You’re invited to a summit for civic leaders, family farmers, community gardeners, concerned citizens, activists, advocates, parents, food experts, policy makers, environmentalists, nutritionists, educators, urban planners, urban designers, community, business leaders, family farmers, educators, advocates, elected officials and city government leaders. The goal of this Summit is to increase awareness engagement and action around our food system’s role in climate problems and solutions. Featured speakers include Anna Lappé, Marion Nestle and US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand.

December 12, 2009
8:30a.m.-5:00p.m.

New York University
Jack H. Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 LaGuardia Place, NY, NY 10012

For more details and online registration go to
www.nyu.edu/foodandclimatesummit

TICKETS ARE GOING QUICKLY!

Once his family switched to eating only foods produced within a 250-mile radius of New York City, the farmer’s market became a regular ritual. Such American dietary staples as pizza, take-out Chinese–even peanut butter sandwiches–became off-limits, either because they contained non-local ingredients or generated trash.

The No Impact Project week’s in full swing now, and those of us who’ve signed on are taking a closer look at our carbon “foodprint” today. So I asked Colin to tell us a bit more about his year-long adventure in ecological eating:

KT: Did you know when you embarked on the No Impact experiment that our eating habits play such a crucial role when it comes to climate change?

CB: I knew that the centralized, agri-giants that produced food put good nutrition and people’s health very low down on their priority list. After all, they don’t profit from our eating healthily; they profit from our eating more. So the environmental and human degradation caused by centralized food production and distribution came as no real surprise to me.

And the problem is not just climate change. There is a 75 square mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by the amount of chemical fertilizer washed off American farmland and down the Mississippi.

I like eating locally because the farmers are not anonymous corporations. I can look them in the eye and become friendly with them. I can choose to trust them to make sure that they care for our land, water and climate. And I trust them to provide food I can trust for my little girl too.

KT: You’ve emphasized in your public appearances–on Good Morning America, for example–that reducing our meat consumption is one of the most significant ways that we can curb our carbon “foodprint.” Were you a vegetarian prior to beginning the project? What inspired you to make the shift to a plant-based diet?

CB: Did you ever see the Humane Society video showing the cruelty to the cows in confined animal feeding operations (CAFO)? I’m talking about the video that sparked the largest beef recall in US history.

Becoming aware of the cruelty and the climate impact of the beef industry has done me in forever. I used to have occasional bacon and pepperoni slips, but no more.

Thinking again of the cruelty I witnessed. I can’t help but believe that somehow the energy of that cruelty and unhappiness enters the animal and that energy might get passed on to whoever eats it. I don’t want my little girl to be the recipient of that energy.

For those who choose not to give up meat though, I know many local farmers who treat their animals kindly. When cattle are raised well in pasture, their manure fertilizes the land, causing more plants to grow and more carbon to be sequestered in the land. This is a way better choice, in my view, than CAFO meat.

KT: You’re also a strong advocate of eating locally and seasonally. Critics of the locavore movement have attempted to dismiss it as a single-minded fixation on “food miles.” But your impetus for eating locally was motivated as much by your desire to stop generating all the garbage that comes with processed convenience foods and take-out. How do you pitch the ecological benefits of a predominantly local diet to skeptics who’ve been swayed by anti-locavore diatribes?

CB: Look at the funding for the research that is used to back up the anti-locavore spin and look where it has been published. Often times, [they are funded and published by] chemical giants. The ones that produce chemicals local farmers don’t use. The ones that have the most to lose if we change our agricultural system.

But the amazing thing about local food is that it is not just good for the environment. It’s better for my family too. The food, itself, is better for us. And Isabella, who sometimes doesn’t eat veggies, will absolutely eat them when she has seen where they have been grown.

Local food allows for trust and community relationships. When I pay a farmer I know for food, my money supports something I care about and people I care for. I can’t say that when I buy from the frozen food section.

KT: You understandably had a craving for various foods that were off-limits for the duration of your project. What did you miss the most? When the year was up, what formerly verboten foods gave you the greatest pleasure?

CB: Pizza and peanut butter.

KT: In your book, you write that the television used to be the center of your life. When your family gave up the big screen TV, the kitchen table took center stage; making meals became the proverbial “quality time” with Michelle and Isabella. And when your project put you in the media’s glare, you found refuge in baking bread.

Now you’re out on book tour and promoting your foundation, which presumably doesn’t leave a lot of time for treks to the farmers’ market, home cooked meals with friends and family, or bread making. As anyone who travels knows, finding fresh, healthy, sustainably grown food on the road can be a challenge (though the Eat Well Guide is working to make it easier all the time!). How are you eating these days, if you don’t mind my asking?

CB: Badly. And this points to an important point. It is not always easy to live and to eat sustainably. That is because our major cultural systems–food production, energy generation, etc.–are not sustainable. We have to find ways to live outside those systems if we want to live sustainably.

