Chefs are artists. Good ones draw people in with their inspired plates and atmosphere–performance art meets flavor. While deliciousness at a restaurant is first and foremost, more patrons are now also making decisions about where to eat based on the values behind the food–like social justice for the workers, healthy growing practices, and support for local economies.

Last week in an interview with The New York Times, chefs Thomas Keller–who has received many awards for his creative approach to food at restaurants French Laundry and the Bouchon empire–and Andoni Luis Aduriz, of the restaurant Mugaritz in Spain, took the Damien Hirst approach to feeding people: It’s about the experience and whatever it takes to create radical and inspiring food is more important than the potential impact on the environment. “With the relatively small number of people I feed, is it really my responsibility to worry about carbon footprint?” remarked Keller.

Both chefs admitted that they buy local when they can, but didn’t want to focus on that as a practice. According to Aduriz, “to align yourself entirely with the idea of sustainability makes chefs complacent and limited.”

The good food movement would beg to differ. The proliferation of farm-to-table restaurants, farmers’ markets and small food businesses, and the increased visibility of food policy issues in the media all speak to a sea change under way.

Keller and Aduriz seem like dinosaurs when you compare them to younger chefs like René Redzepi of Noma, for example, who is proving that taking a local, values-driven approach to food can be inspiring, delicious and award-worthy. All three chefs’ restaurants are featured on the “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” list, but Noma is number one.

While the list is not at the heart of discussions around food, the chefs that appear there do wield an influence far beyond the people they feed day in and day out at their restaurants. As the article in the Times points out, “While their restaurants may be accessible only to the world’s 0.1 percent, chefs at top restaurants influence the entire global food community with the way they think, write, tweet, and talk about food—not just the way they cook it.”

This is not the first time Keller has made the case for quality above values. Only now, it sounds even staler than the day-old bread at Bouchon Bakery.

Food preparation can be a creative pursuit, but at the end of the day, chefs are just feeding people. They create an experience of flavor, but the results end up in someone’s stomach. And in requiring an agricultural product for their creations, a chef is reliant on nature’s whims in a way that most artists are not. This is why the locavore movement is not a trend easily dismissed, but part of a greater paradigm shift around how we view and value resources.

While reactions to the Times story continued on Twitter, scientists, advocates, and food policy media gathered last week at the Monterey Bay Aquarium for the annual Sustainable Foods Institute, part of Cooking for Solutions. The purpose of the event, according to aquarium Executive Director Julie Packard, is to explore “how the food choices we make affect the health of our soil, water, and oceans.”

In contrast to the antiquated remarks put forth by Keller and Aduriz, James Beard Award winner and owner and chef of the restaurant Dressing Room in Westport, CT, Michel Nischan, was present to be honored as Chef of the Year. He is also known for his work as President and CEO of Wholesome Wave, an organization that seeks to increase access to healthy food. They have had huge success to date through doubling the value of SNAP–food stamps–used at farmers’ markets, resulting in $1 million more spent on produce in 2010.

While not every chef feels inspired to use their celebrity and time to start an organization to help people who would probably never set foot in their restaurant, Nischan couldn’t be more in line with the food Zeitgeist. A growing number of chefs are now taking part in the evolving conversation on how we value food.

Chef Alexandra Guarnaschelli of the restaurant Butter in New York City remarked last week on a panel focused on food waste that, “Chefs can convince people to eat things that they don’t know about or normally prize.” She was eager for people to eat sardines and other forage fish, saying, “Let’s just stop eating tuna for 300 years.”

As a presentation at Cooking for Solutions by Jonathan Foley, Director of the Institute of the Environment at the University of Minnesota, demonstrated, chefs ignore the sustainability of their sources at their own peril.

“We’re running out of everything,” said Foley. “Agriculture uses up a planet’s worth of land, a planet’s worth of water and agriculture is the single biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. If you want to solve climate change you absolutely have to address agriculture and its emissions. It’s huge.”

Fixing this issue will require us to look beyond the next plate. Many great artists have produced world-renowned work within constraints. Similarly, chefs face a problem of resource scarcity that demands their creativity.

Photo: a recent plate at Noma restaurant in Copenhagen, by @ohgeffroy on Instagram.

As a health writer who often talks about the links between what gets grown and what gets put on the plate, I consider myself an advocate. I want to see people eating good food in close proximity to their homes. It never occurred to me that walking to the store—no matter what you go there to get–could get you murdered. And as a person who cares about justice, I never thought that in 2012, our system would care so little about seeking justice for this boy. He was somebody’s son. As the mother of a young black male who often walks to the convenience store by our house, my heart is broken. 

As a person who wants equity and justice for everybody, I am just mad. But there is a teachable moment here. We who work hard in the food movement often work in the silos of our own passions and forget that justice and equity move across sectors. Place matters. Race matters. Humanity matters.

