Here is New York there is a debate going on about soda. Specifically: should the government place a one penny per ounce tax on bottled sugary drinks? The tax could bring in $7.6 billion annually to the state — money Bloomberg says would go to support education and health care. The opposition argues: “Taxes never made anyone healthy! And this tax is unfair to poor people!”

First, let’s be skeptical about the beverage industry standing up for the rights of the poor to drink soda.

To address the real issue, of whether a soda tax is unfair to people already struggling to afford food for their families: theoretically, yes, a tax on food items will be felt more by those with less money. Sugar and fat rich foods pack in more calories per dollar, and in the U.S.A. it’s cheaper to eat heavily processed, nutrient-void food than fresh, healthy food. This is the current reality. But no one benefits from us collectively throwing our hands in the air and saying, “Oh well! That’s life!” And no one benefits from a continuation of the status quo. As so many people have argued, the cost of eating junk may be cheaper in the short term, but in the long term is is hugely more expensive. 2 in 3 American adults are overweight. 1 in 3 kids. The money saved at the grocery store is being felt on a nation-wide scale in the rising costs and expenditures in health care.

A tax on soda would be a step towards changing this discrepancy. However, the solution is not to raise the price of processed food so it is as expensive as fresh food and therefore less appealing. We must also lower the cost of fresh food so healthy stuff is affordable for regular working people.

The question we should ask about the soda tax is: what will this money subsidize? Will it directly fund school lunch programs that provide fresh healthy food to kids on free or reduced lunch? Will it be used to change our food system so healthy options are available and affordable?

So far, the soda tax is being touted as a two-for-one fix: funding Medicaid and education, and addressing childhood obesity. Bloomberg has specifically said that this money would go towards keeping teachers in classrooms and preventing further cuts to public education. But I think we should get specific: If this tax is really being done in the interests of nutrition and health, than some of the money should be used specifically to fund healthy food programs. We can’t just make junk more expensive, without making the good stuff affordable.

But that’s just my opinion. What you think readers? Soda Tax: Yay or Nay?

Last Friday team WOYP headed over to the Neighborhood School in NYC for some screening, eating, and talking. There was a signup for the Angel Family Farm CSA (Season 2! alright!), homemade tamales, a Q&A, and a chance for parent and kids to see their school on the big screen.

Remember the part from WOYP that takes place in a school cafeteria? Going into the kitchen and kids talking about school food and their lunches? That was the Neighborhood School. There’s other neat stuff happening over there as well: a school garden which also serves as science classroom, and ongoing projects to make the school green and sustainable.

On March 17th 2010 thousands of chefs will descend on Washington D.C. and, with sushi knives and scorching cast iron pans in hand, will barge into the halls of Congress to demand that they invest $4 billion in the Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill. Upon seizing victory, the chefs will then cook a seasonal, well balanced meal for members of the House and Senate, and they will all eat together at the table of bipartisanism.

It might actually go down a little differently, but yes, there is a Chef’s Day of Action planned for March 17th 2010 in Washington D.C. All those involved in the culinary profession are invited to join in the action — which will involve visiting representatives and talking to them about the crucial importance of funding child nutrition programs.

It’s great to see chefs building as a political force. We often think of cooking as an entertainment or leisure activity — it’s about butter, and chocolate, and fennel — but not politics. No longer. Chefs around the country are speaking out about food justice, childhood obesity and the need to change our food system. And as lovers and masters of quality food, they are great spokespeople.

Spread the news to other Chefs, cooks, sous chefs, and culinary pros! For more information visit the NYC Alliance for CNR.

Starting a farm is a huge, daunting undertaking — requiring a serious leap of faith and streak of daring recklessness. Why would you willingly enter into a profession that hundreds of people are getting out of every year? How could you know that small scale organic farming provides no financial security, and is hard and expensive — and still do it anyway? These people are my heroes.

Mihail Kossev  is a  young farmer, a NYU alum from Brooklyn, who is, in his words:
“pursuing my dreams and starting a small CSA in southern Albany county.”

He’s looking for CSA members for his first growing season. (The drop-off location will be in Catskill, NY.) He also has a really nice and informative website where he is selling seeds he personally collected from organic farms all over the Northeast. All seeds are open-pollinated, grown and processed organically.

If you live in the area, or need seeds for your own garden — check out his Collected Seed Farm or get cozy on  Facebook.

Young farmers are courageous warriors! Let’s support them.