This shouldn’t be so. Our systems should be designed to be good for the people and good for the planet. You shouldn’t have to “resist” the temptation to eat from your grocery store when you want to take care of yourself and the planet. Living healthily and sustainably should be as easy as falling off a log.

And that’s why just changing our individual lifestyles is an important part of the equation but not the whole equation. Joining in with others to ask for system change via our city, state and federal governments is also important. To do this, finding community in grassroots environmental organizations is a big help.

And of course, you’re always welcome to join in at NoImpactProject.org, too!

According to UK organization WasteOnline, the world’s annual consumption of plastic has increased from around 5 million tonnes in the 1950s to nearly 100 million tonnes today. That’s an extraordinary increase of 2,000 percent! Consider this, from The Lifecycle of Plastic – “…unless it has been melted or recycled, all the plastic products ever made, are, of course, still in existence, rotting slowly on landfill sites all over the world.”

I thought I was doing well limiting plastics in my life until I read Beth Terry’s blog Fake Plastic Fish. Terry chronicles her efforts to eliminate plastics from her life, charting her monthly plastic waste reduction. Here is her List of Plastic-Free Changes that includes everything from making your own hand lotion to making your own soy milk. And, of course, it includes not using plastic shopping bags. That’s a critical step when you consider that plastic bags were found to be the second most prevalent component of litter at the 2008 International Coastal Cleanup Day sponsored by the Ocean Conservancy. Clearly Terry has a lot of time on her hands, but she makes some excellent points about how choosing sustainability sometimes means forgoing a little convenience.

Inconvenience aside though, it seems as though it’s impossible to live a plastic-free existence. Do you have electronics? Do you use prescription drugs? Do you drive a vehicle? Then you live with plastics. But what about recycling, you ask? What about the biodegradable and compostable plastics? Okay, let’s talk about those.

There are about 50 groups of plastics and all of them can be recycled (if you’ve wondered what all those numbers on plastic packaging mean, check out this information on plastics resins from the American Chemical Society). According to Earth911, since 1990 plastics consumption in the U.S. has steadily increased but the plastics recycling rate has held steady at 24 percent.

This means that three of every four plastic items go somewhere other than recycling when we’re done with them – some go to landfills, others become litter, and a great deal winds up in the world’s oceans. In fact, there is a huge patch of garbage, comprised primarily of plastics and estimated to be twice as large as the state of Texas, stuck in the currents of the Pacific Ocean. This is our legacy: plastic litter is everywhere on the land and in the water. Clearly we aren’t doing well with recycling.

Maybe the solution lies with biodegradable and compostable plastics. They seem like a reasonable solution – but not so fast. Just because something is labeled biodegradable doesn’t mean that it will just go away. Biodegradable and compostable plastics require specific conditions to degrade properly, which home composting systems don’t provide.

In Do Biodegradable Plastics Really Work?, Dave Gilson of Mother Jones Magazine wrote that real biodegradable plastics should be sent to a commercial facility that can provide the proper composting conditions but as of 2007 there were only 42 such facilities throughout the United States. To further complicate things, if biodegradable plastics are mixed with regular plastics, the whole batch is seen as contaminated and generally ends up in a landfill instead of being recycled. Also, biodegradable plastics are more expensive to produce and are made from starches that often come from corn, which adds to the myriad environmental problems associated with growing corn for anything other than food. Unfortunately, biodegradable plastics are quite a ways away from being the solution to the problem of plastics.

Plastics bags that are made to break down in sunlight and oxygen work because they are made with metals that cause rapid degradation of the plastic. What happens to those metals when the plastics degrade? That’s a good question. They end up in landfills or wherever their final resting place is, eventually finding their way into soil and water.

There really is only so much that can be done at a post-consumer level, at least until governments enforce zero waste policies and businesses decide that it makes good business sense to be more sustainable. The City of San Francisco has enacted a Zero Waste policy that is working towards a goal of having no waste sent to the landfill by 2020. From their Web site:

While we are well on our way to our diversion goals, ultimately we will need to look beyond recycling and composting to get to Zero Waste. This includes passing legislation to increase producer and consumer responsibility. In other words, manufacturers, businesses and individuals will need to be accountable for the environmental impact of the products they produce and use.

I hope I’m still alive when the whole country goes to a zero waste policy.

What does this mean for you and me? It means taking a page from Terry’s book and thinking about the environmental impacts of what we purchase before we buy, especially where plastics are concerned. The first step is deciding whether or not we really need something. If the answer is still yes, then consideration should be given to whether non-plastic alternatives are available.

A former geology professor of mine used to say that this period of geologic history would be seen in the future as “The Pampers Layer.” That can’t be the legacy we intend to leave. I believe we can all do better.

Emily Fudakowski is a consultant for Grace.  Photos courtesy of Heather Heagney.

