In the 10 weeks since that momentous spark in mid-September, what began as an audacious protest, call to action, and singular act of civil disobedience on Wall Street, has quickly taken root worldwide. Capturing the hearts of those negatively impacted by the current economic and political system, speaking passionately for the disenfranchised, and uniting arms in solidarity with protest movements around the world, the Occupy movement has become a lightning rod and catalyst stimulating a long needed dialogue. Economic and social justice, corporate control and profiteering, and systematic corruption are just part of that discussion.

On Thursday, December 15, 2011 please join us in San Francisco for the next Kitchen Table Talks for a thought provoking and stimulating exploration of the context, implications, actions, and promise of Occupy for the food movement.

When: Thursday, December 15, 2011; 6:30-8:30 p.m.

Food and drink at 6:30 pm; Discussion at 7:00 p.m.

Where: Women’s Building, 3543 18th St. (between Valencia and Guerrero Streets), San Francisco

Tickets: $10, available at Brown Paper Tickets
A limited number of sliding scale tickets will be available on a first come, first serve basis at 7:00 p.m. on the night of the event.

Joining us in conversation will be:

Raj Patel, thought leader, writer, academic, and activist who has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and now protests against both. Raj is currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Center for African Studies and a fellow at The Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, he regularly writes for The Guardian, and for many mainstream publications. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and The Value of Nothing, is a New York Times bestseller.

Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of the Center for Food Safety, is a public interest attorney, activist, and author. He has been involved in public interest legal activity in numerous areas of technology, human health and the environment for nearly 25 years. He is author of Your Right to Know: Genetic Engineering and the Secret Changes in Your Food and editor of the highly-acclaimed Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture. His articles on law, technology, social, and psychological issues have also appeared in numerous law reviews, technology journals, popular magazines, and newspapers across the country, and he has been featured in numerous documentaries including the film The Future of Food.  In 1994, the Utne Reader named Kimbrell as one of the world’s leading 100 visionaries.  In 2007, he was named one of the 50 people most likely to save the planet by The Guardian-U.K.

Sarah Treuhaft, Associate Director, Policylink. Sarah collaborates with local and national partners on research and action projects and authors policy briefs and reports to advance Policylink’s social equity mission. Sarah has worked on food policy and was a member of the team that successfully advocated for the creation of a national Healthy Food Financing Initiative. Her most recent publication is America’s Tomorrow: Equity is the Superior Growth Model, co-authored with Angela Glover Blackwell and Manuel Pastor. Sarah was a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo, West Africa.

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of CivilEats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Space is limited, so please RSVP. Seasonal snacks and refreshments generously provided by Bi-Rite Market and Shoe Shine Wine.

Recently, Tree and I discussed the recently-passed legislation which officially legalized urban agriculture in the San Francisco. His project is primarily concerned with food access for low-income communities and creating collaborative, non-commercial projects. Tree does not see a benefit in gaining the legal right to sell city-grown food because he wants food to be free. How, Tree asked, is the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance (SFUAA–the main civic group pushing for the passage of the legislation) going to work for those who want to see volunteer-based, collective, and non-commodified forms of urban agriculture?

As mentioned in my previous post, the SFUAA worked on this new legislation out of a need expressed by one of our members, Little City Gardens, and an opportunity presented by members of city government. But my conversation with Tree has brought to my attention a rift forming in the San Francisco urban farming scene.

The other side of the rift is expressed by Iso Rabins, Founder of ForageSF and the Underground Farmers Market, who said in a recent review of his market:

“The feeling in the food community is that if you’re making money, it’s not something you’re passionate about,” Mr. Rabins said. “But if we actually want to change anything—dedicate our lives to it—we need to make money doing it.”

I have two reactions to this. My skeptical response is to ask what sort of “change” Rabins is talking about making here. The Underground Farmers Market, in my experience, is a bacchanalian celebration of homescale food preparation, not food system change. To be sure, eating homemade pickles might be a stepping away from the corporate food world. But, as a student of international food systems issues, I’ve never seen the political economy of food shift due to slightly expanded networks of boutique prepared foods. That the Underground Farmers Market has also been skirting the law by allowing producers to circumvent health and safety rules (In fact, the market was recently issued a cease-and-desist notice by the California Department of Public Health) does not mean that it is challenging, or “changing” the food system in a substantive way.

My less skeptical response is that, yes, Rabins is right about something. No matter how anti-capitalist your values might be, we still live in a capitalist society, with capitalist realities like rent (which here is San Francisco is a brutal reality indeed). Some people can choose to live a low-income lifestyle, and spend their free time volunteering to grow and give away organic food. But many people cannot.

Many marginalized communities are not as focused on creating a world free of capitalism as they are creating a way to survive and thrive within capitalism. A model that promotes what some call “social entrepreneurship” then, is more appropriate than one that asks that we all volunteer our time, in service of grander values and long-term goals. With the exception of Little City Gardens, no San Francisco farm has people who are paid to farm via sales of produce. Most rely on volunteers, plus grants, philanthropies, and government funds to pay any staffers who do exist.

