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.

Lilia worked for Slow Food International for 10 years and not only initiated the Slow Food network in Eastern and Central Europe as well as Canada, she also worked on the core team (of five!) that planned the first Terra Madre, a meeting of food communities from 150 countries. While at Slow Food in Bra, Italy, she also supervised international communications and directed the launch of an international education program that birthed the first European network of sustainable school cafeterias.

Originally from Belarus, Lilia holds a BA from Minsk Linguistics University, a Master’s in languages from Turin University and a Master of Science in Environment and Development from King’s College London, and is fluent in Italian, Russian, English, French, and Spanish. She also earned a certificate in environmental management from UC Berkeley, where she co-authored a nutrition education study and recently guided an expedition of Italian scientists along the Silk Road to research food preferences and genetics. Lilia, an enduring idealist, believes that food is among the best ways to experience the world, especially Uzbek pilaf, Pamir mountain mulberries, and Transylvanian jams.

What issues have you been focused on?

I’ve focused mostly on food education and taste education. Taste education is about developing taste buds and the senses so that people can recognize good food. If you educate kids to taste food, they tend to change their interest and cravings for salt and sweets for example. Since moving to the U.S., I’ve focused more on policy. Food Day is really about how to change policy and how we make the work of non-profits easier and make Food Day work for policy change. I’m also getting into the Farm Bill because I think it’s key for the states. I’ve always thought that’s it’s personal choice that influences change; the more I work here I realize it’s not enough to address personal behavior through education, but we should work on food access, especially in food deserts, so there needs to be more done to improve policies. I’ve changed my opinion recently.

What inspires you to do this work?

When I was a kid in Belarus in the 90s, we had really bad food because when the Soviet Union collapsed all the junk came in and we didn’t have a lot of choice. I didn’t realize we didn’t have variety and quality. When I ended up at Slow Food, which was sort of an accident, my taste changed and my vision of the world changed. It made such a big difference for me personally. Initially, I started to work in Eastern Europe and I wanted to teach the kids there because I saw the difference in me and wanted to share that with them. Then I realized it’s not just an Eastern European thing, it’s everywhere. What people eat in the U.S. influences the world, so changes here can have a big impact. So, I just want to change the world.

What’s your overall vision?

I think I’m quite idealistic and I think that works. When I work I think of an ideal world and how that should be. So for Food Day, I start from there: Who do I want to get involved? What does the ideal event look like? If I hear it isn’t possible I will do anything it takes to make it possible. It’s more of a work style to set goals high and try to reach them. If I don’t arrive, I feel sad I didn’t but I know I did a lot to try.

What books and/or blogs are you reading right now?

I like Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle very much. And, I found Momentum and The Tipping Point useful. I’m reading now Fair Food by Oren Hesterman. And of course Carlos Petrini’s books – they are always good to read again.

Who’s in your community?

When I was with Slow Food, it was mostly colleagues and friends there. I get very close to people I meet through work and there are people in Canada, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. For the first time in my adult life I am working with people who talk about more than food. It’s fun to see how people not in the food world talk about food. I’m also very close to my sister. Here in the U.S., it was rather hard and took a while to build a group. I met a lot of new people like bloggers, community gardeners, educators, and chefs.

What are your commitments?

My work is my hobby. And, I’m lucky I’ve always done what I like. Dialogue is very important because sometimes there is very little. I like building networks and putting people in touch and trying to tie differences together and getting people from different sides together to talk. Wonderful things can happen. I appreciate an honest approach in everything.

What are your goals?

I would love Food Day to become at least as big as Earth Day and to change how kids are educated at schools. I’d like to see more food education in schools.

What does change look like to you?

It’s hard work of course and takes a lot of time and I think change is viral. When something happens and there is a critical group of early adopters of a new concept it can snowball. The trick is to get the critical group. I don’t know exactly how it happens. To give an example, when I started European Schools for Healthy Food–a network of 11 countries to improve food in the cafeterias, financed by the EU–I started by telling people whom I hoped to get involved that there was a network, before one existed, and so it was created.

Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

Seeing what ideally will work, having a vision and talking to people and asking for feedback, and sharing and seeing it as a structure and seeing how it actually takes shape. Once it does, I let it go. I know it will go well and it’s in the hands of people who know what they are doing.

What projects are affiliated with yours?