The season for eating outdoors is nearing an end in this neck of the woods. Folks living north of the 42^nd parallel are scrambling to soak up all the warmth, sunlight and outdoor gastronomical indulgences we can get to last through winter. Aside from the common corn roast barbecue, with friends, guitars and garden-fresh veggies galore, I can’t think of a better way to spend a waning summer evening or crisp fall day celebrating the harvest season than at the annual Feast of Fields.

With 25 teams of chefs and farmers from the Ottawa region, Canadian Organic Growers’ 5^th annual Feast of Fields hosted this tremendous gastronomical delight along the Rideau River in Vincent Massey Park.  In two quick hours of meeting farmer and chef teams from the region and sampling their creations, guests tasted some of the best the Ottawa Valley has to offer.

When the delectable temptations passing by became too much to endure, I left my post at the National Farmers Union and Food Secure Canada table and dashed across to The Piggy Market for a sausage. All by itself on my plate it looked delicious but lonely, so I waited in the fast-moving queue to get a grilled papadum filled with white bean mousse from the fantastic chefs from Ballygiblins in Carleton Place. My neighbors at the Whalesbone Oyster House and Catering table saved me a plate of organic chicken chowder that I paired with Mariposa Farms beet salad. For dessert I had a familiar treat: a chili-chocolate cookie, the best cookie known to cookie-lovers in Ottawa from the B Goods Mobile Bakery.  See some of the exquisite dishes and read about extraordinary chef/farmer teams at fellow foodie Heather’s blog After the Harvest.

Lucky foodies in Vancouver got their summer food on last Sunday at  Providence Farm on Vancouver Island’s 12th  annual Feast of Fields organized by Farm Folk/City Folk.  It may be too late to get to a Feast of Fields near you, but there are still harvest festivals aplenty yet to come. In the golden triangle of Southwestern Ontario, the Niagara Food Festival is not to be missed. A must for Maritimers is Prince Edward Island’s Fall Flavours festival. An equally scrumptious alternative is to get inspired with locally grown food and host your own outdoor feast this harvest season.

I climb on the coattails, eager to make a good impression. “Mine, too,” I proudly announce, ceramic vessel proffered; it’s a mug, not so grassrootsy-looking as a jar, nor as capacious. I reassure myself by noting that at least it’s clean.

Colin Beavan, the self-described “guilty liberal who attempted to save the world” with a year-long, high-profile foray into extreme green living, begins to extol the myriad virtues of the screwcap jar – it’s light, it seals tightly and doesn’t leak, it’s more conspicuous than a coffee mug, you can see what’s inside it, it’s attractive in a sort of homegrown way, it can also serve as Tupperware. I begin to regret my lowly mug, and make a mental note that next time, I will bring the gnarliest, most salvaged-looking jar I can find.

Since that fragmented moment in the No Impact journey wedged between blog posts, deadlines and press appearances, Colin and his No Impact family have metamorphosed while the world watched – on the Colbert Report, Good Morning America, in The New York Times (and the Green Fork!). And since his book, titled No Impact Man, debuted on September 1st, their lives have fallen under even greater scrutiny – magnified by this coming Friday’s theatrical release of the No Impact Man documentary. And have they ever risen to the occasion! With nation-wide appearances and book signings on the docket, Colin Beavan and Michelle Conlin (and little Isabella and four-footed Frankie, of course) have carried the mantle of sustainability with enthusiasm, inspiration and grace. Together they create a compelling vision of good green living – and all the quirks and hiccups along the road to getting there.

Want to get a look inside their year of No Impact? Find a screening of the No Impact movie near you (or host one!)! New Yorkers – join Kerry Trueman and me at the Angelika theater on September 15th at 5:00, where we’ll field your questions about sustainable food and how it fits into a low-impact lifestyle.

To keep current with Colin, follow his No Impact blog; to find out how you can change the world and even yourself, check out www.noimpactproject.org, a new nonprofit project aimed at enabling a sustainable way of life that makes us happier, healthier and more balanced citizens of the planet.

And now, I’m off to refill my gnarly pickled herring jar, which previously held lingonberry jam made by my friend’s grandmother in Poland, and which has a fish on the lid. Take that, No Impact Man!

The First Lady caught some heat again a few months ago when she planted an organic garden on the White House Lawn, this time from the Crop Life Association, who thought going organic set a bad example .  But many of us were inspired by her actions.  Thousands of us planted gardens of our own for the first time.  Harkening back to the days of Victory Gardens, it seems that the first lady’s garden has given legs to a movement of garden-fresh food, and those who’ve followed in her footsteps are making an investment in a delicious future.

One of the people who rallied for that garden was IATP Food and Society fellow Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International, whose Eat the View campaign started at OnDayOne.org, where it quickly rose to the top of the list (and subsequently won).  Eventually, the campaign culminated in its own website, eattheview.org.

