There’s a scene in Terry Gilliam’s 1991 movie “The Fisher King” in which a man plucks the discarded wire cage from a champagne bottle off a pile of garbage bags as he walks down a New York City street with a woman he is trying to impress.  He fiddles with the wire in his hands as they walk, eventually holding up what looks like a delicate and beautiful little metal chair, fit for a dollhouse. “You can find some pretty amazing things in the trash,” he says to her.  She is smitten.

That transformation of a piece of trash into a thing of beauty transfixed me then, and still does.  When I traveled to Cuba a few weeks ago, on a food sovereignty study trip with Food First, I had the opportunity to be transfixed again and again.

Some of the things I saw there included: the discarded front grill to an old electric fan used as a hanging planter with just three chains and some burlap lining; liquid humus packaged in old Havana rum bottles and sold at a farm supply and consultation site; soda cans at an educational farm center cut to be planters for small succulents; an old cooking oil tin at a community garden turned sideways, sliced open, and planted with herbs; raised beds created with upturned spent liquor bottles; and a chicken coop on a family tobacco farm cobbled together from scrap wood and metal.

Everywhere we turned we saw materials whose natural life was being maximized, extended. I joked to my fellow travelers to watch their water bottles–if it ain’t nailed down, it might become a planter. An image flashed through my mind: the corner deli in New York City (my hometown) where with a sandwich order one is given a stack of 30 napkins and a set of plastic cutlery she’ll never use. What would a resident of Havana think?

This Cuban thrift is sometimes taken to an extreme, reminding me this practice is not done because it’s beautiful or quaint, but because it’s a necessity. Examples include: Styrofoam seedling planter trays are reused and reused, brown with age and crumbling at the edges; a farm carved out of a former trash dump; and earth that was a rainbow of glass and plastic shards, unidentifiable debris, the old shell of a bus—and who knows what else–nestled next to the pig barn.

After the fall of the Eastern Bloc, Cuba was left to figure out how to survive without the influx of food, fuel and other supplies that they had purchased affordably from the Soviet Union until then. The answer turned out to include the practice of a more local and organic agricultural system (fewer inputs, less fuel, more oxen), as well as an overall practice of thrift. In doing this so successfully they made survival possible. As an engineer at the Institute for Research in Tropical Agriculture (INIFAT) told us: “the best thing that could have happened to Cuba was to be forced to use sustainable and organic methods of agriculture.”

As part of this transformation, the government now runs programs that support small farmers and encourage local—and often urban—production. When we met with the PR representative from the Ministry of Agriculture, we had lots of questions about how their theory played out in practice. One person in our group asked “do you encourage people to practice seed saving?”  He responded with a chuckle: “the main concept we teach here in Cuba is saving. I’m not just talking about seeds, I am talking about everything.”

Farmers in general—whether they be in Cuba, the U.S. or elsewhere—are experienced practitioners in reducing and re-using. Financial necessity and deep understanding of the natural environment means that small-scale sustainable farmers must be magicians of a sort, from seed saving to all manner of cost saving and resource saving practices. They, like the character in “The Fisher King,” know how to make something beautiful (and delicious) out of almost nothing.

After all, isn’t the transformation of soil, seed and water into something that feeds and nourishes us—nothing into something—the ultimate expression of this?

With the incredible generosity of cool companies like Nau, an eco-conscious clothing company based in Portland, Oregon, we are able to make the site more financially sustainable through donations. For the next few months (or until it sells out) you can snap up this fabulous breathable, wind-resistant and water-repellent eco-dress jacket, modeled by a Civil Eats fan Allison Arieff, former Editor-in-Chief of Dwell magazine, a regular New York Times opinion columnist, and food advocate.

She is featured in Nau’s “Portraits” series wearing the Chrysalis dress from their spring collection–and five percent of every sale will be donated to Civil Eats. In addition, Nau has extended to Civil Eats readers a 10 percent discount on all other clothing on their site just by using the “CIVILEATS” promotional code at the point of purchase.

We love that Nau shares our values, and that they make well-designed clothes that are both functional and aesthetic. The Nau “Portraits” series is all about iconoclasts. Watch here as Allison talks about her ideas on sustainability and design, and also why she chose Civil Eats to receive this donation:

Do these Walmart promises really hold big upsides for health and food insecurity? The Times seemed to think so, running with this headline: “Wal-Mart Shifts Strategy to Promote Healthy Foods.” (Am I crazy or does that read remarkably like the Walmart press release: “Walmart Launches Major Initiative to Make Food Healthier and Healthier Food More Affordable”?) Had the Times been aiming for accuracy it might better have titled the article: “Walmart Launches PR Campaign Promoting Promises to Win the Hearts and Minds of Urban Consumers.”

With little critical coverage in the mainstream media, we are left to ponder the impact of these Walmart commitments ourselves. Thankfully, we have the wisdom of experts like Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics and What to Eat, to shed light on these claims. (Check out her take here). One of Nestle’s most important points is that Walmart’s promise to develop its own front-of-package seal is a clever preemption of work underway at the Institutes of Medicine and FDA to “establish research-based criteria” for such packaging and create regulations for the entire industry, with real oversight.

Let’s dig deeper and look carefully at what the company is saying it is committing to doing. Specifically, Wal-Mart is pledging to “reduce sodium by 25 percent, eliminate industrially added trans fats, and reduce added sugars by ten percent by 2015” in some of the processed foods that it carries.

Impressive? Not so fast.

First, consider that it’s not unusual for a can of soup to contain as much as 2,291 mg, or more, of sodium. (For perspective, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend we consume just 1,500 mg a day). We need to reduce that sodium figure significantly more than 25 percent on many of Walmart products before we dare call them “healthy.” As for trans fats, public health advocates have long been advocating for all food producers to eliminate trans fats across the entire food supply. Finally, a 12 oz. can of Coke, for instance, bought at Walmart—and which the company notoriously pushes at steep discounts—will already contain 39 grams of sugars, the upper limit of what is often suggested as the total daily consumption for non-diabetics. In other words, Walmart’s nutritional commitments are really about making the unhealthy processed food it sells marginally better, at best; at worse, it’s offering the veneer of healthfulness to foods that should be considered bad for us.