To date, for Food Day we have 45 states involved and more than 700 activities planned. We have major involvement from school districts (LA, Boulder, Denver) and public health departments in LA County, Seattle, and the state of Colorado. There are different events ranging from a huge festival in Savannah, GA to a progressive dinner along the Santa Cruz River in Tucson. There will even be an event in Union Square in New York. All of the events can be seen here.

Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next 5-10 years? Is real policy change a possibility?

I think so. With Food Day we have created six policy priorities. There’s a petition on our Web site and information about the initiatives. If you think there will be hundreds of events around the country with thousands of people participating, I am optimistic that momentum will be good. It’s hard to say what will happen in five to 10 years, because I don’t have a deep understanding of U.S. food policy, but maybe in six months I can answer that.

What does the food movement need to do, be or have to be more effective?

There should be more dialogue. Groups need to get out of their silos, recognize the expertise of those of different backgrounds, share information and look for common goals. For example, in California I was talking with groups separately about Food Day, so to make it easier we had a conference call with several organizations together and they came up with a joint policy statement for the Farm Bill that was inspired by just one phone call. They will promote it on Food Day, a very common sense document on a large scale policy platform from groups of different backgrounds.

What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

I was thinking about this the other day. It would be cottage cheese pancakes my Mom makes with sour cream and kefir. It’s something I had as a kid before school. It’s a combination of tastes I’ve been missing for at least 12 years since I left home.

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

Joining us in conversation will be:

San Francisco Supervisor Eric Mar. For over two decades, Eric has been a dedicated and responsive advocate for working families, youth and seniors, small businesses, and all the diverse residents of the Richmond District and San Francisco. He championed the Healthy Meal Ordinance in San Francisco and co-sponsored the urban agriculture zoning ordinance.

Eli Zigas, co-coordinator of the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance, an all-volunteer community organization, which promotes the growing of food within San Francisco and the associated goals of its member organizations, through advocacy, education, and grassroots action. This year, Eli helped organize the successful push to change the City’s zoning code to allow gardeners to sell what they grow in the city. Eli is also the Food Systems and Urban Agriculture Program Manager at the San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association (SPUR).

Stephen Burdo, Political Director for Kathleen Russell Consulting and an expert in using social media in the areas of legislative advocacy, electoral campaigns, grassroots organizing, media relations, strategic planning, and community outreach.

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of CivilEats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Space is limited, so please RSVP. Seasonal snacks and refreshments generously provided by Bi-Rite Market and Shoe Shine Wine.

“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.”

The audience heard from Haleh Zandi, co-founder of Planting Justice, an organization that combines permaculture landscaping, sustainable food education, and community organizing. (For every three edible gardens Planting Justice builds for paying clients, they provide one for a low-income household.) Zandi came to food through the anti-war movement. And, after studying the industrial food system, with its heavy dependence on fossil fuels and the abundance of cheap, heavily processed food, she says she drew a connection between the two. “I started to see it as a slow and violent warfare on our bodies,” she said.

In an effort to create genuinely “green” jobs, Zandi and her co-founder employ youth of color, including formerly incarcerated youth, and pay them a living wage (from $17-$25 an hour). “Most discourse around green jobs focuses on … solar panels and such,” she told the audience. “But we’re trying to demonstrate that green jobs can be created with very little capital input.”

Panelist James Berk is also working to make significant change in the Oakland food landscape. The owner-worker at Mandela Foods Cooperative was recruited right out of high school to help run an independent, full-service grocery store in West Oakland. Berk spoke eloquently about his motivation and the state of food in his community.

“Regardless of what part of Oakland I’ve lived in,” said Berk, “there was never a grocery store within walking distance.” He spoke of eating mainly frozen HungryMan dinners and Hot Pockets, saying, “although I didn’t really understand high fructose corn syrup, I knew that when I ate those things they made me feel bad.” Now Berk is working to get fresh produce into corner stores in West Oakland – an idea he says he often has to defend. “People in these communities are buying [produce] – that’s something we’ve been questioned about a lot. Although some of them could use some education…we all want something better than what we have.”

Hai Vo, a former organizer with the campus-based Real Food Challenge*, and a recent college graduate, spoke of his new project, Live Real. With Live Real, Vo hopes to engage in organizing off college campuses precisely so he can give youth like James, who are “highly impacted by the food system,” more of a platform in the movement.

“We want to make sure the food movement is inclusive,” says Vo, who described Live Real as an “on- and off-line platform that builds community.” He is also involved in a search for eight to ten Real Food fellows for the coming year.

