There’s nothing like sitting in an audience and getting goose bumps listening to a great visionary tell it the way it is. They say lightening doesn’t strike twice, but when I heard Prince Charles’s speech that day, I felt the same kind of jolt I got the first time I saw Al Gore’s slide show on global warming. Gore’s power point stood out because it was the clearest, most concise explanation of our climate crisis I had ever heard.

Now, another elder statesman, Prince Charles, is boldly speaking out about another crisis that we urgently need to address. With eloquent words, clarity and heartfelt passion, the prince explained, what’s gone so terribly wrong with our food chain–and what we can do to make it right.

The prince’s speech was both terrifying and uplifting. Terrifying, because we really have screwed up our food system and our food system is, as a result, screwing us up our health, our environment, our climate.

But the speech was ultimately uplifting because, as the prince noted, “There are alternative ways to grow our food … which would go a very long way to resolving some of the problems we face.”

It was truly impressive to see Prince Charles use his considerable clout to promote a vision for a more ecologically enlightened food system. He has been living and breathing these issues for decades, a brave public voice against massive, aggressive interests. I was so inspired that I wanted to help the prince’s speech find a wider audience. Happily, the folks at Rodale Books, assisted by the Grace Foundation and Patrick Holden, shared my enthusiasm and helped publish it.

The Prince’s Speech is actually more of a booklet–just 48 pages, even counting the moving forward from Wendell Berry and an equally inspiring afterward from Will Allen and Eric Schlosser.

It’s a lovely paperback with a cover that manages to evoke both Michael Pollan and Peter Rabbit (thank you, Kelly Doe). You could breeze through it on your lunch break or read it in an evening, and you’d be up to speed on all the ways you can support a saner, less fossil-fueled food chain and as Prince Charles declares, “put Nature back at the heart of the equation.”

It won’t be easy. But, as The Prince’s Speech emphasizes, we can still do this, we do not have to continue to do things the same old way, especially since we can clearly see it is unsustainable. This booklet is truly a labor of love, so I think it’s only fitting that its official publication date is Valentine’s Day. As a friend said to me recently, “I like that it’s being released on February 14, because it’s like a love poem to the future.”

Please read this booklet, share it with friends and family, tweet, talk, and blog about it, buy copies and hand them out, do whatever you can to help spread the word. Because the future of food is the future of us all. Learn more at OnTheFutureofFood.org.

Originally published on Huffington Post

All organizations have to make decisions about from whom they are willing to take money and under what terms. Some groups will take money from any corporation that gives it to them, believing that they can do better things with the money than the company can. Other organizations are more selective, only taking money from those aligned with their mission. Yet Growing Power’s acceptance of this contribution and CEO Will Allen’s statement on his blog present some crucial dilemmas for the movement. Will writes: “We, as a society, can no longer refuse to invite big corporations to the table of the Good Food Revolution… We can no longer be so idealistic that we hurt the very people we’re trying to help. Keeping groups that have the money and the power to be a significant part of the solution away from the Good Food Revolution will not serve us.”

Let’s unpack this situation first by looking at Wal-Mart. It is the largest food retailer in America capturing one of every three grocery dollars spent. Yet, Wal-Mart has little room for growth in suburban and rural communities. Urban areas remain its great untapped market. The company has been kept out of cities because of concerns about its labor and environmental practices and its negative impacts on independent stores.

Wal-Mart has adopted a sophisticated and integrated business strategy, employing both highly publicized but modest changes to their practices and their enormous philanthropic capacity to co-opt opposition to their entry into cities. Earlier this year, the Boston Globe reported on this practice: “She [the new Executive Director of Wal-Mart Foundation] has also become an ambassador for the world’s most powerful retail machine, helping to burnish its image and lay the groundwork for its push into urban markets–including Boston.”

“Such charitable giving shows how sophisticated Wal-Mart has become in wooing communities,” said Russ Davis, executive director of MA Jobs with Justice. ‘They’re throwing a lot of money around,” Davis said. “They have a desire to buy goodwill, and for actual business and political decisions to happen as a result.”

In the other part of this strategy, Wal-Mart claims to be changing its operating practices to accommodate our movement’s concerns. They announced that they will start buying produce from local farmers. They’ll discount their produce and reformulate their house brands to reduce sodium. And, they’ll even build more stores in urban food deserts.

