Real Time Farms is the brainchild of former Google senior engineer, Karl Rosaen, who’s turned his attention from developing Android to the food sector. “Real Time Farms is a crowd-sourced online food guide, and we’re all about connecting you to fresh sources of food — items you can trust, whether eating in or out,” he explains. “We aim to be the IMDB of food transparency.”

This clear and intuitive website covers 4 categories: Farms, Ingredients, Farmer’s Markets, and Eateries. It’s super simple, just choose a category, and type in your zip code. Up pops the fresh foods in your area, with links to purveyors, descriptions, photos, connections, and soon video. Let’s try some examples…

Say you lived in New York City, and typed your zip code into the restaurant search. You might click on the blue fork of Northern Spy Food Co. You’d see this. It displays red lines fanning out revealing which farms and purveyors this restaurant sources from. If you clicked on the restaurant’s name, this would appear. It’s the entire menu, with all the primary ingredients linked to their source farms. You’re just another click away from learning about the restaurant’s particular farms and purveyors. Instant transparency!

Say you were at the farmer’s market in Hamilton, New York, and were eager to buy pasture-raised beef to make burgers that night for your health-conscious mother-in-law. You could scan the market Web page here, where you’d discover that Sun Fed Beef has a grass-finished line of beef which is particularly lean.

Or maybe you were in Ann Arbor, Michigan for the day, and you strolled up to Darcy’s Cart. “The Molly” breakfast burrito looked appealing, but you’d heard about recent spinach recalls in the news. The menu feature reveals that Darcy’s Cart sources its spinach from Tantre Farm, which states that it’s been proudly certified organic since 1993. You breathe easy.

These are just three examples of the power and potential of Real Time Farms. Currently there 2,100 farms, 3,383 farmer’s markets, 2,940 menu items and 15,700 photos in the system. So far, Real Time Farms has targeted metropolitan and foodie centers nationwide, focusing on the people most committed to getting these stories out. But more data is being added every day.

And that gets to a key point about the guide. It’s all about user participation. Anyone can upload photos and descriptions of farms, farmer’s markets, restaurants, and food purveyors. Jump right in! We all get to say and show what we know and like.

Additionally, Real Time Farms has launched its Food Warrior Summer Internship Program. These Warriors are priming the pump in targeted areas across the country, currently Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle, Boulder, and Michigan. They’re tracking down and contributing data in these regions, building a buzz and showing people what it means to participate.

Further, if you’re a restaurateur, it’s easy to showcase your establishment and its producers. “Any restaurant anywhere,” explains Rosaen, “can sign themselves up to become a trailblazer of food transparency.” James Beard winner Chef Alex Young, of Zingerman’s Roadhouse, agrees, “Real Time Farms gives our customers the ability to see and learn why we choose the products we choose.”

“I want to stress,” Rosaen adds, “this isn’t just about local or sustainable food. This is about transparency. If McDonald’s signed up, and revealed where they sourced their meat and produce, we’d be thrilled! We’re trying to build a totally new way to see and interact with our food web.”

So what’s next for Real Time Farms? Mobile applications are on the horizon, so you can find food you trust on the go. More generally, Rosaen and his development team want to make all this data available to everyone, thanks to an open API (application programming interface). So say you’re a programmer, you can take the data and make a new app. Or if you’re a food blogger, you can use it to create a cool infographic about a delish dish you just created. But that’s for another post.

For now, go check out Real Time Farms. Start playing with the features. Check out what’s happening in your community. Submit a photo or a description of a farmer’s market or eatery that you like. The more we can share this data, the easier it’ll be for everyone to learn about the foods they eat!

Originally published on Huffington Post

Last week, the Department of Justice announced the panel for the second public workshop on regulation and competition issues in agriculture, which will take place this Friday, May 21 in Normal, Alabama. The workshop will focus on production contracts, concentration and buyer power in the poultry industry, in which four of the top producers — Pilgrim’s Pride, Tyson, Perdue, and Sanderson Farms — controlled 58.5% of the poultry market as of January 2007. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division Christine Varney will be at Friday’s workshop, which is important because it gives producers, consumers and advocates a chance to speak on record about how the practices of these companies affect them.

In the last forty years there has been a shift towards the use of poultry contracts between companies and farmers, which now represents 90% of the industry. The Campaign for Contract Agriculture Reform‘s legislative coordinator Steven D. Etka will be speaking on the panel this Friday. He explains in his letter [PDF] to the DOJ that in contract-based agriculture, farmers are paid not for their product, but for their services, as the corporate entity owns the product. This means that rather than being simply an issue of price, the contract terms, payments and relationship between the grower and the corporation becomes the main source of anti-competitive behavior.

According to Farm Aid, some of these practices include dropping a contract without fair warning, providing ill or weak chicks that die within days of delivery, halting or delaying the delivery of new birds, and requiring farmers to make expensive upgrades to their facilities without adequate compensation. Etka’s letter highlights the fact that while the USDA’s Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Agency (GIPSA) has the authority to regulate the livestock industry through the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act, poultry falls into a loophole, and thus, “From the poultry company’s perspective, breaking the law and increasing company profits through fraudulent or deceptive practices carries little financial or legal risk.”

