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.”

Can you tell me a bit about the book–how you got involved, who the writers are, and why you think it’s a good read?

The idea for the book hatched about three years ago when [co-editor] Severine von Tscharner Fleming and I were at a food and farming conference together. We got Storey Publishing interested in the idea and spent the next couple of winters–during our “off” seasons–putting the book together. The essayists are from all corners of the country, and all of them are beginning farmers, meaning they’ve been running their own operations for fewer than 10 years.

When you’re just starting out farming, the heartaches and breakthroughs are so acute. It’s a rocky road for most of us. We’re short on cash, short on sleep, short on time, and long on optimism and pure buckle-down grit. A lot of the essays in this book shed light on that–some funny, some exuberant, some sad. It’s a great medley of stories for that reason, all woven together by a singular passion for growing good food.

What gives you the most hope for the coming generation of young farmers?

The fact that public awareness has shifted so much in the past ten years. I remember a time when I would strike up a conversation with a stranger on an airplane, and when they asked me what I did, and I replied that I was a farmer, they looked puzzled/unimpressed/dismissive. Now when I have that same conversation, people’s eyes light up and they say, “REALLY!!!?? That’s awesome! My sister is part of a CSA farm…” or something to that effect. More and more folks are learning about alternatives to industrial food, supporting local family farms, eating more seasonally, trying kale.

Still, there’s a lot working against beginning farmers; access to capital and land are the foremost. Money and credit are hard to come by, and buying affordable land is maybe even harder. It’s why you see so many creative arrangements–non-conventional leases, incubator farms, etc.

A few years ago, you used to write your own dispatches for Edible Portland as you began farming, Diary of a Young Farmer. How has your perspective changed in the years since, and what has remained constant?

I’m in my fifth season of running my own farm now, and things have definitely stabilized—thank God! Financially, the farm is on solid footing, and the big push to build and buy all the infrastructure we needed—barns, irrigation systems, equipment—is largely behind us for now. I’m able to focus more on fine-tuning and improving my growing practices and my marketing strategies. It’s still a roller coaster–unpredictable weather, crop failures–but the ride feels less bumpy now, I think in large part because our community of loyal customers and CSA members provide such a foundation of financial and moral support. With them behind us, things feel less catastrophic than they did in the first year or two of scratching out this little farm and getting established.

I wonder about the phrase in the title “New Farmers’ Movement.” What about new farmers today has created a movement? What is the movement and what are its goals?

I imagine every single one of the essayists in this book would have a slightly different answer to this question. Personally, I think it feels like a movement because it’s not just the farmers themselves talking about these issues, spreading the message, and doing the work. It’s a larger community of eaters, advocates, policy-makers, and everyday newspaper-reading citizens who are connecting to it. People want clean, green, fair food. They want family farms, not factory farms. And the farmers in this book want to create just that kind of world.

What are you most excited about that’s growing in your fields right now?

Other than my one-year-old, who is doing a lot of her growing in our fields right now, I’m pretty excited about the new rhubarb planting. It’s been doubling in size everyday, which feels like a little nod from the plant world that things are A-OK out there.

Originally published by Ecotrust

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).

For the past decade, Paul has worked to protect communities from hazardous pesticides in their food, air, soil and water. He’s worked side-by-side with people that bear the brunt of industrial agriculture, and helped share their stories, grounded in science, with elected officials and policymakers. It hasn’t been easy. He’s gone up against the likes of pesticide and biotech corporations, oil and gas interests, and industrial food companies.

Highlighting food and environmental injustices has been a priority for Paul from an early age. He grew up in Tucson, Arizona, a state where the five C’s were imprinted on young schoolchildren: copper, cattle, cotton, citrus and climate. It didn’t take long to see that many of these industries, coupled with explosive growth, were incompatible with the desert.

Over the years, Paul has come to see his work on pesticides, food and agriculture as a means of unraveling the larger issues of building democracy and diminishing corporate control and influence. He’s focused a lot on breaking down the pesticide treadmill–the trap that farmers get caught on as they are forced to use more (and increasingly toxic) chemicals to control insects and weeds that develop resistance to pesticides.

Paul recently moved from Sacramento to the San Francisco Bay Area, but still remains connected to neighborhoods and issues in the political hub of the state. Paul was a key leader of a multi-year effort in Sacramento aptly entitled CLUCK (Campaign to Legalize Urban Chicken Keeping) which eventually legalized keeping egg-laying hens in the city. He continues to be involved in efforts to create more local farmers markets in underserved neighborhoods, spur more urban gardening and strengthen community organizations that collect and deliver social services.

Every one of these efforts required building political pressure to put new policies in place to allow people to grow safe, healthy and local food.

What issues have you been focused on?

Bees and strawberries have been the main focus in recent months.

First, a word about bees. It’s widely understood that one in every three bites of food we eat is reliant on bees. In working with beekeepers across the country, including some of the largest commercial operations, I’ve learned about the dramatic losses they’re experiencing–over 30 percent of their hives each year. These losses are often termed colony collapse disorder. This is bad for all of us, especially if you like to eat things that require pollination like almonds, cherries, and blueberries–and dozens of other crops.

Increasingly, science points to this newer class of systemic pesticides called neonicotinoids as a critical factor in CCD. We filed a legal petition with over two-dozen beekeepers last month urging EPA to take action on these neonicotinoids. As you can imagine, pesticide corporations like Bayer are pushing back, trying to confuse the science.

Strawberries have been a big focus too. With strawberry season now upon us in California, many of us are getting excited to eat our share of the fruit. While the controversial fumigant pesticide methyl iodide is off the shelf, other strawberry pesticides are still widely used in California and across the country. Many rural residents and farmworkers are on the front lines of exposure, with these gaseous pesticides drifting into their homes and bodies. Many fumigants are known to be cancer-causing, neurotoxins and reproductive toxins. So we’re working with people across the country to bring their case to local, state and federal officials to phase out the use of these chemicals and invest in green, safe and cutting-edge agriculture.

What inspires you to do this work?

A lot of things inspire me to strive for an ecologically sound and socially just food system.

But more than anything it’s the injustices I see and the people who are taking incredibly courage steps to counter them. It’s the people I meet from all over the country–from Alaska to Florida, Illinois to California–who are working to ensure that their communities are safe and healthy. Last week, I had a chance to meet with a diverse group of Hawaiians who are actively working to take their food system back from pesticide and biotech corporations and the plantation system.

I’m also an expecting father. It is likely that our child is already being exposed to pesticides and other chemicals in utero. And that makes me angry. So I work to create protections and find solutions to ensure our child isn’t saddled with a toxic legacy of pollution.

As I look toward the upcoming adventure of fatherhood, the health and future of my child–very literally–is a big part of what inspires me to keep doing this work.

What’s your overall vision?

In the not so distant future, my vision is that we re-build our food and farming system to create a sustainable form of agriculture and lift up human rights to food, justice and self-determination.

What books and/or blogs are you reading right now?

I don’t spend nearly enough time reading books, including those on my nightstand. I do consume a lot of news, including newspapers and magazines from all over the country. I’m especially impressed by blogs by folks like Tom Philpott at Mother Jones, Twilight Greenaway and Tom Laskawy at Grist, Barry Estabrook, and so many others.

Who’s in your community?

Our community is large–we’ve got “network” in our name. It’s international and it’s farmers, beekeepers, farmworkers, rural residents, and everyone in between. PAN has five regional centers based in the major continents, representing tens of thousands of people and organizations. I am honored to be part of this global community of concerned and committed citizen activists.

On a day-to-day basis, I work closely with lots of people involved in coalitions like Californians for Pesticide Reform, the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition and Californians for a Healthy and Green Economy.

What are your commitments?

I’m committed to science, justice, and people, across the globe.

What are your goals?

Personally, I want my artichoke plants to thrive this year. Professionally, I want to be part of fixing our food and farming system to protect farmers, workers, communities–and children, include my own. Both are challenging, but of different magnitudes.

What does change look like to you?

