Mark MacInnis is a native-born Detroiter who returned in 2009 to document a burgeoning urban farming community that is converting abandoned lots and open spaces into local food production and a sustainable food system. His film, Urban Roots, takes a close look at what happens to a city after a post-industrial collapse and suggests a new type of American Dream – one founded on nourishing community through the creation of a local economy. In a place where 46.6 percent of children live below the poverty line, there is an urgent need for change.

Having interviewed over 50 people during a two-year span, MacInnis has created a film that speaks to the “positive spirit” of the urban farming movement. He “pulled the weeds, bailed some hay” and grew to know the community as an inducted member. “There’s a bond that takes place when you’re working together on that farm that you can’t really find in other places,” he says. “You’re laughing; you’re working; you’re sweating; you’re bonding over food.” There is much potential in the city’s neglected 40,000 plots of land – and the vibrant marketplace they could create.

“It’s [Detroit] not Chicago, or San Francisco, or LA, where land is so coveted,” MacInnis offers for comparison. And still, the issues around zoning laws and land ordinances remain fuzzy at best. Some of the farmers featured in the film do not own the property they tend. Chickens are raised in dilapidated houses, plants are grown on unsanctioned plots – productivity blooming without official permission. Then there is D-Town Farm, an operation of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which manages a seven-acre plot of land through partnership with the Detroit Area Regional Outreach Training Center for Growing Power Inc. Legal or illicit, these plots of land are thriving as agricultural spaces, so it seems only logical that the state should reconsider outdated regulations that were designed for a city of two million during the 1950 heydays. Now, as the city population has diminished to approximately 700,000, community-powered farmers want new regulations for city land use. By becoming producers, urban farmers are taking part in an improved, fair, localized food system – and they want to keep it that way.

Various perspectives within the movement are presented: There’s Matt Allen from Hantz Farms – a superpower of urban agriculture with Big Ag tendencies; former Mayor, Dennis Archer; and finally city planner, Kathryn Underwood. Each responds differently to the question of what revitalization means for the Detroit. MacInnis and his crew lend their own voices to the conversation. “We want to attach action,” he explains, when asked about the next steps for Urban Roots. Tree Media, Urban Roots’ production company, is doing just that, coming “full circle with story-telling” through their Farms in Schools initiative. Tree Media’s foundation currently supports a school garden at Garfield High School in Los Angeles and five more pilot schools will be added once they raise the funds to expand their programming. (You can help their efforts by donating here.)

To date, Urban Roots has been screened all over the world: in churches, at festivals, in breweries, at community centers and during neighborhood gatherings. MacInnis estimates that over 100,000 people have watched the film so far, and in July the film will appear in theaters. He also encourages interested people to contact Tree Media to organize a screening. “The film is not done yet. The whole mission is not done yet,” declares MacInnis.

Detroit farmers will continue to build their city from the roots upward. There is still much to be done to guarantee a protected system that honors their communal desire to grow a productive, secure and sustainable economy. But at the end of Urban Roots, their vision remains intact and fortified.

With the closing words of community farmer, Greg Willerer, we begin to see what a revitalized Detroit can look like:

“We’re not trying to create another institution. We’re trying to create a bunch of small 1-2 acre urban farms. To me, that’s pretty wise, because when you think about – from an urban planning standpoint – why do people go to New York or Toronto? They go there to see that whole labyrinth of stuff to do. And pretty soon, maybe in another 5 or 10 years, we’re going to have our own mosaic of small, urban agriculture businesses here.”

Originally published on The Edible Schoolyard Project

I went to the Occupy Wall Street march last week, as part of the NYC food justice delegation. We carried baskets of farmers’ market vegetables and signs reading “Stop Gambling on Hunger” and “Food Not Bonds.” Food justice advocates came out from around the city—urban farmers, gardeners, youth, professors, union members, and community organizers. The vegetables attracted a lot of attention. Food so often attracts a lot of attention—the New York Times is just one of the outlets to focus in recent days on the makeshift kitchen at Zuccotti Park. What was more surprising were all of the puzzled looks we got from the bloggers, photographers, and other marchers who wanted to talk to us. “What’s the connection here with food?” we were asked many times.