Now, Roger is at it again, this time with Food Independence Day, a campaign encouraging citizens throughout the US to make local food part of their Fourth of July festivities. Says Doiron of the campaign:

With July 4th and other Independence Day celebrations just around the corner, people will have other options to ponder as they plan their holiday meals. For too many in the US, the “choices” will be Bud or Miller or an industrially-produced hotdog or an industrially-produced hamburger. I don’t know about you, but I think our national holiday deserves better than barbecued mystery-meat and water-flavored beer.

I couldn’t agree more. The 4th is one of my favorite holidays, and as I write this post from Livingston, Montana, having spent the last two weeks crossing the country en route to my own family’s cookout in Long Beach, Washington, (I’m currently moving back to my native Washington from the east coast), I would also say that we have a lot more local food choices than most people might think.

In the two weeks I’ve spent on the road, I’ve tapped into local food resource Eat Well Everywhere, which led me to Madison, Wisconsin’s Willy Street Co-op and to Milwaukee’s Growing Power, whose greenhouses produced the first fresh tomatoes I’ve tasted this year. In Minneapolis, I grabbed snacks at the Linden Hills Co-op. Here in Montana – not exactly a culinary destination – I’ve been practically living on locally-raised buffalo. In spite of some major problems with this country’s food systems, we have a lot to be proud of on the local level.

Roger has also challenged the first families of all 50 states to take part in Food Independence Day by publishing their local food menus. So far, nine governors offices have responded to the FID challenge, including Maine, Idaho, Maryland, Minnesota, Texas, North and South Dakotas and Montana. (Nebraska also responded, but had no menu to report as they will be working the parade circuit all day.) See the red flags on the map at foodindependenceday.org for the juicy details of these gubernatorial local food feasts. While the remaining 41 have only a few days left to join in, over 5,000 people have signed the petition asking them to do so.

It might be a little late for the remaining 41 first families to get with Roger’s program, but it’s worth shooting them a note anyway, because although this particular campaign might focus on the red, white and blue, its ideals are evergreen. According to Roger:

And just as the White House garden campaign was not just about one garden, the Food Independence Day campaign is not just about one day.  It’s about inspiring and teaching people and communities to become more food secure and independent every day.

Local food is not only a tasty alternative to its over-processed, over-traveled industrially-produced counterparts, but it’s also patriotic to support local farmers.  As this recent Washington Post article about the campaign points out, the bulk of garlic sold in the US is now produced in China. Buying locally grown garlic would encourage farmers here to grow more of it, eventually allowing us to wean ourselves off of the foreign stuff.  Perhaps more importantly, buying local supports our local economies and helps to keep American farmers, who’ve dropped by more than half since the 1930s, in business.

And it doesn’t need to be a hardship or an all-or-nothing endeavor.  By sourcing even a few key ingredients locally, you cut back on your “food miles” and therefore your carbon “foodprint,” and just by questioning where your food comes from, what grows in your region and what’s in season, you are reminded of the worth of American soil and the hands that tend to it. Roger says it better:

Moving towards food independence doesn’t mean having to do everything and grow everything on our own. It’s about learning what we, our soils, climate, and local farmers can produce, effortlessly or with some coaxing, and committing to eat more of these things when nature offers them up to us. In doing so, we discover that we have more choices and freedom than we realized.

What could be more All-American?

The front yard farming phenomenon is so hot now that People magazine recently did a story on it, “From Lawn to Lunch.” But when Michelle Obama tore up a patch of the White House lawn to plant a kitchen garden, she inadvertently fertilized another growing movement: a flourishing Agribiz campaign to portray kitchen gardeners and ‘good food movement’ advocates as dangerous zealots out to shove fresh, untainted, ie. aggressively wholesome foods down America’s collective throat and force us all to grow our own veggies–all without benefit of pesticides or chemicals.

Why? Because the rising influence of folks like Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle, and other high profile “food cops,” to quote the uber-astroturf (i.e. fake grassroots) Center For Consumer Freedom, is bad for Agribiz’s bottom line. The more people know about how our food’s grown and produced, the more likely they are to demand better, healthier–i.e. less profitable–food.

And now, Monsanto, Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and their Big Food buddies have to contend with a whole flurry of food documentaries that reveal just how screwed up our food chain’s become over the past half-century. On June 12th, Participant Media will release Food, Inc., which they hope will be the “Inconvenient Truth” of our food system.

Monsanto, not surprisingly, is one of the villains in Food, Inc., so it’s launched a pr offensive dismissing the documentary as pure propaganda that “demonizes American farmers.” The only problem with this line of attack is that it’s blatantly false, and there’s no better proof of that than another outstanding food documentary, FRESH, which premieres this week in New York, Boston and DC. As FRESH director Ana Joanes says, her film “celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system.”

Food, Inc. and FRESH both feature Joel Salatin, the Virginia farmer profiled in Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Pollan himself appears in both films as well. But despite the apparent overlap, the two films are very different.

Each provides a much-needed public service, but where Food, Inc. airs a laundry list of factory farming’s dirty secrets, Fresh makes a beeline past the manure lagoons, veal crates, contaminated food and monoculture madness to land us in truly greener pastures, whether it’s in rural Virginia with Salatin or in urban Milwaukee at McArthur genius Will Allen’s farm, Growing Power.