It’s what Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers did and do, what Lois Gibbs and the Center for Health and Environmental Justice did and do and its what Luke Cole at the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment did and do.

Change means organized, coordinated people pressuring elected officials and decision makers–including corporate leaders–to take steps to protect health and the environment, while advancing safe solutions. The good news is that people want their communities and environment to be healthy–we just need to reach decisionmakers with our collective voice.

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

The success of our international network over the past 30 years has taught us a few things, especially as we’ve helped broker new protections through international treaties. Change requires organizing. Organizing people and partners requires patience, time and commitment. It requires online and offline engagement, meeting people where they are and creating collaborative opportunities to advance a shared vision.

What projects are affiliated with yours?

I already described my work around safe strawberries and healthy pollinators. I also work with PAN to hold the “Big 6” pesticide and biotech corporations–Monsanto, Bayer, BASF, Dow, Dupont, and Syngenta–accountable for human rights abuses. We concluded an international trial late last year in India, documenting harms to live, health and livelihood. And the final verdict should be issued soon, so this work will continue to unfold. In addition, we’re continuing to document the harm to Midwest communities from water contaminated by the Syngenta’s gender-bending atrazine, an herbicide commonly used in corn fields.

What projects and people have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

I’m impressed by so many people and organizations. I respect organizations that shine a spotlight on the broken industrial agricultural system, finding policy solutions, and those that are helping us get out of it. Off the top of my head, I respect organizations like the Center for Food Safety, United Farm Workers and Food & Water Watch are doing a great job of advocating for change. I also deeply respect organizations like ALBA and the California Farm Academy, who are training the next generation of farmers with cutting-edge, green agriculture.

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

Farmers, rural residents, and consumers are demanding something different–whether it’s labeling of genetically engineered crops and products, phasing out the use of hazardous pesticides or investing in sustainable agriculture. We are in a moment of real possibility for a real shift in direction on our agriculture and food policies.

What does the food movement need to do, be or have to be more effective?

Political and organized. The challenges before us are large and profound, including the power of pesticide and biotech corporations. These corporations exert undue influence in the elections, lobbying, and through the revolving door with government regulators. So we, as a movement must gather our voices and be determined, creative and persistent. We can’t afford to be anything but political and organized.

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

Anything my wife cooks. She’s got a real knack for pulling things together, including fresh ingredients from our yard and weekly finds at farmers markets. And she’d probably wrap it up in a fresh tortilla, a nod to those I use to get fresh off the line at the spot across the street after school growing up.

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.

Why did you decide to write a book about calories?

Well actually this came through an invite from the University of California Press. I wish I could say it was my idea, but it wasn’t. My editor at UC Press took me to lunch at one point and said he wanted me to do two things—one was to update Safe Food (2003) and the other was to write a book about calories. I thought it was a brilliant idea. It was so current since nobody seems to know what to do about obesity and there are huge debates about what you’re supposed to eat to maintain a healthy weight. There’s so much misunderstanding with calories especially since, as we say in the book, you can’t see them, smell them, or taste them.

What was the aim of Why Calories Count?

As we say in the introduction to the first chapter, if you just stay with the science, it will pay off later on. Because if you understand the stuff in the beginning [the history and the science] all the rest of it, all of the arguments about diet make sense and you can evaluate it on your own. We were trying to empower people to interpret the food environment around them. We don’t think you need any complicated explanations for weight gain beyond extra calories

You and Malden Nesheim collaborated on an earlier book called Feed Your Pet Right (2010). Since you’ve decided to tackle another project I assume you must work well together…

Yes. I knew that this book was not something I was going to be able to do by myself because the scientific background that’s needed to understand this goes really deep and the thought of reviewing all of that stuff on my own gave me a headache. So I asked Mal to help me and he agreed. Our strengths complement each other really well.

You write that the book explores calories through science and politics. Why both?

We thought that if people were going to understand what’s out there in society then they need to understand the science. If people want to manage their weight they need to learn how to manage the environment and that’s not so easy. I used to see this in our department at NYU when we were still in the space with the kitchen. There was food around all the time. Every new member gained weight and they had to learn how to manage it. Because it is a Nutrition Department everyone did learn how to deal with it, but it required a lot of thought to figure it out.

What calorie-related questions do you get most often?

People always ask us if we count calories. Absolutely not. I think you have to work with portion sizes. The other big question that everyone has is does it matter what you eat?  The answer is yes and no. Strictly for weight gain it’s no. Strictly for health yes. But if you are eating a healthy diet it is so much easier to control your weight.

One of my favorite examples of underestimating calories in restaurant food in the book was from an anecdote you tell about a New York Times reporter taking you and several other nutritionists out to lunch and asking you to estimate the number of calories in your dishes. Despite the fact that you were all nutritionists, you still found it hard to estimate the calories in the food and ended up underestimating by about 30 percent.

It’s impossible to estimate. It was inconceivable to me that a little dish of risotto had 1,200 calories—how is that possible? I was on an airplane with a bunch of chefs the day the article came out, which was quite humiliating. The chefs said I obviously didn’t know anything about being in a restaurant kitchen and they were right.

Let’s talk about the increase in portion sizes.

Once you get used to large portions you cant go back. People feel like they’re cheated. Mini bagels are the size of bagels I grew up with and mini muffins are the size of what a normal muffin used to be. Larger muffins have more calories, sometimes many more. I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than that.

I once went to a meeting of restaurant chain owners and said that I would really like them to give a price break for smaller portions. They said, “what are you trying to do put us out of business?” For them it’s a matter of life and death. Large portions sell.

You briefly mention the controversial front-of-package nutritional labels in the book. Do you support any version of these?

Oh no. I’m on record that there shouldn’t be any labels or health claims on the front of packages at all. If there has to be one then I would advocate for calories of the whole package. Calories-per-serving is a huge source of confusion.

In the introduction you call yourselves “consummate foodies,” which is not a label people necessarily associate with nutritionists…

My love of food is the reason I go interested in all of this. In High School a friend of my mother’s was a cookbook collector and oh how I wish I had her collection. She told me if I liked food then I should study it. But the options then were either agriculture or dietetics and since I’m a city girl [Nestle grew up in New York City] I never considered agriculture. It took me decades to find out how much agriculture had to do with what we eat on a daily basis.

So I went to Berkeley as a dietetics major and lasted exactly one day. It was not a happy experience for me.  I ended up being a science major and didn’t get back to food until many years later when I was given a nutrition course to teach. It was like falling in love. I was in a biology department and I could see that it was the perfect way to teach undergrad bio. Cell biology made everyone’s eyes glaze over, but nutrition made everyone perk up and start talking. I loved that you could go from science to politics in just one lecture. Everything you were doing in the science department was reflected in the culture and society. I figured that out on the first day I was doing research for the course and I never looked back.

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.

What was the hardest part of going undercover?

This was the first time I had gone undercover to do work like that, because I believe very strongly in the importance of being upfront with people about what you’re doing and who you are and I am not a good actress (laughs). So the place where I was culturally the least good of a fit, in the fields, I was really protected by the fact that I didn’t speak the language. I just seemed like a kind of dumb white girl, and that was really helpful.

The first thing was getting over my anxiety over doing that kind of project and coming to terms with it. It meant that I had to be dishonest with my coworkers. I don’t really care so much that I’m not honest with the companies. It’s very interesting, the same year that I was working at Walmart during the holiday season, Stephanie Rosenbloom at the New York Times went and worked for a day at a Walmart with the company’s permission, and she had a very different experience than I did.

And that’s why you do it. Companies and supervisors do not treat you the same, and coworkers won’t be as honest with you, or as open. I’ve come out of this very convinced that undercover work is worthwhile, but it’s a complicated thing. There’s a tendency to think “I can totally do this, and how else can I get this information?” but I also understand why people react badly to it sometimes.

So there was the undercover thing, and then there was finding the right balance between my narrative and talking about the people I was with. It’s not supposed to be about me as a white girl having that experience; the idea is that I can only tell my story and what I observed, but I’m using that to get to the stories of the other people around me.

