D-Nick and Super inLight both embrace the acronym HIP HOP for “Healthy Independent People Helping Other People” and they are doing just that, using their talents to get the word out that “Eating healthy is the first step in disease prevention.” D-Nick has entered the video in The One Chicago, One Nation film contest, whose goal is to reward “videos that tell the stories of people in Chicago from different backgrounds working together for the common good.”

Please watch “Abnormality”, share it with friends and show your support by voting for D-Nick–voting ends on May 9th.

Lyrics to “Abnormality” by D-Nick The Microphone Misfit:

Freedom from disease and abnormality/

Cause you don’t wanna have that stuff affecting your reality/

C’mon…..

I was Chillin’ with my brother Super InLight/

We were shooting the breeze getting our Mind right/

Laughing, talking, politics, and current events/

Buggin’out about a lot of things that don’t make sense/

And then Super all of a sudden got an urge from his tummy/

He looked up and said, “Yo D! I’m kind of hungry”/

“Help ya self in the kitchen there is food in the cabinet/

He opened up the cabinet and said “I ain’t having it/

There ain’t nothing in here except for junk food/

If I eat this It will put me in a junk mood/

No disrespect D don’t mean to be rude/

But Lays chips, French dip c’mon man duuude/

I had no idea you were eating like this/

Why would you ever put that on your grocery list/

This so called food ain’t meant for a human/

If I eat this then my bowels won’t be movin’/

C’mon Super don’t you think you’re jumping the gun/

I just eat this when I’m kicking back and havin’ some fun/

I don’t really need to eat nothing organically grown/

Unless you wanna make your body cancer’s permanent home/

Eating healthy is the first step in disease prevention/

It also cuts down on hypertension/

There’s a few more things I’d like to mention

If you’ll sit back and pay attention

(Chorus)

Freedom from disease and abnormality/

Cause you don’t wanna have that stuff affecting your reality/

Freedom from disease and abnormality/

Cause you don’t wanna have that stuff affecting your reality/

You wouldn’t pay your bills with counterfeit money/

So why would you put something counterfeit in your tummy/

You won’t give ya mama artificial love/

So why would you feast on artificial grub/…

Now that’s something to think about/…

While information is leaking out /

From the lies the scandal from the food pyramid/

The sucka’s who invented that need to do a bid*/

You want…

Freedom from disease and abnormality/

Cause you don’t wanna have that stuff affecting your reality/

Freedom from disease and abnormality/

Cause you don’t wanna have that stuff affecting your reality/

In her books The Comfort Table and The Comfort Table: Recipes for Everyday Occasions, Lee makes a tasty case for “conscious consumption.” You’ll find her on CBS’s Early Morning Show whipping up fresh foods with ingredients your Grandma (and hers) would find reassuringly familiar–not like the slop that got Jamie Oliver so distraught when he descended on Huntington.

Lee is proof positive that back in the day, people in West Virginia knew how to make wholesome meals from scratch and took the time to sit down to savor them with friends and family. And so did the rest of us. What’s truly extraordinary about the people of Huntington is really how ordinary they are, a microcosm of the rest of the country, by and large (as it were.) I asked Lee if she would share her thoughts with me about her hometown and her passion for good food, and she graciously obliged:

KT: What was your first thought when you heard that Jamie Oliver had chosen your hometown of Huntington, West Virginia in which to launch ‘his’ Food Revolution?

KL: I met Jamie in London last summer, just a few months before he launched his revolution. A mutual friend, chef Adam Perry Lang, introduced us when he realized I was from the Huntington area. As a long time fan of Jamie Oliver, I was so thrilled to hear he was taking his ideas of healthy living that had worked so well in the UK and bringing them to my hometown.

Listening to him speak so passionately about his ideas was very inspiring. Huntington may be statistically the most unhealthy city in America, but it’s not far off from most areas in our country. I think it’s an opportunity for people in Huntington to not only get healthy, but also be role models for the rest of the country.

KT: Can you tell us how the food that Jamie’s show depicts the folks there eating now compares to how you ate as a child?

KL: I was very blessed to grow up in a family that appreciated good food. My mom and I lived in the same neighborhood as my grandparents, my great grandmother and my great aunt and uncle. My grandfather had a green thumb and grew all kinds of vegetables, he had a cousin that raised cows, and a cousin that raised pigs and everyone shared their food. At any given time, you could go in my grandma’s kitchen and find her cooking up something delicious.

We had a handful of fast food restaurants in the area, but more “mom and pop” local restaurants that served home-style food. It wasn’t necessarily low-fat, but it was real. It wasn’t the processed crap that you get in a drive-thru. People cooked at home more, too.

Nowadays, most of those locally run restaurants are nowhere to be found, replaced by one junky fast food restaurant or chain after another. I watched cafeteria food change while I was growing up too — while in elementary the cooks actually cooked and by the time I got to high school, the cooks were reheating frozen chicken nuggets and pizza.

It really makes me sad. I believe everyone can cook if they set their minds to it, and their lives would be enriched by it.

KT: What did your friends and family have to say about Jamie and his show when you went home for the holidays last week?