When one considers one’s actions as activism, done for the purpose of creating social, political, or economic change, and not just personal fulfillment, it behooves one to have a “theory of change.” The “anti-capitalist” theory of change holds that solutions to market failures can’t come from the market (recalling Einstein, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”), and this is hard to square with a “green economy” theory of change, which believes that a capitalist economy can be reformed, through business, into one that is less destructive to people and the environment.

Though the anti-capitalist perspective can be seen as elitist (how can many people afford to live from this perspective?), a similar critique could be leveled against green economy proponents. After all, most of the current pathways sought to create a local economy from sustainably produced food lead to high-end restaurants and products (like those sold at the Underground Farmers Market). While there have been efforts to expand access to “good food”, like the Eat Real Market or Peoples Grocery sliding-scale “Grub Box”, these efforts are limited by two main problems: good food costs more to produce, and low income people must often prioritize other necessary expenses over food. Our options are thus framed between cheap foods accessible to all or small scale food products serving only the elite.

A social movement must have a vision of the world it wants to create. Anti-capitalists have this vision in spades, seeing a future economy based in developing and re-creating commons and not just markets, but have a rather unverified and (to many) an unconvincing path to get there. Green economy enthusiasts have a vision which seems more “realistic,” but strikes me as toothless in addressing longstanding legacies of economic inequality and the structural hurdles to sustainability engendered by endless-growth capitalism. With waves of greenwashing and the watering down of organic standards, green seems easily compromised.

Also, competition from cheap foods grown by still-existent industrial farming operations continually skew a green food economy, causing good food sources to seem expensive, even as good food farmers struggle to survive. So “opting out” of this global, corporate-controlled food system is not tantamount to challenging it.

There is another point that vexes both sides of this debate: How do social movements succeed? Is it more imperative that they are massive, unpaid, volunteer, collectively-organized, and values-driven? Or that they are organized (into hierarchical bureaucracies), paid, and supported financially by their work? Looking to the past, we see that both sides are at least part of the equation. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a piece about the inadequacies of social technologies like Twitter to create social change, pointing to the effectiveness of the Civil Rights movement, which was built by organizations with paid staff, but also through deep connections built between individual activists acting together, for free and for no other compensation than the hope for success.

A scary truth is that creating social change almost certainly requires sacrifice, if not of life and limb, then at least of time. To expect to get paid to create change is to deny that change has its own value that deserves effort outside of remuneration.

I hope that we can find “both/and” solutions to this potential rift among food and farming activists, but once again I feel like I find myself with more questions than answers. We who do consider ourselves as “activists” or part of a “movement” need to do a better job of defining what and who that movement is for. And we can’t allow ourselves to settle with self-satisfaction of “a job well done” without considering the true nature of the problem and the efficacy of our actions to solve them.

The world is still, after several long years, desperately trying to climb out of the financial abyss brought about during the latest global financial meltdown. Painful “austerity” measures, largely impacting working class people who already suffered the most during the crisis, are proffered by those responsible as the short-term economic fix to what ails nations around the world.

After roughly 150 years, and the countless day-to-day tribulations of billions of people, capitalism is being questioned like never before. Not surprisingly, the Bay Area’s counterculture spirit transforms economic models as well. New, locally minded businesses whose lifeblood includes notions antithetical to the dominant paradigm, including shared prosperity, enabling and/or giving to others, and creating community, are thriving.

Do they offer a more satisfying, rewarding, and ultimately more viable path for long-term success for society at large? On Wednesday, June 29, please join Kitchen Table Talks as we discuss the vision, mechanics, and spirit behind these “Alternative Business Models.”

Joining us in conversation will be:

Cathy Goldsmith, member of the Cheese Board. Cathy graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in education and has cooked at various restaurants in the East Bay, Philadelphia, and London.  Her interest in food, politics, and social justice have found a home at the Cheese Board (a 100 percent worker owned co-op since 1971), where she’s been for the past 16 years.

Anthony Myint, restaurateur, chef, and author. After eating his way across 31 countries at age 25, Anthony landed in San Francisco and proceeded to co-create Mission Street Food, Mission Burger, Mission Chinese Food, and Commonwealth Restaurant–with its “benevolent business model.” Anthony was named among the most influential people in food in 2010 by Chow.com and among the “Top 40 under 40” by Food & Wine magazine.

Jessica Prentice, Co-Founder, Three Stone Hearth. Chef, educator, innovator, and mother, Jessica has been a spark in the Bay Area for the past 15 years. Formerly chef of the Headlands Center for the Arts and Director of Education Programs for the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, Jessica coined the word “locavore” and co-created the Local Foods Wheel. Her first book, Full Moon Feast was released by Chelsea Green Publishing in 2006.

