When Josh Viertel took the helm at Slow Food USA in 2008, the organization had a reputation—at least in this country—as a club for foodies. Under Viertel’s leadership, though, the organization has dispelled this image with an increasing focus on food justice issues such as improving the abysmal quality of cafeteria food and fighting “ag-gag” bills that would’ve made it illegal to take photos or videos of farms. Last month, Slow Food organized its members to “take back the happy meal” by showing that it’s possible to cook a nutritious meal for less than $5 a person. Over 30,000 people came together at over 5,500 events to participate in Slow Food’s $5 challenge.

When I spoke to Viertel a few weeks ago, he had just returned from a board meeting in Portland, Oregon, and was full of praise for both Andy Ricker’s Thai restaurant Pok-Pok and Portland’s energetic food justice scene. As I talked to him, I came to the happy realization that Slow Food is a flourishing network of people from all backgrounds and socioeconomic levels—from advocates of Native American fishing methods to radical kimchee makers in Indianapolis. All these members are coming together to overthrow the industrial food system and buy and make food that is good, clean, and fair.

Mark Bittman had an op-ed in the Times a few weeks ago in which he argued that, despite subsidies, junk food can actually be more expensive than cooking meals from scratch. You have said in the past that we live in a country where it’s cheaper to feed  our children Froot Loops than it is to feed them fruit. So, which is it?

We live in a country where it’s easier—to feed our kids Froot Loops than it is to feed them fruit. Sometimes that’s price but a lot of times that’s access and a lot of times it’s knowledge, too. Price, access, and knowledge come together as this set of three factors, which can make it really hard to do the right thing when it comes to food.

Take potato chips. To buy a pound of potatoes in the form of potato chips, you are probably spending $11 or $12 a pound for potatoes. And potatoes, even the fanciest organic fingerlings, are never more than $2.75 or $3 pound, which is obscenely expensive. (Generally potatoes are $1 per pound.) So we’re talking ten or twelve times more for the junk food version.

Now the issue with that, though, is that it’s not just a matter of personal choice. It’s not that low-income people are making bad choices—it’s that they live in a food environment where making good choices is really really difficult. And so we need to change the structures that make that the case.

Bittman did acknowledge food deserts, but he implied that most people are lazy and opt to watch T.V. rather than cook. I think there’s some truth to these skewed values, but I also know there are many poor people who want to eat better but don’t because they’re pressed for time and are surrounded by fast food.

If we pretend that food is a democracy, you have to acknowledge that for a lot of people in a lot of neighborhoods, there are no polling stations and there’s only one candidate, and it’s the incumbent. And just saying “Well, if you just voted differently, we’d have a different food system,” verges on pathologizing poor people for bearing the traits of poverty. We can’t do that. We do have to talk about, “Hey, everyone needs to learn how to cook.” This should be something we value and the time should be valued, as well. Everyone should be engaged in building a world where it’s not easier to feed our kids Froot Loops than it is to feed them fruit. Whether that’s a matter of price, access, or knowledge.

Before you became the president of Slow Food USA, you were the co-director of the Yale Sustainable Food Project. Tell me a little about that project.

I was hired by Yale to get local, sustainable food into the dining halls and to build a farm on campus. And also to build curriculum and extra-curricular programs for undergraduates. It was a great adventure.

The idea was, “Let’s intervene with this incredibly intelligent—and for the most part very privileged—group of young people right before they catapult into the world.” Since ’72, every single presidential election at that time had a Yale graduate as one of the top two candidates. If you can intervene in that population you can create incredible change in the world.

At the same time, I was feeling a need to tap into the energy that was growing all over the country—particularly post-Omnivore’s Dilemma. I was seeing a lot of people—not just college students—either really angry or really inspired about food. They needed a place to put that energy. After Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, you saw the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations take readers of the book—people who would be engaged in pushing for social change. So I thought, “Slow Food should be the vessel for all that energy.” I got asked to join the board and eventually got asked to take it over.

So was that your charge as president—to engage in movement building?

Exactly. Which takes organizational change. But we turned ourselves into an organization that’s built to do that work.

Every mom who drops her kid off at school for the first day and realizes, “My child may be eating something that’s going to make her sick”—that mom needs a path to do something about that concern. Everyone who reads Michael Pollan and complains about corn subsidies with a friend over a cup of Fair Trade coffee—they need something to do about it! And our job is to give them something to do about it. That’s what gets me up in the morning. I think it’s what gets all of our staff and volunteers up in the morning—how do we make sure that we take that energy and turn it into power to make change?

I noticed the shift in Slow Food’s mission right around Slow Food Nation, in August of 2008. After that, the popular perception started to change from the notion that Slow Food was a club for foodies (whether or not it was) to a social justice organization.

It wasn’t just me. It was a mood—a tone and tenor and culture of the movement that needed to change. We realized we needed to move in that direction.

But social justice has always been embedded in Slow Food’s overall mission, no?

Absolutely—and globally. Right now we have members in 150 countries. Slow Food has nothing to do with being a gourmet club in these countries. It has to do with changing the world, preserving traditions and maintaining the sovereignty of the people who are growing and eating in their countries. It has a lot to do with corporate power and the way globalization plays out.

Slow Food’s tag line has always been about making food good, clean, and fair.

At the very beginning it was a protest against McDonald’s on the Spanish Steps. And so it started with that sense of anti-corporate protest—it’s in its DNA. And I think some people forgot and thought it was good, clean, or fair. But the “and” is really important.

The latest e-mail I got expands on that: “Food that is good for those who eat it, good for the farmers and workers, and good for the planet.”

And that’s basically how I describe what Slow Food is. It’s the opposite of fast food—it’s all those things.