Nikhil Arora was by far the most business-minded of the group, but that’s not to say he doesn’t also have an eye toward transforming the food system. The Hass School of Business graduate talked about the serendipitous crossroads he and classmate Alejandro Velez found themselves at two weeks before graduation. The two were considering finding jobs as consultants or going into investment banking, says Arora, when they were told about how easy it is to grow oyster mushrooms in used coffee grounds. Arora and Velez were excited by the idea of turning a waste product into food, and began experimenting with growing the mushrooms in buckets in a tiny student apartment.

Within months of leaving business school, the two founded a company called Back to the Roots and, thanks to a national partnership with Whole Foods, began selling mushroom kits. The idea, Arora says, is to get people to think differently about growing their own food (additional, simple food production kits are forthcoming), and therefore appreciate it more. “We’re in Whole Foods, but that’s not the only place want to be,” says Arora, who hopes to get the message behind their product out to a less self-selecting audience. “We’re aiming for Toys R Us by Christmas.”

Samin Nosrat, the organizer of Oakland’s Pop-Up General Store, writer, cooking instructor, and a former chef at Chez Panisse and Eccolo, talked about pushing the “delicious revolution” in new directions. To Nosrat, helping people understand the work and the resources that go into making real food is equally as important as—if not always in harmony with—providing more access to healthy food.

Nosrat called herself an “accidental activist,” saying, “I’m not necessarily a political person. I know how to create community around food, to give people pleasure and teach them how to do that for their families.”  But Nosrat’s actions may belie her words. She went on to describe the success behind her recent Bakesale for Japan, which—thanks largely to online organizing via Facebook and Twitter—raised over $130,000 from 42 locations around the country. At each location, she made it a point to offer affordable options so that “no matter how much money you had, you could go and spend a dollar and feel like you were a part of something big.”

“It’s really easy to send a text message to Red Cross,” she added. “But what’s meaningful is to be able to put your hands on something and be with other people.” On a note that might just explain her generation’s fascination with food, Nosrat said: “It’s something that will never be digitized. At some point you have to get off the computer and eat, and at some point you’re going to have to interact with somebody to get that food.”

* The Real Food Challenge has chapters on campuses around the nation and has spurred other initiatives, such as the Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive (CoFed), a project which seeks to build a web of student food cooperatives. CoFed founder Yonatan Landau was also on the panel.

Originally published by CUESA

Watch the talk here:

Kitchen Table Talks: Next Gen Food Activists from News21 Berkeley 2011 on Vimeo.

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.

In actuality, the science on GE products so far simply has not demonstrated harm to living beings beyond any reasonable doubt from GE food. This situation does not mean that there is no harm; it only means that science has not found it yet—and funding for this research is very limited. Science depends on testing and re-testing and figuring out if any particular result holds up to this kind of scrutiny. In the long run, science may never find harm from GE food because there is none.  Or we may encounter a biological catastrophe like what occurred with the introduction of thalidomide.

The precautionary principle would seem to apply to GE foods—with the implication that we keep doing the science to learn as much as we can before unleashing an unknown force into the environment.  But the advocates of GE alfalfa, sugar beets, corn, and soybeans repeat their mantra:  There is no scientific evidence for harm. Farmers need to plant now. With GE seeds they can use a pesticide that kills weeds but not the product and thereby reduce the cost of production. The company that owns the patent on the GE seed and makes the pesticide earns more money.  (Oh, and of course that one company would be Monsanto. In 2004, Monsanto GE seeds accounted [PDF] for 91 percent of global soybean area and 97 percent of global maize area, a combined total of 155 million acres.  In 2004 Monsanto sold seeds worth more than $28 billion.)

Does anyone else care?  It would seem that not many more people care. After all, most people just want to buy their food.  As long as the grocery store is open, stocks their favorite foods and keeps prices reasonable, people keep shopping. Perhaps more people would care if the grocery store posted a sign at the front door:  THE PRODUCTS IN THIS STORE MAY CONTAIN TOXIC SUBSTANCES.

How crazy would such a warning be?  It would not be crazy at all, even without indisputable, conclusive science.  Charts showing both the rising rate of obesity and the growing quantity of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in the food stream demonstrate a startling fact: The obesity epidemic started at the same time as the introduction as HFCS into the U.S. around 1975, at about the same time as sugar tariffs and quotas made imported sugar very expensive. Coke and Pepsi began to use HFCS in 1984. (See this animated map.)

