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.

With unemployment in the dismal double digits, there’s a lot of chanting and ranting about jobs right now. China’s cleaning our clock when it comes to clean tech, even as its growth continues to rely on dirty ol’ coal. And so does ours, for that matter. The difference is that China’s forging ahead with alternative energy while we bury our heads in the tar sands.

Our national unemployment rate seems stuck at 10 percent and in some urban areas, it’s risen above 15 percent, according to CNN. Creating more jobs is clearly job number one. But what color will those jobs be? A generation or so ago, jobs came in just two basic colors: blue collar and white. Now, we’ve got one black-collared Jobs, trotting out another supposedly game-changing gadget in his trademark mock turtleneck (color Pee Wee Herman among the unimpressed ).

The real game changer, though, is the thousands of green jobs we could be creating, if only we’d reallocate our deficit-depleted resources. And the Steve showing us how to do this is named Ritz, not Jobs.

Steve Ritz is a trail-blazing teacher with an impressive track record of achievement working with students in one of the most challenging environments in New York City, the South Bronx–that eternally dumped-on borough whose name is synonymous with urban blight.

Ritz has figured out how to grow good food, good jobs and good citizens by tapping into one of our greatest wasted resources–urban youth. And he’s doing it in Hunts Point, a quintessential “food desert” that, ironically, just happens to also be one of the world’s largest food distribution centers; 2.7 billion pounds of fresh produce from 49 states and 55 foreign countries passes through Hunts Point’s New York City Terminal Market annually on its way to more affluent neighborhoods.

Sadly, those endless truckloads of fresh fruits and vegetables don’t do the locals much good. In fact, all the fumes from that commerce contribute to the South Bronx’s extraordinarily high rate of respiratory illness, with a death rate from asthma that’s about three times the national average.

Hunts Point is also part of the poorest congressional district in the country, with over half the population living below the poverty line. The unemployment rate is at a whopping 28 percent. And the neighborhood’s 41st police precinct consistently records the highest violent crime rate per capita in New York City.

Undaunted by these grim statistics, Ritz took classes with a 40 percent attendance rate and brought them up to 93 percent. More remarkably still, his students have consistently achieved 100% passing grades on the state Regents exams in math and science.

Ritz’s current goal is to establish the Hunts Point High School for Sustainable Community Initiatives, an open enrollment NYC public school that would train local youth in emerging fields such as green roofing, urban agriculture, natural resource management, brown field remediation–in short, all the 21st century post-petroleum vocations in which our labor force needs to be skilled.

At his current position teaching at the Discovery High School in the Bronx, Ritz just oversaw the installation of a living, edible green wall in partnership with a for-profit enterprise called Green Living Technologies, a pioneering developer of cutting edge urban agricultural systems.

Green Living Technologies is sponsoring a team of Ritz’s students, bringing them to Boston later this month “to be the first high school students in America to be trained and certified as green wall and green roof installers,” Ritz told me, adding that this is “proof that we are poised, ready, willing and able to export our talent and diversity nationally as we transform the landscape and mindset of the South Bronx.”

Ritz believes that kids “shouldn’t have to leave their neighborhood to live, learn and earn in a better one.” His Hunts Point High School for Sustainable Community Initiatives proposal “addresses those facts in earnest; providing the skill set and wherewithal to turn Hunts Point into a preeminent educational and vocational destination that can be replicated nationally.”

Sounds awesome, right? Tell it to the Department of Education, which rejected the proposal in its original incarnation back in 2008 when it was conceived as the Majora Carter Achievement Academy, named for the founder of the environmental justice non-profit Sustainable South Bronx.

Undeterred, Ritz renamed the proposed school and retooled it to be a “career and technical education” school with an emphasis on training in green technologies. He resubmitted it, only to have the Department of Education reject it again last November.

This past Monday, President Obama participated in a YouTube forum in which he took questions submitted by citizens in a kind of virtual, interactive fireside chat. One questioner asked:

President Obama, record numbers of young people elected you in support of a clean energy future. If money is tight, why do you propose wasting billions in expensive nuclear, dirty coal, and offshore drilling? We need to ramp up efficiency, wind and solar, that are all economically sustainable and create clean and safe jobs for our generation.