KL: Jamie’s revolution is the talk of the town. It was in the local newspaper every day that I was there. I think the feelings on the premise of the show are mixed — some people really believe he can help the town, others think it’s impossible to change, much like Rod the DJ. I was so incredibly disappointed when I watched that first episode and saw Rod’s reaction. Jamie is there with the best of intentions and it’s important to be open-minded.

I was in Huntington for the taping of the final episode and Jamie had a street fair. People were out and about, enjoying eating healthy food and celebrating the revolution. I’m hoping as the show progresses, we will see more people like Rod have a change of heart.

KT: Given that you’re known for your prize-winning Logan County Burger (which is really more of a patty melt) and your meatloaf recipe, it might come as a shock to some people to hear that you were once a vegetarian. What role does meat play in your meals these days?

KL: Yes, the burger queen was once a vegetarian! I went meat-free for about five years, during high school and part of college. As you might imagine, I caught some grief in high school, as I was the only vegetarian in our class.

I do eat meat now, and I enjoy it very much, but I am very conscious of where I get my meat and how it was raised. My diet is not meat-heavy, so when I am cooking meat I seek out the highest quality.

I also participate in Meat-Free or Meatless Mondays, an initiative to not eat meat one day a week. Going without meat just one day can make a huge environmental impact.

KT: Your pug Fionula is quite the lucky pup–you make all her food from scratch. What inspired you to start making your own dog food?

KL: I started making much of Fionula’s food because she got pancreatitis a few months ago. I’ve always been very strict with her diet, only feeding her organic dog food, but after her sickness I decided to cook her food myself. She eats mostly organic chicken, rice and veggies.

KT: Your definition of comfort food is based on the notion that since we are what we eat, we ought to know what we’re eating. Would it be fair to describe you as a kind of homegrown cross between Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver? A populist Michael Pollan? A 21st century Edna Lewis? A lean Paula Deen? All of the above?

KL: All of the people you mentioned are people I greatly admire for what they have accomplished. The world of food is so consuming that there is room for all different opinions and personalities. I always think that comfort food starts at the source. To be truly comforted by your food, you need to know where it comes from and be comfortable with the way it was raised and how it got to your plate. I believe in eating healthy, real food and being comfortable.

With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Pet Food Politics, What to Eat and Food Politics:

KT: Monday’s New York Times had an editorial supporting the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, a bill that would give the US Agriculture Department “new powers to set nutritional standards for any food sold on school grounds, particularly junk foods that contribute to obesity.”

The current standards leave a lot to be desired, as Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution has revealed. In the first episode, Jamie stood accused of shortchanging the kids on carbohydrates because he omitted the bread from a meal that already included rice.

Last Friday, in episode three, Jamie found himself charged with the violation of “insufficient vegetables,” despite the fact that his noodle-based entree featured seven different vegetables. The remedy? Add a bunch of french fries to the meal to meet the veggie quota.

How did the USDA’s school lunch standards ever get so nutritionally nutty? Would passage of the CNA support the wholesome, made-from-scratch meals that Jamie Oliver’s trying to bring back to our cafeterias?

Dr. Nestle: You are asking about the history of the USDA’s school lunch program? Nothing could be more complicated or arcane. Fortunately, two new books take this on: Susan Levine’s School Lunch Politics: The Surprising History of America’s Favorite Welfare Program (Princeton, 2010), and Janet Poppendieck’s Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (California, 2010).

I used Poppendieck’s book in my Food Ethics class at NYU this semester and reading it while watching Jamie Oliver’s programs was a lot of fun. Yes, Oliver is doing reality television but no, he’s not exaggerating. If you find this difficult to believe, read Poppendieck’s book or take a quick look at Kate Adamick’s review of Oliver’s Food Revolution on the Atlantic Food Channel.

As Levine and Poppendieck explain, and as I discussed in Food Politics (California, 2007), school lunches started out as a way to dispose of surplus agricultural commodities by feeding hungry kids. Over the years, it got caught up in a series of “wars”–first on poverty, hunger, and malnutrition and later on welfare and obesity.

The politics of school lunch, and of the CNA in particular, have always reflected the tension inherent in any welfare program, in this case feeding the poor vs. inducing dependency and overspending. In recent years, as obesity became much more of a public health problem than malnutrition, the politics came to reflect the tensions between commercial interests and those of nutrition reformers. Congress is always involved as it endlessly tinkers with the rules for “competitive foods”–the sodas and snacks sold in competition with federally supported school meals.

Competitive foods put schools in a dilemma and in conflict of interest. They make money from competitive foods to help support the school lunch program. But sodas and snacks undermine participation in school meals programs.

Poppendieck points out that the result is a mess that leaves financially strapped school districts with few choices. It’s not that the “lunch ladies” (you have to love Jamie Oliver’s term) don’t know how to make decent meals. It’s that they are up against inadequate funding and equipment, and impossible nutrition standards that can be met most easily by commercial products like Uncrustables that are designed to meet USDA standards. My favorite example contains 51 ingredients (my rule is “no more than five”).*

Inadequate funding is a big consideration in the Child Nutrition Act. This act provides $4.5 billion over 10 years for school meals. Although this represents a 10-fold increase over previous (2004) funding, it works out to an additional measly six cents per meal–not nearly enough to solve school districts’ financial problems.