Do you still get remarks from people who think Slow Food is elitist?

I’ve always been clear that I don’t want to spend any time in an argument about whether we’re elitist or not. I want to do work that makes it completely apparent that we’re not. I’m committed to doing work that is relevant to the people who are most hurt by these problems. If we can do that, I think the argument will fade away.

I think it is clear from all the “campaigns” you’ve engaged in—from the $5 challenge to the fight to ensure that taking photographs of farms is legal.

Our first campaign, in 2009, was about school lunch. It was called “Time for Lunch.”

We had over 300 potluck protests all over the country and yet no one talked about that as a social justice campaign or a campaign that was about social change. It was talked about as fixing school lunch. But school lunch is a program that feeds 31 million of America’s poorest children every day. It’s a program that disproportionately impacts low-income people and people of color. Time for Lunch was not just about this lesson: everyone should cook. It was about “What makes it more challenging to feed our kids real fruit rather than Froot Loops?”

The 2012 Farm Bill is right around the corner. Is Slow Food planning a campaign around it?

Food and farm policy is completely against our nutrition and environment policy. It’s a really interesting political climate right now—it’s a budget-driven climate. So we see huge opportunities to take away some of the incentives that allow corn and corn syrup to be so cheap. At the same time there is a huge risk that some of the programs that feed people or support ranchers and farmers will also get taken away.

We’re not sophisticated lobbyists, but what we are are really good organizers. The $5 challenge is essentially a way of helping us find anyone who is concerned about these issues and setting them up to be advocates on the Farm Bill.

We’ll have a policy platform that we’ll be pushing and we’ll be asking Congress to do the right thing by it. The timing of it remains to be seen. But we know that with or without Congress, we’re organizing people around good, clean, fair food policy. The $5 challenge is the launching pad for that.

So what will the organizing on this issue look like?  Will you ask members to call their Senators and Representatives or will there be more of a MoveOn house party model?

The face-to-face engagement—whether it’s political or not—is vital. The kind of relationships we build when we have a meal together is the foundation for doing good work to change the world. What you’ll see are small groups meeting all over the country for meals and taking the $5 challenge over and over again. And pushing legislators by phone and meeting them in their home states.

A lot of the really effective advocacy that’s happening right now is happening not in Washington D.C., but back at home. That’s where legislators are listening. I actually think that’s a healthy trend. We’re set up to do that kind of advocacy because we have 225 chapters, members in every state, and this great volunteer corps.

What is the membership of Slow Food USA these days?

We have about 25,000 active members. We reach a network of about 250,000 people via e-mail. Through Oct. 15^th, membership is pay what you can. So instead of it being $25 for membership, even $1 will make you a member. It’s part of trying to make sure everyone can be involved in this work and be part of the organization.

We also have a really big Twitter and Facebook following. I think we’re at 179,000 Twitter followers now and have 85,000 “likes” on Facebook. What’s great about that community is they’re all over the country and they’re sharing stories of the work they’re doing on the ground but then they’re also talking about food all the time. It’s a nice mix.

We beat McDonalds by a couple thousand Twitter followers—we’re pretty proud.

Does Slow Food do some kind of outreach to low-income communities or food deserts? I would guess that people in most of these communities are not familiar with Slow Food, but I could be wrong.

Our chapters have over 500 local partnerships in the communities where they work, with other organizations. They range from churches to nonprofit organizations and direct service organizations. And a pretty substantial percentage of those local organizations are doing work in low-income communities. For us the key is to do work that is relevant in those communities and let the Slow Food identity and membership follow. So we’re actually not that focused on aggressively diversifying our membership but we are really focused on making sure that the work of Slow Food is relevant to diverse constituents. And if diverse membership follows—and particularly if diverse volunteer leadership follows, whether that’s socioeconomic or racial diversity—that, we think, is a really good thing.

I think Slow Food’s New York chapter gave money for the garden at Automotive high school in Greenpoint.

That’s a great example. Almost all of our tangible on-the-ground work happens at the local chapters. Our hope is that the local chapter will be better at doing local work—whether it’s gaining local press or raising local money than we ever could be at the national level. Our work at the national level is to build up the leadership of those chapters and support them so that they can be effective at their work but then bring us all together around national campaigns.

Bryan Walsh, in his article about the food movement, was tallying up the membership of Slow Food as if it were the main sign of this being a viable social movement.

But you know, another way to look at it is that it’s about potential. The Tea Party at its outset had a much smaller membership than Slow Food has now.  If you look at the early Civil Rights movement—the assets both in organized people and in dollars—it’s much smaller than the food movement.

I think the question now is how do you tap into the passionate concerns of people who want to change things and give them pathways to do it?  For me, I look much less at our current membership than to our potential membership, which is enormous. And then what you do with those folks is incredible as well. We have a set of three Slow Food chapter leaders in Denver: Andy, Gigia, and Krista. They started a garden in their kids’ school and soon parents at other schools were saying, “We wanna see gardens in our school. Would you help us do it?” So they did.

Finally, the three of them were running twelve different gardens in twelve different schools. And they thought, “We can’t do this any more!” The next parent who came up and said, “We want to do this, would you start a garden in our kids’ school?”  They said—“Go find twelve parents and teachers that get together regularly and we’ll train you how to do it yourself.”

A few years later, they’ve got gardens in over 60 percent of the public schools in Denver and they’ve organized a network of 500 parents and teachers to get this whole thing off the ground. So for me, show me, 50 Andy, Gigias, and Kristas—and we’ve got a Tea Party for the food movement.

Were you pleased with how many people turned out for the $5 challenge?