Another speaker on the panel will be Carole Morison, whose Perdue-contracted poultry operation was featured in the film Food, Inc. last year. In the film, Morison explains why many farmers are too intimidated to speak up about anti-competitive practices. “The companies keep the farmers under their thumb because of the debt that the farmers have,” she says. “To build one poultry house is anywhere from $280,000-$300,000 per house. And once you make your initial investment, the companies constantly come back with demands for upgrades for new equipment and the grower has no choice. They have to do it or you are threatened with the loss of a contract… to have no say in your business, it’s degrading.”

Here is the clip from Food, Inc., which shows Morison in her poultry facility, a fairly typical mid-size poultry operation:

You can also read this recent interview with Morison on Civil Eats by Twilight Greenaway. Morison’s letter [PDF] to the DOJ gives more details about what went on at her farm. The other panelists’ letters make for interesting reading too; note that the National Chicken Council is the only one supporting business as usual.

Future workshops will be on competition in the dairy industry in Madison, Wisconsin on June 25th, competition in the livestock industry in Fort Collins, Colorado on August 27th, and on the discrepancy in prices between what farmers receive and what consumers pay on December 8th in Washington, DC.

The Department of Justice requested comments on competition issues last year, and were flooded with over 15,000 so far, which can be read here. The DOJ continues to accept comments at agriculturalworkshops@usdoj.gov.

You can also hear what some of the farmers had to say at the first public workshop in Ankeny, Iowa in December by watching this video:

If you’ve seen Food, Inc., you may remember watching Carole Morison walk through her chicken house gathering a handful of sickly and lifeless birds. It’s a chilling scene, and one that she tells the documentary’s audience occurred almost daily over the two decades she and her husband were contract farmers for Perdue. By the time the film was made, the Morisons had decided to end their contract with the company and Carole was in a rare position to act as a whistle blower. In exacting detail she described the harsh conditions for the animals and the people involved in such contracts and shed light on an industry often shrouded in secrecy. Now a consultant focused on local food systems, Carole visited the Bay Area recently to speak on several food and farming panels, including one held by the Center for urban Education for Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA) called Inside the Hen House. My interview with her follows:

Twilight Greenaway: By now, many of our readers will have seen you discuss breaking the contract you had with Perdue in Food Inc. What happened on the farm next?

Carole Morison: Since we quit raising chickens we’ve been leasing the land to someone else who grows corn and soybeans. Perdue wanted us to upgrade our facility, which would have cost us $150,000, but we didn’t, so we’re not in the debt we would have been. We’re down to 14 acres. And we’re trying to figure out exactly what it is we want to do next.

TG: You had raised chickens for 23 years; that must have been a huge transition.

CM: Yeah, my husband has been in it all his life. The land we’re on was part of his family’s original home farm. By the time the contract ended, we both had jobs off the farm, so we were used to getting up early and every day was filled with work. So yeah, it was a large transition in a lot of ways.

TG: You’re still involved as an activist, trying to help folks who are stuck in contracts with big poultry companies. What kind of changes are you advocating for?

CM: Agriculture has changed so much. Contracts are really at the forefront, not just with poultry, but with most all [industrial] farming. It’s a dictated policy as to how your farm is run, what you do, how you feed your chickens. For instance going out to buy feed from a source other than the company you contract with — that’s cause for violation of the contract. You have to take what they give you. It’s the same with everything. It’s like the coal mine and the company store, totally controlled. It really has nothing to do with the farmer’s performance anymore. It’s more or less the performance of the company’s inputs (the poults, or day-old chicks, the feed, medicine, etc). There are new proposed guidelines that the United Stated Department of Agriculture (USDA) is supposed to release. The hope is that this will level the playing field for contract farming. We’re currently working off the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921.

TG: So why would anyone enter the poultry business at this point?

CM: There’s this idea that if you get just bigger, it’ll get better. If you ever manage to pay off that debt — but you don’t pay it off because they don’t want you to. In our case, they kept demanding we make upgrades. In the chicken belt – from our area in Maryland down through the South – the only new people getting into the business have it handed down through the family, or they tend to be immigrant farmers willing to take the risk. And let’s just say there are people who get into it and learn really quickly that it was not what they thought it was going to be.

TG: What are your thoughts on the recent effort to position people who are proponents of sustainable food as “anti-farmer” because they oppose the methods of conventional farming?

CM: I’ve definitely noticed that and I’d say that’s probably the number one battle plan of industrial agriculture. It has been their way for a long time. Within the poultry industry they also pit farmer against worker; it’s divide and conquer. The fact is these big companies took the farmer out of the equation a long time ago. Now the farmer is trying to take back what was rightfully theirs to begin with. But I do understand the pride folks have, when they’ve put their whole life into this work. Nobody wants to admit that they’re wrong. But I don’t see [the sustainable food movement] as disrespect for the farmer. I view it more along the lines of people finally recognizing what the farmer is stuck in.

TG: You’re in a position to act as a bridge between several kinds of people. How did you get here?

CM: My first foray into the activism world came through an environmental group — and at that point it was like mixing oil and water. It was a Chesapeake Bay group. I went to one of their press conferences prepared to do battle. And a few comments they made kind of hit home. Something called Pfiesteria had caused large algae blooms in the Bay. It was caused by run-off from poultry manure and it caused massive fish kills. The press at the time positioned the farmers against environmentalists and fishermen. But at one point the environmentalists made it clear that they didn’t understand how it all worked. They needed our help and I thought, “if it’s this easy to talk to environmentalists, how bad can anybody else be?” So I think if we all want to survive through what is going on with agriculture, we’re all going to have to give an inch.