Looking behind Wal-Mart’s press releases, we find significant reason for skepticism—and little transparency—about these claims. It is common knowledge that Wal-Mart demands its suppliers to charge them rock bottom prices, which are not economically viable for family scale farmers. With regards to sodium reduction in their products, one highly placed official at Kraft told me, “Wal-Mart is far behind the competition. Other food manufacturers have been working in this area for years.” With regards to their apparently altruistic intentions to build in food deserts, this is little more than a Trojan horse packaged in shiny PR gift wrap.

Back to Growing Power’s blog: Will claims that Wal-Mart can be a “significant part of the solution.”

A solution to what problem? Wal-Mart’s and the “Good Food Revolution’s” interests may dovetail in bringing groceries into food deserts. However, the broader interests of these two parties are in direct opposition to each other. Wal-Mart’s operations cause larger problems to the food security of the communities in which they locate:

• The spectre of Wal-Mart moving into urban areas has other supermarket chains running scared, leading them to demand cutbacks in wages and benefits of their unionized workers across America.

• Wal-Mart is undermining the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ campaign to improve farmworker conditions in the tomato fields of South Florida.

• Every new store further skews the concentration of wealth in the country; the combined fortune of the heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton total $87 billion, over $30 billion more than Bill Gates.

• Each Wal-Mart store, averaging 200 employees, costs taxpayers approximately $420,750 annually in public social services used by store employees. Multiplied by the chain’s 3,800 stores, this translates into a burden on taxpayers of $1.6 billion annually.

Given the tight funding environment, NGO boards and executive directors are often faced with compromises that they wish they didn’t have to confront. They are often forced to become pawns in someone else’s game in order to meet their organizational needs. That is just the reality of fundraising in a society where corporations control much of the wealth.

Nonetheless, we in the movement don’t have to define our game as including those entities whose practices undermine our long-term goals, despite the convergence in short-term more narrowly defined objectives. In plain language, Wal-Mart is NOT part of the “Good Food Revolution,” because at the end of the day it hurts communities more than it helps them.

Let’s not be so idealistic about the power relations between our movement and multi-national corporations that, as Will Allen, says, “We hurt the very people we’re trying to help.”

Last week, right in time for fall harvest, I found myself in the company of Will Allen, an urban farming pioneer, Annie Novak,  co-founder of the country’s first commercial rooftop farm, Fritz Haeg, an edible landscaper, and 1,500 others at the first international urban and small farm conference. The weekend was hosted by Will Allen and his organization Growing Power, an educational farm organization that he founded in a food-desert neighborhood of Milwaukee 18 years ago.

Retracing my steps to Milwaukee: a few months ago, in time for spring planting, I had seen the same three urban-agriculturalists speak in New York City. I had left that evening with the strongest desire to change the world that I had ever felt: All I had to do was plant something green.

That night in New York, Will Allen said that there are enough people talking about growing food, but not enough growers. Even though the closest thing I had to farming were the articles I occasionally wrote about it, I responded by joining Annie Novak’s apprentice team at Eagle St. Rooftop Farm. Suddenly, my mostly sedentary Brooklyn life was filled with kale planting, chicken feeding, delivering produce to restaurants via bicycle, and picking up buckets of coffee grounds from local cafes for composting. Moreover, it was filled with a community of eco-agriculturalists, who were propagating my northeast surroundings with inspiring projects.

As summer went on and plants reached up to my waist, my desire to delve deeper into the agricultural field solidified. But, the question of whether this still small world of alternative farming was a solid field grew, too. The Growing Power conference was all the proof I needed to rid that doubt. The mere fact that over a hundred speakers deemed it worthwhile to trek out to the Wisconsin fairgrounds for a weekend and over a thousand audience members parted with the nearly $300 attendance fee shows that something fertile is growing. It shows that the official conference shirt, with its fistful of worms raised in the air and the words “The Good Food Movement is Now a Revolution” is not just Will’s fantasy but the reality that everyone doing “good food” work must face.

