There’s one, basic, huge question that comes into my head whenever I think about food systems and the way our food gets to us: why is it so hard to get something that comes up out of the ground.  I know that’s a simple way to ask a pretty complex question, and that there are a lot of complex reasons why we get our food by paying stores to buy it from companies that grow it in far away places and fly and ship and drive it across the whole world before we eat it.  A quick way to answer might be “if we were all farmers, we might not have time to make other neat things like books, the Hubble Space Telescope, or, I don’t know, the internet, mr. blogger.”  And alright, that’s fair, but it’s still good to think about how food comes straight up out of the dirt.  Put in a little water and sunlight and hard work, and there it is!  My point is that people gotta garden more.  Wait, no, people gotta garden like their very lives are at stake.  I’m serious here, people, the economy has been walking with a limp for a good 3 years now, and it ain’t easy to buy good food.  And if that isn’t bad enough (it is, by the way) we are looking at an ongoing global food crisis.  It’s scary stuff, but always remember that food grows out of the ground!  So, Internet, I ask you: do you have access to dirt?  Do you have a backyard?  A windowbox? Do you live in a town with community gardens?  Do your friends?  Is there any way at all that you can get your hands on a little dirt?  If so (and please comment if the answer is no, I’m interested to hear why) there is no good reason not to use it to grow something good, healthy, and tasty.  Feed yourself, if only just a little, feed your neighbors, if only just for one salad a year when your tiny tomato plant finally gives you enough to chop up and put in some store-bought lettuce.  Just a little bit will help and just a little bit will make you feel totally excellent, I promise.

Where's all the food at?

It's here! The food's all here.

Recently, our pals at Wholefoods Salt Lake City gave away tickets to the Tumbleweeds Film Festival at the SLC Film Center.  It was totally great!

Either this is a different movie that was in 3D, or WOYP? has some very cool fans.

Also, WOYP? screened at The Hamlin School in San Francisco, and our friends Oliver and Alice were there to check out the party!

Best friends!!

Thanks for coming out to WOYP? screenings, folks!  And thanks to Wholefoods for handing out free tickets.  We’re really excited that so many people get to see our movie all over the country.

Hey, Internet, it’s been a while.  How are you?  Good?  I’m glad.  Remember when I talked about keeping chickens in your backyard?  Well, take a look at this.  That’s right, Internet, fancy, high-design chicken coops for the sophisticated farmer.  I am a huge architecture nerd, Internet, so I can’t completely write this off in the way that I can write off designer dog clothes.  I gotta admit I like seeing a little thought put into chicken coops.  I like the Frederik Roije one that looks like steps and appears to be lit from the inside (is this normal?  I think that’s strange) and I like that the Mitchell Snyder one is a DIY project.  Building a chicken coop yourself is great, building a chicken coop yourself from a thoughtful and excellent design you came up with yourself is the greatest.  Also, I have decided that I want to raise chickens in a coop made to look like a miniature Coop Himmelblau design because I think that would be hilarious.

Okay, so most of these designs are a bit silly.  Building a sleek, modern chicken coop isn’t going to make for happier chickens, or more eggs, or anything, really.  But why the heck not?  Put a little thought into it, make your chicken coop look cool.  In fact, make it the coolest-looking thing in your yard and point it out to everyone who comes to your house.

Hey, Internet! Have you heard about Adopt-A-Farmbox? Would you like to? You would? Adopt-A-Farmbox is a super cool New York City organization that simply builds farmboxes (boxes made of recycled wood, that are perfect homes for delicious plants) and sends them to schools and community centers, complete with organic soil, organic seeds to grow fruit, plan layouts, educational programs with nutrition and cooking classes, and curriculums for schools. It’s pretty awesome, especially in a city where finding the space for a school garden can be daunting, and school and community projects around growing food and caring for plants are totally the best. I mean, how could you not love an organization like Adopt-A-Farmbox? You should totally get a farmbox for your school! Or for your community center!

A new farmbox in the making.                                        Lookin’ good, farmbox!

Check this out, Internet. This isn’t news, per se. It’s not like I read this and spit out my coffee with a “Holy Toledo! Processed meat is terrible for me?!” For one thing, I don’t like coffee, so I would have spit out my tea or something. For another, the old “don’t eat processed meats” story is as old as the hills. The thing that makes this noteworthy is the way the message was phrased this time, “too dangerous for human consumption.” This is one of the things that scares me most about the world we live in: there seems to be a sort of lifecycle of products in which they are invented, praised, become part of our lives, and are finally discovered to cause fatal diseases.