Over 30,000 people took the challenge and there were over 5,500 events on that day. We thought we’d have 500 events and maybe a few thousand people taking part. We never could’ve anticipated this turnout. I think this speaks to the potential power that’s out there and the drive and desire to share food and knowledge and get together in our communities.

There’s a section of our Web site where we posted the tips, tricks, and recipes people sent us. It ranges from videos, pictures, and recipes to a theory of cooking beans. The underlying idea is our communities collectively have a lot of the solutions we need. Whether it’s how to cook real food on a budget or it’s how to effectively drive our legislators for meaningful change for federal policy. We own those solutions ourselves, so let’s begin using them and sharing them with each other.

What’s your definition of food justice?

Everyone can eat every day food that is good for them, good for the environment and good for the people who grow and pick it. That food is a universal right and not a privilege. That’s the short definition.

I used to be a vegetable grower and I would sell very expensive produce at a farmers’ market in an affluent neighborhood. There were some low-income people who would come to that market and they couldn’t afford the produce I had. So I would give it away. My partner and I were making maybe $12,000 between the two of us.

So there’s this paradox. To even stay at the poverty line as a farmer, selling directly to consumers, you have to charge prices which means that your food—which is real food—is completely unavailable to low-income people. And you are a low-income person! So we have this false choice. My only option would’ve been making zero—losing money. When you have those kinds of paradoxical situations, I think it doesn’t call on farmers to lower their prices. And it doesn’t call on poor people to spend more money on food. It calls on all of us to change the way that we grow and share food in this country, so that we don’t have those kinds of choices anymore.

Originally published on The Faster Times

By keeping the size, colors, and flavors of foods consistent, large-scale producers are elbowing out the fragile, juicy, and region-specific foods that used to make our fields and plates exciting. The U.S. Ark of Taste, a program of Slow Food USA, seeks to reverse this trend. The Ark is a growing list of foods that are flavorful, culturally rooted, and at risk of extinction. Slow Food members from around the country nominate foods to the Ark and mobilize volunteers to keep them in production.

Why is food diversity important? For one, interesting new flavors can entice even the pickiest of eaters to try more fruits and veggies. On an environmental scale, ecosystems thrive when they include a diversity of organisms. And while some genetic adaptations might not have immediately apparent benefits, preserving a deep gene pool is critical for long-term food security.

But what can everyday people do to preserve diversity in the food chain? Here are the stories of the two newest foods on the U.S. Ark of Taste, and the committed volunteers who wouldn’t stand idly by while biodiversity around them dwindled. The fact that they’re both from the South is pure coincidence, but not entirely surprising given that region’s continued interest in food culture.

Louisiana Mirliton

The natural and man-made disasters that wreaked havoc along the Gulf Coast in recent years have also threatened the rich culture of growing and cooking traditional foods.

Take the traditional Louisiana mirliton for example. Introduced to the Gulf during the 1804 Slave Revolt in Haiti, the mirliton (a squash-like vegetable also called chayote) became a key ingredient in Creole and Cajun cuisine. Meanwhile, a range of heirloom varieties developed in backyards and abandoned lots.

Commercially hybridized chayotes pale in comparison to their locally-bred counterparts, both in terms of flavor and adaptation to the Gulf microclimate. Nonetheless  they were cheap and easy to find at stores like Wal-Mart, so they had begun dominating the local market even before the floods. After Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, however, many vines were drowned or went untended; the exodus of residents made propagation of heirloom varieties less common. Eventually, some mirliton fans tried to plant store-bought Costa Rican seeds, but many of the vegetables—adapted to mile-high altitude—didn’t take root in New Orleans.

Enter the Adopt-A-Mirliton project, a partner of the New Orleans Crescent City Farmers Market. Founded by Dr. Lance Hill, Executive Director of the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University, in 2008, the project has identified dozens of threatened landraces, propagated them, and made them available at the Crescent City Farmers Market. Along with a fey key volunteers, Hill has essentially saved these distinct varieties from the brink of extinction. And he’s given them names, such as the “Papa Sylvest,” to ensure that their breeding lines will remain distinct.

Volunteers who agree to adopt a vine receive a 16-page growers guide and in turn must keep detailed records of the care their plant receives. According to Hill, the project has plans for expansion: “While our seed distribution is free, we do expect next fall that our growing network of heirloom growers will produce thousands of seeds and they will be available for sale at nurseries that we certify as only selling home-grown Louisiana mirlitons,” he told the The Times-Picayune recently.

The Hua Moa Banana

Hurricanes and disease all but wiped out production of the Hua Moa in the Miami area over the years, causing a heavy dependence on imported bananas.

Then, a few years back, a group  of active Slow Food Miami members started working to revive Hua Moa production, with the hope of  putting these important bananas back on the menu. Last year, local chef Michael Schwartz of Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink prepared a sold-out dinner featuring the fruit at the invitation of area chapter leaders. One of the Hua Moa’s winning qualities is that it can be prepared in both sweet and savory dishes. The versatile fruit appeared in dishes as far-ranging as ceviche, tostones, a spicy coconut milk soup, and pound cake.

The dinner was a collaboration with rare fruit grower Larry Siegel, one of the last remaining producers of the Hua Moa in the region. Seigel grows a range of tropical fruit on 35 acres in Davie, Florida. “I started with lychee, cherimoyas, longans, avocados,” he told the Genuine Kitchen recently.  “They took a big hit during hurricanes Irene and Wilma.  [But] coconut, papaya, and bananas always hang on!”

Introducing chefs and eaters to rare foods can spark a wildfire of interest. The resulting increase in demand can then help convince farmers to take on the risks and challenges associated with less common crops. Nominating the Hua Moa to the Ark was the starting point for more dinners, partnerships, and other events in support of this storied, unique fruit.