According to the Centers for Disease Control, the increase of diabetes in the U.S. also increased after the introduction of HFCS, more than tripling from 1980 through 2008, from 5.6 million to 18.1 million. In addition to soft drinks, HFCS sweetens a large number of processed foods, the canned, packaged and bottled foods occupying the center aisle shelves of supermarkets and making up the vast majority of the stock keeping units (SKUs) in stores that carry tens of thousands of food products.

HFCS is the tip of the toxic iceberg in our food and in our environment.  Residues from other chemicals used in industrial agriculture to increase productivity and lower costs also increase the toxic load carried by every living being. Chemicals like Bisphenol-A in the lining of cans containing food on center aisle grocery store shelves add to our toxic load. We poison the living soil. We poison the fungi and the worms. We poison the frogs and destroy bee and butterfly habitat. Worst of all, every nursing mother has toxins in her breast milk–we are poisoning our babies.

This shared toxic load is self-inflicted genocide—actually biocide, since we are killing all living things.  While we could point fingers and express our outrage, such demonstrations have little impact.

Consumers need to take charge. More than foodies and activists, we need everyday people in neighborhoods all over the U.S. to buy real food and to avoid anything in a bottle, can or package unless the producer can certify that the ingredients are produced using sustainable practices and the production introduces no harmful substances. We need to build a blue-collar, working class, youth and adult popular campaign on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, calling for toxic-free food from the food system. The campaign could include the following actions:

• Everyone who shops can choose to eat real food (defined below) one week a month—buy and cook local food, real food from the supermarket. Nothing from the center aisle;
• Avoid all HFCS and all GE soy-based products all the time. However, since at least 60 percent of all processed foods contain GE soy and are not labeled, the best strategy might be to avoid all soy-based products.
• Reach out to family and friends to join the campaign on Facebook and Twitter;
• Write a letter to the White House and to Congress asking for protection from toxics;
• Form a political action committee that can lobby with the same fervor as the corporations using the services of a volunteer lawyer;
• Create YouTube viral advertising to promote real food.  The most compelling image is the image of toxic mother’s milk poisoning the innocent baby, the symbol of all future generations.  The most intense message is global genocide; and
• Mount a campaign calling on all union pension funds to divest all stock in companies that use GE products.

We need to free our food now.

Definitions:

Food

Food is an edible plant or animal that grows, walks or swims on the earth and its waters with no genetic engineering, no exogenous hormone-driven growth, no anti-biotic driven growth and no synthetic chemical substances to mimic natural qualities.  Plant foods do not depend on petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides or herbicides.  Over millennia human metabolism and cultures have adapted to the foods growing in every ecological niche.

Anything else is a MESS (Manufactured Edible Substitute Substance)

Any edible substance other than real food is a MESS. A MESS has genetic engineering, hormone and antibiotic residue from concentrated production, and synthetic additives. Emerging research demonstrates that human metabolism cannot handle MESSes. MESSes subvert food cultures and food sovereignty. MESSes and the processes used in their manufacture and packaging contribute to the alarming toxic load that every human being now carries.

Photo: stevendepolo via Flickr

It’s clear that the time for growing food through community is here and cities across California are joining efforts to save water, unite neighborhoods, and build a strong movement for local food production. The Victory Garden Foundation in Oakland aims to match Sonoma County’s Challenge and install 350 gardens over the same weekend in May. In Santa Monica, the third annual 100 Garden Challenge, pioneered by Gardens of Gratitude, will take place April 24 and 25.

“Sonoma County’s 350 Garden Challenge seeks to inspire our citizens to create a healthy, homegrown food supply, save water and cut greenhouse gas emissions,” said Trathen Heckman, Director of Daily Acts, a Petaluma-based nonprofit that provides education about greywater, home food production, and a range of sustainable living skills.

Key projects to be undertaken over the weekend include:

On the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, April 22, 20 members of the U.S. Coast Guard will revitalize a garden at Burbank Heights Apartments in Sebastopol; community members will plant this garden on May 15 and 16.

Green Sangha, a nonprofit group of environmental activists, will install a model garden at Community Market natural foods store near Santa Rosa Junior College. Wine barrels, plants, and soil will be distributed to the nonprofit community organization Nuestra Voz to install container gardens at 60 households at Spring Village, a low-income housing complex in Boyes Hot Springs.

