On behalf of Civil Eats we’re proud to have made it through our third full year of delivering some of the good food communities’ top stories and posts from the front lines of the food revolution. Occupy your food system people!

As we do on a daily basis, we gratefully acknowledge that this labor of love continues to grow and thrive. Without the tireless volunteer efforts of our talented and dedicated managing editor, Paula Crossfield, our co-founder and editor, Naomi Starkman, and the support of Stacey Slate, our tenacious deputy managing editor, we would not be here today.

We are very proud of our accomplishments to date. Since January 2009, we’ve now posted 1,471 pieces, averaging 30 per month this last year.

In 2011, we published 21 interviews with folks working towards a just and equitable food system. We talked with Mark Bittman, Kathleen Merrigan, Josh Viertel and Albert Straus to name a few. Ten of those interviews were part of our Faces & Visions of the Food Movement series which aims to highlight the motivations of people who work on behalf of food systems change and connect the dots between their goals, the people and groups in their community, and how they work together to realize their visions.

We covered critical stories relating to Genetically Modified Organisms, Occupy the Food System, the Secret Farm Bill, BPAs, Farm Workers and that irritating Food Plate.

We continued our monthly community conversation, Kitchen Table Talks, in San Francisco and in New York and hope to see one in Chicago in 2012. In those conversations we discussed critical topics relating to the growing food revolution including: Occupy the Food System, the secret Farm Bill, food activism, farm labor, war veterans turned farmers and chocolate, to name a few. (Please let us know if you’d like to start a KTT in your town. We are happy to help you get started.)

This year we also partnered with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism News21 course on food reporting and the class wrote a few stories for us and will continue to in 2012. And, we thank the New York Times and Washington Post for sending readers our way.

As an all-volunteer effort, we are thrilled to have accomplished so much.

Thanks, as always, goes to all of our writers who contribute their work without compensation. We’d love a shout out to all of our dedicated contributors: Tamar Adler, Vanessa Barrington, Helena Bottemiller, Haven Bourque, Siena Chrisman, Eve Fox, Twilight Greenaway, Rose Hayden-Smith, Sarah Henry, Kate Hoppe, Ulla Kjarval, Anna Lappe, Tom Laskaway, Ralph Loglisci, Dave Murphy, Kim O’Donnel, Antonio Roman-Alcala, Kerry Trueman, Amber Turpin, Adrianna Velez, Kristin Wartman, and Mark Winne. As always our goal is to pay our writers a fair wage for their efforts. We hope the work we do brings value and inspires continued efforts for a world that works for everyone.

Now, in no particular order, some of our favorite stories of the year:

1. Why Laying Off Ag Reporter Phillip Brasher is Bad for Food by Paula Crossfield got a lot of attention and played a part in why Gannett re-hired him.

2. Why the Food Movement Should Occupy Wall Street by Siena Chrisman connected the dots between the national Occupy movement and the good food revolution.

3. Andy Fisher’s piece, Growing Power Takes a Massive Contribution from Wal-Mart, generated a good deal of conversation on money and the movement.

4. A Big Fat Debate by Kristin Wartman was one of our most read pieces with 77 comments and 35,915 views. Kristin covered how the health and nutrition community are beginning to debunk misleading information about the importance of fat in our diets. The piece caused a big fat debate on Civil Eats as well.

5. The second most popular post was Where do Americans Get Their Calories (Infographic) by Andrea Jezovit. It was one of many articles posted as part of our ongoing partnership with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism News21 course on food reporting.

6. We are ever grateful that Anna Lappé has written a lot of pieces for us recently, a few exposing conflicting interests. Her post Who’s Behind the United States Farmers and Ranchers Alliance and Why it Matters generated 25 comments and contains very valuable information for any food activist.

7. The North East had it hard this year and Ulla Kjarval shared New York Farmers Struggle in Wake of Hurricane Irene … keeping us all up to speed with the challenging situation.

8. GMOs will continue to be a hot topic for years to come. GMO and Organic Co-Existence: Why We Really Just Can’t Get Along by Paula Crossfield highlights how we really must take a stand against GMOs if we value our organic farming heritage.

