If you think diabetes and obesity are the two biggest health care crises Americans face these days, you’re missing the forest for the trees–literally. Because the roots of all this diet-induced disease lie in two less publicized but even more pernicious epidemics: nature deficit disorder and kitchen illiteracy.
The symptoms include a woeful lack of familiarity with that elusive culinary commodity known as “real food,” or “good food,” or “slow food”, and total estrangement from Mother Earth–who, by the way, keeps hanging around outside pining for a glimpse of you while you remain indoors, mesmerized by your monitor or TV screen and mindlessly munching on ersatz edibles.
Do you have no idea what you’re actually eating, where it came from, or how it was grown? You may suffer from one or both of these maladies. Are you fearful of naked food that’s not encased in microwave-friendly packaging? Petrified by perishable produce that demands any sort of prep?
If we weren’t so divorced from nature, we’d give a rat’s ass–make that a double rat’s ass–about all those freaky deformed frogs that have been sprouting extra legs in recent decades, and the sexually deformed fish that started popping up in the Potomac a few years back.
As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof pointed out in his column last Sunday and again on Thursday’s Colbert Report, scientists increasingly suspect that “a class of chemicals called endocrine disruptors, very widely used in agriculture, industry and consumer products,” may be contributing to a scary hodgepodge of health problems in people as well as the disturbing rise in anatomical anomalies in frogs and fish.
Kristof cites a ‘landmark’ 50-page statement from the Endocrine Society which presents “evidence that endocrine disruptors have effects on male and female reproduction, breast development and cancer, prostate cancer, neuroendocrinology, thyroid, metabolism and obesity, and cardiovascular endocrinology.” The statement adds:
The rise in the incidence in obesity matches the rise in the use and distribution of industrial chemicals that may be playing a role in generation of obesity.
I wrote back in 2006 that the EPA had identified endocrine disruption as one of its top six research priorities in 1996. But, a decade later, they had yet to begin testing any candidate chemicals for their endocrine-disrupting potential. Kristof notes that “for now, these chemicals continue to be widely used in agricultural pesticides and industrial compounds. Everybody is exposed.” [Read more →]
As kids, Fred and Stacia Monahan spent their summers working on farms. In fact, working on the same farm in Connecticut as children is where the two first met. It was only natural that one day would own and operate their own farm.
In 1998 the Monahan’s founded Stone Gardens Farm in Shelton, Connecticut, not far from where Fred grew up. The success of their farm, farmers’ market, and most recently the farm’s Community Supported Agriculture Program (CSA) resulted from their dedication and hard work, but also from a rise in demand for sustainable food.
In the past few years, as knowing where your food comes from became a rising national trend, Shelton, Connecticut became an ideal place for agritourism. Located 90 minutes from Manhattan, this scenic part of Fairfield country is home to many family run farms. Agritourists come from New York City and around Connecticut to cut their own Christmas trees, visit local wineries, tour local farms and dine on fresh- picked produce.
That, however, wasn’t the case when the Monahan’s first began their tiny farm. They started out selling the food they produced from their tiny farm off a table at a nearby friend’s farm. [Read more →]
Michelle Obama caught some flack during the run-up to last year’s elections when she said she was proud of America “for the first time in [her] adult life.” But many of us understood — at the time, we’d spent years building an international reputation for political apathy, but the Obama groundswell was hinting at what would be a record voting turnout. And in spite of a deeply divided country and what was then a flagging economy, people were showing signs of hope we hadn’t seen in decades.
The First Lady caught some heat again a few months ago when she planted an organic garden on the White House Lawn, this time from the Crop Life Association, who thought going organic set a bad example . But many of us were inspired by her actions. Thousands of us planted gardens of our own for the first time. Harkening back to the days of Victory Gardens, it seems that the first lady’s garden has given legs to a movement of garden-fresh food, and those who’ve followed in her footsteps are making an investment in a delicious future.
One of the people who rallied for that garden was IATP Food and Society fellow Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International, whose Eat the View campaign started at OnDayOne.org, where it quickly rose to the top of the list (and subsequently won). Eventually, the campaign culminated in its own website, eattheview.org.
Now, Roger is at it again, this time with Food Independence Day, a campaign encouraging citizens throughout the US to make local food part of their Fourth of July festivities. Says Doiron of the campaign:
With July 4th and other Independence Day celebrations just around the corner, people will have other options to ponder as they plan their holiday meals. For too many in the US, the “choices” will be Bud or Miller or an industrially-produced hotdog or an industrially-produced hamburger. I don’t know about you, but I think our national holiday deserves better than barbecued mystery-meat and water-flavored beer.