The 350 Garden Challenge initiative, which also seeks to educate and empower community and support local businesses, is a collaboration of Daily Acts, iGROW Sonoma, GoLocal, and Living Mandala, in conjunction with the Sonoma County Water Agency (SCWA) and dozens of other community groups and companies. SCWA, in turn, has provided a generous $25,000 matching grant for this project.

Want to get involved? Join the 350 Challenge Facebook page. Garden sites and participation is being coordinated online and in individual community meetings and events. Get ready to dig in!

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.

CE: What do you make of the so-called Good Food Movement?

MK: It depends on who you talk to. It does seem that young people in their 20s mostly have food awareness, but you can’t generalize. I have a daughter in college and she’s a conscious eater, but her friends think she’s weird for eating healthy. So there’s still a stigma that eating healthy is weird, it’s not American. Back then, I was considered a “health food nut” because I broke away from the meat and potatoes that my mom served. And here, a generation later, my daughter is getting the same reputation.

What’s encouraging and exciting is that there are more farmers’ markets and there’s a growing awareness around food. For example, the campaign against transfats has been very effective. I’m also seeing a lot of encouraging food activism—but there’s a lot of work to do. And healthy food consciousness should not to be confused with our new food celebrity culture—TV shows like Top Chef, Iron Chef—have created a gap in what people are seeing on TV and the reality of what they’re eating.

CE: How do you think we got here?

MK: It used to be that we didn’t trust food in packaging and now we don’t trust food not in packaging. In the early 20th Century, the best job that a psychologist could have was working in advertising, which was really fashioned around selling and packaging food. The very first food packaging came from Heinz—they were pickling tomatoes, making horseradish, and experimenting with putting food in cans and jars. Somehow, they convinced folks to accept packaging and advertising—and we really received the message. They excelled at convincing people they needed something that they couldn’t live without it. And in fact, we came to not only trust it, but to think it was better and more desirable.

We’ve gone so far away from the source of our food. There was a time when we knew our farmers and where our food came from. But we’ve been greatly urbanized. By the time I became a cookbook author, I began working in an urban pre-school, planting vegetables so the children could see where their food comes from. I once asked them where they thought pizza came from and they said it came from a telephone—because that’s how they got pizza, from a delivery service. So I took them on a little field trip to a working farm called the Pizza Farm—it had an herb garden with oregano and thyme, they grew wheat and had a cow. Then we made a pizza together. That kind of literacy is essential.

CE: How do we undo this? How do we rewire people to learn the basics about food?

MK: The very basic act of cooking is becoming a radical necessity. That’s why I wrote Get Cooking, because people asked me to lay out the simple basics of how to cook. I wanted to give people the tools they need to make easy recipes, four to five things you can cook well. It sounds simple, but that’s the key to people digging their way out of bad food. They need to know how to shop and how to make food in their busy day and in a small kitchen. I wish cooking was required in school, but until then, we’ve got to teach simple lessons.

CE: You’ve got a fantastic companion Web site to Get Cooking and you’re now on Twitter. How has social media changed the game for you?

MK: I wanted to keep the book small and inexpensive, but I also wanted to provide videos online to allow for interactivity. So, on my own behalf, and with the backing of Kashi, I put together the Web site Get Cooking for the YouTube generation. I wanted to provide the basics: how to shop for a melon (look for “Melon Knowledge”) or what knives you should buy (look for “Knives”) and how to cook basics like stirfry, polenta, and pilaf. The videos are free and accessible to everyone.

I promised my publisher I would engage in social media and I’ve found Twitter to be more in the moment and vital than Facebook. I try and follow people who I believe are doing good work. I’m strict with what I tweet. I try to use it to be useful and retweet information I find important, or as a means to exposing people and ideas which I think need more exposure. On occasion, I might tweet what I’m cooking or I might describe what I’m eating if I think it might be of interest. But, I also take time off from Twitter.

CE: People seem surprised to find out you’re not a vegetarian.

I’ve never said I was a vegetarian, or that anyone else should be one. What I have said is, here are some ways that you can go meatless if you want to. I’ve said, here is my cuisine—it doesn’t include meat. And somehow, it’s been interpreted by some that I am a leader of a movement, which I never saw myself as. I will always eat vegetables and grain. I’m a vegetablist, a pro-vegetable person. But, I’m very tired of people who define themselves by what they don’t eat. For some, being vegetarian is more about the absence of meat and not about the presence of vegetables. I know plenty of vegetarians who don’t eat vegetables. I’m more interested in getting people to eat healthy food. I want to know: “What’s your attitude towards food, do you cook your own food, do you like it?”