The President responded that he believes green jobs will be “the driver of our economy over the long term.”

And yet, his support for “clean coal,” offshore drilling, and other environmentally damaging sources of energy only creates more of what you might call “brown jobs.” I’m not trying to coin a cute euphemism for disagreeable chores like emptying bedpans, cleaning toilets, diaper-changing or dog-walking. By “brown,” I mean jobs that won’t ultimately sustain our economy, because they’re based on outdated, decidedly not-green notions about what our nation needs now.

Steve Ritz has demonstrated the potential of green jobs to revitalize a community and give young people a viable, rewarding career path. The Hunts Point Express published an editorial recently calling on the Department of Education to give the green light to Ritz’s proposal, lauding it as a “visionary yet practical way to meet critical neighborhood needs.”

And Bronx Community Board 2 just voted unanimously, thirty to zero, to pass Ritz’s proposal.

If you’d like to help build momentum for Ritz’s innovative initiative, please consider taking the time to post a comment in response to the Hunts Point Express editorial, or contactNYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. to express your support. And if you’d like to learn more about the HPHS proposal, contact Ritz directly at sritz@schools.nyc.gov.

Part of his strategy with the HPHA is to “turn garbage and waste into money.” Wouldn’t that be more cost effective, in the long run, than throwing good money after bad by clinging to outdated technologies?

They’re pooling their tremendous talents through a non-profit organization called Project H, a social design community founded in 2008 by dynamic young architect Emily Pilloton, who launched the website working from her parents’ dining room table at the age of 26.

Pilloton goes beyond thinking outside the box and dives right into the dumpster; she once made high-end one-of-a-kind freegan furniture entirely out of materials she salvaged. In Pilloton’s view, “design that does not improve life is a form of apathy,” and to settle for merely “doing no harm,” is more than a missed opportunity–it does the world a disservice.

Hence, the “H” in Pilloton’s Project stands for “design initiatives for Humanity, Habitats, Health, and Happiness.” Pilloton and her socially conscious colleagues are choosing to use their creativity not to feather the nests of over-compensated executives, but rather to empower underserved and disenfranchised folks whose needs have been too long ignored. Project H innovations run the gamut from the life-improving to the truly life-saving: safe drinking water, cleaner cooking fuels, affordable forms of alternative energy and transportation, creative educational tools, innovative health aids, and so forth.

Pilloton highlights these projects in her new book Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People. As she told Dwell, the book is “one part rabble-rousing rant about why industrial design has become a severely misguided industry, and some tactics for bringing it back to something that’s about social impact and making people’s lives better.”

Design Revolution is full of nifty ideas and products; some on the market, others still in development. Some are DIY projects, like a rainwater catchment system or a soccer ball made from plastic shopping bags. Others, like the Hippo Water Roller or the spider boots that Stephen Colbert clowned around with when Pilloton was a guest on his show last week, aspire to solve more profound problems.

Colbert introduced Pilloton as an architect who “wants to fix the world through humanitarian design.” He speculated that these endless global needs must offer a potential goldmine for Pilloton and her creative colleagues.

But, as Pilloton told Colbert, she prefers to pursue “the triple bottom line: planet, people, and profit.”

From the most affluent nations to the poorest, we wrestle with the questions of how to feed and house people decently, educate our children, generate renewable energy and deal with waste, combat disease, address social inequality, and how to protect our dwindling natural resources. The news is full of global gloom, from naturally occurring disasters–the so-called “acts of God”–to the merely mortal missteps that have brought us such homegrown horrors as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and the diabetes epidemic. And don’t forget the compound catastrophes, the collusions between nature and man that made Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake doubly disastrous.

Pilloton and her team of visionaries are not only seeking solutions to these problems, but encouraging other folks to rise to the challenge, too. On February 1st, Project H launches the next phase of its campaign with the Design Revolution Roadshow, turning a vintage Airstream into a rolling exhibit of some of the empowering, socially conscious designs depicted in the book.