Caleb Zigas, Executor Director, La Cocina. After interning with ProMujer in El Alto Bolivia where he learned about microfinance in its infancy, Caleb brought those lessons to bear at La Cocina when it opened its doors in 2005 and has been shaping its incubator program ever since.  A former Yoshiyama Young Entrepreneur and named one of five “Community Organizers making a difference” by Inc. magazine, Caleb’s combination of food industry experience and commitment to social justice helps strongly define La Cocina.

The Panel discussion will be preceded by an introduction to the Living Wage by Karl Kramer, Campaign Co-Director of the San Francisco Living Wage Coalition.

When: Wednesday, June 29 from 6:45-8:00 pm

Where: Viracocha, 998 Valencia Street @ 21st Street, San Francisco

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of CivilEats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Space is limited, so please RSVP. A $10 suggested donation is requested at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Sustainable food and refreshments will be provided, courtesy of Bi-Rite Market and Shoe Shine Wine.

This week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed one of the most progressive pieces of legislation for urban agriculture in the nation. The new legislation has amended the zoning code to allow agricultural activities in all parts of the city, as well as defining the parameters by which urban agriculturists can sell their products. It doesn’t address the touchier subjects of animal husbandry or marijuana cultivation, but has created opportunities for and the legitimacy of urban fruit and vegetable cultivation.

The legislation was the result of a rare combined and cooperative effort between city officials and urban agriculture practitioners and advocates. This was accomplished mainly through the work of the San Francisco Urban Agriculture Alliance (SFUAA), an organization of which I am a member, which formed nearly a year ago to coalesce the various efforts and projects focusing on local food and agriculture into a cohesive political voice. The coalition is made up of over 300 individual and 40 organizational members, and its formation turned out to be very well timed.

The work of re-writing the zoning code came up early in SFUAA meetings, but became more pressing when one of our members, Little City Gardens, came up against the code in attempting to expand to a new, larger plot of land. Told that converting the empty lot into a garden would cost $3,000 in conditional use permit fees, LCG opted to petition not for a personal exemption, but for a rewriting of the code.

With support from key individuals in the department, as well as in the mayor’s office, the planning department immediately went to work on crafting a new code. In that process, they consulted a zoning working group of the SFUAA, which proposed certain zoning priorities and tried to limit potential negative impacts of new zoning legislation.

For the most part, our advocacy campaign worked. For example, the original drafts contained provisions (supposedly at the express behest of former mayor Gavin Newsom) that gardens be required to have fencing, and further, fencing that is qualified as “ornamental.” Seeing as ornamental specifies made of wood or wrought-iron, this would have meant any new garden project would have had hundreds, if not thousands, of extra dollars of start-up costs. The SFUAA pushed for the the fencing requirement to be removed for new gardens, and for gardens to be given more choices. Which means that, not only will less-expensive fencing be a possibility, but we have encouraged new spaces to use their fencing to grow something (kiwi? grapes? passionfruit?).

Sadly, another of the SFUAA’s proposed amendments was not adopted. We recommended that the “change of use” fees paid to the planning department for new gardens be waived. We argued that if the city truly intends to support the flourishing of many new food-producing sites, it would behoove them to remove potential barriers to entry. In the context of an economic recession where all governments are having a hard time making ends meet, it was argued that agencies cannot make such blanket fee exceptions, even for something acknowledged as beneficial like urban agriculture. But comparing $3,000 to the $300 it will cost to get a permit with the new code, this is obviously an improvement.

One issue that the code brings up is the question of sales-focused versus community-oriented production. Many of the urban farming projects that currently exist in San Francisco (Alemany Farm, Free Farm, and Hayes Valley Farm being the three largest examples) are all focused on growing food and giving it away; none sell any produce. So how will this legislation help these projects? While a large portion of the legislation regards legalizing production for local markets, by virtue of setting up designations for urban agriculture the legislation legitimizes agriculture’s place in the urban landscape. Food that is grown for personal use is not regulated in the code; if someone has a backyard garden, this legislation won’t effect them. Should for-benefit (i.e. non-profit) farm projects seek to raise some of their operating funds through sales, including of value-added products, this will now be allowed. This could also open the door for social justice-minded urban farms to create truly green jobs without requiring so much grant funding.

Impacts on neighborhoods were also taken into account by planners in writing the code. As a result, the regulatory parameters of the legislation are based on size (less than an acre is designated “neighborhood” vs “large-scale” for more than an acre) and not whether or not the food is grown for sale or not. Any new project (for profit or not) that occurs on a large site would be legally allowable, following the permitting process (including a vetting of water-wise irrigation practices by the Public Utilities Commission). This means that, once neighbors have been notified and a permit has been secured, no neighbor will be able to complain and get a project shut down. Before this code, non-residential gardens on private property had an unknowable legal status, and could theoretically be fought by neighbors.