These nutritional promises are not only weak in their aspirational goals; they’re also non-binding, which means we’ve got to take the company on its word. These nutritional promises are not only weak in their aspirational goals; they’re also non-binding, which means we’ve got to take the company on its word. (The White House’s Sam Kass has stressed that all these proposals can be verified in an “open, transparent” manner. But with Walmart’s history of backroom deals—like its lobbying with other retailers against strict meth laws—I’m dubious).

Corporate driven, non-binding promises like these are also the oldest trick in the food industry PR playbook. Just ask Michele Simon author of Appetite for Profit, who details how Pepsi, Kraft, and numerous other food companies have made similar promises and gotten  big payback with good press even though they’ve done very little to actually improve the health qualities of their products. These commitments also receive great press at first—note the windfall for Walmart—but there is little accountability over time when the changes are supposed to be made.

Now, let’s turn to the Walmart claim that the company wants to move into urban markets, and reduce the costs of some of its food items, to help low-income people access more affordable food. The New York Times writes that “that low-income people, especially those who receive food stamps, face special dietary challenges because eating healthy costs more and healthier food is harder to get in their neighborhoods.” Yet, the Times fails to mention the studies that have found that because of Walmart’s low wages and benefits, its employees rely on food stamps and other social services far more than the typical retail employee. While Walmart is spending a lot of time and money saying they plan to address food insecurity, the company is actually exacerbating its underlying root causes.

The Times also mentions that Walmart will help address food deserts, defined as “a dearth of grocery stores selling fresh produce in rural and underserved urban areas,” by building more stores, the paper didn’t quote any community-based activists addressing these so-called food deserts on the ground. Do these community advocates think Walmart is the solution? Are they happy Walmart has set its eyes on Washington DC, New York City, Chicago, and other urban markets? Of those I’ve talked to, all are skeptical of the company’s promises and highly critical of the Walmart model: the anti-worker rights, low-wage, low-benefit way of doing business.

We also have plenty of evidence now that when Walmart moves into town, the company puts small businesses out of business and sucks capital out of the community. For every dollar spent at a Walmart, only a small fraction stays to benefit the local economy. We’ve seen enough evidence, too, that the company has a long, dark track record of sex discrimination and workers rights abuses.

Let’s be clear, expanding into so-called food deserts is an expansion strategy for Walmart. It’s not a charitable move. Making a big PR splash about improving the health qualities of its food is a smart tactic to deflect attention from the real impact of Walmart on the quality of life for Americans. (Is it a coincidence that this press conference occurred the same week a new study was gaining attention that tracked health and population data and found links between Walmart expansion from 1996 to 2005 and increased rates of obesity?)

As far as I’m concerned, as long as the company depresses wages, exploits workers, violates workers rights, and pushes highly processed foods and sodas, Walmart is not only failing to address the problem of food deserts and food insecurity, the company is exacerbating their root causes.

Last week, Wal-Mart–the largest grocer in the world with over 8,600 stores in 15 countries, two million employees and sales of $405 billion–made news when it launched sustainable agriculture goals for the U.S. and emerging markets focused on regional food systems. The move is part of decade-long trend of food businesses–from producers to purveyors–adapting, or at least claiming to adapt, to the consumer demand for sustainable food.

Wal-Mart’s decision–the details of which I will get to in a moment–comes on the heels of the success of chains like Whole Foods, which also touts local foods. But unlike Whole Foods, which is considered “niche”, Wal-Mart is mainstream. Some say that this announcement is going to shake the ground under agri-business, which has vehemently fought against anyone suggesting changes to the food system for years now. But agri-business companies are not going to take this shift in consumer demand lying down.

In fact, agri-business elites have been trying either covertly or otherwise to convince the consumer that sustainable food advocates have misled them into thinking the current food system is unsafe, unjust, and unhealthy. And the evidence shows that more of the same is coming down the pipeline.

Just last month, the subscriber newsletter Agri-Pulse reported that Tip Tipton–the man behind the “Got Milk?” campaign–has been tapped to create an “ag image” campaign that seeks “to reverse consumers’ negative perceptions about a broad range of issues including so-called ‘factory farming,’ the use of agricultural chemicals, livestock management practices, processed ‘industrial food,’ and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).” The amount the parties involved feel would be needed to reverse the tide of “consumer backlash”? Twenty to 30 million dollars per year. These groups hope to get funding from companies like Monsanto and Cargill and will be seeking out commodity check-off program funding via commodity growers if possible.

We will see if the various groups jockeying to lead the vision of this campaign will succeed beyond past failed attempts like the Corn Refiners Association’s Sweet Surprise campaign, which sought to change consumer ideas about High Fructose Corn Syrup but was instead mercilessly mocked. In the end, the Corn Refiners scrapped the plan in favor of an attempt at re-branding their product “corn sugar.”

One thing is certain, Michael Pollan is the most feared man to agri-business interests. To wit, from Agri-Pulse: “The Michael Pollans of the world and others of his ilk really have captured the imagination of the American public who now think that ‘organic’ is a brand and that everything else that is out here… has no brand image whatsoever,” said Jay Vroom, the CEO of CropLife America, an organization that advocates for the use of pesticides.

National Corn Growers Association Communications Director Ken Colombini told Agri-Pulse:

There is actually a very positive image of corn farmers and corn growers out there… [But] Food, Inc. almost won an Oscar. The other side is getting so much more funding, so much more interest in the mainstream media… We’ve seen so many attacks… we see Michael Pollan going on Oprah… what’s going to happen when those people like Michael Pollan start to have an impact in Washington on policies and regulations?

The author of the article even took to editorializing:

One wake-up call to the ag sector was the remarkable speed with which major food companies reacted to the Pollan message by replacing HFCS in their cereals, soft drinks and other food products with old-fashioned sugar–despite the fact that a number of studies have demonstrated that there’s no difference between the two as far as the human gut is concerned. The only difference, it seems, is in ‘Pollan-ated’ humans minds.

