It’s well known that Detroit has been hard hit by the economic crisis—it’s unemployment rate is a staggering 28%—but it also has one of the most well-developed urban agriculture scenes in the country. Over the past decade, resourceful Detroiters and organizations such as DBCFSN have been converting the city’s vacant lots and fallow land into lush farms and community gardens. According to the Greening of Detroit, there are now over 1,351 gardens in the city.

I spoke to Yakini, one of the leaders of Detroit’s vibrant food justice movement, about the problem with the term “food desert,” how Detroit vegans survive the winter, and what the DBCFSN is doing to change the food landscape in Detroit. “We’re really making an effort to reach beyond the foodies—to get to the common folk who are not really involved in food system reform,” says Yakini.

Tell me about the origins of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network.

It grew out of some earlier work. I was principal of an African-centered charter school in the Detroit area called Nsoroma Institute Public School Academy. In 2000 we started doing organic gardening on a serious level and developed a food security curriculum. That initial garden evolved into something we called the Shamba Organic Garden Collective, where we had parents and teachers planting gardens in their backyards and in vacant lots next to their houses.

We had a team called the groundbreakers who would go out and till peoples’ gardens for them—because that was the most labor-intensive part. We had about 20 gardens spread out over the city as part of this collective. And as the work continued to grow, we were looking for a way to expand it and involve more people. Informally, the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network grew out of this work.

In February of 2006, I called together a group of 40 people who I knew were either gardeners, chefs, raw foodists—people who had some connection to food—for the purposes of starting the DBCFSN.

One of the main activities of the organization is to influence public policy. Is there a political leader in Detroit who has become a powerful advocate for the food justice movement and has helped push through laws that protect community gardeners and promote food security?

The one who has been most supportive has been councilwoman JoAnn Watson. And councilman Kwame Kenyatta has been supportive as well. In fact, it’s through JoAnn Watson that we were able to have the City Council approve the Food Security Policy that our organization wrote. She was able to give us the traction we needed to get the City Council to appoint members of the Detroit Food Policy Council.

What policy goals are the DBCFSN working on right now?

The big issue right now in Detroit is creating ordinances to regulate urban agriculture. There’s a big impediment and that’s a state law called “the Right to Farm Act.” Essentially it says no municipality has the authority to create ordinances that regulate agriculture within their jurisdiction, because of this state law that supersedes it. Just last week there was a bill introduced to the Michigan house to exempt Detroit from the Michigan Right to Farm Act, which was passed in the early 1980s. It was passed to protect rural farmers from suburban sprawl and from complaints from people who were moving into rural areas where farming was taking place, who wanted it to be like a city. So the law was to protect the farmers, but it didn’t anticipate the urban agriculture movement we have now.

At this point, our policy work is primarily done through our involvement in the Detroit Food Policy Council. Our farm manager is a member of the Michigan Food Policy Council. So we are trying to move policy forward through our involvement in those two organizations.

Do you think there’s a chance the Michigan legislature will pass this bill?

It’s a question of building the proper coalition on a statewide level. We have to find a way to get enough Michigan state legislators to vote for that exemption. But that’s challenging because Michigan is a very large agricultural state. In fact, it has the greatest diversity of crops outside of California. But most of what is grown in Michigan, like every other state in the United States, is corn and soybeans. And so these corn and soy farmers are not the natural allies of the sustainable ag folks in Detroit. It’s gonna take some networking across traditional interests in order to build the kind of support politically that we’d need to get an exemption.

Flint and Grand Rapids have very large urban ag movements, too, and they’re handcuffed in the same way. So there are some natural allies out there. But in order to move this thing forward we have to have some allies in rural Michigan—the traditional farmers.

Does that mean that urban farmers in Detroit are technically defying the law right now?

There’s a woman on the Food Policy Council who is an employee of the City Planning Commission. She says there are some things that are illegal and some things that are unlawful. It’s illegal to have farm animals like cows in the city of Detroit—there’s a law prohibiting that. But there are other things like bees that the law doesn’t speak to specifically. So there’s no law that permits it and there’s also not a law that prohibits it. It’s not lawful but it’s not illegal. So we’re kind of caught in this grey area right now.

It’s been estimated that Detroit has about 6,000-10,000 acres that are vacant—that’s about a third of the city. So you have a lot of commercial interests beginning to look at Detroit as a place to do agriculture. Because the city doesn’t have the ability to regulate it right now, we don’t have the ability to say to these large commercial interests that we don’t feel that this scale of agriculture is appropriate for Detroit. Getting the exemption from the Right to Farm Act would allow Detroit to define what is appropriate in terms of scale and in terms of things like composting.

What about policy on the national level. Does the DBCFSN have any position on the farm bill?

Several of us have been involved in webinars and meetings to bring us up to speed on the farm bill. But we haven’t actively taken a position as a group.

We’re more focused on local policy. After studying the farm bill over the last several months, I have a concern about what it takes to build the type of support nationally, across various interests, to get anything passed in the farm bill. It’s much easier to build that level of consensus on a local or state-wide basis.

I think big ag will continue to get billion dollar subsidies. Some of the things that were added in the last farm bill were good: Our organization got a hoop house from the USDA as a result. But when you look at a hoop house that cost $8,000 and maybe there are 5-10 of ‘em in Detroit, that’s $40,000 to $80,000. But then you’re looking at billions of dollars that are going to these folks who are growing corn and soybeans.

So really, if we want to have a major impact on the food system in the United States, the paradigm has to be shifted. So that sustainable agriculture is incentivized and this unsustainable model of industrial farming is dis-incentivized. The best way to do that is through money. Of course, that is a big fight because the food lobby is one of the most powerful lobbies that exists. And I really haven’t heard answer of how you build the level of power, how you galvanize that level of support, on a national level.

The DBCFSN has a “What’s for Dinner?” lecture series. What speakers have you had and what are they about?

This year we had four lectures. The first was called “Is my garden legal?” by Kathryn Underwood, the woman who is on the Detroit Food Policy Council. She spoke about the laws or lack of laws regulating agriculture in Detroit. The second lecture was a guy named Kilindi Iyi and he’s a mycologist. His was on adding mushrooms to your garden and the technologies of growing mushrooms. The third lecture was the board president of our organization, Ife Kilimanjaro, and it dealt with the global food shortage and how that is a man-made phenomenon how it has been manipulated through these multinational companies that are are controlling much of the food supply. The final lecture was one I did on the impact of global warming on agriculture.

So this lecture series—as well as some of the other things we do—is geared towards raising public consciousness. Because we realize that it’s not just a question of greater access to food. But people have to have knowledge about the food, and have to have some understanding about why sustainable growing is better than the industrial food system that provides most of the food. They have to have some understanding about food culture. Because much of our traditional food culture has been lost over the past generation, due to the rush towards convenience in the post World War II period, and then the fast food proliferation which occurred in Detroit and other places throughout the country. Our families today rarely sit down and eat a meal that’s prepared from scratch. So there’s a lot of education that has to go on in order to support the growing of fresh produce. And creating markets in which to sell it. We have to increase demand at the same time as we’re increasing access.

Is D-Town Farm the DBCFSN’s only garden? Or do you have others?

We just have one location. We started out initially with two acres and we currently have seven acres—so it’s a pretty large project. We’re trying to stay focused and not have various locations around the city. Frankly we don’t have the capacity to manage that. Even managing the seven acres we have now is challenging!

We consider ourselves to be a model. Rather than trying to start gardens all around the city, what we’re doing is creating a learning institution where people who are interested in doing this work can come and learn various techniques and strategies that they can take back to their neighborhoods. So we see ourselves as a catalyst.

So the produce that’s grown at D-Town Farm—is it sold there at a farm stand or at Eastern Market?

We sell it at Eastern Market and also at a few farmers’ markets. We also sell to a few restaurants. We’re working on a project called “Take it to the Marketplace” that will put some of our products in grocery stores. It’ll be a producers’ co-op that we’ll be part of and we’ll invite other local food entrepreneurs to be part of. But it will sold under the D-Town brand. And we’ll collectively market and promote those products, and collectively distribute those products. So that’s our next move: to have locally grown options available at stores that people normally shop at.

Speaking of grocery stores, you said something interesting at the Community Food Security Coalition conference in Oakland: that implicit in researcher Mari Gallagher’s definition for “food desert” is the notion that grocery stores are the only solution to food deserts. In fact, what she and others including you stress is that multiple solutions are needed—farmers’ markets, food co-ops, urban farms. But don’t Detroit residents—even those who buy their food from D-town Farm—rely on grocery stores in the winter? Even with hoop house technology, you can’t possibly grow enough produce in the winter months for people to be food secure—can you?

Not at all. We don’t even grow enough in the ground in the summer to be self-sufficient. We’re producing a very small amount of the produce consumed in Detroit—probably less than 1 percent. We are at the embryonic stages. We think we have much greater capacity. But we’re nowhere near that point right now.

People are accustomed to going to grocery stores to buy food and they’re used to these large, pretty pieces of produce. Often, organic food is not as large and sometimes it has flaws. So we have to re-educate people about the aesthetics of food and the nutritional value of food, at the same time as we educate people about the value of eating whole foods.

We’re not self-sufficient even in the summer time—less so in the winter. We are producing food in the winter using hoop house technology, but of course you can only grow limited crops in the winter using hoop houses unless you have some external heating source. People are primarily growing salad greens, collards, kale, and things like that. They clearly aren’t growing peppers, tomatoes, and squash in the winter in hoop houses.

