Lately I’ve been realizing that I married well. Not in the typical, societal ladder, Downton Abbey kind of way. Far from that. More like in a homesteader’s kind of way. Forget investment accounts and family crests, when it comes to spring water, pickles and chicken coops, we are set! And most recently, we hit the jackpot. My husband just landed a job at our local feed store, which in itself doesn’t sound like the most lucrative position, but this isn’t your basic feed store.

Mountain Feed and Farm, owned by Jorah Roussopoulos and his wife, Andi Rubalcaba, opened eight years ago and has since become a talk-of-the-town destination around these parts. “We really just want to be a homesteader’s convenience store,” says Jorah, of the unique inventory he has come to offer. But instead of cheap malt liquor and junk food, this “convenience store” offers books and kits on how to brew your own beer and heirloom seed potatoes to grow your own. “Planting seeds to canning jams, our goal is to be able to take people full cycle from production to preservation,” says Jorah. That means you can walk in and easily find the standards that most feed stores provide: pet products, livestock feed, seed propagation supplies, soil amendments, and anything for the home garden. But wandering in deeper will uncover the homesteader’s playground it really is, stocked full of inspiring project starters, hard-to-find resources, and just the right touch of crafty farm aesthetic to invoke admiration in the whole package.

As they grow and shift (and they are growing at a crazy pace, partly due to knowing good business and partly due to our economic times and the public’s increased DIY inclination) there is an obvious need to make sure that all staff are well versed in every department. They now staff 12-15 full time employees and each department has a “specialist” who is truly expert at helping the customer find what they are looking for and can offer tips and advice on any given project. This level of genuine skill, personality and service is one of the main things that Jorah is concerned with offering. That, and a diverse assortment of items put together with intention to make his business known as the “Sustainable Living Country Store.”

This is where my personal benefits start to become clear. A new series of staff workshops, focusing on anything from canning to pickling to bread baking to beekeeping, are on tap almost every week. And as a spouse, who likes food and happens to write about it a lot, I get a free ticket in.

The most recent class was at our house, and was all about cheese. Our tome was the user friendly, concise and informative book called “Home Cheesemaking“ by Ricki Carrol. It offers practical guidance, clear-cut recipes and a lot of background on the science involved in making cheese from bacteria to rennet to temperature requirements.  It’s a great resource for anyone who wants a comprehensive view of the processes, even if they decide to chuck it over their shoulder and opt instead for making their own coagulator from fig tree bark or scraping stomach lining from a sheep’s intestine to make traditional rennet.  The book tells you about these things too, at least, so you can decide for yourself.

Our long butcher-block counter was quickly crowded with half gallon canning jars of fresh goat milk, each one labeled with the date of milking and the name of the goat who contributed the bounty. Michael Zlotkin is the goat farmer who generously donated the milk to the cause, who also happens to be on staff at Mountain Feed. His little farm is in the beginning stages, but he has already figured out how to raise and butcher a cow, tend to a herd of goats, and acquire a live-in apprentice to start the crops.

A couple of pregnant ladies, a few tradesman, a skilled chef and marathon runner, two little kids, an Aikido disciple, a filmmaker and a bunch of excited homesteaders crammed into our little kitchen. Milk steamed, curds formed, cultures flew as we stretched and stirred and cut our way through much of those jars. The end result was two types of mozzarella (one more successful than the other spongy mass), a kefir and a feta, one brined, one not. All goat and all contributing to a sense of education, accomplishment, and ultimately, community. What’s more is that the consistency of these seminars serves as infective motivation to keep the ball rolling. My husband is now on a weekly cheesemaking mission. He’s been turning the compost way more regularly, initiating a large-scale red wine vinegar project and tending to our garden with renewed vigor. The trend of proactive capability and knowledge gathering spreads, from staff member to staff member, and I think that is really the true gem. Those ripples are spreading from one great business in our little mountain town out into our community and beyond.

Portions of this article were adapted from an original piece in the Spring 2012 issue of Edible Monterey Bay.

Wendell Berry has said that eating is an agricultural act, but what about drinking beer? A thirst for fermented beverages may have inspired the world’s first farmers to plant crops some 13,000 years ago, yet today beer is rarely part of the larger conversation about where our food comes from.

A handful of California craft brewers are starting to tap into that primitive connection. Taking up the motto “Beer is agriculture,” Almanac Beer Co. works directly with local farmers to source specialty ingredients for their seasonal brews. “For most people, beer is what shows up in the bottle or can,” says Almanac brewer Damien Fagan. “We’re trying to create a foundation that beer is rooted deeply in agriculture.”

Fagan founded Almanac with fellow brewer and Beer & Nosh blogger Jesse Friedman last year, after they met in a home-brewing club, where they traded brewing experiments. (“I’d show up with a fig beer or a puréed turnip beer. Not always great ideas,” Fagan admits.) The two instantly bonded over their interest in San Francisco’s farm-to-table food culture. “We saw a real opening to think and talk about the brewing process using that same vocabulary and ideology,” says Friedman.

No stranger to farmers markets, Friedman launched SodaCraft last summer, offering naturally carbonated sodas using fresh produce from his fellow vendors at the Ferry Plaza. He has since sold the business to turn his attention to Almanac, where his sourcing and brewing ethos remains the same. “Both businesses were born out of the idea that you can take farmers market produce and make something special out of it,” says Friedman.

From the Farm to the Barrel

While the term terroir is usually reserved for fine wines, Almanac has found creative ways to “infuse a sense of time and place in each brew,” as Friedman says, by integrating fresh produce into the mash. Since last summer, Almanac has collaborated with Sebastopol Berry Farm, Twin Girls Farm, Hamada Farms, Marshall’s Farm Natural Honey, and most recently, Heirloom Organic Gardens. For each of their beers, made in small batches and released seasonally, Friedman and Fagan meet with the farmer, tour their farm, and feature it prominently on the bottle’s label and Almanac’s website.

Like the Farmers’ Almanac, each brew serves as a record of the season. The Autumn Farmhouse Pale Ale celebrated the last of Twin Girls Farm’s fall plums, while the Winter Wit preserved the end of December at Hamada Farms, with a mix of Cara Cara, navel, and new blood oranges. “If we’d brewed two weeks earlier or later, the mix of oranges would have been different,” Friedman notes.

Their most recent release, Bière de Mars (March beer), is a French-style farmhouse ale highlighting baby fennel from Heirloom Organic Gardens. While fennel might sound like an unexpected choice for beer, farmer Grant Brians thought it made a lot of sense when Almanac approached him. “The flavors in fennel are carried in an oil and slightly alkaline base,” he explains. “It’s perfect to mix into the brewing process.”

The goal with each brew is to provide a distinct but subtle accent that does not dominate the flavor profile, but adds depth and pairs well with seasonal dishes. “We want the ingredient to be an integrated part of the beer,” Friedman insists. “It should not be a fennel cocktail.”

