The shows (Bones and CSI: Miami) aren’t intended to be in-depth examinations of contemporary food production.  But the stories include some good information about the ills of industrial ag – and we’re always glad when these issues percolate into the public consciousness.

Naturally, after viewing both programs, I felt compelled to pin them head-to-head in an epic showdown for the Best Industrial-Ag-Themed Cop Show Episode of 2009 Award.

Here’s the analysis:

Bones – “The Tough Man in the Tender Chicken Suit”

Synopsis: The operator of a chicken factory farm dies.  The police suspect fowl play [insert groan].  View the episode.

Thumbs Up:

• Factory Farms – Most people have never seen (or even heard of) factory farms.  Big bonus points for giving the issue some exposure on a primetime TV show.
• Animal Welfare – The episode includes footage of extremely crowded conditions in a chicken factory, and notes that each bird has less than 1/2 square foot of living space.  Viewers also learn about debeaking, a standard factory farm practice that causes birds to suffer lasting pain.
• Hydrogen Sulfide – The victim’s sinuses are deformed as a result of long-term exposure to this toxic gas.  Indeed, H₂S is among the most hazardous pollutants emitted by factory farms; even low concentrations can cause serious health problems.
• Stench – The factory farm’s nasty odor is mentioned repeatedly.  This is no exaggeration; the odor from factory farms is repulsive and surprisingly pervasive – and it’s not just an annoyance; odor damages human health, degrades surrounding communities, and causes local property values to plummet.
• Workers – The episode touches on the plight of factory farm workers, who earn meager wages despite toiling in dangerous conditions.
• Farm vs. Factory – A distinction is made between traditional farms and factory farms (the chicken CAFO is described as a “different beast,” bearing no resemblance to small, free-range farms).

Thumbs Down:

• The Issues – Regrettably, the episode focuses on the animal welfare impacts of factory farms.  This is a significant concern, but we wish the writers had emphasized the devastating effects of these facilities on human health and the environment.
• Lunatic Fringe – Leave it to Fox to bust out the classic protester stereotype; the factory farm activists are portrayed as a bunch of deadbeat whack-jobs whose primary objective is to create disruption.  In reality, most factory farm activists are normal people who live in the surrounding communities.  They’re not crazy, violent, anti-agriculture extremists – they just want to protect their families’ health and prevent their communities from being turned into cesspools.
• Lame Solution – A lab worker is upset by the treatment of CAFO chickens and decides to take action – by raising $1,500 to save a pig.  Granted, there are certainly worse ways to spend $1,500, but there are plenty of more effective methods of fighting factory farms; easiest approach: don’t buy the foods they produce.  The show makes it seem like factory farmed food is the only option.  Obviously, it’s not.
• Absurd Murder Weapon – Watch the episode; you’ll agree.

CSI: Miami – “Bad Seed”

Synopsis: A woman is killed by E. coli; her boyfriend dies after contracting botulism; CSI traces it all back to a shady corporation involved in factory farming and genetically modified crop production.  Visit the CSI: Miami website.

Thumbs Up:

• Food: Behind the Scenes – Most people don’t think much about where food comes from or how it’s produced.  The story highlights the complexity of the modern food system, and the importance of carefully monitoring the system to ensure public safety.
• Independent Contractors – Bixton foods are produced by independent contractors, which reduces the corporation’s liability if anything goes wrong.  This is standard practice for real-life factory farm corporations, which hire CAFO operators to raise animals, but leave these “independent” contractors responsible for all pollution created in the process.
• Illegal Farm Labor – Though only mentioned in passing, this is an important issue in the U.S.; since many workers lack legitimate legal status, they’re easily exploited.
• Beef Feedlot – The source of E. coli in the story.  We just wish there’d been more than a split-second shot of the feedlot.
• Corn-Fed Beef – The viewer learns that factory farms feed cows corn to fatten them quickly.  Unfortunately, since cows have evolved to eat grass, the unnatural corn diet increases the level of acidity in their digestive tracts, creating perfect breeding grounds for harmful strains of E. coli.  Kudos for including this under-reported issue.
• Genetic Engineering – The plot centers around the discovery of a deadly form of genetically modified corn pushed into the market by an unscrupulous agribusiness corporation.  Though the details of this scenario are far-fetched, in reality there are legitimate concerns that genetically engineered crops are approved for use without undergoing sufficient testing.  The episode also touches on the issue of patented seeds (Bixton sues farmers who unintentionally grew crops from genetically modified Bixton seeds that blew into their fields).  This is a not-so-subtle dig at Monsanto.  (Oh SNAP!!)

