When he was seven years old, Malik Yakini, inspired by his grandfather, planted his own backyard garden in Detroit, seeding it with carrots and other vegetables. Should it come as any surprise that today, Yakini has made urban farming his vocation? The Executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network (DBCFSN), which he co-founded in 2006, he is also chair of the Detroit Food Policy Council, which advocates for a sustainable, localized food system and a food-secure Detroit.

It’s well known that Detroit has been hard hit by the economic crisis—its unemployment rate is a staggering 28 percent—but it also has one of the most well-developed urban agriculture scenes in the country. Over the past decade, resourceful Detroiters and organizations such as DBCFSN have been converting the city’s vacant lots and fallow land into lush farms and community gardens. According to the Greening of Detroit, there are now over 1,351 gardens in the city.

I spoke to Yakini, one of the leaders of Detroit’s vibrant food justice movement, about  the problem with the term “food desert,” how Detroit vegans survive the winter, and what the DBCFSN is doing to change the food landscape in Detroit. “We’re really making an effort to reach beyond the foodies—to get to the common folk who are not really involved in food system reform,” says Yakini.

Tell me about the origins of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.

It grew out of some earlier work. I was principal of an African-centered charter school in the Detroit area called Nsoroma Institute Public School Academy. In 2000 we started doing organic gardening on a serious level and developed a food security curriculum. That initial garden evolved into something we called the Shamba Organic Garden Collective, where we had parents and teachers planting gardens in their backyards and in vacant lots next to their houses.

We had a team called the groundbreakers who would go out and till peoples’ gardens for them—because that was the most labor-intensive part. We had about 20 gardens spread out over the city as part of this collective. And as the work continued to grow, we were looking for a way to expand it and involve more people. Informally, the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network grew out of this work.

In February of 2006, I called together a group of 40 people who I knew were either gardeners, chefs, raw foodists—people who had some connection to food—for the purposes of starting the DBCFSN.

One of the main activities of the organization is to influence public policy. Is there a political leader in Detroit who has become a powerful advocate for the food justice movement and has helped push through laws that protect community gardeners and promote food security?

The one who has been most supportive has been councilwoman JoAnn Watson. And councilman Kwame Kenyatta has been supportive as well. In fact, it’s through JoAnn Watson that we were able to have the City Council approve the Food Security Policy that our organization wrote. She was able to give us the traction we needed to get the City Council to appoint members of the Detroit Food Policy Council.

What policy goals are the DBCFSN working on right now?

The big issue right now in Detroit is creating ordinances to regulate urban agriculture. There’s a big impediment and that’s a state law called “the Right to Farm Act.” Essentially it says no municipality has the authority to create ordinances that regulate agriculture within their jurisdiction, because of this state law that supersedes it. Just last week there was a bill introduced to the Michigan house to exempt Detroit from the Michigan Right to Farm Act, which was passed in the early 1980s. It was passed to protect rural farmers from suburban sprawl and from complaints from people who were moving into rural areas where farming was taking place, who wanted it to be like a city. So the law was to protect the farmers, but it didn’t anticipate the urban agriculture movement we have now.

At this point, our policy work is primarily done through our involvement in the Detroit Food Policy Council. Our farm manager is a member of the Michigan Food Policy Council. So we are trying to move policy forward through our involvement in those two organizations.

Do you think there’s a chance the Michigan legislature will pass this bill?

It’s a question of building the proper coalition on a statewide level. We have to find a way to get enough Michigan state legislators to vote for that exemption. But that’s challenging because Michigan is a very large agricultural state. In fact, it has the greatest diversity of crops outside of California. But most of what is grown in Michigan, like every other state in the United States, is corn and soybeans. And so these corn and soy farmers are not the natural allies of the sustainable ag folks in Detroit. It’s gonna take some networking across traditional interests in order to build the kind of support politically that we’d need to get an exemption.

Flint and Grand Rapids have very large urban ag movements, too, and they’re handcuffed in the same way. So there are some natural allies out there. But in order to move this thing forward we have to have some allies in rural Michigan—the traditional farmers.

Does that mean that urban farmers in Detroit are technically defying the law right now?

There’s a woman on the Food Policy Council who is an employee of the City Planning Commission. She says there are some things that are illegal and some things that are unlawful. It’s illegal to have farm animals like cows in the city of Detroit—there’s a law prohibiting that. But there are other things like bees that the law doesn’t speak to specifically. So there’s no law that permits it and there’s also not a law that prohibits it. It’s not lawful but it’s not illegal. So we’re kind of caught in this grey area right now.

It’s been estimated that Detroit has about 6,000-10,000 acres that are vacant—that’s about a third of the city. So you have a lot of commercial interests beginning to look at Detroit as a place to do agriculture. Because the city doesn’t have the ability to regulate it right now, we don’t have the ability to say to these large commercial interests that we don’t feel that this scale of agriculture is appropriate for Detroit. Getting the exemption from the Right to Farm Act would allow Detroit to define what is appropriate in terms of scale and in terms of things like composting.

What about policy on the national level. Does the DBCFSN have any position on the farm bill?

Several of us have been involved in webinars and meetings to bring us up to speed on the farm bill. But we haven’t actively taken a position as a group.

We’re more focused on local policy. After studying the farm bill over the last several months, I have a concern about what it takes to build the type of support nationally, across various interests, to get anything passed in the farm bill. It’s much easier to build that level of consensus on a local or state-wide basis.

I think big ag will continue to get billion dollar subsidies. Some of the things that were added in the last farm bill were good: Our organization got a hoop house from the USDA as a result. But when you look at a hoop house that cost $8,000 and maybe there are 5-10 of ‘em in Detroit, that’s $40,000 to $80,000. But then you’re looking at billions of dollars that are going to these folks who are growing corn and soybeans.

So really, if we want to have a major impact on the food system in the United States, the paradigm has to be shifted. So that sustainable agriculture is incentivized and this unsustainable model of industrial farming is dis-incentivized. The best way to do that is through money. Of course, that is a big fight because the food lobby is one of the most powerful lobbies that exists. And I really haven’t heard answer of how you build the level of power, how you galvanize that level of support, on a national level.

The DBCFSN has a “What’s for Dinner?” lecture series.  What speakers have you had and what are they about?

