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

Eighty diners a night sample whatever is in season—greens, garbanzo beans, summer squash, lettuces, tomatoes, broccoli rabe—for 10 months out of the year. On the roof, hydroponic towers circulate water to plants through a closed circuit. At its base, each tower has a nutrient-rich reservoir which pumps water upward. As water trickles down from a center passage, plant roots receive their nourishment. The towers use 12 minutes of energy an hour, running on three-minute cycles.

Mooney’s produce is free of typical soil disease and pest infestation. Since he has produced it all himself, it’s also incredibly affordable. Start-up costs can be steep for hydroponic systems, but with their promise of efficiency and high-yield, “roof-to-table” hydroponics may provide New Yorker’s with another way to maximize their valuable, cramped real estate.

Check out Nightline’s report on the chef and his garden.

The beautifully diverse group – kids from the neighborhood coming in with their skateboards, urban farmer and activist Karen Washington, Chris Grace of New York State Department of Ag & Markets, among a few hundred others – gathered for the Summit at Hostos Community College. The event gave voice to the anger and hope, frustration and deliberation, need and intention that surrounds the question of food in the City’s poorest borough.

In her opening remarks, Majora Carter described her hope for high-yield urban agriculture, which she intends to support through her newly launched American City Farms program. Her vision is to make starting urban farm models as simple as opening a fast food franchise, but with wildly different health outcomes. She calls such efforts “monuments to hope and possibility” for this neighborhood.

What’s gone wrong in the Bronx to make a conference about food access necessary? The easiest answer is decades of disinvestment in a low-income neighborhood by traditional investors that has made the neighborhood unappealing to large grocers, but that misses the point. There are two more significant things happening: availability of financing and poverty itself.

When there is a need but no one to fill it, entrepreneurs tend to step up to the opportunity. However, because in the South Bronx access to capital is limited (as Judi Kende of the Low Income Investment Fund pointed out, even a non-profit lender has trouble approving a loan to a first-time business owner with little in the way of a borrowing track record) it’s difficult to fund even a fruit cart or small food retail space. Furthermore, the structure of poverty reinforces demand for the least expensive, highest calorie foods. What you do with the last three dollars you have today when you are hungry now contributes to perceived demand for cheap, easy food. The response to this demand is, of course, more fast food than fresh.

There are alternatives like the South Bronx Food Coop and some grocery stores (though residents claim the chains in their neighborhood have far inferior produce to their neighboring stores in Westchester and Riverdale). New York City has initiated the FRESH program, which provides grocery stores incentives to establish and expand their presence in underserved areas. Yet residents are stunned that even a company like FreshDirect would deliver to zip codes that require their trucks to drive through the South Bronx, but do not bother to take orders for delivery there.

As one woman, who lives in the neighborhood and shops at the Coop, exclaimed, “We have to hustle to make sure we have access to good food… We have to depend on us.” For some in the neighborhood, the hustle involves shopping once a month at a grocery store in Manhattan, paying for a taxi or schlepping a heavy load all the way home, and supplementing their stock with intermittent stops at the corner store. For others, it means making due with low-quality fresh food. And for others, it means foregoing healthy options almost entirely. Perhaps what motivates the Bronx to hold this Summit is knowing no one is going to fix this for them.

The question of what to do about food access in the South Bronx comes down to how you move a market. Is it demand-driven, policy-driven, or supply-driven, or does it require some combination of all three? From the energy and commitment I witnessed on Saturday, I expect demand isn’t enough or we wouldn’t have had anything to talk about – these people want better food badly. I also don’t believe policy is enough; we’re talking about changing entrenched processes, decision-making mechanisms, and incentives both among human beings that want food and within companies that could supply it, and unless there is an accompanying emotional, physical, or economic under-pinning, food choices are unlikely to change.

I believe we need to rethink the paradigm of how we get food into dense urban areas. Perhaps instead of relying on thousands of square feet, millions of investment dollars, and countless hours to make the change happen, we should start thinking about using the organizing capacity, information systems, and distribution tools we have today to get creative with how we move healthy, affordable food into the areas of our cities that need it most.

Originally published on Provenance Food

This week in New York City, get to know the nature around you (and eat some local, wild and seasonal meals featuring native plants, too) during Wildflower Week, from May 1st – 9th.