9. Transparency in labeling will also continue to be an important issue worth fighting for in 2012. Read Naomi Starkman’s piece on the Just Label It campaign and look for an updates in the year ahead.

10. Finally, for all those who say it’s too expensive to buy good food. Please read How to Stay a Foodie Family on Food Stamps by Corbyn Hightower.

For example, just last Thursday, when I was returning back to L.A., less than two months after Gabrielle Giffords was shot and nine people were killed in Tucson, the Arizona State Senate debated legislation that would allow students to bring guns into the classroom. When the measure was finally passed, the legislators decided to modify the bill to allow students to bring guns onto campus on the sidewalks and into the common areas but not yet into the classroom. “Sometimes you have to take baby steps,” the bill sponsor Sen. Ron Gould told the local Fox news station, asserting that he still eventually wants to give those gun toting students full access to the entire campus, including the classrooms.

If it’s not guns, it’s subsidies for the Tea Party. Arizona Senate Republicans introduced a bill to create a Tea Party license plate, with the Tea Party slogan, “Don’t Tread on Me.” The bill seeks to create a fund from the proceeds of the “Don’t Tread on Me (DTM)” license plates that would be administered by a state appointed Arizona Tea Party Committee which would in turn have available $17 out of the $25 payment for the plates. Those funds could then be distributed by the Tea Party fund managers through grants to any non-profit dedicated to promoting “Tea Party governing principles.”

The Arizona legislature has also led the way in establishing what can only be called a campaign of terror against immigrants, especially those without papers but ultimately against all Latinos. More than 100,000 immigrants left the state in the first several months after the passage of SB 1070, the racial profiling and criminalization of immigrants legislation currently held up in the courts. And while the numbers of those exiting the state has since declined (although there is still net migration out of state), the mood of continual vulnerability pervades Latino and immigrant communities. This is terror in the guise of the legislature’s immigration policy and it has come to symbolize, along with guns and Tea Party subsidies, a right wing politics out of control.

Yet the mood at the various talks and discussions I had in Tucson, Flagstaff, and Phoenix last week, was upbeat, and the level of participation was high, both at the campus and community events. There’s a lot of passion about food issues and it’s also clear to many of those who came to the events, that food issues are part of a larger social change agenda; an agenda that is also about changing the politics–and the mood–in the State.

In Tucson, at the community gathering sponsored by the Community Food Bank where I spoke, there were dozens of ideas, programs, policy approaches, and related on-the-ground initiatives talked about and new connections made. There were also those engaged in border and immigration issues, health issues, and political mobilization. In a community still shell-shocked about the shootings in January and horrified by the right wing Tea Party takeover of the Legislature, the passion for engagement and desire for change was palpable.

In Flagstaff, community food activists from groups like Foodlink who have embraced a food justice agenda have teamed up with several of the faculty and students who are part of what they call action-research teams, based at programs ranging from the Program for Community, Culture and Environment to a Holocaust-focused program that is highlighting issues of human rights. There was a clear desire of many of the participants who came to the talks on food justice to want to see themselves as change agents, and to help bring about a change in the politics of the state.

In Phoenix, more than a hundred students and faculty came to hear a quickly organized Food Justice talk at Arizona State University, sponsored by the Global Institute of Sustainability. There was also an afternoon event at the Public Market, an innovative outdoor market and indoor alternative food store located in downtown Phoenix and an evening book talk at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe, a surviving independent book store that has become an important community gathering place. Like the events in Tucson and Flagstaff, where participation exceeded organizer expectations, there was a strong sense of commitment and desire to make things happen. Immigrant rights continued to complement the focus on food justice along with the desire to kick the rascals out, symbolized by an emerging recall campaign against State Senate Majority Leader Russell Pearce, the leader of the war against immigrants. This is the face of Arizona that gives one hope, even–or especially–for those who might otherwise be assumed to have abandoned hope.