This year we had four lectures. The first was called “Is my garden legal?” by Kathryn Underwood, the woman who is on the Detroit Food Policy Council. She spoke about the laws or lack of laws regulating agriculture in Detroit. The second lecture was a guy named Kilindi Iyi and he’s a mycologist. His was on adding mushrooms to your garden and the technologies of growing mushrooms. The third lecture was the board president of our organization, Ife Kilimanjaro, and it dealt with the global food shortage and how that is a man-made phenomenon how it has been manipulated through these multinational companies that are are controlling much of the food supply.  The final lecture was one I did on the impact of global warming on agriculture.

So this lecture series—as well as some of the other things we do—is geared towards raising public consciousness. Because we realize that it’s not just a question of greater access to food. But people have to have knowledge about the food, and have to have some understanding about why sustainable growing is better than the industrial food system that provides most of the food. They have to have some understanding about food culture. Because much of our traditional food culture has been lost over the past generation, due to the rush towards convenience in the post World War II period, and then the fast food proliferation which occurred in Detroit and other places throughout the country. Our families today rarely sit down and eat a meal that’s prepared from scratch. So there’s a lot of education that has to go on in order to support the growing of fresh produce. And creating markets in which to sell it. We have to increase demand at the same time as we’re increasing access.

Is D-Town Farm the DBCFSN’s only garden? Or do you have others?

We just have one location. We started out initially with two acres and we currently have seven acres—so it’s a pretty large project. We’re trying to stay focused and not have various locations around the city. Frankly we don’t have the capacity to manage that. Even managing the seven acres we have now is challenging!

We consider ourselves to be a model. Rather than trying to start gardens all around the city, what we’re doing is creating a learning institution where people who are interested in doing this work can come and learn various techniques and strategies that they can take back to their neighborhoods. So we see ourselves as a catalyst.

So the produce that’s grown at D-Town Farm—is it sold there at a farm stand or at Eastern Market?

We sell it at Eastern Market and also at a few farmers’ markets. We also sell to a few restaurants. We’re working on a project called “Take it to the Marketplace” that will put some of our products in grocery stores. It’ll be a producers’ co-op that we’ll be part of and we’ll invite other local food entrepreneurs to be part of. But it will sold under the D-Town brand. And we’ll collectively market and promote those products, and collectively distribute those products. So that’s our next move: to have locally grown options available at stores that people normally shop at.

Speaking of grocery stores, you said something interesting at the Community Food Security Coalition conference in Oakland: that implicit in researcher Mari Gallagher’s definition for “food desert” is the notion that grocery stores are the only solution to food deserts. In fact, what she and others including you stress is that multiple solutions are needed—farmers’ markets, food co-ops, urban farms. But don’t Detroit residents—even those who buy their food from D-town Farm—rely on grocery stores in the winter? Even with hoop house technology, you can’t possibly grow enough produce in the winter months for people to be food secure—can you?

Not at all. We don’t even grow enough in the ground in the summer to be self-sufficient. We’re producing a very small amount of the produce consumed in Detroit—probably less than one percent. We are at the embryonic stages. We think we have much greater capacity. But we’re nowhere near that point right now.

People are accustomed to going to grocery stores to buy food and they’re used to these large, pretty pieces of produce. Often, organic food is not as large and sometimes it has flaws. So we have to re-educate people about the aesthetics of food and the nutritional value of food, at the same time as we educate people about the value of eating whole foods.

We’re not self-sufficient even in the summer time—less so in the winter. We are producing food in the winter using hoop house technology, but of course you can only grow limited crops in the winter using hoop houses unless you have some external heating source. People are primarily growing salad greens, collards, kale, and things like that. They clearly aren’t growing peppers, tomatoes, and squash in the winter in hoop houses.

Without a full-service grocery store, where do you find sustainable dairy, meat, or bread? Does Detroit have any meat CSAs?

Because I’m a vegan, I haven’t done a lot of investigation about sources for eating meat and dairy. Although that’s my personal dietary preference, that’s clearly not the dietary preference of the majority of the people in Detroit. So since the majority of people do eat meat, we need to find ways of finding high quality meat at affordable prices. I’m very ignorant about what those options are, but that’s an area I intend to educate myself about in the near future.

But even as a vegan, it must be a challenge to find enough healthy food in Detroit in the winter. Do the locally-run bodegas in town—the “party stores”—have any fresh produce?

Unfortunately, many of us, particularly those of us who are trying to eat organic foods, have to leave the city to find those. I’m privileged enough to have an automobile. [Note: one fifth of all Detroit households are car-less.] I’m able to drive the couple of miles from my house to get to Ferndale, where they have food outlets that sell organic food. They do sell some local produce but of course during the winter that selection is very limited. And so although I am dedicated to eating local foods, I’m not able to do that to the extent that I’d like to during the winter time.

I read an article that asserted that Detroit and Cleveland have plenty of corner stores, many of which sell produce. The USDA overlooks such stores when they designate a neighborhood a food desert. (They define supermarkets as grocery stores with at least $2 million in annual sales.) But don’t these so-called “fringe stores” sell mostly processed food, liquor and cigarettes?

There are small grocery stores in Detroit. Mari Gallagher’s 2007 study said there were something like 1,075 food outlets in the city of Detroit. The vast majority, though, are convenience stores or what we call party stores. The problem is that far too many of them sell food that is of an inferior quality, sometimes at inflated prices. And the sanitary conditions in the stores often leave something to be desired. I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush, because there are some very good independently-owned grocery stores in Detroit. A few. So I don’t want to leave the impression that they’re all terrible. Many of them are terrible. But even the decent ones aren’t selling organic produce. And for me, eating organically is very important.

Your friend Malik Shabazz of the Marcus Garvey movement has been videotaping some of the blatant health violations at “party stores” such as rat feces, and is reporting them to the Department of Public Health.

He’s also finding meats that have another label placed over the expiration label. He’s finding stores that are selling alcohol to minors. He’s documenting all of these things. His organization creates the kind of pressure and public scrutiny that’s needed to close down drug houses, too. It’s part of an overall effort to create a higher quality of life in Detroit’s African American community.

In Oakland, you cautioned that racism is prevalent in the food movement—that some white food activists will come into an African American community and tell them what to do. Can you give an example of a white food justice organization in Detroit who is a good ally of the DBCFSN, who works with you in a collaborative way?

The main ally we have is Earthworks Urban Farm. The manger there is Patrick Crouch. We do quite a few things together including participating in the “Undoing Racism in the Detroit Food System” initiative. They are probably our best predominantly white allies.

One of the goals of the DBCFSN is to promote healthy eating habits amongst Detroit’s youth. Any tips on how to do this?  Kids can be tough critics.