Are you interested in fighting for flavor? There are all kinds of other suggestions for encouraging food diversity on the Slow Food USA website.

Mirliton photos courtesy of Dr. Lance Hill.

The terms “local” “organic” “sustainable” and the like have become so mainstream that as someone who writes about these issues I find myself searching for new ideas to explain the tenets of why changing our food system is important.  Even if you are not involved in the “good food movement” at all, a McDonald’s aficionado who revels in hydrogenated oils and spraying your lawn with Roundup, you have heard of “local” “organic” and “sustainable.”  But while this now cliché vocabulary runs rampant even in Walmart, why then do we not have the same exposure to the term “fair”?

The Agricultural Justice Project (AJP) is trying to establish a set of standards to bring fairness as much exposure as the O word gets.  In 1999, a group of five nonprofits (Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA, Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agrícolas/Farmworker Support Committee, Northeast Organic Farming Association, Florida Organic Growers/Quality Certification Services, and Fundación RENACE) came together with the intention of creating “equity in our food system through the development of social justice standards for organic and sustainable agriculture.”  They saw a disconnect between the Organic standards within agriculture and the justice issues faced by those who actually comprise the industry itself.  In what should be a holistic movement, working conditions and price to farmers is actually excluded from the USDA National Organic Program.  The team set out to solidify what social justice actually means quantitatively and to develop standards within the farming community.

Today, the Agricultural Justice Project is gaining speed, conducting pilot programs both in the states and internationally to start implementing these standards of fairness.  The whole vision is to create one label that incorporates three main categories:  Relationships (from the farmer to the buyer to the farm worker to children raised on farms), Environmental Protection, and Labor Conflict and Complaint Resolution.   Their tagline is “Healthy Relationships and Healthy Environment make Healthy Food.” This fair food label, “Food Justice Certified,” is essentially a domestic Fair Trade certification that aims to cover agriculture on a large scale and bring attention to the rampant labor issues that have been left out of organics.

Despite the rise of globalization and industrial-sized organics, AJP is seeing a growing demand for fair, environmentally sound, and local ideologies.  A 2008 Produce Marketing Study indicated that within the top eight areas of focus, fair wages within the workforce was number one.  To ensure that this label takes flight, a strong third party certification must take place, along with worker representation on the inspection team as well as oversight of the certifiers by AJP for consistent compliance.

While these pilot programs are just getting started, the auditing phase is showing promise.  Testimony from some of the small farms already involved is positive and AJP hopes to expand into more regions.  Following the upper Midwest and Canada, the next training sessions will take place in the Southern states and hopefully move into California.  In tandem to these direct efforts, Capacity Building toolkits are also being developed for farmers to have more guidance towards justice goals.  Swanton Berry Farm on California’s Central Northern coast is a longtime supporter of social justice and workers rights.  Swanton is also on the Advisory Committee of AJP and has contributed labor policy templates for this toolkit.  In addition to these self-assessment ideas, they hope to introduce a pledge format for farms that might not be able to participate in the whole program.

What an exciting concept this is, for us as consumers already accustomed to searching out Organic labeling the concept of “social stewardship standards” would really complete the circle on the Slow Food search for good, clean and fair here in the states.  However, at a recent presentation of the Agricultural Justice Project in Santa Cruz, California, a farmer stood up during the Q & A period with a reminder of the biggest issue of all:  How do we make sure that there will always be farm workers?  The disrespect for actual handwork makes it increasingly difficult to entice the next generation into farming.  If this label can accomplish anything, it would be to repair the attitude of disrespect that burdens our labor force and reconstruct a system that ensures healthy relationships and participation in agriculture.

The theme of “food and place” led this year’s Terra Madre while a particular workshop, “Women’s Rights and Land Ownership,” best demonstrated its focus: How does the place of women in developing societies determine food security? As this question was brought to the fore, stories emerged from around globe shedding light on the resilience and creativity of women in their pursuit of both freedom and food.

The workshop commenced with introductions from the two panel speakers: Beatrice Costa of ActionAidItaly and Sabine Pallas of International Land Coalition. Both women are from organizations dedicated to generating equal access to land in the fight against hunger. ActionAid Italy is an international NGO that fights against poverty and injustice at the international level, focusing on women’s issues in countries in which they are active. International Land Coalition supports and promotes endeavors that ensure equal access to land amongst men and women through policy management and capacity-building measures.

Ms. Costa and Ms. Pallas highlighted key concerns surrounding land ownership and invited the audience to participate and share their experiences. “There is a mismatch,” stated Ms. Costa, “between the role women play in food production and their access to land. Although they are responsible for producing 80 percent of the food in foreign countries, only two percent of land entitlements belong to women worldwide.” Thus women lack the authority to make decisions, provide collateral for small loans to purchase seeds and fertilizer, and ensure a modicum of security for themselves and their families.

The mismatch between production and ownership is due to a variety of factors—namely gender blind frameworks, discriminatory customs and traditions, a need for policy implementation, women’s lack of awareness of their rights, and a lack of recognition for women as farmers, productive citizens and leaders at all levels. All of these elements represent the current political and cultural realities that women face in the Global South. It is now widely recognized that these problems are a major cause of poverty and food insecurity today.

There are many potential solutions to these problems. They take shape in advocacy and lobbying strategies, engaging communities for social change, monitoring and holding governments accountable, raising awareness at the institutional level, pushing for legal remedies through lands reform, supporting literacy programs, education and information campaigns, revising and strengthening communication strategies, as well as capacity building and mentoring. Some of the speakers’ stories attested to the efficacy of these approaches. One story in a particular demonstrated how civil society movements were able to generate change, transforming oppression into opportunity.

