaminated or toxic in any way. Read More

All across the nation people are converting their front and backyards, vacant lots, and other spaces into thriving and productive food gardens. To help encourage new gardeners along this verdant path, The 350 Garden Challenge will bring thousands together over a a single weekend, May 15-16, to transform 350+ Sonoma County landscapes into bountiful gardens. The goal is to save water, link local food production and carbon savings, grow food and habitat, promote greywater, and encourage lawn to food transformations. The project is inspired in part by the 350.org international campaign to find and implement solutions to climate change. Read More

Vegetable expert and bestselling cookbook author Mollie Katzen’s handwritten and illustrated cookbook, The Moosewood Cookbook, (not to mention The Enchanted Broccoli Forest and her cookbooks for children, Pretend Soup and Honest Pretzels) introduced many to the love of cooking. She was inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2007 and her most recent book, Get Cooking, was recently nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals Award. Beloved by many, new to some, Katzen continues her clarion call for taking back our food system one delicious meal at a time. I recently spoke to Mollie about vegetables, the new Good Food Movement, and the radical necessity of cooking. Read More

I can’t believe I missed it: the Meat Industry Hall of Fame’s first-ever induction ceremony occurred in Chicago on October 27. And what a night it was: headlined by the illustrious Bill Kurtis—the former CBS anchor who currently narrates criminal justice shows for the A&E Television Network.

Meat industry luminaries including Don Tyson, Jimmy Dean, and the late Frank Perdue were inducted that evening, along with litigious feedlot owner Paul Engler, who you might remember for suing Oprah Winfrey over mad cow disease and getting spanked in court. By all accounts, it was a truly magical evening, what with Kurtis’ gripping keynote address offering up a 30 minute history of the American meat industry.

Despite the glitz, an undercurrent of worry pervaded the event. See, the meat industry was in the midst of its most horrific year on record, being seemingly besieged by all sides. Robert “Bo” Manly, CFO of pork titan Smithfield Foods put it best: “Anything that breathed lost money.” Read More

Happy New Year and welcome back for more Kitchen Table Talks, the monthly conversation series about the American food system. Many thanks to all of you who participated in our discussions in 2009 and we look forward to a fruitful and inspiring year of exchanging knowledge and ideas and building community with you. We’re excited to kick off 2010 with a conversation on Urban Homesteading on Tuesday, January 19 from 6:30 to 8:30 pm at our new location in San Francisco’s Mission district at Viracocha, 998 Valencia St. at 21st St.

As the good food movement grows and urban farming heroes like Growing Power’s Will Allen and Oakland’s own Novella Carpenter pave the way, we will explore the surge towards City self-sufficiency, including growing and preserving your own food; raising chickens and goats; keeping bees and worms; composting, installing greywater and rainwater catchment systems; and a whole host of other DIY activities. Read More

It is often said: You are what you eat, and increasingly in this day and age we come to define ourselves by our food habits.  Are you a vegetarian or a vegan?  Are you a compassionate carnivore or a junk-food junkie?  Are you a locavore?  A raw foodist?  An omnivore?

We choose these labels for ourselves because they in many ways reflect our core values. Read More

The second installment of Kitchen Table Talks was held last Tuesday in San Francisco. The evening featured Jessica Prentice, a professional chef, local foods activist and author and a clip of Edible City, a forthcoming documentary which follows the lives of Bay Area residents who are creating a local food system in their neighborhoods and communities.

Slated for distribution in early 2010, Edible City is a project of East Bay Pictures, a film company committed to making motion pictures that inspire reflection, compassion and imagination. The film, which uses character vignettes, showed Joy Moore, a longtime activist and teacher, discussing gardening and nutrition with the students at Berkeley Technology Academy. To help bring this inspiring film about growing local food systems to a larger audience, East Bay Pictures is seeking funds to finish the film. Read More