The other day a young woman I know who is righteous in the food and environmental movement was upset that organic produce wasn’t getting the media attention that she thought it deserved. She wanted me to write an expose on apples. She said that it was the real social justice issue of the year. And it was also an hour after I learned about Trayvon Martin. “Why aren’t you mad as hell about the fact that all the good organic food never makes it into poor communities?” she asked.

There are a lot of things I want to see happen. I want kids to have healthy meals at school and at their homes. I want them to be educated so that they can compete in the workforce. I want there to be places that offer workers a living wage and health benefits. I want kids to be able to walk to the store to get a snack and not get killed. I want law enforcement to care enough about all our kids to protect them—even when they buy Skittles. And, I want them to have access to apples.

I still might write about apples. But I also want folks in the food movement to care about the people we want to see eating those apples. I want people to see that equity and advocacy are bigger than an apple.

Over lots of conversations with folks who are trying to make a difference, whether it is through the food we eat, the wages we earn, or where we lay our heads at night, I have learned about the notion of being a change agent. I discovered that we all come to it on our own paths, sometimes deliberately and strategically and for others it is accidental and surprising. Some are trained and groomed for the work of change, others like Trayvon Martin end up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Sometimes, sadly, young black men can become change agents by walking to the wrong convenience store in the wrong city, at the wrong moment.

There is a lot of work for us all to do together. If the food movement  wants to make real progress, we must be vigilant in addressing the truly uncomfortable things that hold us all back. We have to tear down the silos to begin to deal with the constructs of poverty, racism, and inequities wherever we see them—in the food system or in a young man with a hoodie. It all matters.

While the mainstream media has tried to paint Occupy Wall Street as a bunch of wild eyed-hippies, for many of us who live in small towns in rural America and fight to reform food and agriculture, we know better. Which is why many of us traveled from as far as Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maine to join with OWS to occupy food, farms and the land.

Family Farmers are the 99 percent!

It’s not for nothing that one Hudson Valley farmer carried a sign (one of my favorites) that said: “Civilization was built on Agriculture, not a Trading Floor!”

Unfortunately, due the rampant collusion between Republicans, Democrats and Wall Street, civilization may end on the trading floor if things continue as business as usual in our economic and political capitals.

Even though it took the massive mortgage crisis and economic collapse to wake the American people up to the vast harms caused by unchecked corporate power, farmers have been acutely aware of these issues for decades, if not centuries; one only has to remember that our nation was founded by an alliance between urban rebels in Boston and Virginia farmers.

In the tradition of uniting urban and rural, the Farmers March was planned as “a celebration of community power to regain control over the most basic element to human well-being: food. The food system has been taken over by multinational corporations to the detriment of communities, ecosystems, local economies, and soil all over the world,” said Paula Winograd and Seth Wulsin, members of the Occupy Wall Street Food Justice group. 

Taking on Economic Injustice in The City

According to AlterNet, more than “500 rural farmers, urban farmers, food laborers, community activists and former occupiers” showed up for the beginning of the day at an East Village community garden, which began with Bronx urban farmer Karen Washington telling an energetic crowd of her journey over the past two decades to create a healthy food environment for her neighborhood.

Washington, who helped found the City Farms Markets, a series of community-run farmers markets, was stunned to hear that “food was a privilege and not a right”. So she set out to change that, mainly by putting her hands in the dirt, planting seeds and feeding her community. Through her work in the Bronx, Washington is helping combat the major issues of obesity, diabetes and lack of access to healthy food faced by underserved communities.

Washington announced proudly, “I’m an urban farmer. I grow food. I feed people’s body and mind.”

Confronting Corporate Concentration from the Prairie to the Plains

Over the past three decades, the U.S. has adopted economic policies promoted by Wall Street investment banks and agribusiness monopolies that have led to massive concentration in food and agriculture. Today market concentration is so great that only four firms control 84 percent of beef packing and 66 percent of pork production, which has resulted in forcing more than 1.1 million independent livestock producers out of business since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.

No one knows that better than Colorado and Kansas rancher Mike Callicrate, who has been at the forefront of the battle against giant meat cartels in cattle country since the 1990s when he became a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against IBP, now owned by Tyson Foods.

As a result of poorly designed federal policies and failure to enforce antitrust legislation, a hallmark of Reagan laissez faire attitude towards economic policy and justice, Callicrate has watched an entire generation of family livestock farmers liquidated from farming, including more than 600,000 independent hog farmers and 500,000 cattle producers since 1980.

The crowd gathered at La Plaza Community Gardens was stunned when Callicrate told them just how out of touch the federal government is with protecting family farm agriculture when he mentioned that in the lawsuit he was originally involved in, he and other cattlemen were awarded $1.28 billion for IBP “rigging the market and stealing their cattle” but the judge reversed the decision. Even worse is the fact that when the Supreme Court had a chance to oversee tougher legal protections for family farmers, it balked, choosing to hear the Anna Nicole Smith case over the plight of America’s cattlemen.