The Roadshow is sure to inspire plenty of problem-solving thinkers and tinkerers, but you don’t need to wait till it comes to town to board the bandwagon for a better world. Project H is now offering a free Design Revolution Toolkit, intended to help not just design students and educators, but “anyone who wants to apply creative problem solving to social issues.” The Toolkit “outlines 13 values and corresponding strategies for not just how to design for the greater good, but how to produce GREAT design for the greater good.”

Will this revolution be televised? Colbert gave us a glimpse of it, but this is one movement whose tenets will triumph thanks to boots on the ground, not butts on the couch. Calling all creatives! Get your toolkit and get to work–or play–for the global good.

Kat: New York City’s new initiative to persuade food manufacturers and restaurants to voluntarily reduce the salt in their foods by 25% over the next five years is eliciting the usual outrage from the “nanny state” naysayers, for whom excess salt consumption is yet another matter of personal responsibility.

But as you noted last week on your website, “nearly 80% of salt in American diets is already in packaged and restaurant foods and if you eat them at all you have no choice about the amount of salt you are getting.” Many Americans consume more than double the daily recommended intake of sodium, contributing to thousands of deaths and billions in medical costs annually.

Mayor Bloomberg equates the food industry’s overuse of salt to such health hazards as asbestos. But Mark Kurlansky, author of Salt: A World History, insisted to WNYC’s Amy Eddings that this analogy is false because “we could reduce our salt intake on our own, if we wanted to.”

You pointed out on PRI’s The Takeaway yesterday that this is only true if you’re willing and able to eliminate packaged foods from your diet, stop eating out, and start cooking all your meals from scratch. Unfortunately, the percentage of folks who have the time, inclination, and resources to do this is roughly on a par with those who think that Wall Street’s robber barons earned those big bonuses.

The food industry maintains that it would gladly reduce the sodium in its products–and some are doing so surreptitiously–if only consumers conditioned to crave super salty foods would be more willing to accept reduced sodium products.

The “invisible hand” of the market can’t seem to let go of the salt shaker. Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal is a step in the right direction, but do you think it will achieve meaningful reductions, or will we ultimately end up having to regulate salt?

Dr. Nestle: I love nanny-state accusations. Whenever I hear them, I know either that food industry self-interest is involved or that the accuser really doesn’t understand that our food system already is government-regulated as can be. These kinds of actions are just tweaking of existing policy, in this case to promote better health.

At issue is the default. Right now, companies have free rein to add as much salt to their processed or prepared foods as they like. The makers of processed foods do focus-group testing to see how consumers like the taste of their products. They invariably find that below a certain level of salt–the “bliss” point—their study subjects say they don’t like it. Soups are a good example. A measly half-cup portion of the most popular Campbell’s soups contains 480 mg of sodium or more than a full gram of salt (4 grams to a teaspoon).

To someone like me who has been trying to reduce my salt intake for years, those soups taste like salt water. That’s because the taste of salt depends on how much you are eating. If you eat a lot, you need more to taste salty. If you are like me, practically all processed and restaurant foods taste unpleasantly salty.

So what to do? I say this is indeed a matter of personal choice and right now I don’t have one. If I want to eat out at all, I know I’m going to feel oversalted by the time I get home.

I want the default choice to be lower in salt. Nobody is stopping anyone from salting food. You don’t think your food tastes salty enough? Get out the salt shaker.

But let me make two other comments. One is that the amount of salt we eat is so far in excess of what we need that asking food makers and sellers to cut down can hardly make a dent in taste. A new Swedish study just out says that young men consume at least twice the salt they need and the authors are calling on government to require food makers to start cutting down.

And yes, the science is controversial and not everyone has blood pressure that goes through the roof when they eat something salty. But lots of people do. And almost everyone has blood pressure that goes up with age. As a population, we would be better off exposed to less salt in our diets.