Robyn O’Brien is the best-selling author of The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It and a “reluctant crusader” for cleaning up our food system. A Houston native from a conservative family—not the most likely candidate to be found on the frontline of the battleground for the American food supply—Robyn’s advocacy began when the youngest of her four children had a violent reaction to eggs. In a quest to find answers and solutions to what seemed to be a personal problem, she used her MBA and background in finance to uncover and report on the relationship between Big Food and Big Money and unearth how a flawed federal policy has allowed hidden toxins in our food that she argues could be contributing to the alarming recent increase in allergies, ADHD, cancer, and asthma in our children. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Robyn about her book and her work, specifically focusing on the recent engineering of patented chemical and proteins in our food. Read More

My obscure Community Studies undergraduate degree provided a multitude of lessons, but the main things I gained were these two ideas: 1. The personal is political. 2. To affect change you must begin right where you are. With these dictums in mind, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about communities that are coming together to become self-sustaining. With food safety threats, economic destruction, globalization, outsourcing of jobs, and the homogenization of our food sources, it is no wonder that people are starting to get more and more organized. It seems like just this week, I have heard about a variety of examples, not just nationally but really close to home here in my small-ish town of Santa Cruz. Read More

Northfield has a rich agricultural history. The town’s motto, “Cows, Colleges, and Contentment” evokes agriculture’s influence on Northfield’s fields, factories, and culture. Founded in 1855, the Minnesotan town was central to the wheat industry. A sawmill for processing lumber and a gristmill for processing flour were both powered by the Cannon River flowing through town. As the wheat frontier moved westward during the 1950s, diversified farms and dairy operations become the town’s principal source of income. Read More

It’s hard out there for the Corn Refiners Association; they just can’t seem to catch a break. High fructose corn syrup (HFCS), their trademark product, has faced a relentless barrage of criticism, both fair and unfair. It has been tagged by clinicians, nutritionists and food bloggers as a primary culprit in America’s obesity epidemic and a contributor to Type II diabetes. And a growing number of consumers just plain don’t like it. Read More

During the Vilsack hearings yesterday, there were a few hints of change — a reference to urban agriculture, a consistently stated commitment to “diverse” agriculture. But, overall, the picture was sobering and not a little depressing. The attitudes of the committee revealed a deep concern for industrial agriculture and its future. Read More

OPENrestaurant, an ongoing series of conceptual art/dinners put on by Chez Panisse employees Jerome Waag, Stacie Pierce, and Sam White, had its third installment at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on January 6. The happening, which melds performance and dinner party, inadvertently weighed in on an argument that’s been circulating in food politics circles for a while. Read More

When I was much younger I would take solo backpacking trips in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. On one occasion I found myself at a very remote campsite deep in the forest. My original plan was to commune in some vague, Thoreau-like fashion with nature, and with a congenial assist from the Almighty, discover heretofore unseen truths. Read More

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals…. They are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

- Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928

It can be easy to forget that food comes from somewhere. Those of us who eat animals tend to like it that way. For that reason, for most of my life, I’ve done my hunting in the deli case, training my shopping cart on plastic-wrapped livestock at rest in a Styrofoam pasture. Read More

The organizers of Terra Madre 2008, the “world meeting of food communities” that took place in Turin, Italy from October 23rd to 27th, deserve a round of toasts and raised fists. This year’s edition brought together 8,000 farmers, cooks, academics, advocates, activists, eaters and everyday people from over 130 countries. And of those 8,000, over 3,000 were delegates under the age of thirty – myself included – gathering under the new banner of the Youth Food Movement. We represented the emerging movement of young people who, defying the precedent of recent generations, are working passionately to dig back into the earth and put real food on all of our tables. That Slow Food International was able to mobilize this young army is testament to its commitment to empowering young people to continue the work our grandparents left behind. So to those who made it possible, and to the many thousands who came and contributed, Thank you—and bravo. Read More

Look, I hate the military-industrial complex as much as the next hemp-seed snacking, kombucha-brewing, raw-milk swigging real food revolutionary. After all, they’re the ones who saturated our soil with their surplus nitrogen in the wake of World War II, reversing generations of careful land stewardship in the name of moving forward. They declared corn King, and turned our supermarkets into minefields littered with fat, salt and sugar bombs. Our blown-up kids? Just collateral damage in the eternal battle to boost Big Food’s bottom line. Read More