Hellman’s can’t fool me

by Youth Programs Intern Reece Trevor

A few days ago, Cecily posted a piece on the Slow Food USA blog about Monsanto’s rather disingenuous efforts to market a commitment to sustainability on public radio shows. Monsanto’s radio spots are the latest in a long string of corporate attempts to “green-wash” their products and actions by spending lots of money on glitzy environmentally-themed public relations efforts even as they continue to conduct business as usual. Green-washing seems to grow more and more rampant by the week, so I thought I’d throw in my two cents.

My two Canadian cents, that is. Earlier this summer, Hellmann’s (of mayonnaise fame) launched a web site called Eat Real, Eat Local. It’s a slick flash-based site designed to “educate” Canadians about the importance of eating locally-grown foods. The site’s centerpiece is an animated short highlighting, for the most part, Canada’s considerable food trade deficit. Hellmann’s frames the issue primarily in economic terms, often veering towards the nationalistic as well with its portrayals of hard-working Canadian farmers losing out to foreign producers.

Okay, fair enough. Economics is certainly a viable component of locavorism. But then the movie fades, and a brave little jar of mayonnaise—you’ll never guess what brand—appears at the head of a mighty phalanx of broccoli, carrots, and beets. Have no fear, good people of Canada! Hellmann’s cares, and they’re here to save you from the corporate masterminds who want to corrupt your nation’s food system!

More after the jump

Full frontal gardening

A while back I wrote about Fritz Haeg’s art-cum-ag project called “Edible Estates.”  Well this news just in: for the new edition of the book they are looking for more reports from across the country from those that have decided to engage in “full frontal gardening.”

Have you replaced the lawn in front of your house or apartment building with a completely edible garden? Questions and submissions can be sent to: assistant[at]fritzhaeg.com

They will need:
- a 500 word story about your garden
- 4 or 5 photos of your garden at the highest resolution
- your name, mailing address, size of garden, date established, and USDA Plant Hardiness Zone

 
• Zone 9 includes: Houston, Tampa, New Orleans
 
• Zone 5 includes: Des Moines, Chicago, Detroit
 
• Zone 4 includes: Minneapolis, Burlington, Anchorage
 
• Zone 3 includes: Northern Minnesota, Montana, and Maine

Find the detailed map here or go here to find your zone by zip code.

Edible Estates (http://www.edibleestates.org) has initiated a series of regional prototype front yard gardens since 2005 for families in Salina, KS; Lakewood, CA; Maplewood, NJ; London, UK; Austin, TX, Los Angeles, CA; Baltimore, MD; and most recently, the Lenape Edible Estate: Manhattan, which will have it’s public opening on September 14th:

A Call to put away the Lunch Box

Deborah Lehmann is an editor of School Lunch Talk, a blog about school food. She is currently studying economics and public policy at Brown University.

I get Google Alerts about blog posts and articles that mention “school lunch,” and lately the emails have had lots of links to stories about how to pack a healthy midday meal. I’ve been getting alerts about everything from packable recipe ideas to the latest stylish lunch boxes. All of this reminds me that while more than 30 million students participate in the National School Lunch Program each year, another 20 million forgo cafeteria fare and bring lunch from home.

Many parents pack lunch for their children because they don’t consider chicken nuggets a healthy meal. I don’t either. But before you resolve to pack lunch for your child every day this year, think about this: one of the best ways to get better food into public school cafeterias is to put away the lunch box and become a loyal lunchroom customer.

I’ve blogged before about how cafeterias operate much like restaurants. Since their revenue comes from a mixture of federal per-meal reimbursements and student dollars, cafeteria directors need to bring students into the lunch line to stay afloat. They do that by offering the foods kids like — pizza, chicken nuggets, nachos and French fries. The hope is that students will look at the menu and say, “Mom, I want to buy lunch today because the entree is popcorn chicken.”