Without a full-service grocery store, where do you find sustainable dairy, meat, or bread? Does Detroit have any meat CSAs?

Because I’m a vegan, I haven’t done a lot of investigation about sources for eating meat and dairy. Although that’s my personal dietary preference, that’s clearly not the dietary preference of the majority of the people in Detroit. So since the majority of people do eat meat, we need to find ways of finding high quality meat at affordable prices. I’m very ignorant about what those options are, but that’s an area I intend to educate myself about in the near future.

But even as a vegan, it must be a challenge to find enough healthy food in Detroit in the winter. Do the locally-run bodegas in town—the “party stores”—have any fresh produce?

Unfortunately, many of us, particularly those of us who are trying to eat organic foods, have to leave the city to find those. I’m privileged enough to have an automobile. [Note: 1/5th of all Detroit households are car-less.] I’m able to drive the couple of miles from my house to get to Ferndale, where they have food outlets that sell organic food. They do sell some local produce but of course during the winter that selection is very limited. And so although I am dedicated to eating local foods, I’m not able to do that to the extent that I’d like to during the winter time.

I read an article that asserted that Detroit and Cleveland have plenty of corner stores, many of which sell produce. The USDA overlooks such stores when they designate a neighborhood a food desert. (They define supermarkets as grocery stores with at least $2 million in annual sales.) But don’t these so-called “fringe stores” sell mostly processed food, liquor and cigarettes?

There are small grocery stores in Detroit. Mari Gallagher’s 2007 study said there were something like 1,075 food outlets in the city of Detroit. The vast majority, though, are convenience stores or what we call party stores. The problem is that far too many of them sell food that is of an inferior quality, sometimes at inflated prices. And the sanitary conditions in the stores often leave something to be desired. I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush, because there are some very good independently-owned grocery stores in Detroit. A few. So I don’t want to leave the impression that they’re all terrible. Many of them are terrible. But even the decent ones aren’t selling organic produce. And for me, eating organically is very important.

Your friend Malik Shabazz of the Marcus Garvey movement has been videotaping some of the blatant health violations at “party stores” such as rat feces, and is reporting them to the Department of Public Health.

He’s also finding meats that have another label placed over the expiration label. He’s finding stores that are selling alcohol to minors. He’s documenting all of these things. His organization creates the kind of pressure and public scrutiny that’s needed to close down drug houses, too. It’s part of an overall effort to create a higher quality of life in Detroit’s African American community.

In Oakland, you cautioned that racism is prevalent in the food movement—that some white food activists will come into an African American community and tell them what to do. Can you give an example of a white food justice organization in Detroit who is a good ally of the DBCFSN, who works with you in a collaborative way?

The main ally we have is Earthworks Urban Farm. The manger there is Patrick Crouch. We do quite a few things together including participating in the “Undoing Racism in the Detroit Food System” initiative. They are probably our best predominantly white allies.

One of the goals of the DBCFSN is to promote healthy eating habits amongst Detroit’s youth. Any tips on how to do this? Kids can be tough critics.

When children are involved in growing food, they feel a sense of ownership. Like, “I grew that carrot, I planted those seeds.” That’s a big incentive right there. But also just bringing in fresh greens and having the kids taste them. Typically they enjoy it—they like it.

We have a youth program called Food Warriors youth development program that functions at Nsoroma. Also, there is a food security curriculum that’s woven into the fabric of the school. Every teacher has to have one lesson per week that has a food security tie-in. We look at food security in a very broad sense, not just in terms of providing access to food but we look at all aspects of the food system. With some of the younger children, rather than inundate them with a lot of theory, their food security lessons are more hands on. Preparing things, tasting them. Exposing them to foods that they don’t normally eat.

Healthy eating is part of the culture at the school—and it has been for some time. Gum, candy, and soda pop are not allowed in the building at all—either by students, staff, or parents. That’s been a long-standing policy. There’s a catering company that provides lunch every day. So we have whole grains—no white rice is served—it’s always brown rice. There’s no red meat served. And so we’ve created a cultural environment that is supportive of healthy eating. So the Food Warriors are building on a culture that already exists in the school.

What about public schools in Detroit? Are there people putting pressure on them to improve their food?

The food service director of Detroit Public Schools, Betti Wiggins, is very progressive. She was recently elected to the Detroit Food Policy Council and she’s very active in the food movement. She has reached out to local growers. Of course she’s working for a bureaucracy that slows down what she’d like to do. But there couldn’t be a better person in place pushing for this to happen.

She is involved in the farm-to-school movement and has piloted that in several schools in Detroit, and has encouraged several schools to start gardens. So she is a very strong ally in this movement.

What do you think of entrepreneur John Hantz, and this ambitious plan he has to create “the largest urban farm” in Detroit?

That is the inevitable question. All interviews lead to that question.

I find it to be problematic for several reasons. The first reason is because the city is 77% African American (according to the latest Census Data), and the key players in the Hantz project are white men. That’s problematic.

Secondly, they are not committed to organic agriculture. They propose some type of mixture of the traditional industrial farming model and sustainable techniques.

Thirdly—and most alarmingly—they don’t have any sense of using urban agriculture to empower communities. They are driven by the profit motive. The current urban ag movement is clearly steeped within the social justice movement and clearly is trying to empower people, communities, and community organizations. And none of that is on the radar of the Hantz project. So that is very troubling.

Although Mr. Hantz is proposing this very large farm, what a lot of people don’t know is that he’s proposing that only ten percent of what he grows is produce. The rest is Christmas trees! Most people think he’s going to have thousands of acres of tomatoes and peppers and lettuce, but that’s not the case.

Mr. Hantz has also said that really what he’s trying to do is create scarcity, thereby driving up the value of the land. At a public forum, someone said to him, “Well that sounds like a land grab.” And he said, “Yes, it is a land grab.” That’s another problem. There are major questions around use and ownership of land. And how land serves the common good as opposed as trying to serve the interests of wealthy individuals who are trying to make a profit.

Has he reached out to the black community in Detroit in any way?

After much criticism, there has been some reaching out to community members. But it seems to be an afterthought, after he received so much criticism. He’s also made overtures to me. I’ve been involved in a couple discussions about trying to sit down with him to understand more fully what he wants to do.

I have a good relationship with Mike Score, who is the president of Hantz Farms. Mike is the person who is leading the farm effort right now. He’s a legitimate farmer and an honorable human being with a very high level integrity. He and I have talked about trying to set up a meeting with Mr. Hantz and some of the key people in the urban ag movement. But Hantz has been resistant to meeting with a group of people.

You were awarded a two-year fellowship with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Do you mind my asking how you’re spending the $35,000 stipend? What project or projects are you working on?

I proposed a project called Be Black & Green. What I’m doing is video documentation of black farmers, gardeners and food activists throughout the country. I just posted an interview with David Hilliard (of the Black Panthers) that I shot in Oakland, and I have five others in the can that I’ll be posting soon. What I’m doing is creating a network of black farmers, gardeners and food activists so they can know each other. I’m also raising the profile of black farmers, gardeners, and food activists in the larger food movement.

We want to assert that black people have always been involved in agriculture in this country and we’ve always been involved in sustainable agriculture. And that we have as much claim to this movement as anybody else does. And so by telling these stories and really allowing others to tell their own stories, and raising the profile of of black people doing this work, I hope to help people understand the role that we play in this movement historically.

It’s out of the bag: kale is your favorite food. What’s your preferred way of preparing it?

Raw kale salad. I’m just addicted to it. I serve it with a special dressing: toasted sesame seed oil, nutritional yeast, cayenne pepper—those are three of the main ingredients. I can’t tell you the rest of the ingredients, but I can say that people really seem to like it.

What’s your definition of food justice?

Food justice is people being treated justly by all of the venues that they interact with to obtain food. The other part of food justice has to do with economic justice: that when people spend money on food, they need to derive some benefits from the money that they spend beside just trading food for money.

The money that they spend on food needs to enrich their community. In too many cases, we have wealth extraction strategies—where people spend money in their communities on food and money is taken out of their communities and creates jobs and wealth in other communities. So part of food justice is circulating the money that people spend on food in their community for their own benefit. It also has to do with simple things like people being spoken to respectfully at the places that they go to purchase food, with their human dignity being upheld. Having equal access to good food sources—that’s a big part of food justice. So I would say, the access piece is key, upholding peoples‘ dignity is key, and the economic justice part of it is key.

The post TFT Interview: Malik Yakini of Detroit’s Black Community Food Security Network appeared first on The Faster Times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the membership of Slow Food USA these days?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s your definition of food justice?

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

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

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

The post TFT Interview: Slow Food’s Josh Viertel appeared first on The Faster Times.

The post Marion Nestle on Chipotle: an Obesogenic Environment appeared first on The Faster Times.

What are Cleveland’s secrets for becoming a food justice utopia? I recently interviewed Cimperman to find out.

How did you get involved in food justice issues? It was Marge Misak at the Community Land Trust, Kristen Trolio, who is a community organizer and a farmers’ market pioneer, and Morgan Taggart from OSU land extension. In about 2002, they came to me about the garden on west 45th Street, St. Paul’s Patch, asking me how we could preserve both the garden and the housing next door. The developer was working behind everyone’s backs and told the community gardeners that it was city-owned land and zoned residential. He wanted to turn the garden into a parking lot and evict the family next door.