The gathering took place at “Ag Village” a remote corner of the Wisconsin fairgrounds devoted to agricultural events. It seemed the perfect setting: a recognition of the already existing and deep-stretching agricultural roots, and a positive and radical addition to them. The conference had many moments like that, ones that seemed almost normal, and yet, revolutionary. The buffet, for example, consisted of–among other items–300 pounds of wild rice, gathered by harvesters at the White Earth Reservations in northern Minnesota. Growing Power had supplied the greens, and meat came from Richard Cates, a Wisconsin dairy and livestock farmer who opens his land for Growing Power students to explore. Cutlery was indeed disposable, as one would expect at a conference, and yet, trash was divided into three containers and all dishware went into the bin with the banana peel taped to it–compost. There was merchandise for sale–it included worm poop, Milwaukee urban honey, and shirts with phrases like “I heart worms.” Seeds and liquid fish fertilizer were given out for free, as samples.

Will’s purpose in bringing these people together was to collect all the fragmented warriors of the revolution and encourage them to work with one another. For the purpose of building well-rounded troops, Will invited a diverse range of folks, not just farmers and educators, but government representatives, urban planners, social activists, the medical community, and members of the corporate world among many others. By the end of the three days of actively discussing the state and future of sustainable agriculture and overwhelming amounts of skill sharing in breakout workshops, it became clear that the good food army is not only real but strong too.

Will believes that the energy created, or rather, harnessed by the conference must now be taken back to communities. “We have this wonderful thing called food that we have to eat. My family’s legacy is to make sure that everybody eats good and everybody has access to the same healthy, affordable, good, food, that is culturally appropriate,” said Will. “The food that’s going to help our gardens, the food that’s going to help our youth.”

He emphasized that this is not the start of the revolution, but rather, a point of continuing. He said all are in it, since all are united by food. And, most importantly, that there is space for everyone to be involved. He reminded us that job creation is an essential factor to consider because the food revolution is a new industry. I thought back to my spring desire to plant. Planting something green, I realized, had little to do with the possession of a green-thumb; instead, it was using whatever thumbs are available for the growth of a healthy food system, from supporting local farmer’s markets, to starting healthy school lunch programs, to–yes–putting hands into the soil.

There is space for more rooftop farms and subterranean farms (like aquaponics), vertical farms (like the five story one that Growing Power is planning on building in Milwaukee) and good old-fashioned horizontal ones. Space for more partnerships with hospital, government organizations, corporate philanthropists.

There is space for amazing leaders. They are inclusive and ever-willing to train new forces. The conference–and the general way of communication in this field–allows for someone like me, an incredibly novice farmer, to spend time with my heroes, ask them endless silly questions, and in the case of Annie Novak, to even become friends. I share my story not to pat myself on the back, but to give credit to people like Will, whose simple statement made all the sense in the world and was a direct call to action; or Annie, who provides Brooklyn with such a beautiful model of a healthy food system and a space where aspiring farmers can learn. Revolutionary indeed, and yet so heirloom.

Photo: Annie Novak, Will Allen and Fritz Haeg at the Growing Power Urban Agriculture Conference

I go to a really cool school. We have two beehives and a 7,000 square foot greenhouse, which used to be an old greenhouse, but is now recycled and updated for our use. I love walking in when the seedlings are growing because it smells alive—I can’t really describe the smell as anything other than a mix of dirt, beans and tomatoes. We now share the greenhouse with The Food Project of Boston. They grow food for people who are hungry.

Because I am interested in farming and animals and I go to this cool school I decided to start a Farm Club. I asked my smart science teacher if she would help us get going and she said, “Of Course!” Our winter discussions focused on what we should do for Farm Club and our approach for executing our plan. What should we cover? How should we use the greenhouse? Should Farm Club be about food, animals, soil, or all of it?

First, I thought we would start with learning about soil. That’s why we started vermicomposting, but then I realized I was probably the only one who thought worms and worm poop was amazing. I learned about vermicomposting from Will Allen at Growing Power. He takes food waste from Milwaukee and gives it to his worms to turn it into something useful: rich powerful soil to grow food in.

Our Farm Club met on Wednesdays in the Spring Semester. To my surprise, Farm Club was the first club to fill up. I’d like to credit farming curiosity as the reason why kids were so excited, but I really think most thought we were going to have baby sheep, chickens, and lambs—a “farm” classroom of cute baby animals. I hope they weren’t disappointed. Even I can admit that worm poop just isn’t the same as a cute baby duck.