Samuel from Kenya, an employee of a community-based network dedicated to eco-farming, told the audience of the difficulties in bringing about change in his country:

“Unfortunately the land is in the hands of the rich and well connected people in government. Therefore women have very little access and control to this land especially at the community level. Further discrimination exists because traditional and cultural practices do not recognize women as legal owners. Yet, it is the women who feed their families and the country at large.”

Although a discouraging introduction to the plight of Kenyan women, Samuel added that things were beginning to change. A new constitutional dispensation had recently been enacted granting women the right to own land. But even so, Samuel stated that it still remained a challenge for such policies to be implemented from the national to the local level. “This is only a legal framework,” he stated, “It will not become a reality until people at the national, regional, local, and even family level begin to participate in some small way.”

Samuel’s analysis underscores the reality that women need to be empowered at all levels in order to play their crucial role in civil society, pushing for change:

“I realized that granting the rights of women in the books was not enough. We need to work with people in advocacy to ensure that we don’t lose the spirit captured in the constitutional dispensation. We need to empower women by making them part of this legal process–mobilizing them to work with organized groups in order to strengthen both their economic capability and social status. More importantly, we need to encourage men to work with women. Men need to recognize that women are powerful in promoting and sustaining change. More importantly, they must realize that this is not a threat but rather an opportunity to strengthen their own livelihoods as well as their country’s.”

For journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, gender inequality is the central focus of their groundbreaking bestseller, Holding Up Half the Sky. In it, they argue that growing international awareness of the economic effects of gender inequality will create a catalyst for turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide.

The current food movement possesses the momentum and power to push hard on this issue, raising awareness and offering concrete solutions for land use and marketing. In the words of former dissident and civil society activist, Vaclav Havel, “A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of clear-sighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human. It is only this awareness that can breath any greatness into an action.”

When we look beyond ourselves–beyond our tables toward the plight of others—we must also acknowledge the important role we play, as members of civil society, in enacting change by spreading awareness and uniting individuals around a common goal. By enlightening others we enact our own form of change. Events such as Terra Madre–in particular its workshop on women’s rights and land ownership–demonstrate that it is both our civic and global duty to do so.

Photo courtesy of ActionAid USA

Causing no end of difficulties in our national discourse is the steadfast belief held by both the right and the left that everything is either right or left: bad or good, strong or weak, despotic or patriotic.  You’re either with us or you’re against us.  President Obama addressed this very effectively before both House Republicans and Senate Democrats in recent days.  It is media driven to a large extent because the media need controversy to sell papers, or bytes or views or whatever it is they’re selling these days.

The most common form this takes is the old build’em-up-then-tear’em-down routine.  Perhaps the only thing many Americans enjoy more than the uplifting emotion of a success story is the schadenfreude of watching that success come tumbling down.  So when an idea comes to the fore, the critics ooze from the woodwork and their primary tactic is divide and conquer.  Label it, frame the debate, and the fight is won or lost before the story is even told.

For a long time in the circles I travel in this was not a problem because the ideas embodied in what some have come to call SOLE food (Sustainable, Organic, Local, & Ethical) were not perceived as a threat to the established paradigm.  Recent successes such as Michael Pollan’s work have, however, shined a very bright spotlight on advocates of real food.  As a result, people who have been toiling at these ideas for decades are becoming targets of powerful interests in the Big Food lobby.  Such is the case this week at WeeklyStandard.com, where Missouri Farm Bureau vice president Blake Hurst has found his most recent audience.

Mr. Hurst was among the earliest vocal detractors of Mr. Pollan’s work, as well as that of anyone who might find flaw in agroindustrial model.  His essay last summer, titled The Omnivore’s Delusion, did an excellent job of exploiting Pollan’s success to rally the big corporate agriculture interests against the perceived threat of critics both in the media and in the field.  It’s natural: he felt attacked and he responded, and has now done so again.  Unfortunately Mr. Hurst’s vitriol, then as now, only serves to fan the flames of a fire that needn’t be burning.  Individuals on neither side of the debate are inherently evil, in fact both want the same thing: healthy food for all.  Since our ideas for how to accomplish this differ, we are immediately cast into the right and left corners and told to come out fighting when the bell rings.

Of course this is not a new phenomenon.  City and country folk have mistrusted each other since the beginnings of civilization (which, it bears pointing out, came into being because of agriculture).  Nonetheless our society has changed enormously in the last 100 years.  Where once nearly everyone lived on a farm or had an immediate relative who did, today only 2% of the population lives in rural America.  It’s not a surprise that when the 2% senses criticism emanating from within the other 98% they’re going to feel a bit nervous.  Some of the critiques in fact even come from within the 2% (witness cattleman Will Harris in Georgia).  In his most recent essay though Mr. Hurst’s fears are misplaced, and he remains little more than a tool for moneyed interests.

The essay suffers from many errors of presumption as well as fact.  He contends that Kathleen Merrigan’s Know your Farmer initiative results from the idea that “America, it seems, has been operating at a knowledge deficit when it comes to farmers, and farmers lack the social skills to close the gap between eaters and producers of food.”  He is partially correct in that people in this country and throughout the Western world have become increasingly distanced from their sources of food, and we have become so to our detriment.  The second part of his statement though, a backhanded swipe at critics of industrial agriculture disguised as self-deprecation and designed to raise the ire of his fellow Farm Bureau members, is uninformed to say the least.  Not only are the farmers I know perfectly capable in the “social skills” department, both they and the rest of my friends in the movement to improve our food are working hard to close that gap.  Ms. Merrigan’s program is one of many tools.