You found that farm work in California’s Central Valley was extremely demanding, sometimes dangerous, and routinely underpaid. What do you think it would take to provide the people who pick our crops with better working conditions and paychecks that don’t deliberately shortchange them?

I was typically working alongside undocumented immigrants. You always hear the stories about how undocumented immigrants work for very low wages and how they get treated. It’s one thing to hear about it, it’s another thing to see how terrified everybody is, how unwilling they are to say anything.

They complained about it outside of work, we’d talk about how bad the wages were and the women were like, “Why don’t you say anything?” For me that was really awkward, because I wanted to say “That’s terrible, and I will march off and I will fix everything!” Which is not something you can do as an undercover reporter.

Even if you’re undocumented, you still have legal rights, but they don’t necessarily know that. And even the ones that do, it’s not like they have a guaranteed job, you could be hired or fired at any moment. There’s no job security. So, you keep working, and at least you have the stability of knowing that you will get your eight hours of work for which you’re paid $25 to $40.

How do you fix that? You enforce the existing labor laws. You don’t necessarily need new ones. I think it’s important not to stifle businesses’ ability to do their job, but I did observe when I was working in the fields that every week I was asked to sign a piece of paper stating that I had taken food safety training that I had never taken. One of the arguments around food safety is that farmers should be allowed to self-regulate that. I saw in my work that self-regulation wasn’t working.

And in terms of labor law enforcement, you need some sense that people are going to get in trouble if they cheat workers. The average fine levied under the Agricultural Worker Protection Act is about $350. During my time in the fields I was underpaid by about $500.

A farm advocate in Ohio explained to me that it’s cheaper to violate the law and pay when someone complains than it is to follow the law.

Can you even imagine how different conditions would have to be for it to not be an anomaly to have someone with your own background choosing that kind of work?

That’s called unionization and massive social change! Factory work in the early 20th century was really dangerous and it didn’t pay very well, but those became really good jobs because there was unionization and legislation to protect workers. My grandfather raised my mother and her two brothers and took care of my grandmother on the salary he earned working for Ford.

So, if you could figure out a way to make farm labor a better job in terms of wages and working conditions, more people would do it. The reason why people don’t do farm labor isn’t because they’re, like, “Oh, we’re too good to be in the fields,” it’s because it’s really hard work that often doesn’t pay minimum wage. Picking up garbage is a shitty job, too, but people still go do that, because it’s a decent gig.

What were your most miserable moments?

This belies my upwardly mobile aspirations (laughs). For me, what was the most emotionally miserable was working the night shift at Walmart. I didn’t see any daylight for the most part. That’s also really physical work, so I would move half a ton of sugar and a half ton of flour in a night, by myself. It’s isolated work, you’re in an aisle stocking by yourself, so there’s no social aspect to it.

But what I found most draining about it was that most of my coworkers, many of whom were married and had families, had been there for seven, 10, 15 years. One coworker was earning $11 an hour after working there for seven years, and she talked about how if you worked at Walmart for 15 years that’s actually really good because you get a lifetime discount card.

There’s something really sobering when what you’re aspiring to is that if you stick it out at $10, $11, $12 an hour you’re going to get a lifetime 10-percent discount card.

Walmart keeps touting its commitment to fresh healthy produce, but in your experience, they treated fresh fruits and vegetables just like any other non-perishable consumer good. Their blasé attitude toward the fresh produce engendered so much waste! How do you square that with their famous obsession for maximizing profit?

I was really shocked to be working at Walmart and to see how inefficient the place I was working was. I have no idea if that department was just an anomaly, or if that’s a broader problem.

Randy, the manager, was incredibly young, didn’t really know what he was doing, and didn’t particularly care. For that, I would fault the store management. It’s one thing to be really bad at your job, but why did somebody give you that job?

What was really upsetting to me was that one of my colleagues, I think I call him Sam in the book, who’s a black man, he had come to Walmart after the grocery store he worked at closed down. He had been working in produce for five years and knew a lot, so I could ask him anything, like “How do I tell if this is ripe?” Sam had applied for that job and they had given it to Randy instead. I have no idea who on the planet would have picked Randy over Sam, because Sam knew produce, whereas Randy had a background in electronics.

You write, “When cooking instruction is paired with basic nutrition education, Americans cook more and eat more healthfully–even when money is tight.” What’s your prescription for battling kitchen illiteracy?

Almost everything people are eating at home involves some degree of convenience foods. That kind of thing usually tends to have a lot of salt and preservatives in it. But it’s actually no more time-intensive to do a Hamburger Helper kind of thing from scratch, and it’s actually cheaper.

The thing that sucks about a box isn’t that it’s quick–it’s that if you don’t already know how to cook, you think you can’t make a cake without a box. We need to start thinking about cooking as a basic life skill, not something that’s optional. Incorporating that into public education to me seems like a smart idea. It can be a really great way to teach people other stuff. It’s great for math, right? And for reading comprehension. Or learning to write recipes. It’s an important survival skill.

I think one of the things you can support, no matter what your politics are, is that our schools should be teaching our kids how to be self-sufficient, how to take care of themselves and not to have to depend on large institutions. I would include in that not just government but also corporations.

We don’t want to be raising kids who depend on corporations to tell them what to eat and how to eat. That’s a really important part of American culture. People talk all the time about a nanny state, but there’s the corporate nanny, too. And I don’t like that either! If we want people to be self-sufficient, cooking and eating is a part of that. So, we need to include cooking as part of public school education. I also understand fully the difficulty of educational reform, but I think it’s an important point to start discussing.

Originally published on AlterNet

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.

Two Different Iowas: Family Farms and CAFOs

In the early 1990s, Willis was raising about 2,500 pigs a year on his family’s farm, all out on pasture.  There were very few options for selling pastured pork at the time, but he believed strongly in raising pigs in as natural environment as possible. As a result, he doesn’t use gestation or farrowing crates and his animals are never fed sub-therapeutic antibiotics or growth hormones. Willis doesn’t dock his piglets tails or clip the ends of their teeth. He believes that he and other pork producers should be able to select the hog breeds that are best suited for their farm and be paid a fair price, based in part on the eating quality of the pork they raise.

Willis’ production methods and philosophies are in sharp contrast to the factory hog farms that are now fairly prevalent in Iowa. In a factory hog farm (also known as a CAFO), the animals are raised indoors in a large, warehouse-like building. Growing pigs are raised in group pens and pregnant and nursing sows are often confined to gestation or farrowing crates. The animals have no ability to express their natural tendencies to root or forage and the stress of confinement in such crowded conditions often leads to the development of neurotic coping behaviors.  The animals are fed a diet of grain and protein, often mixed with sub-therapeutic antibiotics to prevent illness.

If this sounds quite unappealing to you, it did to Willis as well. “All I had to do was go in to a CAFO once to realize I wanted no part of that,” he said. “If you had to raise animals like that, I didn’t want to do it.”

The “to” in “Farm to Fork”

Willis quickly realized that the many logistical hurdles of getting animals to the processing plant and meat to market were often what kept family farmers out of the pork supply chain. When the Niman Ranch Pork Program was first getting started, there were few options for hog farmers outside of the highly concentrated hog production and pork processing industries. The large-scale producers and processors aren’t very interested in buying from farmers who raise “less than a truckload” worth of animals and they pay less for hogs raised outdoors as opposed to indoors. In the mid-1990s, hogs raised on pasture or in deep-bedded systems were being docked about $17 per “hundredweight” or $17 less per every hundred pounds of pig by conventional buyers. The average market hog weighs about 250 lbs., so a farmer could expect to receive about $42.50 less per animal if she raised her hogs outside.

By starting the Niman Ranch Pork Program, Willis set out to address these aggregation, processing, marketing and distribution barriers, or to serve as the “to” in “farm to fork” for small-scale producers. With programs like Niman Ranch and other niche marketers, small-scale producers can raise hogs outside on pasture or in deep-bedded systems and receive a premium for their good animal husbandry and care for their environment, instead of being penalized. In addition, consumers get more flavorful pork, raised without sub-therapeutic antibiotics or growth hormones.