Recently, Newsweek wrote a piece about lapsed vegetarians and even though I’m quoted, I was never interviewed for the story, which created a lot of misinformation. As a result, I received a lot of angry letters from a lot people. I wrote this rebuttal, which was not printed:

I feel a bit misrepresented by this article, which seems to draw a line in the sand with “animal eaters” on one side and “leaf eaters” on the other. I have always seen healthy eating as a continuum, not a dichotomy (and certainly not a game of “which side are you on”). I have never been dogmatic against meat-eating. Rather, my goal has always been, and continues to be, to inspire everyone (including meat-averse vegetarians, some of whom often find themselves eating fewer actual vegetables than one would think) eating greener—more of what I like to call “garden- and orchard-based” foods. My ideal Wonderful World would have everyone loving (and able to access) abundant, delicious dishes made from leafy greens, earthy grains ,and tasty nuts and legumes—and to have these items dominate every dinner plate. As you’ve mentioned, I included a few meat recipes in my most recent book, as I have many readers (old and especially new) who are beginners and omnivorous and want to learn to cook the things they love to eat. I’m hoping that meat-lovers (and also occasional meat nibblers, such as myself) will gain enough knowledge to know how to source it sustainably, and to learn how to eat less of it. Thus empowered, everyone will be able to happily avoid supporting the highly destructive fast food industry and factory farming of animals. If this sounds contradictory, let’s all talk about it more. It’s a discussion worth having–a big-tent conversation toward our common goal of sustainability, regardless of our food choices and tastes. Cook on!

My point is that everybody needs to work together to create a food supply that’s as sustainable as possible. Whether you like meat or not, everybody needs to fight against industrial food production. All meat eaters need to eat less meat and to eat more of a plant-based diet. We forget we can sit down at the same table and do this together. That’s why I’m involved in the Meatless Monday campaign; I want to make sure that people have plenty of choices low on the food chain.

CE: What advice do you have for someone who wants to get started in food now?

MK: Get over the food celebrity and cooking-on-TV-as-entertainment. Don’t try to be famous; learn how to cook and you will always have a job, because people will always need to eat. The gap between celebrity and real food being cooked is huge. People are watching TV, but there’s so few people cooking good, honest food. That is the stuff of daily life. If you know how to cook you’ve got a skill. Long after the TV’s off, you’re still going to need to eat. Go to the other end of the spectrum and become a skilled cook. Learn how to cook in volume, learn how to make soup for 80 people, a vegetarian casserole for 100 people. Develop a trade that enables you to go into an institutional place—schools and hospitals—and make food in the trenches. Become an activist so that food cooking is as respectable as it possibly can be.

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.”

Most of the meat industry’s pain was from a faltering economy that was creating countless “recession era vegetarians.” An August USDA report showed that beef, pork, and chicken production had all dropped substantially. That month, meat giant Tyson Foods warned its investors that quarterly sales had dropped 3 percent from a year before.

The end of burgers and fries as the quintessential American meal may be at hand. In America, the furthest you can possibly get from a McDonald’s is just 107 miles. But it appears the industry has overbuilt, and franchises are closing up left and right. In a sign of the times, one failed KFC was converted to a marijuana dispensary.

Nowhere was animal agribusiness’ pain more keenly felt than in the milk industry. American dairies were failing at such a rate that one observer predicted that a third would go out of business in 2009. To deal with the glut of milk, government and industry combined to organize a mass slaughter of more than 100,000 cows. Dairies spent 2009 looking for every excuse to cut herd sizes, and keep only the most productive cows. Overall, it appeared likely that more than 1.5 million cows would be slaughtered in 2009. The dairy industry’s pain was borne disproportionately by organic farmers, as cash-strapped consumers switched back to cheaper factory farmed milk.

Happily for US dairies, the USDA once again came riding to the rescue, this time with a $290 million taxpayer-funded bailout. Imagine if that money had instead been spent to subsidize the production of healthful fruits and vegetables, instead of producing more unwanted milk and nasty government cheese. Adding to the industry’s woes, agribusiness giant Cargill announced an invention that could dramatically reduce demand for milk: a plant-based substance that can be used to produce gooey, stretchy, totally realistic cheese.