TV, festivals, screenings, blogs and now  . . . the radio. WOYP Director Catherine Gund joined fellow filmmakers Shelly Rogers (What’s Organic About Organic?) and Ana Sofia Joanes (Fresh) on Cathy Erways’s “Let’s Eat In” radio program on Heritage Radio Network to talk about eco-labeling, food systems, filmmaking, eating in and the Hungry Filmmakers screening at Anthology Film Archives.

After it’s super-popularity last fall, the Hungry Filmmaker Series screens again TONIGHT! Come see snippets of the best in food films: What’s On Your Plate? (of course), Fresh, Mad Cow Investigator, The End of the Line, and Fly on the Wall.

And think about taking the eat in challenge, organized by The Huffington Post and Cathy Erway.
Eat at home for the week and see how good it feels.

With all the nonprofits, blogs, articles, films, exposés, and books devoted to improving school lunches, I sometimes imagine that things have already changed. That students around the country are eating healthy, delicious, local meals prepared by well-paid cooks in naturally lit school cafeterias. But for every Boulder school system (currently being overhauled by Renegade Lunch Lady Chef Ann Cooper), there are thousands of regular public schools around the country, where kids are still eating tator tots five times a week.

We’ve reported before on Mrs. Q, an anonymous public school teacher in Illinois, who is eating lunch in her school cafeteria everyday in 2010, taking pictures, and writing about it. Her blog, Fed Up: School Lunch Project, is a straightforward and smart account of what’s being served every day in our public schools. On Day 16, a prepackaged PB&J sandwich, which she could barely choke down, brought on some post-work vomiting. Other meals, she says, aren’t so bad. One thing you’ll notice right away is all the packaging. Everything is plastic wrapped, served on disposable plates, with disposable utensils.

Now Ed Bruske, a dad, urban homesteader, blogger, and former Washington Post reporter, has spent a week investigating his daughter’s school cafeteria, writing about his findings in a six part series, Tales from a D.C. School Kitchen on his blog, The Slow Cook. Just prior to his week in the kithcen, the food service provider for the D.C. schools, Chartwells-Thompson, decided to do away with pre-packaged, military MRE-style lunches, and serve “fresh-cooked” meals. Bruske, an avid gardener and cook, was expecting to see actual cooking in this kitchen, which was recently renovated and outfitted with a new freezer and stainless steel equipment. What we found was a lot of frozen, processed foods, reheated and steamed to appear “fresh-cooked.” Not surprising. But the stories are engaging, and give a full picture of school lunches and how budgetary concerns are dictating the health and nutrition of our children.

One of the reasons school systems have been able to serve bad food for so long is that adults were not paying attention. Now that the national spotlight is on school cafeterias, and grown-ups are peeking around inside, things are going to have to change.

Thanks Huffington Post, for bringing sex appeal to sustainable farming and beekeeping. Following the excitement of their hot organic farmers contest, they have a new series of photos, profiling some of the cutest beekeepers in the land. And they are adorable. Next I hope they show us some good-looking furniture makers.

And in the world of NYC beekeeping, there is news! Did you know that beekeeping is legal in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis, Portland, San Francisco,  and Seattle — but NOT New York City? Sad. Fortunately, this may change soon. The NYC Board of Health is holding a public hearing on the future of NYC beekeeping on February 3, 2010! Following the hearing, the Board will decide on whether or not to revise the code to legalize beekeeping.

Our friends Just Food are on top of the issue, and have great resources for how you can get involved, submit a testimony, or sign a petition.

Sometimes corporations make good choices.

On Tuesday Target announced that they will no longer sell farmed salmon in their stores. In this press release they stated that beginning immediately they will switch to wild-caught Alaskan salmon, and will have only wild salmon in their sushi by the end of 2010. Who knows whether they are doing it because they care about the environment, its good for PR, or because of pressure from citizen activists. Regardless of the reason, when a major corporation makes a decision like this, it has all kinds of trickle-down effects on the fishing industry, the environment, other retailers, and our health.

This announcement is good news for people, fish, and the environment. Here are five reasons why it’s smart to switch to wild salmon:

1. Dye a food to make it look like that food?
Wild salmon are”salmon-colored” because they eat krill, turning them a rich pinkish-orange color. Farm raised salmon are fed manufactured pellets made of corn meal, fish meal, genetically modified canola oil, chicken feces, soy, and other discarded animal materials. In order to make them look like the salmon we are used to they are fed “salmon-colored” dye! Without it, their flesh would be a dull grey color.