This fact was brought home recently when the White House and the USDA refused to stand up for fair market livestock rules for family farmers known as GIPSA, which would have protected them from unfair and discriminatory contracts and implemented a packer ban on the ownership and sale of livestock, something President Obama promised on the campaign trail. Instead, the Obama administration failed to stand up for family farmers and instructed the USDA to gut their own rules to appease the Industrial Meat cartels and out of touch members of Congress.

Fighting for Seeds and the Future of our Democracy

Even worse than livestock is the concentration in the seed industry. Today one company (Monsanto) controls the patents on genetically engineered seeds for corn, cotton, soybeans and sugar beets that are planted on more than 90 percent of the acres of commodity crops farmed in the U.S., which means an estimated 80 percent of the processed food American’s eat contain GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and as a result of their manipulation of our regulatory system, most Americans have no idea what they’re eating.

In an effort to protect the rights of organic farmers and the integrity of our agricultural seed stock, Maine organic potato farmer Jim Gerritsen joined the Public Patent Foundation’s lawsuit against Monsanto and as President of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association is the lead plaintiff, along with 83 other organizations, including Food Democracy Now!.

Gerritsen made his first trip to New York City to join the Farmers March to share his concern about the loss of organic seeds to genetic contamination and the threat this poses to farmers, eaters and our food supply.

Farmers March to Zuccotti Park/ Join Occupy Wall Street in Solidarity at Liberty Square

In what can only be described as a sacred renewal of our nation’s most basic democratic rights, rural family farmers joined with urban farmers and food justice activists on a soulful three mile march, winding from the La Plaza Cultural Community Garden through the East Village, the Bowery, Chinatown and the Financial District to reach the birthplace of the Occupy Wall Street Movement, Zuccotti Park, now appropriately renamed Liberty Square.

Hundreds of fellow Occupiers awaited the crowd as they marched through the metal barricades, now lining the park into an emptied square cleared of tents only weeks before with the famous OWS drummers playing as people gathered in a Circle of Solidarity and farmers and activists shared their stories. One of the most memorable was Wisconsin organic dairy farmer Jim Goodman, who talked about milking cows, feeding people and standing up for democracy.

As twilight gathered over Liberty Square, citizens eager to plant real food and justice in their communities took part in a traditional seed swap, exchanging tomato, beet and kohlrabi seed from the Hudson Valley Seed Library, open pollinated seed from the Turtle Tree Seed, and Gerritsen’s organic wheat and corn from Wood Prairie Farm in Maine.

For those who attended the Farmers March, feelings of hope and solidarity lasted well into the night and following days, reminding us that as Americans, a diverse set of individuals that believe in liberty, freedom and justice, we must continue to stand together, rural and urban, farmer and eater, to advocate through our right of peaceful assembly to reclaim, rebuild and transform our nation to protect our health, our land and our democracy. As many signs at Occupy Wall Street camps across the country remind us: “The Beginning is Now!”

And while the mainstream media toes the line that Occupiers don’t have an identifiable plan of action that they can grasp, you can bet your organic seeds that the folks who put on and showed up to the Occupy Wall Street Farmers March not only know the root of the problems with our food supply, but are already working on building solutions as well. For many of us 99-percenters, urban, rural, eaters and family farmers, we find hope that a new generation of activists is joining the call to action in reforming our food, farms and democracy.

Originally published on Huffington Post

As it stands today, 75 percent of the population are obese or overweight and many are chronically ill with diet-related diseases. They are also largely dependent on an increasingly unhealthful and contaminated food supply that is heavily controlled by corporate interests. It’s obvious that this is our moment to drive a very important point home: Upending corporate control of the food supply is a fundamental change that must occur if the “99 percent” are to be healthy participants in a true democracy.

This could be a catalyzing moment for the food movement with a real chance for average Americans to see and hear the connection between corporate control of the food supply and our nation’s health crisis. Indeed, the declaration of Occupy Wall Street (available on its Facebook page), addresses issues the food movement has been working on for years. The declaration states, “They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.”

Author and activist Naomi Klein has been an outspoken advocate and participant in Occupy Wall Street. When asked how it connects to the food movement she said, “The protest is about the corporate takeover of democracy of our lives in every way. The food movement is inherently anti-corporate and it is inherently about rebuilding a real economy.” She continued, “The food movement is where a lot of the leadership is. Occupy Wall Street is not just about banking legislation. The food movement is paving the way for what needs to happen in manufacturing and I think it’s all connected.”

Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University agrees. “Of course Occupy Wall Street connects to the food movement,” she said. “If we had a healthier financial system, we might be able to fund better food assistance, universal school meals, a rational and effective food safety system, and production agriculture that promotes sustainability and affordable food that is healthier for people and the planet. The food movement needs to be there and its voices heard.”

