Localism

In the latest report by the Food & Environment Reporting Network in partnership with The American Prospect, reporter Paul Greenberg, author of the New York Times bestseller Four Fish, tells the story of how the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is the result of decades-long U.S. agricultural practices and investigates some of the promising solutions to fixing its future. The story, “A River Runs Through It,” features a first look at some of the key players working to keep nutrients out of the Gulf, from a Minnesota conventional commodity farmer to a leading scientist who has studied the marsh ecosystem for 25 years, to a MacArthur genius grantee in Louisiana, who was one of the first to shed light on the dead zone phenomenon. Greenberg also talks with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, who supports voluntary interventions. Greenberg explains how, as industrial agriculture and animal feed-lots have spread around the globe, dead zones have been spreading exponentially along with them. He explains: “Dead zones begin when rivers carry nitrogen and phosphorous-based nutrients—primarily agricultural fertilizers—into the ocean. In the case of the Gulf of Mexico, it is the Mississippi River that delivers nitrates and phosphates from the American heartland into the Gulf at a rate of 1.7 million tons per year. Once this stew of nutrients reaches the ocean, algae bloom in prodigious amounts. When those algae die and settle to the bottom, bacteria consume them, sucking life-giving oxygen from the water.” Greenberg profiles corn and soybean farmer Brian Hicks, who is trying to manage the runoff in his fields through a number of voluntary measures supported by the USDA. “But it’s important to note that none of these efforts is directed at the core of American agricultural activity—the production of corn and soy,” writes Greenberg. “Rather, what the department seems concerned with is a complicated dance with other regulatory bodies, particularly the Environmental Protection Agency, to avoid telling the politically important constituency of swing-state Midwestern farmers what to do.” Secretary Vilsack defends the approach, telling Greenberg: “If you have a voluntary operation and you are able to measure and quantify the benefits from that voluntary effort, then it may not be necessary that you establish requirements or mandates. This is an incentive-driven system, which is designed to provide a reason for people to do something as opposed to force them to do something.” “There are some who believe that everything Vilsack is proposing and that farmers like Hicks are executing is nothing more than a Band-Aid on a gaping hemorrhage that started the moment settlers began their free-for-all on the prairie and sliced into the Midwest’s native sod,” writes Greenberg. He talks with Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas, who explains how planting perennial crops could be part of the solution by absorbing and maintaining nutrients in the soil. And Greenberg examines other solutions, including redirecting the river back to its natural shape so that sediment settles before it reaches the Gulf and rebuilding marshland in Louisiana to absorb nutrients. While saving the Gulf is expensive, Greenberg posits that the money could come from BP, if it ever settles the federal Clean Water Act lawsuit it faces in the wake of its 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. MacArthur Genius grantee and scientist Nancy Rabalais tells Greenberg that the only way to truly save the Gulf is through USDA reform and changing policies that encourage and support the planting of corn. Greenberg asserts that doing nothing is not an option. He points out that a similar situation in the Black Sea was mitigated when the Soviet Union collapsed, followed by the waning of fertilizer subsidies. But it might have already been too late. “The dead zone in the Black Sea has indeed been fixed. The sea has come back to life, but only to a point,” he writes. “According to scien

“I bring my lunch to school every day because the school food is pretty disgusting,” Nick Hilliard, a senior at Apopka High School in Florida, told high school reporter Rachel Armstrong. “If you’re willing to spend some money, you can have a well-balanced meal,” said a senior from Portland, Oregon, in her school newspaper. “A lot of the food is oily. It doesn’t look good,” said a sophomore at California’s Oakland Tech, as quoted in her high school paper. There’s little argument, from any corner, that school food needs to be better—more nutritious, more thoughtfully produced, tastier, and yet still accessible to the 32 million kids served by the National School Lunch program. High school journalists from across the country, whose stories I’ve quoted above, explored the issue this year as part of the first Healthy and Sustainable School Food Journalism Awards, sponsored by the Earth Day Network, the Epstein-Roth Foundation, the UC-Berkeley School of Journalism, and the Edible Schoolyard Project. Most of the young journalists hit on the crux of the matter. Serving a healthy lunch to millions of schoolchildren, every day, is a highly regulated—and woefully underfunded—endeavor. Schools, no matter how good their intentions, face a number of barriers when trying to improve their food; not merely cost but operational issues, such as complex government reimbursements for food purchases, and infrastructure issues, such as outdated and outgrown kitchens. But there’s good news at last on the school food front. Despite these hurdles, many schools are finding innovative ways to make school food healthier and more sustainable wherever they can. And parents, kids, and local farms and businesses can work with school districts to help make it happen. Last fall, the Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves 650,000 meals a day, adopted a Good Food Purchasing Policy, designed to encourage the purchase of more nutritious, local, sustainable, and fairly produced foods. (NRDC helped design these groundbreaking criteria, the first of their kind.)  When a major food buyer adopts guidelines like these, it not only helps ensure that kids have access to healthier foods in school—it also helps support local farmers and producers who run sustainable operations, which are less polluting than factory farms and chemically-intensive industrial agriculture. Los Angeles Unified schools, as of February, have also stopped serving meat in the cafeteria on Mondays, in an effort to encourage kids to eat more plant-based proteins. And PS 244 in Flushing, New York, recently became the first public school in New York City, if not the country, to serve an entirely vegetarian menu. Going meatless will not only improve students’ health by reducing the risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes—it’s also good for the environment. The meat industry worldwide generates nearly 20 percent of man-made global warming pollution. According to the Environmental Working Group, if everyone in the country skipped eating meat and cheese once a week for a year, we would reduce global warming pollution by the equivalent of taking 7 million cars off the road. Chicago public schools have made great strides in serving better meat in cafeterias. The majority of Chicago schools now offer freshly cooked chicken drumsticks, from birds raised without antibiotics on Amish farms in Indiana. Serving freshly cooked rather than reheated food is in itself a major improvement for Chicago schools. And by making large purchases from farmers who raise antibiotic-free chicken, the school system is helping preserve the effectiveness of medically important antibiotics. The vast majority of poultry and livestock operations regularly dose healthy animals with antibiotics, making these potentially life-saving drugs less effective when they’re truly needed, by humans or animals. St. Paul, Minnesota, started a similar program to buy antibiotic-free chicken before Chicago’s—it could prove to be a model fo