At the Changing Hands bookstore event in Tempe, a question was asked about the problem of issue silos, whether those in the food movement, or the immigrant rights movement, or the environmental movement, had weakened their own advocacy by focusing on their single issue. I answered by talking about the need to make connections, and gave an example of how some community-based environmental justice groups had come to be involved in issues around global trade and freight traffic impacting their communities. Afterward, I thought that perhaps the answer was too limited, that the challenge for each of those movements was the need to not just connect the dots but see the work as part of building what used to be called in the 1960s, the Movement for Social Change. This would necessarily become a redefining of politics in an age of Tea Partyism, the war on immigrants, and a food system that is neither just, nor healthy, nor meeting the needs of the producers or the eaters. And there’s no place better for that to happen than in Arizona.

It’s that time of year again when we bid adieu to one year and look ahead to the next. For those of us at Civil Eats that means acknowledging that this labor of love is thankfully thriving. Without the tireless volunteer efforts of our managing editor, Paula Crossfield, our co-founder and editor, Naomi Starkman, and the support of Stacey Slate, our wonderful deputy managing editor, we would not be here today.

We are very proud of our accomplishments to date. Since January 2009, we’ve now posted 918 pieces, averaging 39.6 per month this last year, and we’ve reached the one million pageviews mark! We’re thrilled that the New York Times reads us, folks at NPR have referred to our work; we know from our our analystics that some governmental agencies are reading; and Technorati rates rates Civil Eats in the top 200 for the U.S. politics, food, and green categories and number 35 for health.

In the past year, we’ve published 40 interviews with folks working towards a just and equitable food system. We’ve talked with Laurie David, Morgan Spurlock, Raj Patel, Michel Nischan and Anna Lappé, to name a few and featured a number of profiles of women farmers from Temra Costa’s book Farmer Jane. Twelve of those 40 interviews were part of our new series Faces & Visions of the Food Movement which aims to highlight the motivations of people who work on behalf of food systems change and connect the dots between their goals, the people and groups in their community, and how they work together to realize their visions.

We reviewed over 17 books and six films. We continued our monthly community conversation Kitchen Table Talks in San Francisco and launched KTT NYC in November with a conversation about food waste. (Please let us know if you’d like to start a KTT in your town … we’ll help you get started.)

Not too shabby for an all-volunteer effort.

Thanks goes to all of our writers who contribute their work without compensation. Our goal is to pay our writers a fair wage for their efforts so be on the look out for our fundraising campaign and ways to contribute to the health and vitality of Civil Eats. We hope the work we do brings value and inspires continued efforts for a world that works for everyone.

Now, in no particular order, some of our favorite stories of the year:

1. One of the most inspiring stories of the year, Kids Radically Changing the Food System, highlighted the work of a few teens and tweens doing what they love best—raising chickens and educating other kids about chicken anatomy, making movies about how food gets from farm to plate, and starting non-profits aimed at reducing consumption of fast food.

2. In other tween news, we reported on 11-Year old Birke Baehr, who shares how he ”discovered the dark side of the industrial food system” and discusses food irradiation, GMOs, CAFOs, farm run-off, the problem with marketing food to kids and more, all in five minutes at a TED conference for young people called TEDx in Asheville, North Carolina. On the subject of paying more for better quality food, Baehr said, “with all the things I’m learning about the food system, it seems to me that we can either pay the farmer or pay the hospital.” Watch him here and keep sharing this incredible video.

3. Generating a lot of commentary, A Place for Us: The Black Farmers and Urban Gardeners Conference, by Melissa Danielle, delved into the issue of race and how people of color are “conspicuously and consistently absent from the dialogue that is transforming Americans’ relationship with food and farming.”

4. Was Meatopia’s Vision Too Utopian? by Adriana Velez looked at how producing a meat-centric event designed to take chefs out of their comfort zones ultimately failed to deliver.

5. Banning Soda for Food Stamps’ Recipients Raises Tough Questions by Andy Fisher generated a lot of comments and explored the thorny issues raised when NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to “allow the city to exempt soda from the permitted list of items its 1.7 million food stamp recipients can purchase with their benefits.” Read it for a critical look at the questions both anti-hunger and public health advocates must ask.