I had barely been on the council for a term—I had no clue about anything. They said, “The only way you’re going to change anything is if you change the zoning code.” I thought, well this sounds like a great idea, and these are people who I admire and trust. I’m learning from them. So we did it.

So all of a sudden people in the community started saying, “Hey, what about this? And what the hell are you doing about this?” It was the education of a Councilman. They started to pull me under their wings and say, “You don’t have to think about this now, but this is something you’re going to have to think about in five years.” We’re servants so we have to fix these things.

So, Cleveland really was the first city to pass an urban farm zoning law?

Well, we passed it in 2007. The only way to create justice in this situation was to create a permanent garden there—change the zoning of the community garden. So we start calling around—Portland, Boston, Seattle. No other cities of any size had such a law. That’s when we wrote the legislation ourselves. It ensures that no one can rip out the community’s investment overnight. After that, community gardens would come forward and say, “We’d like to zone our garden this way, too.” People think twice now about threatening gardeners because it’s there.

What other efforts is Cleveland taking to ensure that all residents have access to affordable healthy food?

A funny thing happened on the way to the community garden. There are so many people out there doing urban gardening and agriculture that it’s changed the tenor of the city. So much so that the City of Cleveland has said, “This is important enough for us to change laws. Now the city gives out $3,000 forgivable loans to market gardeners—more and more people are keeping their own chickens and bees. There are 250 community gardens that we know of and we think that there are an additional 75 that operate with some support from the city.

There’s also a strong agricultural ring around Cleveland and that has yielded a great farmers’ market situation. Amanda Dempsey, who is now managing Cleveland’s West Side Market, is the reason we’re having an international Public Markets Conference in Cleveland. I’m really proud of what Cleveland is doing.

All of Cleveland’s farmers’ markets now accept food stamps (aka SNAP benefits), right? That’s impressive. How did that come about?

John Mitterholzer at the Gund Foundation has a real passion for social agricultural justice. He came to me and said, “I’d like to fund a program to give people on food stamps an incentive to shop at farmers’ markets.” We meet, come up with an idea on four specific farmers’ markets which were willing to accept both EBT (the debit card for food stamps), and a $5 matching program. In some cases, the number of food stamp shoppers doubled. Then we did a study with John, on the zip codes around the farmers’ markets and showed the amount of money available if everybody with food stamps and WIC used the farmers’ market.

Farmers were like, “You mean, I get to go home with an empty truck? And I get to sell to people who really need this food?”

Everyone agreed it was a good idea but it had been kicked around for a decade. With the Gund Foundation and people in policy and politics like me backing it, it was hard for farmers’ markets to say no.

[Today, 14 of Cleveland’s 15 farmers’ markets accept food stamps and 13 are part of the EBT Incentive Program.]

You gave a rousing talk in May at the CFSC food policy conference in Portland, Oregon. Portland is often cited as a model for farm-to-school and urban agriculture. What can Cleveland take from Portland’s example?

I was out on Sauvie Island to visit Sauvie Island Organics and the Food Works youth gardening program. I saw four school buses pull up while I was there. If you want to educate kids in every way, that’s how you do it. I want to figure out how to do that in Cleveland. The conference was great—we got so many ideas and talked to so many people. There are many programs on the horizon in Portland—beautiful new public housing projects like New Columbia, which has a community garden called Seeds of Harmony. They’re opening up corner stores with affordable, healthy food like Village Market.

There’s a debate about whether or not it’s necessary to bring full-service grocery stores to food deserts. Some in the food justice world think you can you just bypass the big box grocery stores in favor of community gardens and family-run bodegas (that are stocked with lots of fresh produce). What are your thoughts on this?

In the 90’s, there were areas of Cleveland where there were 100 blocks where you couldn’t get fresh produce. The Department of Economic Development is working on changing that—they’re giving huge subsidies to local grocery store chains such as Dave’s (a family-owned chain with great labor relations).

Now we’re doing the bottoms-up approach. We have a pharmacy, Sheliga Drug, that’s started carrying a line of produce. They’re supported by the Ohio State extension. There’s a hardware store in a Latino community that has bins of apples, bananas, everything else. We’re definitely not where we need to be—but my opinion is that if we start from the grassroots, do the community gardens, family-owned shops and so on, somewhere heaven and earth will meet.

Tell me about the Healthy Cleveland Resolution. What part of it are you most excited about? What’s going to be the most controversial aspect?

We are going to have Dr. Anthony Iton, the doctor from Place Matters, come back to Cleveland, and we’re going to do a day-long session for thought leaders: politicians, foundation people, corporate folks.

What I’m really excited about is that our school system has shown itself to be very interested in food justice. They want to help us achieve a garden per five blocks, by reinstating this program that came from the Victory Garden movement. Cleveland was the leader in school gardens nationally back then. There’s a new book about it called Cleveland School Gardens by Joel Mader.

We’re also working with cafeterias, which are continuing their progression of sourcing healthier food.

The chief purchaser for the Cleveland Public School District was nominated for something called the Walnut Award. His name is Regis Balaban. He has figured out how to get sugared cereal out of the schools by getting wholesome cereal with skim milk and fresh fruit. He said to me, “Please don’t stop passing legislation.” I said, “It’s kind of funny you’re saying that to me, because you’re exempt from the stuff I’ve been pushing through.” But then he said, “I can use what you’re doing to force my providers to provide us with better food.” For me in terms of food justice, that’s kind of big.

At the CFSC Conference, you said that the life expectancy discrepancy between an African American community in Cleveland and the white community was 24 years. Fully half of those years were attributable to smoking and diet.

In neighborhoods with community gardens there is less crime. There are more people attending school. We have a high-rise in downtown Cleveland that’s 22 floors. There are about 24 seniors who live there—mostly African American. They’re petitioning me to purchase containers because they want a container garden on the rooftop. They left their homes, they like walking to the theatre without the burden of a mortgage.

It’s not specific to one community, though. The fact of the matter is that the neighborhood that has the 24 year disparity, Hough, is almost 100 percent African American. There are a lot of other issues, of course: violence, the ability to access health care.

As you and I speak, the Ohio state senate has introduced legislation into the budget banning the city of Cleveland from banning trans-fats. Let us die early! Let our children be morbidly obese! They admitted that their restaurant industry wrote the legislation. So now the battle for food justice has begun.

If the state senate does this, it’ll strike down Cleveland’s law. [Last month, that's exactly what the Ohio state senate did, tucking the provision into a 5,000-page budget law. Cimperman has said he'll challenge it in the courts.]

It’s ridiculous! The trans-fat ban came from doctors and public health professionals. The four major health systems in the state—Cleveland Clinic, St. Vincent’s, MetroHealth, and University Hospitals—have all signed on to the Healthy Cleveland Resolution. The hospital systems are the number one job provider in Ohio. How do you say to these hospitals, “You don’t know what you’re talking about”?

I may not understand trans-fats, but why the hell is the government telling locals what we can and cannot do? They haven’t found a way to ban community gardens.

Here’s my gut feeling. What’s going to happen when those 300 gardens that we have in Cleveland double? When in 2020 the city of Cleveland will have a community garden within five blocks of every resident? All of a sudden, local grocery stores are working with local farms. What’s going to happen when the hoop houses start to provide food three seasons a year? What happens with canning? What happens when agribusiness starts to see this? We have a multinational food production company here in Cleveland. I was at a meeting a couple months ago and some folks from this company started asking me about local food. I think we’re starting to get people’s interest. We’re not a threat yet, but what happens when we become a threat?

What can other cities learn from Cleveland when it comes to food justice?

We let the policy be informed by the practice. We have a lot of people who have been doing this for generations. There’s recognition of that: the importance of learning from our elders. Also, we all really like each other. We enjoy each others’ company. Entire weddings are filled with friends and guests who they meet from within the food justice world. Regardless of your political background or racial background or your proficiency in English, there’s something about the gardens that brings people together!

Community gardens just make us a nicer city. They make us share more, pay more attention to each others’ kids, understand each others’ cultures more. There are just so many ancillary benefits to community gardens—we can’t imagine.

The business community is also excited about the hope of urban agriculture and food justice. It means so many things in terms of employment and in terms of people having a purpose and getting out and getting to know your neighbors. I think if we can keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to be in a really good spot.

The post Cleveland’s Food Justice Hero: Councilman Joe Cimperman appeared first on The Faster Times.

Helene conceived and helped launch Bon Appétit’s Low Carbon Diet program in 2007. The goal of the program is twofold: To raise awareness of the connection between the food system and climate change and to reduce emissions associated with Bon Appétit’s food service operations by 25 percent over five years. To date, the program has achieved reductions by approximately five million pounds of CO2 equivalent emissions each month.

In 2010 she was named a Seafood Champion by Seafood Choices Alliance for her steadfast commitment to sustainable seafood on a global level. Since 2009 Helene has been a regular contributor to the Life channel of the Atlantic Monthly online and a frequent guest lecturer at universities across the country on the subject of the food system’s relationship to climate change.

What issues have you been focused on?

Last summer we successfully challenged our chefs to sign up our 1,000th Farm to Fork vendor, representing tremendous growth since we launched this program way back in 1999—long before the word “locavore” had been coined, let alone become a buzzword. I’m really proud that we work with so many small, local, independently operated farms and artisans.