But–and this is a huge step forward–the act gives USDA the authority to set nutrition standards not only for foods sold in the cafeteria but also in vending machines and a la carte lines.

And the bill does a few other Very Good Things. It provides:

• An estimated $1.2 billion over 10 years for meals at after-school programs, free meals to all students in schools with high poverty levels, and increased availability of meals during summer months.

• An estimated $3.2 billion for establishing nutrition standards, strengthening local wellness policies, and increasing reimbursement rates.

• Mandatory funding for schools to establish school gardens and buy foods from local sources.

• Increased training for local food service personnel.

• Automatic enrollment of foster children for free school meals.

As for the pesky nutrition standards: the bill expects the USDA to revise them according to the recent report of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), School Meals: Building Blocks for Health Children. This report recommended a conversion to food-based, rather than nutrient-based, standards along with increases in the amount and variety of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and limits on calories, saturated fat, and sodium.

All of this makes the CNA well worth supporting. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it is a good first step to making big improvements eventually. In the meantime, plenty of schools are already doing great work and more are joining the food revolution one meal at a time. These deserve all the help we can give them.

*NOTE: the label of this particular Uncrustable was sent to me by someone who works in an upstate New York school district:

BREAD; ENRICHED UNBLEACHED FLOUR (WHEAT FLOUR, MALTED BARLEY FLOUR, NIACIN, REDUCED IRON, THIAMIN MONONITRATE, RIBOFLAVIN, FOLIC ACID), WATER, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, YEAST, PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED SOYBEAN OIL AND/OR SOYBEAN OIL, CONTAINS 2% OR LESS OF: WHEAT GLUTEN, SALT, DOUGH CONDITIONERS (MAY CONTAIN ONE OR MORE OF: DIACETYL TARTARIC ACID ESTERS OF MONO AND DIGLYCERIDES [DATEM], MONO AND DIGLYCERIDES, ETHOXYLATED MONO AND DIGLYCERIDES, SODIUM STEAROYL LACTYLATE, CALCIUM PEROXIDE, ASCORBIC ACID, AZODICARBONAMIDE, L-CYSTEINE), YEAST NUTRIENTS (MAY CONTAIN ONE OR MORE OF: MONOCALCIUM PHOSPHATE, CALCIUM SULFATE, AMMONIUM SULFATE), CALCIUM PROPIONATE (MAINTAIN FRESHNESS), CORNSTARCH, ENZYMES (WITH WHEAT). PASTEURIZED PROCESS CHEESE SPREAD: CULTURED MILK AND SKIM MILK, WATER, WHEY (FROM MILK), SODIUM PHOSPHATE, SALT, CREAM (FROM MILK), CORN SYRUP, LACTIC ACID, SORBIC ACID (PRESERVATIVE), GUAR GUM, ARTIFICIAL COLOR, ENZYMES. BUTTER FLAVORED OIL: PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED SOYBEAN OIL, SALT, SOY LECITHIN, NATURAL AND ARTIFICAL FLAVORS (WITH MILK), VITAMIN A PALMITATE, BETA CAROTENE ADDED FOR COLOR.

You thought maybe it had something to do with poverty and politics? Red herrings (an oily fish that is, by the way, and oddly deficient in omega-3 fatty acids, but high in contaminants.)

No, it turns out  it’s us, the real food rabble rousers, who are subjecting the poorer nations of the world to imminent starvation, because we refuse to embrace genetically modified crops, toxic pesticides and petroleum-based fertilizers. We’re also highly suspicious of those drought-tolerant, high yielding crops that thrive in the otherwise arid microclimate of Monsanto’s boardrooms but have yet to flourish elsewhere.

We’re not content to just gum things up globally, though. Here at home, we support the Dandelion Defense League (DDL), a grassroots anti-grass group that’s lobbying to not only make it illegal for America’s lawn lovers to douse their dandelions with Round-Up, but would in fact require all homeowners–and renters, too!–to harvest those bitter greens and eat them (a rider with recipes will be attached to the proposed bill.)

The suburban-based DDL is closely aligned with but not related to its urban counterpart, the Purslane Preservation Society (PPS), whose own pet cause is to pass legislation protecting this plump and plucky weed from being peed on, stepped on or otherwise disrespected by canines, ferrets or any other ambulatory animal, including pedestrians, who tread on those sidewalks through whose cracks purslane bravely rears its succulent little leaves.

Plants may, however, be harvested, provided that they are then donated to the soup kitchen or food pantry of your choice, where their zingy, citrus-y flavor can be used to add a piquant touch to soups and salads.

And then there are the militant anti-monocroppers, with their not-so-secret plot to loosen the Corn Belt’s grip on the Beltway and redirect those ag subsidies for feed corn and GMO soy into some kind of affirmative action plan for a subversive minority that the USDA tellingly labels “specialty crops.” You may know them as fruits and vegetables, but don’t be fooled by their wholesome facade; they’re just another special interest group looking for a handout.