The “ag image” campaign, which according to Agri-Pulse will launch early next year, is joined by another initiative to protect future Big Ag profits with a messaging blitzkrieg. Agriculture communications departments are common at ag schools–what is new is the blatant fund-raising focused on agri-business. The College of Agriculture, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is speaking Big Ag’s language in its brochure to invite donations [PDF]:

There is a fundamental mistrust among many people of new and novel commercial technologies and the companies that develop them. These companies, critical partners in food and fiber production, face increasingly longer and more expensive development and regulatory lead times, and thus fewer years of exclusivity to reward innovation and pay down research costs.

Their answer: Two million dollars in donations to churn out “key partners in implementing and positioning new technologies vital to meeting a growing demand for biofuels and safe, nutritious and affordable food.” DuPont is on board for $200,000, which we know from a press release [PDF]. But just like the corporate-driven shadow funding this year’s political campaigns, we may never know every player who is behind these types of efforts.

Meanwhile, giants like Wal-Mart will divert our attention from its labor practices by presenting an initiative, that while questions linger, at least focuses on measurable commitments. These include investing in regional food system infrastructure to facilitate bringing local produce to Wal-Mart stores; the creation of a sustainability index that would provide information directly to the consumer in-store about production methods; and new guidelines for product sourcing–including specifically seeking out sustainable palm oil for use in over 100 packaged items sold in the store. The company hopes to double local produce (defined as that which can be procured in-state) sold in U.S. stores to nine percent by 2015.

There is no doubt that by its sheer size, Wal-Mart’s plan will have a huge impact on buying and growing practices worldwide. In places like the Southeast U.S. where cotton and tobacco growing has waned, for example, the company is encouraging the re-emergence of diversified vegetable operations. This initiative has the potential to push forward regional food systems more quickly than the government would be able to through policy-focused rural redevelopment programs–which are currently hyper-focused on broadband and ethanol.

But while Wal-Mart aims to bolster local communities by putting more money into the hands of farmers, critics argue that much of the money the consumer spends at the cash register will still leave the community. Marion Nestle writes that the initiative could only truly help farmers if Wal-Mart, which has historically demanded the lowest prices from its suppliers, pays them fairly for their work. Other sustainable food advocates think that the move is just “greenwashing.” Indeed, the plan makes no mention of organic practices or labor standards, both of which are very important to the sustainable food community. But unlike Monsanto’s claim of being sustainable based on drought tolerant seeds that never materialize, or PepsiCo’s claim to “encourage people to live healthier” while selling them empty calories, Wal-Mart’s plan has muddied the waters of sustainability with added nuance.

However, the ag sector is changing–many would argue irrevocably. Consumers who have developed a preference for unprocessed foods don’t seem to be ready to go back to junk food anytime soon. We will see soon enough whether consumer buying power and commitments like Wal-Mart’s inspire other companies to adopt the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” mentality–and what kind of dent this massive corporately-funded “ag image” campaign will have. One thing is clear: the cash is on the side of the powerful, and the sustainable food movement still has a lot of work to do on messaging in order to define what is, and is not, sustainable.

Photo: fourstarcashiernathan via flickr

I spend a great deal of my time on extremely small-scale food production.  Growing, procuring, cooking, eating, and writing about locally produced food is my bread and butter.  Thus picking up a copy of Empires of Food: Feast, Famine, and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations was in some ways a departure for me.  Authors Evan D.G. Fraser and Andrew Rimas are examining a world that looks to me much the same as the Grand Canyon must look to a mouse.

Culinary history is a truer history though than almost any taught in schools.  Most of what we were taught in high school or even college was little more than the chronology of war.  You may remember that the Norman Conquest occurred in 1066, you probably don’t know about the advances in agriculture that resulted from it, like the invention of the moldboard plow.  The authors suggest that this one innovation might well rank alongside the wheel or steam locomotion in terms of its importance to human development.

Across 12,000 years of history, Empires of Food lays out in clear and compelling terms the ways our world has been shaped by the repeated, head-on collision between politics and the production, transportation and consumption of food.  We learn how the Romans knew of the effects certain vitamins had on health and strength even if they didn’t know what the vitamins themselves actually were; how the ancient Chinese were ahead of even today’s methods of seed selection; of the inescapable importance and value of clean, fresh water.

They put some emphasis too on the flaws in our modern food systems and our seeming inability to learn, as a species, from our own checkered past.  “We devote much of our earth to a very small number of crops.  But instead of relying on prayer, dung and ditches to coax out a harvest we use machines, chemicals, and satellite-guided sprinklers.  The results overflow our silos, our supermarket shelves, and our waistbands.”  It is hard to tell whether the feasts of our current forms of agriculture will lead first to famine or death by excess.

All of this is fascinating, instructive, and vitally important.  But where they are most enlightening  is at the end, in a conclusion titled “The New Gluttony and Tomorrow’s Menu.”  They rail against those who consider food as fashion – what Carlo Petrini described as “wearing produce like jewelry” as people promenade through trendy, shop-to-be-seen markets.  The true threat though is not pop culture, it’s oil-addicted agriculture.  We worry about the effects climate change will have on shorelines and even in our fields, but we pay very little attention to the fact that when the oil runs out (and it will run out), the current food empire run by the likes of Monsanto, ADM and ConAgra will face a 50% loss in fertility and 170 million more empty mouths to feed.

This is what Slow Food proponents and other food activists mean when we say that what we have is not a sustainable food system.  What we must work toward is one that is Good, Clean and Fair.  By Good we mean that the food is good tasting and good for you.  By Clean we mean that it is not polluted and does not pollute – that there is nothing in the food that isn’t food (and if it wasn’t food 100 years ago, it isn’t food now).  And by Fair we mean that the people who produce the food should be justly compensated for their labor. That would be a sustainable food system.

