Civil Eats

Chicago hip hop artist D-Nick The Microphone Misfit teamed up with B-Boy Super inLight to create “Abnormality“, a track for the opening of Graffiti and Grub, the Chicago health food store founded by activist LaDonna Redmond. Their video highlights the physical health issues brought on by artificial, processed foods and encourages us all to look at what we’re putting into our bodies.

D-Nick and Super inLight both embrace the acronym HIP HOP for “Healthy Independent People Helping Other People” and they are doing just that, using their talents to get the word out that “Eating healthy is the first step in disease prevention.” D-Nick has entered the video in The One Chicago, One Nation film contest, whose goal is to reward “videos that tell the stories of people in Chicago from different backgrounds working together for the common good.”

Please watch “Abnormality”, share it with friends, and show your support by voting for D-Nick–voting ends on May 9th: Read More

On Saturday, 3,000 people gathered at John Jay public high school for the Brooklyn Food Conference, a grassroots, volunteer-organized discussion around the state of our food system, featuring keynote talks by Dan Barber, Anna Lappé, Raj Patel, and LaDonna Redmond.  Along with these talks were 70 workshops throughout the classrooms of the school, on subjects as varied as growing your own food, starting a co-op and the value of breastfeeding.

According to the accompanying bright yellow guide, one of the goals of this event was to “bring Brooklynites together to demand — and participate in creating — a vital, healthy, and just food system available to everyone.” By my assessment, that is just what’s begun to happen. Read More