New York City has 53,000 acres of open space, more than Philadelphia and Los Angeles combined, and around 778 native plant species. You can explore some of this natural wealth beginning on Saturday by participating in guided walking tours of gardens, green roofs and park land in all five boroughs, as well as attending planting events, lectures, events for kids, and more. There will also be an opportunity to get free seedlings, see sustainable gardening demonstrations, and get information on native species at a NYC Wildflower Week booth in the Union Square Greenmarket this Saturday from 8am- 3pm.

Once you’ve explored the natural beauty of New York City, you’ll surely have built up an appetite. Fortunately, there are lots of opportunities to dine on “Edible Natives” all across the city. Here are some places to cook and eat local, seasonal plants this Wildflower Week:

Herbaceous Eats: Cooking with Spring Greens, Herbs and Flowers
Time: Fri. May 7, 7-9pm, $25
Location: Whole Foods Culinary Center, 95 East Houston St.

Join Louisa Shafia, chef and author of Lucid Food: Cooking for an Eco-Conscious Life, for easy ways to cook with wild edibles like ramps, lamb’s quarters, sorrel, and other seasonal ingredients.

On the Menu: Stinging-Nettle Pesto with Crostini and Market Vegetables; Lamb’s Quarters-and-Pea-Shoots Soup; Shiso-Cucumber Salad; Spot Prawns with Garlic, Sorrel, and White Wine; Rhubarb and Pistachio Parfait.

Restaurants featuring special wildflower week menus:

MANHATTAN

The Green Table
Time: Throughout Wildflower Week
Location: 75 Ninth Ave., Chelsea Market, 212-741-6623
Green Table’s daily menu reflects what’s freshest at local farms and greenmarkets. Featured menu items: Wild Vegetable Tempura–wild ramps and fiddlehead ferns along with other “domesticated” spring vegetables.

MAS (farmhouse): Wild Tastings
Time: Salon dinners Sunday May 2 and Monday May 3
Location: 39 Downing Street, 212-255-1790
Join chef Galen Zamarra and special guest speakers for an enlightening conversation about cooking with local native foraged ingredients. $65 prix-fixe dinner. Limited seating, reservations required. Nightly menu to include: Trout piscator stuffed with wild ramp and smoked trout mousse.

Pure Food and Wine: Wild Tastings
Time: Throughout Wildflower Week
Location: 54 Irving Place, (212) 477-1010
Pure’s raw vegan menu is entirely plant based, uses no processed ingredients, and nothing is heated above approximately 118 degrees to preserve vitamins, minerals, and enzymes. Featured menu item: Sweet Violet Herb and Orange Salad.

BROOKLYN

James
Time: Throughout Wildflower Week
Location: 605 Carlton Ave., Prospect Heights, 718.942.4255
This seasonal American restaurant with Old-World European influences will feature nightly specials with NYC native plants such as ramps and fiddlehead ferns, including a Spring Onion Soup with Boar Lardon and Pecorino.

iCi
Time: Throughout Wildflower Week
Location: 246 Dekalb Ave., Fort Greene, 718.789.2778
iCi’s pholsophy: the best-tasting food is naturally grown and harvested in ways that are ecologically sound and socially responsible by people who are taking care of the land for future generations. Featured menu item: Braised spring lamb shoulder with Brooklyn-made caviatelli, baby artichokes, ramps, and pea shoots.

QUEENS

Vesta
Time: Throughout Wildflower Week
Location: 21-02 30th Avenue, Astoria, 718.545.5550
This neighborhood restaurant offers simple and Italian-inspired favorites guided by the local green market. Featured menu item: Spaghetti with charred ramps and sheeps milk ricotta.

After hiding indoors all winter, nothing beats the brisk chill of the early spring in my rooftop garden. Cleaning up the dead branches left from the year before, turning the compost, the sweet smell of worm poop in the air as I work amendments into the cool soil. But most exiting are the first green fronds that have begun to emerge — perennials and even volunteers — and the protected annuals springing forth from the previous fall planting.

Kept under a cold frame all winter, three types of spinach and arugula got a head start when the weather started turning around a few weeks ago. The sun also fired up our blueberries, strawberries, chives and sorrel — and gave me a chance to plant some marigolds, bush beans and mixed greens, all now growing.

This past weekend, we chowed down on the early bounty: spinach quiche, sorrel soup, kale in our fresh morning juice, and an arugula salad. The kale was sweet, having been left out through the snow. I even dug up a patch of danvers half-long carrots, protected in the soil all winter and perfect for a carrot, walnut and current salad.