Some food makers are already gradually cutting down on salt, but quietly so nobody notices. If every food company were required to do that, everyone would get used to a less salty taste and we all might be able to better appreciate the subtle tastes of food.

My guess is that Bloomberg has started a movement and we will be seeing much more effort to lower the salt intake of Americans. As I see it, this is about giving people a real choice about what they eat.

Many Americans are rushing to send relief and expressing compassion for the devastated nation. But some influential public figures have done just the opposite. Pat Robertson has stated that Haiti brought this tragedy on itself through “a pact with the devil,” while Rush Limbaugh derides the notion that we should provide any further aid to Haiti because, he says, “We’ve already donated to Haiti. It’s called the U.S. income tax.”

Limbaugh apparently thinks that we’ve already done more than our share for Haiti. It’s a shame to see him use his massive platform to perpetuate this idea, because the reality is that much of what we have done in the name of “aiding” Haiti has in fact been far from helpful.

As Tracy Kidder notes in a New York Times op-ed, many of the projects undertaken ostensibly on behalf of the Haitian people “seem designed to serve not impoverished Haitians but the interests of the people administering the projects.”

Consider, for example, the food aid we send to Haiti. Aljazeera’s Inside USA program ran a report last July called The Politics of Rice that explains how seemingly good intentions can have disastrous implications:

Twenty years ago, Haiti produced enough rice to feed its population. Importing rice from other countries like the US was unheard of.

Today, this country of less than 10 million people is the third largest importer of US rice in the world – 75 per cent of the rice eaten in Haiti is shipped in from the US.

Great for farmers in places like Arkansas and Missouri but devastating for farmers in the Artibonite valley, which used to be Haiti’s rice bowl.

In short, it has been our government’s policy to encourage Haitians to give up farming in rural areas and move to crowded cities like Port-Au-Prince to work in sweatshops manufacturing cheap garments for the US and other markets.

The logic behind this policy is that it’s more “efficient” for US agribiz to produce rice than the small Haitian farmers, and that working in a sweatshop gives Haitians a way to participate in the global economy.

Unfortunately, this approach to “aid” has compelled thousands of Haitians to migrate to overcrowded slums and work in miserable conditions. It also left them vulnerable to fluctuations in the global food supply recently, when rising fuel costs and droughts drove up the price of rice.

Annie Leonard, the environmental activist who created the Story of Stuff video and has a superb book by the same name coming out March 9th, documents the terrible consequences of this misguided philosophy in her book:

…global rice prices tripled over a few months in early 2008, leaving thousands of Haitians simply unable to afford this staple food. The newspaper ran haunting images of Haitians who had resorted to eating dirt pies, held together with bits of lard or butter, in order to have some substance in their stomachs.

Had we devoted our resources to “supporting farmers in developing sustainable farming practices, rather than investing in infrastructure and policies favoring garment factories and export processing,” Leonard concluded, “a drought in Australia would not have made people starve in Haiti, half a planet away.”

Haiti lies in ruins and we have played a role in fostering the conditions that helped reduce this troubled nation to rubble. Now’s the time to make amends for decades–if not centuries–of neglect and exploitation. Find out here how you can help.

On Monday, Daily Show host Jon Stewart kicked off the new decade by inviting Michael Pollan on to discuss his latest book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, a slender guide to healthy eating.

As Stewart noted, you can read it in an hour; it’s a pocket-sized distillation of his last book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, which was itself an appetizer-sized portion of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It reminds me of those Russian nesting dolls that open to reveal ever-tinier incarnations. Presumably, Penguin’s next plan is to publish the bumper sticker: “Eat Food. Not Too Much. Mostly Plants.”

Pollan shares my cautious optimism that we may be on the verge of seeing real changes in our food system. Is he basing this hope on the brisk sales of his books? Maybe, but Pollan also sees promise in that much ballyhooed-and-booed piece of legislation, the health care bill.

He predicted that health insurance reform could spell the end of “the disconnect between what you pay for a cheap fast food meal and the ultimate price of eating that way”:

Pollan: I think what’s about to happen, if we get this health care bill passed, and there are some kind of minimal rules, no more pre-existing conditions, they can’t throw you off the plan, they have to take you–suddenly, the health insurers will have an interest in your health that they don’t have now.