All told, this legislation is proof that “the system,” as ossified and change-resistant as it may seem, can occasionally work, with the combined efforts of the right people in positions of power and aware, active community members. The SFUAA’s mission and work is ongoing and constantly being developed, and we welcome input and participation (see our website for details on our mission and other non-policy-related work). Our next steps will be up to our members to formulate. Having worked to allow fruit and vegetable production and sales in the city, what steps will we take to support our other members’ work? Will we agitate for “food sovereignty” like Sedgwick, Maine? Will we create pop-up resource centers for urban farmers to access compost, mulch, and plants? Will we petition the Recreation and Parks Department to replace purely ornamental landscaping with productive alternatives? These are just some ideas, since we know that there’s plenty to do to craft the urban landscape we know to be necessary for a sustainable and equitable future.

Alliances have a long tradition within U.S. civil society, and urban agriculture alliances can be at the forefront of new movements towards food system sustainability. With the 2012 Farm Bill fast approaching, my personal hope is to see urban agriculture alliances serve as platforms for advocacy and organizing; getting urban folks working together to reorient some of the huge levers of subsidy which so distort our food system.

If you’re interested in starting an alliance in your area, or would like more information on our work, feel free to write us at info@sfuaa.org, or to me at antidogmatist@gmail.com

Photo: Little City Gardens, by Caitlyn Galloway

There are two gardens on the roof at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. One has a picturesque green lawn, a fountain, and an array of decorative trees and flowers. In other words, it’s exactly what you’d expect from a Nob Hill hotel. Nearby, on a smaller terrace, is something less expected: a culinary herb garden. Raised beds brim with lavender and rosemary, a small compost bin is visible in one corner, and, off to one side, honey bees busily travel to and from three large hives.

The bee hives belong to Marshall’s Farm Natural Honey, but it was the Fairmont’s executive chef jW Foster (capitalization intentional) who had the idea to put them there. Shortly after relocating from the Fairmont in Dallas, Texas, where he had started a kitchen garden complete with bee hives, Foster voiced the idea of doing something here in San Francisco. “I had gone to the farmers market in Dallas and met a local beekeeper. After talking with him on a few different visits, we decided to put some bees at the hotel.”

The idea was embraced at the SF Fairmont too, and Foster was put into contact with Helene Marshall from Marshall’s Farm. Helen, who grew up in San Francisco and has a long-standing relationship with the landmark hotel, jumped at the chance. “I used to wear my prom dress to the Fairmont,” she says. “I’ve been going there for weddings and bar mitzvahs for years. The Fairmont and I go way back!”

The garden where the hives were placed last June is located above the Tonga Room, on a sunken rooftop that gets morning sunlight and allows for a good flight pattern. “If it had been any higher, there would have been too much wind,” says Helene. At first, she and her husband Spencer, who does the majority of the beekeeping, were a little worried about the bees having enough to forage in the two-mile radius around the hotel. “Spencer was skeptical, but when he goes to visit the bees they’re always active and healthy looking,” she says.

The Marshalls have several other hives in the city, but none in such a visible location. And while an urban environment does pose some risks of contamination, Helene says they’re no more significant than the risks in rural places. “Urban bees often do better than bees in agricultural areas, because of the pesticides.” Plus, she adds, “People water their gardens here. Out in the Valley everything dries up in the summer, so there aren’t as many year round flowers.”

Foster sees the bees as part of a larger effort to engage his staff and guests in the world of sustainable food. He says that more than half of the food prepared in the hotel’s kitchens comes from local farms (Allstar Organics, for instance, drops off a box of produce every three days), and Foster’s staff breaks down a portion of their own meat from whole and half animals raised on local ranches.

The chef has read widely about colony collapse disorder and says he hopes that hosting bees on the Fairmont’s roof will bring some awareness of the importance of preserving their health. “[As pollinators], they really are crucial to so much of what we eat,” he says. The hotel has included information about the bees on their menus and website, and Foster has high hopes for expanding the garden. “When we put in a greenhouse, I’d even like to try growing tomatoes,” he says.

The hives have only produced around 120 pounds of honey so far—not enough to stock the hotel’s kitchen, but Foster does use it here and there in his recipes. “It’s in some of our ice cream, pastries, vinaigrettes, and wherever else I can find a place for it,” he says.

Foster and Helene will also be teaching two honey-based cooking classes this month in San Francisco with CUESA, at the Macy’s Cellar and in the hotel’s herb garden. Helene is intrigued by the idea of seeing more local people visit the Fairmont. “It’s traditionally a very upscale place, so this could bring it down to the here and now,” she says.  Perhaps most importantly, the hives at the Fairmont are a sign, says Helene, that “people are starting to accept bees in urban situations.” Recalling a letter she received from the lawyer of an angry SF resident living near a Marshall’s Farm hive, she says, “This just wouldn’t have happened 10 years ago.”

