She quotes from an article that she and a colleague wrote:

While visionary CEOs and enlightened food company cultures may exist, society cannot depend on them to address obesity voluntarily, any more than it can base national strategies to reduce highway fatalities and global warming solely on the goodwill of the automobile industry. Rather, appropriate checks and balances are needed to align the financial interests of the food industry with the goals of public health.

I suppose there is only one Mike Curtin, and it’s not going to be feasible to hope that public outcry will be enough to encourage social responsibility from companies. Looks like Nestle is supporting a political solution. That’s going to be a hard sell to the lobbyists, but maybe the only thing big enough to work.

Image from the DCCK web site.

Last week, as another part of our Spring Service Week, I got to meet with Mike Curtin from DC Central Kitchen. It’s definitely an organization you can get behind.

Start with a soup kitchen, then add job training and creation (in the hundreds) for people who are otherwise unemployable and statistically likely to head towards prison and get them cooking meals others can get for free.

But don’t stop there: start tirelessly searching for more environmentally-friendly food. Buy the food farmers would otherwise be throwing out for packaging and distribution reasons and help curb the 25% of all food that gets tossed every year (Seriously. Dude.).

But don’t stop there either. Start buying extra food from what I imagine as an underground market for ugly duckling produce and sell it to restaurants, thus stepping up environmental efforts and turning a profit for more expansion (and trainees and jobs).

Just look at all this, piece by piece. Curtin is, to put it mildly, The Man. He can turn a service into a business model and make everyone happy at the same time. Businesses and resources should both take note of how one can behave as a responsible businessman while working with agencies, and how resources can take responsibility for their own financing. Awesome stuff.

These are three things were considered important across the board:

1. Create jobs to support a local, diversified economy that supports the whole area, not just single towns.
2. Teach better life skills in schools–managing money or writing resumes, for instance.
3. Encourage a better self-image and a bigger commitment from the community as a whole.

#3 is especially good for me because it’s something I can do. Our Fourth Mondays efforts are trying to do #1 and #2, but our biggest, most fun goal is to inspire a sense of belonging and engagement within the area.

This may seem a bit off-topic, but it’s all inter-connected. Economic stability and a love of the community are helpful elements when you’re trying to convince people to think about what they’re eating in terms of the greater good. This applies to how we deal with food, too.

Transition Network, an organization I was just introduced to a few hours ago,  seems like a good example of this. The whole idea is to convince people to think about how they live and encourage them to make more responsible decisions. However, the discussion takes place on the local level, with towns talking about how they can improve.

I think this model is crucial for all environmental and economic change, but especially for food systems. Making CSA’s more readily available and favoring environmental and nutritional food on the local level is going to be much more effective and sustainable than national initiatives. But to do that, we’re going to need to start by making people more excited about where they live.

The beef industry is silent no more. Voluntary rancher fees from an industry association’s advocacy program have underwritten pro-meat marketing campaigns, stipends for researchers to raise doubts (but not conclusive evidence) about scientific studies, and dissemination of talking points that are misleading at best. “Reducing intakes of meat and dairy would only lead to hunger,” I read recently, and the headline of an industry newsletter stated, “Meat and dairy intakes not linked to climate change.” These news items represent a disturbing trend: raise doubts, obfuscate the facts, and misinform.

“Disturbing trend” is right. Have you seen these new High Fructose Corn Syrup Ads?

So basically, the tactic is to maintain ignorance. Not to make an argument for the corn farmers’ economic situation, not to confront facts with counterpoints, but to confuse and misinform.

Youtube is chock full of spoofs on these ads already, which I hope is a sign that it’s obvious how desperately they’re trying to own the conversation at the expense of transparency and accuracy.

Atlantic writer Amy Sullivan and I are apparently very similar eaters. In an old feature she explained that

If the world is divided into those who eat to live and those who live to eat, I am firmly in the latter camp—provided that what I’m eating doesn’t have a beet anywhere near it.

I’ve often said the same thing. I’m very good at hiding it, but I have the nutritional maturity of a six year old boy: quesadillas and cheeseburgers all the way. I also go to a school that adores tomatoes, probably because they can get them locally and organically. Given that I write this blog, I should be down with that. But I hate tomatoes.

So Sullivan’s piece on breaking her tomato-avoidance behaviors was of particular interest. I also learned something that might explain a lot of my tomato-jitters:

When a tomato ripens fully on the vine, it acquires a complex mix of sugar and acid compounds that burst with flavor. But most commercial tomatoes these days are picked when they’re green, packed in a warehouse, and gassed with ethylene, which stimulates the fruits to redden even though they aren’t yet ripe. The process makes tomatoes easier to transport and gives them that appealing fire-engine red color. The end product, however, is bland and, for a tomato-phobe, often not worth the effort.

No wonder I haven’t been a fan! Sullivan explains that

On those rare occasions when I decided to give tomatoes a try, spearing a slice in my salad, I was inevitably rewarded with a watery mouthful that didn’t taste like much of anything.

Ditto! Sullivan found that she could add tomatoes into her repertoire of meals until finally

Then, one day last summer, I stood in a friend’s kitchen while she finished preparing dinner. She had purchased some cherry tomatoes at a local farmers market that afternoon and set out a bowl of them for snacking—a bite-sized rainbow of fruity yellows, oranges, and reds. I popped one in my mouth and stopped. It didn’t taste like any tomato I’d ever had. This was fresh, a crisp bite with a small punch of sweetness inside.