How’s the finished result? “It’s good!” says Brians. “I’m generally a wine drinker, but I enjoy full-bodied and well-balanced flavors in beers. And it was nice to taste the end result of our collaboration.”

Bottlenecks for Local Brewers

While Almanac has sourced some local grains for their brews, including wheat from Massa Organics, brewing a truly Californian beer is fraught with challenges when it comes to hops and barley malt. “Unfortunately, the beer world is defined by the big American brewers,” says Friedman.

California was once home to a thriving hops industry, but by the 1950s, the mechanization of hops harvesting, outbreaks of downy mildew, and changing beer tastes wiped hops growers out. Today, the majority of U.S. hops are grown in Washington and Oregon.

Sourcing specialty malt poses another obstacle, since there are no malt houses in California, and out-of-state industrial malting facilities prefer to work with large brewers. “You can grow high-quality barley here, but the issue is malting,” says Ron Silberstein of Thirsty Bear Brewing Company. “Part of the problem is that local growers are competing with commodity growers who can grow and malt their barley very inexpensively.” Organic malt from locally grown barley is even rarer.

San Francisco’s first and only brewery to carry the California Certified Organic Farmers seal, Thirsty Bear experimented with brewing a 100-percent local and organic beer in 2010, collaborating with Eatwell Farm in Dixon and Hop-Meister in Clearlake. Since there are no local malt houses, Eatwell had to ship its barley to Colorado Malt Company, which hand-malts in small batches.

In launching the Locavore Ale, Silberstein had hoped to enlist more local craft brewers to commit to purchasing organic malting barley from Eatwell Farm, but the buy-in wasn’t there, and Eatwell has since abandoned the project.
“You have to get enough brewers who want to tell a story, who want to have an heirloom varietal of the barley, and who are willing to pay a premium for that,” Silberstein says. He is hoping to build momentum to start a small artisan malting facility, which would make local, small-batch malting more feasible.

While the process of reconnecting local brewers and beer drinkers with local farms still has a long way to go, Silberstein and Friedman are optimistic that the farm-to-bottle movement is growing. “We need to build larger systems to support local brewing, and that’s a challenge we’re excited to tackle,” says Friedman. “In the meantime, we’ve contented ourselves with highlighting specialty ingredients from local farms.”

You can find Almanac Beer on tap at Il Cane Rosso in the Ferry Building, as well as at Bi-Rite Market and other local sellers of fine beer.

Originally published by CUESA

Today, most of us see “local” as shorthand for fresh, delicious food that comes with a story attached—and that serves an alternative to consolidated, anonymous, commodity-based farming. But that hasn’t always been how the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) sees it.

USDA is known for creating, subsidizing, and promoting industrial agriculture. So the agency’s effort to dip its toes into the local food movement in 2009 with its Know Your Farmer Know Your Food program (KYF2) raised eyebrows and questions. Could USDA really help create a thriving bottom-up food system? Or would it spread the term local, and the ethos behind it, so thin as to make it meaningless?

Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food essentially re-packaged and highlighted government programs that support and promote the development of local farmers and ranchers. The funds it made available are a drop in the bucket (at a few hundred million dollars spread across 27 programs run by nine different agencies that support local food efforts in some way) when compared to the tens of billions the USDA puts toward the “big 5″ commodity crops—corn, soy, wheat, cotton and rice.

But that didn’t make it insignificant. In fact, as Know Your Farmer appeared in 2009, former Grist food editor Tom Philpott admitted to feeling cautiously optimistic about the effort. He wrote:

“…it’s remarkable and to my knowledge unprecedented that the USDA is making a major effort to publicize these programs and ensure that at least some federal money flows into emerging alternative food systems.”

This month, the USDA is making a very public effort to report its progress with the Know Your Farmer program after two and a half years. The agency has held several press events, including a live streaming conversation from the USDA headquarters last week, another from the White House on Monday (that included the first family’s head chef/resident looker, Sam Kass), and an ongoing attempt at a conversation via a hashtag on Twitter.

The agency has released what it calls the Compass, a series of documents, case studies, tools, and an interactive map designed to be a living representation of the KYF2 effort and its resources. The Compass includes anecdotes about scrappy, likable farmers, ranchers and other business owners who’ve used USDA dollars for things like food co-ops, small meat processors, hoop houses and artisan cheese operations. And most who take the time to dig in to the somewhat dry materials will likely be convinced that real work and concrete change is taking place—even if they’re ultimately dwarfed by the USDA’s agribusiness efforts.

But the USDA’s media blitz also raises a disturbing question, if we look closely: Does the agency see local food as any sort of alternative to industrial-scale (or “production”) agriculture? Or is it more of a garnish–say, a sprig of parsley—meant to make our nation’s heaping plate of corn and soy more appetizing?

This scene from last week’s live stream might shed some light on the answer:

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan are sitting together talking to an online audience flanked by the USDA seal and the American flag. Off to the side is a screen, where every few minutes a questions that’s been asked by an audience member via Twitter or email will pop up for the secretary and deputy to read out loud and answer.

After a promotional slideshow and several fairly benign questions about the KYF2 effort, an anonymous question appears on the screen (it’s at 17:55, for those of you following along at home). “How can local foods complement production agriculture?,” it reads.

Here’s what they have to say:

Vilsack: “This is a really important question. Because when KYF2 got launched, there was this belief that somehow it was separate from production agriculture.

We have always thought that it complements production agriculture. That it actually… increases the connection between consumers and people that are distant from the farm. The reality is that so many people who live in America today are generations removed from family members who farmed. So they may not have an appreciation for the challenges of farming… [see the video for his complete statement]

Merrigan: One person quoted in the Compass said…”Those of us doing the local/regional food work are ambassadors for American agriculture.” … That resonated with me because they’re putting that face on farming that I think is so important for all our constituents at USDA. [emphasis mine]

In other words, small producers working their behinds off on a local scale—who may get small loans but generally receive no subsidies, little to no crop insurance, and no lobbying power from organizations in Washington like the Farm Bureau—are valuable to the USDA because they make all farmers look much better by proxy.

Now, irony aside, why would USDA feel the need to dedicate so much time to making the point that stronger local economies should be in no way threatening  to Big Ag interests?

Well, some large producers have shown themselves to feel threatened by local food. Take this 2010 example, described by Don Carr of the Environmental Working Group, wherein an Iowa corn and soybean grower who is chairman of the Iowa Corn Promotion Board spoke up to criticize Merrigan’s early KYF2 efforts as “not the USDA that people in the Midwest are familiar with.”

There’s also the fact that a number of the services and funds KYF2 is highlighting were products of the 2008 Farm Bill. Since the Senate Agriculture committee is in the midst of holding hearings about the next Farm Bill, Merrigan and others behind Know Your Farmer probably feel they have a case to make.

