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.

Local foods are patriotic, whether you’re buying them directly from producers in your area or growing your own. They’re good for our local farmers, our economies, our health, and the health of our planet.  Local foods give us pause to (re)consider our connection with the land and those who produce our food.  And they taste great because they’re fresh from the soil.  (Who says that what is good for you can’t taste good, too?)

This Fourth of July, please consider celebrating your independence by including locally sourced foods in your menu.  Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International – who earlier this year petitioned the Obama administration to plant a Victory Garden on the White House lawn – recently launched Food Independence Day to encourage local eating on the Fourth.  Part of this effort was to gain the commitment of individuals to include local foods in their menu.  Another goal?  To petition our nation’s 50 governors to consume local foods and publish their menus for the day.

Let Food Freedom Ring!  Several governors have published their menus, and you can help us get more to join the effort.  Sign the petition at www.FoodIndependenceDay.org and check out the Associated Press story currently running:

Governors don’t have to look far for Fourth fare
07/02/2009
By CLARKE CANFIELD  / Associated Press

“This is an opportunity to celebrate our food culture,” he said.

On the day Americans celebrate the land of the free, a Maine man wants governors to feel free to live off the land.

A sustainable food advocate who campaigned for the Obamas to plant a garden at the White House has now received pledges from several governor’s offices to feature local foods on their Fourth of July menus, from Maine lobster to South Dakota pheasant jerky to milkshakes made with Montana huckleberries.

Roger Doiron said he was inspired to lobby governors to promote locally grown food after a patch of White House lawn was turned into an organic vegetable garden this spring.

“I said to myself, ‘Maybe we should try to look to other first families to eat by example and use their Fourth of July to make that happen,’” said Doiron, who wants to brand the holiday “Food Independence Day.”

Doiron is founder of Kitchen Gardeners International, a nonprofit that promotes food self-reliance through kitchen gardens and sustainable local food systems. Local foods are good for the palate, the health, local economies, the environment and your wallet, he said.

For the “Food Independence Day” effort, he teamed up with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy Food and Society Fellows Program and the Mother Nature Network.

After setting up a Facebook page to promote the idea, they heard from more than 6,000 people who vowed to build their July Fourth menus around local and home-grown ingredients.

The governors’ offices in Idaho, Maine, Maryland, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas and West Virginia pledged to do the same, Doiron said. The office of Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said the family would be out of state on July Fourth but would make efforts to eat locally through the year.

In Maine, the family of Gov. John Baldacci is planning a reunion this weekend that will include Maine lobsters, clams, mussels, potato salad and blueberry pie.

The menu in Maryland will have local crab cakes. South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds will be serving up pheasant jerky (the state bird) and walleye (the state fish) along with hamburgers and hot dogs.

Montana first lady Nancy Schweitzer is planning a meal that includes Montana-raised beef, milkshakes made with local huckleberries, and huckleberry crisp. In West Virginia, the produce is coming from a local farmers market, and tomatoes and herbs were grown at the governor’s mansion.

In North Dakota, the meal will feature hamburgers made from North Dakota beef, along with hamburger buns made from local wheat, potato salad from local potatoes, and baked beans with bacon using local beans and North Dakota-raised pork.

Agriculture is North Dakota’s No. 1 industry, said Donald Caton, spokesman for Gov. John Hoeven. “It wasn’t difficult to put together a home-grown menu,” he said.

For his part, Doiron’s Fourth of July menu will include potatoes, dill, peas, salad makings and strawberries from his home garden in Scarborough. He also plans to dig clams from a local flat.

“This is an opportunity to celebrate our food culture,” he said.

P.S. from the author of this post, aka Victory Grower:  Today, a group of Food and Society Policy Fellows gathered on the phone to talk about Food Independence Day and the local foods we’d be eating with our families.  It was small talk about food from our gardens and food we’re purchasing from local farmers.  About preparing the recipes we’ve borrowed from one another.  Small talk, but sharing big ideas about public policy and food systems and culture and food independence.  Because small actions can result in big changes.

So, from the reaches of Maine (and Roger’s little “white house”) to the coast of Southern California (Rose), to the Pacific Northwest (Erin), to our nation’s heartland (Angie, Eric and Lisa) — or whatever place of the country you call home — let Food Freedom Ring!

For those of you who’ve spent the last year living in a cave, environmentalists and food fighters have been talking incessantly about pushing our next president to plant a garden on the White House lawn. But this is not just so that Obama has an endless supply of arugula.

The Eat the View campaign is the brainchild of Roger Doiron, an organic gardener from Scarborough, Maine.  His hope was that a Victory Garden, like the one that Eleanor Roosevelt famously kept at the White House, would bring awareness to our food miles, encourage eaters to grow some of their own food by example, and show solidarity with farmers, as well as feeding the first family economically and sustainably.

The campaign quickly grew to over 20,000 supporters through an online petition, and garnered notice from the Washington Post, the New York Times and National Public Radio.  Most recently, the concept even won a contest on the site On Day One, which entitles the idea to be presented to President Obama.  Two times a charm?  It is also in the running for a contest on Change.org, and the winner’s idea will be presented to the Obama administration on January 16th at an event at the National Press Club.  The project needs your votes today, as it is the last day of that contest.

Victory Gardening as a positive force can’t be underestimated.  Our resident Victory Gardener and historian Rose Hayden-Smith wrote a few months back about the power of a national gardening effort during wartime, which “helped the family budget; improved dietary practices; reduced the food mile and saved fuel; enabled America to export more food to our allies; beautified communities; enabled every American to contribute to a national effort; and helped bridge social, ethnic, class and cultural differences during a time when cooperation was widely needed.”  All this with just a little show of Presidential leadership.

Walking in your farmer’s shoes also allows you to appreciate the effort that goes into producing your food, and makes you scratch your head when you hear about the abysmal government policies propagating poor nutrition and by extension unhealthy communities.

And did I mention, gardening is fun?  Eating something you’ve grown gives you a sense of well-being that going to the grocery store never will.

“President-elect Obama ran on a platform of social change and of reaching across the political aisle and national borders to tackle big problems together.” Doiron says. “Organic gardens do just that. They’re not conservative or liberal, white or black, male or female, gay or straight. They cut across all lines and offer a hands-on, low-cost way of making progress on global warming, food security, health care and energy independence.”

It remains to be seen whether or not Obama will go the way of the Roosevelts. He has been a little tone deaf on ag policy so far (over-focused on ethanol, taking back his praise of Pollan’s letter to him in the Times, Vilsack appointment), but he did say way back when that he was interested in greening the White House. This could be one of the most economical and far-reaching ways to begin to fill that promise.