While powerful players like Goldman Sachs and Fannie Mae were on the lips of nearly every American after the 2008 financial crisis, the names of industrial agriculture corporations remain largely unknown. But consider how much power they wield. Take Monsanto as an example. When Monsanto began selling its genetically modified Roundup Ready soybeans in 1996 only two percent of soybeans in the U.S. contained their patented gene. By 2008, over 90 percent of soybeans in the U.S. contained Monsanto’s gene. This is especially alarming given that soybeans account for the largest source of protein feed and the second largest source of vegetable oil in the world. According to the USDA, in 2008-09, the farm value of soybean production was $29.6 billion, the second highest among U.S. produced crops—and soy is ubiquitous in processed foods. It ends up in the meat, milk, eggs, and farmed fish many Americans consume (as a result of it being in animal feed) as well as thousands upon thousands of packaged foods usually in the form of soy protein isolate, soy isoflavones, textured vegetable protein, and soy oils. Soy accounts for a fifth of the calories in the American diet.

Monsanto has also produced genetically modified seeds for corn, canola, and cotton with many more products being developed including seeds for sugar beets and alfalfa. (To see how ferociously Monsanto protects its patented seeds watch the Oscar-nominated documentary Food, Inc.) As for corn, the highest valued U.S. produced crop, 93 percent of it is genetically engineered. Physicist and internationally renowned activist Dr. Vandana Shiva points out that the notion that genetically engineered food will improve the food supply and improve nutrition is a myth. “These are illusions that are being marketed in order for people to hand over the power to decide what to eat to a handful of corporations,” she said in an interview on her Web site.

Another corporation with broad reach and control over the foods we eat is Cargill, which rivals Monsanto in its control of the food supply. It is the largest privately held corporation in the nation, owning Cargill Pork and Cargill Beef, the second largest beef producer in North America. According to Anna Lappe’s book Diet for a Hot Planet, Cargill also owns dozens of subsidiary businesses, is one of the largest commercial cattle feeders in the U.S., the world’s biggest processor, marketer, and distributor of grains, oilseeds, and other agricultural commodities, and controls 80 percent of the European market for soybean crushing with a similar share for animal feed manufacturing.

If you eat any processed or packaged food, or anything from a typical restaurant or café, you can guarantee that Monsanto or Cargill played a role in those foods somewhere along the line. As Dr. Shiva points out in much of her work, these companies contribute to the toxification of our food supply. It’s not only the lack of nutritional value in many of these highly processed foods, but also the actual toxins that are added to genetically engineered foods. Bees, butterflies, cattle and other animals have been dying as a result of these crops, so how are they affecting humans? (You can listen to Dr. Shiva discuss this here).

If America’s health crisis is any indication, corporate control of the food supply is taking the ultimate toll. American children born in 2000 are the first generation not expected to outlive their parents as one in three is likely to develop diabetes in their lifetime, with those rates even higher for black and Latino children. The corporate monopolies over the food supply and the government’s role in facilitating corporate control translates into control over the health of the American population.

Occupy Wall Street illustrates a basic tenet of democracy; we must participate for it to function properly. We must also participate in our food system to develop local food economies that function with our interests in mind. Our first steps must be learning and teaching others about where our food comes from and how to access healthy food. We must also boycott companies like Monsanto and Cargill whose sole interest is profit, not our health or protecting the environment.

Writer, activist, and academic Raj Patel said that while Wall Street is certainly behind many problems with the food system, there is an even deeper connection between the two. “At its best, the food movement is about learning to see the politics in our everyday lives and then to take a stand against injustice,” he said. “That’s what Occupy Wall Street is doing—creating a space to learn, demand, exchange and organize.”

Occupy Wall Street understands that the corporations—whose driving force is profit not the health of the people, the country, or the environment—cannot be allowed to control our political systems. Similarly, when corporations control the food supply we are left with an unsafe and unregulated food supply with virtually no oversight and a population in the midst of a dire health crisis as a result of corporate greed and carelessness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published by CUESA

Watch the talk here:

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

On Wednesday, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, farmer, poet and food movement hero Wendell Berry, physicist and seed-saving advocate Vandana Shiva, nutritionist and professor Marion Nestle, and His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales were among the speakers at The Future of Food, a conference put on by the Washington Post at Georgetown University.

The media was quick to focus on the comments by Prince Charles, who has been farming land on his Highgrove Estate for 26 years and selling produce under the name Duchy Originals, the profits of which are given to charities. But though the Prince gave a thorough and informed 45-minute speech about soil loss, the importance of biodiversity, and a critique of U.S. agriculture policy (you can read the whole speech here), some media and online comments focused on the perceived hypocrisy of the Prince as an environmentalist with a huge carbon footprint, and the old fall-back of detractors of the food movement: Elitism.