The chicken industry likewise tightened its belt in 2009, eliminating its national chicken recipe contest. The grand prize—which once stood at $100,000—had been slashed to $50,000 before the contest was cancelled outright.

The pork industry had a horrifying year. Smithfield Foods’ CEO, Larry Pope, said, “I sort of feel like the world has been against us for 12 months.” In November, America’s 22nd largest pork producer abruptly quit the business. The company had an inventory of more than 30,000 breeder sows. USA Today reported in November that, starting in late 2007, pig producers were losing about $23 on each animal they raised.

Business was comparably bad at feedlots, with nearly all hemorrhaging cash. Twenty percent of feedlots were up for sale in 2009, but, given the beef industry’s bleak prospects, there were no buyers. When National Beef attempted to raise $276 million through an IPO this year, they were forced to withdraw the offering for lack of interest. The future looked even worse for ranchers in the UK, where it turned out the minister put in charge of rescuing the beef industry is a vegetarian.

Excerpted from Vegan.com, Read the rest here

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.

Please join us for a rousing discussion with a few outstanding local urban homesteaders who will share their experiences, insights, and ideas:

Kevin Bayuk is an activated advocate for ecotopian living, whose 3,000 sq. ft. backyard in the Haight is home to some 300 species of fruits and vegetables, ducks, worms, and greywater and composting systems. Kevin serves on the Board of Directors for the Urban Alliance for Sustainability, and teaches with the Urban Permaculture Institute, Urban Permaculture Guild, and UC Berkeley Extension and Earth Activist Training.

Heidi Kooy is a former anthropologist turned small business owner. Her City farming adventures are detailed in her blog, Itty Bitty Farm in the City. She gardens, cooks, cans, preserves, and tends to her collection of small livestock, including chickens and goats in her 1,000 sq. ft. backyard in the Excelsior.

Davin Wentworth-Thrasher is a San Francisco native and co-founder of the Ecology Center of San Francisco, a grassroots non-profit that cultivates community through designing and building experiential, ecological education spaces in SF schools and community gardens. Davin leads workshops on ecological gardening, urban homesteading, natural building, appropriate technology and more. Baking bread, making cheese, butter, and yogurt, caring for ducks, chickens, and honeybees, and foraging for uncultivated foods are a weekly passion for him.

In 2008, Davin experimented with a low consumption lifestyle by living in a tent in his 1250 sq. ft. backyard in the Sunset; using rocket stoves and solar ovens; consuming less than five gallons of water a day; and relying on an outdoor shower, greywater system, and a composting toilet to save and reuse water.

We’re also excited to announce our new, permanent location at Viracocha, a new antique store/art gallery/performance, educational, and community space. We are extremely grateful to Jonathan Siegel for his support of KTT and we know that many of you will appreciate the convenient Mission location.

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of CivilEats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Space is limited, so please RSVP to ktt@civileats.com or leave a message at 925.785.0713. A $10 suggested donation is requested at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Sustainable food and refreshments will be provided, courtesy of Bi-Rite Market and Shoe Shine Wines

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. Do you believe that ultimately it is the local connections that you make in life that matter?  Locavore it is.  Do you believe that all life, from the cows in the field to the ants running through your kitchen cabinets, need to be honored and not eaten?  Vegan is the choice.

But in addition to these personal reasons, many of us eat the way we do because we believe that it makes a difference in the greater world.  We believe that if enough of us “vote with our fork,” we can change the very food system that feeds us.

In a blistering new essay by Derrick Jensen in the July / Aug issue of Orion magazine, he starts by asking us: “Would any sane person think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery?”

His point is that individual consumer choices are not a substitute for working toward real political or social change.

Jensen continues:

I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.

I believe Jensen’s is a powerful argument, but only slightly less so when it comes to food.  For example, he writes:

We so often hear that the world is running out of water. People are dying from lack of water. Rivers are dewatered from lack of water. Because of this we need to take shorter showers. See the disconnect? Because I take showers, I’m responsible for drawing down aquifers? Well, no. More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans.

To make a difference we need to change that 90%.  So that short shower might not be the solution, but changing our agriculture system just might, which in turn will surely change our eating habits.

This leads to the next point:  instead of putting so much political emphasis on what we eat, maybe we should spend more time writing letters to our representatives and organizing to change the system directly.  Let’s spend our eating energy on growing, buying, and cooking what’s healthy and tasty for our families, and hopefully have some time leftover for direct engagement.