The connection of the protests with food, of course, runs from the local to the global, the specific to the ephemeral. Food justice advocates are connecting with Occupy sites all around the country to donate fresh, healthy, local food or to help find kitchen space. On a broader philosophical level, as Mark Bittman writes in the Times, “Whether we’re talking about food, politics, healthcare, housing, the environment, or banking, the big question remains the same: How do we bring about fundamental change?”  But there are also clear and specific reasons that all of us working for a just and fair food system, as the food movement should make the connection between our work and Occupy Wall Street explicit and strong.

In the U.S. today, the richest one percent hold 40 percent of the wealth, while almost one in five Americans is on food stamps.  Rampant Wall Street speculation on commodities is driving up food costs, small farmers are being driven off their land, and agribusiness holds monopoly control of our seeds and stores. In this climate, the struggle against massive wealth disparities, unregulated financial institutions, and excessive corporate power is our struggle as well. Two points in the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City address the food system. While barely scratching the surface of the potential connections, the protesters have provided an important opening for the food movement. Will we seize it?

Speculation Drives up Food Costs

At the most obvious level, as the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy recently wrote, “Wall Street deregulation has not only made the stock market extremely volatile, it has increased prices and price volatility in agricultural markets.” That is, the relationship between government and Wall Street firms has turned food into commodity like any other, subject to the whims of the market. For decades, only people directly involved in agriculture (e.g., farmers) could freely participate in trade of futures of agricultural commodities (e.g., corn, soy, wheat). Outside speculators were allowed into these markets but with strictly enforced limits to how much they could buy. Futures trading served a practical purpose, giving farmers a guaranteed price for future harvests, and prices stayed relatively stable and reasonable for both buyers and sellers.

But in 2000, a wave of industry-backed deregulation raised and then removed these limits on speculation, which opened commodity markets to a flood of new players—these later included funds controlled by some of the biggest Wall Street firms looking for new investment opportunities after the housing bubble burst. Flooded with new investments unconnected to any direct stake in crop prices, in 2008, the commodity markets exploded, driving up grain prices worldwide. The grain price spikes were catastrophic for millions of people worldwide. Farmers, who sometimes benefit from high grain prices, mostly were no better off, because similarly skyrocketing energy prices also drove up prices of agricultural inputs.

In 2008 and 2009, the UN estimated that an additional 130 million people were driven into hunger by the food price bubble. Spontaneous food riots broke out in dozens of countries where chronic hunger is a reality. Today’s Wall Street protests are not unconnected to those; the effects of food and energy speculation continue in 2011. A study in June by University of Massachusetts Amherst professor Robert Pollin estimates that U.S. gasoline prices are $0.83 higher per gallon due to Wall Street speculation. The CEO of ExxonMobil said he estimates prices are $1.20 to $1.40 higher per gallon. And food commodity prices are as high, or higher, than they were in 2008—while 46 million Americans are now living below the poverty line, struggling with basic expenses like food.

A New Colonialism

Wall Street firms aren’t just gambling on food prices, they have begun speculating on land as well. Alerted to the potential market in agriculture, investors are buying up huge parcels of farmland all over the world, displacing the occupants, and converting subsistence production to cash crops—or, worse, simply leaving the land fallow and waiting for its value to increase. According to international NGO GRAIN, which first reported on this trend in 2008, more than 50 million hectares of land has been transferred from farmers to corporations since 2009. “Land grabs” have affected tens of thousands of people around the world who have been driven off their land–often violently–with little or no compensation, given no say in the process, and left with no recourse. For most of them, land is their livelihood; without it, the future is bleak.

Land grabs are perpetrated by governments, private sector corporations, pension funds, and university endowments–as well as by banks and international finance groups. Some of these deals have a stated agenda of food security in the buyer country–at the expense of food security of those moved off the land–but many others are purely business deals, seeking to profit off of land on which millions of people are merely trying to feed themselves.

Too Big to Feed Us

Meanwhile, U.S. agribusiness is getting bigger and bigger, and, like the financial sector, is subject to less and less government regulation or oversight. When the top four companies in any industry control over 50 percent of the market, that industry is at risk of being controlled by a monopoly. Right now, the top four companies control 85 percent of the nation’s beef, 70 percent of pork, and 60 percent of the nation’s poultry. Monsanto holds patents on 80 percent of corn seed.

On the grocery store side, Walmart didn’t even sell groceries twenty years ago, but it now controls nearly 30 percent of the US retail grocery market–and over 50 percent in many regional markets. A marketplace dominated by just a few players is subject to abuse of all kinds. Grain farmers, for example, are suffering: With often only one seller of inputs and one buyer for their crops (which is frequently the same company), they are forced to accept both prices, even if it means they don’t break even. Ultimately, many U.S. family farmers, like those in developing countries, are being driven off their land, because they can’t afford to stay in business.