Chris Clayton, agriculture editor for The Progressive Farmer, tweeted “You just don’t make your case of what is needed in ag by tweeting “HRH Charles… His Royal Highness says. #FoF definitely #foodelitism”

Phillip Brasher, agriculture reporter for the Des Moines Register, didn’t use the word elitist, but used hyperbole to imply it. The title of his article: “Prince Charles: Save the world with organic farming.”

Elitism has been one of the hardest critiques for the good food movement to shake. For the last 50 years, conservative politicians have gained currency by slamming their opponents as elitist, pointy-headed liberals, and “nattering nabobs of negativism.” And food, which is often viewed as a liberal cause–even though conservatives are some of its biggest supporters–has become the latest hotbed for this fight (See Cookiegate). Making things more difficult, food is personal, habitual, and even addictive, and Americans are willing to cling to cheap food despite clear and present assessments about its toll on our health, our national deficit, and effects on our air and water.

Eric Schlosser, an investigative reporter and author of Fast Food Nation, among other books, kicked off the Future of Food event by saying:

Today, the chemical companies and the biotech companies like to dismiss organic food as something trendy or elitist. Well you know who needs organic food more than anyone else? …the two million farm workers who pick by hand almost all of the fresh fruits and vegetables in the United States. And their children need organic food, too. For them, the need for organics …is literally a matter of life and death. Pesticides are poisons. They have been carefully designed to kill insects, weeds, funguses and rodents. But they can also kill human beings. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that every year, 10,000-20,000 farmworkers in the United States suffer acute pesticide poisoning on the job, and that is probably a great understatement.

Though representatives from General Mills, Panera Bread, and the Grocery Manufacturers Association sat on panels, The Future of Food did bring together many known critics of the current food system. But the question is not whether the system should change, but how.

In fact, saying the system has to change should not be controversial. While the Farm Bureau and industry groups are preparing a PR campaign to change the consumer’s mind about industrial agriculture, it has become obvious that change must happen even at big corporations like Monsanto, Mars (which sponsored the event), and Walmart, which are all constantly trying to associate their image with sustainability. Meanwhile the price of oil is rising, the world water supply is becoming more tenuous, and extreme weather conditions and biofuel production contribute to food price spikes, all of which is leading to system collapse. Letting industry defend the current food system is akin to letting climate change deniers have a seat at the table while the science has long been settled.

Moreover, the two sides in this discussion are not equals. One is supported by an army of lobbyists and lawyers who shape legislation and feed talking points to the media. The other is an upstart with popular support based on overwhelming evidence that the system we have now is broken.

Just last week we saw what happens when you give too many industry spokespeople the stage at a similar event, put on by The Atlantic magazine. That event was sponsored by DuPont, Dole, Coca-Cola, and the Council for Biotechnology Information, a group funded by the industry. Each got to place staffers on the panels in return for funding. What resulted was a biased panel on “sustainable agriculture” that focused heavily on one thing: biotechnology. It also featured a panel on obesity, during which a Dole staffer and an American Beverage Association spokesperson marginalized the debate to focus on things like soda can sizes. Dr. Zeke Emmanuel, Chair of the Clinical Center Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health, struggled to move the conversation toward discussing deeper solutions to the problem.

While bloggers lamented these biases, and asked whether or not this was what it takes to stay afloat as an independent magazine publisher, The Atlantic event was not a complete loss. White House chef and policy adviser Sam Kass spoke. The event also featured Alice Waters, who tweeted before taking the stage that, “The true elitism is a food system controlled by a handful of corporations,” and sent out a photo of the refreshments table, which featured bottles of Coke.

The Future of Food event instead featured a delicious lunch prepared by Bon Appétit Management Company, a locally-sourced and organic-committed caterer. But aside from the food served, the main critique I have of both of these events is their lack of deep, meaningful debate. For The Atlantic event, the debate was stunted by industry, for The Future of Food, there were too many people on each panel and a lack of time and direction by some of the moderators. And both events lacked diversity and youth voices. The Future of Food took place on a college campus, and yet the students who showed up didn’t stay after Prince Charles spoke. Indeed, the event could have been better publicized if the goal was to engage students on Georgetown’s campus.

If we are going to sit together in a room and discuss the finer points of food policy, we need to have real, solid debates and solutions. It’s time we get down to brass tacks about genetically modified foods, antibiotics in livestock agriculture, health concerns surrounding pesticide use, and other subjects, featuring scientists and those unassociated with industry. We need to talk about the barriers to producing research when it is missing, the consolidation in the industry and how this effects choices, and bring more farmers into these discussions to speak for themselves.

Otherwise, we should be rolling up our sleeves to build new models for food access. Dr. Hans Herren, a scientist and lead author of the IAASTD report, who was on a panel about international food policy, said it succinctly when he pointed out that we need to stop talking and writing reports and do something. “The time to act was yesterday,” he said.

Writing new policies will also help put to bed the tired old argument of whether or not organic vegetables are elitist. “Smart sustainable food policy is common sense,” said Senator Jon Tester in the closing keynote at The Future of Food. “And if you fight for it, you can win.”