TG: Would any of your three kids be interested in getting involved if you were to start farming again in a different way?

CM: Our son would love to be in farming; but the closest he can get to it right now is working at a farm supply store. He’s where he is now because we made him do it. We said, “you’re getting off the farm.” We did not want him to continue the downward spiral. I think we’re seeing that in a lot of our generation of farmers. They’re just not there.

TG: You’ve been in the Bay Area all week; what will you take back with you?

CM: One of the things I hear from contract poultry farmers I work with is: how can we manage this enormous debt, cut back on the amount we’re producing, and still survive? I’d had a hard time envisioning how that might be done. Then I spent time on Alexis Koefoed’s Soul Food Farm and now I know it’s possible. Their rotational grazing system is great. And it was just mind-boggling for me to see chickens running around. We used to raise 54,000 chickens every seven weeks. And even if we’d cut that in half, it could have made a big difference in terms of the environmental impact. And heck, with what the farmers are making under contract — an average of four cents a pound — how much worse can it be? I’ve also learned that [changing the system] will take more than separate groups working on separate issues. At the panel I spoke on the other night, so many good ideas came up — like nonprofit investing in meat-processing infrastructure, for instance. I thought maybe we can throw all these ideas together and come up with a different system! So I have a good feeling about it. I’m beginning to think I just might see it in my lifetime.

It has often been said that the reason television is called a medium is because it is neither rare nor well done.  For forty years, PBS has been defying that axiom, consistently providing some of the best television on television.  They also have the only serious nightly news show left.

Possibly the best thing they offer is POV, the easiest way to see serious documentaries by strong filmmakers unless you are a obsessive film junkie with scads of time on your hands and you live in New York or LA.  Even for a show as impressive as POV though, their plans for April 21^st are unique.

In conjunction with the showing of Robert Kenner’s Oscar-nominated film Food, Inc. (trailer) that day, POV is helping to organize potlucks in people’s homes all across the country.  The idea is to get groups to share a healthy, sustainably-sourced meal, watch the film, and discuss – thus helping to spread the gospel of real food.

For the convenience of those with scheduling troubles, these potlucks don’t even need to be that evening when the movie will be on PBS stations nationwide.  For one week afterward, it will be available free, streaming on their website.  The site points out that “Some of the scenes in Food, Inc. may be, shall we say, unappetizing to you and your guests,” so you should eat first, then watch.

Odds are that somebody somewhere is going to be upset about this though.  Like all the doc’s on POV, Food, Inc. takes a stand, and it’s a stand that is not particularly appreciated by Big Ag, least of all the folks just up the road from me here at the “Supermarket to the World.”  Archer Daniels Midland has been an underwriter of PBS for many years, often to the tune of $1M or more.

I will be very curious to see how they react.  Michael Pollan, a producer and narrator for the film, has been confronted numerous times at his public appearances by the Farm Bureau and other Industrial Ag proponents, in some cases threatening to get corporate funding pulled from colleges that invite him to speak.  This despite their lack of cooperation in making the film (Kenner invited many of them repeatedly to go on camera), and despite their inability to effectively refute even one of the facts laid out in the film.

The sustainable food movement as a whole has been getting the attention of the Food Barons a lot lately, such as Monsanto, Tyson, Smithfield, the Farm Bureau and the NRA (That’s Restaurant, not Rifle – it’s larger and to the right of that other NRA).  That’s because of films like Food, Inc., books like Omnivore’s Dilemma, TV shows like Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, companies like Edible Communities, and organizations like Slow Food. As they take these issues out of the foodie fringe and into the mainstream, these moneyed special interests are beginning to fear for their bottom lines just a little bit.  But persistence overcomes all, and as Ghandi once said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.”

The ensuing shouts from Agri-Chemical companies and Big Beef notwithstanding, POV’s potluck idea is an innovative way to draw their viewers into the conversation while increasing awareness of the issues.  Participants will learn a little bit more about their food and their community simply by making a casserole or a salad or a pie from local, seasonal, sustainable ingredients.  Think of it as old-fashioned activism with a hot dish to share.

If it’s true that you can judge a nation by how it treats its most vulnerable members, then unfortunately for Japan, it may be no better than the U.S., when it comes to its treatment of animals. The Cove, a riveting documentary about the nation’s barbaric slaughter of dolphins, reveals the dark underbelly of a culture better known for its love of tradition, civility, and sushi. Now the Oscar winner for “Best Documentary,” The Cove beat out Food, Inc. (reviewed on Civil Eats), a contender for this year’s category as well. While Food, Inc. offers a sweeping panoramic view of America’s broken food system, bringing to light the detrimental costs of cheap food seen in our nation’s grocery stores, factory farms and cornfields, The Cove succeeds by expertly focusing on a single event in a remote Japanese village.
Through the lens of former National Geographic photographer, Louie Psihoyos, we witness the annual slaughter of more than 20,000 dolphins in an isolated cove located in a national park in Taiji, Japan.