All along the food chain, people are squeezed by powerful corporations: Walmart demands low prices from its suppliers, so the suppliers cut wages for workers in the factories and fields; most food stores rely on a single national buyer, so it is almost impossible for small producers to get products onto the shelves; supermarket chains buy out the competition and then close the only store in a low-income neighborhood.

The level of consolidation all along the food chain has reached such an extreme degree that last year the Department of Justice and the USDA conducted an investigation into antitrust issues in agriculture and food. During a year of workshops, the Departments heard expert testimony and thousands of personal stories about farm foreclosures, bankruptcy, workers’ rights abuses, unfair contracts, poor access to healthy food, and corporate propaganda; much of it demonstrating that antitrust laws are not protecting citizens from powerful corporations. The investigation concluded in December; the Departments issued a joint letter in July stating that they are continuing to study the issue. After a year of investigation, testimony, and almost a quarter of a million petition signatures requesting immediate action, the promise of nothing more than further study makes it seem as though the voices of big business have been louder than those of the people.

Many food justice advocates are well aware that to truly create a healthy and just food system, we must also address issues larger than food.  At a town hall meeting in Iowa the night before the first DOJ/USDA hearing, a family farmer from near Des Moines wanted to talk not about his farm, but about power. “Industry cannot turn one wheel unless people make those machines work,” he said. “We have the power here, and we need to understand what that power means.”

To change the food system, we need systemic change in financial institutions, regulation, corporate influence; we need a shift in power. For a movement that has long been waiting for its moment, uniting in common cause with Occupy Wall Street may be the way to finally build enough power to create the change we need.

Photo: Amy Schneider

Thanks to Dave Kane, Christina Schiavoni, and Maria Aguiar for invaluable assistance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published on Huffington Post

The now-popular idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) dictates that businesses should take it upon themselves to forgo profits their shareholders demand so they can address social problems. But, as Aneel Karnani posits in a recent essay in the Wall Street Journal, the reasoning behind CSR is flawed. Publicly traded companies, including those that produce the lion’s share of our food, are required by law to prioritize maximizing profits to satisfy their shareholders, who are generally taken to desire profit above all else.

Executives who have a mind to put the public good over profits are invariably stopped short, since they are seen to be acting against their stakeholders’ interests. “The movement for corporate social responsibility is in direct opposition, in such cases, to the movement for better corporate governance, which demands that managers fulfill their fiduciary duty to act in the shareholders’ interest or be relieved of their responsibilities,” Karnani writes.

This obsession with profit at all cost plays out in many ways in the U.S. food system. Companies that advertise unhealthy foods to kids and market an endless smorgasbord of processed crap in the face of an obesity epidemic are galling examples. Add to that list restaurants that offer massive portions to a population too fat for its own good, companies that cut corners with sanitation to get ahead, and agribusinesses that destroy our productive soils and drain our water supplies.

In a perfect world, we could subscribe a simple return to ethical standards of behavior to fix this problem. But Karnani by necessity holds out several other solutions, including government regulation and watchdog groups. But he doesn’t mention one of the most innovative possibilities: public companies that are allowed to be as motivated by a quest for societal good as they are by profit. Luckily, we already have these, in the form of the Low-profit Limited Liability Company (L3C) and the B-Corp.

The L3C and the B-Corp structures let shareholders demand more than just money. In both of these instances, the companies in question are tasked both with remaining profitable and maximizing social benefit. Profits may be reduced by the company’s hybrid goals, but shareholders expect and support such compromise. Companies with such joint priorities are referred to as “double bottom line” enterprises.

The L3C is a new form of business entity classified by the IRS, which is meant to work as a link between for-profit investing and philanthropic action for socially beneficial ends. The B-Corp, on the other hand, is a regular corporation that has been certified by Pennsylvania’s B Lab as being a socially responsible business. Part of this process involves the corporation rewriting its articles of incorporation to signify that the business plans to take the interests of societal stakeholders such as communities and the environment into account.

These new types of businesses could, if they come to take a prominent enough position in our business universe, basically replace CSR. Karnani argues compellingly that CSR is a mirage, and that any who spend their time trying to institutionalize this illusory principle are distracting us from more proactive action we could be taking for the common good.