When children are involved in growing food, they feel a sense of ownership. Like, “I grew that carrot, I planted those seeds.” That’s a big incentive right there. But also just bringing in fresh greens and having the kids taste them. Typically they enjoy it—they like it.

We have a youth program called Food Warriors youth development program that functions at Nsoroma. Also, there is a food security curriculum that’s woven into the fabric of the school.  Every teacher has to have one lesson per week that has a food security tie-in. We look at food security in a very broad sense, not just in terms of providing access to food but we look at all aspects of the food system. With some of the younger children, rather than inundate them with a lot of theory, their food security lessons are more hands on. Preparing things, tasting them. Exposing them to foods that they don’t normally eat.

Healthy eating is part of the culture at the school—and it has been for some time. Gum, candy, and soda pop are not allowed in the building at all—either by students, staff, or parents. That’s been a long-standing policy. There’s a catering company that provides lunch every day. So we have whole grains—no white rice is served—it’s always brown rice. There’s no red meat served. And so we’ve created a cultural environment that is supportive of healthy eating. So the Food Warriors are building on a culture that already exists in the school.

What about public schools in Detroit? Are there people putting pressure on them to improve their food?

The food service director of Detroit Public Schools, Betti Wiggins, is very progressive. She was recently elected to the Detroit Food Policy Council and she’s very active in the food movement. She has reached out to local growers. Of course she’s working for a bureaucracy that slows down what she’d like to do. But there couldn’t be a better person in place pushing for this to happen.

She is involved in the farm-to-school movement and has piloted that in several schools in Detroit, and has encouraged several schools to start gardens. So she is a very strong ally in this movement.

What do you think of entrepreneur John Hantz, and this ambitious plan he has to create “the largest urban farm” in Detroit?

That is the inevitable question. All interviews lead to that question.

I find it to be problematic for several reasons. The first reason is because the city is 77 percent African American (according to the latest Census Data), and the key players in the Hantz project are white men. That’s problematic.

Secondly, they are not committed to organic agriculture. They propose some type of mixture of the traditional industrial farming model and sustainable techniques.

Thirdly—and most alarmingly—they don’t have any sense of using urban agriculture to empower communities. They are driven by the profit motive. The current urban ag movement is clearly steeped within the social justice movement and clearly is trying to empower people, communities, and community organizations. And none of that is on the radar of the Hantz project. So that is very troubling.

Although Mr. Hantz is proposing this very large farm, what a lot of people don’t know is that he’s proposing that only ten percent of what he grows is produce. The rest is Christmas trees! Most people think he’s going to have thousands of acres of tomatoes and peppers and lettuce, but that’s not the case.

Mr. Hantz has also said that really what he’s trying to do is create scarcity, thereby driving up the value of the land. At a public forum, someone said to him, “Well that sounds like a land grab.” And he said, “Yes, it is a land grab.” That’s another problem. There are major questions around use and ownership of land. And how land serves the common good as opposed as trying to serve the interests of wealthy individuals who are trying to make a profit.

Has he reached out to the black community in Detroit in any way?

After much criticism, there has been some reaching out to community members. But it seems to be an afterthought, after he received so much criticism. He’s also made overtures to me. I’ve been involved in a couple discussions about trying to sit down with him to understand more fully what he wants to do.

I have a good relationship with Mike Score, who is the president of Hantz Farms. Mike is the person who is leading the farm effort right now. He’s a legitimate farmer and an honorable human being with a very high level integrity. He and I have talked about trying to set up a meeting with Mr. Hantz and some of the key people in the urban ag movement. But Hantz has been resistant to meeting with a group of people.

You were awarded a two-year fellowship with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Do you mind my asking how you’re spending the $35,000 stipend? What project or projects are you working on?

I proposed a project called Be Black & Green. What I’m doing is video documentation of black farmers, gardeners, and food activists throughout the country. I just posted an interview with David Hilliard (of the Black Panthers) that I shot in  Oakland, and I have five others in the can that I’ll be posting soon. What I’m doing is creating a network of black farmers, gardeners and food activists so they can know each other. I’m also raising the profile of black farmers, gardeners, and food activists in the larger food movement.

We want to assert that black people have always been involved in agriculture in this country and we’ve always been involved in sustainable agriculture. And that we have as much claim to this movement as anybody else does. And so by telling these stories and really allowing others to tell their own stories, and raising the profile of of black people doing this work, I hope to help people understand the role that we play in this movement historically.

It’s out of the bag: kale is your favorite food.  What’s your preferred way of preparing it?

Raw kale salad. I’m just addicted to it. I serve it with a special dressing: toasted sesame seed oil, nutritional yeast, cayenne pepper—those are three of the main ingredients. I can’t tell you the rest of the ingredients, but I can say that people really seem to like it.

What’s your definition of food justice?

Food justice is people being treated justly by all of the venues that they interact with to obtain food. The other part of food justice has to do with economic justice: that when people spend money on food, they need to derive some benefits from the money that they spend beside just trading food for money.

The money that they spend on food needs to enrich their community. In too many cases, we have wealth extraction strategies—where people spend money in their communities on food and money is taken out of their communities and creates jobs and wealth in other communities. So part of food justice is circulating the money that people spend on food in their community for their own benefit. It also has to do with simple things like people being spoken to respectfully at the places that they go to purchase food, with their human dignity being upheld. Having equal access to good food sources—that’s a big part of food justice. So I would say, the access piece is key, upholding peoples‘ dignity is key, and the economic justice part of it is key.

Originally published on The Faster Times

Is the Jewish deli in decline or the midst of a revival?

It depends on where you’re sitting. Recently I found myself sitting in front of a panel of deli owners who had gathered in Berkeley, California to talk about their efforts to redefine and save the beloved institution of the Jewish deli.

Moderated by cookbook author and Jewish food expert Joan Nathan, the panel consisted of Peter Levitt of Saul’s Restaurant & Delicatessen in Berkeley, Noah Bernamoff of Mile End Deli in Brooklyn, Ken Gordon of Kenny & Zuke’s in Portland, and Evan Bloom of Wise Sons Pop Up Deli in San Francisco.

