Civil Eats

In February 2008, Zoë Bradbury left her job at Ecotrust, where she was a regular contributor to Edible Portland, to start farming on Oregon’s southern coast. Right after leaving, she wrote, “I pulled up to my new greenhouse on Floras Creek with a riot of saw-toothed artichoke divisions in the back of the truck, teased them apart into one-gallon transplant pots, and officially began my first season farming for myself, next door to my mom and sister.”

Recently pesticide manufacturer Arysta LifeScience agreed to stop selling the cancer-causing strawberry pesticide methyl iodide in the United States. It was a tremendous victory for the 200,000+ farmworkers, farmers, rural residents and environmentalists that worked over the past several years to pull a chemical that one scientist called “one of the most toxic chemicals on earth” off the market.

One of the central figures of this battle from the get-go, both behind the scenes and in the media spotlight, has been Paul Towers, Organizing & Media Director for Pesticide Action Network (PAN). Read More

Dr. Marion Nestle and Dr. Malden Nesheim’s Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, is not a diet book selling you on the newest trend nor does it encourage you to count calories. Instead it does the seemingly impossible: It takes calories from the abstract to the concrete. Nestle and Nesheim explain the significance of the calorie not only in understandable scientific terms, but also in social terms with the explicit aim of helping their reader navigate the convoluted world of food labels and diet fads.

Nestle and Nesheim address frequently asked calorie-related questions like: Is there such a thing as negative calories and are some calories good and others bad? Chapters titles like “What is a Calorie?” belie the complex nature of the subject, but despite their respective PhD’s in molecular biology (Nestle) and nutrition (Nesheim) they manage to make the science of the calorie a personal and ultimately relatable subject.

And, not unlike Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” mantra, Nestle and Nesheim leave us with four simple charges when it comes to calories: “Get organized. Eat less. Move more. Get political.”

I spoke with Nestle about her motives behind writing the book, the impossibility of estimating calories by sight, and the reason she got into this field in the first place. Read More

Tracie McMillan’s The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table takes us on a vivid and poignant tour of a place we don’t really want to go: the mostly hidden, sometimes horrible world of the workers who form the backbone of our cheap, industrialized food chain. Sound grim? It is, at times, but McMillan’s lively narrative and evident empathy for the people she encounters make her sojourn into the bowels of Big Food and Big Ag a pleasure to read.

From the fields of California’s Central Valley to the produce aisle of a Michigan Walmart, and lastly, the kitchen of a Brooklyn Applebee’s, McMillan gives a firsthand account of the long hours, lousy wages and difficult conditions that are par for the course in these places. This is tricky terrain for a white, relatively privileged, middle-class American woman, and McMillan navigates it with grace and humility, remaining acutely aware of the pitfalls inherent in such a project.

I sat down with McMillan recently to chat about her populist odyssey and found her to be just as down-to-earth and plucky as her prose. Read More

The name Paul Willis is pretty much synonymous with sustainable pork production. In the mid-1990s, Willis teamed up with Bill Niman to develop the Niman Ranch Pork Program and bring flavorful, antibiotic-free pork to market. If you aren’t familiar with it, the program is actually quite different from the way most hogs are raised and sold in this country in that it sources from family farms, raising hogs on pasture or in deep-bedded systems.  I was fortunate enough to meet up with Paul for a pleasant conversation at the lovely 18 Reasons space in San Francisco’s Mission District to learn more about his farm, the Niman Ranch Pork Program and his recent trip to Capitol Hill. Read More

Sometimes a spoonful of sugar does, indeed, make the medicine go down. Though you won’t find that catchphrase in the just-released hardcover edition of Food Rules, Michael Pollan‘s best-selling little eater’s manual.

Food Rules does sport the whimsical and witty illustrations of well-known artist Maira Kalman, however. And the new book also boasts 19 new rules—many gleaned from eaters around the country that Pollan wished he had thought of and included the first time around.

Take two is again full of commonsense kitchen wisdom such as If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re probably not hungry; and When you eat real food, you don’t need rules.

The takeaway message: food need not be complicated, and the act of eating is as much about pleasure and communion as it is about nutrition and health. In other words: lighten up a little and enjoy your dinner. Read More

When Josh Viertel took the helm at Slow Food USA in 2008, the organization had a reputation—at least in this country—as a club for foodies. Under Viertel’s leadership, though, the organization has dispelled this image with an increasing focus on food justice issues such as improving the abysmal quality of cafeteria food and fighting “ag-gag” bills that would’ve made it illegal to take photos or videos of farms. Last month, Slow Food organized its members to “take back the happy meal” by showing that it’s possible to cook a nutritious meal for less than $5 a person. Over 30,000 people came together at over 5,500 events to participate in Slow Food’s $5 challenge.