Attention Washington: “We can do this”

Willis was recently on Capitol Hill, testifying to Congress about the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture.  He was there in support of Rep. Louise Slaughter’s (D-NY) bill The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act.  His message to Washington was, “We can do this. We can raise pigs without sub-therapeutic antibiotics.”

You’ve probably heard a lot of fuss from the conventional hog industry that the world will starve to death or farmers will all go broke if they can’t routinely feed antibiotics to animals. But that simply isn’t true. Farmers and ranchers are perfectly capable of raising animals without sub-therapeutic antibiotics and many, like the producers in the Niman Ranch Pork Program, are making their living doing just that. As a result of their program, Willis has even seen a reversal of the usual exodus in rural communities. Instead of leaving the farm, the sons and daughters of Niman Ranch producers are getting involved and staying in the family business. The average age of a Niman Ranch hog farmer is 47 years old, which is ten years younger than the average American farmer.

So, listen up, Congress! Public health, the environment, and a whole crop of new, successful, pasture-based farmers demand that you keep antibiotics working for humans and stop routinely feeding them to animals.

What can consumers do? 

As Willis and I were wrapping up, I had one more question for him. I seek out pasture-raised, antibiotic-free meats at restaurants and grocery stores and am often disappointed by the lack of options. There is currently much more consumer demand for antibiotic-free meat than supply, so what can we consumers do if we want to see an increase in these products? Keep asking for it, says Willis. Continue to increase awareness and demand. If restaurants, grocery stores, your local caterer, etc. keep hearing that you want antibiotic-free meats, that could justify the slight price increase that would be necessary to get more producers involved. Willis said that if, “we could pay our farmers another $0.10 cents/lb. live weight [about $25 per animal] that would make a difference.” To me, that means eating less meat so I can afford to pay for higher quality products and demanding antibiotic-free options.

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.

In case you’ve been living under a compost pile, Pollan is a champion of small-scale, sustainable farming, humanely-raised livestock, and access to real food for all. A foe of what he calls highly-processed, edible food-like substances, Pollan’s food philosophy is famously simple: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

He is the author of five previous books including the popular In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, andBotany of Desire, and he writes regularly about food matters for The New York Times. Pollan is also the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley and co-instructor of the Chez Panisse Foundation funded Edible Education 101 at Cal this fall.

Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world last year and everyone from students and grandmas to Oprah and the Obamas listen up when the mild-mannered man speaks out about corporate food, Big Ag, school food, factory farming, eating culture, and food safety.

We talked, briefly, following an Edible Education lecture given by former Berkeley School Lunch Lady Ann Cooper, whom Pollan introduced before taking her to dinner at—where else?—Chez Panisse. And we spoke again the next day, at length, via phone.

Pollan, 56, dedicates his latest work to his mother, former New York Magazine style columnist Corky Pollan, “who always knew butter is better for you than margarine.” He lives in North Berkeley with his wife, the artist Judith Belzer. His formerly picky eater son, Isaac, recently dispatched to Wesleyan, misses family meals.

Why Food Rules Two?

I wanted to work on a more visual version of Food Rules to reach more people and continue the conversation that the first edition started. My wife and I saw an exhibit of Maira Kalman’s work at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and Judith suggested we collaborate.

When you look at Maira’s work—like a painting of a Snickers bar on a pink ground or a framed collection of onion rings—it often manages to be poignant, funny, and sad all at the same time.

Eating is important to her but she doesn’t take food too seriously and is not politically correct about it in the least. We’re already neurotic enough about our eating; I wanted this book to be fun while it covered some serious ground.

Can you give us insider insights into Edible Education 101?

It’s been an interesting experience for me personally because I’ve not taught undergraduates before, though I should note my co-instructor Nikki Henderson is carrying most of the load as I’m technically on leave. I’ve found the students terrific; they ask questions that are sharp but well phrased and polite. In a community meeting with corporate food people you might expect to hear the Berkeley hiss, but there’s been none of that. They’re an engaged and impressive group.

We’ve learned things too. We might have had a more effective dialogue in the case of the corporate food lecture, which included Wal-Mart, if it hadn’t been webcast. That had an inhibiting effect on the conversation. I’m also used to three-hour classes; these 90-minute ones go by really fast. I think they work best when we have just one guest so we can really drill down and expound on the issues. At this stage of the semester I wouldn’t be sorry if one of our guests had to cancel just so we had some time for reviewing and contextualizing the material with the students.

And, it has to be said, what a gift this is from the Chez Panisse Foundation to the community as well as the students. The list of speakers and the subjects covered is impressive.

Has interest in the food movement peaked in the popular culture?

It’s hard to know where we are right now but I don’t think so. I remember when I was trying to finish The Omnivore’s Dilemma, published in 2006, I thought I was coming to the subject a little late. It took me forever to finish that book. I do feel a sense of urgency to keep writing about food. We’re just beginning to see the impact of our food choices on health care and insurance costs—obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are soaring—and we need to keep the pressure on the government and corporations for change. If anything, I only see the conversation deepening, and that’s especially encouraging given the economic situation since 2008.

Do you ever want to write about something other than food?

I haven’t always written about food but I find it’s a good place to talk about other things like the environment, the economy, health, culture, and politics. Food is a very big tent as subjects go. That’s why it’s held my interest.

How—and what—do you cook?

I make simple food. I grill more nights than I don’t and my wife and I typically cook together. We work well in the kitchen together. One of us makes the main and the other the sides. We’re fortunate to work from home so we’re able to make dishes that require slow cooking like braises and soups.

Some of our readers view you as an elitist foodie and roll their eyes at such stories as your New York Times Magazine piece, The 36-Hour Dinner Party. Is that unfair?

I reject that characterization while I’m sensitive to the fact that not everybody has access to good food. I appreciate that food and class are intimately tied: that story is set in Napa, which implies a lot of leisure in certain circles. But I don’t think Americans should be afraid of aestheticism; as a culture some times we can have an aversion to pleasure.

To eat healthily in this country—by which I mean consuming food that contributes both to the eater’s health as well as to the health of the environment—costs more than it does to eat poorly. That situation is a public policy problem. We need farm policies that will correct this imbalance, so that healthy calories can compete with unhealthy ones.

There is no question that there is an elite strand within the food movement, but a lot of social change movements in this country—I’m thinking of abolitionists, women’s suffrage, and civil rights as examples—have been started by the affluent because they have the leisure and resources to do so.

As a recognized leader in the food movement how do you handle the rock-star status?

A sense of humor helps, so does remembering that this type of attention is fleeting. And regardless of what people say about my books, the next morning I still have to get up and face the page and come up with sentences I like. All that other stuff doesn’t help with writing, which can be incredibly hard.

What’s the subject of your next book?

It’s about the transformation of food through cooking methods such as baking, fermentation, and cooking with liquids or heat. So it focuses on the science of cooking, the classical elements; I’ve been doing research about fire, for instance. It should be out in early 2013.

What gives you hope on the food front?

I see movement happening all around the country, like grass-fed beef in supermarkets and young people taking up farming. I’m now asked to speak in places like Troy, New York, Cleveland, and Lubbock, Texas. They aren’t typical food towns. People in their 20s are as engaged with this issue as their parents, whether it’s for health, the environment, or both. I have a lot of faith that as consumers we can change things by voting with our forks.

WATCH: Michael Pollan reads excerpts from Food Rules here, featuring the illustrations of Maira Kalman:

Photos: Top, Author Michael Pollan, by Fran Collin. Middle, Food Rules cover. Bottom, #76: Place a Bouquet of Flowers on the Table and Everything Will Taste Twice as Good. Illustration: Copyright (c) Maira Kalman 2011. Reprinted with permission from The Penguin Press from FOOD RULES by Michael Pollan.

Originally published on Berkeleyside

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.