I’ve been excited about FRESH ever since my colleague Kate Croft, one of the prime movers and shakers behind New York University’s Sustainability Task Force and a consultant/blogger (as am I) for the Eat Well Guide, told me about it a couple of months ago, and introduced me to Ana.

Ana grew up in Switzerland, but she’s been living in the U.S. for more than 15 years. Her interest in the cultural and environmental impact of globalization drew her here to earn her BA in political science from Barnard college, followed by a degree from Columbia Law School. Before dedicating herself to filmmaking, Ana founded Reel Youth, Inc., a video production program for youth coming out of detention, and other under-served youth.

Now, after making FRESH, she’s become, like myself, a kind of accidental sustainable agtivist:

KT: Fresh is an essential companion piece to Food, Inc., but while both films expose the fundamental flaws in our food chain, your documentary focuses on folks who are committed to sustainable food production, whereas Food, Inc.’s primary purpose is to expose the horrors of Agribiz. At what point during the filming of Fresh did you become aware of Food, Inc.? And did it affect your decisions as a director?

AJ: Robert Kenner, the director of Food, Inc., contacted me sometime during the fall of 2007. Robbie had gotten my info from Joel when he was filming there (at Polyface Farm). We talked for a long time and have been in touch since. Learning about Food, Inc. did not affect any of my decisions, besides perhaps some strategical concerns with regard to a release date. But the structure and focus of my movie was in no way influenced by my conversation with Robert. Also, I only got to see his movie recently and so did not really know so much what to expect (although I knew our movies would be very different.)

KT: You first started working on Fresh in late 2005, before Omnivore’s Dilemma came out, “locavore” entered the lexicon, and Wal-Mart became the nation’s leading seller of “organic” milk. Did you sense back then that you were documenting a growing movement?

AJ: yes. When I started thinking about making this documentary, my focus was much broader. I thought to look at people and initiatives not only in farming but energy, architecture, technology, etc., and although I was finding out about amazing people and stories through my research, it became clear, almost from the start, that what was going on at the food level was the most exciting.

One thing in particular struck me: I was finding programs, initiatives, people ALL OVER the world, in apparently completely different environmental, cultural, and political environments, and yet they all shared key attributes: they all had a grassroots, bottom-up quality, as well as an incredibly integrated approach to the work they were doing.

“Yes, it’s about food,” these initiatives seemed to say, “but it’s really about education, health, quality of work, environmental preservation, our spiritual well-being…” Food, I started to realize, was both a microcosm of the problems (economic consolidation, environmental destruction, exploitation of workers, oil crisis, etc.) and of the solutions. And because food plays such an intimate and immediate role in our everyday lives, it’s a powerful entry point to discuss and address these challenges.

Food is a central part of our social and cultural fabric and we can instantly observe the consequences when we change our eating habits–not only in our pleasure and health, but on the vitality of our local economy, on our community and environment.

KT: You grew up in Switzerland and came to the U.S. as a student. There’s a perception, validated by recent studies, that Europeans and Americans have very different eating habits. Did you notice this when you first arrived in the U.S.?

AJ: I think that what I noticed the most was how I missed the fresh products I grew up taking for granted. Tomatoes that actually have taste. Great salads. Yogurt and cheeses (it’s much easier now to get great yogurt and cheese than it was when I first got here.) And being in New York, it didn’t take long before I found myself eating all my meals out. It’s hard to resist the “convenience” ethos that’s so pervasive in New York and perhaps around the country.

I also came to realize that the price of food was much cheaper in the US, at least compared to Switzerland. Not only are restaurants very expensive back home–and therefore a much less regular occurrence–but food purchased at the supermarket is expensive, as well. People back home don’t have the expectation that food should be cheap, so they spend a much larger portion of their income on food. Also, although we have amazing farmers’ markets, the quality of food in the supermarket was always great and I never had to think about where to go to buy food. In New York, depending on your neighborhood, the difference in quality can be dramatic.

KT: Do you find that your own relationship to food has changed since you made FRESH?

AJ: When I started making FRESH, my main relationship with food was one of dieting and guilt. I would choose food based on calories, mostly. I think I always had a fairly healthy diet, to the extent that I never ate much junk, and always enjoyed vegetables and fruits, but I never thought of the quality of the meat, vegetables, or fruits that I was eating, or the impact that it has on my health, my community, and the environment.

To be honest, it never really crossed my mind to think of the way that food was raised/produced, or to worry about it. It also never crossed my mind that the food I was eating might be contributing to my not feeling good, having low energy, gaining weight and possibly to my long-term well-being.

As I started making the documentary, my food anxiety mostly increased: I was still mostly concerned about calories, but I also started wondering about the pesticides, hormones, and antibiotics that might be in the food I was eating. I started thinking of all the “health snacks” I was eating that contained GMOs and the unknown health risk attached to that food.