Last year I’d sat in the same place listening to a somewhat different group of people—also called together by Levitt and his partner Karen Adelman—hold a referendum on the deli. That panel’s purpose was for Levitt and Adelman to ask their customers’ permission to serve more seasonal, sustainable food, offer a smaller menu, and bring in Jewish food traditions other than Ashkenazi. The rub? The deli was endangered (evidenced by the fact that there were once 1,550 Jewish delis in New York City and today only a couple of dozen remain). Their take was that the deli was no longer sustainable in either a business or an environmental sense, and its survival depended on customers adjusting their expectations of what deli is.

One year later, a lot has changed. The trail blazed by Levitt and Adelman is being trod by a new group of operators who are collectively pushing the boundaries of what deli is today. Breakfast sandwiches with bacon; homemade celery soda; hummus, harissa, and hamentashen all co-exist on today’s inventive menus.

These menus, though they may raise the ire of traditionalists, are keeping customers coming back and bringing new ones into the deli fold. They’re also proving that deli is what you make it. They’re innovating, redefining, and opening up the concept of deli to include new traditions, creative preparations, seasonality, and yes, even sometimes bacon.

As Joan Nathan pointed out, the “deli is an American invention and its always changed. It’s not even Jewish. It was started by German immigrants who opened on Sundays. Over time, Jews from Alsace Lorraine took over and then kosher delis came along.”

After World War II homemade sausages and hand-cured meats gave way to mass-produced factory meats. Now the deli is coming full circle and these new operators are making their own pastrami–an endeavor that comes with its own set of problems, namely consistency in production and lack of a dependable supply of quality meats. All of these pioneers are trying to source pasture based, humanely raised brisket for their pastrami, but are finding that 100 percent grass-fed beef doesn’t produce the product consumers expect, and also sometimes angering customers who are attached to kosher certifications.

But kosher slaughterhouses have their own problems. Noah Bernanmoff was blunt on the subject of kosher certifications: “Kosher food is laughable,” he said. “Especially meat. Kosher meat is a kind of scam. As a Jew I ascribe to tikkun olam, or taking care of one’s world. This means buying meat from places that take care of workers and slaughter humanely.”

It’s not just the kosher question. All the deli owners on the panel admitted to struggling with consumer expectations about what certain iconic dishes are. Take kugel, for example. To some diners kugel is a sweet noodle based dish with fruit. Others expect a savory potato-based dish. And then there are the non-Jewish customers being brought into the deli fold who wouldn’t know kugel from cacciatore.

Though most of these new deli operators try to accommodate the traditional tastes of older customers, they are anxious to forge ahead with their idea of what a deli is. According to Bernanmoff, “There is no tool to fight nostalgia. If you take the backlash personally, you forget the mission you’re on.”

Nostalgia for deli isn’t always about the food; sometimes it’s about the deli as a space. That includes the people who populate it, the hum of conversation, the feeling. Evan Bloom and his partner Leo Beckerman of Wise Sons Pop-up Deli in San Francisco have learned how to make a space for deli from scratch every Saturday in a Mission District coffee house, proving that deli is what you make it. “Every Saturday we create it,” he said. “That first Saturday, my partner Leo looked around and said, ‘it smells like a deli, it looks like a deli,’” adding, “We like to watch the tables change position throughout the day as people come in. They push them together, they pull them apart, and it’s a deli.”

I left the evening feeling hopeful about the future of the deli and excited by the passion of these new operators. It wasn’t until later that it struck me that the deli renaissance might be part of a cycle of death and rebirth in the food movement. It seems that just as we’re on the brink of losing something precious, forward thinking people start to work to save it. Think about the resurgence in gardening, canning, small-scale agriculture, locally raised meat, the Slow Food Ark of Taste, and the many new cheese artisans that have started up in recent years.

Indeed, after a period of decline, it looks to me like deli really is in a period of revival. Long live pastrami!

Photo: Neon sign at Saul’s, via CT Young on Flickr

Unless you travel in food policy or agronomy circles, you probably haven’t heard of Oran Hesterman. It’s time you had.

Hesterman, who runs the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based nonprofit  Fair Food Network, has written a book that just might wake you up and get you to care about what’s going on with the food you eat and how it gets to your table.

Fair Food: Growing a Healthy, Sustainable Food System for All is what Hesterman is talking about, and I’ve got to admit, this reporter covering food news cracked open his book (which landed in bookstores yesterday) a tad wary.

Would this highly educated and well-meaning agronomist-activist guy really offer anything new to the sustainable food conversation, I wondered, and more importantly, would he speak to regular people trying to feed their families in a tough economy and who might not understand the difference between grass and grain-fed (or why it matters)?

Boy was I wrong and thrilled to stand corrected. Hesterman breaks free from a tradition of densely written, muddled prose intended for inside baseball players and instead speaks to us all, loud and clear.  On the opening page of the book, he starts from a familiar point of reference–that our education, health care, financial and energy systems are all deeply troubled and in need of dramatic reform.  (No matter which side of the political fence one sits, no one would dispute that America is hobbling on these four fronts, all of which make daily headlines.) He is clever to point out that as we focus our attention on the ongoing debates over health care or financial reform, “there is another system that gets much less attention than it deserves, even though we all rely on it to keep us alive–if we are lucky, three times a day: our food system.”

And then he takes us straight to Detroit, America’s eleventh largest city and erstwhile mecca of the automotive and music industries, which has been without a supermarket since 2007.  (Take a moment to absorb that stunning tidbit.)  If you’ve been scratching your head over what a “food desert” means, here you go.

And if you’re wondering why you should care, a la “not in my backyard,” Hesterman’s got that covered, too. “Even those of us who live in ‘food oases’ and have enough money to buy virtually any food product from any place in the world are living with the fallout of a broken system,” he writes.

It’s a bleak picture alright and arguably depressing. But, I applaud Hesterman for keeping it real and shouting from the rooftops that yes indeed our food system is broken. If you read just the first 50 pages of the book, you will get your money’s worth because it succeeds (where so few others do) in explaining what in the hell is going on every time we chew and how we are all affected, regardless of our wallet size, politics and geography.

Lest you think the book is one big downer, Hesterman quickly shifts gears and proposes solutions for a redesigned (yep you got it) “Fair Food” system that operates on a guiding principle of equal access to healthy food. “In truth,” Hesterman writes in chapter three, “Equal access to healthy food will do more to level the playing field than anything we might change in our health care system.”

And this may be where some of us, new to the conversation, may wander to the list of resources (which is thorough and vast) or skip to the how-to “From Conscious Consumer to Engaged Citizen” chapters.  For the more fluent and well versed, there’s a chapter on public policy and another on the power and influence of big business and its role in the food system, broken or otherwise.