Stewart: That may be the worst sentence I’ve ever heard said! “Suddenly, the health insurers will have an interest in your health. Which, right now, they don’t.”

Pollan: Their business plan, now, is to keep you out of their business plan, if you’re likely to get chronic disease. And the Western diet creates a lot of chronic disease. Right now, the food industry creates patients for the health care industry; they have a very sympathetic relationship. But that might change. And, I think if that changes, you will see this very powerful industry getting on board with this growing national movement to reform the food system.

On Wednesday, Stewart’s Comedy Central Colleague Stephen Colbert struck a blow against a notoriously inedible food-like substance, Domino’s Pizza. Colbert declared Domino’s his “Alpha Dog of the Week,” in recognition of the “great new recipe” the pizza chain’s touting. Colbert played a clip from its “game-changing ad campaign,” featuring some damning assessments of Domino’s previous formula:

“Domino’s pizza crust is, to me, like cardboard.”

“Worst excuse for pizza I’ve ever had.”

“The sauce tastes like ketchup.”

“Totally devoid of flavor.”

Colbert: Folks, it takes alpha meatballs to stand up and say, “America, we suck”. But now, the company that brought you the Philly Cheesesteak Pizza, the Cali-Chicken-Bacon-Ranch Pizza, and the Oreo Pizza, has a radical new product: pizza that is pizza.

Cue another clip featuring the folks at Domino’s extolling the virtues of the new version:

“We changed everything: the crust, the sauce, the cheese, now it tastes better…we started working on the cheese…we’ve got shredded cheese, it’s tastier. When you smell it, it’s got an aroma to it…it’s cheese, it’s cheese!”

Colbert: So, to recap, Domino’s old pizza cheese did not taste good, had no aroma, and was not cheese. And, because they are an alpha dog, folks, Domino’s is not apologizing. After all, we’re the human garbage cans who bought these trash discs by the millions.

Speaking of trash discs, the segment trashing Domino’s was followed by a visit from sea captain Charles Moore, discoverer of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. He described how our disposable culture’s turned the ocean into a “disgusting plastic cesspool.” And we’re inadvertently consuming this toxic plastic soup:

Moore: It’s a sponge for our pollutants, absorbing all the toxics floating around in the ocean and transmitting them up the food web back to us…

Colbert: Are you suggesting that we do without plastic gee-gaws and doo-dads and beer can holders?

Moore: Whatever happened to “A place for everything and everything in its place?” Or “Waste not, want not?”

Moore’s comment drew cheers from the audience; another sign of a possible sea change?

Lastly, if you missed Sunday’s much-anticipated Iron Chef America Super Chef Battle, the Food Network’s repeating it this Thursday at 8pm. It pits celebrity chefs Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse against Bobby Flay and White House executive chef Cristeta Comerford, but the true star of the show was supposed to be the secret ingredient, which turned out to be fresh produce harvested from the White House kitchen garden.

It may not have been “The Culinary Event of the Decade,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog declared. But it was cool, nonetheless, to see lovingly shot close-ups of vegetables, especially exotic ones such as watermelon radishes, lacinato kale, and kohlrabi.

“Maybe not two hours worth of cool,” as Kim Severson noted on the New York Times Diner’s Journal blog, referring to the show’s blatant padding, “but the show will serve as a cultural bookmark. See Mario’s naked calves there in the White House vegetable garden? The times, they are a changin’.”

As everyone knows by now, Batali and Lagasse lost out to Flay and Comerford, in large part because they disregarded the mandate to showcase the vegetables, whereas Flay put the veggies front and center on his plate.

I was disappointed that no one bothered to feature the under appreciated, misunderstood kohlrabi, which is my favorite (and perhaps the only) above-ground-vegetable-that-looks-like-a-root-vegetable. This omission was also noted and lamented by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

However, I have it on good authority that Batali and Lagasse did, in fact, employ the kohlrabi in one of their dishes, but it got lost on the editing floor. Perhaps they should demand a recount?