One of the great successes of Psihoyos’s film is its element of suspense, as the camera crew shadows renowned dolphin expert, Richard O’Barry, while he tries to gain entry into the well-guarded cove. The brisk cat and mouse drama is gripping, as O’Barry and his crew elude local police officers, petty bureaucrats and Japanese fishermen, who harass them as they move closer to the protected waters where the annual killings take place.

O’Barry became famous in the 1960s for capturing and training dolphins in the beloved TV show, Flipper. Airing from 1964 to 1967, the show became an instant classic and was likened to “an aquatic Lassie,” focusing on the clever hijinks of a bottlenose dolphin named Flipper. While the show introduced a generation of American children to the playful intelligence of dolphins, the untimely death of one of the five captured female dolphins, Kathy, led O’Barry to become an activist. O’Barry launched into a career to free dolphins from captivity, as the dolphin showcasing industry was just beginning to take off as an entertainment attraction.

In The Cove, O’Barry leads Psihoyos and his camera crew around Taiji, in a frantic race to expose the truth about dolphin abuse and capture it on film. He explains how the rise of SeaWorld, dolphin shows, and dolphin swim parks, have created an expensive niche market for the sale of these prized animals—selling for as much as $150,000 each. Taiji, Japan is ground zero for both the capture and slaughter of these beautiful mammals.

In the cover of darkness, O’Barry sneaks around the cove with the film crew, as they place hidden cameras in this secretive zone.
 When all is said and done, these daring filmmakers capture the horrifying scene of Japanese fisherman impaling dolphins, turning the waters red with blood and filling the cove with the eerie cry of dolphins, desperate to escape death. 
Ironically, Flipper, the show that exposed millions of Americans to one of the most intelligent mammals on the planet, has consequently been a source of their heartbreaking destruction. In a world where the ocean is marked with catastrophic decline, with the rate of decline accelerating, this senseless violence is beyond imagination.
 Despite repeated efforts to stop the killing, Japanese fishermen defend their annual slaughter as a form of “pest control.” Ultimately, hiding under the thin veil of “scientific study,” the slaughter of dolphins is unlikely to receive significant attention from the Japanese.

Seafood is a staple of their diet and killing whales continues with official government sanction. 
However, when O’Barry reveals that slaughtered dolphin meat is being served to local school children, the Japanese are stunned.

Endorsing the emblematic union of greed and official collusion, the local mayor has created a program where Taiji school children are forced to eat slaughtered dolphin meat. Considering that dolphin meat in Japan can contain as much as 5,000 times more mercury than allowable under Japanese law, the local mayor’s decision to feed this tainted meat to students is criminal.

For those left stunned by the senseless slaughter witnessed in The Cove—that this behavior continues to take place in the 21st century, that a civilized nation continues to allow it, that government officials are willing accomplices—there are more documentaries to learn from. The Cove’s American counterpart, Food, Inc., shines a bright spotlight on similar injustices in the food system found across America, where farmers, farm workers, consumers and rural citizens, are regularly ground under the heel of industrial agribusiness in its endless quest for profit. It is a remarkable statement that these two films were singled out by the Academy for potential awards. The success of these films depends on viewership,  dissemination of information and consequent change in policy. Their nominations–and one win–are also an indicator that the power of citizen engagement is only gaining steam.

Fortunately, for activists and concerned citizens around the globe, a new era of documentary exposure is dawning. While the violence in The Cove may prove too brutal for some to watch, this film serves as a reminder of the interconnectedness of our global actions and our individual responsibilities to stand up to injustice, on behalf of the helpless among us.

Watch the trailer for The Cove here:

If you think diabetes and obesity are the two biggest health care crises Americans face these days, you’re missing the forest for the trees — literally. Because the roots of all this diet-induced disease lie in two less publicized but even more pernicious epidemics: nature deficit disorder and kitchen illiteracy.

The symptoms include a woeful lack of familiarity with that elusive culinary commodity known as “real food,” or “good food,” or “slow food,” and total estrangement from Mother Earth — who, by the way, keeps hanging around outside pining for a glimpse of you while you remain indoors, mesmerized by your monitor or TV screen and mindlessly munching on ersatz edibles.

Do you have no idea what you’re actually eating, where it came from, or how it was grown? You may suffer from one or both of these maladies. Are you fearful of naked food that’s not encased in microwave-friendly packaging? Petrified by perishable produce that demands any sort of prep?

Perhaps you’d buy the new wearable feedbag that lets Americans eat more and move less, or sample Taco Bell’s new “green” menu with no ingredients from nature, if these products existed outside the fertile imaginations of the Onion’s writers.

If we weren’t so divorced from nature, we’d give a rat’s ass — make that a double rat’s ass — about all those freaky deformed frogs that have been sprouting extra legs in recent decades, and the sexually deformed fish that started popping up in the Potomac a few years back.

As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof pointed out in his column last Sunday and again on Thursday’s Colbert Report, scientists increasingly suspect that “a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors, very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products,” may be contributing to a scary hodgepodge of health problems in people as well as the disturbing rise in anatomical anomalies in frogs and fish.

Kristof cites a “landmark” 50-page statement from the Endocrine Society which presents “evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology.” The statement adds:

I wrote back in 2006 that the EPA had identified endocrine disruption as one of its top six research priorities in 1996. But, a decade later, they had yet to begin testing any candidate chemicals for their endocrine-disrupting potential. Kristof notes that “for now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed.”