To get there though we must know our history, and Empires of Food is a great way to learn it.  As the poet says, can’t know where your going if you don’t know where you’ve been.

Last week, the National Research Council (NRC) upped the ante with the publication of Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems for the 21st Century. The report will surely be an important milestone on the path toward agricultural sustainability. This 570-page tome, an update of the 1989 NRC report Alternative Agriculture, set out to investigate the sustainability of various agricultural production systems. It aims to distill principles of practice that can underlie agricultural production across geographies and scales, with a particular focus on applying practices—drawn from the U.S. experience—in less developed countries, specifically sub-Saharan Africa. The report also illustrates sustainable practices by showcasing a range of case study farms, many of them a review of studies conducted for the 1989 report.

The NRC report sidesteps the debate about what sustainable agriculture is by arguing that the “pursuit of sustainability is not a matter of defining sustainable or unsustainable agriculture, but rather is about assessing whether choices of farming practices and systems would lead to a more or less sustainable system as measured by the four goals.” It argues the “inherently subjective” nature of characterizing sustainable agriculture and underscores the degree to which different groups emphasize different goals of sustainable agricultural systems, which the NRC frames as:

• Satisfying human food, fiber, and feed requirements, and contributing to biofuels needs;
• Enhancing environmental quality and the resource base;
• Maintaining the economic viability of agriculture; and
• Improving the quality of life for farmers, farm workers, and society as a whole.

The bottom line conclusion of the study? In order to meet society’s long-term needs for food, fiber, and fuel, and minimize externalities, “agricultural production will have to substantially accelerate progress towards the four sustainability goals” outlined above.

The authors stress the need to pursue two approaches simultaneously: incremental and transformative change. In other words, we should support positive baby steps toward one or more of the goals across all farming types and scales, while at the same time striving to re-envision a model farm landscape, as well as a policy framework that will facilitate its realization.

Where do farmers fit?

So just what will it take for our production systems to make this shift? The NRC strongly emphasizes that scientific knowledge is the necessary foundation to progress toward sustainability, stating that “[s]cience generates the knowledge needed to predict the likely outcomes of different management systems and expands the range of alternatives that can be considered by farmers, policy makers, and consumers.” Science is undeniably important to the development and refinement of sustainability practices and policies. But where do farmers fit?

The NRC report makes surprisingly little reference to farmers’ knowledge in the American context, but it does recommend that the USDA and other research support agencies “encourage researchers to include farmer-participatory research or farmer-managed trials as a component of their research.” But is this kind of partnership really about placing farmers’ knowledge on a level playing field with that of scientists? The stated objective of this farmer involvement is to “enhance information exchange and enhance farmers’ adoption of new practices and approaches,” a formulation that emphasizes a flow of information from scientists to farmers, not the other way around.

Farmers can not only offer new innovations and advances in farming practices, but importantly, an understanding of what approaches have worked and not worked over decades and even generations of diligent trial-and-error on a given piece of land. Yet many farmers are not inclined or encouraged to document their experience in formal academic format that has come to be the respected standard for knowledge among decision-makers.

Many analyses, including the bulk of the NRC report, take a literature-based approach, which typically (and often inadvertently) ignore or downplay farmers’ experience and knowledge. One byproduct is that decision-makers in our society tend to overlook farmers as experts, and they get subjugated in broader decision-making processes. It may be that sustainability cannot be achieved until farmers are understood as agricultural experts in their own right and broader solutions truly integrate practitioners and their knowledge systems.

The NRC report correctly acknowledges that the loss of local agricultural knowledge is a key barrier to sustainability in farming systems. True sustainability will require a recognition and acceptance of a diversity of agricultural knowledge systems.  As core actors in any kind of agriculture, farmers must be placed at the center of proposed change models, in coalition with representatives from throughout the model supply chains and food systems that foster healthy food systems more broadly.

As Toward Sustainable Agricultural Systems for the 21st Century indicates, different people—agricultural producers included—emphasize different aspects of sustainability. True sustainability requires all four goals to be met. It is to farmers like the ones profiled in the report, especially those who have scored high on all four sustainability goals, that we should look to in order to move U.S. farming to greater sustainability. Not only do farmers like these offer up valuable practices, but they hold important value systems and worldviews that are essential underpinnings for agricultural policy, as well as society as a whole.

What would it look like to truly place farmers like these at the center of agricultural policy and production systems for the 21st Century? How can we build collaborative decision-making models that better integrate farmers and communities into policy decision-making?

Urban farming has the potential to help us take charge of the foods we eat, green our cities, build community, and increase food security for urban residents.

Everyday, there’s articles about backyard chickens, bee keeping, or urban yard sharing. Clearly urban agriculture is at the top of the trend pile. But is it just a trend, or a part of a sustainable future?

Recently I attended a panel discussion in San Francisco at The Commonwealth Club (presented by INFORUM), about how today’s urban farming movement began and where it’s going. Attendees were treated to a variety of perspectives from four pitchfork-toting farmerpreneur leaders of the urban farming movement in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Panelists included Jason Mark, co-manager of Alemany Farm; editor-in-chief, Earth Island Journal, Novella Carpenter, author of the book Farm City about her farm Ghost Town Farm, Christopher Burley, founder, Hayes Valley Farm, and David Gavrich (aka The Goat Whisperer), founder of City Grazing. The panel was moderated by Sarah Rich, writer; editor; co-founder, The Foodprint Project; and co-author, Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century.

The panel started off with a discussion about the most recent “back to the land” movement and how it differed from today’s urban farming movement.

Back in the 60s and 70s young people migrated back to the countryside to make a go of farming. Novella Carpenter’s parents were part of that movement. But it didn’t last. People found that growing food is very hard and rural life can be extremely isolating. The motives of today’s generation of farmers are different, and more communitarian. They’re not trying to drop out. They’re trying to engage more fully with the world around them.

“We’re realizing that maybe there is a different way. We can stay in the cities and grow food where we live and it can serve as a model for sustainability, said Jason Mark. “There’s not enough room for all of us in Sonoma.”