6. In Wal-Mart Promises Local Food, While Big Ag Gears Up for a Fight, Paula Crossfield looked at how Walmart’s new commitment to local foods which “has the potential to push forward regional food systems more quickly than the government would be able to through policy-focused rural redevelopment programs” will impact the efforts of big ag to maintain the status quo and the bulk of food dollars in their pockets.

7. Kerry Trueman reported on Domino’s Pizza and the USDA: The Bailout You Didn’t Hear About. Thanks to Kerry and both Stephen Colbert and the Times’ Michael Moss, we are all now very aware that Domino’s new extra cheesy redux was “financed by a government handout, or, if you prefer, corporate welfare.”

8. Rooftop Gardens and Community Plots Welcome City Bees by Stacey Slate hailed the excitement of New York City’s beekeepers after the beekeeping ban was lifted on March 16.

As always, Civil Eats is grateful to you, our readers, for your participation in this democratic venture. Your ideas, feedback, and support make this community endeavor truly worthwhile. We look forward to more inspired stories in 2011.

Happy end of 2009! For those of us at Civil Eats we’re proud to have made it through our very first full year of delivering you, our dear readers (thanks for joining us!), some of the good food communities’ top stories and posts from the front lines of the food revolution.

We’ve published over 640 stories to date with over 420,000 pageviews since January. And, we’ve had the honor of working with so many wonderful contributors from so many different branches of the food community. Managing editor, Paula Crossfield, who’s on a much needed holiday, had this to say, “I have been continually surprised and inspired by the enthusiasm people have had for Civil Eats this year. Looking forward to 2010, we hope to bring more thinkers and eaters into the fold. With all of our heads together we can improve our food system.”

As a bookend to this incredible year, we’d like to share with you a round-up of some of the most viewed, most commented on, and most impactful stories of the year.

We’ve had a number of highlights in our “Young Farmers Unite” series which we hope inspires a new generation of farmers to join this vital profession and stick with it. One of the most popular pieces in the series, titled, “Drive-Through: A Truck Farm Grows in Brooklyn: by Curt Ellis, details the creativity of a group of young urban farmers.

As the “Local Eats” editor, I’ve featured some excellent reporting on inspiring local projects, initiatives, chefs and community leaders in Richmond, Baltimore, New Orleans, Lakeview, VT, Kansas City, Spokane, Auburn, Alabama, Boulder, Columbus, OH, Madison, WI, Atlanta, and other spots across the country committed to a more sustainable future. The story with the most comments and community response was the very first piece in the series, one I wrote on the growing food movement in Indianapolis, “Hoosier Food: Watching the Food Movement Grow in Indianapolis“.

I hope to see more stories, from more cities, burbs, hamlets and towns in 2010. Keep sending them in! My personal goal is to cover at least one project in every municipality in America!

Paula, our tireless managing editor, reported regularly in her “Roof Garden Rookies” series on the growth and development of the garden she started on top of her lower Manhatten apartment building. The most viewed piece was “Building Raised Beds”. Her garden was also featured in the New York Times.

Out of our involvement with Civil Eats, some of us initiated Kitchen Table Talks, a monthly food forum in San Francisco, which has become a wonderful way to take the conversation off-line and into the community. We held six conversations in 2009 with topics ranging from local school food issues to our most recent conversation on the ever debatable topic of genetically modified foods. That conversation brought together over 60 people in a performance space in the Mission District. You can read about it here.

Look for more from Kitchen Table Talks in 2010. We are thriving and have just secured a permanent home on Valencia Street. We hope to engage more people, from more parts of the city and are grateful for the help of the following, without whom it would not be possible to keep KTT alive: Sam Mogannam and Bi-Rite Market for all their catering donations and support, the folks at SUB-Mission Gallery, Sagan-Piechota and Paul Arenstam and his staff at the Hotel Vitale each for graciously hosting us through the year. And, many thanks to all of our wonderful community speakers.