That means kids have a lot of power when it comes to determining what’s for lunch at school. But it also means that parents have a lot of power. After all, parents are the ones who supply the lunch money.  If parents — and I’m talking big groups of parents — started using that power, cafeterias would probably be pretty receptive. If cafeterias had to cater to parents instead of kids, they probably wouldn’t serve popcorn chicken.

More after the jump

No More School Lunch Baloney

by Claire Stanford

My school lunch awakening began the summer after I graduated from college, in 2006, when I volunteered as a counselor at a free day camp in New Haven, Connecticut. The point of the camp was many-fold: to teach kids about the environment, to keep kids off the street and out of trouble all day, and to exhaust them enough during the day that they’d stay out of trouble when we let them out, too. And, importantly, to give them free breakfast, lunch, and snack every day, provided by the New Haven public school system.

For many kids, school lunch (and the less well-known school breakfast) serve the invaluable function of providing two guaranteed meals a day, something I didn’t realize until that summer. Kids were allowed to bring their own lunch; out of the forty-or-so kids, I could probably count the number who actually did bring brown-bags on one hand. 

Every day at noon, the kids would sit in a big circle on the floor, and we would pass out lunch, the most typical one being a baloney and cheese sandwich (one slice of baloney and one slice of processed American cheese on white sandwich bread), a bag of carrots, and a small carton of chocolate milk. In the middle of the circle were three bins labeled trash, recycling, and food waste. The plastic wrappers for the sandwiches and the carrots went in the trash bin, the milk cartons in the recycling, and anything the kids didn’t eat into the food waste. At the end of every lunch, after everything had been cleaned up, one counselor would weigh the bin of food waste. We recorded these weights on a chart posted on the blackboard; the goal was to get below one pound of food waste. If the goal was reached, the head of the camp promised, she would shave off her eyebrows.

More after the jump

NPR and Monsanto

I love my public radio station. I’ll admit I even drive to work some days just to listen to the morning news (note: I live in New York City, where driving to work takes more time, costs more, and is just plain silly). On the way home, I’m usually back in the car just in time to hear the tail end of Marketplace, the daily broadcast of the day’s economic and financial news. Marketplace is a great show – they explain complex content simply and with humor (I have a radio crush on the host, Kai Ryssdal) and they always play good music between the segments.

Lately, however, I’ve found myself cringing with disgust as I listen. It’s not the bleak financial news day after day or the fact that Kai and I mostly likely will never date that causes my reaction, but the fact that Marketplace is now sponsored by Monsanto – the biotech company responsible for Round-Up, Agent Orange, GMO corn and soy, and all hosts of other types of evil.  And as if it couldn’t get any worse, the announcer, in a smug and confident voice, informs me that Monsanto is “committed to sustainable agriculture.”

Um, WHAT?

If someone asked me to name a corporation that epitomized the opposite of sustainable agriculture, the name Monsanto would be out of my mouth before they even finished the question.  But I’m not going to rant about Monsanto here, you can read all about how they’re destroying the planet here. And if that’s not enough, go here.

What I want to rant about here is Greenwashing.  Greenwashing is the process by which a corporation disseminates a false or misleading picture of environmental friendliness in order to conceal or obscure damaging activities.  Now, I’m not green about greenwashing.  I know it’s all over our food packaging in terms like “all natural” or “made from the best stuff on earth,” but Monsanto’s blatant usurping of the term “sustainable agriculture” makes my blood boil.  Why? Well, for one, they’re insulting our intelligence.  And for two, I’m scared.  Really scared.  Scared that people will believe them.  Allowing Monsanto to piggyback on public radio, which is seen as a credible, reliable – albeit left-leaning (which, let’s face it, makes it worse) – suggests that their message is all these things.

More after the jump

Take Action on Food Safety Bill HR 2749

Call your representative today and urge them to support the Kaptur-Farr Food Safety Proposal.