“We’re all trying to find balance and bring the rural environment into the urban environment. We’re trying to find that niche that we live in. Everyone who plants a seed is sowing a bit of sustainability,” added Chris Burley.

Though the movement is young, things are changing rapidly. According to David Gavrich, the goat whisperer. When his business, City Grazing, put an ad in Craigslist for “goat herder, San Francisco,” they got 200 applications, and half of the applicants actually had goat experience. According to Gavrich, “people are yearning to get away from their desks”.

Urban farming does seem to be helping to revitalize neighborhoods and foster community. For example, Burley, of Hayes Valley Farm, who was featured here in a Q & A a couple of weeks back said that he was amazed to find that 50 people will consistently show up on a Thursday to shovel horse manure for four hours. Sunday work parties regularly attract 100 folks.

Jason Mark says, “community is what distinguishes this from the back to the land movement.” Alemany Farm is completely volunteer run and over the years has built up a core group of volunteers that are friends and together make up a vibrant community.

For Novella Carpenter, the community happened more by accident. Her farm begin as a personal project but has evolved into one in which neighbors are involved in various ways. The involvement started with people picking her produce without permission. Describing herself as “not a do-gooder” but saying that. “If my neighbors are hungry and I know how to grow food how can I not feed them?” she says, “everybody gives what they can.” This includes everything from the wagon proffered by the neighbor who likes her mustard greens to goat butchering lessons from the Yemeni liquor store owner.

What about bureaucratic hurdles to farming in urban areas?

They do exist but each panelist had different experiences. Gavrich has said he’s had no problems in enlightened San Francisco but recommends anticipating problems and getting everything in writing. He has a “goat clause” in his agreement with the railroad line he maintains stating that all landscape is done by natural means.

Mark echoes that San Francisco has been extremely supportive and that the mayor has laid out a food policy proposal that is sweeping and visionary. He does cite “getting the city staff to connect with the mayor’s policies” as a hurdle.

Burley said that the city came to his group to develop Hayes Valley Farm, so they have the full blessing and support from the authorities. He also said that a bottom- up approach to urban farming that utilizes people’s backyards has worked.

Most of the panelist agreed that policy changes that support urban farming are important because (though many of the non-profit farms and farms located in private backyards don’t run into problems) when an urban farm is commercialized, all it takes is one neighbor to complain about commercial activity in a residential area for a farmer to get cited.

And as Burley said, “We need to advocate for farms in residential areas because 60 percent of land is in people’s yards.”

Can urban farming help us rebuild our food systems and increase food security?

Urban farming can certainly increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables to city dwellers but we need to look at how the food is distributed and find creative ways to get the food to the people who most need it. The most sustainable way of all to provide food is to teach people how to grow their own.

For example, Alemany Farm is right next to public housing. The farm runs youth programs and provides plots to nearby residents where they can grow their own food. The farm once held a farmers market where nearby residents could purchase produce on a sliding scale. The farm is no longer allowed to sell the food, which means they have to give it away. Yet all the panelists agree that a charity model is too top-down and not sustainable.

Things are shifting as policy makers realize that urban farming can be both a green solution to city ills and perhaps even a green jobs solution. Novella Carpenter is working on a project in San Lorenzo that is part of the city’s green job training program and is funded by the sheriff’s department.

All panelists agreed that the movement needs to network, share information and resources and build the system from the ground up.

According to Chris Burley, an urban agriculture alliance is forming. And indeed for urban agriculture to ever become more than isolated individuals working on scattered city plots, we need concerted organization efforts that can both demand and work with government backing.

Panelists were asked what role education plays in the movement.

Chris Burley says it’s crucial. In fact Hayes Valley Farm’s mission is not even so much to produce food, but to serve as an urban agriculture resource that provides education and advocates behavioral changes. “We can’t change what we don’t know. We need to become more aware of our impact. Food is the gateway drug to a more sustainable lifestyle. Through learning about food, little by little, we’ll become more connected and thrive as a community,” said Burley.

Novella and her co-worker/owners run an urban farming store at Biofuel Oasis in Berkeley. All day they educate people on beekeeping, chicken coops and more. They teach classes on bee and goat keeping, preserving, and other topics as well. With a trend like urban farming, it is necessary to make sure people know what they are getting into or the movement will not develop in a sustainable way.

I wonder if the Internet existed during the 60s and 70s, giving people access to information and ready support from fellow travelers, if the back-to-the-land movement might have survived.

In conclusion: here are the panelist’s best 60-second ideas to change the world.

David Gavrich – “Get leadership and political people to think holistically. Think about the impact beyond what we see. Look at externalities. If we do that, it will be clear that we’ll be better off farming in our communities.”

Chris Burley – “Crop mob. Get together and transform a backyard. Have a potluck.”

Novella Carpenter – “Every city should have a demo farm. It could be a cool tourist thing with a person managing it and showing people how to raise chickens and bees and how to can and process vegetables. There should be an ‘office of urban farming.’”

Jason Mark – “Find a little bit of land and a little water, find a friend and find someone to help. Connect with you neighbors doing the same thing. Personal actions alone don’t do it. Progress happens collectively.”

You can listen to the discussion in its entirety here.

Originally published on EcoSalon

After months of uncertainty, the Senate is expected to bring pending food safety legislation to the floor within the next week.

The FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510), has been stalled behind health care reform and other priorities since it was unanimously voted out of committee in mid-November. The coalition of interests supporting the bill, which includes the major food industry groups, public health organizations, and consumer advocates, and Senate staff working on the bill have been waiting for a break in a busy legislative schedule to bring the bill to the floor where it is expected to pass easily with broad bipartisan support.

Though S. 510 has the coalition needed to clear the Senate–which some would consider a miracle in this political climate–the small, sustainable agriculture community is still voicing serious concerns about certain provisions in the bill which, they contend, will stifle small-scale, local food production.