In the end, calling those who want to change the food system elitist is merely a way of diverting our attention from the very real problems we face. In an opinion piece last week, Eric Schlosser wrote:

This name-calling is a form of misdirection, an attempt to evade a serious debate about U.S. agricultural policies. And it gets the elitism charge precisely backward. America’s current system of food production—overly centralized and industrialized, overly controlled by a handful of companies, overly reliant on monocultures, pesticides, chemical fertilizers, chemical additives, genetically modified organisms, factory farms, government subsidies and fossil fuels—is profoundly undemocratic. It is one more sign of how the few now rule the many. And it’s inflicting tremendous harm on American farmers, workers and consumers.

Photo: AP

In December, the Atlantic published “The 10 Biggest Food Stories of 2010,” a list that ranged from restaurant trends to food truck and butchery trends, with a smattering of food policy in between. In response, the Daily Yonder (motto: “Keep It Rural.”) ran The (Real) Important Food Stories of 2010, pointing out that the Atlantic’s list included “no mention of either the people or the places that produce food,” and that it was “heavy on New York City.” (Both true.)

Ellen Gustafson is beaming. She’s sitting at the center of a long table inside a greenhouse at the center of San Francisco’s Hayes Valley Farm and she’s surrounded on both sides by an assortment of guests representing the Bay Area food movement. Every now and then someone will get up and make a toast. The food is locally and organically produced and perfectly prepared and the table and greenhouse have been designed and built specially for the event, but it’s the toasts that have Gustafson smiling. This is the kick-off dinner for the 30 Project, Gustafson’s latest brainchild, and every toast is a new opportunity to hear stakeholders in the food world—from community leaders and authors to artists and business owners—put forth their vision for the food system of the future.

“It’s working!” she says, after a handful of people have gotten up to speak. “I had this idea, but I didn’t know if people would actually do it. And they are!”

Gustafson, a former UN World Food Program employee-turned social entrepreneur, is probably best known for her work on the FEED project, which she co-founded with George W. Bush’s niece, Lauren. The pair raised millions of dollars to provide meals for people in the developing world through sales of burlap bags emblazoned with the word FEED.

More recently, Gustafson has become known for a talk she gave at the TED conference last spring. If you’re at all interested in food and you spend any time at all online you’ve probably seen it; she starts off by saying, “When I’m hungry, I’m really pissed off,” and goes on to draw a connection between global security and food security while addressing the polarity of today’s food system in an eloquent, disarming manner. Now, Gustafson has left her role at FEED to do more speaking on the food system and to invite others to do the same.

Which brings us back to the evening’s toasts. The idea behind the 30 Project dinners is a simple one; Gustafson and her team of collaborators plan to host dinners for 30 people in 30 cities (around one dinner a month) over the next few years. But the number 30 has a deeper significance, as well. It was around 1980 (or three decades ago) when the first genetically modified crops became patentable, Gustafson pointed out. That was also around the time when high-fructose corn syrup became available on the market and other changes, such as the increasing consolidation of agriculture, really set the stage for the systematic challenges we’re facing today. “I’m making the case that our food system has been in its current state for almost 30 years,” she told the group. “We can have a better food system 30 years from today if we all sit down and talk about it.”

While Gustafson’s approach takes cues from the grassroots, she also hopes to leverage corporate interest (her CEO was most recently in marketing at PepsiCo., and representatives from Annie’s Homegrown and Safeway were both present that night). Although the 30 Project plans to use media outreach, help network its participants and convene a summit, the dinners themselves are a corner stone of the group’s strategy. And the result is perhaps as much about cultivating an  aesthetic and serving delicious food as it is about concrete steps toward systematic change.

The greenhouse and table that were built for the event were the product of C-Lab and Architecture for Humanity (and donated to Hayes Valley Farm after the event) and looked like something from the pages of Dwell or Sunset magazines. The meal itself was prepared by established chefs, each representing a unique segment of the Bay Area culinary scene: Leif Hedendal, Laurence Jossel of NOPA, and  the pastry team at Chez Panisse.

The visions put forth around the table were inspired and varied. Bob Corshen from Community Alliance with Family Farmers spoke about the importance of recognizing farmers and the traditions they carry forth, People’s Grocery’s Nikki Henderson spoke about community self-determination and food justice, Co-Fed founder Yoni Landau talked about finding connection through food, and Farmer Jane author Temra Costa addressed women in the food system. If the group present has anything to do with it, the year 2040 will see a populace well-armed with an abundance of knowledge and respect for food production—not to mention safer, healthier food that is accessible to everyone.

Near the end of the evening, Dana Harvey, executive director of Mandela Marketplace, a small community grocery store in West Oakland, stood up and made this poignant addition, “I hope, in 30 years we see a dismantling of corporate control over our food.” Harvey’s vision, and the questions it raised—about how to make real change in an increasingly privatized world when so many of the most viable solutions (e.g., farming without patented seeds or synthetic fertilizer ), seem to resist corporatization–lingered a little longer in the cool March air than the other statements.