Serious about energy conservation? Consider hibernation; curling up into a ball and snoozing away the winter while surviving on surplus fat might just be the way to go. You’d wake up next spring feeling lighter and brighter, rested and ready for the new decade.

Then again, if the next ten years are going to be anything like the last ten, Rip Van Winkle might be a better model than a bear. I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I can handle another decade of terrorist attacks, financial folly, endless wars, crumbling infrastructure, hurricanes, floods, fires, drought and reality TV-wannabes. Who wouldn’t want to crawl under a rock and sleep for a decade or two after all that?

The collapse of the climate talks in Copenhagen seemed like a fitting end to this frazzled, fizzled-out decade (was it “the oughts,” “the naughts,” “the oh-oh’s” or “the zeros?). Hey, we never liked this decade enough to even give it a nickname.

Whatever you want to call it, don’t feel bad if you’re glad to see it go. Now what, though?

Like it or not, this new century is going to be shaped largely by the choices we make in the next few years. The triple threat of a changing climate, dwindling resources and a growing population will create unprecedented challenges for every nation, large and small, rich and poor.

The disappointing outcome at Copenhagen – all the more disheartening given how low expectations were to begin with – launched a flurry of furious dispatches looking to lay the blame on Obama, or China, or the EU, or some combination thereof.

But amidst all the gloomy post-mortems, I found a few stray rays of hope. James Hansen, the NASA scientist who first testified to Congress about global warming in 1988, was so convinced that no meaningful accord would come from the talks in Copenhagen that he didn’t bother to attend. Instead, he addressed a packed house of eco-geeks, myself included, at a Secret Science Club gathering in Brooklyn.

The good news, Hansen told us, is that we still have time to avert the most catastrophic consequences of climate change. We just have to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by, say, 60 to 80 percent in the near future. Weaning the world off coal would go a long way towards achieving this goal.

Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? No. David Gershon, a climate change expert who specializes in strategies to encourage people to adopt a more low-impact way of life, individually and collectively, wrote about the steady progress he’s witnessed through his Cool Communities program on Huffington Post the other day:

…there are now over 350 Cool Communities in thirty-six states across America. Participants are achieving on average a 25 percent carbon footprint reduction and reaching out to fellow citizens to accomplish the same. A growing number of these campaigns have committed themselves to a three-year effort to mobilize up to 85 percent of their communities’ residents to reduce their footprint by at least 25 percent….

…The Cool Community movement is building Mount Everest base camps in communities across the nation for the long climb we must make to address climate change. It is also providing fire for the soul to inspire community leaders to reach for new visions of what is possible, with some committing to reduce their carbon footprint 80 percent by 2020. Nelson Mandela, an exemplar of taking on large, epic challenges, describes the journey this way, “It always seems impossible until it is done.” But the journey must begin somewhere with someone. That somewhere is our homes, neighborhoods, towns and cities. And that someone is us.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, while acknowledging that the Climate Summit itself was a bust, came back from Copenhagen impressed by the great strides Denmark has made towards achieving a low-carbon economy. Friedman marveled at the ability of the Danish government to implement solutions that no American politician would dare to suggest:

How long are we Americans going to go on thinking that we can thrive in the 21st century when doing the optimal things — whether for energy, health care, education or the deficit — are “off the table?” These issues have been banished by an ad hoc coalition of lobbyists loaded with money, loud-mouth talk-show hosts who will flame anyone who crosses them, political consultants who warn that asking Americans to do anything hard – no matter how important – makes one unelectable and a citizenry that doesn’t even ask for optimal anymore because it believes that optimal is impossible.

The solutions are out there, just waiting for us to embrace them. As we get ready to say goodbye and good riddance to a difficult decade, now’s the time to chart the course of the next one. It doesn’t have to be the Terrible Teens. We’re all in this together, so let’s christen it the “We” decade, and get to work. The big picture is that we’ve got an awfully small window.