He writes:

Very simply, in cases where private profits and public interests are aligned, the idea of corporate social responsibility is irrelevant: Companies that simply do everything they can to boost profits will end up increasing social welfare. In circumstances in which profits and social welfare are in direct opposition, an appeal to corporate social responsibility will almost always be ineffective, because executives are unlikely to act voluntarily in the public interest and against shareholder interests.

Instead of demanding that profit-motivated companies work against their stated interests, we should be working to increase support and demand for companies that have the quest for social benefit built into their priorities. We are far more likely to secure the common good by working with allies than trying to force CSR concessions from businesses with no motivation to compromise their profits.

Food businesses are particularly appropriate for these new types of double-bottom-line structures because food is not just another commodity like, as Bill Clinton once said, “a color television set.” The availability, cost, and abundance of food and the health, stability, and well-being of societies go hand in hand, so it’s hardly a stretch to say that food-related businesses should be concerned with the larger social picture.

This idea might have a major impact if we all started understanding, supporting, and investing in it. I, for one, imagine a future in which such double-bottom-line models are standard practice, and profit-only companies are seen as relics of a barbaric past.

Originally published by Huffington Post

Gawande goes on to explain that agriculture was, like health care, a ridiculously expensive and yet crucial sector in the early 1900s, when “more than forty per cent of a family’s income went to paying for food…and farming was hugely labor-intensive, tying up almost half the American work-force.” The author credits former “agricultural explorer” Seaman Knapp, hired by the USDA in 1903, with getting farmers to farm differently through efforts that started with a pilot program. Knapp’s work began in Texas, where he encouraged a single farmer to test out a list of simple innovations, including “deeper plowing and better soil preparation, the use of only the best seed, the liberal application of fertilizer, and thorough cultivation to remove weeds and aerate the soil around the plants.” The success of this initial program led other farmers to follow Knapp’s guidance, leading to similar “demonstration farms” across the country and to the establishment of the USDA Cooperative Extension Service, employing seven thousand extension agents nationwide by 1930. Other USDA pilot programs led to comparative-effectiveness research, investment in providing farmers with weather forecasts, seasonal statistics, and tremendously helpful information broadcasting. Gawande claims that the “hodgepodge” of pilot programs led to ultimately successful change, in that agricultural productivity increased dramatically, food prices fell by over fifty per cent, and farming came to employ only twenty per cent of the workforce by 1930. “Today,” he goes on, “food accounts for just eight per cent of household income and two per cent of the labor force. It is produced on no more land than was devoted to it a century ago, and with far greater variety and abundance than ever before in history.”

Testing, Testing makes several worthwhile, take-home points. The author characterizes the reformation of the health care system (like the transformation of the agricultural system) as a problem which is not “amenable to a technical solution,” or a “one-time fix,” but rather one that requires a process of change. He recognizes farming and medicine as both involving “hundreds of thousands of local entities across the country.” And he encourages his readers to resist their cynical reaction to the government, writing that his solution is one in which the government “has a crucial role to play,” to guide the system, rather than running it. He rather shockingly fails to mention, however, the failure of the agricultural transformation that is his model for modern day health care reform.

The failure of the 20th century agricultural transformation is made manifest in the one product that (appropriately enough) both farming and health care would ideally generate: human health.

Over the past century, food prices have indeed gone down, agricultural production has indeed gone up, and America has, on paper, been relieved of devoting to agriculture the significant force of labor formerly required by farming. This was all considered a success for several decades, until obesity, diabetes, early sexual maturity, and E. coli food poisoning (along with dozens of other health problems) were recently recognized as the effects of industrial agriculture. The modern American diet – of highly processed foods made with high fructose corn syrup, meat from animals injected with antibiotics and hormones, and genetically modified foods not quite approved for human consumption – is one of the main causes of our deteriorating health. Not to mention that industrial agriculture has irreparably damaged our nation’s environmental health, has dangerously demolished biodiversity, and still employs a fantastically under-paid, under-represented workforce of undocumented immigrants.

Gawande perhaps deserves the benefit of the doubt, for his article is optimistic, and encourages the American people to see more in the new health care bill than 2,074 pages that do not “even meet the basic goal that [we] had in mind: to lower costs.” But his comparison begs for the recognition of what went wrong in the transformation of agriculture, because of a lack of holistic thinking, of preventative solutions, of respect for resources. This time around, unless we are careful, the price drop and the productivity increase will still not provide the one thing we all want more than a smaller bill. It will not provide us with health.