Thumbs Down:

• Big Stretches – An E. coli death treated as a homicide?  An agribiz CEO admitting to criminally negligent corporate practices?  The source of foodborne illness discovered and the guilty party punished all in an 8-hour workday?  Not exactly the most realistic story.
• Not Enough Dirt on Factory Farms – We wish there’d been more detail about the ills of factory farming (air pollution, misuse of antibiotics, irresponsible waste management, etc.).
• Inevitability of Industrial Ag – Bixton’s CEO delivers the standard “Big Ag or Death” speech (without industrial ag, food prices would skyrocket, everyone starves, etc.).  Would’ve been great if Horatio had refuted the contentions.

And the winner of the Best Industrial-Ag-Themed Cop Show Episode of 2009 Award is… CSI: Miami, “Bad Seed”!!!!

This is just our verdict…if you watch the shows and care to cast a vote, please do so in the comment section.

Yeah, the plot takes liberties with, you know, science and the real-world characteristics of agribusiness, food safety oversight, government bureaucracy, etc., but we like how the story wove together a wide range of issues to illustrate the complexity and interconnected nature of the problems created by industrial food production.  But don’t let this go to your head, CSI – if anyone even thinks about launching another new iteration of CSI in some other city, the Best Industrial-Ag-Themed Cop Show Episode of 2009 Award will be rescinded.  Immediately.

It was through my friendship with Kim O’Donnel, who I met through my freelance work with the Eat Well Guide, that I began to really think hard about the virtues of cooking, and its very necessary role in what my colleagues and I have been working toward — major change in the way we eat.  Some who focus on food politics (and many who don’t) have pooh-poohed others’ focus on culinary niceties, often slamming such groups as Slow Food as elitist, over-indulgent gastronomists.  But, if we are to celebrate “real food” and lack the funds to dine out nightly at the restaurants that serve it, and we are to encourage people to eat more fresh vegetables, well, they’re not going to cook themselves.

So, last weekend, when the NY Times Magazine published a new Michael Pollan manifesto, this one bemoaning the fact that most Americans now spend more time watching cooking shows than they do in the kitchen (all while waxing nostalgic about his mother’s love for Julia Child, playing on the upcoming release of Julie and Julia), I ate it up.  But I was quickly given pause to think by a couple of aspects of the piece, and I was not alone, because Pollan, in navigating the seemingly innocent but all too treacherous waters of American home cooking, had drawn the wrath of the feminist blogosphere.

Pollan credits Child with helping 60’s era would-be cooks to overcome the fear factor, but only the fear of hoity-toity French cuisine, and fails to acknowledge that for some, there are very real fears of even basic culinary exploration (more on this in a minute).  And while he acknowledges that at the same time Julia Child rose to fame, food marketers were taking advantage of the rise of the feminist movement, he might have done well to riff on the marketing front and leave out, or at least edit more carefully, such nuggets as this one:

Curiously, the year Julia Child went on the air — 1963 — was the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” the book that taught millions of American women to regard housework, cooking included, as drudgery, indeed as a form of oppression.

Did Friedan and her peers really “teach” American women to see being saddled with the responsibility for the majority of their family’s housework as oppressive?  Or were they merely, as Salon’s Kate Harding suggests, lending a voice to American women who already felt slighted by society’s branding of them as familial head chefs?  One can easily see how any woman, but especially one who was newly entering the workforce, would want some help around the house.

Through my work advocating for local and sustainable food systems, I’ve heard the argument that “we” need to cook more hashed out more times than I can count, and while I certainly agree, I’m always surprised disheartened by the fact that, like Pollan does, even the most progressive crowds quickly revert, however subconsciously, to the assumption that the “we” who no longer cook are women.  It’s not a mistaken assumption per se – according to Pollan, men, now cooking more than ever, still only prepare 13% of meals – but to fail to question the legitimacy of that is to let American men off the hook.