Yet, one not need be explicitly anti-corporation to crave a revamped food system. Or that appears to be the assumption Gustafson and the 30 Project are working under. The night’s guests, themselves, represented a full continuum of beliefs, but few could argue with the idea of making space for mainstream participation in the food movement. It’s a task so large, it might only be possible through the work of the same woman who convinced the nation that a tote bag made of burlap could be fashionable.

The next 30 Project dinner will take place in San Diego at Valley Site, a farming training program for veterans in San Diego. Visit the 30 Project site to plan your own dinner.

In 2004, Morgan Spurlock‘s documentary film Super Size Me debuted. In it, Spurlock eats McDonald’s food for 30 days straight. This extreme experiment sought to document the adverse health effects of the all-to-common practice of over-eating fast food, using himself as test subject. Indeed, Spurlock gained weight, scared his doctors when his liver went south, felt depressed, lost sexual function and more. But the film also became a sort of watershed moment, shocking general audiences and thereby playing a big role in spurring growth of the food movement. I met Spurlock recently while picking up my weekly farm share (we belong to the same local CSA), and he kindly agreed to talk about the food movement, changes in the fast food industry, and how his McDonald’s binge has affected his long-term health.

McDonald’s has gotten a lot of heat since Super Size Me came out. I thought it was amazing, for example, how much media attention that non-decomposing Happy Meal photography project recently got. Do you think your movie inspired people to be more brazen in taking on fast food companies?

I think people were already questioning them. Maybe it gave them reason to know they would not get sued afterward! I do think the film did open people’s eyes, and at least opened the door to an even bigger conversation.

Are you surprised at how the interest in food and agriculture has grown since you made Super Size Me?

Yeah, I think there’s a big trend, which I am also joining. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), locally grown produce, whole farmshares and landshares are happening now. It seems like there has been, even a post-Slow Food movement–people wanting to get a healthier, better, more sustainable way of eating and living, which I think is fantastic.

You were an early pioneer of the food documentary. Do you ever consider making others?

There are great films that are out there that deal with food, [and] I think if there’s a way I can help champion some of those other filmmakers, I’d rather do that than go into making another food movie. For me, movies have to be something that if you don’t [make them], then you are going to go crazy. If you don’t tell this story, if you don’t put it on a page, if you don’t put it on film, then it is literally going to effect your brain from this moment forward. There may be something that comes along that kind of strikes me in that way, and if it does, I’ll have to tell it.

In what ways did making Super Size Me change the way you eat?

It was really after the film that I decided that I wanted to become part of a CSA, I wanted to support this whole locally grown movement. I think the biggest thing that happened after that movie was that it really turned me into someone who reads labels. It made me a really conscious consumer in a way I never had been, and I think that’s the greatest thing that could happen. I’m not going to tell anybody, hey, don’t eat fast food. I’m somebody who still loves to have a good burger, but I’m not eating a burger everyday. I may have a burger once a month.

Do you still eat fast food?

Never. [laughs]. When I am in California, I go to an In-and-Out Burger, and that is a fast food chain. But its a much smaller, and even more sustainable fast food chain. The meat when it comes in is still in a patty form, the french fries are still potatoes. There is a process of actually cooking food that happens at In-and-Out Burger. Part of the blessing of living in New York City, is that we can get all kinds of food fast. We can get good Italian food fast, we can get good Mexican food fast, I can get great Chinese food fast from a little mom-and-pop shop around the corner.

Have there been any long-term health effects following your McDonald’s binge?

I think the biggest thing is my ability to gain weight. Ever since making the movie, I can put on four or five pounds in a weekend so easily. Its incredible how my body has kind of lost its resiliency. Part of that comes with age, but it also comes with your body having all these additional fat cells that weren’t in your body before. As you create fat cells to store fat and you lose weight and those fat cells get smaller, they don’t magically vanish. They are still in your body, still swimming around waiting for you to overeat so they can store more fat.

For those of us who will never conduct such an experiment–Could you describe in one word how you felt physically after a month of eating only McDonald’s food?

Nauseous.

What do you think about the regulation of Happy Meal toys in San Francisco?

I think toys do make kids want to go to these places. But I think parents need to be brave enough to tell kids no. Parents need to claim some responsibility.

What needs to happen for fast food companies’ role to change in our society?

One of the things that is already happening is they are making companies put the calories and the fat content right up on the menus, which I think is a great idea. I think the more you can arm consumers with information, the more you start to leave the choice in their hands. In the movie we were trying to find the nutrition information [in McDonald's stores], and it was behind a door or in the basement. They didn’t even have it out. Its almost like they don’t even want you to know how bad the food is. [I think they should] let people know. Are people going to stop suddenly eating fast food? No. I mean, people haven’t stopped smoking cigarettes. That’s a product [that] when used correctly will kill you. So I think we need to arm people with as much information as possible and then ultimately let them make that choice.