Oh, and if we get our way, we’re going to declare a Nanny State of Emergency, which will entail confiscating all cupcakes and putting a padlock on pantries that are overstocked with over processed foods. And now that Meatless Monday’s gone mainstream, brace yourself for Tofu Tuesday, which aims to make those much-maligned slabs of soy mandatory in every public school cafeteria across the country.

But why stop at just two days of the week? Why not eight days a week? We’re a bunch of modern day Benedict Arnolds, conspiring with the Brits (well, okay, maybe it’s just one Brit, but what an arsenal of PR weapons he’s got!) to launch a coup in our school cafeterias, proclaiming an end to the Reign of Beige and installing a rainbow coalition of aggressively colored produce on our children’s plates.

And in keeping with Michelle Obama’s plea to provide kids with greater physical activity, we want to make sure our kids are getting a workout, too–by weighing their backpacks down with Michael Pollan’s entire oeuvre. Every agrarian, egg-headed essay the man has ever written, as well as his lesser known but equally eloquent treatises on gardening and carpentry, will be required reading, barring an armed uprising from the Texas Board of Education.

When it comes to farmers, Pollan is enemy number one. Just look what he’s done to poor Joel Salatin, the self-proclaimed “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist farmer” whose Polyface Farms became the poster child for sustainable farming in America after Pollan and the producers of Food, Inc. made him a star.

Now, he’s been plucked off his farm and found himself obliged to come to a big city he openly dislikes to lecture folks on how to feed the world sustainably. Presumably he’d rather be back home tending to his flocks, herds and family, as he does so joyfully in Ana Joane’s documentary FRESH.

Joanes, like Jamie Oliver, is a European; specifically, she hails from Switzerland. But she just couldn’t remain neutral about the way we eat in America when she moved here as a student. With FRESH, Joanes gives real food rockstars like Pollan, Salatin and the mighty Will Allen of Growing Power fame a platform from which to share their radical theories about how we grow and consume, our food. It’s coming to a theater near you soon–don’t say I didn’t warn you.

As Matt Wilkinson, the gym teacher who created the program, told the New York Times, “How long is somebody going to play basketball or soccer? Gardening they can do their whole lives.”

Wilkinson, a former wrestling coach with a green thumb, enlisted the help of the community to raise $1,500 to build 16 raised garden beds at the school last fall. And his students are developing a weight lifting regime geared to the demands of gardening; as Wilkinson noted, turning soil with a shovel uses the same muscles as a bicep curl.

The program isn’t mandatory; students can choose more conventional kinds of exercise if they’re not eager to take up a trowel. And it’s got an academic angle as well, the Times reports:

Each department has adopted a bed and will choose the types of seeds to be planted. The science department wants to study which plants prevent erosion the best, while the foreign languages department will grow food related to various culinary traditions. Even the guidance department is getting involved; it selected plants that will yield relaxing aromas.

Some folks (hi, Caitlin Flanagan) insist that taking kids out of the classroom to let them get some exercise while learning how food is produced is a waste of time and tax payer dollars. A critic who called himself  Old Fart groused to the local paper that Wilkinson’s fitness-through-farming approach “only serves to further coddle an increasingly wussy generation…athletics isnt (sic) supposed to be easy but it provides a balance in education that the ‘gardening lifestyle’ doesnt (sic).”

You wanna talk about a wussy generation? What about the kids in Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution reality TV show who can’t tell a tomato from a potato and don’t know how to use a knife and a fork, thanks to their steady diet of corn dogs, pizza and chicken nuggets?

The hard truth is that kids who are physically unfit and culinarily and horticulturally illiterate are already pretty soft. Homegrown heroes like Matt Wilkinson deserve support, not derision.

The students themselves are psyched about the program. As sophomore Kruthi Isola noted, “It gives people who aren’t that athletic — and I feel like I’m not — it gives them an opportunity to do something else. You learn how to do more than just play a game.”

Alex Henry, a football-playing Princeton sophomore, told the Times:

Some of my friends, they’re like dude, come on, let’s go play some basketball. Why are you doing this girl stuff? But I was like, you know, let’s break the orthodoxy a little bit…

…looking at articles I’ve seen, you don’t really know what’s in your food. It kind of inspires you to say, ‘O.K., let me start a garden, so I know exactly what I’m eating.’ My nutritional level goes up, and I live longer, and I’m healthier.

Jamie Oliver is doing a great job highlighting the role that government plays in our children’s eating and exercise habits. And Wilkinson is clearly one of those “angels in America doing great things in schools” that Oliver celebrated in his TED talk last year.

But, as Oliver declared in that talk, Wilkinson and his fellow foot soldiers in the food revolution need corporate America to get behind the movement to get kids playing outside and understanding where their food comes from:

The problem is, they all want to roll out what they’re doing to the next school, and the next–but there’s no cash. We need to recognize the experts and the angels quickly, identify them and allow them to easily find the resources to keep rolling out what they’re already doing and doing well. Businesses of America need to support Mrs. Obama to do the things that she wants to do.