But if Pollan stumbled at the intersection of feminism and food, he also fails to mention the people — and there are more of them everyday in this economy — who lack not only the skills but also the basic cooking implements necessary for a Rachel Ray-style feast, let alone a Julia Child-caliber meal, or who for that matter, can’t afford to risk burning their dinner, and he barely touches on the obstacles some of us face in getting a wholesome meal on the table, most notably time.  I’ve been guilty, too, of insisting that locally grown and sustainably produced food can be had as cheap as most “ordinary” food, if only folks were willing to cook for themselves, without recognizing how many people lack these two most imperative ingredients.

On the time front, perhaps a more community-minded approach would help.  With the rise of kitchen gardening this year, we are seeing more and more community gardens, as well as creative solutions like organized gleaning and yard-sharing.  Why does this ideal not extend to the kitchen?  Potlucks, eat-ins, taking turns hosting meals with your neighbor or extended family, all of these could help lighten the load for home chefs, with the added benefit of enhancing those relationships.  After all, good food is best enjoyed with company.

Over the years, food processors and fast food companies have exploited the time crunch by marketing to us ever more complexly processed but easy to imbibe foods, in the supposed effort to simplify our lives, but for many of us, it probably takes as long to run for take out as it would to have whipped something up.  So too, have they capitalized on the decidedly archaic ideas so many of us (however subconsciously) hold about women’s roles and food, often by marginalizing food issues as something only women care about.

Pollan does make some interesting points about the rise of the Food Network and why it has had such success in capturing male viewers – largely due to the mindlessly competitive nature of shows like Iron Chef, and he points out that such programming is designed, not to impart any knowledge of how to cook, but to teach viewers how to order high end foods and this observation is important, because it’s hard these days to overestimate the role that money plays in the design of  not only such programming, but say, government subsidies, or the layout of our supermarkets.

I don’t think Michael Pollan is sexist – the article was about a film that is about two women chefs, and the reality is still that women perform the overwhelming majority of cooking that still gets done in this country.  Could he have done better?  Sure.  And he could certainly stand to dig a little deeper into the reasoning behind America’s lack of culinary proclivity, but of course, that would have made for a deeper, less nostalgic, almost certainly much longer article.

As for my friend Kim, whose blog is a great resource for those who would seek to re-learn the culinary arts, she was just excited to hear Pollan issue a call to cook.  Says Kim of the article:

One of the lines that resonated for me was:
“It has been easier for us to give up cooking than it has been to give up talking about it — and watching it.”

I think this is really true, no matter how much money you earn or how much you know about where you food comes from.  We love to talk about food, we love to watch it on TV, but by and large, we need a swift kick in the pants when it comes to actually preparing it.

True enough.  Below, for those of you who heed the call and are looking for inspiration, a few of my favorite pants-kicking  cooking blogs.  There are so many more — please see the Green Fork blogroll for links.

Licking Your Chops

Brooklyn Farmhouse

101 Cookbooks

Garden of Eating

Not Eating Out in New York

Alison’s Lunch

Robbie Kenner didn’t mean to make a horror film when he started working on Food, Inc.. But you can’t shine a light on our food chain without exposing some ugly truths. As Michael Pollan says in the opening of the film:

Whether we’re ready to have that pastoral veneer peeled away is the question. Pollan and his fellow investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, the Fast Food Nation author who co-produced Food, Inc. with Kenner, are determined to fling open the doors to those rank, cavernous CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) and force us to confront the nasty consequences of our addiction to cheap processed convenience foods.

America the Beautiful? Um, not so much, these days. Let’s do an inventory:

Amber waves of grain: sure, we’ve still got ‘em. But the corn we subsidize now isn’t even edible. It’s only good for three things:

1. Fattening up cows–although, as Food Inc. reveals, their digestive tracts aren’t equipped to digest corn, so it makes them sick and creates a breeding ground for the potentially lethal E. coli 0157:H7 bacteria, which sickened 73,000 people in the U.S. in 2007.

Do statistics like that make your eyes glaze over? Food, Inc. will make you weep at the story of Kevin Kowalcyk, a healthy, beautiful two and a half year-old boy who died after eating a hamburger contaminated with E.coli. The tragedy turned his mother Barbara into a food safety advocate lobbying to give the USDA the power to crack down on producers of tainted meat, with a bill named after her son. After seven years of lobbying, “Kevin’s Law” has yet to pass.

2. Fattening us up on soda filled with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and processed convenience foods, which makes us sick. One in three Americans born after 2000 will contract early onset diabetes, as Food, Inc. points out–unless you’re a minority, in which case, the rate will be one in two.