The day after the Compass was announced, Republican senator Pat Roberts publicly criticized the KYF2 effort: it’s not “steeped in reality,” he said, since most food Americans consume isn’t grown locally.  In a story that ran on the industry site Agri-pulse, he was quoted saying that the initiative would be the subject of discussion at the Senate Ag Committee hearing. He continued:

“Would taxpayer dollars be better invested elsewhere, like research, pest and disease management that help the entire industry, rather than one particular farmers’ market.”

I’m guessing Merrigan and her staff understand the benefit of playing up local food’s “complementary” qualities in public, while doing work behind the scenes that could—even in small ways—begin shifting the power in American farming back towards small-scale producers and local infrastructure.

In fact, depending on how the 2012 Farm Bill shakes out, I have a hunch that the KYF2 effort will either be seen as a foundation on which the next several decades of system-changing local food work are built and strengthened, or a brief moment of possibility that very few of us truly understood while it lasted.

Originally published on Grist

Nic Welty employs himself full time year-round raising lettuce, spinach, and other leafy greens in three low-cost passive solar greenhouses, which together cover less than one acre of land.

His Nine Bean Rows farm near Traverse City, MI, is one of many smaller, diversified, often first-generation farms in the country that defy expectations, particularly among bankers and others with money needed to finance the new food enterprises.

Most find it difficult to pencil out the possibility that such a niche farm business could reliably make enough money to grow. Yet as Welty explains, “This business is good enough to take a cash advance on a credit card and run with it.”

The fact that many smaller niche farmers must do just that is alarming to a growing group of activist lenders and small farm business advisors.  They say it’s high time to line up resources behind the nation’s new farm entrepreneurs and the new jobs, food supply, and local commerce they are building. 

Lender Re-Training

“There is a critical need to provide business and financial support to this sector to help it grow, prosper, and meet its economic and production potential,” says Denise Dukette, a New England Bank vice president.

Dukette is part of a team of experts who will this year conduct a series of workshops for nonprofit loan funds and other mission-driven Community Development Financial Institutions, or CDFIs. The CDFI national association, the Opportunity Finance Network, will offer the training on farm production lending as part of a capacity building effort funded by the U.S. Treasury’s Healthy Food Financing Initiative.

Dukette and colleagues came together last year to assess the situation for small- and mid-scale diversified farms, and find leverage points for change. Their Financing Farming in the U.S. report found that building knowledge and capacity on the lender side of the farm financing equation is just as critical as building farmer’s financial skills.

“We want to make sure that a farm with a business model that works, and strong business management capacity, can communicate with lenders and get a fair shake in a loan,” says Mark Canella, a farm business advisor with University of Vermont Extension.

A new USDA study points to the economic development potential: The local food market that such entrepreneurs are largely forging is growing rapidly and amounts to nearly $5 billion annually, four times higher than previous estimates.

With the next Farm Bill on the horizon, Congress has new opportunities to support local and regional food systems.  The Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act, introduced in November 2011 by Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME-1), contains several provisions to bolster funding for local food infrastructure and markets.  One provision, for instance, would increase Business and Industry (B&I) federal loan guarantees for local and regional food enterprises.  Another would require Farm Credit System lenders to implement a program for providing credit to farmers producing for the local market and to undertake initiatives to improve local food infrastructure.

Capital Jam

One small-farm financing problem is that few commercial bankers are familiar with farming anymore given consolidation over the years in both banking and agriculture, says Susan Cocciarelli of the Center for Regional Food Systems at Michigan State University. With funding from the WK Kellogg Foundation’s Food and Community Program, Cocciarelli co-convened the Financing Farming in the U.S. team with Dorothy Suput of The Carrot Project, a small-farm financing organization in the Northeast.

“Financial institutions have to have good information about the sector they’re lending into,” Cocciarelli says of the familiarity gap between lenders and new farmers.

Another small-farm financing challenge comes in the form of policies and practices among traditional farm lenders and agencies. Their loan criteria and other measures generally reflect where agriculture has been over the past decades of industrialization, not where a good portion of agriculture may be going with local and regional market opportunities.

Growth Factor

Oregon farmer Zoe Bradbury ran into that problem in 2008. Her story is featured in a recent report from the National Young Farmers Coalition about barriers to success for beginning farmers.

After investing her savings in startup equipment and supplies, Bradbury sought a small irrigation loan from the USDA Farm Service Agency. She ended up taking out a credit card cash advance instead, in large part because the local FSA office would only consider income projections based on low global commodity market prices for fruits and vegetables.

Yet Bradbury’s business is based on a much healthier diet of higher net revenues from direct-marketing produce at farmers markets and the like. She managed to pay down her debt before the credit card’s 18 percent interest rate kicked in a year later.

“It was the biggest, scariest financial risk I had ever taken,” Bradbury said. “I’d never been so far out on a limb.”

Nic Welty has so far avoided the credit card risk so many others have had to take to finance their smaller diversified operations. But he’s wondering how he’ll finance further growth.

“It’s not so hard to get a loan for something solid (and saleable) like buildings and equipment,” he says. “But it’s almost impossible to get financing for the marketing, employee training, and other operational investments that will really make the difference.”

Originally published on National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition‘s blog

Meanwhile, only meager public resources have been invested smartly to build the kind of dynamic local food economies that support agricultural diversification and help link small- and mid-sized family farms to local and regional markets.

With the 2012 Farm Bill fast upon us, Congress has an opportunity to make smart, timely changes to help  fix our broken food and farm system by embracing a package of policy reforms outlined in the Local Farms, Food and Jobs bill. This legislation was recently introduced by Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and is co-sponsored by 63 representatives in the House and 9 in the Senate.

The Pingree-Brown bill includes a comprehensive package of cost-effective policy reforms that would boost farmers’ and ranchers’ incomes by helping them meet the growing demand for local and regional food.  The legislation also aims to make fresh, healthy and affordable food-especially fruits and vegetables- more accessible to consumers.  Given our nation’s costly epidemic of diet-related disease, small investments now that increase access and affordability of healthier food will save us billions of health-related dollars down the road.

Trends show people want fresh, healthy, local food

Demand for locally grown, sustainable food is growing in every corner of the country, with more than 100,000 growers now serving more than 160,000 outlets (pdf):

• In 2011, 7,175 farmers markets were open for business, more than double the number in 2002.
• An estimated 6000 Community Supported Agriculture programs are delivering food directly from the farm to consumers.
• More than 2,000 farm-to-school programs are up and running, a five-fold increase since 2004.
• More than 300 universities are involved with the Real Food Challenge and sourcing sustainable food locally.
• More than 360 hospitals have committed to sourcing more nutritious, locally grown food through the Healthy Food in Health Care pledge.
• The number of restaurants purchasing locally-grown food has skyrocketed; For the fourth year in a row, locally sourced food is the top restaurant food trend in 2012.
• More grocery stores are carrying food produced locally or from farms within the state–and labeling it for customers!