Eighty-seven groups, including the Center for Food Safety, Food Democracy Now!, R-CALF USA and dozens of food co-ops, recently signed a letter in support of an amendment proposed by Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) that would exempt small, local processing facilities from the bill’s hazard analysis and risk-based preventative controls and traceability requirements.

“Farmers and processors who sell directly to consumers and end users have a direct relationship with their customers that ensures quality, safety, transparency and accountability,” said the letter.  “In addition, small-scale food producers are already regulated by local and state authorities, and the potential risk their products pose is inherently limited by their size. For these farmers and processors, new federal requirements are unnecessary and would simply harm both the food producers and their consumers.”

In anticipation of the Senate vote, there have been a flurry of action alerts from dozens of ag groups to garner support for several amendments to lessen the impact of federal regulation on small farmers and producers. “There’s no doubt that industrial agriculture needs better oversight. But family-scale local and organic farms are probably the safest in the nation–they are part of the solution, not part of the problem–and need to be protected,” said The Cornucopia Institute in an action alert last week.

The notion that small farmers and producers are not the source of the nation’s food safety problems is a common theme in the dozens of alerts circulating via Twitter, email, and Facebook.  But the coordinated campaign for federal food safety reform, driven by the Make Our Food Safe Coalition, of which the Pew Charitable Trusts, Consumers Union, the Center for Science of Public Interest, and the Grocery Manufacturers of America are all members, does not support federal exemptions.

“We do have issues with anything that provides any blanket exemptions,” Sandra Eskin, director of the food safety campaign with The Pew Charitable Trusts, said in an interview. “Food should be safe regardless of its source–big processor, small farm, conventional operation or organic grower. We can talk about scale-appropriate regulation, but not exemptions.”

The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), is also working with Senate staff to get specific provisions in the manager’s amendment (a group of amendments both sides of the aisle agree upon before debate). NSAC wants the FDA to focus “only on those on-farm processing and co-mingling activities that present significant risk for causing for foodborne pathogen contamination” and ensure food safety performance standards are based on scientific risk assessments. They would also like to see traceability requirements relaxed and a shift to a progressive fee structure–the House version, which passed in July, calls for a $500 flat registration fee per food facility.

Aimee Witteman, a spokeswoman for NSAC, said last week that, though the situation remains uncertain, she is optimistic that some of NSAC’s concerns will be addressed in the manager’s amendment.

If all goes as planned in the Senate, a final bill could be on the President’s desk within a few weeks. Both House and Senate versions give the agency mandatory recall authority, require more frequent inspections, and ask food facilities to implement food safety plans. The legislation incorporates key recommendations from the President’s Food Safety Working Group, which was launched shortly after the massive, multi-state Salmonella peanut outbreak in early 2009.

Originally published on Food Safety News

While many of the more than 2,200 attendees of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture’s yearly gathering would have gladly entertained a dialogue with a Monsanto representative, it’s safe to say they view the conference’s central concept in a quite different light.

In his opening remarks, PASA President Kim Seeley borrowed a phrase from architect and designer William McDonough, a previous year’s keynote speaker, and asked: “Does the end result love all the children? We will condone all forms of farming that will love the children.”

It’s hard to associate the maker and marketer of Roundup pesticide and poison-withstanding genetically modified seeds with “loving all the children.” Yet, that is what Monsanto–newly crowned by Forbes “for persevering in the face of vicious criticism to feed the world”–would have us believe through what writer Ken Edelstein has called a “greenwash marketing” campaign that is “positively Rovian on the chutzpah meter.” Equally credibility-straining is Elanco, Ely Lilly and Company’s animal-health division, which in 2008 purchased the Posilac brand of synthetic bovine-growth hormone from Monsanto. Elanco’s president has been on a speaking tour promoting a technology-dependent program of “Sustainability and Feeding the World.”

Obviously, a different take on technology from that of most who attended the conference.

And in a recent call-to-arms speech delivered in Seattle, American Farm Bureau Federation President Bob Stallman railed against those he called “extremists who want to drag agriculture back to the days of 40 acres and a mule” and against “misguided, activist-driven regulation on labor and environment being proposed in Washington.” Further, Stallman called sustainability “the most overused and ill-defined word in the policy arena today.”

Finally, a patch, however small, of common ground.

“I completely agree that the term ‘sustainability’ is overused and often confused for something it’s not by those who try to use it,” PASA Executive Director Brian Snyder said in his stage-setting conference speech. “So, I have an idea–how about if you, Mr. Stallman, and your counterparts at Monsanto and Elanco stop using it! We can handle this one, and have been doing so quite ably for several decades now.”

Snyder said it is impossible to overlook the deliberate attempt by sustainable agriculture’s detractors to dilute the dream and goals PASA and its members aspire to in order that their objective of putting profitability above all else does not fail.

Not that profitability was ignored during the Farming for the Future conference. Quite the contrary. Neither was the concept of “small” farming, currently a pejorative term in Washington and elsewhere, where those who use that word, according to Snyder, “get immediately pigeonholed and tossed aside as a probable relic of the past.”

Here, the common-ground borderline was crossed.

“There is nothing ‘small’ about what any member of PASA is doing with respect to our food system, whether as a producer, processor or consumer, regardless of any volume specifications,” Snyder said.

“People like to hear about lots of acres or large numbers of animals and bushels of corn per acre measured in the hundreds,” he continued. “But models of farming that can gross $50,000 to $100,000 on a single acre, or Community Supported Agriculture programs that, in some cases and on relatively small acreage, are able to count their customers in the thousands and bank $1 million or more in the spring before even planting a seed, are anything but small!”

A non-genetically-modified seed, he might have added.

Snyder said that a second misconception held as incontrovertible truth in the halls of power is the notion that “we cannot feed the world this way,” that only industrial food systems can do so.

“We must encourage everyone, wherever they are and as a priority, to eat food produced as near to their own homes as possible,” Snyder said. “Secondly, feed thy neighbor as thyself. From this perspective, local food not only can feed the world, it may be the only way to ever feed the world in a healthy and just manner.”