I couldn’t agree more. The 4th is one of my favorite holidays, and as I write this post from Livingston, Montana, having spent the last two weeks crossing the country en route to my own family’s cookout in Long Beach, Washington, (I’m currently moving back to my native Washington from the east coast), I would also say that we have a lot more local food choices than most people might think.
In the two weeks I’ve spent on the road, I’ve tapped into local food resource Eat Well Everywhere, which led me to Madison, Wisconsin’s Willy Street Co-op and to Milwaukee’s Growing Power, whose greenhouses produced the first fresh tomatoes I’ve tasted this year. In Minneapolis, I grabbed snacks at the Linden Hills Co-op. Here in Montana - not exactly a culinary destination - I’ve been practically living on locally-raised buffalo. In spite of some major problems with this country’s food systems, we have a lot to be proud of on the local level. [Read more →]
It’s important to start the week off with healthy goals, but sometimes the bustle of everyday life makes it hard to stick to good intentions. We grab a quick meal in between errands, without realizing that fast food can be riddled with unnecessary fat and calories.
Thankfully, having a Healthy Monday on the go just got a lot easier! More and more states are introducing legislation requiring that chain restaurants disclose nutritional information to their patrons.
Earlier this month Maine passed a series of new anti-obesity measures, including mandatory nutritional postings. Obesity has become an epidemic there as it has throughout the United States: the amount of overweight children in Maine has tripled to 30% in the last twenty years. Lawmakers hope that educating the public about calorie content will stop this dangerous trend.
Certain parts of New York, Washington and Oregon states currently display nutritional information in chain restaurants. California and Massachusetts will begin the practice next year. There could even be national legislation in the offing. On June 10th the Senate agreed to include calorie counts as an aspect of new, comprehensive health care reforms. We are a vote away from a national policy requiring chains to inform us about the calorie content of their products. [Read more →]
Time to change kids’ lunch This week, Slow Food USA launched its Time for Lunch campaign. They’re gathering signatures to show support for prioritizing “real food” in reauthorization of the upcoming Child Nutrition Act, which funds school lunch (and breakfast) programs nationwide. Reauthorization by Congress is slated for September and Slow Food is organizing a national day of action this Labor Day, with local Eat-Ins around the country.
Change in China IATP’s Jim Harkness reports on a new animal welfare law in China, which protects pets but not farm animals, for whom things have rapidly gone downhill as the old days of table-scrap-fed barnyard pigs and chickens have given way to a major increase in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Baby steps, yes, but Harkness, who spent over a decade in China, sees some hope in the country’s shifting attitudes toward animals and nature.
Un-appealing The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has denied Monsanto’s request to reconsider a ruling keeping the agri-giant from selling its Roundup Ready alfalfa seeds “until the government completes an environmental impact study on how the genetically modified product could affect neighboring crops.” Here’s hoping this shutdown will set a precedent for other GM crops.
E coli, in beef and elsewhere As experts puzzle over how E. coli, a bacteria specific to cattle, wound up in Nestle’s Toll House cookie dough, sickening over 60 people across the country, Colorado’s JBS Swift Beef company announces a massive Class 1 recall on its products.
Regina Weiss is a gardener and is communications director for Eat Well Guide and a number of sustainability projects.
When writer and former Mademoiselle editor Eleanor Perényi died in May at 91, her New York Times obituary noted that she used her “years of toil in her Connecticut garden as a window onto the wider social world, ranging over history, myth and philosophy.” All true – bewitchingly so – especially to someone like me, without a deep sense of ancient history, as Perényi excelled at describing growing practices and agricultural customs going back thousands of years.
She also had compelling views, not found elsewhere to my knowledge, about the use of gardens and flowers in suppressing, even imprisoning, women, across the centuries and hemispheres, arguing that while women invented crop agriculture while men were off hunting, they were later relegated for thousands of years to growing flowers, “of all plants the least menacing and the most useless. Their sole purpose is to be beautiful and give pleasure,” she added. Employing references ranging from the bible to Medieval gardening texts and the ancient Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, Perényi went so far as to write, for example, “one of the principal functions of the . . . garden from Turkey to China was the incarceration of women.”
What the Times failed to note, surprisingly, is that Perényi, whose Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden, is a much beloved classic, was decades ahead of her time in delineating the noxious effects of industrial agriculture that define much of our food politics today. [Read more →]
A few weeks ago, I made a bittersweet last trip (for awhile, anyway) back to New York to meet with the team at Eat Well. While I was there, EW new media guru Karen Kanan Correa and I trekked down to Tribeca to visit Cate Bruce-Low, aka Tribeca Yummy Mummy. A former chef and present yoga teacher, Cate teaches toddlers (aka “yummies”), including her own daughter Mira (son Liev is a bit young still), to cook with fresh local ingredients from her Tribeca apartment.