But we could find true prosperity, improve our health, and fight global warming all at once. How? By transforming the way we produce, distribute, consume and dispose of our food.

Of course, you’ll never hear this from the climate change skeptics. On the contrary, they’ll tell you that we can’t reduce our greenhouse gas emissions without destroying our economy and our quality of life. These fossil fueled foot-draggers are being rightfully skewered at swifthack.com, but they’re doing their damnedest to derail the negotiations at the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, where the world’s leaders are struggling to hammer out a consensus on how to reduce our collective carbon footprint.

I’m not investing all my hope in Copenhagen. I don’t have to, and neither do you. Because this Saturday, we’ve got our own climate summit here in New York City, where our politicians are laying the groundwork for real progress on climate change by rethinking our food chain. Hosted by NYU, the NYC Food and Climate Summit is a collaboration between the university, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s food policy team and the non-profit powerhouse Just Food, which promotes CSAs (community supported agriculture), urban food production and greater access to healthy food.

You don’t hear much about it, but the production, distribution and disposal of food all generate a tremendous amount of greenhouse gases. Changing the way we do these things is not only one of the most effective ways to fight global warming, it has the potential to provide us with healthier food and a revitalized economy as well.

So while economists and scientists debate the merits and perils of cap and trade, Stringer and New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn have been busy working with food policy experts and others (like me) to craft cutting edge initiatives to curb New York City’s carbon “foodprint” by relocalizing our food chain, supporting urban agriculture, converting food waste to compost instead of sending it to the landfills, and so on.

Last Friday, Stringer unveiled a New York City Food Charter, with “10 Principles For a Sustainable Food System.” On Monday, Quinn announced “Foodworks New York,” an ambitious five-point plan to overhaul New York City’s food system to create green jobs, improve access to healthy food, and preserve our environment.

Stringer and Quinn recognize that a relocalized New York City food system would provide a model of sustainability for other cities in the US and around the world. Mayor Bloomberg, who’s off to Copenhagen next week to meet with 100 other mayors from around the world to discuss the critical role that cities play in reducing the world’s carbon footprint, is committed to a greener Big Apple. But when he launched his sustainability initiative, PlaNYC, he left our food system out of the equation, as my fellow good food advocate Alexa Van de Walle pointed out on Huffington Post.

So a group of advocates, scholars, farmers, nutritionists, chefs, labor leaders, community gardeners, students and others–myself and Alexa included–have spent the last several years campaigning to put food issues on the table. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of many dedicated and passionate people, and responsive, visionary politicians like Stringer and Quinn, sustainable agriculture’s potential to help solve climate change is becoming more widely known. This, as much as anything that might happen in Copenhagen, gives me hope.

On Saturday, nearly a thousand folks will gather for the NYC Food and Climate Summit and learn more about the link between food and climate change from good food luminaries, legendary locavores, and a wide range of experts who’ll be conducting skills-building workshops and policy sessions. Speakers include Scott Stringer, Marion Nestle, Anna Lappé, Joan Gussow, and Colin Beavan (aka No Impact Man). Conference-goers will be lunching at sustainable spots around campus – check out the map, brought to you by the Eat Well Guide! – or noshing on an eco-friendly bag lunch provided by NYU Dining Services.  Seats for the summit, which is free, were “sold out” a day and a half after registration opened, indicating the tremendous interest in this subject.

As 350.org founder and longtime climate change activist Bill McKibben wrote the other day, we are at a critical juncture in the climate crisis now. McKibben warns that “politics-as-usual may mean the end of civilization.”

You have three choices: you can be a denier, a defeatist, or a doer. Deniers may or may not admit that the climate is changing, but they flatly reject the notion that we’re contributing to it; defeatists recognize that global warming is real and we’re part of the problem, but feel helpless to do anything about it. The doers? Thousands of us are congregating in Copenhagen right now, but there are thousands more right here in New York, and all over the world. We’re tackling climate change, supporting healthy food, and revitalizing our communities. Why be a doubter, or a downer, when you could be a doer?