Princeton High’s gardening for credit program is a model to be applauded and emulated in schools all over the country. The school garden concept already enjoys widespread support; witness the success of Ethan Genauer’s School Gardens Across America campaign, one of the winners in Change.org’s Change in America competition.

Thanks to Wilkinson’s vision, the students at Princeton High are gearing up to get weeding, seeding and composting. And the fruits of their labor will benefit the community’s soup kitchens and other charitable organizations. Sadly, the produce can’t be used in Princeton High’s own school lunches, as Wilkinson explained to the Times, because that would violate the school’s contracts with food service companies.

Can America’s institutions and the food providers who serve them figure out a way to resolve such hurdles? It would be a wonderful thing if our corporations could partner with students, teachers, community gardeners and others who are leading the movement to grow more of our own food.

Here’s hoping that Wilkinson’s groundbreaking gym class will inspire other gym teachers to consider offering food-growing as an alternative to football-throwing. As he told his local paper, “It’s a far-reaching project that I think is going to benefit an enormous amount of people.”

Yesterday was a momentous day, thanks to the historic, histrionic passage of health care reform. Lack of access to adequate health care kills an estimated 20,000 to 45,000 Americans annually, so here’s hoping that the health care bill will stem that terrible tide.

But Monday was also World Water Day, a fact that pretty much fell through the cracks. And that’s a shame, because access to safe, clean drinking water is essential to good health, and the lack of it kills millions of people all over the world each year. As a UN report released yesterday entitled Sick Water noted, “the sheer scale of dirty water means more people now die from contaminated and polluted water than from all forms of violence including wars.”

Ironically, those of us who have relatively safe drinking water are the ones buying up all the bottled water that’s become the bane of environmentalists. Annie Leonard, the force of nature who brought us the wildly successful Story of Stuff video (and her new book by the same name), explores this perplexing trend in her latest video, The Story of Bottled Water, released yesterday to coincide with World Water Day.

I’ll be discussing the bottled water phenomenon with Leonard tomorrow evening in a live interactive webcast at 8 pm EST. We’ll be joined by Elizabeth Royte, author of Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle Over America’s Drinking Water. Please tune in and join the conversation!

For $164, you get a vacuum-sealed tube of PVC pipe filled with enough seed “to feed friends and family forever,” because, “in an economic meltdown, non-hybrid seeds could become more valuable than even silver and gold!”

But hang on to your credit card! It turns out that the folks flogging the Full Acre Crisis Garden are nothing but horticultural hucksters, as Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas revealed.

The Survival Seed Bank claims to offer “the peace of mind knowing that if things were to get scary, that you and your family could still eat.” But those vacuum-packed seeds “will be dead within the first year,” according to Seed Bank Scams, because “seeds need an airtight, but not airless environment…if you take away all the air, you will kill the seeds.”

Glenn Beck has made a fortune by stoking his viewers’ sense of persecution and their fear that shadowy, corrupt forces are hard at work conspiring to rip them off.

And he’s right, of course; there’s no shortage of greedy, dishonest individuals and companies eager to profit by preying on people’s worst instincts. Take Bill Heid, the guy behind the Survival Seed Bank. The Federal Trade Commission fined him $400,000 “in consumer redress” back in 2005 for making “false and unsubstantiated claims for the “Himalayan Diet Breakthrough.”

Heid made $4.9 million in sales off The Himalayan Diet Breakthrough, a dietary supplement containing “a paste-like material” called Nepalese Mineral Pitch that “oozes out of the cliff face cracks in the summer season” in the Himalayas. Heid promised buyers that this miraculous product would enable them to achieve rapid and substantial weight loss without dieting or exercise, while still consuming unlimited amounts of food.

Who could possibly buy the notion that you could sit on your ass all day eating crap and still lose weight by ingesting some mysterious substance harvested in the Himalayas?

Maybe the same folks who think that slashing taxes and shredding regulations is a dandy way to shore up our crumbling bridges and highways, boost our children’s flagging academic performance, clean up our environment, guarantee affordable health care, protect consumers from makers of defective products (like, say, cars that accelerate unexpectedly, or a diabetes drug that’s known to cause heart attacks); and prevent financial institutions from ripping people off through fraudulent, predatory practices.

If you buy into all that, I’ve got a seed-filled PVC tube to sell you.

The Full Acre Crisis Garden is a twisted variation on a victory garden, tailored to folks who fear a laundry list of perceived threats: a “world wide government agenda;”; “a belligerent lower class demanding handouts”; “a rapidly diminishing middle class crippled by police state bureaucracy”; “an aloof, ruling elite that has introduced us to an emerging totalitarianism which seeks control over every aspect of our lives;”; and the ever popular “Big Government.”

It would be bad enough if the folks who wrote this stuff actually believed it, but Heid’s history proves that he’s just a cynical con artist looking for suckers to help him make a quick buck. And he’s found them in Beckistan.

The Survival Seed Bank gets one thing right: seeds are “more valuable than silver or gold in a real meltdown…” After all, they’re the source of all life.