Mark Bittman had an op-ed in the Times a few weeks ago in which he argued that, despite subsidies, junk food can actually be more expensive than cooking meals from scratch. You have said in the past that we live in a country where it’s cheaper to feed  our children Froot Loops than it is to feed them fruit. So, which is it?

We live in a country where it’s easier—to feed our kids Froot Loops than it is to feed them fruit. Sometimes that’s price but a lot of times that’s access and a lot of times it’s knowledge, too. Price, access, and knowledge come together as this set of three factors, which can make it really hard to do the right thing when it comes to food.

Take potato chips. To buy a pound of potatoes in the form of potato chips, you are probably spending $11 or $12 a pound for potatoes. And potatoes, even the fanciest organic fingerlings, are never more than $2.75 or $3 pound, which is obscenely expensive. (Generally potatoes are $1 per pound.) So we’re talking ten or twelve times more for the junk food version.

Now the issue with that, though, is that it’s not just a matter of personal choice. It’s not that low-income people are making bad choices—it’s that they live in a food environment where making good choices is really really difficult. And so we need to change the structures that make that the case.

Bittman did acknowledge food deserts, but he implied that most people are lazy and opt to watch T.V. rather than cook. I think there’s some truth to these skewed values, but I also know there are many poor people who want to eat better but don’t because they’re pressed for time and are surrounded by fast food.

If we pretend that food is a democracy, you have to acknowledge that for a lot of people in a lot of neighborhoods, there are no polling stations and there’s only one candidate, and it’s the incumbent. And just saying “Well, if you just voted differently, we’d have a different food system,” verges on pathologizing poor people for bearing the traits of poverty. We can’t do that. We do have to talk about, “Hey, everyone needs to learn how to cook.” This should be something we value and the time should be valued, as well. Everyone should be engaged in building a world where it’s not easier to feed our kids Froot Loops than it is to feed them fruit. Whether that’s a matter of price, access, or knowledge.

Before you became the president of Slow Food USA, you were the co-director of the Yale Sustainable Food Project. Tell me a little about that project.

I was hired by Yale to get local, sustainable food into the dining halls and to build a farm on campus. And also to build curriculum and extra-curricular programs for undergraduates. It was a great adventure.

The idea was, “Let’s intervene with this incredibly intelligent—and for the most part very privileged—group of young people right before they catapult into the world.” Since ’72, every single presidential election at that time had a Yale graduate as one of the top two candidates. If you can intervene in that population you can create incredible change in the world.

At the same time, I was feeling a need to tap into the energy that was growing all over the country—particularly post-Omnivore’s Dilemma. I was seeing a lot of people—not just college students—either really angry or really inspired about food. They needed a place to put that energy. After Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, you saw the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations take readers of the book—people who would be engaged in pushing for social change. So I thought, “Slow Food should be the vessel for all that energy.” I got asked to join the board and eventually got asked to take it over.

So was that your charge as president—to engage in movement building?

Exactly. Which takes organizational change. But we turned ourselves into an organization that’s built to do that work.

Every mom who drops her kid off at school for the first day and realizes, “My child may be eating something that’s going to make her sick”—that mom needs a path to do something about that concern. Everyone who reads Michael Pollan and complains about corn subsidies with a friend over a cup of Fair Trade coffee—they need something to do about it! And our job is to give them something to do about it. That’s what gets me up in the morning. I think it’s what gets all of our staff and volunteers up in the morning—how do we make sure that we take that energy and turn it into power to make change?

I noticed the shift in Slow Food’s mission right around Slow Food Nation, in August of 2008. After that, the popular perception started to change from the notion that Slow Food was a club for foodies (whether or not it was) to a social justice organization.

It wasn’t just me. It was a mood—a tone and tenor and culture of the movement that needed to change. We realized we needed to move in that direction.

But social justice has always been embedded in Slow Food’s overall mission, no?

Absolutely—and globally. Right now we have members in 150 countries. Slow Food has nothing to do with being a gourmet club in these countries. It has to do with changing the world, preserving traditions and maintaining the sovereignty of the people who are growing and eating in their countries. It has a lot to do with corporate power and the way globalization plays out.

Slow Food’s tag line has always been about making food good, clean, and fair.

At the very beginning it was a protest against McDonald’s on the Spanish Steps. And so it started with that sense of anti-corporate protest—it’s in its DNA. And I think some people forgot and thought it was good, clean, or fair. But the “and” is really important.

The latest e-mail I got expands on that: “Food that is good for those who eat it, good for the farmers and workers, and good for the planet.”

And that’s basically how I describe what Slow Food is. It’s the opposite of fast food—it’s all those things.

Do you still get remarks from people who think Slow Food is elitist?

I’ve always been clear that I don’t want to spend any time in an argument about whether we’re elitist or not. I want to do work that makes it completely apparent that we’re not. I’m committed to doing work that is relevant to the people who are most hurt by these problems. If we can do that, I think the argument will fade away.

I think it is clear from all the “campaigns” you’ve engaged in—from the $5 challenge to the fight to ensure that taking photographs of farms is legal.

Our first campaign, in 2009, was about school lunch. It was called “Time for Lunch.”

We had over 300 potluck protests all over the country and yet no one talked about that as a social justice campaign or a campaign that was about social change. It was talked about as fixing school lunch. But school lunch is a program that feeds 31 million of America’s poorest children every day. It’s a program that disproportionately impacts low-income people and people of color. Time for Lunch was not just about this lesson: everyone should cook. It was about “What makes it more challenging to feed our kids real fruit rather than Froot Loops?”

The 2012 Farm Bill is right around the corner. Is Slow Food planning a campaign around it?

Food and farm policy is completely against our nutrition and environment policy. It’s a really interesting political climate right now—it’s a budget-driven climate. So we see huge opportunities to take away some of the incentives that allow corn and corn syrup to be so cheap. At the same time there is a huge risk that some of the programs that feed people or support ranchers and farmers will also get taken away.

We’re not sophisticated lobbyists, but what we are are really good organizers. The $5 challenge is essentially a way of helping us find anyone who is concerned about these issues and setting them up to be advocates on the Farm Bill.

We’ll have a policy platform that we’ll be pushing and we’ll be asking Congress to do the right thing by it. The timing of it remains to be seen. But we know that with or without Congress, we’re organizing people around good, clean, fair food policy. The $5 challenge is the launching pad for that.

So what will the organizing on this issue look like?  Will you ask members to call their Senators and Representatives or will there be more of a MoveOn house party model?

The face-to-face engagement—whether it’s political or not—is vital. The kind of relationships we build when we have a meal together is the foundation for doing good work to change the world. What you’ll see are small groups meeting all over the country for meals and taking the $5 challenge over and over again. And pushing legislators by phone and meeting them in their home states.

A lot of the really effective advocacy that’s happening right now is happening not in Washington D.C., but back at home. That’s where legislators are listening. I actually think that’s a healthy trend. We’re set up to do that kind of advocacy because we have 225 chapters, members in every state, and this great volunteer corps.

What is the membership of Slow Food USA these days?

We have about 25,000 active members. We reach a network of about 250,000 people via e-mail. Through Oct. 15^th, membership is pay what you can. So instead of it being $25 for membership, even $1 will make you a member. It’s part of trying to make sure everyone can be involved in this work and be part of the organization.

We also have a really big Twitter and Facebook following. I think we’re at 179,000 Twitter followers now and have 85,000 “likes” on Facebook. What’s great about that community is they’re all over the country and they’re sharing stories of the work they’re doing on the ground but then they’re also talking about food all the time. It’s a nice mix.

We beat McDonalds by a couple thousand Twitter followers—we’re pretty proud.

Does Slow Food do some kind of outreach to low-income communities or food deserts? I would guess that people in most of these communities are not familiar with Slow Food, but I could be wrong.