Sure, you could try to minimize your exposure to these apparent toxins by growing some of your own food without using pesticides and chemicals. But as our farming First Lady’s recently discovered, the ground you’re cultivating might be tainted anyway, because the chemicals and contaminants we’ve thoughtlessly dispersed into our air, soil and water in recent decades have a way of lingering.

Our obliviousness to the hazards of a chemically dependent food system have allowed these toxins to accrete in our environment — and our bodies — for far too long. But now, growing tomatoes has replaced throwing tomatoes as a form of protest: millions of Americans are looking to opt out of our toxic food chain by trying to grow some of
their own food this year, many for the first time.

If we truly hope to create an alternative food system, though, many more of us will have to roll up our sleeves and get digging. As urban ag pioneer and MacArthur genius Will Allen told Elizabeth Royte in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “We need 50 million more people growing food on porches, in pots, in side yards.”

Royte notes the inherent challenges for advocates of urban agriculture:

But the edible landscaping trend is taking root wherever there’s soil, and even where there isn’t, with the help of exhibits like the New York Botanical Garden’s Edible Garden, which just opened last weekend and runs through September 13th.

The Edible Garden exhibitions include a Good Food Garden, a Seed Savers Heirloom Vegetable Garden, and a Beginner’s Vegetable Garden, along with a half dozen other edible landscape-related exhibits. Rosalind Creasy, whose essential but long-out-of-print book Edible Landscaping has a new edition coming out in 2010, thankfully, designed the Heirloom Vegetable Garden. Other homegrown heroes like Kitchen Gardeners International founder Roger Doiron and Slow Food USA‘s new president Josh Viertel will be among the featured speakers at events taking place over the course of the summer.

If I may borrow from Stephen Colbert, I’d like to give a tip of the hat to cookware company Anolon, a major sponsor of the NYBG Edible Garden exhibition whose own Creating a Delicious Future campaign seeks to remedy kitchen illiteracy by fostering “a return to eating delicious foods prepared simply at home using fresh, seasonal, local ingredients.”

The exhibition’s other major sponsor, Scott’s Miracle Gro, gets a wag of the finger: hey, guys, great way to greenwash the profits from all those pesticides the EPA has ordered you to take off the shelves.

Another wonderful edible gardening program to which I’ll gladly give a shout-out is the Giving Through Growing campaign sponsored by Robert Mondavi’s Woodbridge Winery in partnership with The American Community Gardening Association. Woodbridge is donating $40,000 this year to the ACGA to help provide “educational tools, leadership training, and community building strategies to participants in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles.” As the Giving Through Growing website notes, the ACGA estimates that over 2,000 new community gardens will be established this year, on top of the 20,000 existing community gardens.

The Giving Through Growing program encourages you to send virtual “eSeeds” to your friends, and for every eSeed that’s planted, Woodbridge will donate a dollar to the ACGS. It’s a pretty painless way to show support for the folks who are greening our urban spaces.

Those of us who garden understand that food waste can either become “black gold,” i.e. soil-enriching compost, or be shipped off to the landfill where it rots and generates methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas. Animal manures, too, can be a blessing to a farmer who raises his livestock on pasture, where the manure returns fertility to the soil as it has for centuries.

But when you crowd farm animals into what Jon Stewart aptly dubbed “an Abu Ghraib of animals” on Thursday’s Daily Show in his interview with Food, Inc.‘s Robert Kenner, the massive quantities of manure that result become an environmental disaster.

And when you saturate the soil with synthetic chemicals to grow resource-intensive commodity crops, you deaden and deplete it.

This, then, is the fundamental difference between sustainable agriculture and intensive industrial food production. The first method enriches the soil; the other ultimately ruins it. Destroy the soil, and you destroy your civilization.

Will Allen predicts that 10 million people will plant gardens for the first time this year. But, as he told Elizabeth Royte, “two million of them will eventually drop out,” when they get discouraged by pests and insufficient rain — or too much.

That’s OK; 8 million new gardeners still adds up to a revolution. So grab your trowel and start digging for democracy. Let’s overthrow the cornarchy this 4th of July!

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

Big Ag realizes that the tide is turning on the corporate control of our food system, and that their message is in jeopardy. This is why most of the corporations and corporately supported groups from Monsanto to the National Chicken Council (now tainted in light of the newly-released CDC report about chicken as contamination’s numero uno) have created special sections of their websites dedicated to the film, in an attempt to mislead the public on the facts Food, Inc. is bringing to light for the first time.

Unfortunately agribusiness has chosen to try and turn the message on its head with falsehoods. Jill Richardson did a good job refuting some of these claims here.

One of the most seething attacks from Big Ag argues that Food, Inc. “demonizes family farmers,” to which Farm Aid, an organization that has been supporting family farmers for 23 years, has replied:

Food, Inc. is an indictment of the industrial system of agriculture and the policy that promotes it, putting many family farmers out of business, compromising rural communities, degrading soil, air and water, and creating a public health epidemic. Troy Roush, an Indiana corn farmer, said in the film, “People have got to start demanding good, wholesome food of us and we’ll deliver, I promise you.” That’s the epitome of the American family farmer: innovative, creative, adaptable. It’s not to say that every farmer is going to start growing vegetables and selling direct to consumers… that doesn’t represent the entirety of our agricultural system. But our food system is more nuanced than the dichotomies like ‘commodities versus local food’ or ‘conventional versus organic.’ The main point is there are better policies that can reward methods that benefit our farmers, our planet and our health. And if there’s a market for that food, family farmers stand ready to meet the demand.