Cross-posted from Thoughts on the Table

Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty says, “That so many young men had such substandard diets that they were unfit for military service [during World War II] was a matter of national chagrin and a threat to national security. This was the impetus for the creation of the national meal program to feed malnourished children and thus to ensure the nation’s future soldiers were fit to fight its battles.”

America has come a long way since then. Nowadays, diet-related diseases are due to eating too much food, not too little. As such, the vegetable-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex have collided head on. Many of today’s would-be recruits are too fat to serve, according to a new report by the non-profit Mission: Readiness. The report found that 75 percent of young people ages 17 to 24 are unable to enlist in the United States military. Over one-third of those unable to serve are unfit because they are overweight. The military turns away 15,000 potential recruits every year because they are too heavy. The U.S. spends more on defense than the entire rest of the world combined, and while much of our military largesse consists of machinery and contractors, the military still relies on a steady stream of recruits. This is particularly true now, as troops cycle through Iraq and Afghanistan again and again until many are no longer physically or mentally capable of returning for another tour of duty.

To find out how this happened, we should go back to the beginning of both “complexes”– World War II. As the U.S. rapidly expanded its production capacity for the war effort, it essentially built up an industry that would have no one to sell to once the war was over. What do you do if you’re a fighter jet manufacturer and your nation is no longer at war? Demand for your products is inherently going to be limited. You might even go out of business! That’s where the two complexes come in. In some cases, the industries feeding the war effort just continued to grow and prosper as the U.S. entered into the Cold War and continued to stockpile arms and prepare for the war with the Soviet Union Americans were told was just around the corner. Other World War II inputs, like pesticides, were converted to civilian uses — mostly agriculture.

The roots of pesticides go back as far as gas warfare in World War I, but that was nothing compared to the adoption of DDT after World War II. During World War II, malaria posed an enormous threat to U.S. troops in the Pacific and DDT was touted as the mosquito-killing hero that allowed us to overcome malaria so we could ultimately defeat the Japanese. (In reality, other tactics, such as draining standing water where mosquitoes bred, had begun to decrease the malaria threat before DDT reached the scene, but DDT got the credit for the victory.)

DDT’s manufacturer, a Swiss company called Geigy, could not keep up with American demands for the pesticide, so the U.S. brokered a deal with other companies, including DuPont, Merck, and Monsanto, arranging for them to produce DDT for the war effort on the condition that they would be allowed to produce it after the war as well. In similar fashion, excess World War II planes became crop dusters and ammonia used for explosives was churned into our soil for fertilizer. Thus, the same war that birthed the military-industrial complex also gave rise to industrial agriculture, which produces the majority of food consumed in the U.S. today.

Just as the military-industrial complex relies on a bloated U.S. defense budget to keep it in business, the vegetable-industrial complex relies on the American people to purchase the massive quantities of food corporate farmers produce. It doesn’t matter much to producers whether the food is eaten or thrown away (as a projected 40 percent of it is) so long as the food is grown, processed and paid for, and they pocket the profits. Often, very simple, healthy foods are turned into less healthy foods in order to make more money. Whole grains are refined and combined with sugar and artificial flavors and colors to make nutritionally lacking breakfast cereals, for example. Whereas the breakfast cereal is less healthy than its whole grain ingredients, whole grains cannot be branded, advertised, and sold for premium prices like Froot Loops or Lucky Charms. Furthermore, for food companies to report increased earnings to Wall Street every quarter, the U.S. population must eat more and more. And we do. In the last three decades, obesity has doubled among adults and tripled among children.

The U.S. government played a role in the buildup of the vegetable-industrial complex from the start, legalizing and promoting pesticides and fertilizers and then making policies that would favor large farms while putting small and mid-sized farms out of business. On the other end, the U.S. government approved processed foods containing questionable if not downright unhealthy ingredients, sometimes even after the ingredients were proven harmful. For example, artificial food dyes are linked with behavioral problems in children, and while they are illegal in some countries, they are perfectly legal here. The U.S. government also buys up surplus commodities and distributes them to the National School Lunch Program. The commodities purchased for the school lunch program turn the food pyramid on its head, providing schools with a lot of meat and dairy but very few fruits and vegetables. While that made perfect sense back when we were a nation worrying about having enough to eat, it no longer makes sense now that we are a nation plagued with obesity. Feeding our kids too much of the wrong foods is causing massive problems, as obesity skyrockets.