You are from West Virginia. What did you think of Jaime Oliver’s Food Revolution?

I love Jaime Oliver and I loved his show. [But] I think that there were people, even people I’ve spoken to, who were turned off by the fact that there was a Brit in America kind of telling them what to do. I think that threw off audiences quite a bit and made it less accessible than it should have been. I know they are getting ready to do another version of the show, and what I think would be great in this next season is to really empower people to grow their own food. Go into these schools and build community gardens, like Alice Waters did. Get the kids hands in the dirt, get the community’s hands in the dirt. Let them do things that not only support their schools but support their local communities.

What would be your last meal on Earth?

A home-cooked meal by my mom. She is such a great cook. I would have mom cook up some pepper steak, mashed potatoes and green beans. And I am a big pie fan, but I love her chocolate cake. I’d probably have her make a three-layer chocolate cake with white icing.

Chef Ann Cooper, also known as the “Renegade Lunch Lady,” has been working to improve public school lunches from the inside first in Berkeley, and now in Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of Lunch Lessons: Changing the Way We Feed Our Children. I asked Chef Cooper a few questions for our series, Faces & Visions of the Food Movement.

Civil Eats: What issues have you been focused on?

Ann Cooper: School food. The big thing around why this is so important is that one-third of all Caucasians and one of every two blacks and Hispanics will have diabetes and will die before their parents. It’s the social equity issue of our time. If we don’t change the way kids are eating, we will start to die off. If we don’t turn this around we’ll all be obese by 2040. And it’s all about money.

I wish all the people working on these issues could just come together and agree on a platform and agree on what we’re going to do. Can we all agree to do whatever it will take? What happens in our movement is everyone has their own agenda. We saw this in the write-in campaigns and everyone’s doing great things. But there’s no one thing we can agree on. We’re in too many places doing to many things. There’s something important about saying this is the one thing we want to do. If we change school lunch and teach ‘them’ the meaning of healthy people and healthy planet, then we can fix the planet.

If we can come up with one agenda that we can all stand behind, we can beat the conservatives.

The challenge is that everyone is trying to raise money. Big business doesn’t have to raise any money. We’re all going after money from the same well. Everybody is going to the same people for money. So it’s hard to have one view so you’re no different than anyone else, therefore the foundations need to take this on as well. Foundations need to come together to build a platform people can work towards to build a more powerful outcome.

CE: What inspires you to do this work?

AC: We’re killing our kids and we’re killing them in the name of profit and we have to stop doing it. And, there’s nothing more important.

CE: What’s your overall vision?

AC: Change the way we feed our kids in America.

CE: Who’s in your community?

AC: There are people all over the country doing this kind of work. And, that’s really great. I spend most of my days dealing with the day-to-day operations of a fairly large school district, 30,000 kids, and I also have a consulting company and a foundation and I’m really wrapped up in doing this on an on-the-ground basis.

CE: What are your goals?

AC: Stop killing kids with food. Stop putting profit before nurture. To put myself out a job because the country as a whole is taking care of it’s kids.

CE: What does change look like to you?

AC: Change would be having a government that’s protecting our children that would just demand that big business profit isn’t more important than kids and the planet. That people all across the country would see kids’ health as a priority and the symbiotic relationship between healthy kids, healthy earth and healthy profits.

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

AC: We’re building the web portal. It’s really our big social engagement piece and with The Lunch Box what we’re doing is trying to give people the tools they need to start making these changes all across the country.

CE: What projects are affiliated with yours?

AC: We partner with a lot of organizations from the Kellogg Foundation, The Children’s Health Foundation, the Colorado Health Foundation, Orfalea Foundation, Whole Foods Market, Barbara’s Bakery, Allergy Kids, the Environmental Working Group, Roots of Change, Two Angry Moms, What’s on Your Plate, Farm to School and many more.

CE: What projects have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

AC: The Food Corps is a really great idea and is something I think is going to be really good. School Food Focus is working on school issues as is Farm to School.

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

AC: I don’t know. Some days I’m optimistic and some days I’m not. There’s so much money inherent in the system. Look at Michele Obama’s Let’s Move campaign, there’s no mention of kids, food or heath, there’s no money behind it. We are such a partisan politics country that I just don’t know. Though there really is a movement here. We’re working towards the next Farm Bill and CNR. There’s a lot of reason to be optimistic and partisan politics and money are just difficult to overcome.

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

AC: Depends the season I was living in. In The summer I might be walking out to the field and picking fresh tomatoes and basil and coming inside to make the perfect salad with oil and salt and pepper. But if it was in the middle of a Colorado winter: braised buffalo ribs with polenta. I’d have to pick the day and then I can answer the questions better.

Photo: Chicksspeak/Flickr