The second claim many of these agribusiness interests are making is that the film somehow reinforces that the sustainable food movement is elitist. It is time to lay this one to rest, Big Ag, for right now it has never been more obvious that the system we have in place is a two-tiered system in which the poor are forced to eat fast food at their peril; where some corporate bottom line is more important than the right of all people to eat healthy food. That is elitist.

So why is Big Ag shuddering in light of Food, Inc.’s reception by the media? Because Big Ag benefits from the status quo. With mass awareness about the current realities of the inner workings of our food system comes public outrage, and with public outrage comes regulation and thus a minimized corporate profits. So what is the government going to do about a public who is aware of the realities of our food system, conditions that are making us sick?

Here is hoping that the eye-opening that ensues from this film will roll into policy decisions.

Already in Washington we have legislation in the works like the Food Safety Enhancement Act, which is the biggest reform of food safety since 1938. It’s a start. There is also the Waxman-Markey Climate Change bill, in which agriculture is largely left out, but agribusiness is trying to use to its favor. We know that agriculture, and especially Big Ag contribute heavily to climate change and should thus play a role in this bill. But according to Tom Philpott’s article, linked above:

If the ag giants get their way, they could seriously compromise the legislation’s ability to mitigate climate change… To move in that direction would require a tremendous shift in practices, [director of the School of the Environment and Natural Resources at Ohio State University, Rattan] Lal told me in an interview: a move to farming that explicitly seeks to build organic matter in soil. That means reduced tillage, extensive cover cropping, and “as much manure and compost as possible.”

Changing the way we view our relationship to the soil, however, requires us to get off our addiction to biotechnology. What Monsanto and other companies are proposing we “feed the world” is more potentially e. coli-ridden meat, cheap calories like high fructose corn syrup, and some feed for our cars: ethanol. That is what they are producing, not the leafy greens and grains we are told are so good for us. Yet we support these claims out of some unyielding dedication to technology as our big fix. Even the recently passed Lugar-Casey Global Food Security Act slipped a cool 7.7 billion dollars that could be focused on research in genetically modified crops in to Big Ag coffers. (More here from the Ethicurean’s Elanor Starmer). But we have yet to see the yield increase, nor has it been explained how Monsanto and others propose to increase said yields. So what does all this portend for our future legislation around agriculture?

Yesterday on the Huffington Post, Secretary Hillary Clinton weighed in on government strategies around hunger. One of her head advisers, Nina Federoff, is a well-known proponent of genetically modified food as a means of dealing with the food crisis, so one wonders if by “quality seeds” Secretary Clinton is hinting at GMOs.

It is my hope that the administration consider the following when making international development policy in Africa and elsewhere: it would be irresponsible, when yields have yet to be proven to increase here at home, and when farmers from the first Green Revolution in India are committing suicide over unmanageable debts and a depleted water table, and six countries in Europe have banned GMOs from their fields, to impose a policy built on such shaky ground.

Let’s hope that Secretary Clinton and others in the administration see Food, Inc. (Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack already has, but has yet to comment) and get a broader image of our food system to draw on.

When Michael Pollan was recently asked whether this was a “pivotal time for food” in a Newsweek interview about the film, he responded:

I do. I think we are reaching a tipping point, to use a cliché. This is one of the most interesting social movements afoot right now. The politicians haven’t quite recognized it yet. There are a very small handful who realize that there are votes in these issues. Hopefully this movie will be part of the change. We are realizing that the way we are eating is making us sick. The phrase “health-care crisis” is in large part another term for the catastrophe of the American diet. More than half the money we spend on health care goes to treat preventable diseases linked to diet.

Agribusiness has continuously blocked the labeling of genetically modified meat and other food, because they argue that too much information is a bad thing. After Food, Inc., hopefully consumers will be empowered to fight back for the information they deserve to know about their food.

The legislation is set to increase the authority and funding of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and at yesterday’s markup, Democrats agreed to halve the registration fee all food producers (domestic and foreign) would have to pay from the proposed amount of $1,000 to $500. The $1,000 charge, which had been supported by new FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, would have generated an estimated $378 million—money Democratic lawmakers said would go toward increasing plant inspections and other food safety activities.

Also during markup, industry, which raised objections to fees in the past, will have a say through public hearings on how the FDA should spend the money. Democrats also agreed to ask the FDA to first study how the industry should maintain records, and the costs and benefits associated with it, reported the Wall Street Journal. “Serious, substantive progress has been made,” Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the Energy and Commerce Committee’s ranking Republican, told the Journal. Still, he said, Republicans will work to change some provisions of the legislation.

After years of an underfunded and overstretched agency and countless food safety lapses—including record recalls of contaminated spinach, peppers and peanut butter—the Act goes a long way by requiring high risk facilities to be inspected at least every 6-18 months (currently facilities are inspected once a decade on average); providing FDA with mandatory recall authority, which the agency currently lacks; and requiring electronic traceability systems that are able to track identified contaminated food back to its source.