To us sustainable ag advocates, seeds are sacred. Ken Greene, co-founder of the Hudson Valley Seed Library–note that it’s a library, as opposed to a bank–said it best:

Seeds are, by nature, about sharing. They are community resources. Saving seeds is about survival, both of the plants and people who depend on them, but this is survival through cooperation, not competition. Through the Seed Library we are trying to change the way people think about and treat seeds. We are trying to move seeds from being seen as commodities to be traded or profited from, to cultural and nutritive resources to be protected, shared, and celebrated.

As opposed to, you know, making them the foundation for your get-rich-quick scheme to pick the pockets of paranoid Tea Partiers. Not to get all biblical, but as ye sow, so shall ye reap. So skip the fear mongering fraudsters and get your seeds from the companies and collectives dedicated to promoting kitchen gardens as a source of empowerment and abundance. In their search for suckers, the swindlers at the Survival Seed Bank have apparently sucked the life right out of their seeds.

Big River Trailer from Wicked Delicate Films on Vimeo.

Frustrated swimming pool owners in thousands of backyards across this country have posted a sign that pleads “We don’t swim in your toilet, so please don’t pee in our pool!”

The message is crude but clear. Nobody wants to wallow in somebody else’s waste–or our own, for that matter. So why do we treat our seas like sewers? Why do we contaminate our streams, rivers, lakes and oceans with a horrible hodgepodge of chemicals, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, plastic debris and waste?

Evidently, the world’s waterways are a giant toilet into which we can dump anything and everything, and then simply flush it all “away.” As if river currents and rolling waves will pull our pollution into some giant cosmic garbage disposal.

Industrial agriculture’s synthetic fertilizers have given us lush green lawns and amber waves of grain. But the run-off from all those yards and farms seeps into our water table and feeds the “red tides”, those toxic algae blooms that cause massive die-offs of aquatic plants and animals.

Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, the filmmakers who fondly documented their brief stint as Iowa corn farmers in King Corn, explore agribiz’s downstream downside in Big River. In this thirty-minute sequel, Cheney and Ellis revisit their Iowa acre and trace its toxic trail all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

The film will make its Manhattan debut on March 15th at the Brecht Forum, followed by a panel discussion with Cheney, Ellis, King Corn director Aaron Woolf, Hudson Valley farmer and MacArthur genius Cheryl Rogowski, and Steve Rosenberg of Scenic Hudson.

The screening is a benefit for the Food Systems Network NYC, a non-profit organization whose members (myself included) are dedicated to bringing fresh, wholesome foods to all New Yorkers and supporting our region’s farmers, both urban and rural.

Cheney and Ellis have chosen to go the grassroots route with the release of Big River, organizing screenings across the country in churches, schools, community centers, libraries, boardrooms and so forth. So if you’re not in New York, check out their website to find a screening near you.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben calls the film ” a sharp and clever reminder that nothing ever really goes away, certainly not the soup of chemicals we’re pouring on our fields.” And Big River is more timely than ever in the wake of a flood of stories this past week about our nation’s troubled waterways.

When Cheney and Ellis revisit Iowa, they discover that Atrazine, the herbicide they relied on to grow their corn, has tainted the local creek. Just this week, scientists reported that this widely used weed-killer, which has contaminated the tap water of millions of Americans, is “chemically castrating”–and even feminizing–male frogs. Their gender is literally reversed to the extent that they can bear eggs.

Atrazine is a known endocrine disrupter and suspected carcinogen. The European Union banned it back in 2004. Researchers in the US have called for a ban here, too, citing studies that have linked it to “human birth defects, low birth weight, prematurity and low sperm count.”

Nonetheless, we apply about 80 million pounds of Atrazine annually, and the Environmental Protection Agency has long insisted that it poses no risk. In October of last year, however, the EPA announced that it would “reassess atrazine’s safety, including its cancer risk.”

But there’s only so much the EPA can do to defend our waterways, because, as the New York Times reported last week in the latest installment of its superb Toxic Water series, the Clean Water Act doesn’t give the EPA the authority to pursue some of the biggest offenders:

Thousands of the nation’s largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act’s reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law.

The result?:

Some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.

Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.

Some members of Congress are trying to remedy this egregious state of affairs through a piece of legislation called the Clean Water Restoration Act, but as the Times reported:

…a broad coalition of industries has often successfully lobbied to prevent the full Congress from voting on such proposals by telling farmers and small-business owners that the new legislation would permit the government to regulate rain puddles and small ponds and layer new regulations on how they dispose of waste.

Glenn Beck is warning that passage of the Clean Water Restoration Act will result in the government regulating virtually every body of water larger than your birdbath. This could conceivably include the puddles of crocodile tears that Beck routinely weeps, and maybe even the pools of drool that accompanied his ick-inducing interview with Sarah Palin.

Allowing the EPA to prevent industries from polluting our waterways is just bad for business, according to Beck. Never mind that letting manufacturers dump toxins into our waters is bad for us. For wingnut pundits whose populist veneer is thinner than the chocolate shell on an M & M, the concerns of common citizens must never be allowed to trump the needs of commerce.