H.R. 2749, The Food Safety Enhancement Act, has been moving through committee and now is slated to go to the floor of the House on Wednesday, July 29. The bill will go to the house floor under a suspension vote, which means limited debate and no amendments can be introduced on the floor. A two-thirds majority is needed for passage.

Last week, representatives Marcy Kaptur (OH-9), Sam Farr (CA-17), Maurice Hinchey (NY-22), Jesse Jackson Jr. (IL-2), Peter Welch (VT-at large), Chellie Pingree (ME-1) and Earl Blumenauer (OR-3) submitted a letter to the House Energy and Commerce Committee with specific proposed changes to HR 2749 that addresses many of the concerns raised by the sustainable and organic agriculture community.

H.R. 2749 contains provisions that could hinder sustainable and organic farmers’ access to markets, require expensive fees, and lead to dismantling of important conservation practices and wildlife habitat.

Please call your Representative today, Wednesday, and ask them to join the effort to protect small and mid-sized family farmers, the environment, and consumer choice by supporting the provisions in the Kaptur-Farr proposal to HR 2749. 

It’s easy and only takes a minute to do:

Click here to find your Representative’s name and enter your zip code in the top left-hand corner of the screen.

Then call the Capitol Switchboard and ask to be directly connected to your Representative’s office: 202-224-3121.  You can say:

“I am a constituent of Representative___________ and I am calling to ask him/her to support the Kaptur-Farr proposal to HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009.  I am also asking him/her to vote against HR 2749 unless the proposals included in the Kaptur-Farr letter are included in the final bill.”   

For more information, read the action alert from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and an overview of the legislation from Food & Water Watch last month.

Alaskans get creative about school lunch (and join the Time for Lunch campaign, natch)

by Slow Food USA campaign intern Stephanie Miller

Here at Slow Food USA, we started our Time for Lunch campaign because providing kids with local, healthy food at school is a goal worth fighting for.  Over the last few months, we’ve been talking with parents, food activists, and food service professionals from all 50 states about the challenges they have faced on the road towards a better National School Lunch Program.

Extreme environments often overlooked in the discussion of local food and nutrition are the frozen deserts, deciduous ranges, and rain forests of Alaska.  According to Kerri Burrows, manager of the Alaska Food Coalition, the main food issue in area schools is not nutrition, but supply.  Traditionally, native Alaskans have relied on a seasonally variable high-protein diet.  But schools still have to comply with the nutritional standards of the National School Lunch Program.  This means that most school food is shipped thousands of miles north from the continental United States.  When perishable foods arrive, they are less than fresh, and very expensive.  To account for these extra costs, school meals in Alaska are subsidized three times as much as the average in the rest of nation. The one thing that isn’t unique about Alaska’s school food is its impact on children’s health: as is the case elsewhere else, childhood obesity is spiraling out of control, especially among indigenous children who rely on a non-native diet full of the processed foods that are popular in the rest of the country. 

Kathryn Carl, of Haines, AK, has been working hard to find a solution to this problem.  She works with a school in nearby Klukwan, a Chilkat Indian village, to serve locally sensitive lunches.  In order to implement the program, the school has opted to not receive lunches from the National School Lunch Program.  They serve about 30 meals a day to local children and elderly residents of the small village.  The program relies heavily on donations, such as local Halibut and Salmon, as well as a garden where they can grow produce such as potatoes.  They are currently trying to raise funds for a greenhouse.  Kathryn’s husband makes fresh bread several times a week, since shipped bread often arrives with mold in the middle. 

On September 7, Kathryn and other residents of Klukwan will hold an Eat-In as part of Time for Lunch’s National Day of Action.  We hope that their example of hard work and ingenuity will inspire discussion in their region and in other local food communities, whatever the local challenges. It’s not always easy to give kids real food at school, but it’s an important and absolutely necessary job: the health of our nation depends on it.

Tweeting: Not just for birds

Follow Slow Food USA President Josh Viertel on Twitter!

And while you’re at it, follow Slow Food USA, the organization, as well. So far, about 1,500 people are doing it!