In short, Fair Food is like a good salad bar: You can fill your plate, or have a light snack, but whatever you decide to bite off and chew, you’ll digest every morsel.  Fair food for thought indeed.

For example, just last Thursday, when I was returning back to L.A., less than two months after Gabrielle Giffords was shot and nine people were killed in Tucson, the Arizona State Senate debated legislation that would allow students to bring guns into the classroom. When the measure was finally passed, the legislators decided to modify the bill to allow students to bring guns onto campus on the sidewalks and into the common areas but not yet into the classroom. “Sometimes you have to take baby steps,” the bill sponsor Sen. Ron Gould told the local Fox news station, asserting that he still eventually wants to give those gun toting students full access to the entire campus, including the classrooms.

If it’s not guns, it’s subsidies for the Tea Party. Arizona Senate Republicans introduced a bill to create a Tea Party license plate, with the Tea Party slogan, “Don’t Tread on Me.” The bill seeks to create a fund from the proceeds of the “Don’t Tread on Me (DTM)” license plates that would be administered by a state appointed Arizona Tea Party Committee which would in turn have available $17 out of the $25 payment for the plates. Those funds could then be distributed by the Tea Party fund managers through grants to any non-profit dedicated to promoting “Tea Party governing principles.”

The Arizona legislature has also led the way in establishing what can only be called a campaign of terror against immigrants, especially those without papers but ultimately against all Latinos. More than 100,000 immigrants left the state in the first several months after the passage of SB 1070, the racial profiling and criminalization of immigrants legislation currently held up in the courts. And while the numbers of those exiting the state has since declined (although there is still net migration out of state), the mood of continual vulnerability pervades Latino and immigrant communities. This is terror in the guise of the legislature’s immigration policy and it has come to symbolize, along with guns and Tea Party subsidies, a right wing politics out of control.

Yet the mood at the various talks and discussions I had in Tucson, Flagstaff, and Phoenix last week, was upbeat, and the level of participation was high, both at the campus and community events. There’s a lot of passion about food issues and it’s also clear to many of those who came to the events, that food issues are part of a larger social change agenda; an agenda that is also about changing the politics–and the mood–in the State.

In Tucson, at the community gathering sponsored by the Community Food Bank where I spoke, there were dozens of ideas, programs, policy approaches, and related on-the-ground initiatives talked about and new connections made. There were also those engaged in border and immigration issues, health issues, and political mobilization. In a community still shell-shocked about the shootings in January and horrified by the right wing Tea Party takeover of the Legislature, the passion for engagement and desire for change was palpable.

In Flagstaff, community food activists from groups like Foodlink who have embraced a food justice agenda have teamed up with several of the faculty and students who are part of what they call action-research teams, based at programs ranging from the Program for Community, Culture and Environment to a Holocaust-focused program that is highlighting issues of human rights. There was a clear desire of many of the participants who came to the talks on food justice to want to see themselves as change agents, and to help bring about a change in the politics of the state.

In Phoenix, more than a hundred students and faculty came to hear a quickly organized Food Justice talk at Arizona State University, sponsored by the Global Institute of Sustainability. There was also an afternoon event at the Public Market, an innovative outdoor market and indoor alternative food store located in downtown Phoenix and an evening book talk at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, a surviving independent book store that has become an important community gathering place. Like the events in Tucson and Flagstaff, where participation exceeded organizer expectations, there was a strong sense of commitment and desire to make things happen. Immigrant rights continued to complement the focus on food justice along with the desire to kick the rascals out, symbolized by an emerging recall campaign against State Senate Majority Leader Russell Pearce, the leader of the war against immigrants. This is the face of Arizona that gives one hope, even–or especially–for those who might otherwise be assumed to have abandoned hope.

At the Changing Hands bookstore event in Tempe, a question was asked about the problem of issue silos, whether those in the food movement, or the immigrant rights movement, or the environmental movement, had weakened their own advocacy by focusing on their single issue. I answered by talking about the need to make connections, and gave an example of how some community-based environmental justice groups had come to be involved in issues around global trade and freight traffic impacting their communities. Afterward, I thought that perhaps the answer was too limited, that the challenge for each of those movements was the need to not just connect the dots but see the work as part of building what used to be called in the 1960s, the Movement for Social Change. This would necessarily become a redefining of politics in an age of Tea Partyism, the war on immigrants, and a food system that is neither just, nor healthy, nor meeting the needs of the producers or the eaters. And there’s no place better for that to happen than in Arizona.

This past holiday weekend, hundreds of people gathered for a free conference, called Food Justice, hosted by the University of Oregon’s Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics. In the words of the conference organizers the purpose was to, “Explore the history and future of our food system with a focus on three themes: community, equity and sustainability.”

With a heavy hitters Fred Kirschenmann and Dr. Vandana Shiva offering inspiring plenaries and a host of academics and practitioners sharing their latest research and ideas, the event was as stimulating as it was frustrating. As Dr. Shiva so eloquently said in her closing plenary, “No other species has achieved the amazing success of depriving itself of food.”

As I was manning the Civil Eats table at the food fair in the student union all day Monday, I wasn’t able to attend as many sessions as I’d like, but I do want to offer a few notes and ideas that I gathered. There is no way to capture everything, clearly, and the following may seem out of context, but hopefully something will spark new ideas and actions.

I’m particularly interested in the language we use to express this movement and advocate that we all get on the same page, so to speak, especially with terms that will resonate with consumers, therefore new or recommended terms always peak my interest. To that end, some of the words I overheard: The word local isn’t cutting it, we should use instead, “resilient” and “foodshed.” We need no longer say “climate change” when we should call it “climate destabilization” and need to refer to GMOs as “transgenesis.” The best wheat to buy is “small wheat” and fish from the Pacific Northwest should be “troll caught” to ensure the future for farmers and the fish. And, finally it looks as if almost everyone has started to say “Food and Farm Bill” in reference to the 2012 Farm Bill.

At Saturday night’s opening plenary with Kirschenmann, we heard from Pete Sorenson, Lane County Commissioner, who started the evening off saying, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Kirschenmann followed and framed my experience for the conference when he said, “We are all just citizens of the biotic community and we need to start [designing a just food system] from this perspective.” He continued by saying, “Not all local systems are the same size … therefore it’s about community engaged as a local ecosystem as a part of a larger ecosystem … so it’s about the health of each impacting the health of the whole and about a network of healthy foodsheds.” He also talked about “coming into the foodshed” and that “our first priority should be to make food for people in the foodshed by people in the foodshed.”