And, now for a short list, just five, of our most popular, discussed and impactful stories of 2009:

1. “Tests Find Wide Range of Bisphenol A in Canned Soups, Juice, and More” by Naomi Starkman. With 26 comments and by far most views (11,243), we are grateful for Naomi’s continued contributions on this topic. We actually broke this news on Civil Eats thanks to the fact that Naomi (who is one of our founding editors) works directly on this issue as a food policy media consultant. Thanks to her, we were able to get this crucial update about a harmful chemical into the media quickly. There has been much interest in BPA and we reported on this early in the year (“Bisphenol A: More Body Burden News“) and as the story progressed (“Bumping Up the Ban on BPA“) and when Chicago became the first city to ban it. [And we're still waiting on FDA to announce their decision on BPA.]

2. Since we’ve established that we do not shy away from complex problems and issues, we were happy to report that the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future recognized the Baltimore City Public Schools with the 2009 CLF Award for “Visionary Leadership in Local Food Procurement and Food Education”. The inspiring story of their journey is detailed in “School Lunch Revolution Blossoms in Baltimore” by Ralph Loglisci.

3. In the transforming suburban America files, we proudly published this piece by architect Forrest Fulton: “Inventing the Suburban Farm”.

4. Of course, we love getting dirty in the kitchen too. Eve Fox’s “The Art of Canning: A How-To” was the most popular. (And, a good new year’s resolution for those of us who haven’t tried it – I’m talking to myself here!)

5. And, finally, Paula wrote a piece about the agribusiness response to the film Food, Inc., which made waves by lifting the veil from the food system this year. In “Food, Inc. Gets Rave Reviews, Big Ag Shudders” she lays to rest the tired attacks of elitism and on how the film portrays farmers, then goes on to discuss some of the pivotal political battles currently being waged around food.

Of course, there were so many other stories we could highlight, including:
“Tomato Disappointment: A Farmer’s Perspective on Late Blight in the Northeast” by MK Wyle and, “The Revolution Will Not Be (Petrochemically) Fertilized” by Kerry Trueman, and “There is No Box: Big Ideas About Urban Agriculture and Local Food Systems” by Rose Hayden-Smith, and “Why I Disagree with Thomas Keller, and What Local Food Teaches Me” by Aaron French, and “Food Desert Dispatches: Building a Just Food System for the First Time” by LaDonna Redmond – but we wouldn’t want to overwhelm you.

Happy, peaceful, beautiful holidays and we look forward to your contributions in 2010.

I was amazed when I opened my New York Times yesterday, after a busy Sunday working at the café. The first face I saw when I pull the paper out of its blue plastic wrapper was that of Alice Waters, gracing the cover of the Sunday Business section. The superb accompanying article by Andrew Martin raises the question of whether the sustainable food movement is ready for the visibility it is getting these days.

According to the article, Michael Pollan doesn’t think so:

Mr. Pollan, who contributes to The New York Times Magazine, likens sustainable-food activists to the environmental movement in the 1970s. Though encouraged by the Obama administration’s positions, he worries that food activists may lack political savvy.

“The movement is not ready for prime time,” he says. “It’s not like we have an infrastructure with legislation ready to go.”

While I entirely agree with him, I think this is perhaps the wrong question. My question is: does a grass-roots movement that is focused on re-localization and de-centralization of our food system need a centralized infrastructure in the first place?

Consider this: currently over 85% of large food manufacturing companies have a sustainability program in place. While it is certainly true that they are primarily focusing on “Sustainability 1.0” programs of waste and energy reduction, the fact is that Big Food is starting to take notice. And the reason they are taking notice is because people are increasingly choosing the most sustainable and green products that they think they can afford.

And this is why the NYT Sunday Business section decided to devote a full page and a half to the topic – because sustainable food is the food of the future. From my perspective, that makes the question a tautology. The cover of the Sunday Business section is prime time.

As is the recent 60 Minutes profile of Alice Waters that was discussed in the article. Her segment was followed by a deluge of discussion online and on the airwaves about the role she has played in creating this movement.