Ami Gadhia, policy counsel for Consumers Union, said the bill gives FDA the authority it needs to help keep unsafe foods off store shelves and out of consumers’ homes. “We’re pleased that the bill is moving forward,” Gadhia said. “We would have preferred that the current bill contain a higher registration fee to provide more funding for FDA oversight, but we’re hopeful that the full committee will approve the bill soon without watering down the strong protections it provides consumers.”

Consumers Union is also asking lawmakers to consider making the bill stronger by adding a provision to require testing and reporting for contaminants to the FDA, the critical need for which was highlighted by the recent case of Peanut Corporation of America, which, in 12 different instances, found salmonella in its peanut butter and continued to ship deadly peanut products without being required to report known contamination.

With the fee issue now negotiated, hold on for a bumpy week of wrangling. As Tom Laskawy noted over at Grist, Big Meat has expressed their displeasure with the bill, especially with the potential for FDA regulation over meat and poultry, both of which are currently regulated by USDA. The American Meat Institute has also expressed concerned with the inspection schedule and the empowerment of FDA to mandate a recall and impose civil penalties

Most interestingly, the markup and vote on the Act take place just as Food, Inc., reviewed on this site here and here, opens this Friday in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco (it opens in other cities 6/19). In addition to exposing the underbelly of corporate agribusiness, the film takes aim at Big Ag for food safety failures, and brings these issues to the silver screen and, hopefully, to the American kitchen table.

This is your Act, so between now and next week, you can do a lot by calling on lawmakers on the Committee to maintain the strong provisions in the bill.

Dave Murphy’s great review of Food, Inc. the other day was spot-on and HSUS urges everyone to see it. Its fundamental aim is to expose the rampant abuse of power that has resulted in an inefficient, polluting, degrading, cruel, and unhealthy food system in America.  To add to Dave’s commentary, I wanted to offer the perspective  of someone who works daily to address the torturous conditions that 10 billion animals raised for food routinely each year endure.

About a third of the film’s footage features feedlots, confinement facilities, and slaughterhouses. In an artful and effective way, images flick quickly from living animal to dead animal to carcass to giant vats of flesh. In so doing, the film challenges the cognitive dissonance so many people live with: identifying and empathizing with individual animals while eating others.

One scene sticks out in this regard and generated an interesting discussion at the Sacramento screening. Both the film and Michael Pollan lionize Joel Salatin, who at his Polyface Farms in Virginia, is shown raising many of his animals in what most people would consider the “old-fashioned” way – outdoors, in small herds, with species-appropriate feed. And certainly Salatin’s methods seem far preferable to how most farm animals are raised. But the film also shows a matter-of-fact Salatin and crew performing an outdoor slaughter of a number of chickens. As he chats amiably to the camera, Salatin and his co-workers grab flapping and screaming birds, cut their throats while they’re fully conscious, and then de-feather and dismember the carcasses.

As was the case the two other times when I watched this scene with an audience, I looked around to see that the vast majority of the crowd reacts viscerally: grimacing, covering eyes, wincing, looking away. As Salatin and his workers engage in these fundamentally violent acts, the audience (mostly meat-eaters) becomes uncomfortable.

It’s in this space that Food, Inc. has the biggest opportunity to impact the lives of the 10 billion animals – nearly all of whom endure far more suffering than Salatin’s chickens. If we cannot accept our role in the process that turns living, breathing animals into commodities to be slaughtered and sold, we may want to consider whether our dietary choices really reflect our values.

At the film’s close, a number of individual actions are proposed for filmgoers who will definitely be hungry for change. But only one of those encouragements has the potential to positively affect all of the ills the film highlights: reducing our consumption of animal products.

• Pollution? Giant cesspools of liquefied manure are a significant threat to air and groundwater quality. The fecal waste produced by a single industrialized pig operation (500,000 animals) exceeds that generated by the residents of Manhattan (1.5 million people).
• Food safety? Nearly 70 percent of antibiotics produced are fed to animals raised for food, contributing to the growing problem of human antibiotic resistance. Further, there is simply an irresolvable tension between raising and killing billions of animals in only a handful of plants each year and ensuring proper traceability and food safety assurances.
• Global warming? According to the UN Food & Agriculture Organization, animal agriculture is responsible for the largest contribution of any sector to global warming – more than transportation.
• Water conservation? Huge amounts of water are utilized in producing meat: According to the EPA, 400 gallons to make a single pound of chicken, for example.
• Mono-cropping? The majority of corn – 60% by some estimates – produced in this country is consumed by animals raised for food.
• Human hunger? We’re feeding animals the food that starving humans need desperately. It takes 6.5 pounds of corn for a pound of pork.
• Worker safety? Slaughterhouses are among the most dangerous workplaces. Low pay, repetitive work, the potential for injury, and the poor conditions are driven by the need to kill as many as 32,000 animals a day, as the film reports one Smithfield pig slaughter plant does.
• Rural communities? According to the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, “[t]he family-owned farm producing a diverse mix of crops and food animals is largely gone as an economic entity… and rural communities have fared poorly. Industrialization has been accompanied by increasing farm size and gross farm sales, lower family income, higher poverty rates, lower retail sales, lower housing quality, and lower wages for farm workers.”

• Animal cruelty? Factory farming and the institutionalized cruelty it involves is driven by the numbers. There’s no way we can continue to eat the same number of animals without something akin to the current system – brutal, dehumanizing, and inherently cruel.