So, what do we do in Farm Club? Well, we:

• Vermicompost of all of our leftover lunch food;
• Plant vegetable seeds and organize a seedling sale (instead of a bake sale);
• Bring rain barrels (with the money raised) to water the greenhouse;
• Let my home chickens graze and fertilize around the greenhouse;
• Support a home-made bee garden to help our bees; and
• Have fun together talking about bees, worms, vegetables, and pollination.

Next year it’s going to be different. I hope we will be able to operate all year long, so our projects can be longer than a few months. Also, my school added tilapia aquaponics to our greenhouse, so we will be able to work with fish.

People ask me if I wanted to start Farm Club to get kids to eat better. Nope. Not at all. I selfishly wanted to start it because bees, chickens, and fresh food is cool and I thought some of the other kids would think so too, if they had the opportunity to get involved with the club. I also wanted kids to think about where their food comes from (especially related to factory farms).

Has Farm Club changed any of my classmates’ minds about food or the treatment of farm animals? I think so. I know for a fact that when you grow a vegetable yourself it tastes better. The tomatoes in the supermarket aren’t tomatoes. They may look like a tomato, but they don’t taste like one. No wonder kids hate vegetables—the ones at the supermarket taste terrible.

Also, I think by meeting my amazing hens (I raise them at home), kids thought about what eating chicken really means. I don’t want kids to feel bad about eating meat, I just want them to think about it. Remember meeting my hen Sweet Sugar, just remember. I personally think you can taste the torture from factory-farmed meat. But Farm Club isn’t about telling people how I feel about local, sustainable agriculture. I just want to introduce my school to these awesome animals and fresh produce and let every person decide for himself why farming is cool.

Photos: Libby DeLana

If you think diabetes and obesity are the two biggest health care crises Americans face these days, you’re missing the forest for the trees — literally. Because the roots of all this diet-induced disease lie in two less publicized but even more pernicious epidemics: nature deficit disorder and kitchen illiteracy.

The symptoms include a woeful lack of familiarity with that elusive culinary commodity known as “real food,” or “good food,” or “slow food,” and total estrangement from Mother Earth — who, by the way, keeps hanging around outside pining for a glimpse of you while you remain indoors, mesmerized by your monitor or TV screen and mindlessly munching on ersatz edibles.

Do you have no idea what you’re actually eating, where it came from, or how it was grown? You may suffer from one or both of these maladies. Are you fearful of naked food that’s not encased in microwave-friendly packaging? Petrified by perishable produce that demands any sort of prep?

Perhaps you’d buy the new wearable feedbag that lets Americans eat more and move less, or sample Taco Bell’s new “green” menu with no ingredients from nature, if these products existed outside the fertile imaginations of the Onion’s writers.

If we weren’t so divorced from nature, we’d give a rat’s ass — make that a double rat’s ass — about all those freaky deformed frogs that have been sprouting extra legs in recent decades, and the sexually deformed fish that started popping up in the Potomac a few years back.

As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof pointed out in his column last Sunday and again on Thursday’s Colbert Report, scientists increasingly suspect that “a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors, very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products,” may be contributing to a scary hodgepodge of health problems in people as well as the disturbing rise in anatomical anomalies in frogs and fish.

Kristof cites a “landmark” 50-page statement from the Endocrine Society which presents “evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology.” The statement adds:

I wrote back in 2006 that the EPA had identified endocrine disruption as one of its top six research priorities in 1996. But, a decade later, they had yet to begin testing any candidate chemicals for their endocrine-disrupting potential. Kristof notes that “for now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed.”

Sure, you could try to minimize your exposure to these apparent toxins by growing some of your own food without using pesticides and chemicals. But as our farming First Lady’s recently discovered, the ground you’re cultivating might be tainted anyway, because the chemicals and contaminants we’ve thoughtlessly dispersed into our air, soil and water in recent decades have a way of lingering.

Our obliviousness to the hazards of a chemically dependent food system have allowed these toxins to accrete in our environment — and our bodies — for far too long. But now, growing tomatoes has replaced throwing tomatoes as a form of protest: millions of Americans are looking to opt out of our toxic food chain by trying to grow some of
their own food this year, many for the first time.

If we truly hope to create an alternative food system, though, many more of us will have to roll up our sleeves and get digging. As urban ag pioneer and MacArthur genius Will Allen told Elizabeth Royte in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “We need 50 million more people growing food on porches, in pots, in side yards.”