Here is a video of the class we taped. Only one of Mira’ s friends was able to attend that day but as you’ll see, the two of them were enough for a festive atmosphere. Ben, Mira’s fellow culinary student, has aspirations to one day own a restaurant.
In many ways, Cate is part of a movement toward teaching children to eat well through hands-on experiences, and can count among her contemporaries first lady Michelle Obama, who points out that fresh, local food tastes better and that children are more likely to eat healthy food if they are involved in its production, whether in the garden or in the kitchen.
My own parents never cooked much, and I never really cooked with fresh herbs myself until I was in my 20s and set out to learn to cook on my own. At 3 years old, Mira and Ben, thanks to Cate, are already light years ahead of where I was in my teens! [Read more →]
This 4th of July, let’s declare our freedom from the “pharmo-petro- chemico-military-industrial-agribusiness” food chain, exemplified by Stephen Colbert’s funny but creepy Carlyle-like Prescott Group. Give your patriotic picnics and potlucks a truly independent flavor; serve foods grown “locally, deliciously, and sustainably,” as the Food Independence Day campaign is calling on all of us to do–including our elected leaders.
And please, before you dismiss this as just another frivolous feel- good PR stunt, be aware that Food Independence Day is the brainchild of Roger Doiron, the Kitchen Gardeners International founder who led the call for the White House kitchen garden, which has yielded more produce–and more publicity–than even Roger could have hoped. Yes, he did! And he will, with your help.
But don’t stop there. Join me in declaring a war on our tired policy of declaring wars, whether it’s the war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on whatever. This habit of framing everything in violent terms impoverishes us all.
In fact, our fixation on making a killing, as opposed to making a living, is what’s brought our economy to the brink of collapse, as venture capitalist/eco-preneur Woody Tasch argues brilliantly in his new book. The title, Inquiries Into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as If Food, Farms, and Fertility Matteredmay be a mouthful, but it’s one I’d love to see on everyone’s lips, because this book gets right to the heart of everything that’s ailing our economy and corroding our culture.
Tasch’s book is, in part, about how bad business decisions keep us from having good food. But it’s not your (organic) garden variety indictment of industrial agriculture. Yes, his “Slow Money” concept borrows freely from Italy’s Slow Food movement–which famously began as a revolt against a McDonalds in Rome–and Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini wrote the forward to Tasch’s book. But Slow Money is not some kind of simplistic, anti-corporate, socialist rant. [Read more →]
It’s the 4th Monday of June and, if you’re the parent of young kids, chances are your life is a shambles right now.
As the school year races to an end, you may be adjusting to a new schedule, planning a trip or a stay at home vacation, getting the kids ready for camp, or frantically searching for child care you can trust and afford. It’s stressed-out times like these when parents often find themselves relying for dinner – and maybe even breakfast – on the closest, cheapest purveyor of fast food – aka hi-fat, hi-sugar, sodium-infused junk.
Take heart. Even if you’re barely eating at home these days, you don’t have to throw in the towel on your kids’ nutrition. Take a breath, consider the week ahead, and spend just a few minutes rethinking your concepts of “convenience” and “fast food.” Most importantly, rethink your beliefs about what your children will eat.
In a survey that’s been done repeatedly since 1976 – that is, for more than 30 years – the most recent data collected shows that, while fat-, sugar- and-calorie-laden foods such as burgers, fries and cola remain popular with kids eating out, healthier selections are gaining ground with this age group.
Specifically, for the year ending March 31st, cola consumption was down 10 percent among children under 13, chicken nuggets consumption was down 8 percent and French fries down by 7 percent. More impressive is that the number of kids choosing soup rose by 29 percent, those opting for yogurt rose 21 percent, those choosing carrots rose by 9 percent and the number of children who picked fruit while eating out rose by 6 percent. [Read more →]
Monsanto according to Change.org Hot on the heels of Secretary of State Clinton’s love letter to genetically modified food technology as a solution to global hunger, Natasha Chart has a 4-part series on the subject. (1234) Tom Philpott also takes Clinton’s science czar to task on Seed Magazine Forum and gives us the goods at Grist.
Global hunger tops 1 billion This from the FAO, which reports the “biggest ever year-on-year increase” in hunger and blames the poor global economy and high food prices for the jump.
Food security more complex than income and demand Science Daily has a preview of a new report on food security in Asia, which ends with a recommendation to look at not only efficiency in food production (what we’ve been looking at) but also sustainability. Sounds good.
Getting Permacultured Jen M. at the Ethicurean reports on her enviable trip to George Jones Memorial Farm in Oberlin, Ohio.
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