So maybe I’ll take a cue from Sullivan and slowly try to get myself into tomatoes, with the end goal of being a.) brave enough and b.) emotionally-adjusted enough to enjoy a fresh, locally-grown cherry tomato.

But let’s take it one step at a time.

Michelle Obama knows how to stay active with her daughters.

Michelle Obama appeared in Newsweek last month to discuss her new campaign, Let’s Move. She said:

Let’s Move is about families making manageable changes that fit with their schedules, their budgets, and their needs and tastes. It’s about giving parents the tools they need to keep their families healthy and fit, and getting more nutritious food—more fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and less sugar, fat, and salt—into our nation’s schools. It’s about helping grocery stores serve communities that don’t have access to fresh foods, and finding new ways to help our kids stay physically active in school and at home.

Definitely some good goals to have. I like the idea of these big ideas intersecting with the realities of families’ busy schedules. If we want to make nutrition a priority in America, we need to make it accessible for everyone. That means catering to people with tight schedules and budgets.

…it’s about what all of us can do to help our kids lead active, healthy lives: parents making healthier choices for their families; mayors and governors doing their part to build healthier cities and states; and the private sector doing its part as well—from food manufacturers offering healthier options to retailers understanding that what’s good for kids and families can be good for businesses too.

I hope a big part of this campaign will be focused on the food manufacturers. I think that’s a good place to start.

I like, too, that she has found inexpensive ways to further her cause. For instance, she’s been forging partnerships with private companies to push for better eating, and has advocated for simple scheduling changes in the school system (for instance, putting recess before lunch and forty minute lunches at reasonable lunch times).  Every aspect of public education can use more funding, so it’s nice to see these cheap actions having an impact, however small.

No doubt because of her location in the food system, Cooper puts a lot of emphasis on the big, bureaucratic picture. She talks about reworking how the American government commodifies its food and putting school lunch programs under the supervision of the CDC rather than the USDA.

These are excellent goals, but they are big ones. I think a more effective strategy would be to come at this from the ground. By advocating for education and small, grassroots efforts at the local level, the bigger organizations will be forced to eventually change themselves in order to follow the financial and social trends. I see it as a matter of fixing the problem rather than its symptoms.

Cooper talks about school lunches as a source of education about nutrition. I agree, but it’s important to note that parents are the first source of information here. My mom was sensitive about healthy eating, and I made better decisions in the lunch room because of what our habits were at home. These kids are going to enter the real world, and if they don’t know any better, they’re going to fall into the food habits of their parents. This is in tandem with what Cooper’s saying, I think:

And what I came to understand is, we needed to teach children the symbiotic relationship between a healthy planet, healthy food and healthy kids.

The only major complaint I have with Cooper’s talk is her penchant for gimmicky rhetoric. We’re going to become extinct? Because we spend more on prisoners than kids’ eating, “it’s no wonder… we have criminals”? “If they’re eating chemicals all the time, they’re not going to be able to think”? I find these issues important enough without the melodrama, and she should too.

All the same, check out the whole video. For more information, you can read her bio here, or visit her web site here.

Faced with lingering unemployment, 20- and 30-somethings with college degrees and foodie standards are shaking off old taboos about who should get government assistance and discovering that government benefits can indeed be used for just about anything edible, including wild-caught fish, organic asparagus and triple-crème cheese.

Bleyer talks about some instances in the last few years where online commentary turned against those who used food stamps for these supposedly high brow purchases. The outrage makes sense at first glance–why should the government be paying for fancy-pants food?

I worked at my local grocery store for several years (the cheapest one in the area), and faced a totally opposite frustration. Young working families, those who are usually associated with these programs, would buy mostly processed foods, canned produce, and more expensive brand name snacks. As much as I tried not to make generalizations, it was impossible to deny the pattern.

The “food stamp-using foodies,” however,

might be applauded for demonstrating that one can, indeed, eat healthy and make delicious home-cooked meals on a tight budget… And while they might be questioned for viewing premium ingredients as a necessity, it could also be argued that they’re eating the best and most conscious way they know how.

True, some of the decisions may be unnecessarily lavish, but there’s no reason to be dubious of people who put their monthly SNAP funds towards to delicious, nutritional, environmentally responsible food. These trends are also good news for the economy, and not just for Whole Foods and farmer’s markets.

My friend Kim from Target: Hunger (of the Food Bank of Western MA) explained to me that the government actually wants everyone who is eligible to sign up for food assistance. The less people are paying out-of-pocket for food, the more they’re spending on paying off debt and in other areas of the economy. Basically, the more SNAP users, the more economic stimulation in other areas.

Expanding the demographics of those who apply and utilize SNAP is good for warmer and fuzzier reasons too: it breaks down the stereotypes of “welfare families.” Some people Bleyer quotes in the article are a little anxious about others knowing they use food stamps, but I think it’s great for people to talk about it openly. The more we expand our perception of those who use the food stamps, the more tolerant we can be towards the families that need them most, and the less stigmatizing it can be for those who are just now applying to the programs.