In 2008, the USDA valued this expanding market for local and regional foods at nearly $5 billion. The total will likely surpass $7 billion by the end of 2012, when the current farm bill expires.

This growth is particularly remarkable considering the tiny amounts of federal funding that have been invested in local and regional food system projects. Since 2008, funding has almost doubled but EWG estimates that still just a measly $100 million dollars of taxpayer money a year is being channeled to projects supporting increased local food production, distribution and consumption.

Compare that to roughly $12 billion in subsidies annually that go to industrial-scale growers of commodity crops who are enjoying record income year after year.

Farm Bill must help scale up local and regional food systems

While the recent expansion is impressive, local and regional food markets represented a mere two percent of gross farm sales in 2008. We desperately need the new investments and policy reforms outlined in the Pingree-Brown bill to help this burgeoning market grow and remove the many barriers farmers face in meeting existing demand from grocery stores, restaurants, schools, universities, hospitals and consumers. The Local Food bill has a  $100 million a year price tag, a small sum compared to its potential benefits.

The Local Farms, Food and Jobs bill will improve our broken food system by:

• Increasing support for local aggregation, processing and distribution so that farmers can more easily sell healthy food, including locally raised and processed meat, directly to schools, hospitals, stores and restaurants.

• Enabling schools to use more of their federal food funding to buy fresh, local foods. Public schools could opt to use up to 15 percent of their school lunch commodity dollars for buying foods from local farmers and ranchers, instead of through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s nationalized commodity food program.

• Improving the diets of food stamp recipients and low-income seniors by making it easier for them to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables at farmers markets, community supported agriculture programs, and other direct food marketing services, putting more money in the pockets of local farmers and generating additional economic activity in nearby business districts.

• Diversifying and increasing the production of healthy and sustainable food by increasing funding for the Specialty Crop Block Grant program and increasing access to credit, crop insurance, and other support for organic producers, diversified operations, smaller-scale and beginning farmers.

Together, these modest but effective investments will yield important, much-needed economic benefits. Farms that sell locally through shorter supply chains often keep a higher portion of the retail dollar, increasing profitability and potential for expansion and job creation.

According to a recent USDA analysis, farmers producing for local markets generally provide 1.3 full time jobs compared to 0.9 for farmers who sell through traditional wholesale markets.  And local food farmers grow higher value crops that generate greater sales per acre—$590 per acre versus $304 for the average farm. Local food markets also provide a critical pathway for new businesses, with beginning farmers accounting for 48% of local West Coast food producers.

Tough road ahead

Despite proven economic and public health benefits, getting this bill through the House agriculture committee may be challenging, given the panel’s hostility to the “Know Your Farmer” Program, the USDA’s comprehensive local and regional food initiative.

Pingree’s bill presents both a major opportunity and challenge for the highly decentralized local food and farming movement to work together in a unified, focused way to transform its considerable success at the local level into the political power needed to win support in the House and Senate agriculture committees.

With the stakes as high as they are, we believe that local farmers and the more than 180 hundred organizations that have endorsed the bill are up to the challenge.

Originally published on EWG

The attacks coming from economists against the local and sustainable food movement sound a lot like this joke: The arguments are based in flawed assumptions, obfuscated by fancy charts, big words, and complex calculations. 

Consider this most recent rant, “The Inefficiency of Local Food,” on the Freakonomics blog by economist Steven Sexton, who challenges the claim that “relocalized” food systems can be as efficient as today’s modern farming. He writes, “Today’s high crop yields and low costs reflect gains from specialization and trade, as well as scale and scope economies.”

Let’s start with Sexton’s assertion that industrial agriculture’s high yields can be attributed in part to specialization and trade—gains presumably lost when we “locavores” start frequenting farmers’ market. He writes, “The case for specialization is perhaps nowhere stronger than in agriculture, where the costs of production depend on natural resource endowments, such as temperature, rainfall, and sunlight, as well as soil quality, pest infestations, and land costs.”

When I was in graduate school, our economics textbooks spun this old yarn, too. It’s based in the theory of “comparative advantage,” dating back to classical economist David Ricardo’s writings in the 19th century. Specialization, argued Ricardo, makes sense because regions and countries should grow what best suits their climate and soils and then trade for what grows best elsewhere.

But when Ricardo extolled the benefits of comparative advantage, “capital” couldn’t move. Now that corporations can, and do, this theory no longer holds. In fact, regional or national agricultural comparative advantage often reflects nothing “natural” at all, but rather the extreme imbalances in power in our food system that enable those at the pinnacle to more heartlessly exploit the land and the workers lacking power.

To choose but one example: Ricardo’s theory doesn’t explain why North Carolina jumped from a bit player in the hog industry to number two, after Iowa, just in the past few decades. The key was the state’s concessions that lured the hog confinement industry, including its weak environmental and labor laws.

Of course it doesn’t make sense to try to grow mangoes on rooftop farms in Manhattan, but contrary to what Sexton implies, that’s not what regional food advocates suggest. Indeed, one of advocates’ core tenets is that the healthiest diet, for eaters and the planet, prioritizes choosing foods that grow well where we are, when they are in-season or when they can be stored, and considers those mangoes a special treat.

Sexton’s other hit on the efficiency of sustainable farming is that its yields don’t measure up. As a result, he says, shifting to a regional food system would require “more inputs to grow a given quantity of food, including more land and more chemicals.” But his calculations are based on assuming we’re not reconsidering what we grow or how we grow it.

But locavores and regional food advocates aren’t suggesting we try to plant Iowa-like monoculture corn farms in New York’s Hudson Valley; we’re arguing we need to radically rethink not only where we source our food, but what we plant and what methods we use.

Most American industrial farm acreage, for example, is devoted not to growing food for people to eat directly, but to grow commodity crops like corn and soybeans that are mainly used as inputs—for livestock production, ethanol, and industrial products. In addition, the American industrial food system wastes as much as half the food we could all be consuming. This waste embedded in the industrial model and its squandering of vital farmland for non-food production is enough to shake your head at the economist who praises its alleged efficiency—or suggests that by shifting away from this model we are putting the planet at a greater risk for hunger.

Sexton misses two other important points. For one, those industrial yield figures start looking a lot less impressive when you consider the cost by which we’ve achieved them—and especially when you learn that those costs are ones we need not pay. High yields from industrial agriculture rely entirely on external inputs—most of them in the finite, nonrenewable, we’re-not-gonna-have-them-in-fifty-years category.

Consider, for example, that in the Midwest we’re outstripping the nation’s largest source of groundwater faster than we’re replenishing it. A recent peer-reviewed study published by the National Academies Press concluded that if we don’t shift away from this industrial model, the Ogallala aquifer—which one-quarter of the farmers growing corn, soy, and cotton and 40 percent of those raising feedlot beef rely on for water—will be completely drawn down in a few decades.