But we’re finding that the criteria we currently use to define “small” (under $5 million in sales) and “local” (within 150 miles of our cafés) can be limiting, especially when it comes to protein. I’ve found owner-operated, humane-certified chicken farms, for example, that have more than $5 million in sales per year but are featherweights compared to the Big Birds of poultry. Should they be excluded from our Farm to Fork program? Currently they are. So we’re looking at how we keep the integrity of the program if we were to widen the definition. I’m also examining what “local” means for fish. “Good Choice” albacore tuna might be landed in Portland, but if it was caught 1,000 miles out to sea, can Oregonians really call it a “locally caught” fish?

What inspires you to do this work?

I see myself as supporting 500 chefs who are committed to making so-called “institutional food” taste great and be healthy. Some of them are responsible for feeding thousands of people every day. My job is to help them source foods as responsibly as possible and give them tools to push wherever they can. Lots of them have helped medium-size farmers and ranchers change their practices by nudging them toward a third-party certification of humane practices or reduced pesticide usage. It so makes my day to hear those stories of making change.

What’s your overall vision?

Food that is prized more and wasted less. Foodsheds that are regional in nature and not dependent on a few enormous global actors. Persuading some of the bigger players to make meaningful changes in their food production and distribution practices—to use radically fewer chemicals, treat their workers and animals well, keep nutrients in basic foods instead of injecting additives later, and use “natural” food waste to replenish the land rather than add to the landfill.

What books and/or blogs are you reading right now?

I’m reading an advance copy of Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland about the absolutely insane Florida tomato industry. Insane from an environmental standpoint because the natural sandy soil can’t support growing commodity tomatoes in Florida and there’s so far to go to make the labor conditions there truly humane.

I’m also nearly done with Tom Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses (2005), a fascinating romp through millennia of beer, wine, tea, and cola drinking that shows humanity’s tendency to commodify foodstuffs and trade it globally. These aren’t new phenomena.

Who’s in your community?

Everyone from prep cooks learning to use vegetable trimmings for stock and weigh their kitchen waste, to NGOs looking for business leadership to buy certain products or speak out in favor of a public policy, to suppliers of every stripe who claim environmental benefits of their “eco-friendly” products. I support the first two; I bust the third.

What are your commitments?

Personally, I don’t eat meat, even though I’m on the board of Humane Farm Animal Care and visit ranchers often who do a tremendous job. I respect what they do, but I feel very strongly about meat’s impact on climate change and its overuse of natural resources per calories delivered compared to other foods. Plus piglets are awfully darn adorable! It’s hard not to think about that when I think about food for a living.

Professionally—well, Bon Appétit has a very long list of commitments. In addition to the Farm to Fork Program we launched in 1999, we’ve addressed the overuse of antibiotics, sustainable seafood, cage-free eggs, the connection between food and climate change, and most recently, farmworkers’ rights. And we now source Fair Trade-certified baking chocolate for our kitchens. We’re the first food service company to do so.

What are your goals?

It’s natural for me to think about chef goals and I’m so delighted when I hear them talk about how they changed their menus to reflect our Low Carbon Diet principles. This isn’t “my” project anymore. It’s theirs! They’re the ones making it happen on the ground every day. But my goal is to reach all the line cooks in the kitchens, like the ladies I met in Washington, DC, who are proud to be feeding healthy food to students, and taking those lessons home to their own kids and grandkids. I spent much of a week last year alongside cooks in one of our kitchens to know what it’s all about. When I think about initiatives, I think about reaching them.

What does change look like to you?

Change means redefining lunch on a national scale. Sandwich options at most places are so limited: Turkey, grilled chicken, roast beef, or an under-cooked eggplant slice with red pepper, all of which hide under a block of factory-processed cheese, a tasteless pink tomato slice, and piece of wilted lettuce. Many ethnic options are similarly homogenous: How often do you see actual vegetables in a “veggie burrito” and why do burritos have to weigh a pound and a half, anyway? Change means caring enough to put these scenarios out of business, having responsible meat as optional toppings, a wide variety of fresh seasonal produce options, and reasonable quantities.

Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

The supply chain for a big company does not change quickly. We spent two years creating the Low Carbon Diet and then established a five-year timeline starting from launch in 2007. Some goals were met early (we committed to reducing beef purchases by 25 percent in two years but hit a 33 percent reduction during that time) and others, like completely eliminating air-freighted seafood, have been hampered by a lack of transparency in our suppliers’ reporting systems. Every change effort requires buy-in from many people—chefs, managers, suppliers—and everyone’s busy. Our initiative isn’t their top priority that day; making lunch for 3,000 is. I’ve got to make sure that I express our goals in a way that anticipates their questions and needs and is reasonable. It’s also important to give everyone a sense that the project is part of a larger vision, connected to an idea bigger than all of us, and that we can help bring about through our individual actions.

What projects are affiliated with yours?

We have worked closely with a number of independent organizations to guide our purchasing policies and renew our intellectual underpinnings for them over the years, including Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) for the antibiotics-reduction policies that guide our meat purchasing; Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) and Humane Farm Animal Care (HFAC) for our egg purchasing policy; The Monterey Bay Aquarium and Ocean Conservancy for seafood; Fair Trade USA for coffee, tea, bananas and a program under development; and Ecotrust on the Low Carbon Diet, among others.

What projects and people have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

The grass-roots movement around urban agriculture springing up in so many corners of the country. Preliminary academic research is showing that many small, diversified programs in inner cities are more environmentally efficient than many rural operations in terms of energy, water, and transportation use. They offer the added benefit of teaching a new generation of young consumers about seasonality, respect for farming, and that fresh-picked, unprocessed peas tastes a lot better than frozen peas.

Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next 5-10 years? Is real policy change a real possibility?

I think we have to be vigilant and patient at the same time and despite how oxymoronic that sounds: Vigilant about pushing for progress, but patient because this is going to take a long time. The current food system took 150 years to develop, much of it with federal support: Railroad infrastructure and refrigerated box cars brought us uniform beef; aquaducts and canal systems brought us industrial agriculture; state-by-state approaches to regulating agriculture have given us a patchwork of environmental and labor laws that fail to protect workers, waterways, and soil in much of the country. We’ll achieve change if we focus on the big things and recognize that full-scale change can only happen in a generation at the earliest.

What does the food movement need to do, be or have to be more effective?

Every successful movement for change—the Civil Rights Movement is a great example—included many personalities and a variety of agendas, but the ultimate goals were few and clear—and took decades to realize success. Food activists ultimately need to rally around a few well-articulated priorities and reduce the fussing that will dissipate our collective strength. I liked Tom Philpott’s only half-joking proposal to form a Vegan/Omnivore Alliance Against Animal Factories. Michelle Obama’s campaign to combat childhood obesity is bringing together strange bedfellows behind an important cause, but many committed activists prefer to scorn the efforts because big business has signed on or it doesn’t go far enough. In my view, this a huge step right now in the right direction. We need to examine what our primary goals and our long-term “non-negotiables” should be so we can measure progress toward achieving them.

What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

A traditional kaiseki ryori, multi-course Japanese meal using seasonable vegetables and fresh, sustainable seafood, including really fishy fish such as oysters, mackerel, uni and sardines.

Find the original story HERE

More Faster Food Politics

Friday Round-up: “Fat is not the Problem,” Jacquie Berger at Just Food, and Redirecting Ag Subsidies

TFT Interview: Debra Eschmeyer of FoodCorps

The post Faces & Visions of the Food Movement: Helene York appeared first on The Faster Times.

Helene conceived and helped launch Bon Appétit’s Low Carbon Diet program in 2007. The goal of the program is twofold: To raise awareness of the connection between the food system and climate change and to reduce emissions associated with Bon Appétit’s food service operations by 25 percent over five years. To date, the program has achieved reductions by approximately five million pounds of CO2 equivalent emissions each month.

In 2010 she was named a Seafood Champion by Seafood Choices Alliance for her steadfast commitment to sustainable seafood on a global level. Since 2009 Helene has been a regular contributor to the Life channel of the Atlantic Monthly online and a frequent guest lecturer at universities across the country on the subject of the food system’s relationship to climate change.

What issues have you been focused on?

Last summer we successfully challenged our chefs to sign up our 1,000th Farm to Fork vendor, representing tremendous growth since we launched this program way back in 1999—long before the word “locavore” had been coined, let alone become a buzzword. I’m really proud that we work with so many small, local, independently operated farms and artisans.

But we’re finding that the criteria we currently use to define “small” (under $5 million in sales) and “local” (within 150 miles of our cafés) can be limiting, especially when it comes to protein. I’ve found owner-operated, humane-certified chicken farms, for example, that have more than $5 million in sales per year but are featherweights compared to the Big Birds of poultry. Should they be excluded from our Farm to Fork program? Currently they are. So we’re looking at how we keep the integrity of the program if we were to widen the definition. I’m also examining what “local” means for fish. “Good Choice” albacore tuna might be landed in Portland, but if it was caught 1,000 miles out to sea, can Oregonians really call it a “locally caught” fish?

What inspires you to do this work?

I see myself as supporting 500 chefs who are committed to making so-called “institutional food” taste great and be healthy. Some of them are responsible for feeding thousands of people every day. My job is to help them source foods as responsibly as possible and give them tools to push wherever they can. Lots of them have helped medium-size farmers and ranchers change their practices by nudging them toward a third-party certification of humane practices or reduced pesticide usage. It so makes my day to hear those stories of making change.

What’s your overall vision?