And if you really just really can’t get enough, join the fun with 4,500 other fans on Facebook!

Measuring (and curbing) a city’s “foodprint”

Chicago’s doing it; New York City’s doing it.  Who’s next, and what’s “it?”

“It” is something called a “foodprint resolution,” and it represents an initiative to help cities acknowledge the connection between climate change and food production and distribution; and make a commitment to reduce their impact and increase their citizens’ access to healthier, greener foods.  On Tuesday, in Chicago,  the City Council’s Committee on Energy, Environmental Protection and Public Utilities voted unanimously to pass the resolution.  On June 30, New York City Council Member Bill de Blasio introduced a similar resolution calling for a citywide “FoodprintNYC” initiative to reduce the city’s climate foodprint and create greater access to local, fresh, healthy plant-based food, especially in low-income communities, as well as city-run institutions. So far, 11 City Council members have signed on as co-sponsors.

The resolution is being introduced as a kind of coda to NYC’s carbon footprint reduction commitment (PlaNYC).  As blogger Kerry Trueman explains on the HuffPost,

“a lot of us—including our very own mayor—are only just starting to understand that our food choices affect the environment’s health as much as our own. Mayor Bloomberg has famously (and courageously) launched numerous campaigns to fight various public health nuisances: trans fats; smoking; calorie listings; sodium; yada, yada…

NYC’s carbon foodprint must be considered, too, when we examine how to conserve resources, improve our aging infrastructure, and create a more sustainable city.”

Local organizations are hopeful that this initiative has traction and can be a model for all cities across the country.

Take Action:

 
• if you are a NYC resident, take just a couple of minutes to tell your city council representative that you’d like him or her to help lead the charge on climate change and food justice by signing on to the “FoodprintNYC” initiative
.  
• Consider introducing a foodprint resolution in your own city!

2 Comments | Categories: Farms and Farming, News, Current Events, Policy, Take Action

Catch my drift? With a gust of wind, an Iowa crop duster can squash an organic farm

by Kurt Michael Friese (this post originally appeared on Grist)

Grinnell Heritage Farm is 152 years old. Andrew Dunham is the fifth generation of his family to work this land about 50 miles east of Des Moines. He is a direct descendant of Josiah Grinnell, founder of the town and the man Horace Greeley once famously quoted as having said, “Go west, young man, go west.” Andrew and his wife Melissa are a few months shy of receiving their formal certification as an organic farm.

Across the road, due north of their land, is a field of corn that is managed by the nearby Monsanto seed corn plant. In Iowa and anywhere commodity corn is grown, it is common practice around this time of year to use chemicals to control fungus. Often this is accomplished via the use of aerial application, commonly referred to as cropdusting. On July 6th, a rustic-looking old biplane swooped in to spray Monsanto’s field. To put it mildly, the pilot’s bombardiering skills were not what one would hope.

Dunham’s crew was in the field picking broccoli and spinruts (“turnip” backwards—a Japanese form of the root vegetable). They witnessed the plane as it failed to shut off its spray mechanism in time, and the fungicide drifted into their tree planting and hay field. “The hay ground is in the third year of transition and would have become organically certified on September 1st,” Andrew said. Now, probably not.

You’d think that this would be a clear-cut cause of action, as the legal folks would put it. But the clever folks at Monsanto hire the crop dusters as contractors, and they in turn use a corporate shell with no assets, so when something like this happens and a victim sues, they simply file bankruptcy and then form a new corporation.

Iowa is the single most radically altered landscape in the country. No state has changed more since the arrival of European settlers, and today the land is heavily “mono-cropped.” Nature abhors a lack of diversity, but pathogens love it so farmers respond with more and stronger chemicals to fight off the bugs and weeds and fungi. No one owns the airspace, so planes can fly over any land they choose. Even if the pilots are incredibly accurate, Iowa is a windy place (thus the massive increase in wind energy production here in recent years). Drift is practically inevitable.

More after the jump