Using new techniques to track soil erosion, scientists at the Environmental Working Group  found that vast swaths of Iowa and other Corn Belt states were losing their rich topsoil soil at rates many times faster than official estimates had assumed. Industrial monoculture methods leave the soil bare for most of the year and relying on external inputs for fertility defeats the build up of healthy soil—both practices make land vulnerable to erosion.

By definition, industrial agriculture relies on applying manmade fertilizer year-upon-year. But relying on external inputs for farming’s key macronutrients—nitrogen, potash, phosphorus—comes at big costs. While nitrogen is abundant in our atmosphere, to “bind” it into a usable form requires an enormous amount of energy–often natural gas. In China, 70 percent of nitrogen fertilizer production is powered by coal-fired plants.

The widespread use of phosphorus in industrial agriculture–by 2008 industrial agriculture was applying 17 million metric tons annually–has led to what some experts call “the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.” Relatively rare on the Earth’s crust, phosphorus is mined from ancient marine deposits, but it’s running out. Some say that within 30 to 40 years we may have none left. Plus, for every ton of phosphorus we mine, we produce five tons of radioactive waste. Today, the U.S. is home to more than one billion tons of this waste stored in 70 towers, ranging from just a few acres wide to some the size of 720 football fields.  In addition, we’re using more potent pesticides than ever, yet despite massive chemical pesticide use, we still face significant crop loss due to pests.

The second point Sexton misses is that strong yields don’t necessarily require chemical inputs and egregious water overuse. Truly sustainable growers know how to grow abundant food without all these external inputs: They recycle nutrients, employ natural methods to repel pests and conquer weeds, and tap ecological sources for fertility, like nitrogen-fixing cover crops. And guess what? Yields hold. In one crop-by-crop analysis over three decades, organic corn yields held steady per acre with conventional ones. Even more notably, during drought years the organic fields, with quality soil structure that retain water better, had 31 percent higher corn yields than conventional ones.

Studies are coming in from around the world—from the UK government to the United Nations to the OECD—that innovative sustainable farming techniques can match industrial agriculture in yields. And, when and if yields are lower, the lower output is more than made up for in reduced costs (both financial and societal) of inputs, better nutritional quality, improved soil and biodiversity, and more. In one of the largest studies of its kind, researchers at the University of Essex analyzed 286 farming projects in 57 countries, including 12.6 million farmers transitioning towards agricultural sustainability, and found a yield increase of 79 percent across a wide variety of crop types. Take a look at just those projects in East Africa and the increase in yields jumped 116 percent when sustainable farming approaches were introduced.

But, despite the evidence, Sexton and other economists with their collective blinders on still argue that the only way to feed the planet is with the industrial agriculture methods they endorse. Sure, that works. Just assume unlimited water, fossil fuels, petrochemicals, potash, phosphorus, topsoil, land, stable climate, and endless storage for radioactive waste. Just assume farmers can keep paying for these expensive inputs. And, assume all of us can afford the environmental and health consequences.

You’ll also need to ignore the plain fact that industrial agriculture has already proven unable to feed the world: Globally, we’re now producing over 20 percent more food per person than the late 1960s, but there are more hungry people—now almost a billion. Fixated narrowly on production, industrial agricultural so concentrates power that people go hungry no matter how much we grow.

So, ignore all that; assume the can opener.

If, however, you’d rather join me in the real world—where the occasional economist resides—and where natural resources are preciously limited and where farmers prefer not to pay dearly for inputs or be poisoned by pesticides, you’ll see that the most effective way to feed the world is to embrace a food system based in ecological systems and common sense.

Recently, I attended an event at New York City’s famous James Beard House that took me back to Yellowstone National Park.

Around this time last summer, I was on a tour boat on Lake Yellowstone with my family, where we learned that lake trout, a non-native species introduced around 1995 (presumably by an angler), had grown extremely problematic for the ecosystem of the lake–in particular, for the prized cutthroat trout, which is easily preyed upon and out-competed by the larger lake trout.

Not only was there no fishing limit on lake trout but in fact,  the only rule about catching them was that if you weren’t going to eat them, you had to kill them before throwing them back. According to our tour guide, you could cart a fresh-caught lake trout to any of the park’s restaurants for professional cooking and earn a pat on the back from the chef and staff.

Why did my visit to the Manhattan-based James Beard House inspire me to recall that ecological factoid from my visit to the nation’s oldest national park? Recently, Kerry Heffernan, head chef for Central Park’s South Gate Restaurant, prepared a delectable feast based on four exotic invasive varieties of seafood: Green crab (known to most fisherfolk as bait for blackfish), Asian carp, lionfish, and blue tilapia.

The brainchild behind the event was Washington, D.C.- based Food & Water Watch, producers of the Smart Seafood Guide. In partnership with James Beard House, the watchdog organization had invited Chef Kerry to prepare the invasives Iron Chef-style–with a little more than a day’s notice. This isn’t much time to get acquainted with the four exotic new ingredients, but Heffernan managed the challenge admirably, at least, according to this amateur seafood lover.

I’ll be honest. I’d expected something that might challenge my sense of adventure a little more–something slimy, maybe–but all four dishes were delicious. Food porn isn’t my thing, so I’ll spare you the details and instead fill you in on what drew me to the event.

1. I like seafood, but. ..
2. even with productions like Food & Water Watch’s Smart Seafood Guide , Blue Ocean Institute’s Seafood Guide,  and Monterrey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch Guide , I still find the “rules” around seafood difficult to navigate, mostly because:
3. Seafood is often not well-labeled in supermarkets or restaurants.
4. Harvesting seafood takes a toll on the environment, and/or…
5. Popular varieties of seafood are often overfished, and/or…
6. The seafood industry is largely unsustainable because corporate fishing enterprises out-compete local fishermen, which may keep costs down but takes a valuable source of protein away from local populations and hurts smaller markets, and this doesn’t jibe with my values.
7. There are a few fish that I like and feel good about eating, like U.S. farmed catfish and oysters, but I still worry about health hazards related to consumption of seafood.

As I made my way through the famously small James Beard kitchen, up the stairs, (past the shower where Beard supposedly enjoyed showering outdoors), rubbing elbows with food writers, chefs, and staff from Food & Water Watch, while sampling Chef Kerry’s tasty creations, I got to feeling hopeful.

Aside from the Yellowstone example, there are many cases of invasive species wreaking havoc, on water and on land, on ecosystems around the globe. Eating them would seem not only to mitigate harm, but to actively improve those “invaded” ecosystems. With so many proverbial genies let out of so many proverbial bottles–is it possible to fish and market and eat our way out of a situation that, at least in part, we’ve fished and marketed and eaten our way into?

New York Times reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal suggests a cautious optimism, noting:

Scientists emphasize that human consumption is only part of what is needed to control invasive species and restore native fish populations, and that a comprehensive plan must include restoring fish predators to depleted habitats and erecting physical barriers to prevent further dissemination of the invaders.