Related article: U.K. guv takes threat of bee-killing pesticides seriously. Why doesn’t the U.S.? by Tom Philpott

Originally published by CUESA

On February 17, 2011, the San Francisco Planning Commission passed a resolution approving a new urban agriculture planning code that would allow a range of urban gardens and farms to be located throughout the city. The new code creates an agricultural use category with two sub-uses (Neighborhood Agriculture and Urban Industrial Agriculture) that represent different scales and intensity of food production.

The Planning Commission’s action is an important step toward integrating various scales of food production into San Francisco’s landscape, creating certainty about where and to what extent urban land can be used to grow food. San Francisco residents are environmentally conscious and the Bay Area is where the word “locavore” was coined, yet even the most fervent sustainable food supporters can have NIMBY tendencies when urban farms sprout near their homes. The code change will hopefully create consistent expectations and ensure that gardens and farms can locate throughout the city and improve–not detract from–the quality of life for which San Francisco is famous.

If enacted by the city’s Board of Supervisors and signed by the Mayor, as anticipated, the city’s planning code would for the first time clearly define the status of urban agriculture in San Francisco by identifying where small and large scale farms can be located, letting property owners, urban farmers, and ordinary people know exactly what kinds of agricultural uses are allowed in any given place.

Neighborhood Agriculture is any use for food or horticultural production that occupies less than one acre. It includes but is not limited to home, kitchen, and roof gardens. The use of a site for food production may either be “principal” or “accessory” to other uses, such as a private home. These smaller growing spaces must also comply with the following standards:

·      Sales and donation of fresh food or horticultural products grown on site may occur between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m.  People are allowed to sell produce from their garden/farm but cannot create a storefront in or make commercial improvements to their home that turn it into a defacto grocery store.  They cannot sell value added foods like jams or baked goods.
·      Compost areas must be set back at least three feet from structures on adjacent properties.
·      If fencing encloses the farmed area, it must be wood or ornamental and comply with a section of the planning code that regulates fences.
·      Mechanized farm equipment is prohibited in residential districts except during the initial preparation of the land, when heavy equipment may be used to prepare the soil. Landscaping equipment designed for household use is permitted in residential districts. All farm equipment must be screened from sight.

Urban Industrial Agriculture uses describe farms that are one acre or larger, or smaller farms that cannot meet the physical and operational standards for Neighborhood Agriculture. This more intense use is principally permitted as-of-right only in industrial districts. In all other districts, creating a farm one acre or larger requires conditional use authorization, which is granted only if the project is deemed necessary, desirable, and compatible with the district.

The proposed zoning changes were widely supported, though urban agriculture practitioners and supporters raised a few concerns: (1) that the fencing requirement was onerous and unnecessary; (2) that the fee for obtaining a change of use (currently $300) was prohibitively high for smaller growers; (3) that selling value added food is an important source of revenue and an appropriate activity on an urban farm; and (4) that urban soils may not be safe. In approving the code changes last week, the Planning Commission called for further consideration of these issues.

Another concern was raised by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC), which supplies the city with drinking water. Staff at the commission noted that large-scale urban agriculture would increase water use, despite the fact that a programmatic Environmental Impact Report for SFPUC in 2008 limited the amount of water consumption through 2018 and required that any increases in water use be met through conservation, recycling, graywater, rainwater harvesting, and city groundwater. Given that the expansion of urban agriculture in San Francisco will require that more alternative water sources be developed to meet the increased demand for irrigation water, SFPUC recommended adding requirements that urban farms use water-efficient practices.

Stay tuned for any fine-tuning that may happen at the Board of Supervisors.

Originally published on Urban Food Policy

Last Tuesday, while most of the nation was distracted with the mid-term election, another vote was taking place in San Francisco City Hall. The Board of Supervisors approved an ordinance to place limits—based on specific nutrition criteria—on how toys are marketed by restaurants in the city and county of San Francisco.

Most media accounts got the story wrong. The Los Angeles Times for example, called it a “Happy Meal ban.” (It’s true that, according to McDonald’s, none of the current Happy Meals meet the criteria, but that’s fixable.) The real story is, how did McDonald’s—the nation’s most beloved fast food brand—get so beat up?

It’s easy to dismiss this victory as just another liberal law passed in “wacko” San Francisco. While the majority of the Board of Supervisors do lean to the left, passing this bill was by no means a slam dunk. To the contrary, it took months of organizing and coalition-building to get the job done. Along the way, proponents faced numerous obstacles, including underhanded lobbying, deceptive polling, and more.

How did they do it? According to Judy Grant, Value [the] Meal campaign director for Corporate Accountability International (CAI), the lead organizing group on the ground, “the old-fashioned way – we hit the phones and the pavement.” [full disclosure: I'm on the advisory board of CAI's Value [the] Meal campaign.] Once the bill was introduced by Supervisor Eric Mar, CAI quickly realized the industry would defeat it without a solid grassroots voice. Grant explains:

We worked with Mar’s office to form a coalition from every corner of the City. Many San Franciscans felt the time for this law had come, so it was easy to find many residents in support. We took local activists to farmers’ markets and food-related events to get their fellow San Franciscans involved.