We chefs are blessed with the capacity to influence the public’s food choices. And our purchasing power is equally as influential among producers and purveyors. We will continue to push for ingredients produced and harvested with a passion for quality that matches our own; and we will continue to share the stories behind these ingredients with our customers, schoolchildren, public health professionals, the media—anyone, in fact, who will listen. By: Michael Leviton, chef/owner of Lumière (Newton, MA) and chef/partner of Area Four (Cambridge, MA) In the late 1980s, I was a cook at Square One in San Francisco, California, where the food revolution was already under way. While the word “sustainability” did not exist in our vocabulary as chefs, there was an overarching belief that to be the best chef—and to make the best meals—you needed to start with great ingredients. It was not uncommon for chefs in that area to search out the best farmers, ranchers, bread bakers and cheesemakers because we knew that they put just as much care into their work as we did. When I returned to New England in 1996, I found a much different culture. The area was not as robust with farmers, fishers, and other food artisans who shared a commitment to grow and produce great food, and it was a struggle to find the caliber of ingredients I was used to working with. By then, Chefs Collaborative had a presence in Boston, and the organization connected me to like-minded chefs and food producers. Through my participation in Chefs Collaborative, I had an epiphany that flavor, healthfulness, and quality of ingredients are intricately linked to the care that is shown to the environment during production. We chefs are blessed with the capacity to influence the public’s food choices. And our purchasing power is equally as influential among producers and purveyors. We will continue to push for ingredients produced and harvested with a passion for quality that matches our own; and we will continue to share the stories behind these ingredients with our customers, schoolchildren, public health professionals, the media—anyone, in fact, who will listen. With these and other efforts, we hope to keep this conversation—this movement—progressing. With The Chef’s Collaborative Cookbook: Local, Sustainable, Delicious: Recipes from America’s Great Chefs, we start where we always have—with a mixture of flavor and community. These two values have anchored us to our mission and principles since we began our work 20 years ago, and we have no doubt they will carry us into the decades to come. The community at our core is reflected in it—from the chefs who have provided recipes and information about our food to the farmers, ranchers, fishers, cheesemakers, foragers, and others who have brought the food into our kitchens and given us the tools and the context to understand how great flavor is created. This cookbook is a blueprint for cooking like a sustainably minded chef. You’ll find delicious dishes that feature less familiar cuts of meat, like Beef Shin and Farro Soup, Pork Heart and Sausage Ragoût over Pasta. Lesser-known seafood species show up in Whey-Poached Triggerfish with Asparagus and Coconut Black Drum Seviche. And seasonal showpieces like Goat Cheese Gnocchi with Spring Peas and Tarragon and Autumn Pear “Ravioli” with Chanterelle and Shaved Pear Salad will inspire you to cook in the rhythm of the seasons. The recipes will make you want to head straight to the kitchen (with a quick stop at the farmer’s market first, of course). Sustainable cuisine is about an approach to sourcing and cooking predicated on flavor, quality, and sharing our passion and knowledge. The pleasures of the table—that mix of flavor and community—enrich us in mind, body, and soul and inspire us to do our best work.