Our chapters have over 500 local partnerships in the communities where they work, with other organizations. They range from churches to nonprofit organizations and direct service organizations. And a pretty substantial percentage of those local organizations are doing work in low-income communities. For us the key is to do work that is relevant in those communities and let the Slow Food identity and membership follow. So we’re actually not that focused on aggressively diversifying our membership but we are really focused on making sure that the work of Slow Food is relevant to diverse constituents. And if diverse membership follows—and particularly if diverse volunteer leadership follows, whether that’s socioeconomic or racial diversity—that, we think, is a really good thing.

I think Slow Food’s New York chapter gave money for the garden at Automotive high school in Greenpoint.

That’s a great example. Almost all of our tangible on-the-ground work happens at the local chapters. Our hope is that the local chapter will be better at doing local work—whether it’s gaining local press or raising local money than we ever could be at the national level. Our work at the national level is to build up the leadership of those chapters and support them so that they can be effective at their work but then bring us all together around national campaigns.

Bryan Walsh, in his article about the food movement, was tallying up the membership of Slow Food as if it were the main sign of this being a viable social movement.

But you know, another way to look at it is that it’s about potential. The Tea Party at its outset had a much smaller membership than Slow Food has now.  If you look at the early Civil Rights movement—the assets both in organized people and in dollars—it’s much smaller than the food movement.

I think the question now is how do you tap into the passionate concerns of people who want to change things and give them pathways to do it?  For me, I look much less at our current membership than to our potential membership, which is enormous. And then what you do with those folks is incredible as well. We have a set of three Slow Food chapter leaders in Denver: Andy, Gigia, and Krista. They started a garden in their kids’ school and soon parents at other schools were saying, “We wanna see gardens in our school. Would you help us do it?” So they did.

Finally, the three of them were running twelve different gardens in twelve different schools. And they thought, “We can’t do this any more!” The next parent who came up and said, “We want to do this, would you start a garden in our kids’ school?”  They said—“Go find twelve parents and teachers that get together regularly and we’ll train you how to do it yourself.”

A few years later, they’ve got gardens in over 60 percent of the public schools in Denver and they’ve organized a network of 500 parents and teachers to get this whole thing off the ground. So for me, show me, 50 Andy, Gigias, and Kristas—and we’ve got a Tea Party for the food movement.

Were you pleased with how many people turned out for the $5 challenge?

Over 30,000 people took the challenge and there were over 5,500 events on that day. We thought we’d have 500 events and maybe a few thousand people taking part. We never could’ve anticipated this turnout. I think this speaks to the potential power that’s out there and the drive and desire to share food and knowledge and get together in our communities.

There’s a section of our Web site where we posted the tips, tricks, and recipes people sent us. It ranges from videos, pictures, and recipes to a theory of cooking beans. The underlying idea is our communities collectively have a lot of the solutions we need. Whether it’s how to cook real food on a budget or it’s how to effectively drive our legislators for meaningful change for federal policy. We own those solutions ourselves, so let’s begin using them and sharing them with each other.

What’s your definition of food justice?

Everyone can eat every day food that is good for them, good for the environment and good for the people who grow and pick it. That food is a universal right and not a privilege. That’s the short definition.

I used to be a vegetable grower and I would sell very expensive produce at a farmers’ market in an affluent neighborhood. There were some low-income people who would come to that market and they couldn’t afford the produce I had. So I would give it away. My partner and I were making maybe $12,000 between the two of us.

So there’s this paradox. To even stay at the poverty line as a farmer, selling directly to consumers, you have to charge prices which means that your food—which is real food—is completely unavailable to low-income people. And you are a low-income person! So we have this false choice. My only option would’ve been making zero—losing money. When you have those kinds of paradoxical situations, I think it doesn’t call on farmers to lower their prices. And it doesn’t call on poor people to spend more money on food. It calls on all of us to change the way that we grow and share food in this country, so that we don’t have those kinds of choices anymore.

Originally published on The Faster Times

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.  

What’s a Southern girl like you doing in a vegan joint in Hollywood?

I’m from Tennessee, and like most people, grew up eating the Standard American Diet, only Southern style. People ate a lot of meat, everything was fried, and no one questioned frozen or packaged food. When I moved to New York City in the 1980s to pursue an acting career, I worked in a natural foods restaurant and that experience had a big impact on me. I became interested in the cause and effect relationship between my body and the food I ate. But mostly, I just felt really good eating whole food. When I moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s, I worked as a personal chef to actor/director Danny DeVito, and later had a home delivery service before I opened the first RFD restaurant in 1993. I base my cooking on macrobiotics (a diet based on whole grains and vegetables), which taught me the connection between diet and health. I’ve been vegetarian and vegan on and off for three decades; these days I eat a small amount of dairy and fish.

What about cooking for families appeals to you?

I thought the RFD cookbook would be my one and only. But, I realized I had another book in me after I had two children (a daughter, Halle, twelve, and a son, Walker, eight) and began feeding my family out of my own home kitchen. I wanted to create a book with very simple and tasty recipes. The central theme of this book is family and who is around your table and it doesn’t have to be kids. Your family is your friends, neighbors, colleagues, and even just yourself. I want people to sit down and eat together in a healthy and delicious way. The focus is on texture, color, cooking methods, simplicity of ingredients, accessibility—you can find most of the ingredients in your own pantry. I grew up sitting down to a meal of protein centered in the plate with several side dishes. People are busy and don’t have time to make all of that food now. In this book, you can learn to make a whole meal out of salad, which is my favorite way to eat, and you can be completely nourished and satisfied.

Your family helped you with this book. What is like raising kids vegetarian and/or vegan?

I’m lucky because my husband is as committed, if not more, than I am to eating well. We keep a vegan household, though sometimes we have goat ice cream or yogurt, and the kids eat what we eat. My daughter breastfed and was vegan for first two years of her life and then she became vegetarian, and now she’s exploring food. She is sort of a radical vegan, who understands what it means to kill an animal. Children do. It will be interesting to see if my kids will rebel against it and if they do, I’m not going to stand in their way. I made a conscious decision that I don’t want to be the mother who follows her kids around with “special” food, though I do appreciate families whose children have allergies.

Why is eating less meat important?

I try to never preach and knock people over the head with a vegan message. Veganism is a noble cause, but most people aren’t going to become vegan or vegetarian. That doesn’t mean they don’t seek out and want more grain-based food in their lives. I’m hopeful that the more grains and vegetables people eat, the more they will want to eat this way. And times have changed. People are eating less meat due to the horrible practices involved with industrial animal agriculture and also for their health and the environment. And there are a lot of vegetarians who are living on processed tofu meat-like products. While I do include recipes in the book with tofu, tempeh, and nondairy cheese, I’m not trying to replicate flavors or textures of meat. I’m much more interested in getting people to eat whole, unprocessed food.

You were one of the first restauranteurs to commit to organics. Why is organic important to you?

Choosing fruits and vegetables that are grown organically in pesticide-free soil is the best thing you can do for yourself and your family. My dollars go toward supporting small family farms and keeping chemicals off my plate, out of my body, and out of the environment. Nearly everything we have at RFD is almost 100 percent organic. We bite the bullet and pay the extra cost for organic ingredients because we believe it is better for our customers and the planet. When we first opened, I went to the Santa Monica farmers’ market twice a week, and I have longterm relationships with some incredibly committed organic farmers, including Bill McGrath, Coastal Organics, Burkhart, Maggie’s farm, and Del Cabo—Larry Jacobs is my brother-in-law, and we love using his cherry tomatoes in our guacamole.

What’s your take on MyPlate?

From my perspective, USDA’s MyPlate represents a shift in the right direction from prior recommendations, but that’s not saying much. Let’s face it, the agency has a stated purpose to promote the sale of agribusiness products. Leaving my cynicism behind, I do like that fruits, vegetables, and grains comprise three-fourths of MyPlate. But why did they stop at half? Mostly likely because the cereal manufactures won the day at that negotiation. Madison Avenue has convinced America that whole grains come from a cereal box. The inclusion of “protein” as a “food group” is an obvious win for the meat industry’s lobbyists.   These guys have spent big bucks for generations convincing Americans that protein is the flesh of a dead animal. For the most part, they have succeeded. So now we have  ”official” guidelines with their “code word” taking up one-fourth of the plate.  On the positive side, beans, peas, nuts and seeds make the list of “protein foods.” The fact is, all plants contain plenty of protein for a healthy diet and American’s over consume protein, which many experts say contributes to depletion of calcium.  Eating more calcium will never overcome the problem of bone loss and I’d like to see that cup of dairy on the side of MyPlate fed back to the calves as the mama cow had intended. Obviously, the dairy industry’s lobbyists earned their pay here.