It’s a view evidently shared by mega developers the Toll Brothers, who withdrew from a proposed project along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn last Tuesday after the EPA finally declared the famously fouled Gowanus a Superfund site.

Thanks to “years of discharges, storm water runoff, sewer outflows and industrial pollutants, the Gowanus Canal has become one of the nation’s most extensively contaminated water bodies,” the EPA declared.

The Toll Brothers had grand plans to build 450 housing units and 2,000 square feet of retail space there. “We’re extremely disappointed in the EPA’s decision,” David Von Spreckelsen, a Toll senior vice president, told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s going to have a big impact on the properties along the canal…It’s unlikely you are going to see development there for many, many, many, many years.”

Admittedly, this news is a colossal disappointment for all those would-be home buyers who longed to live by a canal whose signature stench betrays its industrial past: a heady blend of “cement, oil, mercury, lead, PCBs, coal tar, and other contaminants.”

But as the New York Times reported last year, “Studies have shown that property values decline after a Superfund listing but rebound after the cleanup, sometimes to far higher levels.”

Given the choice, most folks prefer their creeks and canals to be contaminant-free. Sadly, too many communities haven’t got a choice. They’re up a rancid river without a paddle, while Glenn Beck piddles on the truth and peddles his twaddle about puddles.

But “the weird and disruptive weather patterns around the world are pretty much exactly what you’d expect as the planet warms,” as environmentalist Bill McKibben noted in an op ed in last Sunday’s Washington post, because “warmer air holds more water vapor than cold air does.”

McKibben explains, “The increased evaporation from land and sea leads to more drought but also to more precipitation, since what goes up eventually comes down. ”

So, unless you don’t believe in gravity, it kinda makes sense.

Tom Friedman’s column in the New York Times on Wednesday suggested that we ditch the term “global warming” altogether, and call it “global weirding” instead, because that’s a more accurate way to describe all the extreme weather that we’ve been experiencing, from droughts to floods to hurricanes.

Whatever you want to call it, it’s real, so the sooner we stop dithering and start taking meaningful steps to halt climate change, the better our chances of avoiding its most catastrophic consequences.

Even if you’re not convinced that things are as bad as the experts say, we’re facing a future in which the world’s population is expected to grow from about 6 to 9 billion people between now and 2050. And as Friedman points out, more and more of those people will want to live the way that we do in the United States, which means that the demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to skyrocket.

That’s why China is betting its future on things like clean tech and high speed rail, while we’re still buying into a biofuel boondoggle like corn-based ethanol. We can barely muster the political will to upgrade the antiquated rail system that we have, much less imagine the kind of high speed rail that could take you from New York to Chicago in five hours.

Meanwhile, environmentalists who thought that President Obama shared their vision of an America powered by alternative energy have been bitterly disappointed to hear him touting nuclear power, offshore oil drilling and the oxymoronic, Orwellian “clean coal” as viable solutions to our energy needs.

And then there’s the 16 lawsuits that have been filed by “industry groups, conservative think tanks, lawmakers and three states” to challenge to the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases pose a threat to our health.

The list of litigants reads like a veritable Who’s Who of Prodigious Polluters, including the Ohio Coal Association, the Corn Refiners Association, the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, the Western States Petroleum Association, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Iron and Steel Institute, the National Mining Association and their carbon-loving colleagues at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, among others.

Of course, the EPA’s ruling is itself a threat to the fiscal health of these industries. A study due to be published this summer by the UN estimates that the world’s 3,000 biggest companies caused $2.2 trillion dollars of environmental damage for the year 2008. The report concludes that if we were to hold these companies financially accountable for the “use, loss and damage of the environment,” it “would wipe out more than one-third of their profits,” according to the Guardian, which noted that:

The biggest single impact on the $2.2tn estimate, accounting for more than half of the total, was emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change.

The notion that companies could be required to bear the true costs inflicted by their industries represents a radical departure. As Richard Mattison, the consultant who headed the report team, told the Guardian:

What we’re talking about is a completely new paradigm. Externalities of this scale and nature pose a major risk to the global economy and markets are not fully aware of these risks, nor do they know how to deal with them.

Here at home, supporters of industrial agriculture are alarmed by the prospect of having to curb their carbon footprint. And commodity crop farmers are reportedly feeling betrayed by the USDA’s new-found support for small-scale, sustainable agriculture.

The American Farm Bureau Federation issued a statement declaring that:

EPA regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from farms and ranches through the Clean Air Act could lead to costly and burdensome mandates on America’s food, fiber and renewable fuel producers.

And not regulating greenhouse gas emissions could lead to increasingly costly and burdensome climate change.

So, how can we convince these people that there’s no time to waste debating whether global weirding is for real? Well, if you’ve got an iPhone, I’ve got an app for you, courtesy of Skeptical Science. The app lists all the climate deniers’ pet claims and provides you with the solid science to refute them. Needless to say, the deniers are already up in arms, leaving scathing reviews on the iTunes app store and calling on their side to produce a rival app.