Unfortunately, these two “complexes” share the same target: teenage boys. The same segment of our population that the military wants to enlist is also remarkable in their ability to eat large quantities of unhealthy food. (This is true to a lesser extent with teenage girls.) Thus, the two complexes have collided head on.

In decades past, the National School Lunch Program served both complexes, providing a market for Big Agribusiness and protecting America’s youth from malnutrition. But now it’s clear that both our military and our food systems need reforming. Spending half of our budget on defense serves nobody except for defense contractors, and the food produced by corporate agriculture has resulted in an epidemic of diet-related health problems. In order to raise healthy young people who are capable not just of military service but of leading productive lives in all segments of society, we must take measures that will reduce the profits of the vegetable-industrial complex and create a food system in which health comes before the corporate bottom line.

Originally published on AlterNet

This is an old phenomenon in our country. Studies have documented a strong link between cotton crop failures in the South and the incidence of lynchings of African-Americans. In the 19th Century, economic depressions were often accompanied with an increase in “nativist” sentiments; established immigrants attacking the most recent immigrants as “un-American”.

Richard Hofstadter’s classic work, Anti-Intellectualism in America presents these “know nothing” reactions as an inherent part of the American Revolution’s anti-aristocratic roots — one of the original “them” and “us” moments that divide and define our nation. (The historical irony of largely well-off Republicans dressing as revolutionaries at tea parties over the past summer has escaped most reporters.)

The rise in antipathy we are experiencing today has a more disturbing dimension because it is based, in large part, on a series of failures so profound as to threaten our very way of life. This is particularly true of food.

The industrial system in agriculture depends on cheap oil, surplus water, and stable climate to operate. All three of these pre-conditions are becoming increasingly questionable, yet there is little acknowledgment of this truth in the corridors of government and corporation power. Indeed, the handful of corporations which control the US food system today engage in a systematic misrepresentation of our situation that verges on lying.

This lie of industrial agriculture is at the heart of the increasing vitriol in the public debate about food. The growing assault on the so-called agri-intellectuals — Michael Pollan, Christopher Cook, Eric Schloesser, Francis and Anna Lappe, and others (referred hereafter to as Michael et al) — reflects something more than class (working farmers vs. educated elites) and geographical (the farm heartland vs. the coasts) differences that now dominate the conversation.

Michael et al function today like that boy in the crowd who couldn’t see the new clothes worn by king and called out “he is naked”. They challenge the basic design assumptions of the entire industrial agricuture system and worse, much of the global economic system, as well.

In doing so they raise the emotionally-laden specter of our civilization and our nation being “out of control” as the majority of people understand “control” –- a kind of predictability they can count on in making day-to-day decisions about their lives.

I believe ordinary people, in their guts, know, in the words of Fox Commentator Glenn Beck, “SOMETHING JUST DOESN’T FEEL RIGHT” (his emphasis). Now, I am definitely not a fan of Glenn Beck, who is a racist and a fear monger. But we can’t ignore that there is growing unease about the failure of our current systems, an unease Beck skillfully promotes and exploits.

I believe what “doesn’t feel right” is a growing sense that the financial, industrial design paradigm that promotes a global, resource intensive global economy (including food) is failing.

The evidence of this failure fills the news everyday. In the massive institutional failure on Wall Street, in the health insurance system, in Washington and state capitols, many people can see their personal, family, and community security crumbling. All people, regardless of ideology or party, are increasingly confused about what is happening and, as a result, are increasingly anxious about the future. In 19th Century cotton economy terms, it is time for a lynching of the “other”.

With trillions of dollars at stake, industrial agriculture hires PR/astroturf consultants and supports right wing surrogates to attack the science, the advocacy, and the pioneers of a true healthy, local food system through caricatures, smears, and fear.

Most local food revolutionaries are too polite, too inexperienced, or too afraid to confront these attacks. The little resistance raised is often drowned out by the volume of the right wing media noise machine. This absence has consequences.

As Malcolm Gladwell wrote, “If a window is broken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares and no one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal that anything goes.” Our food system is a broken window that we are ignoring.

We are at a moment of fundamental change, not just in a trough of an economic cycle. To survive and prosper, we all must stand up and be honest about the challenge we face and the need for healthy, local food.