While he correctly points out that the average age of farmers in America is 58, he misses the point that this means we are running out of farmers.  We actually now have more prisoners in America than farmers.  He goes on to put words in foodies’ mouths by claiming that we seem to think farmers are not sustainable.  Quite far from it, but many of the inputs many farmers use are not. These include the GMOs and chemical fertilizers that Farm Bureau and the Property and Environment Research Center he cites both adamantly advocate.  It’s not the farmers or even the farms that are unsustainable; it is the methods they have been railroaded into using by large corporate interests seeking markets for their chemicals since even before the early 70’s when Earl Butz and his “Get Big or Get Out” mantra took hold of American food.

The point is missed yet again when Mr. Hurst says:

In December, strawberries from California can be shipped to market in Canada with less total energy use than the locally grown crop. The food miles are greater, but the carbon footprint is smaller. True believers in the local food movement, of course, simply stop eating strawberries in winter. Their devotion is admirable, but a winter diet of freshly dug turnips and stored potatoes is hardly interesting.

I choose not to eat strawberries in the winter not because they come from far away but because they taste awful.  In my own restaurant, we stock everything feasible from local sources.  This does not mean, as Mr. Hurst would have it, that we have nothing but turnips and potatoes in winter, nor does it mean we forego oranges or olives because they don’t grow in Iowa.  Despite what he and his corporate-activist-supported friends at PERC might have you believe, the “SOLE” food movement is not a bunch of lefty Luddites, and that’s my main point (besides that I like turnips).  Not only does food I trust from people I know taste better for those reasons, it also keeps my dollars in my community.

Consider this: there are about 50,000 households in Johnson County Iowa, where I live.  If each of those households redirected just $10 of their existing weekly food budget toward buying something local, whether from the farmers market or a CSA or eggs from the farmer down the road, it would keep $26M in the local economy rather than it being siphoned off to China via Bentonville.  Now imagine the same thing in larger communities.  That’s not a left or right issue, that’s a hometown issue.

I must also point out Mr. Hurst’s use of the phrase “alleged global warming.”  It carries with it all the intellectual honesty of “alleged cancer from smoking.”

Agendas like those of Mr. Hurst, the Farm Bureau and PERC serve only the interests of the large corporations that fund them, not of the farmers whose toil fills their coffers.  Better to look to the like of the Practical Farmers of Iowa, who are truly concerned with the well-being of the food, the farms and the people on them.

This is not about rich v. poor, city v. country or smart v. dumb.  It’s not even I’m right and he’s wrong nor the reverse.  It’s that these issues are only important to those of us who eat, live and breathe on this planet.  It matters to those of us who have to pay for health care, and raise our children, and get and keep a job.  And the positions that the organization I work for, and many others take are not ones designed to attack farmers but rather to support them and all the people who are making food where it should be made: on farms and dairies, in breweries and wineries and vineyards and not in factories.

The organization began in Italy as a political stance against the way fast food was changing the local eating culture, and has since grown to 100,000 members in 132 countries, all interested in building a food system that is good, clean and fair. There are groups, called conviviums, in cities across the US that meet to discuss and enjoy food together. Much of the focus of Slow Food has been on protecting biodiversity: their program Ark of Taste promotes plants and animal breeds that have been dying out as industrial agriculture spreads a handful of species through standardization. But now, they’re rolling back their sleeves and setting their sights on food justice.

In Slow Food’s most recent campaign, Time for Lunch, the organization began to bring awareness to the upcoming Child Nutrition Re-Authorization, which will allocate funding to our nation’s school cafeterias — and will help decide if our kids will continue to be the recipient for excess commodity calories, or if instead we’ll start serving them fresh, home-cooked food, featuring the fruits and vegetables we’re told we should be eating more of. During these tough economic times, many children are getting their most important meal(s) of the day at school, so starting there with healthy alternatives could be a down payment on the future well-being of the nation.

Time for Lunch featured over 300 eat-ins in all fifty states, where neighbors gathered to eat each other’s home cooking, and talk about how to organize for better school food. Their campaign has recieved a lot of media attention, and their petition to Cogress requesting an additional $1 for school lunch has garnered 30,000 signatures to date.

With continued focus on child nutrition and more social justice-oriented programs, now could not be a better time to get involved with a national organization that works to build a better food system for all to participate in, and pay what you wish!

Like victory gardens, home canning, and depression-era resource conservation, Slow Food USA’s Gordon Jenkins believes the idea of healthy school lunches is one worth revisiting.

“The school lunch program was created in 1946 as a measure of national security,” says Jenkins. “The goal was to make sure that our nation’s children were healthy, because only then would the whole nation be productive.”

Four decades later, most of us take for granted the fact that schools serve lunch, and that the federal government subsidizes many of them. Whether they have anything to do with students’ health is another story. “A lot of today’s adults remember school lunch when it was institutional Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes,” says Jenkins. “It wasn’t delicious, but no one expected it to be. Now, the cheapest fast food and junk food is in our cafeterias and it’s fueling the obesity epidemic.”

Jenkins and his colleagues at Slow Food USA have spent the summer organizing Time for Lunch, Slow Food’s first nationwide grassroots advocacy campaign focused on getting real meals in front of the 30 million children who eat in today’s cafeterias. At the core of the effort is the Child Nutrition Act, a bundle of legislation including the National School Lunch Program that is up for reauthorization by Congress at the end of this year.

To draw attention to the issue, Slow Food chapters in 49 states have planned a national Day of Action by staging 295 Eat-Ins — or potluck gatherings in parks, civic centers and backyards — as a way to engage communities, build bridges, and show Congress that school lunch is a priority.