Spring is a constant surprise: Garlic planted last fall pushing northward, the thyme you thought was dead coming back, and even some oregano that you neither planted nor expected to volunteer on your roof.

Spring is about potential. Its about taking on new projects, exploration, and the nitty gritty practical planning for the months to come. Its about planting herbs in your windowsill again (even if you killed them the year before), spying an empty lot near by and asking around about whether can grow on it, getting a few hens and building a coup from scratch, signing up for a CSA, joining a Crop Mob, even just waking up early to get to the farmers market to score some fava greens and claytonia!

Are you new to growing? Just planning your garden and looking for some fool-proof advice? Doug Muller from the Hudson Valley Seed Library has penned some of the finest tips on planning and planting for the thoughtful and thorough gardener (they’re informative, too, for the giddy and impulsive gardener like myself). We are featuring the series on Civil Eats, check out Crafting a Seed Starting Schedule, Starting Seeds Under Protection, his instructions on building A Quick and Easy Cold Frame, and a How-to on Sowing Practices. (The next post in the series will be featured on Friday, and the last post will be up next week.)

Let us know about the creative places your cultivating, your early spring meals, or what is surprising you in your garden!

This is the first post in a six part series on the basics of starting seeds.

From the soft comfort of a fireside rocking chair, your garden holds endless possibilities. You can picture–taste, even–the sweet tang of your certain bushels of tomatoes, the crisp crunch of cucumbers, the melting delicateness of a pile of stir-fried snow peas. All of this dreaming is essential–and at least partly true–but luckily February moves along, and wispy garden dreams must solidify into concrete garden plans if you hope to bring your visions to fruition, so to speak.

There are many garden plans to be made–questions of fencing, fertility, and size, among countless others–but one of the most vital is planning your schedule for starting seeds.

The key information to establishing your plan is your last spring frost date. This date is the average last day that gardeners can expect a frost to visit their garden. Here in the Mid-Hudson Valley, this date is about May 10th. However, this date differs significantly throughout the state (see this link from Cornell for an enlightening map), and it is also often refuted by actual fact: in both 2008 and 2009, for example, much of the Hudson Valley experienced a late May frost strong enough to damage frost-tender crops significantly. Still, we need a starting point, and the last frost date is it. (Outside NYS? Check out this link for extremely thorough frost and freeze data from throughout the country.)

Below is a rough schedule of spring seed-starting tasks in our region. For gardeners in the NYC metro area, you can start seeds about two or three weeks earlier than listed; for gardeners north and west of the Hudson Valley, you can start seeds about one week later than listed. Live elsewhere? Modify the chart by figuring out the difference between your frost date and May 10th, then adjust your plantings by that increment in either direction.

This table is a work in progress (it’s also too busy-looking for my taste–but it’ll have to do for now). It is not meant to be prescriptive; it just lists sowing and transplanting opportunities for each of the main spring planting weeks. Many flowers and herbs are not yet included, and probably a few veggies are missing, too. Share your preferred planting dates in the comments, and let me know what’s missing–I’ll update this as much as I can over the next week or two. Enjoy!

“Under Protection” means in a cold frame, greenhouse, or indoors with supplemental lighting.

Originally Published on the Hudson Valley Seed Library blog

New York City urban beekeepers (and lovers of honey, fruit and flowers): tomorrow is the big day to let your legislators know that you want beekeeping to be a legal activity by giving an oral testimony at the public hearing on the issue between 10am-12pm, 125 Worth Street, Room 330.

Beekeeping is currently illegal under the health code of NYC, which prohibits the possession, keeping, harboring and selling of “wild animals” and “venomous insects.” However, beekeepers are becoming commonplace in cities across the United States. These cities have realized that bees are essential to a thriving natural environment, including as a support to urban vegetable gardens.

Just Food, an organization that seeks to expand access to healthy food to all New Yorkers, has spearheaded the campaign to get this antiquated law changed. Nadia Johnson from Just Food sent over some of of the organization’s testimony. Hopefully it will inspire you to come along and speak your mind on this important subject:

Just Food supports the Department of Health’s proposed amendment to Article 161 of the NYC Health Code regarding honey-beekeeping in New York City. Lifting the ban on honey-beekeeping is essential to a green, healthy, sustainable city.

As a local organization that works to increase access to fresh, healthy food in New York City and to support the local farms and urban gardens that grow it, honeybees and beekeepers are vital to our mission.

City planners and elected officials increasingly acknowledge urban farming as key to addressing greening, climate change and other environmental sustainability issues, and honeybees are key to building a strong local food system. As pollinators they contribute to productive harvests in New York City’s community gardens, botanical gardens, public parks, greenroofs and backyards.

With the crisis of Colony Collapse Disorder, it’s never been so important for all communities—urban and rural—to promote beekeeping. Beekeeping is legal in cities throughout the country—including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle. Even government sites such as Chicago’s City Hall and the White House’s South Lawn has honeybee hives.

Beekeepers in New York City—past, present and future—play a vital role in ensuring our city is greener, healthier, and sweeter. The proposed amendment to Article 161 would bring New York City up to speed with cities around the country

Check out Just Food’s video, “Hidden Hives Tour”:

Hidden Hives Tour from Just Food on Vimeo.

Photo: Vancouverconvention

The Food & Climate Summit is the first of its kind in the US, and shows that New York City is ready to lead on improving how cities fit into the food system. Cities have a particularly big role to play, because as the global population increases, urban centers will be growing the most. So how do we do it? Tomorrow’s summit focuses on empowering individuals through skills-building sessions as well as bringing together academics, policy makers, and activists to discuss ideas like breaking down barriers for urban agriculture, opportunities for promoting the local food supply, bolstering child nutrition programs, reducing food waste, creating “food-collar” jobs, and more in the day’s policy sessions.

Last Friday, the Borough President’s office launched the Food Charter, which outlines ten principles for a sustainable food system (you can sign and pledge your support here), but Borough President Stringer is not the only politician proposing new food policy. Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced her office will do a six-month review of the food system, called “FoodWorks New York,” which will aim to improve the city’s food infrastructure among other goals. If New York can succeed at lowering it’s planet impact when it comes to food, then so can all cities.

People everywhere are beginning to realize the impact our food chain has on the climate conundrum; how we currently produce, distribute and consume food accounts for one third of all greenhouse gas emissions according to the new book by another speaker at the summit, Anna Lappé. The book is called Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, and you can bet we’ll be getting a taste of it at Lappé’s plenary speech tomorrow, and that you’ll be hearing a lot more about it when it debuts in April. Despite this high number representing food systems emissions, Lappé is hopeful because the answers are known, and people are becoming more and more empowered to make changes.

On the Leonard Lopate show today, Borough President Stringer said that the Food & Climate Summit was an opportunity to “drill down on [food and climate change] issues and come up with specific proposals for New York City government.” He continued, saying “we’re hoping that through this effort, we will be able to go to the state legislature, go to the council, go to other town councils around the city, and give them legislative ideas with specific policy initiatives…”

He even projected into the future: “When they learn about these issues… the livestock issues, the production issues, the job creation, hopefully [more] elected officials and legislators will get involved in Farm Bill issues.”

Lappé and Nestle joined him on the program, and its worth listening to their lively conversation here.

If you were not lucky enough to be one of the 1,000 people to get a ticket to the conference (the free event filled up in 36 hours), do not despair. The plenary will be streamed on the summit’s website, beginning at 9:30am tomorrow, and there will be follow-up and repeated sessions in the future, according to Just Food’s executive director, Jacquie Berger. If you do plan to attend, here is a great map [pdf] of nearby sustainable food choices for lunch, put together by the splendid team over at the Eat Well Guide.

There’s some very big news on the environmental front, and it’s big news for the animals, too! Green food resolutions are starting to pop up, and this is a very good thing for everyone, as it’s an important sign that the public at large is beginning to confront the truly inconvenient truth: What and whom you consume has a direct effect on our planet.

By consuming a plant-based diet, you are significantly reducing your global foodprint. You’ve probably already heard by now that in 2006, the United Nations came out with a study (“Livestock’s Long Shadow”) documenting that livestock production is a major contributor to global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. The report estimates that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions; that’s more than the entire transport sector combined.

Thanks to the diligence of hay-makers like you, people are slowly starting to talk about this. And recently, two city council resolutions have found their way into the mix.

Earlier this week, Chicago’s City Council Committee on Energy, Environmental Protection and Public Utilities approved a resolution urging that sustainable plant-based food be made readily available to all the city’s residents. This signaled a milestone in Farm Sanctuary’s campaign to introduce Green Food Resolutions in cities across the country. Thanks to Alderman Margaret Laurino, the sponsor of the resolution, the Windy City is a shining example of green progress. People are listening. Eating animals is simply unsustainable and wreaks havoc on our planet. This resolution is a platform for change, and it shows without a doubt that there is a strong demand for vegan food, which is the best answer for the animals, our health and, of course, the environment.

As if that were not enough, the Big Apple is also making big strides. On June 30, New York City Councilmember Bill de Blasio introduced Resolution 2049, another groundbreaking step toward a greener, kinder planet. FoodprintNYC, as it is called, is the creation of the NYC Foodprint Alliance, a coalition of several nonprofits – including Farm Sanctuary. It is a citywide initiative that aims to create greater access to local, fresh, healthy plant-based food, especially in low-income communities and city-run institutions.

For two years, I have been personally enmeshed in FoodprintNYC. What started with a conversation between Farm Sanctuary and the New York League of Humane Voters grew to become a coalition of movers and shakers, and now, thanks to Councilmember de Blasio, we can see this resolution get passed. If you reside in New York City, we need your help to make that happen.

Here’s a video that Councilmember Bill de Blasio put together, along with the help of me and my dog, Rose:

Watching this idea grow to become a citywide and then national campaign is enough to make this hay-maker a believer. Not only can change happen, but change needs to happen so that we can preserve and care for our planet and all its inhabitants. That is why we’d like to work with you so that a Green Food resolution can be introduced in your city, too. And if you need support in doing that, let me know.

I have the sudden strong desire to end this entry with my favorite quote, said by Margaret Mead. If you know me personally, then you know I recite it on a regular basis. It’s my MO, and it should be yours, too:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

This post is part of a series called Roof Garden Rookies, which explores my attempt, as an amateur gardener, to grow a garden on the rooftop of my building in lower Manhattan. My roof garden was recently featured in the New York Times.

Last week I wrote about the process of building raised beds for my rooftop garden. The next step was clear: ready the soil and onto planting.

First thing was first, we started with 1000 pound of soil from the Lower East Side Ecology Center, a potting soil mix that includes vermicompost, coconut-based coir (a sustainable replacement for peat), perlite, green sand and black rock phosphate.  Once we got each of the 20-pound bags up the stairs, we began to fill the beds and quickly realized that we’d need another 500 pounds.

Eight of the beds were prepared with Garden Tone, an organic soil preparation for vegetables, as well as mushroom compost, a byproduct of mushroom growing that is full of minerals, as well as seabird guano for slow release fertilization.

Then, the fun part: making a planting plan, gathering the seedlings, and getting dirty!

Many of the seedlings I planted were either from Silver Heights Farm at the Greenmarket, which carries a large variety of heirloom seedlings, or they were grown from seed by me or by Kerry Trueman of Retrovore.com. Many of my seeds came from the Hudson Valley Seed Library, a local seed library that works with heirloom plants that grow well in our area.

Some of the seedlings I planted out included: Tollies sweet pepers, habenero peppers, three types of eggplants, eight types of tomatoes, bush and climbing beans, strawberries and blueberries, an heirloom melon called the Delice de la Table, two types of cucumbers, two types of zucchini, a Musque de Provence, green and white pattypan, butternut, and blue hubbard squashes, beets, carrots, turnips, lettuces, piracicaba broccoli, a variety of flowers and a bed full of herbs.

For each plant, I consulted my book (Tanya Denckla’s The Gardener’s A-Z Guide to Growing Organic, among others) to make sure I was planting companions and not foes, then I laid out my plants, leaving room for marigolds and other flowers in the beds, dug a hole for each, adding mycorrhizal fungi to help prevent transplant loss and a moisture crystal to keep moisture at the roots, and then tucked in my new green friends.

The acidic bed required Holly Tone, a preparation for evergreens — lovers of acidic soil. In addition, I supplemented garden sulpher around the base of the blueberries and euonymous vines I planted there.

With the addition of a composter for kitchen and garden scraps, and a few more flower plantings, the garden is off to a great start. After two weeks, I am happy to report a few tasty salads and strawberries, along with some developing zucchinis, tomatoes and beans! I can’t wait for the day when I harvest a whole dinner. Now, all we need up there is a table, and I’ll be outside all summer.

Photos: Yann Mabille, close look at the beds, one planted side, and me, exhausted after a day of planting