Many other organizations also played an important role, including the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, Prevention Institute, and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, whose mailing lists and resources were critical to garnering support.

Testimony from doctors at the University of California, San Francisco was also key. Pediatricians told heartbreaking stories about how the children they see suffer.

Another critical organizing group was the Bayview Food Guardians, based in the low-income San Francisco neighborhood of Bayview / Hunters Point. Here is an excerpt from Food Guardian Jameela Toups’ powerful testimony:

The youth in my community are getting diet-related diseases like diabetes and hypertension at younger and younger ages. This is largely because of an unhealthy food environment that lacks fresh, affordable food and instead has an overabundance of fast food and relentless fast food marketing, including these toy incentives.

We at Food Guardians have helped some folks in our neighborhood change the way they eat. But we can’t reach everyone. There are hundreds of others that we have not been able to talk to yet. To reach everyone, we would need millions more in funding.

But the fast food industry has those millions. They can reach pretty much everyone, almost 24-7, and their message is counter to what we want our neighbors – particularly our youth – to hear. We try to reach youth before their habits are set, but far too often the industry has gotten to them first.

All of this organizing and testimony was needed to go up against a full-court press counter-lobbing effort by McDonald’s and the California Restaurant Association, the industry’s powerful statewide lobbying arm.

At the bill’s very first hearing, dozens of local supporters showed up while McDonald’s flew lobbyists in from corporate headquarters to testify, including the company’s “director of nutrition.” But the hearing got really bizarre when a parade of Mandarin-speaking individuals testified against the bill, each with similar talking points. One of these speakers was even seen consulting a script in the hallway.

Given that most Chinese people in San Francisco speak Cantonese and not Mandarin, were these alleged McDonald’s supporters even locals? “We were not able to confirm that they were from San Francisco, though we got the sense they were not,” said Supervisor Mar in a statement. “We’re also not able to confirm their connection to the fast-food industry. It’s all very suspicious.”

Another underhanded move involved expensive polling conducted by the California Restaurant Association that allegedly showed San Franciscans were largely opposed to the bill. But the survey questions were so biased that the tactic actually backfired. For example, the lobbyists asked, do you agree or disagree that “It should be up to parents, not city politicians, to decide what to feed their children,” and, “A working parent coming home after a tough day should have the option of occasionally purchasing a meal with a toy for their child.” Not exactly objective scientific survey methods.

While San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (who was just elected lieutenant governor of California) has promised to veto the bill, organizers were able to secure a veto-proof majority, which was a tremendous effort in itself, requiring hundreds of phone calls and hours of meetings to get the key swing vote to come on board.

So how much money did McDonald’s and friends spend on lobbying against the measure? According to Deborah Lapidus, senior organizer for Corporate Accountability’s Value [the] Meal, at least tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars. But no amount of corporate cash was enough to overcome the passion of a few hundred community leaders and residents who said enough is enough. As San Francisco is often a national leader on health issues, other cities are sure to follow. McDonald’s may have to start loading up a few more buses.

Photo: Breakmould. via Flickr

Today, the man who encourages us all to eat food, mostly plants, and not too much will bring his prescription for a healthier population and planet to a group that, surprisingly, he hasn’t spoken to before: Doctors and other healthcare professionals.

The man, of course, is Michael Pollan—who talks about the importance of eating and growing sustainable food to folks as diverse as urban ag advocates and Oprah fans. The best-selling food book author will address physicians, dieticians, hospital food service staff, and others at the Food for Health Forum in San Francisco sponsored by HMO giant Kaiser Permanente.

Rather than rehash the sorry state of hospital food in many parts of the country, Pollan sees this as an opportunity to rally a new audience.  In an email prior to the event, he writes that he wants to encourage doctors to help drive change in this country’s food system by talking about food with patients, pressuring hospitals to serve better meals to both employees and the sick, and supporting national reform by getting involved in farm bill politics.

Whether docs heed his Rx remains to be seen. Of course, this being the dollar-driven healthcare world we’re talking about, there’s always the bottomline to make those in the business of medicine sit up and pay attention. In the past, Pollan has noted that “the less we spend on food, the more we spend on healthcare.” He cites statistics which reveal that in 1960 the U.S. spent 18 percent of its income on food and 5 percent on healthcare nationally, while now it spends 9 percent of its income on food and 17 percent on healthcare.

Hosting a food health forum in San Francisco makes sense. As reported here previously, the Bay Area is a hot bed for hospital food reform. And the driving force behind today’s event is a high-profile player in the movement, Dr. Preston Maring, associate physician-in-chief at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Oakland.

Maring, 65, who is relatively new to food advocacy, has worked for Kaiser for almost four decades. During his tenure he’s delivered babies as an obstetrician, worked in hospital administration, and spearheaded the creation of its new pediatric neurosurgery unit.

Since then, 35 markets have sprung up in Kaiser facilities in five states, serving employees, members, and the greater community.