But my habits didn’t change much at first. The change happened slowly and with a general change in my outlook and lifestyle. It was as if my inquiry into our food system helped me realize not only our communal dysfunctions and misplaced priorities, but mine as well.

I started to try to find more balance in my life, to find or look for pleasure in daily activities, in the “process” of life, rather than constantly running after the next “thing” that was going to make me happier, better, more something or the other. Eating well was no longer about (or only about) improving my health or not gaining weight, it was about pleasure: taking care of myself and the folks that I love and taking the time to do so.

I also came to realize how important it was for me to align my actions with my heart and mind. I have always been concerned with the destruction of the environnment and the exploitation of people. But I did not always align my actions with my belief. Once I started living a more aware/conscious life, I felt great pleasure and satisfaction in acting in ways that support my beliefs. It was not a sacrifice–which is how I had always thought about it–but a relief.

KT: You’re about to become a mother (congratulations!). Have you figured out how you’ll equip your child to cope with a culinary culture where cheap, fast and toxic is the norm and fresh, untainted produce is seen as a luxury for an elite few?

AJ: No, I have no idea. I mean, I’ll certainly feed him/her great food and hope to introduce him/her to the pleasures of gardening and cooking, and thereby influence his/her taste buds for life. But I have no doubt my kid is going to get exposed to foods that will taste absolutely wonderful to him/her and that he/she will want more of them…and I have no idea how I’ll deal with that. I do think celebrating food and making shopping and cooking a joy, as well as the sharing around a table on a daily basis, will go a long way–at least I hope!

KT: What’s the most drastic change you’ve witnessed on the real food front in the years since you began this project? What gives you the greatest hope that we can really transform the way we eat and grow food in this country?

AJ: It seems to me that food has become a substantial focus for Americans. The mainstream news and cyberspace are filled with information and discussion ranging from concern about the latest food scare to a favorite recipe. This shift in American’s awareness is both dramatic and fills me with great hope.

The sustainable food movement is, in essence, a grassroots movement advocating for a change in awareness, a shift in our relationship with each other and with our environment, a new social and economic paradigm. Like any deep cultural change, it starts small and slowly grows, then accelerates as it reaches a critical mass. Michelle Obama’s garden is a reflection on how far and wide “real food” ideas have reached. More than a reflection, though, Michelle’s garden will be a catalyst for raising awareness even further, and is evidence of our government’s receptivity to the concerns and demands of sustainable food advocates.

It is this, and the amazing people that I encounter through my work, their energy and dedication, that keep me hopeful. Hopefulness is simply the knowledge that change is possible and that we can participate in it. Lin Yutang said that “Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.”

The conference aims to create a solid foundation for the food movement in Brooklyn in order to advocate for Food Democracy locally and globally. In the words of its mission statement, the conference “will bring together a uniquely broad and diverse community of activists and citizens to discuss and learn more about the critical food issues of our time and what role we as neighbors can play to address them.”

Through speeches, panel discussions and workshops for both teens and adults, the Brooklyn Food Conference will educate Brooklynites on what can be done at a local level to address the current dysfunction of the global food system. These forums will specifically concentrate on the effects of the food system “on health, the environment, and labor,” as well as “improving the nutritional value of school lunches; urban agriculture; farmers’ markets; community gardens; and food coops.”

Featured speakers include Dan Barber, the executive chef and co-owner of Blue Hill Restaurant; Anna Lappé, the author of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen; Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System; and LaDonna Redmond, who is head of the Institute of Community Resource Development in Chicago.

We are also very proud to announce that Leslie Hatfield, freelance editor of our official blog, The Green Fork, will be moderating a panel titled “Organizing in the Obama Era: Digital Activism” which will outline some best practices in the use of new media for food advocacy and discuss the ever-burning question, “what’s coming next?” Additionally, famed food systems advocate and Green Fork contributor Kerry Trueman will be moderating the panel “Our Industrial Meat Complex: Hazardous to Our Health & Our Environment.” Kerry co-founded the sustainable food sites Eating Liberally and Retrovore, and is a prolific blogger for Open Left and The Huffington Post, as well as The Green Fork.

Other exciting schedule items include:

• Materials and tabling from local organizations (yes, the Eat Well Guide will be there, sharing a table with our sister program Sustainable Table!), food demos, and healthy food provided by local vendors;
• Educational activities for kids organized by Brooklyn parents and teachers;
• Specific programs developed by and for teens;
• An evening dinner/dance honoring local farmers and key Brooklyn Food activists, to top off what is sure to be an amazing and inspiring day!

We’ll be there…will you?

The program is co-sponsored by the Park Slope Food Coop (PSFC), World Hunger Year, Caribbean Women’s Health Association (CWHA), Brooklyn Rescue Mission and Brooklyn’s Bounty.