On April 8, the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center stepped into the debate about antibiotic use in animal agriculture. Under the guidance of physicians and foodservice staff alike, UCSF’s Academic Senate unanimously approved a resolution to phase out the procurement of meat raised with non-therapeutic antibiotics and urged all ten University of California campuses to do the same. This resolution is not just a symbolic decision – serving over 650,000 meals per year to patients, staff, and the community, and with a food budget of close to $7 million, UCSF and its food purchasing choices have the power to send a strong message to the market and to policymakers.  “There is overwhelming scientific consensus that overuse of antibiotics in livestock is a health hazard to people,” says Dr. Thomas Newman, a member of the Academic Senate who spearheaded the resolution with the help of the non-profit San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility. He is in good company. Independent experts ranging from the World Health Organization to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences agree that the routine use of antibiotics in animal agriculture cultivates antibiotic-resistant bacteria, threatening the long-term efficacy of antibiotics for human use. Two thirds of the drugs that animals in our food supply get in their feed and water, from penicillins to macrolides, might sound familiar to anyone who has been to the hospital recently. In fact, eighty percent of all of the antibiotics sold in the U.S., almost 30 million pounds on an annual basis, are used for meat production. The majority are given to otherwise healthy animals in order to promote faster growth and to compensate for unsanitary and overcrowded living conditions. “We believe that health care is best positioned to lead our society away from its addiction to antibiotics in animal agriculture,” says Gary Cohen, President of the non-profit organization Health Care Without Harm. He adds: “Hospitals have both the mission-critical rationale and the economic clout.” Health Care Without Harm works to leverage both health care’s healing mission and purchasing power on a range of sustainable food issues, from organic production to local food purchasing. UCSF is one of over 440 hospitals across the country that have signed Health Care Without Harm’s Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge, which states that healthy food must come from a food system that is ecologically-sustainable, economically-viable, and socially-just. However, hospitals attempting to purchase sustainable food face serious supply chain challenges. In the case of meat produced with non-therapeutic antibiotics, the market to date has been small in the U.S., making these products costly. For now, UCSF is taking a two-pronged approach to procurement. “We have reduced the amount of red meat being served,” states Jack Henderson, Associate Director of Nutrition and Food Services at UCSF, “And secondly, we are pursuing a source of beef that is grass-fed, raised without non-therapeutic antibiotics, and that still fits within our budget. It is a complex maneuver, but we believe it is the right thing to do for our patients, our staff, and our visitors.” Health Care Without Harm is working with nearly 100 other hospitals nationwide that have committed to this “less meat, better meat” approach. Leading the pack is Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, Vermont which created a long-term antibiotics reduction plan in 2005. Currently, close to 100 percent of Fletcher Allen’s beef has been raised without non-therapeutic antibiotics, and the hospital hopes that all of its chicken will soon meet this standard. Fletcher Allen estimates that its foodservice budget rose by $75,000 when it switched to a line of chicken products raised without the routine use of antibiotics. The cost of treating a patient infected with a resistant bacterial infection like MRSA (Meth

What does it take to run a successful farmers market? Coordinator of the Bloomington Community Farmers Market Marcia Veldman gives tips in this week's podcast.

Join us for a tour of one-of-a-kind Eden Farms and learn about their hydroponic farming that grows basil, arugula, and watercress year-round.

Milwaukee, St. Louis and Detroit have joined the list of cities where fast food workers have struck for $15/hour wages and the right to unionize.

After months of political gridlock, new farm legislation may be in sight.

In the spring of 2010, 60 people met in downtown Detroit to talk about a new idea. Three years later, the concept honed in that Detroit hotel conference room is now a national organization supporting some 80 corps members in 12 states around the country. Last month the service members, fellows, staff and board of FoodCorps returned to Detroit.  We gathered for trainings, conversation, and immersion in Detroit’s urban farms and gardens. We delved into issues of food justice and inequity, both local and national. We heard from local leaders about their organizations and companies, and the career paths they’ve followed. And, of course, we got our hands dirty on some field trips. It’s not easy bringing everyone together in person, but these meetings are an important part of the experience for our service members, and they’re critical to helping FoodCorps learn as we grow. Detroit provided an important backdrop for this event. Like many of the communities we serve, Detroit faces high rates of childhood obesity and food insecurity, economic hardship, and institutionalized inequality. At the same time, Detroit is a place where local solutions to these problems are taking root. Detroit is addressing its challenges through strategic and thoughtful community organizations and leaders who have stepped up to build thriving new communities centered on food and agriculture. We’re proud to be a part of this through partnerships with organizations like the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network––one of our service sites in Detroit, where FoodCorps service member Whitney Smith is spending her year. While together, we celebrated our accomplishments since August: reaching nearly 55,000 children in 300 schools, giving them opportunities to gain knowledge of what real food is in the classroom, to engage hands-on with fruits and vegetables in school gardens, and to get access to farm-fresh ingredients in their cafeterias. And while our metrics of success this year are strong (13 football fields worth of school gardens! 2,000 volunteers! 230 healthy items added to lunch menus!), our proudest accomplishments come in the form of stories. That’s why, while in Detroit, we held our first ever “FoodTalks,” an evening of storytelling that we recorded, and can be seen on YouTube. We had a chance to hear from service members in each state about how they see FoodCorps service working in their communities; about students who have taught them as much as they’re teaching; about the people in their lives who inspired them to get involved in food and farming; and about where they see themselves headed after FoodCorps service. Jen Rusciano, another of our FoodCorps service members in Detroit, explained to us how her student, “Jay,” who usually struggled with school, found connection and pride through the small food business he created with his peers. These are the stories that fuel our service members to keep doing what they do. Each of them could tell a similar story, about a child who fell in love with gardening, about a school food director who was willing to think outside the box. We hope you’ll take a moment to watch some of these beautiful stories, and maybe feel inspired to start telling your own.