When I spoke to Viertel a few weeks ago, he had just returned from a board meeting in Portland, Oregon, and was full of praise for both Andy Ricker’s Thai restaurant Pok-Pok and Portland’s energetic food justice scene. As I talked to him, I came to the happy realization that Slow Food is a flourishing network of people from all backgrounds and socioeconomic levels—from advocates of Native American fishing methods to radical kimchee makers in Indianapolis. All these members are coming together to overthrow the industrial food system and buy and make food that is good, clean, and fair. Read More

Ann Gentry is the creator and founder of Real Food Daily (RFD), a mecca for organic, vegan cuisine in Los Angeles, where she and her staff serve up delicious, plant-based food to celeb devotees including Alicia Silverstone, Ellen DeGeneres, and Conan O’Brien. The executive chef to Vegetarian Times magazine, and star of her own cooking show, Naturally Delicious, Gentry is also the author of The Real Food Daily Cook Book. Her new cookbook, Vegan Family Meals: Real Food For Everyone, just out this week, offers more than 100 tasty recipes. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Gentry about cooking for families, raising children vegetarian, and why she believes in feeding people whole, natural food.   Read More

If a women’s place is in the kitchen, then why do men get celebrity chef status?

This age-old question, although archaic, still has some validity when you take a moment to study the statistics on which gender tends to hold more power in the culinary arena. Of course, we can acknowledge and celebrate the legions of legendary women who have risen to the top of the food world, but we should also not forget to keep asking ourselves if things are truly equal.

This holds true in beverage circles as well.  The list of iconic winemakers, distillers and brew masters heavily tilts to male.  So where are the ladies?  Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing is helping to turn the tide.  Opened in 2005 by wife and husband Emily Thomas and Chad Brill (she actually taught him how to brew), they are all organic, integral to the local community, and work to promote beer education through a myriad of events throughout the year.  The second annual Strong Women Brew Day took place on a rainy weekend during SF Beer Week, and the turnout was heartening despite the downpour.  Strong women gathered to learn about, taste and craft the next batch of the brewery’s Belgian Wit. In between hauling canfuls of mash, forklift trips and temperature checks, owner and brewer Emily Thomas ducked inside to talk with me about women and beer. Read More

Few would argue that Joan Dye Gussow is the mother of the sustainable food movement. For more than 30 years, she’s been writing, teaching (she is emeritus chair of the Teachers College nutrition program at Columbia University), and speaking about our unsustainable food system and how to fix it. (This excellent article by journalist Brian Halweil showcases her work in detail.) Now more than ever, her ideas have wings. Michael Pollan, for example, has said, “Once in a while, when I have an original thought, I look around and realize Joan said it first.”

Gussow lives what she teaches, growing most of her own food year-round in her backyard. The New York Times profiled her last spring as she was rebuilding her garden after it was destroyed by a flood. When I asked her about her newly rebuilt garden, she said, “It’s given me 10 additional years of life, at least!”

I spoke to her recently about how far we’ve come, the future of the food system, and her new book, Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables.

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Only 20 percent of people who seek out kosher foods are Jewish; the rest look for the label because they believe it signals food that is healthy, safe, and generally high in quality. The reality is that many kosher meats and processed foods — like their conventional non-kosher counterparts — are made in large, industrial facilities. Today’s kosher standards are focused mainly on religious ritual and do not account for aspects of the production process that might impact the environment* or food system workers.

If Rabbi Morris Allen and the team behind a soon-to-be-introduced seal and certification process called Magen Tzedek (or “seal of justice”) have their way, however, this won’t always be the case. Through Magen Tzedek, Allen hopes to give food producers a chance to incorporate social justice, corporate transparency, and environmental stewardship into the world of kosher food. And, while Jewish people make up only two percent of the U.S. population, the movement to create a complementary label for sustainable kosher food has significant implications for the wider food world. Forty percent of all products sold in the US are certified kosher and the market is growing. When they were last measured in 2008, sales of kosher foods totaled $12.5 billion. I spoke with Rabbi Allen recently about his motivation and the challenges he’s facing in advancing this new frontier for kosher food.   Read More

Louisa Shafia is the author of Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life, a cookbook that focuses on the earth-friendly kitchen. Shafia is a teacher, she runs a catering company, and has cooked at restaurants like Aquavit and Pure Food and Wine in New York City, and Millennium and Roxanne’s in San Francisco. I got the chance to talk to her last week about Thanksgiving and the art of eco-eating. Read More

Despite the efforts of many communities that are working hard to support local agriculture and improve nutrition standards, the majority of the food consumed in the USA is still highly processed, unhealthy and unsustainable. Mark Winne, the co-founder of Connecticut Food Policy Council, End Hunger Connecticut!, and the National Community Food Security Coalition and author of the recently published Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture talks about the myths of Big Agribusiness, the possible casualty of American democracy and how Food Citizenship can reclaim our dilapidated food system. Read More