There were conversations about: Measuring the cost of food by its nutrition value; a resurgence of the concept of food commons; the idea that we’ve become too linear in our thinking as a result of the industrial food system – that it causes us, as humans, to think in terms of either this or that, one or the other, rather than holistically and bio-diversely; that there is no one definition of food justice.

Net neutrality, a free Internet, should be a second priority to any food security solutions we work towards.

What if deliciousness were the solution to the problem? How would that re-order our priorities? What would that food system look like?

As citizens participating in food, we have obligations, we have power and our resources are supposed to be equitable, so it’s up to us to fight for them. (There were a lot of references to Egypt … when will Americans stand up for what’s truly just?)

Chuck Benbrook, a leading scientist at The Organic Center told us, “Our community needs to up its game in terms of how we respond to our current food system.” He and University of California Berkeley’s Ignacio Chapela presented on my favorite panel entitled, “Sustainable Agriculture & Emerging Research in Plant Genetics.” Chapela, whom I’ve heard speak on transgenesis in the past, is a total anti-GMO bad ass. He presented, in detail, how the scientific community was derailed and high jacked by the promises of the Manhattan Project and how a small group of people created a national program, in secret, to push technology as the new frontier and led us inevitably into what he calls a “bio ponzi” scheme, or “faciscm as they call it in Italy” – the GE era. He advocates for science that is free and independent (more reason to support the Union of Concerned Scientists) and says “we are bundling when we should be diversifying.”

There was a riveting presentation about wheat production and seeds that lead to the question, do you want to rent your seed or own it? Resulting in a call for revitalizing local mills and keeping wheat in county; as well as breeding our own varieties so Monsanto can’t sue everyone for saving, cleaning, or supposedly stealing seeds.

Our very own Naomi Starkman presented, with Leslie Hatfield on New Media & Food Activism. In “Digitally cultivating food justice” they explored the impact of Twitter (“it’s the tool”) and Facebook, advocated for everyone to use Wikipedia to define their work, and told us that the Huffington Post is our friend. Naomi encouraged anyone interested to become one of their bloggers because, “If we don’t frame this debate, they will.” Plus, it’s quite easy and once you do, “the doors are open.”

One of the attendees asked a question that I must throw out there: When thinking about a new food system, it’s become apparent that we’ll have to do it with the big guys, not against them. So, if that’s the case, that we’ll have to work with Monsanto, McDonald’s, Wal-mart, etc., what are some of the non-negotiables? Panelists didn’t have any answers, but I thought of two, to start: People who work to produce food are paid a fair living wage and if commodity crops get subsidies so should soil health and bio-diversity.

These snippets are a mere tip of an iceberg of notes, fodder for my own advocacy and continued learning, all valuable indeed. But as my head spun with theories, facts, concepts and case studies, I had to wonder why we don’t use our time together more meaningfully when we gather at these conferences. Here you have rooms full of activists, academics and advocates — all concerned, interested eaters hungry for action and change and yet we do nothing but listen and ask questions. Fill our heads with more information. I’d like to challenge all future conference organizers to come up with one action that everyone can take, en masse, some galvanizing call that will give these people something to actually do when they are all together. You know, the old power in numbers theory.

On a final note, Alison Carruth, the conference organizer and resident scholar at the Wayne Morse Center for Law & Politics, said in her closing remarks, “Food justice happens when communities define it with each other.” Great. Let’s get to it!

Still, I feel lambasting a movement that I respect, albeit not always linguistically, is counterproductive to fostering a united front. If we are going to recreate our food system, both locally and globally, it is imperative that both the food intelligentsia (Pollan, Allen, Patel, Berry) and rank-and-file, food-minded citizens are not cannibalizing each other during this very important moment in time.

Decades from now, the early 2000s may be seen as a watershed moment for the alternative-food movement. Sociologically speaking, food consciousness, akin to the increase in human-rights consciousness during the 80s, has entered full-force into mainstream American society.

Evidence of this collective food consciousness is everywhere, and unless McDonald’s begins injections a brain-altering serum into their McRibs, it is here to stay. We can look at the popularity of movies like Food, Inc. (Oscar-nominated) and Fresh and Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, as good indicators that mainstream America is awake and mobilized toward the problems of our incredibly destructive food system.

But being awake about an issue doesn’t always mean you truly understand it. And this is not to say that there aren’t smart people spending serious amounts of time looking at the issue of food, but personal experience, no matter how scientific we try to be, invariably leads to some degree of bias. The problem is not the bias, but the fact that we seem to be ignoring glaring contradictions in favor of a more comfortable narrative. The food movements seems to be content with the idea that since poor food choices got us into this mess, changing these choices will in turn solve the problem.

When Michael Pollan says that “[e]ight dollars for a dozen eggs sounds outrageous, but when you think that you can make a delicious meal from two eggs, that’s $1.50. It’s really not that much when we think of how we waste money in our lives” (Worthen 2010), there seems to be some strange, out-of-touch daftness in his line of thinking. Is the problem simply that we haven’t understood the message of the food vanguards? Perhaps, but I think there’s more to it than that.

I’d like to propose something a little more critical—fully aware that it will be perceived as both polemic and hyperbolic. The problem of food is just another example of a systemic assault that has been waged against the poor and working-class in this country over the last thirty-odd years. As wages have remained stagnant, the price of foodstuffs—with the exception of soda—has steadily risen. We have the saturation of commercials focused almost exclusively on promoting heavy, processed, food-cum-chemically-enhanced meals to children—with fruits and vegetables rarely making an appearance.

We have people with limited access to personal transportation, coupled with working multiple jobs and longer hours, living in food-dead zones, where the nearest grocery store might be miles away. We have basically created an economy running so fast and unequally that the logic of this system is predicated on people also eating as quickly and cheaply as possible. This isn’t about people just not wanting to eat healthy food. Or not knowing some ridiculous cost-balance equation about how spending X amount of money on nutritious food today will save Y dollars on health bills in the future. Or the platitudes that if people stopped wasting so much money on material junk they’d have more money left to buy $4.00 organic peaches. It’s about a system in which food, which should be the most basic of rights, is now some repackaged, commodified afterthought.

The problem of consumer-based movements is that they tend to focus all the strategies on personal choice, disregarding structural inequalities that are at the root of our food problems. And even when they acknowledge these structures, they think that civil-society-promoted social movements can somehow operate successfully within the system. When thinking of food, the question should not be why people don’t eat well, but why we have created a system that reinforces—at a cost to mental health, financial security, and physical well-being—a food plutocracy where food has become increasingly fetishized at the top and placed out of the reach at the bottom.