Royte notes the inherent challenges for advocates of urban agriculture:

But the edible landscaping trend is taking root wherever there’s soil, and even where there isn’t, with the help of exhibits like the New York Botanical Garden’s Edible Garden, which just opened last weekend and runs through September 13th.

The Edible Garden exhibitions include a Good Food Garden, a Seed Savers Heirloom Vegetable Garden, and a Beginner’s Vegetable Garden, along with a half dozen other edible landscape-related exhibits. Rosalind Creasy, whose essential but long-out-of-print book Edible Landscaping has a new edition coming out in 2010, thankfully, designed the Heirloom Vegetable Garden. Other homegrown heroes like Kitchen Gardeners International founder Roger Doiron and Slow Food USA‘s new president Josh Viertel will be among the featured speakers at events taking place over the course of the summer.

If I may borrow from Stephen Colbert, I’d like to give a tip of the hat to cookware company Anolon, a major sponsor of the NYBG Edible Garden exhibition whose own Creating a Delicious Future campaign seeks to remedy kitchen illiteracy by fostering “a return to eating delicious foods prepared simply at home using fresh, seasonal, local ingredients.”

The exhibition’s other major sponsor, Scott’s Miracle Gro, gets a wag of the finger: hey, guys, great way to greenwash the profits from all those pesticides the EPA has ordered you to take off the shelves.

Another wonderful edible gardening program to which I’ll gladly give a shout-out is the Giving Through Growing campaign sponsored by Robert Mondavi’s Woodbridge Winery in partnership with The American Community Gardening Association. Woodbridge is donating $40,000 this year to the ACGA to help provide “educational tools, leadership training, and community building strategies to participants in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles.” As the Giving Through Growing website notes, the ACGA estimates that over 2,000 new community gardens will be established this year, on top of the 20,000 existing community gardens.

The Giving Through Growing program encourages you to send virtual “eSeeds” to your friends, and for every eSeed that’s planted, Woodbridge will donate a dollar to the ACGS. It’s a pretty painless way to show support for the folks who are greening our urban spaces.

Those of us who garden understand that food waste can either become “black gold,” i.e. soil-enriching compost, or be shipped off to the landfill where it rots and generates methane, a particularly potent greenhouse gas. Animal manures, too, can be a blessing to a farmer who raises his livestock on pasture, where the manure returns fertility to the soil as it has for centuries.

But when you crowd farm animals into what Jon Stewart aptly dubbed “an Abu Ghraib of animals” on Thursday’s Daily Show in his interview with Food, Inc.‘s Robert Kenner, the massive quantities of manure that result become an environmental disaster.

And when you saturate the soil with synthetic chemicals to grow resource-intensive commodity crops, you deaden and deplete it.

This, then, is the fundamental difference between sustainable agriculture and intensive industrial food production. The first method enriches the soil; the other ultimately ruins it. Destroy the soil, and you destroy your civilization.

Will Allen predicts that 10 million people will plant gardens for the first time this year. But, as he told Elizabeth Royte, “two million of them will eventually drop out,” when they get discouraged by pests and insufficient rain — or too much.

That’s OK; 8 million new gardeners still adds up to a revolution. So grab your trowel and start digging for democracy. Let’s overthrow the cornarchy this 4th of July!

Cross-posted from The Green Fork.

Urban agriculturist Will Allen recognized a need for the delivery of healthy foods to underserved, urban populations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he lives. In 1993, he started working with neighborhood children on a gardening project. It was there that he planted the seeds for the farming methods and educational programs that would become the non-profit, Growing Power, that he now runs, and for which he is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship this year.

Allen’s organization focuses on low-income urban populations, who are most at risk for diabetes and obesity largely because they lack access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Growing Power’s farm sits on two acres within Milwaukee’s city limits. It was important to bring the farm itself into the urban setting, to serve as a tool for children and adults, re-building the community and teaching individuals new ideas about food. This includes connecting people to Community Supported Agriculture programs, and setting up internships and workshops on the farm to provide hands-on training for those interested in establishing similar farming initiatives elsewhere.

It’s catching on, too. In 2002, Growing Power started initiative in Chicago, and are now developing national training centers in cities across the country.