Food that is prized more and wasted less. Foodsheds that are regional in nature and not dependent on a few enormous global actors. Persuading some of the bigger players to make meaningful changes in their food production and distribution practices—to use radically fewer chemicals, treat their workers and animals well, keep nutrients in basic foods instead of injecting additives later, and use “natural” food waste to replenish the land rather than add to the landfill.

What books and/or blogs are you reading right now?

I’m reading an advance copy of Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland about the absolutely insane Florida tomato industry. Insane from an environmental standpoint because the natural sandy soil can’t support growing commodity tomatoes in Florida and there’s so far to go to make the labor conditions there truly humane.

I’m also nearly done with Tom Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses (2005), a fascinating romp through millennia of beer, wine, tea, and cola drinking that shows humanity’s tendency to commodify foodstuffs and trade it globally. These aren’t new phenomena.

Who’s in your community?

Everyone from prep cooks learning to use vegetable trimmings for stock and weigh their kitchen waste, to NGOs looking for business leadership to buy certain products or speak out in favor of a public policy, to suppliers of every stripe who claim environmental benefits of their “eco-friendly” products. I support the first two; I bust the third.

What are your commitments?

Personally, I don’t eat meat, even though I’m on the board of Humane Farm Animal Care and visit ranchers often who do a tremendous job. I respect what they do, but I feel very strongly about meat’s impact on climate change and its overuse of natural resources per calories delivered compared to other foods. Plus piglets are awfully darn adorable! It’s hard not to think about that when I think about food for a living.

Professionally—well, Bon Appétit has a very long list of commitments. In addition to the Farm to Fork Program we launched in 1999, we’ve addressed the overuse of antibiotics, sustainable seafood, cage-free eggs, the connection between food and climate change, and most recently, farmworkers’ rights. And we now source Fair Trade-certified baking chocolate for our kitchens. We’re the first food service company to do so.

What are your goals?

It’s natural for me to think about chef goals and I’m so delighted when I hear them talk about how they changed their menus to reflect our Low Carbon Diet principles. This isn’t “my” project anymore. It’s theirs! They’re the ones making it happen on the ground every day. But my goal is to reach all the line cooks in the kitchens, like the ladies I met in Washington, DC, who are proud to be feeding healthy food to students, and taking those lessons home to their own kids and grandkids. I spent much of a week last year alongside cooks in one of our kitchens to know what it’s all about. When I think about initiatives, I think about reaching them.

What does change look like to you?

Change means redefining lunch on a national scale. Sandwich options at most places are so limited: Turkey, grilled chicken, roast beef, or an under-cooked eggplant slice with red pepper, all of which hide under a block of factory-processed cheese, a tasteless pink tomato slice, and piece of wilted lettuce. Many ethnic options are similarly homogenous: How often do you see actual vegetables in a “veggie burrito” and why do burritos have to weigh a pound and a half, anyway? Change means caring enough to put these scenarios out of business, having responsible meat as optional toppings, a wide variety of fresh seasonal produce options, and reasonable quantities.

Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

The supply chain for a big company does not change quickly. We spent two years creating the Low Carbon Diet and then established a five-year timeline starting from launch in 2007. Some goals were met early (we committed to reducing beef purchases by 25 percent in two years but hit a 33 percent reduction during that time) and others, like completely eliminating air-freighted seafood, have been hampered by a lack of transparency in our suppliers’ reporting systems. Every change effort requires buy-in from many people—chefs, managers, suppliers—and everyone’s busy. Our initiative isn’t their top priority that day; making lunch for 3,000 is. I’ve got to make sure that I express our goals in a way that anticipates their questions and needs and is reasonable. It’s also important to give everyone a sense that the project is part of a larger vision, connected to an idea bigger than all of us, and that we can help bring about through our individual actions.

What projects are affiliated with yours?

We have worked closely with a number of independent organizations to guide our purchasing policies and renew our intellectual underpinnings for them over the years, including Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) and Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) for the antibiotics-reduction policies that guide our meat purchasing; Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS) and Humane Farm Animal Care (HFAC) for our egg purchasing policy; The Monterey Bay Aquarium and Ocean Conservancy for seafood; Fair Trade USA for coffee, tea, bananas and a program under development; and Ecotrust on the Low Carbon Diet, among others.

What projects and people have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

The grass-roots movement around urban agriculture springing up in so many corners of the country. Preliminary academic research is showing that many small, diversified programs in inner cities are more environmentally efficient than many rural operations in terms of energy, water, and transportation use. They offer the added benefit of teaching a new generation of young consumers about seasonality, respect for farming, and that fresh-picked, unprocessed peas tastes a lot better than frozen peas.

Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next 5-10 years? Is real policy change a real possibility?

I think we have to be vigilant and patient at the same time and despite how oxymoronic that sounds: Vigilant about pushing for progress, but patient because this is going to take a long time. The current food system took 150 years to develop, much of it with federal support: Railroad infrastructure and refrigerated box cars brought us uniform beef; aquaducts and canal systems brought us industrial agriculture; state-by-state approaches to regulating agriculture have given us a patchwork of environmental and labor laws that fail to protect workers, waterways, and soil in much of the country. We’ll achieve change if we focus on the big things and recognize that full-scale change can only happen in a generation at the earliest.

What does the food movement need to do, be or have to be more effective?

Every successful movement for change—the Civil Rights Movement is a great example—included many personalities and a variety of agendas, but the ultimate goals were few and clear—and took decades to realize success. Food activists ultimately need to rally around a few well-articulated priorities and reduce the fussing that will dissipate our collective strength. I liked Tom Philpott’s only half-joking proposal to form a Vegan/Omnivore Alliance Against Animal Factories. Michelle Obama’s campaign to combat childhood obesity is bringing together strange bedfellows behind an important cause, but many committed activists prefer to scorn the efforts because big business has signed on or it doesn’t go far enough. In my view, this a huge step right now in the right direction. We need to examine what our primary goals and our long-term “non-negotiables” should be so we can measure progress toward achieving them.

What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

A traditional kaiseki ryori, multi-course Japanese meal using seasonable vegetables and fresh, sustainable seafood, including really fishy fish such as oysters, mackerel, uni and sardines.

Find the original story HERE

More Faster Food Politics

Friday Round-up: “Fat is not the Problem,” Jacquie Berger at Just Food, and Redirecting Ag Subsidies

TFT Interview: Debra Eschmeyer of FoodCorps

The post Faces & Visions of the Food Movement: Helene York appeared first on The Faster Times.

Called FoodCorps, the program is a scalable national response to the epidemics of childhood obesity and diet-related disease. Building on the AmeriCorps model, FoodCorps trains young adults to educate K-12 students who live in high-obesity, low-income communities. FoodCorps members will help students plant edible gardens, show them how to prepare healthy, simple meals, and drive it all home with lessons on nutrition.

Eschmeyer squeezed in an interview with me during a rare free moment between running FoodCorps, tending a 13-acre organic vegetable farm with her husband in New Knoxville, Ohio, and traveling to the National Farm to School Network’s annual meeting in Portland, Oregon. She spoke to me about FoodCorps, how the Obama administration is doing when it comes to child nutrition, and why young people are more likely to play a video game about farming than actually get their hands dirty.

FoodCorps sounds like a Peace Corps for school food, where members get paid a stipend to do one year of service with a nonprofit. Tell me more.

At FoodCorps, we focus on three pillars of work: Building school gardens, so kids have experiential knowledge; nutrition education; and local food procurement. Research by the Centers for Disease Control has demonstrated that engaging children in growing food leads to healthy eating habits that last a lifetime. Research also shows that on average, children participating in farm-to-school programs consume one more serving of fruits and vegetables a day than kids who don’t.

When I worked for the National Farm to School Network, I received thousands of comments from around the country saying, “I love the idea of a farm-to-school program, but how do I get started in my community’s school? Our budgets are tight and we just don’t have the sweat equity and labor to pull it off.” Now I have an answer: FoodCorps! One of the most game-changing aspects of FoodCorps is that we’re dedicating resources to high-obesity, limited-resource communities—schools where over 50% of the students are on free or reduced lunches. We’ll be in communities like the Tohono O’odham nation in Arizona, where Type II diabetes was once unheard of, but where children as young as six are being diagnosed with the disease.

How many locations will FoodCorps be in starting this fall?

We have amazing partners that we work with in 10 states: Arizona, Arkansas, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Oregon. Selecting host sites was an extremely competitive process. We had 108 organizations from 39 states and the District of Columbia apply, within a relatively short window. I think this shows the maturity of the movement. (See here for the complete list.)

And how many FoodCorps members are there?

We’ll have 50 members in 2011. The idea is to start with a strong cadre of 50 at the 10 host sites and then grow, so that in a decade we can have 1,000 members in all 50 states. We received over 1,230 applications for this year’s team.

That’s a lot of applicants for just 50 spots.

I know! We’re officially more competitive than Harvard or Teach for America. The applications were above and beyond awe-inspiring and brilliant—and also a fascinating glimpse of what has inspired the next generation. Back when Michael Pollan published the Omnivore’s Dilemma, we had conversations that it was the Silent Spring of the food movement. And lo and behold, the number of FoodCorps applications that quoted Pollan was incredible. We have such a self-empowered and educated generation—they want to not just vote with their forks but vote with their whole being through service. They were all so motivated and passionate and all had personal experiences that validated why they believe so much in our vision. I’ve never felt more confident about the future of our country when it comes to reversing childhood obesity.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5s4YbLPSKtY

Who funds FoodCorps?