As citizens we need to break the Ag Business-political accord. This can be done by voting into office people who are not wedded to the interests of Big AG, supporting your local food movements, and pressuring at all levels of government a need for healthy and safe food alternatives. But without widening government support toward locally grown food, current food solutions will remain largely on the periphery—eating around the edges instead of tackling the middle of our increasing food crisis.

If the 2050 food disaster-narratives are even half true, it’s not a matter of making better personal food choices, following rules of eating, or becoming awakened to a foodie manifesto, it’s about addressing a coming global food disaster the world has never seen. I think the food movement needs to push even further and leave no options off the table. As Raj Patel once said, “why are there markets for food at all?” If we are going to buy into the idea, as proposed by the likes of Graham Riches and Patricia Allen, that access to healthy and safe food is a fundamental human right, how then that right becomes realized is an essential question.

How about a government program that tiers the prices of food—through EBT-type cards—by income bracket? Or government refund checks to individuals who buy fruits and vegetables. This isn’t about accepting a future of “eight-dollar eggs” which will only exacerbate the division—mostly along class lines—between the well fed haves and the well fed have-nots, but about realizing that gravity of our food future requires a range of solutions.

Originally published on CounterPunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here, a few of my favorites so far:

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

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

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

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

And Hank Herrera (@hankherrera):

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

And friends from CUESA (@CUESA):

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

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

From @kmcdade:

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

From @poundforpound:

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

From @foodinteg:

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

from @rjgiusti:

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

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

Originally published on Ecocentric

You’ll never look at food the same way again. That is the unspoken promise of the book Food Justice, by Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi, respectively the director and farm to school director of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute (UEPI), at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

Published in October 2010, Food Justice takes the reader through a narrative analysis that relates the struggles and triumphs of food system change in the United States and abroad. Food Justice is about how, what, and where food is grown and processed, and who gets it.  It’s about the pieces of our history that have come to shape the lives of the world’s hungry, its minority and migrant populations, and our food cultures, and what individuals and organizations are doing to change it.

But even as victories are won in the tomato fields of Florida, ending conditions of modern-day slavery for migrant farm workers, and in the schools of New Orleans, as students fight for healthy, locally-sourced meals, can we answer the question Michael Pollan couldn’t when President Obama asked him, “Is this a movement?” (pg 79).

This simple question, posed throughout the book, is the point from which the authors weave the web of food justice issues, revealing an answer that is at once complex yet accessible.  The authors set out to uncover the common language and unifying themes that define and encapsulate the move to transform the food system.  They argue the need to work united at all levels–from seed to plate–in order to effect change.

With this broad, yet crucial foundation, the authors launch into part one–an intuitively laid out, historical analysis of food injustice.  From the flight to suburbia to the building of corporate food empires, what becomes clear is how these modern-day monuments of American (and increasingly global) culture have impacted the ability of people to justly grow, produce and access fresh, affordable food.  Globalization, the movement of corporations abroad and “local” and “organic” marketing ploys further complicate and confuse the consumer, but are here laid bare.

In part two of Food Justice, the authors plant the seeds of inspiration.  We are told the inspiring story of the Nuestras Raíces organization, for example, whose growing crew is pictured on the front cover.  Faced with poverty and food insecurity when jobs in the once prosperous town of Holyoke, Massachusetts, moved overseas, this largely Puerto Rican community tapped into its farming roots and created a community garden. More than a decade later, the organization has increased its impact through the use of a 30-acre farm, farmer training, youth empowerment programs and small-business incubation.

Like Nuestras Raíces, similar groups have formed to tackle not only food insecurity, but farm worker rights, environmental degradation, economic viability and social policy.  In showing what has come before, the reader is given a road map to what can be accomplished and how we might, by way of an all-encompassing food justice movement, get there.

This book has something for everyone–the farmer, the college student, the foodie, and those just beginning the journey to understand where their food comes from and why it matters.  My only caution to readers is that the mass of information provided through the multitude of stories may become overwhelming. That said, this book’s grand sweep of food justice from the early 1900’s to today is like no other on the shelves, offering food for thought and plenty of opportunity for further research.

A tell all narrative that clearly elucidates the issues and what we can do to reshape the food system, Food Justice is a must read for everyone who eats.  So, is this a movement?  Read Food Justice and find out.

Community is at the center of the good food revolution, and the Lower Ninth Ward section of New Orleans is home to one of the more extreme examples. Five years after Hurricane Katrina broke the levees–flooding the neighborhood and forcing its residents to decamp elsewhere–the area, largely frozen in time, has become home to a thriving community of urban farmers aiming to improve the quality of life of its residents.

I was in the neighborhood recently on a tour arranged by the Community Food Conference, a four-day event in October offering panels on different aspects of food policy. My tour guide, Jenga Mwendo, grew up in the Lower Ninth, but was living in New York City when Katrina hit.

“I quit my job, sold everything and moved out to New Orleans with the intention of finding some way of being a contribution,” she said. Mwendo had purchased a house in the Lower Ninth as an investment property just weeks before the storm, and so began by rebuilding it. Next, she decided to figure out who owned the abandoned properties near hers. “I decided that I was going to single-handedly revitalize my block,” she said.

Statistics reveal that only 25 percent of residents have returned to rebuild. As a result, abandoned houses dot the neighborhood, services and infrastructure are sorely lacking, and there is a lot of land. This has made the Lower Ninth prime for urban agriculture–which, for Mwendo, has been key to rebuilding and bringing together the community.

Through her work, she has brought back to life an existing garden, started a new one, and created the Backyard Gardeners Network, which connects gardeners to resources and to each other. She also helped facilitate the planting of 175 fruit trees. [You can read more about her work in an interview I did with her recently for Grist.]

“The more people that I spoke too, especially the elders, the more I realized that [agriculture] was really an integral part of the history of the Lower Ninth Ward,” she said. “This whole process has been an opportunity for me to reconnect with my past and know New Orleans in a way that I never knew it before.”

In communities of color, where one in two people is now predicted to become diabetic in their lifetime and where there is often a strong history of agriculture, community gardening projects can have a huge impact–especially in places like the Lower Ninth, which doesn’t have a single grocery store. “I see the gardens as opportunities to come together, work together, and do things that are going to be beneficial for our neighborhood,” said Mwendo.