“We are not going to be able to just eat our way out of the invasive species problem,” Dr. Kramer said. “On the other hand, there are places where this can be a very useful part of the strategy.”

Having written about quite a few of the perils of our modern food system, it makes sense to me that there are no silver bullets for the many invasive species scenarios. Surely, working solutions must be as nuanced, or nearly so, as the complex problems we face, on land and at sea. At local levels, though,  harvesting these species as food sources could help beat back some of these invasives, and might help local economies, too.

Food & Water Watch director Wenonah Hauter is enthusiastic about the potential benefits of marketing invasives, noting that in order to do so effectively, supply chains need revamping and some of the species may need some added sex appeal, in some cases, through re-naming.

Chef Kerry Heffernan filets a lionfish

At the event, Chef Kerry spoke to a “learning curve,” for himself and other chefs, but also acknowledges the role chefs can play in promoting more sustainable seafood choices. In true James Beard fashion, foundation vice president Mitchell Davis called this a “cutting edge” culinary trend, one that the foundation was happy to get behind.

Count me in. Below, some information on the seafood we sampled last week. Here’s to guilt-free seafood smorgasboards!

Asian carp

Actually a catch-all term for eight different varieties of carp, including the common goldfish and silver carp, known for their tendency to jump–high–when spooked by boats. Cultivated for over 1,000 years in China, the varieties of Asian carp generally referred to as invasive in the U.S. are grass, black, silver, and bighead carp. Over the last decade or so, Asian carp have been the subject of controversy and legislation, as many worry that some of these varieties will make their way into the Great Lakes. Asian carp are believed to be low in mercury, though the FDA has yet to evaluate them for contaminants. Prolific breeders, they can out-compete other fish for feed like algae and phytoplankton.

But how does it taste?

Chef Kerry describes them as sweet and mild, like whitefish.  He also noted that the large fish was difficult to debone, a likely reason that this fish has not caught on in the U.S.

Lionfish

Native to the Indo-Pacific, the aptly-named lionfish (also known as the scorpion fish or firefish) is believed to have been introduced to East Coast waters, including the Caribbean, by pet owners releasing aquarium fish into coastal waters. The lionfish is prey to no known predators, is a voracious eater, grows fast and reproduces year round. It is quite impressive with its spines, which can cause death in other sealife and major discomfort for unlucky swimmers of the human variety.

But how does it taste?

Chef Kerry couldn’t think of a counterpart and described it as a cross between John Dory and monkfish.

European green cab

Introduced on the East Coast in the early 1800s, likely as a castaway on a European ship, the European green crab was discovered on the West Coast as well during the late 1980s. The FDA has not performed testing on the green crab specifically, but it is considered likely to not contain high levels of mercury or PCBs because it is sensitive to these contaminants itself.

But how does it taste?

Chef Kerry notes that the green crab boasts more flavor than its blue counterpart, but that its small size makes for time-intensive meat-picking. He used it in a delicious crab soup and says he’s waiting for molting season to try it out as a soft-shell crab.

Blue tilapia

Native to Northern and Western Africa and the Middle East, also known as Israeli tilapia, blue tilapia (PDF) were, in some cases, intentionally introduced as weed control in Gulf state lakes, and are currently wreaking havoc in lakes in Florida, Texas, and Nevada.

But how does it taste?

Compared to its farmed counterpart (which, so long as it’s grown right–we like recirculating systems–are quite sustainable) blue lake tilapia has a less “muddy” flavor, according to Chef Kerry.

Watch video on actual footage of lionfish hunt for the tasting:

Originally published on Ecocentric

Photos: Jon Simon

Video: Atlantic Charters

For four years Kim Allen has served as garden program manager for Berkeley Youth Alternatives (BYA), which provides a minimum-wage, internship program for socio-economically challenged adolescents ages 14 to 18. Some come to the garden through word-of-mouth from family or friends, others as part of mandated community service.

During the school year Allen’s youth garden crew, typically a group of six to eight, work and learn alongside her in two community garden plots in West Berkeley. There’s the half-acre Bancroft Community Garden, which the BYA shares with two dozen community gardeners on Bancroft Way, and the smaller Community Orchard garden on land the nonprofit owns on Bonar Street. The fruit tree garden includes many heirloom varieties, donated by Trees of Antiquity–among them citrus, apples, and pluots. The Bancroft Garden boasts typical farmers’ market fare.

In the summer, BYA offers an eight-week program for a dozen youth, who put in about 20 hours a week. The organization runs a small Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) during peak harvest season. It sells flowers and whatever is in abundance in the garden to Bill Briscoe, who owns The Bread Workshop. Briscoe puts surplus fava beans, sunchokes, garlic, and other vegetables to good use in his in-house soups. BYA youth harvest about two to four boxes of produce a week for The Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice program, which serves low-income residents. Every other week the garden provides perishables for a local food bank pick-up point.

Allen, 33, lives in a semi-cooperative house with a garden (that her roommates tend) in walking distance of her job. She hails from a horticulture and outdoor education background and represented the national grassroots network Rooted in Community at last week’s EcoFarm Conference, where she spoke about working with youth in urban farming settings. We talked in the garden early last week.

What do you enjoy about your job?

I love working outside and witnessing things grow—both the gardens and the youth. Everything in life is always changing and evolving. There are always new challenges and things to learn. A garden is a good metaphor for life.

What do you like about working with youth in a garden setting?

I like the confidence it gives them; they leave knowing how to create their own garden. They also learn about the life cycle, the value of growing food and the interconnectedness of plants and garden species. Some of our youth come in scared of insects but they leave with an understanding and respect for their role in nature.

Maybe more than anything else the garden is a safe, peaceful place where these adolescents can come and forget about other things—whether it’s personal struggles, academic issues, family problems, or concerns about violence in their communities—and just work together doing physical labor in a social setting.

Are there any misperceptions people have about what you do?

When I tell people that I run a garden program for youth in Berkeley they always assume it’s the Edible Schoolyard, because they’ve heard about that garden. Many people don’t realize that there are school gardens in every public school in Berkeley. And of course that particular garden is beautiful. It’s nice to see what’s possible if you have resources like they do.

We’d like to be able to hire more youth and give step raises or incentives to our crew as they move into leadership roles. In terms of equipment: our wheelbarrow is about to fall apart and we can always use tools. We don’t have a truck so it’s a big help if someone with a truck can pick up soil. We can always find jobs for people who can repair things. It’s good to have more money to do the things we want to do, but finding people willing to do physical labor is key.

Are there any wrong assumptions that people make about food in Berkeley?

A lot of people don’t realize that hunger is a real issue in this city. Because Berkeley has a reputation as a food town people forget that there are a lot of poor people here who don’t have access to good food.

Who are your local food heroes?