Consumer advocates for sustainable, healthy food are fighting with farmers, not because either picked a fight with the other, but because the knowledge gap between them has grown so expansive that misunderstandings rule the day. Credit the gap to industrial specialization and consumer marketing, which I will return to in a moment. Often times, these misunderstandings turn personal, further driving apart two groups that have much to gain by working together.

How this benefits the industrial food players may not be obvious, but by fighting amongst ourselves, we are paying less attention to the mechanized system generating massive amounts of unhealthy, environmentally unfriendly food and unprecedented concentrations of profits.

For the average consumer, and likely many farmers, the “black box” of industrial food is a mystery. There is little to no transparency, except through increasingly common investigative journalism and documentaries, which industrialists and their associations quickly line up to discredit.  Keeping us in the dark allows industrial food processors and large food retailers to paint an idyllic picture of grassy fields and red barns backed annually by an estimated $33 billion¹ spent on advertising to reinforce a desired, yet highly inaccurate image of where our food comes from.

Unfortunately, they have most of us fooled, which is why it is critical that we – consumers and farmers alike – find a shared set of priorities to unite our voices in securing safe, healthy, tasty food for generations to come. Let us abandon overused stereotypes and language that divides us, and instead concentrate on educating consumers about where the food they eat comes from, including industrial and “alternative” food systems.

Closing the farm-to-plate knowledge gap won’t be easy. With the earliest advances in agriculture resulting in food surpluses, people, no longer physically needed on the farm, moved to urban centers to pursue non-agricultural careers. As the years passed and the complexity of the food system increased, people came to rely, exclusively in most cases today, on food processors and retailers to provide for them. In effect, we traded knowledge for convenient, cheap food.

On the surface, this seems like a great tradeoff, and for most of agriculture’s history it has been. Civilizations prospered. Farmers made a decent living. Consumers readily found fresh produce, meats, and other ingredients to prepare wholesome, nutritious, tasty meals. But things started to change. Industrialization intensified. Corporate consolidation accelerated. Seeds became intellectual property (protected by patents). High-paid lobbyists proliferated. Politicians bowed. And, most important, people stopped paying attention.

Take a snap shot of today’s food system. Study the details. What you find are a number of increasingly dramatic side effects that most people are not aware of, most of which are getting worse.

• Today’s average farmer makes about 55 percent less money for the food they grow than they did 50 years ago. According to the USDA, farmers’ share of consumer food expenditures dropped from about $0.40 per dollar in 1950 to around $0.19 in 2006. The balance of consumer expenditures, termed the Marketing Bill, goes to “value-add” (i.e., industrial food companies).
• While farmers’ financial situations have deteriorated, food manufacturers’ fortunes have skyrocketed to the tune of $3.1 trillion in revenues per year with above average profit margins. Judging by the fact that the Top 50 Food Processors and Top 50 Supermarket & Grocery Chains all have over $1.0 billion in annual sales, with Wal-Mart topping the list at nearly $100 billion, increasing concentrations of power are clear.
• One billion people are obese, thanks in part to value-add convenience foods (e.g., fast food, prepared meals, snacks, sodas), massive advertising campaigns, and time-constrained lifestyles (e.g., two income households with kids). This, while another one billion people go hungry, bypassed because they are unable to provide profit margins required by industrial food.
• According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, obesity (one of the “western diseases” attributed to diet) accounted for $75 billion in extra medical costs in 2003. The Journal of the American Medical Association attributed some 112,000 premature deaths in 2000 to obesity. These additional health care costs, half of which are paid for by taxpayers, have all but erased the cost-of-living savings claimed by the makers of cheap, convenient food. And it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
• Analysis by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization reports that agriculture contributes 14% of human-released greenhouse gases each year, through methane from livestock and rice paddies, nitrous oxide from fertilizers, and fossil fuel use during production. In an era where controlling carbon emissions is critical, the industrialized food system must change or give up market share to environmentally friendly alternatives.

We have turned our food over to a system that doesn’t have our best interests in mind, despite what billions of dollars of advertising tell us. Power is concentrated, not by farms or consumers, but by multi-national corporations. Increasing complexity rules the day, making it harder for even those in industry to keep food safe. And the halls of Congress are jammed with food system lobbyists fighting for more power, or, at a minimum, maintaining the status quo.