Nat Turner also made his way to New Orleans from New York City in the wake of Katrina. First he came as a history teacher bringing his students there for volunteer projects, and then later he became a resident and founded Our School at Blair Grocery, a school housed in a former grocery store.

“There were kids falling through the cracks, so I said, let’s start an independent alternative school,” said Turner. Agriculture is used as a tool to help students, who have dropped out of traditional school settings, develop work skills.

As Turner tells it, the idea of using food as a teaching tool was originally about providing access to produce. “People in the neighborhood want bell peppers, okra, and shallots,” he said. So he built vegetable beds, chicken coops, and greenhouses where the students participate in a sprout-growing operation for local restaurants.

In addition, he saw that there was a need to create jobs. “There is nowhere for black teenagers in New Orleans to find a job,” said Turner. “There is probably a 70 percent unemployment rate in our neighborhood.”

Each day at Our School, in addition to studies geared toward passing the GED exam, students plant, harvest or deliver sprouts grown in their greenhouses to restaurants all around the city. The farm’s model is inspired by Will Allen–a Milwaukee, Wisconsin urban farmer who builds intricately diverse growing systems that provide fish, vegetables and rich compost year round to residents. Through their work, students learn business skills–and get to rub elbows with famous local chefs like John Besh of restaurants La Provence, Lüke and August. After he took a tour of the school recently, Turner said, Chef Besh said that he “wants to buy everything that we can possibly grow for his restaurant.”

The school benefits from around $2000 per week from these restaurant sales, which helps subsidize local sales, and the students take home a stipend of $50 per week along with other benefits like paid cellphone bills. As a result of this work, three blighted lots in the neighborhood have been turned into productive farmland. And they are expanding–having just received notice of a three-year, $300,000 community food project grant from the USDA which will allow them to increase their growing capacity, take on more students, and pay for building repairs.

Both Mwendo and Turner agree that the government has a role to play in improving the quality of life in the Lower Ninth. “It would be really nice if they could release some of those federal dollars around fresh food retail outlets in under-served neighborhoods,” said Turner, who is also looking for the government to make it easier for groups like his to access blighted land.

Volunteering for an afternoon at Our School, I found myself standing up to my ankles in rotting fruits and vegetables, cardboard, and coffee grinds at the giant compost pile that would become a new farm field in the spring. Four of Our School’s students–all boys–and one teacher explained the difference between “green” matter and “brown” matter (the green matter being the food waste, containing nitrogen, and brown matter the cardboard and wood chips, containing carbon). All four of the students were different sizes and ages, and all worked diligently together to complete the project.

Indeed, composting seemed like an apt metaphor for the changes happening in the Lower Ninth. Instead of standing by to watch a neighborhood slowly disintegrate, urban farmers are breaking down food waste into a productive medium in which to grow. While the stand-off continues between business owners who wait for the population of the neighborhood to increase, and people who wait for amenities like grocery stores and schools to open before they move in, activists like Mwendo and Turner will continue to grow community at the grassroots: starting with the soil.

The terms “local” “organic” “sustainable” and the like have become so mainstream that as someone who writes about these issues I find myself searching for new ideas to explain the tenets of why changing our food system is important.  Even if you are not involved in the “good food movement” at all, a McDonald’s aficionado who revels in hydrogenated oils and spraying your lawn with Roundup, you have heard of “local” “organic” and “sustainable.”  But while this now cliché vocabulary runs rampant even in Walmart, why then do we not have the same exposure to the term “fair”?

The Agricultural Justice Project (AJP) is trying to establish a set of standards to bring fairness as much exposure as the O word gets.  In 1999, a group of five nonprofits (Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA, Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agrícolas/Farmworker Support Committee, Northeast Organic Farming Association, Florida Organic Growers/Quality Certification Services, and Fundación RENACE) came together with the intention of creating “equity in our food system through the development of social justice standards for organic and sustainable agriculture.”  They saw a disconnect between the Organic standards within agriculture and the justice issues faced by those who actually comprise the industry itself.  In what should be a holistic movement, working conditions and price to farmers is actually excluded from the USDA National Organic Program.  The team set out to solidify what social justice actually means quantitatively and to develop standards within the farming community.

Today, the Agricultural Justice Project is gaining speed, conducting pilot programs both in the states and internationally to start implementing these standards of fairness.  The whole vision is to create one label that incorporates three main categories:  Relationships (from the farmer to the buyer to the farm worker to children raised on farms), Environmental Protection, and Labor Conflict and Complaint Resolution.   Their tagline is “Healthy Relationships and Healthy Environment make Healthy Food.” This fair food label, “Food Justice Certified,” is essentially a domestic Fair Trade certification that aims to cover agriculture on a large scale and bring attention to the rampant labor issues that have been left out of organics.

Despite the rise of globalization and industrial-sized organics, AJP is seeing a growing demand for fair, environmentally sound, and local ideologies.  A 2008 Produce Marketing Study indicated that within the top eight areas of focus, fair wages within the workforce was number one.  To ensure that this label takes flight, a strong third party certification must take place, along with worker representation on the inspection team as well as oversight of the certifiers by AJP for consistent compliance.

While these pilot programs are just getting started, the auditing phase is showing promise.  Testimony from some of the small farms already involved is positive and AJP hopes to expand into more regions.  Following the upper Midwest and Canada, the next training sessions will take place in the Southern states and hopefully move into California.  In tandem to these direct efforts, Capacity Building toolkits are also being developed for farmers to have more guidance towards justice goals.  Swanton Berry Farm on California’s Central Northern coast is a longtime supporter of social justice and workers rights.  Swanton is also on the Advisory Committee of AJP and has contributed labor policy templates for this toolkit.  In addition to these self-assessment ideas, they hope to introduce a pledge format for farms that might not be able to participate in the whole program.

What an exciting concept this is, for us as consumers already accustomed to searching out Organic labeling the concept of “social stewardship standards” would really complete the circle on the Slow Food search for good, clean and fair here in the states.  However, at a recent presentation of the Agricultural Justice Project in Santa Cruz, California, a farmer stood up during the Q & A period with a reminder of the biggest issue of all:  How do we make sure that there will always be farm workers?  The disrespect for actual handwork makes it increasingly difficult to entice the next generation into farming.  If this label can accomplish anything, it would be to repair the attitude of disrespect that burdens our labor force and reconstruct a system that ensures healthy relationships and participation in agriculture.