The people who have the passion and dedication to nourish our under-served communities. I’m thinking of Farm Fresh Choice, run by Gerardo Marin (who just left) and Hunia Bradley. School food reformer and food justice advocate Joy Moore has tremendous positive energy and teaches youth about growing and cooking healthy food. Daniel Miller at Spiral Gardens is another food security activist in our area doing good work. And Willow Rosenthal, who lives in Berkeley now and started City Slicker Farms in Oakland, which builds produce gardens in people’s backyards and sells locally grown produce through its food security program. She’ a role model and a colleague and I admire that she knew when it was time to move on, she worked her arse off doing hard, physical labor at that non-profit and recognized she needed to find balance in her life.

What plans do you have for the garden?

If we could find both the funding and someone to manage it, I would love to put a chicken coop in the garden.

I’d like to move the front fence and open up the entrance so that more people in the neighborhood can come and visit. I’d like to make it a place where people can sit and enjoy the peace we have here.

I’d also like to create a memorial garden space. A lot of youth in our program have dealt with family or friends dying. Violence is a constant in some communities. I’d like the memorial space to evolve, with new and different plants, just as life evolves, but the space would be a permanent refuge and a safe haven in nature.

Photos: Kim Allen, top. BYA garden crew share a Thanksgiving meal, middle. From left to right: Nahom Fasil, Kithorny Porter, Andranee Nabors, and Davion Barnes. Photo: Kim Allen. Growing greens for the community, bottom. Photo: Courtesy BYA.

View a student video of the Berkeley Youth Alternatives garden program.

Originally published on Berkeleyside

The food companies have created an industrialized agriculture system that uses a multitude of chemicals in fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides as well as genetically-modified products. Some people believe these additives contribute to skyrocketing rates of diabetes and obesity not to mention asthma, food allergies and other health problems.

Accessibility to good food can also be a problem, especially for lower-income groups in large metropolitan areas who typically do not have grocery stores in their neighborhoods. Instead, these “food deserts” have an ample supply of party and liquor stores that stock snacks and processed foods but not fresh fruits, vegetables and meats.

Participants in the food movement have actively taken on these “food security” or “food sovereignty” issues by creating substitutes to the industrialized food system including community-supported agriculture (CSA), farmers markets, local food, family and neighborhood gardens, farm-to-school initiatives, food as economic development, food policy councils, food assessment programs, and youth programming and training. And, they are beginning to make a difference in the way America eats.

Food sovereignty means that people have the right to decide what they eat and to ensure that food in their community is healthy and accessible for everyone, according to the Community Food Security Coalition. It also means that producers receive a fair price for their products and that local family farmers and fishers should have the first right to local and regional markets.

With this mission in mind, food security advocates have been successfully changing food policy not only in the United States but all over the world.

Here are some good examples of groups that were honored at the Community Food Security Coalition at its annual conference held recently in New Orleans. Family Farm Defenders received the 2010 Food Sovereignty Prize, which recognizes organizations that uphold the principles of food sovereignty and fight for and make real change to end hunger and poverty.

Honorable mentions were also awarded to ROPPA (Burkina Faso), the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, and the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty (Vancouver, BC).

Family Farm Defenders

Family Farm Defenders (FFD), a grassroots non-profit organization in Madison, WI, was founded in 1994 to support the livelihoods of small dairy and vegetable farmers.

John Kinsman, who is president of FFD, began pushing for food sovereignty when he helped protest the injection of bovine growth hormones (rGBH) in dairy cows on the University of Wisconsin campus. Researchers there were beneficiaries of corporate gifts that encouraged and affirmed its use. Even the National Dairy Board promoted rGBH. But no one ever asked the dairy farmers if rGBH hurt their production, said Kinsman, despite Monsanto’s claims that it did.

Kinsman worked with former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold who at the time was a state senator, on labeling rGBH milk, which the corporate milk producers didn’t want to do. A labeling law was eventually passed, however, and it became a model for the organic food movement, which now is trying to label genetically-engineered (GM) foods.

Through FFD, Kinsman also worked to re-localize food/farm economies and forge new economic relationships between consumers and farmers. An example of this cooperative effort is the Family Farmer Fair Trade Project that enables FFD to direct market cheese from Cedar Grove in Plain, WI. One outcome of this relationship is that farmers receive a fair price for their products as they provide consumers with rGBH-free alternatives.

“I’m a peasant farmer,” said Kinsman who uses this term to differentiate himself from food corporations that are now trying to call themselves “family farmers” just as Monsanto is trying to call itself “green.”

“We need to find new words,” he said.

It is important to note that Family Farm Defenders makes sure that urban people are on its board–40 percent of them. This is because the board believes that they must be as involved in defending the family farm as the farmers themselves.

“Farmers are so beaten down by industrial food companies and low prices,” he said. “They have had their dignity taken away from them.”


ROPPA

Our culture requires us to behave in a certain way and that is centered around food, said Djibo Bagna, of the Network of West African Peasant and Agricultural Producers’ Organizations.

Food policies are usually formulated by people in offices and agriculture is governed only by financial considerations, he said. However, peasants are leaving their farms because they cannot earn a living.

“As a food sovereignty council, we first had to decide that we would no longer allow others to speak for us or tell us what kind of agriculture we should have,” said Bagna.

Poverty is a rural phenomenon and its strongest conflicts center around resources. Unfortunately, there typically is no investment in rural areas nor is credit offered at reasonable rates. ROPPA tried to change this situation and decided that in order to do so it had to be present at the policy table.

The United Nations Agriculture Policy group was surprised to learn of ROPPA’s request. At first it allowed them only one representative but ROPPA baulked. It didn’t just want representation; it wanted to shape the policy. When the UN refused to give ROPPA representation, ROPPA promised that it would organize 10,000 farmers to take the streets during the policy group’s meetings. The UN capitulated and allowed ROPPA a seat at the table.

“You can’t have food sovereignty unless you are involved in the debate,” said Bagna. “You need funding for farmers to grow food and communication to break down the barriers between policymakers who set the rules and farmers who produce the products. You need agricultural research, value-added products and a dialogue space to talk to each other.”

Detroit Black Community Food Security Network

Detroit has one of the poorest urban populations in the country. With 50 percent unemployment in the city, which contains areas labeled as “food deserts,” a group of school parents, teachers and administrators decided it was time to act: they would learn how to grow their own food for their children.

In 2006, this group became known as the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. It focuses on urban agriculture, policy development and cooperative buying.

The group observed that “many of the key players in the city’s local urban agriculture movement were young whites, who while well-intentioned, nevertheless exerted a degree of control inordinate to their numbers in Detroit’s population,” according to its website.

DBCFSN believes that the most effective movements “grow organically from the people whom they are designed to serve.” So, the group is creating model urban agricultural projects that seek to build community self-reliance and to change people’s consciousness about food.