School gardens are as old as schools themselves. As Arden Bucklin-Sporer and Rachel Pringle see it, however, their return might just be the key to a modern education. Bucklin-Sporer and Pringle are the executive director and programs manager (respectively) of the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance (SFGSA) and authors of the new book How to Grow a School Garden: A Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers. I spoke with them recently about the book, their network, and what it will take to change education—one green schoolyard at a time. Read More

As a long-time regular of Angelica Kitchen restaurant in New York City, I’ve come to consider it a “second kitchen,” a place I feel good about supporting because it shares the values I keep in my own kitchen: High quality ingredients that provide a fair income to farmers who are working to protect the environment–and which provide nutrition without sacrificing any of the flavor–all for the reasonable cost afforded by buying direct.

And I am not alone. Since it opened its door in 1976, Angelica Kitchen has cultivated a loyal following, and their sustainable business model–maintained without serving alcohol (you can BYOB)–is a case study for success outside of the mainstream restaurant industry. Angelica’s is also one of the most popular vegetarian restaurants in New York City, precisely because it attracts a clientele that includes many non-vegetarians. In honor of Vegetarian Awareness Month, I spoke with owner Leslie McEachern–who is being awarded for her long-time advocacy of small, local farms by the Northeast Organic Farming Association this month–about running a restaurant built on relationships. Read More

Mark Bittman has been cooking and writing about food for four decades, including creating simple recipes for his weekly column at the New York Times, The Minimalist. Simple, because they don’t require difficult-to-find ingredients (and if they do, he gives alternatives) or an elaborate process to get a delicious and often impressive meal on the table. He has challenged his readers to travel across cultures, try things they thought were really difficult to prepare, and to rethink the tools in their kitchen repertoire (last week’s Minimalist, for example, breathed new life into the food processor).

Bittman has also emerged as a sane voice in the discussion around food policy, penning excellent reporting on industrial meat production, sustainable fish, and organics, to name a few stories. In addition, he digests news on the food system, writes about his cooking exploits and publishes the work of other food writers (full disclosure: I’m one of them) on his site, markbittman.com. In his recent book, Food Matters, he discussed why we should cut out the junk food and cut down on the amount of meat we eat for our own health and for the well-being of the planet. Building on the success of that work comes the Food Matters Cookbook, with 500 recipes for inspired “less-meatarians.” I spoke with him this week about his new cookbook and the state of the discussion around food politics. Read More

The CAFO Reader – a new book featuring essays by farmers Wendell Berry, Becky Weed, and Fred Kirschenmann, Republican speech writer Matthew Scully, journalist Michael Pollan and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., among many others – gives a full picture of the environmental, social, and ethical implications of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, and includes a section of essays on “Putting the CAFO Out to Pasture.” A CAFO is an Environmental Protection Agency designation for a farming facility that keeps numerous animals raised for food in close confinement, with the potential to pollute. These facilities often produce extreme amounts of waste, which ends up in toxic lagoons, sprayed on the land, and eventually in the watershed; require the use of high doses of antibiotics, thereby adding to the growth of drug-resistant bacteria; and are exempt from most animal cruelty laws. I spoke with the editor of The CAFO Reader, Daniel Imhoff, who is also the cofounder, director, and publisher of Watershed Media, about recent legislation and the future of the CAFO.

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Samin Nosrat is a veritable poster girl for the current trend (some would say necessity) of workplace reinvention.

Since the shuttering last summer of Eccolo, an acclaimed Italian eatery on tony 4th Street in Berkeley, that restaurant’s one-time sous chef now juggles an impressive number of part-time jobs in the culinary world. Read More

Our North Berkeley neighborhood is a haven for chicken fanciers. I’ve counted at least six coops within a three-block radius of our house! And we’re fortunate enough to live right next to one of them. Our lovely back neighbors, Fran and Chip, have three young hens in their backyard. In addition to entertaining Will, who now says “buck, buck” and heads for the back door whenever we say “chicken”, we also receive delicious eggs with brilliant orange yolks from the girls next door. Read More

Tanya Henderson is a cooking instructor for the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD). During the day she cooks with teens at Willard Middle School. Once a week she whips up dishes with kids in the after-school program at Malcolm X Elementary. She also teaches evening nutrition classes to parents at several BUSD locations.

A former New Yorker who worked in television — including directing a season of MTV’s Real World – Henderson moved to Berkeley to attend Bauman College, a holistic nutrition and natural culinary arts academy. Now a certified nutrition consultant and educator, she specializes in digestive wellness, allergies and eating disorders, and sees private clients after hours.