Details and Directions:

The conference is FREE and will be held at John Jay High School and PS 321 (one location) at 7th Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn. For more information and registration, which is HIGHLY recommended due to location limitations, please visit their website at www.brooklynfoodconference.org or call them at (718) 384-1369.

Aside from Earth Day, today marks the Green Fork’s one-year anniversary. That we launched this blog one year ago today (with 20 Ways to Green Your Fork) is no coincidence — the team at Eat Well, along with a growing number of consumers, are  concerned about how our food choices impact the environment.  Social justice concerns, especially access to healthful foods, and labor rights, are at issue here too, as well as animal welfare and public health issues.  There is a lot to chew on, if you will, and we were excited to add our voices to the growing choir of sustainable food enthusiasts.

This past year has  been huge for Eat Well.  We started producing videos, published the educational booklet Cultivating the Web: High Tech Tools for the Sustainable Food Movement (of which we’ve distributed over 20,000 copies — you can download the digital version here) and launched the beta version of our interactive mapping feature, Eat Well Everywhere.  We also added hundreds of new listings to the Guide and yesterday, we were named “best local food  blog” in Treehugger’s “Best of Green” (you can help us win the Reader’s Choice Award by voting for us before midnight tonight) .

It’s also been a big year for the larger food movement.  To recap, we’ve tapped some of our favorite foodie writers, bloggers, activists and advocates to answer this question:

What is one of the most powerful things you’ve seen and/or learned over the last year? And what is one thing you’d like to see happen over the next year?

Be sure to read through to the end, where Annie Meyers shares some exciting news about New Amsterdam Market (spoiler: it’s happening!), and please, feel free to share your answers in the comments section.

For my part, even as author of the question, I’m finding it really hard to narrow it down one thing, so I would just say that the the idea of “good food for all” has gained tremendous momentum over the last year.  The New York Times prints a story about good food nearly everyday, and they are not alone — all across America, people are talking and writing and organizing for more farmers’ markets, more community gardens, more nutritious lunches and better food in general.  Today, I’m writing from the W.K. Kellogg Food & Society conference, where over 500 good food advocates have gathered to work on what last year, many were hesitating to call a “movement,” but these days, there hardly seems to be a question of whether or not what’s happening qualifies as one. Given all that has been achieved over the last year, I can’t wait to see what unfolds over the next one. If you have yet to join us, do yourself and your fellow global citizens a favor and get on the bus.

Marion Nestle, of Food Politics: One person really can make a difference, and a big one, as shown by what’s happening with community gardens, school food, and organic gardens at the White House.  Let’s have lots more people out there making a difference, each in their own way.

Michael Pollan, of MichaelPollan.com: We’ll look back at Michelle Obama’s work –planting an organic garden on the White House lawn and talking about the importance of real food, as the most important food-and-ag news of the past year. She has already changed the conversation, inspired a counter-attack, and raised people’s consciousness about food more than anyone else.

Joan Dye Gussow: After more than 30 years of playing Cassandra, of living in opposition to the dominant myths about our truly gross national product and our unhealthy food supply, I’ve been shocked into hopefulness by what simple truth from the top has managed to transform despite a continuing din of misinformation.

My hope is that we can revive the real economy-the one where people build, grow, feed and care for each other-without the need to resuscitate our still unsustainable “consumer society.”

Kerry Trueman of Eating Liberally: Oh, geez. I thought this was gonna be easy until I started to think of all the great things that happened over the past year: the resounding success of Roger Doiron’s Eat The View campaign to get a kitchen garden established at the White House; the MacArthur Foundation awarding Growing Power’s Will Allen a much-deserved “genius” grant; the support that the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has received in their struggle to improve conditions for our farm workers; the passage of Proposition 2 in California thanks to the tireless efforts of our friends at the Humane Society; the extraordinary and ever-growing influence of Michael Pollan, who’s got Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer talking about food sheds and urban ag; and Slow Food USA’s shockingly savvy decision to make Josh Viertel its new president.

The most powerful thing may be that folks like Pollan and Viertel have actually been granted access to our new administration, giving us an opportunity, at long last, to loosen the stranglehold of Big Ag and Big Food on our agricultural policies.

According to Pollan and Viertel, President Obama is receptive to the sustainable ag agenda, but demanding evidence that we are, indeed, a real force to be reckoned with. “Show me the movement,” he’s reportedly saying.

We’re fighting “some of the most powerful and moneyed interests in the United States,” as Joan Gussow noted in a speech at Columbia a couple of weeks ago. We must be doing something right, ’cause Monsanto and the rest of the bio-tech brigade have stepped up their disinformation campaigns to confuse consumers who are rethinking our fossil-fueled food chain.

So, can we do away with Agribizness as usual? Yes, we can! Well, that’s my hope, anyway…

Sam Fromartz of Chews Wise: What I’m most encouraged by is the way people are thinking about food – understanding that how it’s produced effects people, health, animals, fish, the environment, oceans, the climate, everyday lives. That consciousness is even more important than making the right food choice according to a rigid guideline. My only hope is that this continues to spread, altering the marketplace in ways we can only imagine.