He has worked to get more fresh, local food into Kaiser hospitals and forged ties with local, sustainable farmers, including the nonprofit Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF), where he is on the board.

Improving food at Kaiser, which runs the largest nonprofit health care system in the country, has the potential to impact a lot of eaters. The provider and insurer has about 8 million members, 15,000 doctors, and 165,000 employees, mostly in the western states.

In his hospital rounds Maring urges docs to vote with their forks and choose organic, sustainable food for their families. He wants employees and patients alike to eat more fruits and veggies. To help them do that, this enthusiastic cook shares recipes on his blog, offers kitchen wisdom in short Web videos, and conducts a culinary show on the road, teaching new hospital employees basic cooking skills.  “A couple of cutting boards and a sharp knife are the best public health tools we have,” says Maring. “My mantra is: If a guy like me can do it, you can do it.”  (Maring and his medical student-chef son were the subject of a recent New York Times profile by Civil Eats co-founder Katrina Heron.)

Pollan and Maring will be joined on stage by acclaimed cookbook author Mollie Katzen, who is used to talking with physicians, through her work as a member of the Harvard School of Public Health Nutrition Roundtable and at events Harvard sponsors aimed at hospital food personnel at the Culinary Institute of America.

Mostly, though, she plans to give healthcare professionals a gentle nudge to head into the kitchen and cook something simple, for themselves, to eat. “I want to give people a little pep talk—not wag my finger at them and talk about how we’re all getting sicker and fatter,” says Katzen, who will demo cooking techniques (think dicing, mincing, and macerating) as she talks. “My mission is modest: I want to help people reclaim the lost art of cooking by learning to make one or two dishes.”

Rounding out the line up is Brenda Eskenazi, a UC Berkeley researcher who will discuss the effects of pesticides on farm workers and their children, organic farmer and CAFF member Judith Redmond of Full Belly Farm, and several hospital food folks, who will chime in with reports from the inside.

Attendee Alison Negrin, executive chef of John Muir Health, which operates hospitals in the East Bay, says she hopes panelists will recognize the work that has been done to improve hospital food.

Negrin thinks doctors are beginning to understand the key role food plays in health. As an example, she recounts an exchange she had with a physician at her hospital who, while heartened by healthy choices in the cafeteria, questioned why fried foods and sodas were still on the menu. (These items now come with signage about calorie and fat content.)

“People like myself and others on the Bay Area Hospital Leadership Team have been talking about these issues and working hard to improve hospital food for some time,” notes Negrin, speaking of a group coordinated by the SF Bay Area Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), while conceding that change can move at a glacial pace in such institutional settings. “But I think many of us hope to come away from this forum reinvigorated with new ways to fix hospital food and fresh ideas we can incorporate into our own settings.”

Others who have toiled on the hospital food reform beat for some time are particularly interested to hear what Craig Watson, who works for the SYSCO Corporation, has to say. SYSCO is a major hospital food distributor.

“Hospital farmers’ markets are fabulous, but we all know that improving the quality of food served to employees and patients is a slow process,” says Lena Brook, senior program associate for PSR. “Preston Maring would be the first to acknowledge that Kaiser is a bulky facility to move in terms of improving food. I hope this forum gets people thinking big and helps us all find ways to make change faster.”

Photos: Michael Pollan, Preston Maring, Mollie Katzen

Originally published on Lettuce Eat Kale

It is impossible to build a sustainable food system without addressing the issues surrounding water. The struggle over water in California is more than a century old and continues today with an $11 billion water bond, Proposition 18, proposed by Governor Schwarzenegger for November’s ballot.

Some portray California’s water problems as a farmer vs. fisher battle, but this is a simplistic, inaccurate depiction. Small and midsized farmers are just as concerned about the ecological health of the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta as the fishermen and women whose livelihoods have been devastated by the reduction in fish populations over the past several years. Additionally, many feel that continuing the status quo through the development of more dams on California’s rivers will benefit large-scale corporate agribusiness, not the family farms that serve local and regional markets. Anyone who advocates for sustainable agriculture in California needs to know about the state’s water politics.

Join us for the next Kitchen Table Talks in San Francisco on Tuesday, July 20, where we will bring together a fisherman and a farmer to share their stories and provoke thoughtful conversation about the ties between our water and our food.

The conversation will be moderated by Adam Scow, California Campaigns Director for the consumer advocacy nonprofit Food & Water Watch. Our fisherman is Mike Hudson, the president of the Small Boat Commercial Salmon Fishermen’s Association and former executive director of SalmonAid, the largest coalition of West Coast salmon advocates. Mike fishes out of the commercial fishing port of Berkeley, where in the summer he chases wild Pacific salmon and tuna and in the winter he catches crab.

Our farmer is Brett Baker, a sixth generation pear farmer from Sutter Island, California, as well as a biologist who has been studying the Delta ecosystem for several years, including one as the water and agricultural policy analyst for former Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi.