One of Gentry’s favorite recipes from her new book follows. On Tuesday, June 21, she will be cooking up some vegan fare and discussing her new book at 18 Reasons in San Francisco.

Lasagna Rolls with Tofu Ricotta and Everyday Tomato Sauce

This is a fun way to serve lasagna: Instead of the traditional layering, you top the individual noodles with a vegan ricotta cheese and vegetable mixture and roll it up. My tofu ricotta cheese is a blend of tofu, miso, and tahini, which creates a creamy consistency that easily spreads. The tomato sauce takes no more than 10 minutes to make; if there is any left over, use it the next day over rice or noodles. Serves 6 (makes 12 rolls)

2½ tablespoons olive oil
2 onions, thinly sliced
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1 teaspoon fine sea salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
3 medium carrots, peeled and cut into ¼-inch pieces
2 zucchini, cut into ¼-inch pieces
1 head broccoli, stems removed and florets finely chopped
2 cups Tofu Ricotta Cheese (recipe follows)
12 eggless lasagna noodles
3 cups Everyday Tomato Sauce (recipe follows)

Preheat the oven to 350°F. Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a large, heavy frying pan over medium-high heat. Add the onions, garlic, basil, salt, and pepper. Sauté until the onions are tender, about 10 minutes. Add the carrots, zucchini, and broccoli and sauté until the carrots are crisp-tender, about 12 minutes. Let cool completely. Mix the vegetable mixture into the tofu ricotta cheese.

Cook the noodles in a large pot of boiling salted water, stirring often, until tender, about 10 minutes. Drain and rinse the noodles, then toss them with 1 tablespoon of the remaining oil to prevent the noodles from sticking together.

Coat a 13 by 9 by 2-inch baking dish with the remaining 1½ teaspoons oil. Spread 1 cup of the tomato sauce on the bottom of the dish. Using a spatula, spread about ½ cup of the vegetable mixture over each lasagna sheet, leaving about ½ inch of each end uncovered. Roll up each sheet tightly and place it seam-side-down in the baking dish. Pour the remaining 2 cups tomato sauce over the lasagna rolls.

Cover the dish with aluminum foil. Bake until the sauce bubbles, about 55 minutes. Remove the foil and continue baking for 15 minutes.

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Tofu Ricotta Cheese

When blended, the tofu gives this vegan cheese a creamy consistency that resembles ricotta. This recipe is borrowed from my first book, The Real Food Daily Cookbook—when you have a good recipe, why change it?  Makes about 3 cups

(14-ounce) container waterpacked firm tofu, drained and  cut into quarters
²⁄3 cup yellow miso
²⁄3 cup water
½ cup tahini
¼ cup olive oil
5 large garlic cloves
1½ teaspoons dried basil
1½ teaspoons dried oregano
¾ teaspoon sea salt

Blend all the ingredients in a food processor until smooth. The cheese will keep for 2 days, covered and refrigerated.

***

Everyday Tomato Sauce

This is a perfect, simple tomato sauce. The key is to use canned crushed tomatoes, easily found in a grocery or natural foods store. Eden and Glen Muir are my favorite brands because they are organic.
Makes about 4 cups

¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil
4 shallots, thinly sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
½ teaspoon fine sea salt
1 (28-ounce) can crushed tomatoes
1 cup water
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1 teaspoon chopped fresh oregano

Heat the olive oil in a heavy saucepan over medium-high heat. Add the shallots, garlic, and salt and sauté until fragrant, about 20 seconds. Stir in the tomatoes and the 1 cup water. Bring to a gentle simmer, then decrease the heat to low and simmer gently, stirring occasionally, for 20 minutes, to allow the flavors to blend. Stir in the basil and oregano. Remove from the heat.

—From Vegan Family Meals by Ann Gentry/Andrews McMeel Publishing

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.

So tell me more about the Wit.

We took a Classic Belgium style wit, which is a lighter style beer typically made with oranges and coriander, it’s got a specific yeast profile that has some cloves and vanilla.  Both Nicole (brewer & manager) and I are very novice herbologists and so we like the idea of getting some healthy properties while we’re drinking.  It’s more about putting some good stuff into the beer that we’re brewing.  So we brew our beer with St. Johns Wart and lemon balm as well as the orange peel and the coriander.  That’s why it’s called the Feel Good Wit.  We got in trouble with the witches because we were calling it the Witches Wit, based on this idea that witches were just female brewers. It came out in the newspaper and then we started getting these messages on our machine from women who were part of the Santa Cruz Mountain Witches and they didn’t want to be associated with that at all, so we decided to change the name.

Why do you think there aren’t more female brewers?

I think in general beer has always been perceived to be a man’s drink and that just led to men being brewers and getting interested in it. Even with homebrewing, it seems like men really picked it up a lot more, which is strange because originally it was mainly women who brewed, but over time it definitely shifted. I think with beer popularity growing with women, it’s starting to open a lot of doors in homebrewing and brewing in general, but it’s still dominated by men and that can be really intimidating for women to even get their foot in the door.

Are there any female brewers, beside you, working at successful breweries?

Yes. There is a society of women brewers called the Pink Boots Society and I’ve been to a few of their meetings. And there is a brewery started by a women and her husband about 30 years ago called Sprecher up in Wisconsin.  There are also several women in California; North Coast and Stone have some women brewers.

Historically, did women play a role in beer?

Yeah.  One of our customers just gave me this book called Beer in the Middle Ages and I just started reading it.  It is one of the first real concrete pieces of literature that talks about women as brewers.  There is a lot of speculation about how the term “witch” came to become associated with brewing techniques, and all the symbols that were actually part of brewing like the broom and the cats and the kettle and the cauldrons…traditionally they would stick a broom outside their door so people would know this is where you get beer.  Especially in the Middle Ages, women’s work was definitely separate from men’s work, which was building and hunting.  Women would produce food and beverages.

Why do you think a “witch” became such a negative thing?

I don’t know.  I can’t wait to really get into this book, because it did become a really negative thing.  But I think in general during the Renaissance things shifted from solid ideas like this is earth and this is water, and all the spiritual stuff just took on a whole negative connotation.

What compelled you to start this annual event?

That’s a good question.  Well, Nicole and I do a lot of beer traveling and we also do a lot of brewing and we just thought, here is a unique opportunity and nobody else is doing this.  Probably the reason no one else is doing it is because there aren’t that many women brewers and here the two of us are.  We kind of just did it on a whim last year, it wasn’t really well planned, we only had a couple of people, but then people were interested in it long after.  So then it was like, oh yeah, we have to keep doing this.  It’s become this neat thing about us and our brewery.

In general, do you see a rise in women’s participation in brewing?

Yes, I think one thing, especially about this area, and I guess the across the whole country too, is that women in particular are really aware of food and what’s going into it and how it’s being produced. There’s more of a drive of knowing who’s making what I’m going to put into my mouth.  Partly because there’s a big scare about mass-produced food right now, but also because it’s just an interesting thing.  So women are definitely gravitating more towards brewing and doing it themselves, which is a whole other movement too.  Growing it yourself, making your own products, canning, preserving, cheesemaking, brewing…

Do you think it goes along with the resurgence of DIY trends?

Definitely.  That’s the driving force.  Also, beer is evolving so it’s not just fuzzy yellow Budweiser or whatever.  There are so many complex flavors and styles and adaptations, especially for people who like cooking, and that really draws them in and starts to inspire them as a culinary thing too.