When it comes to our food, it’s clear that we need to be doing both simultaneously.  Just be sure to finish that grilled summer vegetable sandwich before your homemade pesto gets all over those letters.

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.

One of the individuals featured in Edible City, Prentice, who coined the term “locavore,” New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2007, spoke about how eating can an a revolutionary act. Prentice told the crowded room how her desire to support farmers led her to shop exclusively at her local farmers’ market, where she would always give her change back to the grower. She’s not wealthy, she explained, but it was important to her to pay for the true cost of food.

Prentice noticed that, though we live in the Bay Area where fresh produce is plentiful, people were always asking and wondering what is in season. As a society, we are used to shiny, perfect-looking produce being available year-round in our local grocery store. This led her to create the Local Foods Wheel with Sarah Klein and Maggie Gosselin. The purpose of the wheel is to identify which foods grow in your region and when it is available. Currently, it is only available to the San Francisco Bay and the New York Metropolitan areas.

More recently, Prentice joined four business partners in founding Three Stone Hearth, a community-supported kitchen in Berkeley that uses local, sustainable ingredients to prepare nutrient-dense traditional foods on a community scale. Customers can order meals and other food items directly from the web site for pick-up or delivery. It can be as simple as ordering homemade chicken stock to create your own soup or ordering an entire meal for the family.

At first, Prentice was concerned about offering prepared food because it would encourage people to cook less. However, she found that their customers have had the opposite reaction. Since they are purchasing more expensive items, customers are stretching their food and dollar by supplementing with simple ingredients to create a quick, healthy and homemade meal for the whole family. In addition, customers tell her that they are eating less because they are consuming nutrient dense foods which satisfy them more quickly. Prentice admits that the food is more expensive and wishes that it could be more accessible to low income families. (She said that she had been asked twice whether her business would accept food stamps—something she is now looking into.)

The premium cost to source local, sustainable ingredients, overhead of a commercial kitchen and labor increases the cost of their end product. However, she is quick to point out that factory-farmed meat and foods only appear to be inexpensive because the true cost is hidden in various other ways, including corporate control of the food system, exploitation of migrant farm workers, environmental degradation and the rise in healthcare-related costs.

Prentice noted that traditional, small-scale food processing has the ability to make our food more nutritious while manufactured food processing makes our food less nutritious by removing important nutrients and replacing them with additives/preservatives to extend shelf life. While we might spend more money initially on “real food,” it helps protect us from disease and prolongs our lifespan.

From the Local Foods Wheel to Three Stone Hearth, Prentice has revolutionized the local food system in the Bay Area; and by coining the term “locavore,” she brought national attention to the concept of eating locally within 100-miles of our foodshed.

Highlights from the evening included a spirited discussion that included the following ideas:

• We need to make the nutritional advantage of local, whole foods more important in our conversation. Despite the claims that they can feed the world, industrial food is simply less nutritious than whole foods. What good is it to feed the world if we are going to be unhealthy and have a shorter lifespan?
• Wholesome, nutritious foods can be our health insurance.
• We have an entire generation that does not know how to cook.
• Cook simple meals at home. In recent years, the focus of cooking at home has become complicated, fancy recipes which require uncommon or expensive food items. It doesn’t have to rival a meal at the French Laundry every time you make dinner. Just get in the kitchen.
• Use the whole animal if and when you cook meat. We live in a “chicken nugget” and “boneless skinless chicken breast” culture in which we only use the desired pieces of meat. This desire for white meat has encouraged the breeding of chickens and turkeys so top-heavy that they can barely walk. By using the whole animal, we decrease the production of these animals and stretch out our dollar.
• CSAs are not just for produce. Raw milk, meat, fish and foraging CSAs are popping up throughout the country. By supporting local, small-scale producers, we build a local infrastructure for our own foodshed and challenge corporate control of a select few companies.
• How do we create community supported kitchens in other areas? The challenge becomes finding a commercial kitchen which is required if you are selling food to the general public. However, what if we were to come together in our communities, in small groups and cook together out of our own kitchens? There are book clubs, how about a cooking club or a cook-in? Small groups would gather to prepare meals for the week or once/month to prepare stocks, jams, fermented items. No commercial kitchen is required because you are not selling the food.

The important point is that even small change can be a revolutionary act which we can do three times a day.