2. Farmed salmon are sickly creatures.
Raised in packed pens with barely enough room to swim, farmed salmon play host to sea lice and other infections, which spread easily in crowded conditions. To combat diseases, salmon farmers shower fish with antibiotics. The antibiotics then seep into the surrounding waterways, polluting the waters and killing the healthy bacteria that live on the ocean floor.

3. Farmed salmon is full of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. These are not good for you.
Scientists have shown a link between PCBs and cancer — making farmed salmon actually dangerous to eat. The farmed salmon absorb PCBs from the fish meal they are fed — which has high levels of toxins, including PCBs.

4. Farm raised salmon are affecting native salmon populations.
When farm salmon escape from their pens (yea freedom!) they often out-compete the native salmon for food and breeding. This threatens the wild salmon population and the whole eco-system they are a part of.

5. WASTE!
Salmon are raised in open cages, which means the concentrated poop of thousands of salmon flows right into the surrounding waters. This is the same amount of waste as the raw sewage produced by a town of 65,000 people. Fish waste spreads bacteria, germs, chemicals, toxins, and diseases.

For more information on salmon farming, check out this very informative and pleasant-to-look-at website.

And p.s., even though Target is selling wild salmon now, they are still a mega-corporation that pays employees low wages and busts up unions. May I suggest buying wild salmon at your local fish market instead?

So you graduate from college and get psyched up about organic gardening and food justice. You try working on a farm and decide: yes this is for me. You enthusiastically declare to friends and family: I have found my calling, my purpose! I am going to toil in the dirt and grow beautiful, pure food!

You do some research about independent farming and   . . . . WHOOA. The reality sinks in. You need serious $ to start a commercially viable farm, even a small one. Land, tools, seed, labor, insurance, and on and on.

On top of all that you have $60,000 in student loans for your lucrative Anthropology degree from an expensive University.

The economics of farming in this country are deeply skewed. Small farms go out of business every day and and it is increasingly difficult for small operations to compete with Agri Giants. As the population of farmers ages, and farms go out of business, we need a new generation of farmers to take their place.

There is a building movement to make farming a little more financially viable for young folks.

Ever heard of Public Service Loan Forgiveness or Income Based Repayment? They are two options offered by the federal government to encourage college grads to go into public service and non-profit work. Within Public Service Loan Forgiveness, remaining student loan debt is forgiven after ten years. And with Income Based Repayment, one is protected from paying more than 15% of their disposable income to repay student loans.

Farming and food activists are trying to make farming qualify as a public service in these programs. According to this article by Kimberley Hart, adding farming to the pool of public service employment could be the piece we need to make farming more do-able for a new generation.

From my own personal observations and talks with wanna-be farmers, it is not the physical labor, time commitment, or geographic isolation that deters them from trashing their laptops and picking up pitchforks. It is a real concern that you just can’t make a living as a small scale farmer.

If you want to see farming become more financially viable for a new generation of farmers, contact your representatives. You can use this handy letter to get you started.

WOYP friends! You have until February 16th  to tell the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) what you think about Monsanto, genetically engineered (GE) foods, and  the importance of accurate food labeling!

A little back story: In 2006 the Center for Food Safety sued the USDA for approving Monsanto’s GE Roundup Ready alfalfa. Alfalfa is open-pollinated by bees, who can spread the seed for miles. This means that farms growing organic and non-GE alfalfa could have their crop contaminated by Monsanto’s GE alfalfa.

This poses a serious problem for organic farmers. Current USDA Organic standards state that an organic crop that has been accidentally contaminated with GE seed can still display the official “USDA Organic” seal, as long as the farmer did not intentionally pollinate the crop with GE seed.

So this means the organic food you are buying may, or may not, be genetically engineered. This may come as a surprise to the  75% of consumers who believe that when they are buying organic they are also buying GE-free.

It also forces us to ask: what good is a label if it doesn’t mean what it claims to mean? If Monsanto continues to rule over our food system, we may never have accurate and dependable labeling of GE foods.

The federal judge in the case of the USDA vs. the Center for Food Safety ordered that the USDA complete an environmental impact statement (EIS) on the effects of GE crop on farmers and the environment. The USDA finished the first draft of their EIS on December 14th — and we are now in the 60 day public comment period! (One great thing about EIS is that it mandates a period of time for the public to weigh-in.)

Go to True Food Now to tell the USDA that organic does matter, and that you want correct labeling of GE foods, just like they have in Australia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Russia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom.