If you think diabetes and obesity are the two biggest health care crises Americans face these days, you’re missing the forest for the trees — literally. Because the roots of all this diet-induced disease lie in two less publicized but even more pernicious epidemics: nature deficit disorder and kitchen illiteracy.

The symptoms include a woeful lack of familiarity with that elusive culinary commodity known as “real food,” or “good food,” or “slow food,” and total estrangement from Mother Earth — who, by the way, keeps hanging around outside pining for a glimpse of you while you remain indoors, mesmerized by your monitor or TV screen and mindlessly munching on ersatz edibles.

Do you have no idea what you’re actually eating, where it came from, or how it was grown? You may suffer from one or both of these maladies. Are you fearful of naked food that’s not encased in microwave-friendly packaging? Petrified by perishable produce that demands any sort of prep?

Perhaps you’d buy the new wearable feedbag that lets Americans eat more and move less, or sample Taco Bell’s new “green” menu with no ingredients from nature, if these products existed outside the fertile imaginations of the Onion’s writers.

If we weren’t so divorced from nature, we’d give a rat’s ass — make that a double rat’s ass — about all those freaky deformed frogs that have been sprouting extra legs in recent decades, and the sexually deformed fish that started popping up in the Potomac a few years back.

As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof pointed out in his column last Sunday and again on Thursday’s Colbert Report, scientists increasingly suspect that “a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors, very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products,” may be contributing to a scary hodgepodge of health problems in people as well as the disturbing rise in anatomical anomalies in frogs and fish.

Kristof cites a “landmark” 50-page statement from the Endocrine Society which presents “evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology.” The statement adds:

I wrote back in 2006 that the EPA had identified endocrine disruption as one of its top six research priorities in 1996. But, a decade later, they had yet to begin testing any candidate chemicals for their endocrine-disrupting potential. Kristof notes that “for now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed.”

Sure, you could try to minimize your exposure to these apparent toxins by growing some of your own food without using pesticides and chemicals. But as our farming First Lady’s recently discovered, the ground you’re cultivating might be tainted anyway, because the chemicals and contaminants we’ve thoughtlessly dispersed into our air, soil and water in recent decades have a way of lingering.

Our obliviousness to the hazards of a chemically dependent food system have allowed these toxins to accrete in our environment — and our bodies — for far too long. But now, growing tomatoes has replaced throwing tomatoes as a form of protest: millions of Americans are looking to opt out of our toxic food chain by trying to grow some of
their own food this year, many for the first time.

If we truly hope to create an alternative food system, though, many more of us will have to roll up our sleeves and get digging. As urban ag pioneer and MacArthur genius Will Allen told Elizabeth Royte in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “We need 50 million more people growing food on porches, in pots, in side yards.”

Royte notes the inherent challenges for advocates of urban agriculture:

But the edible landscaping trend is taking root wherever there’s soil, and even where there isn’t, with the help of exhibits like the New York Botanical Garden’s Edible Garden, which just opened last weekend and runs through September 13th.

The Edible Garden exhibitions include a Good Food Garden, a Seed Savers Heirloom Vegetable Garden, and a Beginner’s Vegetable Garden, along with a half dozen other edible landscape-related exhibits. Rosalind Creasy, whose essential but long-out-of-print book Edible Landscaping has a new edition coming out in 2010, thankfully, designed the Heirloom Vegetable Garden. Other homegrown heroes like Kitchen Gardeners International founder Roger Doiron and Slow Food USA‘s new president Josh Viertel will be among the featured speakers at events taking place over the course of the summer.

If I may borrow from Stephen Colbert, I’d like to give a tip of the hat to cookware company Anolon, a major sponsor of the NYBG Edible Garden exhibition whose own Creating a Delicious Future campaign seeks to remedy kitchen illiteracy by fostering “a return to eating delicious foods prepared simply at home using fresh, seasonal, local ingredients.”

The exhibition’s other major sponsor, Scott’s Miracle Gro, gets a wag of the finger: hey, guys, great way to greenwash the profits from all those pesticides the EPA has ordered you to take off the shelves.

Another wonderful edible gardening program to which I’ll gladly give a shout-out is the Giving Through Growing campaign sponsored by Robert Mondavi’s Woodbridge Winery in partnership with The American Community Gardening Association. Woodbridge is donating $40,000 this year to the ACGA to help provide “educational tools, leadership training, and community building strategies to participants in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles.” As the Giving Through Growing website notes, the ACGA estimates that over 2,000 new community gardens will be established this year, on top of the 20,000 existing community gardens.

The Giving Through Growing program encourages you to send virtual “eSeeds” to your friends, and for every eSeed that’s planted, Woodbridge will donate a dollar to the ACGS. It’s a pretty painless way to show support for the folks who are greening our urban spaces.

Those of us who garden understand that food waste can either become “black gold,” i.e. soil-enriching compost, or be shipped off to the landfill where it rots and generates methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas. Animal manures, too, can be a blessing to a farmer who raises his livestock on pasture, where the manure returns fertility to the soil as it has for centuries.

But when you crowd farm animals into what Jon Stewart aptly dubbed “an Abu Ghraib of animals” on Thursday’s Daily Show in his interview with Food, Inc.‘s Robert Kenner, the massive quantities of manure that result become an environmental disaster.