And who knows what all those GMOs (genetically modified organisms) lurking in 70% of our processed foods are doing to our bodies and our environment? Not to mention the pesticides, bisphenol A and phlalates that permeate our food chain. Studies suggest these contaminants may be linked to dozens of diseases.

3. Ethanol, the bogus alternative fuel that’s more boondoggle than boon. Not only is it not a solution to our energy needs, it may actually be worse than gas when it comes to global warming. And speaking of our energy-intenstive way of life…

Purple mountain majesties: If our mountains are purple these days, it’s ’cause they’ve been bruised and battered by mountaintop mining removal, a practice which entails blasting the tops off mountains and dumping the resulting rubble into creeks and streams. Jim Hightower calls the mountaintop mining removal that’s destroying the Appalachians “ecocide,…the total annihilation of a priceless ecosystem that is older than the Himalayas.”

We could do an awful lot to conserve energy if we shifted to a diet dominated by local, seasonal produce, and bypassed factory farm animal products in favor of grass-fed meat and poultry from farmers like Food, Inc.’s Joel Salatin, the wry, quotable contrarian who’s become the poster boy for sustainable agriculture. Such a change would dramatically reduce the amount of fossil fuels we use to grow and transport our food. But that would require agricultural policies that actually encouraged American farmers to grow more fruits and vegetables, and less feed corn, which brings us to…

The fruited plain: The USDA tells us to consume five to nine servings a day of fruits and vegetables even as it marginalizes the farmers who grow these so-called “specialty crops.” The fruit and vegetable farmers aren’t powerful enough to buy themselves favorable legislation, as the corn and livestock lobbyists do. Michael Pollan calls it “the silence of the yams,” and until the USDA decides to put our money where it keeps telling us to put our mouths, you’ll be able to get four burgers for the price of one salad at McDonalds.

With all the resources it takes to produce a pound of beef, shouldn’t a salad cost less than a burger? Not to mention the hidden costs of industrial livestock production, like the contamination of our waterways from…

Sea to shining sea: excess fertilizer runoff feeds the algae blooms that create dead zones along our shores and dull our oceans’ gleam, along with all that discarded plastic from our disposable consumer culture. There’s so much junk floating around in the ocean now that it’s impeding the search for the remains of Air France Flight 447.

We’ve been heading down this polluted path for decades. George Carlin provided us with his own satirical ode to catastrophic consumption back in 1972:

Maybe we’re finally ready to change course, 37 years later. Food, Inc. exposes the dark side of the American diet in a compelling–and surprisingly entertaining–way. Will you lose your appetite for factory farmed foods after you’ve seen it? I hope so. But its stated goal is to leave you “hungry for change,” the kind of change that’s transforming the way we think about how–and where–our food is grown.

Yes, Food, Inc. is a horror story, of sorts, but it’s no scarier than the tall tales that Agribiz and Big Food have been spinning in their efforts to ensnare you in their monoculture myths of efficiency, convenience and affordability. They’d have you believe that the folks behind Food, Inc. are technology-hating luddites and arugula-eating elitists who want the world to subsist on wormy apples.

They’d also love it if you’d take their word for it that their methods of farming are super sustainable. And our food supply’s plenty safe, thank you very much. More frequent inspections and stringent regulations? That will just drive up the price of food.

But as Food, Inc. clearly shows, industrial agriculture’s cutting corners in some lethal and inhumane ways, and our cheap food supply is poisoning Americans on a scale that Al Qaeda could only dream of.

It’s all well and good to espouse shopping at farmers markets and growing our own food wherever possible. We can also demand better from our corporations and our government. But the fact remains that fruits and vegetables are unavailable–or unaffordable–to many low-income Americans.

Industrial agriculture’s got the cheap part down. Sustainable agriculture’s got the fresh, healthy part of the equation covered. The burning question we need to ask was raised by Grist blogger Tom Laskawy in a recent email to some colleagues pondering this issue of access: Do all Americans have the right to affordable, fresh, healthy food?

Big Ag and Big Food insist that their food chain is doing a perfectly swell job of meeting all our needs. Oh, beautiful, for specious lies. Food, Inc.’s implied answer to Laskawy’s question is yes, we all have that right, but we’ll have to fight for it.

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.”