“Lunch” might be a stretch

The biggest myth about school lunch, says Deborah Lehmann of the school food policy blog School Lunch Talk, is that kids are eating square meals in the middle of the day. Lehmann has spent the last 8 months visiting school cafeterias around the U.S. and interviewing the people who work there. In addition to kids who bring lunch from home and those who opt for the official lunch option, many of the students she observes piece together a mid-day meal entirely of snacks and so called “a la carte” foods. In one school she visited recently in the Santa Cruz area, Lehmann sat down with an administrator to look through records of what the students were eating and the results were astounding. “There were a number of kids eating a lunch of corn nuts, hot chocolate, Gatorade, and baked Cheetos.”

Because school cafeterias essentially function as stand-alone businesses that get no funding from school districts, they rely solely on the reimbursements they receive for free and reduced meals and the income they generate when students buy what they serve. It’s not hard to see why many have resorted to serving what students will buy. And the drive to create novel, kid-friendly products like bubble gum flavored apples and rootbeer flavored milk means kids don’t have much reason to make healthy choices.

“School lunches have always been a reflection of what people are eating in America,” says Lehmann. “Back when we served casseroles and spaghetti with meat sauce, that’s what kids were eating at home. Today they’re used to eating fast food and frozen food and processed food and restaurant food. So that’s what gets served.”

Fast School Food Nation

Of course, it’s the same forces that have shaped children’s diets outside schools that shape what they eat between classes. The problem dates back to the 1980s, when Congress opened the doors to private food service companies.

When schools are given commodities from the USDA, most send them straight to companies to be processed. Over the years it has become much more cost-effective for schools to send their chicken, for example, to Tyson and to get it back in the form of chicken nuggets, than to prepare it in their own, often under-funded, low-function facilities.

Many of these companies, says Jenkins, have been perfectly happy to sell highly processed foods back to schools “at a below-market price because it meant that they were going to get their brands and products into the lunch room and potentially get customers for life.”

The solution? For starters, Slow Food is asking for one dollar more per student –- an increase that may seem large in light of the current $2.68 the government currently pays for school lunch reimbursements. But because students who pay for lunch would continue doing so, the total increase for reimbursements for free and reduced meals would only be around 18 million dollars, says Jenkins. It’s a modest request that would “give nutrition directors and food service directors the baseline level of support they need to start bringing healthier options into the lunch room.” More funding, combined with education about growing and cooking food, could as Slow Food President Josh Veirtel wrote in a recent letter to the New York Times, represent a “turning point in the food movement” and “signal the rise of a national movement driven by the passion of ordinary citizens.”

Want to show your support for healthy school lunches? Attend an Eat-In this Labor Day: Find one in your neighborhood.

Can’t make it to an Eat-In? Visit the Slow Food USA site to sign the petition.

Ed Wilkins, Director of Student Nutrition Services for the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), said the biggest obstacles for SFUSD are inadequate staffing, out of date kitchen equipment, lack of infrastructure and training for school lunch employees. SFUSD is the largest feeding program in San Francisco and is facing a $20 million financial shortfall this year. Though San Francisco has one of the highest costs of living, it is not allocated additional school lunch funds. Simply put: the money just does not go as far as it might in other cities. Wilkins believes a critical first step in improving the system is more integration of local farmers, producers and prep staff.

Colleen Kavanagh, executive director of Campaign for Better Nutrition, gave the audience a brief history of the National School Lunch Program which feeds nearly 30 million children each day. Originally, it was established to absorb farm surpluses and provide food to school-aged children. In 1966, President Johnson signed the Child Nutrition Act to help meet the nutritional needs of children. Over the years, we have shifted from combating hunger to fighting childhood obesity. The important thing was just to feed children. Now, study after study shows that children perform better in school when fed a nutrition-rich breakfast and/or lunch. Kavanagh noted that we cannot reform the dietary guidelines through the Child Nutrition Act but we can advocate for additional funds and source more fresh (and local when possible) food items.

Lena Brook, parent of a first-grader at SFUSD and founding board member of Urban Sprouts, recently launched a parent advocacy campaign to reform school food programs in the SFUSD. Brook explained that SFUSD operates under the auspices of the California Department of Education, rather than the City and County of San Francisco. Politically, it is important to build support and leadership within the school board first. “Wilkins and his staff are doing the best they can within current constraints but do not have options at their disposal,” said Brook. The parent group is aiming to raise money to support a feasibility study that would look at three to five options for a new food program. Before proceeding with this plan, it requires buy-in and formal support from the School Board and Superintendent Garcia. The SFUSD food program needs more resources to work with if we are to see a real change.

There’s still a lot of hard work ahead for those fighting to improve school lunch, but the issues are finally in the forefront of the public dialog and solutions are gaining momentum.

What Can You Do?

• Join SFUSDFoodFuture, the list serve for the SFUSD parent advocacy group on school food.

• Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a key player in terms of the Child Nutrition Act Reauthorization. During the fall, as Congress takes up the reauthorization measure, San Francisco constituents can call or email her office to ask for her support of child nutrition programs.

• If you are a parent at an SFUSD school and would like to assist the Student Nutrition Services department with compliance (i.e., ensuring that applications are completed, working with the school leadership to ensure that rules are enforced, etc), please email Lena Brook.

• Spread the word! Let your community–in the broadest sense of the word–know that this parent advocacy effort is underway. At this point, they need representation from schools throughout the City, but especially from the Southeast and Northern sections.

• Support Slow Food USA’s Time for Lunch campaign, sign the petition and/or attend one of the 294 Eat-Ins across the country on Labor Day, Sept. 7.