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Corporation for National and Community Service (AmeriCorps), the Woodcock Foundation, the Claneil Foundation, the Wallace Genetic Foundation, and anonymous private donors.

Typically, there’s a lot of red tape that gets in the way of schools serving produce from their own gardens in the cafeteria. How does FoodCorps get around that?

In most states, regulations don’t directly address school gardens, so you end up having to figure out how to meet each state’s concerns. We’ve been working with Tufts graduate students who’ve developed a template school garden policy for our 10 states so the food safety and regulatory concerns have been documented. But schools in our program will also buy from local farmers.

For those who are getting push-back from their school district, I recommend reading “Fresh, Healthy, and Safe Food: Best Practices for Using Produce from School Gardens,” and then contacting your state’s Department of Health. Be prepared to cite the federal memo that allows serving food from the school garden. If they say you can’t do it, ask them to point you to the specific part of state code that says so. There’s a good chance schools can meet the standards if they know what they are up against and are already following the guidelines in the food safety brochure.

Michelle Obama has done a lot to advocate for backyard gardens both at home and at school. What did you think of the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Bill (the bill that funds the National School Lunch Program) that her husband signed into law?

I’m actually very happy with the end results of the bill. If you had asked me that question three years ago, I wouldn’t have said the same thing.

The bill needed to be passed and I was delighted that we could get the funding increase for school lunches, considering the budget climate that we’re in now. We were able to increase the reimbursement funding by six cents per lunch—and improve nutrition standards. And now the Secretary of Agriculture can set standards for all food served on school premises. There’s mandatory funding for farm-to-school programs. We’ve been fighting for that for six years! Those were substantial wins.

When I volunteered for New York City’s Wellness in the Schools, a bunch of us went to Capitol Hill to ask our senators and representatives to push for 70 cents more per child. I couldn’t help but see six cents per child as a big disappointment.

“The perfect can be the enemy of the good,” became my mantra over the past couple of years. We got as good as we could get in this political and fiscal climate. And we have to soldier on. If that bill hadn’t passed last year, we wouldn’t have gotten even the six-cent increase.

And you need the advocates—the people who say we need an extra 70 cents per lunch. But in the end, you need to come together. We’re making decisions now that are going to affect people 20 years down the road. Every edging forth is important.

How do you think the Obama Administration is doing with food and agriculture policy overall?

They’re doing as well as I expected. On certain issues the Obamas have been amazing. The Let’s Move! campaign has been brilliant. Michelle Obama is obviously a great spokesperson—getting people active, having fun. (Have you seen the Beyoncé video?) I’m very grateful for the energy she’s putting towards improving the health of the next generation.

This administration has been great with efforts such as Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food and the Childhood Obesity Taskforce These things are really transformative.

Regarding farm policy, there could be a lot of improvements. Congress is looking to trim any and all fat, so we’re going to have to protect what we have now. It’ll be interesting to see how the USDA works within that environment.

One of the gains of the last Farm Bill was an office of Advocacy and Outreach at the USDA. And they have a Beginning Farmer and Rancher Development Program—that’s something we’ve been working on for a decade. But if program funds are cut, then we go back to square one.

What was your response to that article in the Atlantic last year by Caitlin Flanagan, in which she argued that edible schoolyards are depriving our children of a “real” education?

My initial response was, “Really? This is what you’re spending your time on?” But her role was provocateur. And as it happens, I think she gave us a gift. A whole bunch of us came together and wrote letters—novels basically—about all the benefits of school gardens. It helped us think more critically about various facets of our program. In the end, we came together with some amazing stories, talking points, and new friendships.

You know how you talk to your best friend about the work you do and you don’t have to defend it or explain it? If you have these conversations with someone who you don’t agree with, you become stronger. We explain ourselves better after such conversations.

The next farm bill is around the corner. What are the top three items you would like to see change?

It’s a $307 billion bill! It’s very heavy—there is so much that could be tackled in it.

Instead of focusing on the detailed items I would change—there are so many that it would be difficult to focus on three—I would like to focus on no-cost solutions.

• Get an insider guide to farm policy out there to the general public that puts us all on the same page. Each of the many groups that comprise the food movement has a different agenda. But what are the things we can all be on the same page about?

• Develop a realistic agenda. In the end, these are the lofty goals that we want to achieve, but here are the things we know we can achieve in the 2012 Farm Bill.

• Ensure that the voices that are being heard are the grassroots and the farmers—especially beginning farmers. They all bring legitimacy to the cause. We love journalists, chefs, and nonprofits—that’s what makes our food movement go ’round. But we need to make sure that the people who are actually farming every day, who will be impacted the most by these programs, have a voice in this conversation.

I get the sense from talking to you that the so-called food justice movement is growing and gaining mainstream support.

Brian Walsh recently wrote an article in Time Magazine about how quickly the food movement has become a measurable force in American society—and how it may eventually eclipse the environmental movement. However, he also pointed out that while the Sierra Club has 1.3 million members nationwide, Slow Food USA (the food movement’s most dynamic and visible group) only has 20,000 members. (Author’s Note: Since Walsh’s article was published in February, Slow Food USA’s membership has grown to 24,000.) So we still have a long way to go, but the food movement is slowly and steadily building. (Sign up for Slow Food here.)

My question is: why are there so many people on FarmVille and yet we can’t get those same people interested in farming? I became addicted to FarmVille when I was in DC, but as a dairy farmer’s daughter, I was perturbed by the chocolate milk coming out of a brown cow! And you never slaughtered your pigs, you just petted them for truffles. Such a great opportunity for real farm education missed.

What’s your definition of food justice?

I was an editor of Food Justice (the new book by Robert Gottlieb and Anupama Joshi) so I spent several years thinking about the definition. Food justice seeks to ensure that the benefits and risks of where, what, and how food is grown, produced, transported, distributed, accessed and eaten are shared fairly. It represents a transformation of the current food system, including but not limited to eliminating disparities and inequities.

The post TFT Interview: Debra Eschmeyer of FoodCorps appeared first on The Faster Times.

Just Food It’s been awhile since I’ve touted Heritage Radio’s the Main Course, which has become my podcast of choice. It’s not just Patrick Martin’s dry sense of humor and Katy Keiffer’s maniacal cackle—and the jangly bluegrass music they play between guests. What keeps me coming back is their combined knowledge of heritage pork, urban gardening, and farm-to-table cooking and the discursive interviews they do with chefs, ranchers, professors, food writers, activists, and food justice leaders. Also, they regularly confront the “elitism” question head-on. (As in: is the food movement elitist?) Which is why I highly recommend this interview with Jacquie Berger, the firecracker executive director of New York City’s Just Food. (Just Food does many things, but its primary role is to serve as a matchmaker between rural farmers and New Yorkers who want fresh, affordable produce.) When Patrick and Katy ask her how she responds to the “elitist” charge when it comes to organic produce, she has a fantastic reply. “Why is having poison on your food elitist? Every community, if you say, do you want pesticides or herbicides on your food, they say no.” She went on to tout the many things CSAs do to make organic, local produce affordable to low-income communities, such as allowing members to pay for their share in installments with their SNAP benefits.

Reclaiming Saturated Fat Did you see Melissa Clark’s pro-virgin coconut oil story last week? In it, she interviews a scientist who says most of the damning studies about coconut oil were done on partially hydrogenated coconut oil rather than virgin coconut oil. Scientists are starting to realize that the pure coconut oil is much healthier, even though it’s still high in saturated fats. Thomas Brenna, a professor of nutritional sciences at Cornell also tells Clark, “I think we in the nutrition field are beginning to say that saturated fats are not so bad, and the evidence that said they were is not so strong.”

In other pro-saturated fat news: Kristin Wartman at Civil Eats wrote a clear recap of the emerging scientific consensus that carbs, not saturated fats, are to blame for heart disease and diabetes. My favorite quote is this pithy one from Dr. Walter Willett at Harvard’s School of Public Health: “Fat is not the problem.”

The Food Movement is Not Defined by Foodies That B.R. Myers article in the Atlantic magazine this month is still provoking rebuttals. The best is Nicolette Hahn Niman’s, in which she gracefully defines the food movement, saying it “emphasizes not only mindful consumption but also reducing waste, conserving natural resources, and respecting the people and animals involved in food production. Moderation and conservation are its fundamental values.” She also makes a terrific point about Myers easy slur against Slow Food, reminding us all that one nonprofit does not a movement make. “This is a particularly egregious failure either to grasp or properly present the facts. Slow Food USA…is one organization of hundreds, perhaps thousands, focusing on such work. Quite obviously, a single organization’s membership rolls cannot be used to tally a social movement’s supporters.”

Fixing Subsidies, Bittman-style New York Times food writer Mark Bittman has a new column and I love it. One of his latest blogs is on agricultural subsidies and why they need to be repurposed. Instead of giving $5 billion in handouts to industrial-scale farmers of corn and soy (and wheat and rice) they should, he argues, go to subsidizing fruits and vegetables, adding incentives for 100,000 new farmers and persuading commodity farmers to switch from monoculture to more varied, nutritious crops. He also unveils some of the outrageously unfair practices that are permitted under the current Farm Bill:

That the current system is a joke is barely arguable: wealthy growers are paid even in good years, and may receive drought aid when there’s no drought. It’s become so bizarre that some homeowners lucky enough to have bought land that once grew rice now have subsidized lawns. Fortunes have been paid to Fortune 500 companies and even gentlemen farmers like David Rockefeller.