Come take a deep dive with us into California water politics and their impact on our food system.

Tuesday, July 20

Viracocha, 998 Valencia Street @ 21st Street, San Francisco

Food and drink at 6:30 p.m.; Discussion at 7 p.m.

Kitchen Table Talks is a joint venture of CivilEats and 18 Reasons, a non-profit that promotes conversation between its San Francisco Mission neighborhood and the people who feed them. Space is limited, so please RSVP. A $10 suggested donation is requested at the door, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. Sustainable food and refreshments will be provided, courtesy of Bi-Rite Market and Shoe Shine Wine.

Have been mulling over just what to say about forageSF founder Iso Rabins ever since I attended one of his underground dinners back in February. The meal was a big hit and, as billed, featured plenty of wild foods plucked from local woods, parks, and seas to keep a trend-spotting foodista happy.

Plus my galpal and I felt vaguely au courant showing up for supper at an unknown Folsom Street location.

We shared a communal table with a gay couple who sung the praises of their forageSF CSA box, Asian-American friends from the outer SF neighborhoods in search of something a little edgier to celebrate Chinese New Year, and canners and jammers from Pacific Heights, of all places. Go figure.

And, as previously noted, the wild mushroom ice cream, rocked. Seriously.

In a relatively short amount of time, Rabins has developed a devoted culinary cult following for his off-the-grid, gourmet venture, which includes a CSA box filled with gleaned goodies such as miner’s lettuce, ramps, and nettles, secret seasonal feasts like the one I attended, and local wild food walks. Rabins says he hopes his foraging forays help city folks get in touch with the wider, wilder world. A worthy goal, for sure.

Rabins is also the driving force behind another clandestine city culinary event, the Underground Farmers Market, a monthly meet held in San Francisco’s Mission District that exudes more of a party vibe than a venue for earnest produce lovers  — with long lines snaking around the block filled with inner-city, health-conscious hipsters in search of pork-belly buns (Rabins specialty), baked goods, homebrews, pickles, and preserves, all for sale by DIY home cooks.

Stephanie Rosenbaum did a nice job conveying the scene in a post for Bay Area Bites. (This writer did swing by a recent farmers’ market but didn’t queue to get in. I gather since the market moved to a bigger space, the crowd control issues are a thing of the past.)

Vendors happily flog their foodstuffs sans city approval or permits — which can prove prohibitive for urban-homesteading types trying their hand selling on a small scale. (Rabins does his own, informal quality control, tasting every item for sale.)

The frequently plaid-clad Iso Rabins is a king of inner-city cool and in high demand in culinary circles. He writes an occasional column for CHOW, speaks at food panels like a recent Kitchen Table Talks, and gathers lots of press for his projects.

His events typically sell out, and when he’s not foraging, cooking, or penning posts for cyberspace, he’s contemplating the contents of a book project about bringing wild food recipes to urban home cooks.

What most impresses me about Rabins is his quiet intention to make a living out of doing what he loves. He’s the sole proprietor of forageSF and while he’s hardly bringing in the big bucks — he tells me he’s now able to pay the rent without stress each month for the first time in a while — he’s doing what all those corporate big shots suggest: Building his brand, diversifying his portfolio, and expanding his franchise (an underground market is set to open in the East Bay in June).

His advice? “Just go for it, the worst that can happen is that you’ll have to move back in with your parents,” says the 28-year-old aspiring chef, who has done time toiling in brick-and-mortar restaurants. “Beyond that, think of something that you wouldn’t mind doing seven days a week for a year, and craft your business around that. If you enjoy doing it, you’ll keep doing it, even if money doesn’t come in immediately. Sooner or later it will support you.”

Hmmm. That’s the kind of advice we writers — the ones caught between the demise of the dead-tree-media and the advent of the don’t-pay-media — may do well to follow.

Rabins is one of the budding new food entrepreneurs buzzing around the Bay Area, reinventing how to build a culinary career in these post-recession, social-media savvy times. I’ve profiled two high-end confectionery makers who found their sweet spot in the marketplace while holding onto demanding day jobs. I’ve also showcased a successful non-profit cooking program for kids run by a recent graduate.

If you’re local, don’t just take my word for it, you can get a taste of Rabins’ foraging finds by attending a Wild Kitchen feast but check out previous underground eats and sign up for email invites for future events.

Or take a wild walk (an amble, really) in San Francisco or the East Bay. I attended a recent such meet-up in a modest park in Oakland led by a gregarious guide who goes by the moniker FeralKevin. The guy knows how to glean goodies like nobody’s business and was full of handy tips about how to incorporate wild weeds into home cooking.

Find out when the next SF underground market is slated by becoming a member. (To date, the city’s health department has given forageSF room to grow by making market goers sign up for his “club,” though Rabins suspects it’s a matter of time before he gets cited.)

What say you, readers? Share your thoughts about taking a walk on the wild side below.

Originally published on Lettuce Eat Kale