Anna Lappe of Take a Bite: One of the most powerful things I experienced last year was visiting communities on the outskirts of Seoul with farming activists from Southeast Asia who are part of the La Via Campesina movement. La Via Campesina, now hundreds of thousands strong, is a powerful reminder that small-scale farming is a viable way of life and can be a powerful tool for both helping us mitigate and adapt to global warming. As they say, small-scale farming can “feed the world and cool the planet.”

But perhaps the biggest consciousness shifting experience for me in this past year has been becoming pregnant. All the abstractions about toxins in our environment and on our foods, about the future of the planet and the species, feel very real to me as I sense my baby daughter swimming around inside me. At 29 weeks old, she already has all the eggs she will ever create, so that in me is literally the seeds of my grandchildren, as in my grandmother was the seed of me. The generational frame of sustainability is no longer an abstraction.

Paula Crossfield of Civil Eats: The most powerful thing I’ve come to know about the sustainable food movement this year is how eager young people are to farm (myself included). I would love to push Vilsack to start a young farmer corps program, recruiting interested new farmers and paying them as apprentices and continuing to support them as they seek out land and begin their new occupation.

Kim O’Donnel of A Mighty Appetite: A lot of yin yang this year — Increased awareness on a consumer level about the state of our food system, which is horrifying, yet inspiring to hear the very good work being done to re-establish the farm-to-table connection.  Seemingly unprecedented press coverage on food safety, the Farm Bill, immigrant worker rights and  global food shortages, all disheartening news, yet bright sparks of light and encouraging reports of vegetable gardens and from the White House south lawn to the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. More hunger and demand on food banks yet communities pulling resources to feed one another.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming of the Irresistible Fleet of Bicycles: An incredible surge of young people making bold professional choices, entering agriculture, starting businesses, becoming engaged in the foodsytem.

From Jill Richardson of La Vida Locavore: The highlight of my year was the appointment of Kathleen Merrigan. And my top thing to change? The control of corporations over our food system. Yeah, I know… I dream big.

From Gwen Schantz, frequent contributor to the Green Fork and also to Alternet:Last summer I was living in an Alaskan fishing town when the US Supreme Court ruled that Exxon Mobil would pay an insultingly low $500 million in damages for its role in the worst oil spill in the history of our country. In 1989 the Exxon Valdez spill left much of coastal Alaska covered in crude oil, crippling aquatic ecosystems and obliterating the livelihood of thousands of fishermen. At the time, fishermen put their bodies and their boats to work scrubbing beaches and hauling supplies and volunteers to cleanup sites. Twenty years later, these men and women continue to act as stewards of the sea, working the most environmentally-sustainable fishery in the world. Even as the Supreme Court’s ruling last June illustrates the struggles and frustrations of the environmental movement, it gives me hope and pride to know that Alaskan fishermen carry on a tradition of stewardship through the act of putting good food on my table.

Annie Meyers of Thoughts on the Table:  One of the most powerful initiatives that I’ve noticed (and hope!) is gaining ground is the effort to bring fresh, local produce into hospital kitchens. The specific hospitals that have made this link (in Connecticut and California, for example) have had to do a lot of creative work with their food service providers or with individual distributors to connect with local farmers, but many hospitals are also starting to use common language to describe the type of foods they hope to source. Hospitals that have signed the Health Care Without Harm pledge have agreed to “create food systems which are ecologically sound, economically viable, and socially responsible.” Of course we’ll see whether health care reform will place value in the preventative care of healthy food, but at least for now, some hospital representatives are taking the initiative to do this themselves!

One thing I look forward to in the next year is the establishment of a year-round wholesale regional market in New York City. The New Amsterdam Market project is the primary force building the foundation for this institution, and will be holding Monthly Markets starting on June 28th this year. The New Amsterdam Market will eventually provide a critical meeting point for the growing infrastructure of New York’s regional food system, so that institutions, supermarkets, bodegas, and ever more families will have physical and financial access to the fresh food of the Northeast!

Just a brief post to remind you all that the Eat Well Everywhere Spring Break Challenge will be ending April 10th ! So get your submissions in ASAP so we can begin the judging process and send out those prizes! To jog your vacation fogged memories: the challenge goes a little something like this:

As you’re plotting your adventure – be it road tripping, beach bumming or backpacking – use our handy, FREE Eat Well Everywhere (EWE) mapping tool.

Send your trip details and photo documentation (in other words, yes, please do take pictures of your food, your friends and the places you stopped) to info[at]eatwellguide.org. Send us your information by April 10, 2009 to qualify.

FIRST PLACE–gets your group a $100 gift certificate to an Eat Well Guide location of your choice, plus a goodie bag of stylish Eat Well gear.

ANYONE–who sends us their local/sustainable food eat-inerary will be rewarded with Eat Well Guide swag.