But you really don’t need any high-tech help to set the skeptics straight. The next time someone holds up the snowstorms as evidence that man-made climate change is a myth, just ask them, “Do you believe in gravity?” and offer Bill McKibben’s simple observation that what goes up, must come down. Sow enough seeds of doubt amongst the doubters, and we could gain a whole new crop of converts. We surely need ‘em. As McKibben asks:

Can you sit in a snowstorm and imagine a warming world? If you’re a senator, can you come back to work and pass a bill that blunts the pace of climate change? If the answer is no, then we’re really in a world of trouble.

I don’t want our kids to live diminished lives because we failed to step up today. I don’t want them looking back decades from now and asking us, why didn’t you help us when you had a chance? Why didn’t you put us first when it mattered most?

So much of what we all want for our kids isn’t within our control. We want them to succeed in everything they do. We want to protect them from every hardship and spare them from every mistake. But we know we can’t do all of that. What we can do…what is fully within our control…is to give them the very best start in their journeys. What we can do is give them advantages early in life that will stay with them long after we’re gone. As President Franklin Roosevelt once put it: “We cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.”

That is our obligation, not just as parents who love our kids, but as citizens who love this country.

I applaud the First Lady’s attempt to rally the nation by casting this crisis as a problem that ought to concern any self-proclaimed patriot. But I’m really glad she didn’t name the campaign the War on Waistlines, because we’re already overextended in the metaphorical war department, what with the War on Drugs and the War on Poverty. Not to mention the actual wars we’re waging in the Middle East.

Or maybe we should mention them, because, as Michelle Obama noted on Tuesday, “Military leaders report that obesity is now one of the most common disqualifiers for military service.”

Mission: Readiness, a nonprofit, bi-partisan organization of senior retired military leaders who believe that “the most effective long-term investment we can make for a strong military is in the health and education of the American people,” flatly declares that being overweight is “the Number 1 reason why potential recruits are unable to enlist in the armed services,” adding this shocking statistic:

75% of young Americans are ineligible to serve their country because they have either failed to graduate high school, engaged in criminal activity, or are physically or mentally unfit.

This is no laughing matter, despite George Saunder’s painfully funny Heavy Artillery piece in last month’s New Yorker, a fictitious dispatch from an out-of-shape, soda-swilling soldier too preoccupied by snack attacks to fend off enemy fire.

Whether you’re a hawk or a dove, surely we can all agree that we’ve done our children a terrible disservice by allowing poor nutrition and physical inactivity to become the norm. If three quarters of our kids aren’t fit to serve in the military, you’ve got to wonder how well equipped are they to succeed in civilian life?

Decent jobs may be in short supply now, but supposing we could even get our economy back on track and create rewarding employment opportunities, what are we doing to prepare our youth for those good jobs?

And what good do the billions of dollars we devote to military preparedness do us if our kids are in such lousy shape that only one quarter of our youth are fit to serve? As Michelle Obama pointed out:

If kids aren’t getting adequate nutrition, even the best textbooks and teachers in the world won’t help them learn. If they don’t have safe places to run and play, and they wind up with obesity-related conditions, then those health care costs will just keep rising…

…we know that solving our obesity challenge won’t be easy – and it certainly won’t be quick. But make no mistake about it, this problem can be solved.

This isn’t like a disease where we’re still waiting for the cure to be discovered – we know the cure for this. This isn’t like putting a man on the moon or inventing the Internet – it doesn’t take some stroke of genius or feat of technology. We have everything we need, right now, to help our kids lead healthy lives. Rarely in the history of this country have we encountered a problem of such magnitude and consequence that is so eminently solvable.

We could start by allocating more money to provide healthy school lunches, as Slow Food USA, The Healthy Schools Campaign, The LunchBox, and dozens of other organizations have been calling on the USDA to do.

Imagine if, instead of subsidizing the commodity crops that form the cornerstone of our disease-inducing food chain, we channeled that money into the production of wholesome foods that would provide our kids with the nutrients they need?

And if we provided kids with appealing outdoor activities and regular recess, they’d get more exercise and spend less time playing video games, watching TV and being bombarded with junk food advertising, which has been shown to encourage more unhealthy eating habits.

These may be common sense solutions, but to implement them we’ll need to address a number of significant obstacles: insufficient access to affordable fresh produce; our addiction to convenience foods and a too-busy culture that doesn’t leave time for real meals; a lack of basic cooking skills; and agricultural policies that favor processed foods.

Nutrition professor Marion Nestle found much to commend in the Let’s Move campaign, which has the potential to put these issues on the front burner.

The campaign’s success will depend on whether Michelle Obama and the many other participants in Let’s Move can motivate parents and children to alter deeply ingrained habits.

But it can be done–there is a precedent. As the Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote in the Washington Post:

…it is a challenging goal, indeed, but the percentage of American smokers dropped from 42 percent in 1964, when Surgeon General Luther Terry revealed the dangers of cigarette smoking to the American public, to less than 20 percent in 2007…Americans have shown a willingness to become healthier; on the issue of childhood obesity, we can do it again.

So, if you really want to serve our country, you can start by serving real food. The Let’s Move campaign is a serious call to arms, toned or not. Let’s hope the nation heeds it.