Bittman’s latest blog, on the perennial bugaboo “Can organic farming feed the world?”, is also quite good.

The post Friday Round-up: “Fat is not the Problem,” Jacquie Berger at Just Food, and Redirecting Ag Subsidies appeared first on The Faster Times.

City Slicker Farms was founded ten years ago by Willow Rosenthal when she moved to West Oakland and discovered a dearth of fresh food. Residents without cars had no choice but to buy their groceries at corner stores or liquor stores—where produce, if it’s sold, is more expensive than it would be at a grocery store. But then, as now, this historically impoverished neighborhood didn’t have a single full-service grocery store. (Though it does have a small worker-owned co-op, and thanks to People’s Grocery founder Brahm Ahmadi, a larger grocery store is on the way.) With money borrowed from a friend, Rosenthal bought a vacant garbage-strewn lot on Center Street for $11,000 and worked with community members to create a lush garden. This small but fecund plot has since become City Slicker’s best known farm, home to the twice-weekly donation-based farm stand.

Today, City Slicker Farms is thriving: it has seven “farms” scattered around West Oakland that together yield nearly 10,000 pounds of produce a year. The small nonprofit—it has just three full-time staffers—was just was awarded a $4 million grant from California to buy a 1.4-acre plot of land, its largest farm yet. The organization also has a hugely popular backyard garden program—staff and volunteers build raised beds and provide seeds, seedlings, compost, and even hen coops (and hens) to low-income West Oakland residents so they can be self-sufficient, relying on the food they grow themselves.

Last month, I met with City Slicker’s Executive Director Barbara Finnin to talk about the challenges of farming on vacant lots, West Oaklanders’ love of collards, kale, and eggs, and the importance of “culturally- appropriate food” when building a just food system.

Tell me about the origin of City Slicker Farms.

The organization started around food access and community building. The folks that started City Slicker Farms lived here in West Oakland, and they were looking around and saying, “OK—where is the food access? There are corner stores, liquor stores. We know that they don’t provide the best food. It’s calorie sufficient and not nutrient dense. It’s really difficult to get produce.” So the idea was, “How can we build the community’s own capacity to grow food?”

We looked at the community’s assets. We had vacant land and we had plenty of folks here who had come from gardening and farming backgrounds. We work with a lot of people who have immigrated from the south, particularly African American folks, who gardened and farmed. So we have a lot of rich resources when it comes to knowledge.

Talk to me about City Slicker Farms’ two main programs. And what is the difference between a “market farm” and a community garden?

There is a crucial distinction. We have a community market farm program and a backyard garden program. The community market farm program is for small farms—1 acre or less—that are growing food for some kind of market. In this case, a farm stand. All the food that is harvested on Fridays at all the farms is distributed through a farm stand at donation-based prices.

You can see the community gardening philosophy in our backyard garden program. We’re meeting people where they are—at their homes—to grow their own food. I feel in all honesty that we can reach way more people that way. If all of our community market farms were community gardens, how many people would actually use them? Do they have time to walk down the street to garden?

People are more motivated when they garden at their own home. It’s also a great teaching tool. We work with grandmothers who are taking care of their grandkids all the time, so it’s a really great way to pass the knowledge down.

Recipients of backyard gardens can also sell their extra produce at the Center Street farm stand. Do a lot of people take advantage of that?

Not at all. They donate it to the farm stand or to others in the community. We’ll have neighbors swapping or people give it to family members. We advertise it: we’ll buy your produce. But most people want to give back or they want to swap.

West Oakland was and still is an industrial neighborhood—do you have to import soil?

It depends on the site. We test all the soil. But all of our locations are residentially zoned, so we don’t have to worry about industrial contaminants from old factories. We do find issues with lead, and we find that everywhere here because of old housing stock. Where houses burned down, there was lots of lead that accumulated into the soil. If there’s a low-to-medium level of lead, then we’ll build raised beds and import the soil.

When I was at Center Street Farm the other day, I heard a rumor that it’s going to be transformed into an orchard.

The foreclosures have affected us as well. We had been getting water from our neighbor, but that house got foreclosed upon, so we lost our access to water. Just to get a city water meter costs between $20,000 and $40,000, depending. It’s hard to rationalize spending that much when water doesn’t cost that much over time. Not to mention that we don’t have the funds to pay for it. We’ve been gardening there for 10 years and we wouldn’t even get close to $20,000 worth of water.

It’s intense to see the change: a site that was once abundant. Now we’re transitioning to an orchard and are wheeling in buckets of water from other neighbors. Once the trees are established, they won’t need ongoing water. We need more fruit anyway.

City Slickers was just awarded a $4 million grant. Where did it come from and what are you going to do with it?

It was from Proposition 84—a grant to get parks and recreation centers and parks into poor communities. We got this money to purchase land and construct a farm and park. It is very exciting, because, with the exception of Center Street Farm (which is owned by our founder, Willow), we don’t own any of the land we’re on—we’re land insecure. We’re basically at the will of whoever owns it. For instance, the owners of one vacant lot we were on wanted us to leave so they could turn it into a parking lot. It’s heartbreaking! People who work in urban farming and gardening deal with this all the time.

How big is the new plot—and where is it?

We’re hoping to buy a piece of land that is nearly an acre and a half—just down the street from Center Street on Peralta. Even though some of it will also be lawn, and a place for children to play, it’s definitely the biggest plot we’ll have—and we’ll be able to grow at least double what we’re growing now.

City Slicker Farms focuses on “high-yield” crops. Can you explain?

I think the best example is corn vs. collards. Think of Center Street Farm. If the whole thing was planted with collards, we’re going to get a higher yield than with corn. Meaning, each corn plant only gives you a certain number of ears. With collards you get more per plant and it’s ongoing. They’re more like perennials. So you can harvest from it, pulling leaves from the outside, and then the plant will keep giving you more. We have to think in those terms because we don’t have that much land.

When you’re planning crops, do you take into account nutrient density?

We do. So we look at yields, nutrient density and how easy it is to grow and harvest. For instance, if we did all berries, they are very difficult to harvest. So we have more fruiting trees instead.

Do you consider the heritage of people in the neighborhood, as well?

Every year we survey folks. We’re not going to grow things that people don’t want to eat. So we ask everybody, are we getting you what you need? Is there something you’re not seeing? People want to see more fruit.

What sells out at the farm stand?

Cooking greens and eggs. Collards are probably the most popular, then kale. Kale is tied with mustard greens. People also like chard, but it’s not as popular as collards or kale.

How many backyard gardens does City Slicker plant a year, and would you say that most residents stick with it?

Currently we have 100 backyard gardeners in our program. When someone enrolls in our program, we help them build a garden and partner them with a mentor who checks in on them four times a year for a two-year period. Since the backyard garden program launched in 2005, we’ve planted 170 gardens.

We ask people what they want to grow, where they want to grow it. And then on a Saturday we come and build a garden with the family—we ask them to invite friends and family or a neighbor. If we know there’s another backyard garden family near there, we’ll invite them over as well, it’s all about community building.

There’s an assumption out there that low-income folks don’t want to eat healthy foods—that those of us who can afford to eat fresh, organic produce are pushing our values onto a community that doesn’t share them. What do you say to that?

I want to start with this: America has a problem. Low-income people don’t have the problem. It’s everyone. In most places, it’s easier to get fast food then it is to get fresh, healthy produce.

Although food deserts aren’t everywhere.

But there are McDonalds everywhere. We’re talking about actual choice here. People don’t have real choice or real options. People select our program because they want real choice and options for healthy food in their neighborhood.

This idea of, “Let’s help those low-income people eat better” is elitist. I say, “No, let’s help everybody eat better.” The real barrier is access. And real choice.

And once the playing fields are leveled and there is affordability and access, City Slicker Farms doesn’t need to push the produce?

We don’t push the agenda. Our programs exist and people self-select into them. I think that’s really important. We’re here to normalize food and the act of gardening and get young children seeing it and becoming a part of it.

If you’re used to cereal that’s fortified, that’s food. Say you’re not used to having fruit for breakfast. So if you want to normalize food like berries and fruit, then you have it in abundance in your home garden or neighborhood and you’re eating it. That’s huge! It becomes part of your environment.

I’m not here to bang on your door and say, “eat healthily!” People know that already. And I think that it would be very insulting to a low-income person, “Oh, you don’t know how to eat healthily.” Instead, we should be asking, “Do you have healthy food in your neighborhood or do you want to learn about preparing healthy food or do you want to share with others how you prepare healthy food?”

Right. It’s not like anyone is claiming to have a perfectly wholesome diet. The other day when I was at Center Street Farm, some neighborhood kids pitched in with the weeding. Later in the day, they walked by eating Cheetos. It’s hard not to be disappointed. But at the same time, who doesn’t have a Cheeto or Oreo occasionally?

Look: I love donuts. I loooove donuts. I want to be real about this. And the real is this: we are surrounded by junk food. Everybody has junk food. It’s pervasive. It’s about harm reduction in my mind. Let’s reduce harm.

We’re not going for perfection. That’s what splinters groups and sabotages relationships. Again, if all you had were Cheetos, that’s one thing. But now you have Cheetos and you have collards. You have Cheetos and Plums. That’s better.

One of the challenges of eating fresh produce, of course, is finding the time to cook it. (And knowing how to cook.) City Slickers does a lot of farming education, but do you do any cooking education?

