Civil Eats

When Jesse Kuhn started Marin Roots Farm at age 28, he already had dirt under his fingernails. He’d studied ag in college, managed a student farm, and worked as a landscaper. But when it came to succeeding financially in the farming business, he had a long way to go. “I was charging up my credit cards like crazy and bouncing balances back and forth,” he says. “I almost had to declare bankruptcy during the first year.”

Almost 10 years and many lessons later, Marin Roots is a well-established organic specialty produce business. “It’s a lot of people’s dream to live off the land, but the reality of it is, you have to have a plan for how you’re going to pay the bills,” says Kuhn.

His journey is not unlike that of many beginners who are eager to try their hand at farming but don’t yet have all the necessary skills and resources. In a recent report titled Building a Future with Farmers, the National Young Farmers’ Coalition (NYFC) surveyed 1,000 young and beginning farmers across the US and found that access to land, capital, health care, credit, and business training posed huge challenges. Read More

Every five years, we have the chance to influence the way our food is produced, our land is conserved, and our health is protected. The legislation that addresses these issues is known as the Farm Bill, and in 2012, it’s up for renewal. “It isn’t really a bill just for farmers,” says food journalist Michael Pollan, in this video from Nourish Short Films. “It really should be called the food bill because it is the rules for the food system we all eat by.” Read More

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

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

On Thursday, September 22, the U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance (USFRA), a new trade association made up of some of the biggest players in the food industry—including the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, Dupont, and Monsanto—hosted what they called “Food Dialogues” in Washington D.C., New York City, U.C. Davis, and Fair Oaks, Indiana.

The USFRA describes the Food Dialogues, and their broader multi-million dollar media campaign, as an effort to amplify the voice of farmers and ranchers and help consumers know more about “how their food is grown and raised.”

Sounds good, on first blush.

Most of us are in the dark when it comes to the story of our food. And, farmers and ranchers—the people working hard every day to bring us our food—are nearly invisible in mainstream media. But dig into the Alliance’s membership, and its impetus for forming, and you start to wonder whether it truly represents the voices of grassroots food producers or whether this well-funded media campaign is agribusinesses latest attempt to push back against well-documented and well-publicized concerns about the environmental and health consequences of industrial agriculture. Read More

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.” Read More

I’ve been asked to respond to a query sent out by GOOD magazine’s new food hub, in their week-long series Food for Thinkers. They ask, “What does–or could, or even should–it mean to write about food today?”

I write about food because I think it is a vital issue that has for decades been critically overlooked by the media–and thus the American public–leaving a vast backlog of interesting stories. And because I think food has the potential to unite us. Read More

Good food practices are alive in our world today. We roam farmers markets to find new recipes for familiar produce. We know that once we have seen a farm operation that treats its animals with respect that the meat produced there is the meat we want to serve at our dinner tables. And, we learn from annual potlucks, where a well-guarded family recipe makes its only public appearance, what community culture really means. In Wyoming today, 2011 marks a crucial time in state history, when citizens are fighting for their right to eat free. Read More

Last week, Haven Bourque published an article here on Civil Eats about the contradictions she found at the recent Community Food Security Coalition conference in New Orleans. While she found the conference to be very informative and a great networking opportunity, she also noted that the presence of junk food at snack times and Sodexo’s sponsorship appeared to be contradictory to CFSC’s values.

As the Executive Director of CFSC, and the responsible party for some 20 conferences over the past 13 years, I was keenly interested in her comments. Read More

Safe and sustainable: we need our food to be both, and nowhere has the case been made better than in the Academy Award-nominated documentary, Food, Inc. Earlier this month, Consumers Union, long a proponent of safe, sustainable food, hosted an Activist Summit in Washington, D.C. which featured two of the film’s leading voices: Barbara Kowalcyk, who lost her two-year-old son to beef suspected of contamination with E.coli 0157:H7, and whose struggle for tougher food safety laws is documented in the film, and Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, and the film’s co-producer. Read More

The key members of the Food Safety Working Group (FSWG) didn’t announce Michael Taylor as the new Special Food Safety Commissioner/Advisor during their press conference today, but they did announce a new, excellent public-health based approach to food safety. This is based on a new, more aggressive approach to the three core principles of prevention, improving enforcement, and improving response to and recovery from foodborne disease outbreaks, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. Food Pol expert Marion Nestle of Food Politics, however, is confirming that Michael Taylor has gotten the job.

During today’s announcement, Secretary Sebelius thanked Rep. John Dingell and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, longstanding champions of food safety, before she introduced her FSWG partners, Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack and Vice President Joe Biden. Read More

The New York Times ran a special food-themed issue of its Sunday magazine a week back. It was kicked off by a fine piece by Mark Bittman, who observed quite rightly that the conversation being had in the magazine’s pages reflects America’s new, and healthy, interest in what they’re eating. Read More

Yesterday, Michael Pollan spoke on The Leonard Lopate Show on New York Public Radio about his New York Times Magazine article, Farmer in Chief: What the Next President Can and Should do to Remake the Way We Grow and Eat Our Food.  He argues that we should “re-solarize” the food system, an essential step to the energy independence both candidates are talking about because bringing food from farm to plate is responsible for 20% of our oil consumption.  His plan touches on the cultural elements of food: a re-valuation of farming, changing the federal definition of food, the future president’s role in re-engaging us about what we eat.  He also suggests a new view of policy, which currently has us mired in corporate welfare and poor land stewardship.  For this all to work, he says, we need more farmers, and those farmers need to have access to land, resources and education.  And we need a President who is willing to look at the long term effects our current practices are having (like factory farm operations, shown in the photo above, and the multiple waste lagoons we as taxpayers probably helped pay for), and be willing to make a definitive change.  Listen to the program here. Read More