Lesley Stahl began the piece with a loaded statement, saying “When it comes to food, Alice Waters is a legend. At age 64, she has done more to change how we Americans eat, cook and think about food than anyone since Julia Child.” Provocative stuff, for a foodie.

Personally, I believe that Ms. Stahl is right. I was born in the same month that Chez Panisse opened, in August of 1971.  Nearly four decades later, I now run a café less than two miles from that honored institution. In that time I have seen first-hand how fresh local hand-crafted food has gone from being a fringe-of-the-fringe movement to where we are now.

As a infant and small child, I lived on a farm commune in the California foothills.  Later, my Mom bought a small farm on the outskirts of Sacramento, where we raised rabbits and chickens for food, and had a mixed vegetable and fruit garden year round.  Growing up, eating locally wasn’t a way of life or a political statement, it simply meant harvesting the days eggs and vegetables, maybe skinning a rabbit to roast, and perhaps pulling some apples or winter squash stored in the shed.

Being a farmer was definitely not culturally accepted where I lived.  As a child I didn’t appreciate it much – especially when asked to explain the roasted rabbit leg in my lunch bag during elementary school.  A rabbit leg was definitely a 4^th grade conversation stopper.  And my sister and I would get heckled, even pelted with stones, by passers-by when we would forget to change out of our knee-high mud boots before going to the local store.

We sold our eggs door to door around the neighborhood, to the Sacramento Natural Foods Coop, and later to a new crop of gourmet markets that were opening up in the early 1980’s. I remember clearly one spring when one of these markets asked if we could harvest our vegetables smaller. Smaller, we asked? Yes, they said, the new trend was for baby vegetables. We happily obliged. It wasn’t until much later that I learned this trend was in no small part the result of Alice Waters’ personal taste for Chez Panisse.

The impact of Waters’ choices has been discussed and dissected at great length in various articles and books. But I personally think that it is simply that she has kept her vision true and steady for so many years that her impact is so great. Restaurants come and go in America, even the great ones. A great 40-year old restaurant is a rare thing, indeed. And to have a venerated restaurant that forged long-standing relationships with farmers, ranchers and foragers directly has done more than a little to raise the respect they receive. Little by little. Year by year.

After university I specialized in tropical biology and worked and lived for about ten years in some of the most remote places on the globe, and I savored the local foods wherever I went.  In Brazil I feasted on flank steak from a cow butchered fresh that morning.  In Hawaii I spent the day digging a hole and slow roasting stuffed wild boar.  In Cameroon I learned to appreciate wild porcupine stew.  I lived with people naturally in their small villages while studying the local ecology, and ate what they ate.

It was the Cameroonian Baka and the forest they live in that truly changed my appreciation for food.  One of the world’s oldest surviving hunter-gatherer peoples, the Baka became my friends and guides in the African forest for nearly two years.  For my Masters research, I spent thousands of hours looking through binoculars and scopes observing natural animal feeding behavior.

One day, my Baka guide Michelle came across some edible wild fruit, and started gorging himself on them.  I ate a few – deep red, juicy like an orange, and flavored like a vitamin-C bomb in your mouth – delicious.  I then asked if we shouldn’t bring some back for the rest of the camp.  He laughed, and said “No, if they are here today they are everywhere tomorrow.  Enjoy them like the birds you’ve been watching.  Mangez comme les oiseaux. Eat like the birds.” Eat what is in season. Now. There is no reason to wait, he was saying.

Many years later, my life has come full circle.  Now I can offer rabbit legs for lunch at a popular café without scorn.  My farming childhood has become culturally accepted and even admired – a radical departure from my youth.

The fact that a festival like Slow Food Nation could have been created is due in large part to those various social / cultural forces I have lived with all my life – only now they are starting to become integrated from the edge to the mainstream.

And I know that this integration, which I appreciate so dearly, is possible in no small part to that restaurant born in the same month as me back in 1971 on a sleepy street in Berkeley.  (Thanks Alice).