The most effective choice we can make right now is to reduce our consumption of animals. And it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition. It is great to stop eating animals altogether, but every meal counts. And it’s not just The Humane Society of the United States on board with this idea: writers such as the New York Times’ Mark Bittman and Pollan advocate reduction as well, with Bittman’s new book describing his “vegan until dinner” strategy.

A new PSA for Food, Inc. featuring NBA star and vegan John Salley was unveiled at the Sacramento screening, and appears now on our web site. I spent perhaps too many words here saying what he sums up best, “Skip the meat, eat some veggies. You are the consumer, you have the power. Vote with your fork, three times a day.”

If you’ve ever been curious exactly how America produces the cheapest and “safest” food on the planet, but not quite believed all the hype that fuels the empty advertising slogans on your television, then Food, Inc. promises to be the film that explains why there’s a serious disconnect between food propaganda and reality.

In exactly 93 minutes, director Robert Kenner manages to slice down to the bone the many myths of the U.S. food system in a riveting documentary that exposes how a handful of corporations determine what our nation’s children eat and how America’s addiction to cheaper, faster, and larger portions has managed to shorten the average lifespan of the next generation for the first time since the Black Plague.

Helping Kenner make his point are leading food journalists Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, who take us on a tour of how food is really produced in America and not the sanitized, red barn, picket fence logos that have become ubiquitous in today’s grocery stores.

Unfortunately, the way food is grown, slaughtered and processed today owes more to mechanized practices honed during the industrial revolution and the audience quickly learns that the corporate food industry is desperate to keep the American public in the dark about their unsavory practices.

“There is this deliberate veil, this curtain that’s drawn between us and where our food is coming from. The industry doesn’t want you to know the truth about what you’re eating because if you knew, you might not want to eat it,” says Eric Schlosser, the bestselling author of Fast Food Nation who also co-produced the movie.

Instead of roaming freely out in green fields, as these animals have for thousands of years, today’s cattle are confined to giant feedlots while chickens, turkeys and hogs are crammed into factory farms, where disease and antibiotic resistant bacteria rage through the system of industrial animal confinements.

The High Cost of Cheap Food

The film opens with a voiceover from Michael Pollan, whose books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food have become foundational tomes for the growing food movement. Pollan calmly leads viewers down the aisles of an immaculate grocery store, rattling off facts about America’s food system that are greatly at odds with the pristine image that U.S. food companies are anxious for American consumers to swallow.

“The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000,” Pollan says, brilliantly painting the picture of today’s food marketing schemes, which Pollan calls a “pastoral fantasy.”

“There are no seasons in the American supermarket. Now there are tomatoes all year around. Grown halfway around the world. Picked when it was green and ripened with ethylene gas,” says Pollan.

For those unsure what exactly is wrong with that reality, the rest of the film succinctly explains the high cost that the cheapest food system in the world has had in wrecking havoc on human health, the nutritional quality of food, the livelihoods of family farmers, the safety of farm workers, rural communities and the environment.

While this has all been covered vividly before by both Pollan and Schlosser, Kenner manages to condense exactly what is wrong with the American food system in just the amount of time it takes the average American to gobble up a giant tub of artery choking buttered popcorn and slurp down a vat of the nation’s favorite soda, chock full of high fructose corn syrup, a cheap commodity sweetener which has been indicated as a leading cause of America’s obesity epidemic and the rise of type II diabetes.

The industrialization of the American food system takes the stage as the leading villain in Food Inc., which shines a bright light on the handful of corporations, Smithfield, Tyson, Cargill, ADM and Monsanto, that have centralized all segments of production, fulfilling the winner takes all mantra of 20th century capitalism.

The direct consequences of the intersection of the corporate, financial and political power of America’s food system are demonstrated through the heartbreaking stories of a woman whose 2-year-old son died from eating a contaminated burger, a low-income Hispanic family that have to pass up eating vegetables because they can only afford to eat fast food and a Maryland chicken farmer who is forced out of farming because she could no longer afford to be tied to a system that treats farmers like serfs while all the profits funnel up to multinational corporate agribusinesses. Unfortunately, these stories are not uncommon, happening every day across America.

For those looking for the brighter side of the food story, Food Inc. shows Gary Hirshberg, who started Stonyfield Farms with 7 cows in the early 80s, and now brings organics to the masses by partnering with Wal-Mart, the largest seller of groceries in America.
In stark contrast to Hirschberg’s warm embrace of mega corporations, is Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, the grass-based Virginia farmer of Omnivore’s Dilemma fame.

While Hirschberg brings Wal-Mart executives on a tour of one of Stonyfield’s small dairy farms, Salatin shows visitors the synergy of his small-scale sustainable farm based on a pasture rotation system, which mimics nature’s patterns rather than rely on the petrochemicals of industrial agriculture.

Overall, there’s something in this movie for everyone, from the beginner and the policy wonk, to learn exactly how the food on their plate gets there and why the current system is badly in need of reform. Fortunately for viewers, Kenner did his homework. Food Inc. is another nail in the coffin for industrial ag, which is now continually on the run as their bad practices are finally catching up to them.

If you only see one film this year, Food, Inc. is that movie. In many ways, it can be seen as the antidote to America’s obesity epidemic. So drop that burger and fries and get to the theater!

Starts in select theaters June 12th, check here for more details.