Kitchen Table Talks is a monthly conversation series about the American food system. The next session will be held on Tuesday, September 29 and will focus on Mayor Newsom’s new Executive Directive for Healthy and Sustainable Food for San Francisco. To receive information about Kitchen Table Talks, please send an e-mail to ktt@civileats.com.

Today in America we have steadily rising rates of childhood obesity, and if you were born after 2000, you have a startling one-in-three chance of developing early-onset diabetes. Meanwhile America now has more prisoners than farmers, and among those few remaining farmers the average age is 57.1 and rising. The equation becomes quite simple to understand: No farmers equals no food.

In an effort to raise awareness and rally support behind changes to the upcoming reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, Slow Food USA has created the Time for Lunch campaign. This campaign is calling on Congress to provide the resources schools need to serve real food for lunch. Those involved in making the day-to-day dietary decisions for our children do not have the adequate resources to provide healthy, nutritious, and yes, tasty food for our kids. This must change. It’s time to invest in children’s health, protect against food that puts children at risk and teach children healthy habits that will last through life.

All the talk in Washington right now is on health care reform, and that’s a good thing. But no matter what solutions they craft to meet America’s health care needs, their system will be bankrupted by skyrocketing rates of preventable illnesses that began when we started using our schools as a dumping ground for agribusiness surplus and as a proving ground for corporate marketing to our children. With the red herring of providing the “freedom to choose,” the conglomerates who peddle edible food-like substances have weaseled their way into what is, for many children, the most important (indeed sometimes only) meal of the day: lunch. They tell us the kids should be allowed to choose between a salad and a Twinkie, milk and Coke. And schools fall for this because their resources are constantly being cut, and the junk food pushers offer a cheap and easy way out.

Under the National School Lunch Program, the USDA reimburses schools for every meal served: $2.57 for a free lunch, $2.17 for a reduced-price lunch and 24 cents for a paid lunch. Since these reimbursements must also pay for labor, equipment and overhead costs, schools are left with only $1.00 to spend on food. How can schools be expected to feed our children and protect their health with only a dollar a day? It’s time to build a strong foundation for our children’s health by raising the reimbursement rate to $3.57.

That amounts to an increase of $5.4 billion over an academic year. Serious money to be sure, but when obesity-related healthcare costs are $147 billion annually, it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with an extra buck a day for our children.

Senator Harkin and Congresswoman Woolsey are to be commended for their efforts in this area. Their Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act of 2009 will put a stop to food companies profiting from selling obesity to our kids. We need more though. We must fund grants for Farm to School programs and school gardens, simultaneously improving local economies, supporting local farms, and raising our children’s awareness of where food comes from and why it’s important.

We can even create jobs by training unemployed and underemployed Americans to be the teachers, farmers, cooks and administrators that our school cafeterias need. President Obama has called for an end to childhood hunger by 2015; let’s answer that call by putting Americans to work building and working in school kitchens nationwide.

This Labor Day you can help by joining or organizing an Eat-In, a National Day of Action being coordinated in communities all over the US. Details are at www.SlowFoodUSA.org/timeforlunch.

Pro Food is primarily focused on driving entrepreneurial interest in solving the complex food system challenges we face. By attracting such talent and energy to sustainable food, from farming through retail to home cooking, it is my belief that the money will follow to support their efforts (new post coming on this subject).

Pro Food is not about debating the current problems by taking one side or the other. There is plenty of that already happening, and is my belief that the valuable time and energy being spent in such debates can be put to far better use if it is directed toward finding innovative solutions to our food problems.

For 20 years, Slow Food has been successful in reestablishing links between food and terroir. The most successful event at each Terra Madre convention in Bra, Italy, the birthplace of the movement, has always been Salone del Gusto. This event features local foods from around the globe, prepared and presented by the artisans themselves. In Europe, where the movement was born, the emphasis has been on reviving the culinary expression of local cultures.

When Slow Food crossed the pond to America it took some time to find its feet as our unique food cultures have endured decades of pressure to homogenize, thanks in large part to the dominant industrial food system. Every region has its specific culinary traditions, dating back in some cases to before the founding of the nation. In addition, our immigrant newcomers brought their respective food traditions with them, but soon found the need to adapt to locally available food stuffs.

Slow Food USA Vision: Food is a common language and a universal right. Slow Food USA envisions a world in which all people can eat food that is good for them, good for the people who grow it and good for the planet.

Slow Food USA Mission: To create dramatic and lasting change in the food system. We reconnect Americans with the people, traditions, plants, animals, fertile soils and waters that produce our food. We work to inspire a transformation in food policy, production practices and market forces so that they ensure equity, sustainability and pleasure in the food we eat.

Slow Food USA recently started addressing food policy issues in earnest, sparked by Slow Food Nation, its first national convention held last fall in San Francisco. Policy-making efforts have been spearheaded by other organizations, working just as diligently to remake our food system, including Food Democracy Now!, Roots of Change (specific to California), Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF), and Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), to name a few.

Pro Food stands apart in its efforts to revitalize the entrepreneurial side of the American food system, with the express purpose of re-establishing the link between food and source, bringing together eaters and farmers in new, innovative ways. This specific focus will make it possible to re-inject business sense into the sustainable production, distribution, preparation, and consumption of local foods with entrepreneurial savvy, adapted to each level of the entire chain.

Further information on Pro Food and Slow Food:

• Huffington Post: Sustainable Food Ripe for Entrepreneurs to Drive Forward
• Huffington Post: Closing the Farm to Plate Knowledge Gap
• Slow Food USA: Good, Clean and Fair
• Slow Food USA: From Plate to Planet
• Slow Food International: What We Do

I look forward to your comments regarding these two important efforts dedicated to solving our food system problems, in what I believe are unique and complementary ways.

Do you agree?

This post originally appeared on Huffington Post.