And when you saturate the soil with synthetic chemicals to grow resource-intensive commodity crops, you deaden and deplete it.

This, then, is the fundamental difference between sustainable agriculture and intensive industrial food production. The first method enriches the soil; the other ultimately ruins it. Destroy the soil, and you destroy your civilization.

Will Allen predicts that 10 million people will plant gardens for the first time this year. But, as he told Elizabeth Royte, “two million of them will eventually drop out,” when they get discouraged by pests and insufficient rain — or too much.

That’s OK; 8 million new gardeners still adds up to a revolution. So grab your trowel and start digging for democracy. Let’s overthrow the cornarchy this 4th of July!

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

If you’ve ever been curious exactly how America produces the cheapest and “safest” food on the planet, but not quite believed all the hype that fuels the empty advertising slogans on your television, then Food, Inc. promises to be the film that explains why there’s a serious disconnect between food propaganda and reality.

In exactly 93 minutes, director Robert Kenner manages to slice down to the bone the many myths of the U.S. food system in a riveting documentary that exposes how a handful of corporations determine what our nation’s children eat and how America’s addiction to cheaper, faster, and larger portions has managed to shorten the average lifespan of the next generation for the first time since the Black Plague.

Helping Kenner make his point are leading food journalists Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, who take us on a tour of how food is really produced in America and not the sanitized, red barn, picket fence logos that have become ubiquitous in today’s grocery stores.

Unfortunately, the way food is grown, slaughtered and processed today owes more to mechanized practices honed during the industrial revolution and the audience quickly learns that the corporate food industry is desperate to keep the American public in the dark about their unsavory practices.

“There is this deliberate veil, this curtain that’s drawn between us and where our food is coming from. The industry doesn’t want you to know the truth about what you’re eating because if you knew, you might not want to eat it,” says Eric Schlosser, the bestselling author of Fast Food Nation who also co-produced the movie.

Instead of roaming freely out in green fields, as these animals have for thousands of years, today’s cattle are confined to giant feedlots while chickens, turkeys and hogs are crammed into factory farms, where disease and antibiotic resistant bacteria rage through the system of industrial animal confinements.

The High Cost of Cheap Food

The film opens with a voiceover from Michael Pollan, whose books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food have become foundational tomes for the growing food movement. Pollan calmly leads viewers down the aisles of an immaculate grocery store, rattling off facts about America’s food system that are greatly at odds with the pristine image that U.S. food companies are anxious for American consumers to swallow.

“The way we eat has changed more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000,” Pollan says, brilliantly painting the picture of today’s food marketing schemes, which Pollan calls a “pastoral fantasy.”

“There are no seasons in the American supermarket. Now there are tomatoes all year around. Grown halfway around the world. Picked when it was green and ripened with ethylene gas,” says Pollan.

For those unsure what exactly is wrong with that reality, the rest of the film succinctly explains the high cost that the cheapest food system in the world has had in wrecking havoc on human health, the nutritional quality of food, the livelihoods of family farmers, the safety of farm workers, rural communities and the environment.

While this has all been covered vividly before by both Pollan and Schlosser, Kenner manages to condense exactly what is wrong with the American food system in just the amount of time it takes the average American to gobble up a giant tub of artery choking buttered popcorn and slurp down a vat of the nation’s favorite soda, chock full of high fructose corn syrup, a cheap commodity sweetener which has been indicated as a leading cause of America’s obesity epidemic and the rise of type II diabetes.

The industrialization of the American food system takes the stage as the leading villain in Food Inc., which shines a bright light on the handful of corporations, Smithfield, Tyson, Cargill, ADM and Monsanto, that have centralized all segments of production, fulfilling the winner takes all mantra of 20th century capitalism.

The direct consequences of the intersection of the corporate, financial and political power of America’s food system are demonstrated through the heartbreaking stories of a woman whose 2-year-old son died from eating a contaminated burger, a low-income Hispanic family that have to pass up eating vegetables because they can only afford to eat fast food and a Maryland chicken farmer who is forced out of farming because she could no longer afford to be tied to a system that treats farmers like serfs while all the profits funnel up to multinational corporate agribusinesses. Unfortunately, these stories are not uncommon, happening every day across America.

For those looking for the brighter side of the food story, Food Inc. shows Gary Hirshberg, who started Stonyfield Farms with 7 cows in the early 80s, and now brings organics to the masses by partnering with Wal-Mart, the largest seller of groceries in America.
In stark contrast to Hirschberg’s warm embrace of mega corporations, is Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms, the grass-based Virginia farmer of Omnivore’s Dilemma fame.

While Hirschberg brings Wal-Mart executives on a tour of one of Stonyfield’s small dairy farms, Salatin shows visitors the synergy of his small-scale sustainable farm based on a pasture rotation system, which mimics nature’s patterns rather than rely on the petrochemicals of industrial agriculture.

Overall, there’s something in this movie for everyone, from the beginner and the policy wonk, to learn exactly how the food on their plate gets there and why the current system is badly in need of reform. Fortunately for viewers, Kenner did his homework. Food Inc. is another nail in the coffin for industrial ag, which is now continually on the run as their bad practices are finally catching up to them.

If you only see one film this year, Food, Inc. is that movie. In many ways, it can be seen as the antidote to America’s obesity epidemic. So drop that burger and fries and get to the theater!

Starts in select theaters June 12th, check here for more details.