It’s up to us – farmers and consumers – to take back control of the food we eat. At a minimum, we need to fight for the checks and balances needed to ensure safe, affordable, and environmentally-friendly food for generations to come. It won’t be easy given the stacked deck industry is playing with. But by thoughtfully considering each other’s perspectives, while separating ourselves from the complex, concentrated, industrial food system, we will find the common ground necessary to drive the change we seek.

Now, more than a half a century after that first declaration, that same date brought the movie Food, Inc. to theaters, a film that reveals the dysfunction of our food system. With obesity rates at the highest point in history, contaminated food regularly sickening thousands, and government estimating we will continue to spend 6.2% more on healthcare annually (this year, an additional $200 billion, more than our annual economic growth of 4.1%), it is clear that we have a problem as big as smoking: an addiction to cheap, unhealthy food perpetuated by an industry intent on maximizing profits at the expense of our health and our land. It is time to regulate Big Food by changing the culture in Washington that allowed it to proliferate.

According to a recent study [pdf] by Kelly D. Brownell and Kenneth E. Warner at Yale University, the food industry is using “similar legal, political, and business strategies” that were once employed in tobacco, including dismissing peer-reviewed studies that make a connection between their product and disease, paying scientists to produce pro-industry studies, denying the addictive nature of their products to create doubt in the minds of consumers, and advertising heavily to children. A powerful lobby also ensures that agribusiness as usual is maintained in Washington.

But we know the food system as it stands right now isn’t working, and that it isn’t sustainable. Cheap processed food requires commodities like corn, soy, wheat, and rice. The production of these crops currently depends on industrial-scale, acreage-intensive monoculture that is in turn not feasible without surplus water, cheap oil and fertilizer, and a stable climate, all of which are at risk for becoming scarce.

Instead of taking a seat at the table, Big Food has renounced as “junk science” peer-reviewed studies showing the correlation to obesity with the proximity to a fast food restaurant. It has actively denied the science proving the relationship between soda consumption and weight problems and diabetes. Big Tobacco spent years insisting that there wasn’t enough evidence that smoking caused lung cancer. The results were that millions of people had to die before the government acted.

Good health, food safety and sustainability will never exist in our current food system. Big Food is standing in the way of change with agribusiness campaign funding and corporate ties moving through the Washington revolving door that brings lobbyists, consultants and strategists to high level positions. Historically, thirty-two members of the Senate Agriculture Committee and fifty of the House Agriculture Committee have had these ties to industry.

We were able to rattle the grip of Big Tobacco loose and we can start to do so now with Big Food by tightening campaign finance reform. Agribusiness is one of the largest lobbying interests in the capital, spending nearly 140 million in 2008 according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In creating a system based on public financing, their power could be greatly diminished. Food production is controlled from seed to supermarket shelf by a handful of companies [pdf], who are in effect deciding what we can and cannot access to eat. 83.5% of all beef-packing was controlled by 4 companies in 2007, while the numbers for pork-packing (66%), chicken processing (58.5%) and turkey (55%) reflect the same lack of competition. This extends to soy bean crushing (80%) and wet corn processing (74%), both sectors producing many of the ingredients in the processed foods we consume. President Obama has promised to take a hard line on anti-trust regulations, including those impacting agricultural companies. This would be a great start to building a better food system.

In addition, our government should fully fund unbiased studies assessing the long term sustainability of our food system. Most food research is funded by industry, and therefore focuses on biotech and other subjects that favor its development, rather than forming true assessments of the safety of our food and the lasting health impacts of our current food system. We can also change the incentive structure by incentivizing better farming practices like crop rotation, intercropping, smaller-scale food and animal operations that improve the air, water and land quality of the local environment.

President Obama can also nominate a Surgeon General who could set the tone for a better food system. A strong Surgeon General should warn Americans about the longterm health effects of consuming fast foods, and educate and advise the public about the outcomes of unbiased government studies. He/she should also oversee the labeling of foods for their possible detrimental health effects. The tobacco industry no longer has the power to advertise wherever it pleases, nor can it advertise to children; cigarettes are properly labeled with health advisories. A similar tack needs to be taken with unhealthy food.

While millions still die of smoking related illness every year, it’s not too late to lift the veil from Big Food, and in doing so, save lives and public health for years to come.

h/t to Bonnie Powell and Naomi Starkman

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

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

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

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

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

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

The High Cost of Cheap Food

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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