For example, its urban agriculture program planted and maintained a quarter-acre garden in 2006 and a three-quarter-acre mini-farm in 2007. In 2008 it built the D-Town Community Garden where it grows 35 crops, keeps bees and maintains a vermiculture compost program.

All produce is grown using sustainable, chemical-free practices, and sold at the farm sites, the Eastern Market, and markets for urban growers throughout Detroit. The group also holds harvest festivals four times a year.

Policy development, however, is DBCFSN’s “jewel in our crown.” It has crafted food policy for the city that was adopted by the Detroit City Council. This policy includes provisions for education, economic justice, finding ways to combat hunger, discerning the school’s role in food security, advocating and providing for urban agriculture, developing emergency responses to food shortages and food deserts and forming a food policy council.

With cooperative buying, the network has tried to go beyond the basic co-op model and include food distribution networks. So the network formed a regional system with Detroit, Toledo, Chicago, and Milwaukee in cooperation with the trucking industry.

“We didn’t do anything that we didn’t feel we had to do,” said Aba Ifeoma, one of the members of the network.

Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty

Dawn Morrison of the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty is a member of the Vancouver Island Network that has mobilized people to define the food system in Canada for indigenous peoples of 27 nations. They did this by working together with non-indigenous people.

Morrison pointed out that food is a sacred gift of the Creator and humans have a responsibility to maintain right relationship to plants and animals that provide us with food.

“We must be free from corporate control to determine where we get our food and how we grow it,” she said. “We do this in our day to day actions with family and the community. Our policies, meanwhile, must be driven by practice and be community-based.”

Citizen participation is the key to establishing and keeping a democracy. As we watch our representative government crumble through corporate influence, political corruption and hate speech, we can look to the food sovereignty movement to remind us how democracy really works. Then, let’s hope that spirit will spread.

In 2004, Morgan Spurlock‘s documentary film Super Size Me debuted. In it, Spurlock eats McDonald’s food for 30 days straight. This extreme experiment sought to document the adverse health effects of the all-to-common practice of over-eating fast food, using himself as test subject. Indeed, Spurlock gained weight, scared his doctors when his liver went south, felt depressed, lost sexual function and more. But the film also became a sort of watershed moment, shocking general audiences and thereby playing a big role in spurring growth of the food movement. I met Spurlock recently while picking up my weekly farm share (we belong to the same local CSA), and he kindly agreed to talk about the food movement, changes in the fast food industry, and how his McDonald’s binge has affected his long-term health.

McDonald’s has gotten a lot of heat since Super Size Me came out. I thought it was amazing, for example, how much media attention that non-decomposing Happy Meal photography project recently got. Do you think your movie inspired people to be more brazen in taking on fast food companies?

I think people were already questioning them. Maybe it gave them reason to know they would not get sued afterward! I do think the film did open people’s eyes, and at least opened the door to an even bigger conversation.

Are you surprised at how the interest in food and agriculture has grown since you made Super Size Me?

Yeah, I think there’s a big trend, which I am also joining. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), locally grown produce, whole farmshares and landshares are happening now. It seems like there has been, even a post-Slow Food movement–people wanting to get a healthier, better, more sustainable way of eating and living, which I think is fantastic.

You were an early pioneer of the food documentary. Do you ever consider making others?

There are great films that are out there that deal with food, [and] I think if there’s a way I can help champion some of those other filmmakers, I’d rather do that than go into making another food movie. For me, movies have to be something that if you don’t [make them], then you are going to go crazy. If you don’t tell this story, if you don’t put it on a page, if you don’t put it on film, then it is literally going to effect your brain from this moment forward. There may be something that comes along that kind of strikes me in that way, and if it does, I’ll have to tell it.

In what ways did making Super Size Me change the way you eat?

It was really after the film that I decided that I wanted to become part of a CSA, I wanted to support this whole locally grown movement. I think the biggest thing that happened after that movie was that it really turned me into someone who reads labels. It made me a really conscious consumer in a way I never had been, and I think that’s the greatest thing that could happen. I’m not going to tell anybody, hey, don’t eat fast food. I’m somebody who still loves to have a good burger, but I’m not eating a burger everyday. I may have a burger once a month.

Do you still eat fast food?

Never. [laughs]. When I am in California, I go to an In-and-Out Burger, and that is a fast food chain. But its a much smaller, and even more sustainable fast food chain. The meat when it comes in is still in a patty form, the french fries are still potatoes. There is a process of actually cooking food that happens at In-and-Out Burger. Part of the blessing of living in New York City, is that we can get all kinds of food fast. We can get good Italian food fast, we can get good Mexican food fast, I can get great Chinese food fast from a little mom-and-pop shop around the corner.

Have there been any long-term health effects following your McDonald’s binge?

I think the biggest thing is my ability to gain weight. Ever since making the movie, I can put on four or five pounds in a weekend so easily. Its incredible how my body has kind of lost its resiliency. Part of that comes with age, but it also comes with your body having all these additional fat cells that weren’t in your body before. As you create fat cells to store fat and you lose weight and those fat cells get smaller, they don’t magically vanish. They are still in your body, still swimming around waiting for you to overeat so they can store more fat.

For those of us who will never conduct such an experiment–Could you describe in one word how you felt physically after a month of eating only McDonald’s food?

Nauseous.

What do you think about the regulation of Happy Meal toys in San Francisco?

I think toys do make kids want to go to these places. But I think parents need to be brave enough to tell kids no. Parents need to claim some responsibility.

What needs to happen for fast food companies’ role to change in our society?

One of the things that is already happening is they are making companies put the calories and the fat content right up on the menus, which I think is a great idea. I think the more you can arm consumers with information, the more you start to leave the choice in their hands. In the movie we were trying to find the nutrition information [in McDonald's stores], and it was behind a door or in the basement. They didn’t even have it out. Its almost like they don’t even want you to know how bad the food is. [I think they should] let people know. Are people going to stop suddenly eating fast food? No. I mean, people haven’t stopped smoking cigarettes. That’s a product [that] when used correctly will kill you. So I think we need to arm people with as much information as possible and then ultimately let them make that choice.

You are from West Virginia. What did you think of Jaime Oliver’s Food Revolution?

I love Jaime Oliver and I loved his show. [But] I think that there were people, even people I’ve spoken to, who were turned off by the fact that there was a Brit in America kind of telling them what to do. I think that threw off audiences quite a bit and made it less accessible than it should have been. I know they are getting ready to do another version of the show, and what I think would be great in this next season is to really empower people to grow their own food. Go into these schools and build community gardens, like Alice Waters did. Get the kids hands in the dirt, get the community’s hands in the dirt. Let them do things that not only support their schools but support their local communities.

What would be your last meal on Earth?

A home-cooked meal by my mom. She is such a great cook. I would have mom cook up some pepper steak, mashed potatoes and green beans. And I am a big pie fan, but I love her chocolate cake. I’d probably have her make a three-layer chocolate cake with white icing.