Few involved with farming, even of the sustainable variety, relish increased government regulation. But Snyder likened what he called the “Stallman Doctrine”–a “Don’t Cap Our Future”-sloganed, war-like resistance to a cap-and-trade system or any proposal to limit farming’s environmental impact–to a modern re-emergence of Manifest Destiny, “wherein we take and use what we believe was divinely ordained for us to have, regardless of the consequences for others.”

By contrast, Snyder said a truly sustainable farmer wakes every morning with two thoughts in mind. The first is one of gratitude that the land we are privileged to own, rent or be paid to cultivate has been given to us, and we must give it back in better shape than we found it.

“Second,” Snyder said, “we as individual farmers are limited and essentially dependent on each other to figure out what’s best to do with this land in order to honor it, improve it and make a living from it and one day to deliver it back to the source from whence it came.”

“It’s all about maintaining a ‘right relationship’ with the land, which,” he said, “is analogous to the good relationships we hope for in other aspects of our lives as well.”

Or, at the end of the day, does it truly love all the children, and will it give them a good Earth to love, as well?

That–regardless of what corporate farmers and the companies they serve will tell you–is what sustainable agriculture is really all about.

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In contrast to the Stallman Doctrine – an unwillingness to work as hard as possible to save our beautiful planet – PASA Executive Director Brian Snyder offered the Promise of Sustainability.

“We understand that this world is not really ours to do with as we please and that we must work together to make it better,” Snyder said. From this perspective, here are some things sustainable farmers choose for themselves, rather than depend on government regulations or ballot initiatives to force upon them:

• We would do everything possible to protect the Earth, its water, air and climate systems, and to cherish and protect our great watersheds, including especially here in the Mid-Atlantic region, that which feeds the Chesapeake Bay.

• We would never lock up livestock of any kind for prolonged periods in restrictive cages or crates where they can’t even turn around or care for their young in a natural manner.

• We would not treat cows with artificial growth hormones, either for profit or the pride to be gained from seeing how much milk we can force them to give. We would also never feed antibiotics to animals for the sake of speeding their growth, especially in the absence of medical need.

• We would take whatever pre-emptive steps may be necessary – even if less than 100 percent certain – to protect our bees and other pollinators, and also to promote the diversity and integrity of seeds we depend on to produce food, avoiding advanced technological strategies that might otherwise undermine or diminish them.

• In dealing with our neighbors around the world, we would reject the political philosophy of Free Trade in favor of Fair Trade.

• We would treat with dignity immigrant and migrant laborers who are needed to work our fields, care for our animals and generally keep our food system moving, and welcome them as full members of our communities as they choose and are able to settle here.

• We would teach and assist the citizens, communities and countries of a hungry world to feed themselves as we would wish to be fed.

• We would build our entire food system on the concept that fair prices for farmers will keep wholesome, nutritious and safe food on our tables without fail.

Corporate entities such as Monsanto and Elanco–Ely Lilly Company’s animal-health division, which owns the Posilac brand of synthetic bovine growth hormone–lay claim to “sustainability,” thereby distorting its meaning and diluting its promise.

The president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, no ally of sustainable agriculture, recently called “sustainability” the most overused and ill-defined word in the policy arena.

Perhaps we can help.

The Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture has recently partnered with Food Alliance, based in Portland, Oregon, to deliver a trusted, third-party certification to our region’s farms, processors, food buyers and consumers. The Food Alliance Certified seal ensures safe and fair working conditions, humane treatment of animals and careful stewardship of ecosystems. Here is how Food Alliance answers the question, “What is sustainable agriculture?”

Sustainable agriculture:

• Provides safe and fair working conditions. It creates a work environment with open communication about workplace safety and job satisfaction, with incentives and opportunities for development of employee skills; it considers quality-of-life issues for farm workers and their communities.

• Ensures the health and humane treatment of animals. It raises livestock with respect for their physical needs and comforts; it provides livestock with access to sunlight, fresh air and an environment where they can socialize and express normal behaviors; it handles livestock with care to minimize fear and stress.

• Does not use hormone or antibiotic supplements. It raises animals without using hormones or antibiotics to stimulate growth or productivity; it uses antibiotics only to treat a sick animal and return it to health, not as a substitute for healthy living conditions.

• Does not raise genetically modified crops or livestock. It raises crops or livestock that are not derived from transgenic or genetically modified organisms in order to respect public concern over potential impacts on human or environmental health.

• Reduces pesticide use and toxicity. It practices integrated pest management by using field scouting and cultural and biological controls to avoid pest problems; it minimizes risks to human health and the environment by selecting least toxic pest treatments and using best practices for application.

• Protects water resources. It protects water quality and riparian habitat by providing buffer zones along streams; it manages tillage to maximize the ability of soils to absorb rainfall; it manages animal wastes to prevent ground and surface water contamination.

• Protects and enhances soil resources. It protect soils by maximizing plant cover, rotating crops and using cover crops to enrich soil and increase productivity; it uses management-intensive grazing; it uses tillage methods that protect soil quality and promote soil conservation.

• Provides wildlife habitat. It encourages vegetative cover, food and water resources necessary for habitat; it establishes biological corridors; it manages mowing and grazing cycles to minimize impact on wildlife; it protects and restores wetland, prairie and woodland habitats.

• Continually improves practices. It sets annual goals for improving performance in areas addressed under Food Alliance certification; it evaluates and reports progress on goals annually.

For more information, go to www.foodalliance.org.

Is tradition ever changing or static? Where does it actually come from? What happens if a tradition is no longer serving its followers or their environment? If these questions sound like they could have been formed in a therapy session about relationship patterns, in a way, I guess they were. We do have a relationship with food (especially when it comes to so-called traditional foods) and it’s not always a healthy one for the planet or for us.

To explore these questions with customers and the community and to start a conversation about what a more sustainable, local, seasonal Jewish deli tradition might look like, Saul’s Restaurant and Delicatessen in Berkeley, CA. hosted a Referendum on the Deli Menu last week.