We don’t do a lot. People’s Grocery and OBUGS do more of that—we don’t want to replicate services. OBUGS will send Chef Mo to the farm stand at Center Street, and he’ll do some cooking demos. They were popular: smelling cooking food—that always draws people in.

We do share residents’ recipes. All the healthy recipes in our West Oakland Healthy Eating Guide are from folks in the neighborhood. Or we’ll photocopy a recipe and have it at the farm stand. We did that at Thanksgiving.

Do a lot of kids get involved at the market farms?

Center Street probably has the most action when it comes to kids. Chickens help.

At Fitzgerald and Union Plaza park we’d really like to get more youth involvement. We’re working with the City of Oakland on shared programming and will be giving stipends to youth to work there, so it becomes more of a youth hangout.

Have you ever had a kid who has volunteered and then become a formal apprentice?

We’ve tried. I’ll be very honest and say that our apprenticeship positions tend to be people who come from privilege. It’s a big risk to go through our program—and be like, “do I have to leave my neighborhood to become an urban farmer? Where is that job besides at City Slicker Farms?” OK, there are landscape jobs, or you could work at a nursery. But there aren’t that many jobs in this arena in the city. Though it’s changing. More and more people from the neighborhood are interested in gardening. So in the beginning, we attracted the type of youth who would go WWOOFing (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), who had had other farm apprenticeships. We’d like to do something along the lines of Americorps, where we recruit folks from the community and give them stipends but they’re also provided with an education voucher and job training skills.

What is the apprenticeship stipend?

The stipend is $500 a month. We also provide housing and pay all utilities, including Internet.

You do all this with only five staff members—two of whom are part-time—and four apprentices. So, when you get the grant $4 million grant, will you be able to scale up the staff?

This is the beauty and downfall of the grant—people are like, “you have $4 million—you’re doing great!” But the money does not go to programming or operations. It’s for the sale and construction, and the pre-construction. So I could hire a temporary person to run the construction, but it’s not for staff.

I’m hoping to get that out loud and clear. We need to double our budget over the next few years to meet the new demands.

What’s your definition of food justice?

It’s so long! The idea of food justice to me is that everyone has equal access to fresh, healthy, affordable food that’s culturally appropriate. Meaning this is the food that I want to eat, not that someone is telling me I’m supposed to eat. This is based on peoples’ food traditions.

Food justice also means that the people in the food chain are getting good paying jobs and they’re not in harm’s way: meaning working near pesticides and herbicides and such.

Food justice also means that the land we’re using is well taken care of. So what kind of practices are we using in our farming? Are we actually adding to the health of the earth and not taking away from it? Food justice is being able to provide jobs.

It is also very much calling into play that we don’t have a just food system now. The current reality is that if you’re in a low-income community of color, you don’t have equal access to fresh, healthy food. The food in your community isn’t health-promoting. There’s probably a lot of other stressors in your neighborhood like pollution, industry. So food justice means calling out the bad—institutional racism and class inequalities—and then fighting to ensure that we all have equal access to health-promoting food.

I’m particularly interested in the culturally appropriate part. Fried chicken could be culturally appropriate. Or Popeye’s for that matter. So is that undermining a larger food justice goal? Most food deserts are full of this kind of fast, unhealthy food.

It’s complicated because if I have fried chicken sometimes, that’s fine. If I have fried chicken from Popeye’s all the time because that’s all I have, that’s different. It goes back to choice and it goes back to harm reduction.

When my grandma cooked with lard, it wasn’t that big of a deal because it was all fresh food. And you weren’t cooking with lard all the time. That’s also what you had. And you had the balance of the fresh food from the garden, the healthy chicken you were getting that weren’t full of antibiotics.

And I don’t think it does much good to abolish certain foods. Whole milk is one of my culturally appropriate foods. But at public schools across the country, whole milk has been banned from cafeterias in the name of health. As if our kids are getting fat from whole milk!

Yeah, that’s not where our problem is. I totally agree. I also want to get back to the cultural appropriateness. I want to use myself as an example: I grew up with casseroles. In those casseroles are things like chicken, tuna, noodles and vegetables. I could have those ingredients be more healthy or less healthy than others. But it’s still the idea that that’ s what I grew up with, that’s what I’m used to. That’s what I want. It’s comforting and I can find healthy fresh ways of preparing that food.

What do you say to the naysayers who say about urban agriculture, “That’s great, but it won’t feed the whole city.”

We believe that urban agriculture makes a difference. We’re very realistic. We’re growing produce and eggs. We’re not growing field crops. We’re not growing wheat. This is a complement. And it’s about normalizing fresh fruit and vegetables. You see Cheetos, but you also see this.

The post TFT Interview: Barbara Finnin of City Slicker Farms appeared first on The Faster Times.

• DIS-PEPSI-A If you’re one of those otherwise health-conscious people who still drinks Diet Pepsi, you might swear off it after reading Tom Philpott’s excellent back story about aspartame, our #1 diet soda sweetener. It’s a fascinating read that includes Donald Rumsfeld, a corrupt FDA official, and Monsanto. (Doesn’t it sound like the makings of a John le Carré novel?) Not only does a growing body of evidence suggest that the chemical sweetener is a carcinogen, says Philpott, a recent study of 2,500 New Yorkers shows that there’s a correlation between diet soda drinkers and strokes. Refreshing!

• THE FOODIE BACKLASH The Atlantic enjoys courting controversy. Last year, the magazine published Caitlin Flanagan’s over-the-top screed against Alice Waters and her Edible Schoolyard movement, in which she argued that “forcing” children to garden keeps them from studying Shakespeare and Arthur Miller. Now, they’ve run a myopic book review by B.R. Myers that singles out the (very real) elitism and insularity of some foodies and food writers. Judging by Myers’ caricature of the Omnivore’s Dilemma as a book that elevates the eating of (sustainably-raised) meat, though, it seems that Myers has excerpted the most egregious parts of each of the books he was asked to review rather than review each book as a whole. (As anyone who has read even an iota of Pollan’s oeuvre knows, he advocates eating a plant-centered diet, with meat serving as an occasional side.)

Not that I’m going to defend any of these books—other than the Omnivore’s Dilemma, I haven’t read any of them and would much rather re-read M.F.K. Fisher. And Myers has a point: many so-called foodies are elitist and would rather brag about their latest meal at Per Se (and eating ortolan, apparently) than work to make organic fruits and veggies affordable and accessible to low-income communities. No, what pissed me off about Myers’ review was his dismissal of Slow Food as some elitist foodie club. That is such a tired cliché. If Myers had done his research, he’d know that Josh Viertel, who has been the president of Slow Food USA for three years, has reasserted the organization’s focus on food justice—the organization’s tag line is “supporting good, clean, and fair food.” That is, making sure all Americans have access to nutritious food that’s been harvested in an environmentally conscious manner by farmers who are earning a livable wage. Slow Food USA was instrumental in pushing Congress to allot more money for public school lunch programs (those bastions of elitism!) and supports many gardening and cooking initiatives at struggling public schools, including this one in Brooklyn. As Eric Schlosser pointed out in a 2008 article for the Nation, Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini believes there is nothing contradictory about championing pleasure and working for change. Fundamental to his Slow Food philosophy, Schlosser writes, is the need to “distance its celebration of pleasure from mindless decadence.”

Myers also engages in Alice Waters-bashing. Yes, Waters has an upscale restaurant in Berkeley (did it ever purport to be otherwise?) but she also pays everyone at her restaurant—including the dishwashers!—a living wage. (That Magruder Ranch veal that Myers singles out is no doubt pricey. But guess what? The farmer who raised it is making his livelihood thanks to the support of chefs like Waters. If we are to change our food system, we’re gonna need upscale restaurants who cater to the well-heeled as well as ways of subsidizing sustainably-raised food for low-income folks.) Waters also has a foundation that’s raised nearly $5 million for Edible Schoolyards, revamping the school lunch program at Berkeley public schools, and advocating for school lunch reform. No one who takes pleasure in eating food of any kind is immune from Myers’ disdain, apparently.

As with many reviews, this one tells us more about the author than it does about the books he’s ostensibly writing about. Half-way through reading “the Moral Crusade Against Foodies,” I realized that Myers must be a vegetarian. All of the passages he excerpts as examples of perverted, out-of-touch-with-the-common-man food writing have to do with…meat. (The more extreme and macho the better.) So I was not surprised to learn, in Robert Sietsema’s amusing rebuttal in the Village Voice, that Myers is both a vegan and an animal-rights activist. Good for him! But his review would’ve been stronger had he disclosed that fact up-front.

• ACTION OF THE WEEK The Obama Administration just approved both Roundup Ready GMO alfalfa and Roundup Ready GMO sugar beets. (These biotech crops contain genes that are resistant to Monstanto’s infamous Roundup Ready herbicide.) Change we can believe in? If this pisses you off, join the Food Democracy Now letter-writing campaign. Their smart sample letter reads, in part: “In order to protect the biological integrity of our nation’s seeds and the organic industry, we call upon you as President to immediately rescind the recent approval of GMO alfalfa and instruct the Secretary of Agriculture to implement a moratorium on the further approval of genetically engineered crops until the issues over the science, contamination and labeling are more transparently reviewed.”

The post Friday Round-Up: the Aspartame Cover-up, Elitist Foodies Suck, and Obama Approves GMO Beets appeared first on The Faster Times.