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.

Your have been talking about food, energy and the environment for decades. Do you think there is real potential now for a big change in the food system?

I must say that compared to the reception my ideas got thirty years ago, its quite astonishing the reception they’re getting now. I am excited to see the kinds of things that are going on in Brooklyn, for example. People are butchering meat, raising chickens, and it’s become the sort of “heartland” of the food movement. But whether or not there’s going to be sea change in the whole system is so hard to judge. I am politically very discouraged, because of what happened in the [last] election and what has happened with our president whom we elected with such hope. He seems completely unable to get really really passionate about anything.

Do I have hope? Yes, because as Michael Pollan wrote in the Omnivore’s Dilemma, what it means to say that something is unsustainable is that it will stop. And we have an unsustainable food supply. I believe the short-sightedness of both national and international leaders and their inability to do anything useful politically is so stunning that we’re going to come to a crisis period much sooner than anyone expects. But what I really believe is hopeful is that there are so many experiments going on on the ground now all over the country, everything from [Growing Power’s] Will Allen to what’s going on in Hardwick Vermont, and the Slow Money movement putting money into agriculture and the food system. There’s going to be models out there when we need them.

What do you think went wrong the first time around with the “Back to the Land” movement? and how can this generation get things right this time around?

Seeing young people in agriculture is so promising. However, I also know people who’ve hung in there who are in their 40s or 50s who have no retirement and no health insurance, and don’t know how long they can continue to farm.

We’re only set up right now for those people to make a living in a situation where there are enough rich people to buy their food at a decent price. I know there are all kinds of groups working to make good food accessible to poor people, but the reality is that you can’t go into a supermarket for the most part and get anything good for someone in that situation to eat. And there is still a class divide, an economic divide between the foodie movement, if you like, and the reality of the world.

In 1980, they had just brought out a report at the USDA that studied organic foods. There was so much hope. There was an alternative energy center in the upper Midwest, and I remember getting a newsletter from them that was dated January 1980, and showed all of the things they were trying, and I wrote at the top, “The End.” Because it was clear that Reagan would just kill it all, and he did. He took the solar panels off the White House roof, he fired the one person at USDA focused on organic agriculture and he sent us back twenty years. And it was very hard at that point to keep the momentum going because there was no money in it. At least now there is money around the fringes. The thing that is different now is that it’s got publicity, it’s caught the eye of the press, which is of course dangerous too.

How so?

We’re such a faddish country. And of course you’ve noticed there is a real blow back. These attacks on “local” saying how naïve it is, how its better to import your lamb from New Zealand. And then you have the corporations gathering together to do a publicity campaign. The last one I saw was that the meat industry is getting together to push back against this notion that this way that we’re raising animals is not healthy.

Do you think this is the last gasp of industry, or do you think they have the ability to mobilize that other 80 percent against this growing movement?

[Laughs] Oh they have many more gasps left. I believe that is the reason that you have to keep hope alive, you have to keep moving along the way you believe in and keep telling the truth and trying to get the word out there. Because the reality is that the pressure is on the other side. There is a lot of money at stake, and they’re not giving up their livelihoods.

How do you see the field of nutrition now as opposed to when you first started teaching your “nutritional ecology” course?

The existence of farmers markets, CSAs, all these things have in a sense forced the profession to move. [But] there is a huge resistance. I gave the keynote address at Teacher’s College in which I talked about giving up nutrients [because] we don’t know enough. Like what is the ideal mix of fat, carbohydrates and protein? We don’t even know that. And when it comes to micro-nutrients, we are really up a tree.

The fact of the matter is that we’ve allowed people to be led astray. Michael [Pollan, in In Defense of Food] identified that moment when the FDA said that if a food is essentially equivalent you didn’t have to call it imitation. Once you could restore the nutrients and say something is nutritionally equivalent, we allowed ourselves to be lured into thinking that as long as it met nutrient requirements, it was healthy. [Yet] here we have this abundant food supply and this incredibly unhealthy population. The level of obesity, the level of diabetes, all these things are shocking.

Michael [Pollan]’s advice in that book, which is to get off the western diet, is really the right advice. And if I had tried to say that twenty years ago, it wouldn’t have been possible. There was no place to go to buy foods that were not so processed, to get meat that was raised right, or many types of fresh fruits and vegetables.

In Growing, Older you write about how “having possibilities” means freedom from despair in the face of climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, soil loss, etc. Could you explain this?

Temperamentally I’ve never been the sort of person who looks ahead in my life and gloomily assesses the future. Maybe at this point in my life I should be doing that a little bit more [laughs]. I have to say that [I have possibilities] because I don’t know what the answers to anything are going to be. Like when my garden was totally destroyed last March, people were sort of astounded that I didn’t fall apart. And I spent the whole summer rebuilding it two feet higher.

If someone had told me that I would look upon what happened [in 2010] as a blessing I would have thought they were out of their mind. I am not a religious or superstitious person, but I honestly believe that mother nature took care of me in the spring. She looked down and she said, “Joan you’re not getting any younger, this yard is getting worse and worse. Its getting wetter all the time because the tides are rising. You have access to your land from the north for the first time in 100 years because someone has torn down a house and isn’t going to build until April, and you have the first ever advance that you’ve ever gotten on a book, so you can pay for it.” So wham. And that’s what it feels like, it feels like I was given this gift. Now I couldn’t have forecast that, I couldn’t have wished for that.

If there is anything that worries me, really worries me deeply, its how we’re going to overcome American and modern peoples’ detachment from the natural world, and how we’re going to get them connected again. Unless we’re connected, we’re never going to be able to save the planet. I mean we can’t isolate ourselves in these boxes that are artificially maintained by energy that we don’t even recognize as maintaining us, and save the planet. We have to be in touch with what the planet is calling out for us to do.

What is it about gardening that inspires you?

It provides so many rewards. There is so much beauty out there and there is so much interest out there, and there are so many wonderful plants and animals sharing your life with you out there. Katherine Hodgson Burnett wrote that “to have a garden is to have a future, to have a future is to be alive.” That’s my theme for my old age.

In a chapter called “My Obituary” You write about how you would like to be remembered. What do you hope is your legacy?

I’d love to be remember as having a sense of humor. I was most pleased when some of my students told me I should go into stand-up environmental comedy. I would like to be remembered as having tried to tell the truth.

I feel like the food movement has difficulty in trying to explain to people that reducing their consumption is actually a net benefit for them, that it’s not about deprivation, but about life improvement.

I obviously feel that the life that I live, in which I attempt to consume minimally, and don’t waste things and don’t buy things often, I consider it very life affirming. I really do believe that people would be so much happier and creative if they had some limitations and if they acknowledged their limitations. What I love about the way I eat for instance is that basically I eat what is available. Going to the supermarket to try to figure out what to eat is so deadly to me. It doesn’t feel good at all. What does feel good is that you don’t have to go out and shop, you can make do with what you have.

The common wisdom says that if we don’t buy stuff, the economy will collapse. How do you respond to that?

My brilliant young friend Jennifer Wilkins, who writes a monthly column up in Ithaca, was at my house at Thanksgiving and was looking at the paper about Black Friday. And she decided to write about the sudden changeover from these Thanksgiving values, which is the only really non-commercial holiday we have where your not asked to buy cards or go shopping for gifts, you just buy food and you eat.

She wrote about how Black Friday is the opposite: get out there and spend. And when you don’t spend you aren’t helping the merchants, and the economy doesn’t recover. She also talked about “Buy Nothing” day and she goes on and says that the answer is not to buy nothing, it’s to invest your money in things that make a difference, and that help grow the things that matter to you, like local food and local merchants, or having a meal with friends. Something that promotes your values, which is sort of the premise of the Slow Food movement. When you put your money down there, where is it going to go? What is your money doing out in the world? If we need to keep spending to keep the economy going, we just have to start deciding which economy, which parts of the economy do we want to grow? And if what we want to grow is a sustainable local food system, then we need to put our money where our hearts are.

Photo: Lohud