Moderated by Evan Kleiman, host of KCRW’s culinary radio show Good Food, panelists included author/journalist Michael Pollan, Gil Friend, author of The Truth about Green Business, and CEO of Natural Logic, Willow Rosenthal, urban farmer and founder of City Slicker Farms, along with Karen Adelman and Peter Levitt, Co-Owners of Saul’s.

Why a referendum? Situated just down the block from Chez Panisse (the restaurant with the lead role in remaking our collective food culture and incubator to countless chef alumni, including Peter Levitt), Saul’s stands at a crossroads. The owners don’t want to sell industrially produced meat, sodas with high fructose corn syrup, out of season chilled borscht, and factory pickles. But because Levitt and Adelman serve a cuisine that is steeped in tradition and memory and so associated with comfort, their customers are not always receptive to the foods they want to serve and the changes they want to make.

For example they’ve moved away from that standby of the Jewish deli experience—the giant, industrially produced and heavily subsidized corned beef sandwich in favor of a smaller, more flavorful sandwich made with grass-fed beef from Marin Sun Farms. They’ve replaced Dr. Brown’s soda with housemade sodas in flavors like celery, Meyer lemon, ginger, and cardamom, and switched out the factory pickles for locally made, traditionally fermented pickles. Specials include items like grilled trout with fresh, seasonal vegetables and zhoug, a bold and spicy condiment of Sephardic origin made with cilantro, jalapenos, and cardamom. Saul’s has even stopped carrying salami until they can find an all-beef version that was not made from industrial meats.

But they want to go further and they need their customers to join them.

The changes they want to institute—a more seasonal menu, more sustainably raised, artisan produced meats, the inclusion of more fresh vegetables and foods from traditions other than the Ashkenazi—bump up against customer expectations of traditional Jewish deli foods…and they cost more.

The standard Jewish Deli menu has multiple pages of traditional foods that are often industrially produced, flown in from far away, and not even remotely in season. But because people want their herring when they want it, their chilled borscht, even in January, and yes, those giant corned beef sandwiches, its difficult for restaurant owners like Levitt and Adelman to offer a smaller, more carefully edited menu, in which everything is made from scratch that day.

They dream of a two-page (instead of the current 4-page) menu that allows them to pick and choose from a variety of traditions and offer foods in season.

“We want to move toward a more seasonal menu and let the deli cuisine breathe with the seasons…in which we have everything [in the deli repertoire] but in its time,” said Adelman.

Levitt added, “The chef doesn’t have time to make wonderful specials when they are hauling around a 4-page menu.”

Where do these traditions originate and why are they so fiercely guarded?

“These are foods that are embedded in our souls. We know what we love has some issues…is the meat we are longing for only something that can be produced industrially?” said Evan Kleiman.

“The desire to eat those sandwiches comes from a place of poverty and not having enough….what was chicken soup if not having to make another meal from a chicken you’d killed?” said Willow Rosenthal.

“…and the dumplings were leftover bread,” added Peter Levitt.

“It goes back to the issue of our people and food scarcity,” said Kleiman

So if the tradition was eating what was available and making use of all of it, is what we think of as tradition really something else?

Like many other foods, traditional Jewish deli foods have been commoditized and their ownership has been concentrated among a few large companies.

“What we take as traditional is fairly new…it’s not the deli, it’s postwar America,” said Gil Friend.

Michael Pollan added, “this tradition that we call Jewish deli food and that has seemed unchanging has been revolutionized [by industrial agriculture] over the last 50-years, but a lot of people didn’t notice it.”

Levitt points out that those old Jewish companies are no longer what they were. It’s all nostalgia. For instance, Con Agra now owns Hebrew National. There is one company producing salami. Salami used to vary by city, neighborhood, kitchen. “Now we have one salami,” said Levitt.

Saul’s has had some success gaining acceptance for menu changes by as, Friend said, “offering an alternative that is more satisfying,”

But what about cost? Some people just don’t care enough to pay more for their food.

“We live in a world of hidden subsidies,” said Friend. “If you substitute the concept of the towering pastrami sandwich with a gallon of gas in which you are paying the real price, you’d have a $20 gallon of gas.”

By way of example, Levitt chimed in with a rundown of the different costs of deli meats. Government subsidized industrial meat costs $2 a pound, Niman Ranch, which is not 100% grass-fed or local, but was raised without antibiotics and hormones, is about $4.50 a pound, and locally raised, 100% grass-fed beef is $6 a pound.

So far the restaurant has handled the cost issue by offering smaller sandwiches for a little more money, balancing portion size adjustment and cost. Some customers are appreciative, some less so.

“Saul’s proves it can be done. It’s just more expensive…what they are doing here is important. We’ve figured out how to do sustainable, expensive food. (the customers at Chez Panisse are well-trained…nobody there expects an out-of-season tomato.) When sustainable food hits delis, taquerias, and cafes, that’s when it democratizes,” said Pollan.

I left the talk thinking that Saul’s is taking on a heroic task in redefining the deli menu and asking customers to come along, even if it means giving up some of their favorite foods some of the time. I also left with a mean craving for a pastrami sandwich.

“Jewish cuisine is a Diaspora cuisine and the fact that the cuisine stays the same is not where we came from and not where we are going. Food changes. We have to lead, not react. The cuisine needs to reach back and connect to the past but we need to connect to our future as well. We need permission to do that,” said Adelman.

Afterwards, by way of bestowing my blessing, I did go treat myself to a pastrami sandwich, and when I visited the restroom, I found further evidence of Saul’s commitment to changing the deli. Near the sink hung a nicely framed wanted sign with the following plea:

99% of meat in this country is produced by factory farms.

Help us find salami that is:

Humanely raised – Let’s not support confined animal feeding operations.

Sustainably raised – Protect our air, water and soil from pollution. Reduce petroleum use in agriculture.

Hormone and antibiotic free – Protect our public health.

Locally made is preferred, to support local production, food skills, craft, and local commerce.

Saul’s customers love salami. We have the demand. Help us procure the supply.

Anybody know where I can get a good salami around here?