Henderson describes herself as ageless and lives near Lake Merritt in Oakland. We caught up at Mudrakers Cafe, opposite Willard, over gunpowder green tea. Read More

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. Read More

Syndicated eco-columnist and Master Gardener Annie Spiegelman (AKA “The Dirt Diva”) offers practical tips on organic gardening, composting and planting along with guidance and gripes on marriage, motherhood and “having it all.” A cynically optimistic horticulturist, Spiegelman offers positive reinforcement and moral support as a gardener who’s made all the mistakes, and has lived to tell how to make peace with snails, fungi, bacteria (and your boyfriend). Civil Eats caught up with the Dirt Diva to dish about her new book, Talking Dirt: The Dirt Diva’s Down-to-Earth Guide to Organic Gardening. Read More

Temra Costa is a sustainable food and farming advocate and author of Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat. Civil Eats will feature her profiles of some of America’s women farmers and food advocates over the coming weeks.

Farmer Jane caught up with newly appointed Executive Director of People’s Grocery, Nikki Henderson, to get the inside scoop on what brought this dynamic woman to the West Coast from Brooklyn. As Executive Director, Nikki will be spending her time working to address one of the most important questions of the food movement: How can the sustainable food movement increase the health and well-being of economically disadvantaged people? In Nikki’s case, the people of West Oakland. Read More

Anna Lappé’s latest book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, investigates the intersection between the environmental crisis and the food system in more detail than any book that has come before it. Lappé’s rendering makes us realize the imperative of addressing these issues, and empowers us to do so by demystifying corporate spin, giving thorough examples of people making change, debunking the myths for maintaining the status quo, and more. Lappé talked to me last week about climate friendly farming, policy and the state of the food movement. Read More

Vegetable expert and bestselling cookbook author Mollie Katzen’s handwritten and illustrated cookbook, The Moosewood Cookbook, (not to mention The Enchanted Broccoli Forest and her cookbooks for children, Pretend Soup and Honest Pretzels) introduced many to the love of cooking. She was inducted into the James Beard Cookbook Hall of Fame in 2007 and her most recent book, Get Cooking, was recently nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals Award. Beloved by many, new to some, Katzen continues her clarion call for taking back our food system one delicious meal at a time. I recently spoke to Mollie about vegetables, the new Good Food Movement, and the radical necessity of cooking. Read More

It’s citrus season in California, and yet many of us are drinking orange juice out of cartons — juice from Florida oranges picked last spring, stored without oxygen and then flavored with synthetically produced “flavor packs.” I recently spoke to Alissa Hamilton, author of Squeezed: What You Don’t Know about Orange Juice, about this irony, the industry behind it, and the value of fresh fruit. Read More

In his latest book, The Value of Nothing, Raj Patel explores the failures of so-called free market capitalism, and highlights some of the ways people are changing the democratic system. One of the most exciting social movements for Patel is the food movement, where thousands of people are raising the bar for social justice by improving the health and environmental impacts of the food we produce, and the labor practices employed in how we bring food to the table, with the goal of providing a stable food supply for all people.

The title of his book comes from a quote by Oscar Wilde, “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” I spoke to Patel this week to better understand where our market system went wrong, and how we can begin to reclaim the idea of value from the marketplace. Read More

Nicolette Hahn Niman has been thinking about livestock for nearly a decade. Before she married (and began ranching with) Bill Niman, founder of Niman Ranch*, Nicolette worked as a senior attorney for Waterkeeper Alliance where she was in charge of the organization’s campaign to reform the concentrated livestock and poultry industry. Nicolette spoke with CUESA recently about greenhouse gas emissions, the sustainable livestock tipping point, and her book Righteous Porkchop: Finding a Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms (HarperCollins, 2009). She also authored a New York Times op-ed on Saturday called The Carnivore’s Dilemma. Read More

Recently, a good friend handed me Mildred Armstrong Kalish’s outstanding book, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression, and succinctly said, “I think you’ll appreciate this.” And she was right. Named one of the best 10 books in 2007 by the New York Times, Little Heathens is a breath of fresh air, a message of hope and revival, and a timely reminder of how we once knew how to grow our own food, chop our own wood, and survive on next to nothing. I’ve returned to the book as a constant reference, source of inspiration, and general salve for simple, good ideas, common sense, and for a dose of Millie’s refreshingly honest and joyous take on life. Part memoir, part how-to manual, her life lessons of hard work, self-reliance, and determination to make it through one of the toughest times in American history are especially relevant today. Read More

The first time I saw “Pressure Cooker” was at Slow Food Nation last Labor Day. It left me–and as far as I could tell every single other viewer in the theater–in tears. It follows three seniors at a Philadelphia public high school, charting their journey through a culinary arts curriculum under the wing of the hilariously blunt, tough-loving Mrs. Stephenson. The film has been making the film festival circuit for the past 9 months and will now be enjoying a theatrical release in several cities (scroll all the way down for schedule). Here I sat down for an interview with Co-Directors Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman: Read More