Lead paint, for example, stays bright and fresh looking much longer than the safer stuff, and was used just about everywhere, until it was banned in the 1970s for causing serious brain damage. The use of DDT as an insecticide won the Nobel Prize for Hermann Muller in 1948 and got sprayed over just about every plant we ate until it was banned in 1972 for causing cancer. What else is lurking in your kitchen, waiting to strike you down? I mean, it’s hard not to think like a tabloid here, but it’s true. We often find out that things are harmful to us only after they are used widely.

What’s to blame for this? Are food and other industries too willing to use risky chemicals in their products? Can we really get a safe level of “riskiness” defined when the reasons that a product might be harmful might not even occur to us for decades? Is medical research too slow to identify health risks? Too underfunded to take chances on studies of innocuous products on the off chance that they might harm us in some way we haven’t thought of yet? The only optimistic point I can think of is that this kind of medical research, this kind of thinking that things we use in our daily life might harm us in unknown ways, is relatively new, and each new discovery adds to a pool of knowledge that only grows with time. For instance, carcinogens, which are the cancer-causing substances in sodium nitrate (processed red meats), DDT, tobacco, and loads of other things, were only discovered in 1910. That’s a hundred years ago, and at least 3000 years too late to prevent humans from picking up smoking habits, but once we knew what to look for, we found it. Once we found it, we started working on banning the dangerous products. It will always be slow going, but the trick is to keep working at it. And when scientists tell you that processed meats are bad for you, remember to stop buying them.

Hi fives all around, Internet! Our pals at Zis! Boom! Bah! won a big award from Apps for Healthy Kids! Zis! Boom! Bah!’s Pick Chow! app won Best Tool for being a great web app kids can use to eat healthier. I checked out Pick Chow! a while ago and I can confirm that it is an awesome app. Planning out a healthy, balanced, delicious meal can be a tough task, but it’s a lot more fun with bright colors and cool looking nutrition meters. Way to go, Zis! Boom! Bah! You guys are internet champs!

Apps for Healthy Kids is part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign and is a competition where software developers, game designers, students, and computer whizzes of all types can win prizes for using computers to help kids lead healthier lives. It’s a good idea these days when we use computers in just about every part of our lives. Apps for Healthy Kids is a great way to start making kids’ health an important goal for software developers and designers. There’s so much potential in computers as a way to teach kids, and programs like Apps for Healthy Kids can help us realize it.

Internet, it’s been a while! I’ve been real busy for the last month, because (I don’t want to brag, but) the What’s On Your Plate? DVD is out! You can buy it from Amazon, from our website or our distributor Bullfrog’s site, or you can stream it on Netflix (it even works on the Netflix-Wii instant queue thing my roomate has, if that’s how you watch movies). Basically, we’re incredibly excited here at WOYP HQ. The DVD is really cool, it’s got a music video of the WOYP song by Nona Hendryx (from Labelle! I still can’t get over that) plus a video of a Q&A session from one of our screenings and a way-mysterious deleted scene!

Okay, I’ll stop pushing the DVD now. We’re really proud of it, and we hope you guys check it out and like it, but for now, stay cool, Internet, and eat something good today.

Hey, Internet, how’s it going? That’s cool. Me? I’m pretty good, been checking out ZisBoomBah. It’s a website meant to teach kids about healthy eating, especially about choosing foods to make up a healthy meal. It’s pretty cool, since it involves the rare combination of bright colors, cartoon characters, computer games, and healthy food choices (basically every junk food company out there seems to have a zany, cartoonish site full of games. I dare you to google a few). Basically, you head over to the site, you sign up (kids can’t sign up without parents also signing up, which is actually cool because ZisBoomBah has some kid-parent connectivity features I’ll explain in a minute) you create an “Anvatar,” a cartoony ant character for your username (I have no idea why they’re ants) and you start exploring the site. The main attraction is the Pick Chow section, where you put together a meal from a big selection of different foods, and try to get a perfect 5-star meal by balancing stuff like protein and fiber with saturated fats and sodium. I like that you can have dessert, but only if the rest of the meal gets five stars, and the dessert can’t make you lose a star. I managed to make a few delicious meals, but it can be tough. The best part is when kids make a healthy meal they like, they can send a shopping list to their parent’s username on the site, and eat that meal in real life! It’s pretty fun, too. Definitely more fun than writing a shopping list down on paper. There’s pictures of the food I’m about to eat!

The other cool thing about ZisBoomBah is the Play section, which I thought would be some online games to help kids learn about nutrition. I was so wonderfully wrong! Play is full of activities that involve actual exercise and have little or nothing to do with computers! The web is a great tool for helping kids learn about being healthy, but sitting in front of a computer is not actually good for you (thus the great paradox of the 21st century) and the Play section is a wonderful way to solve that. In fact, from the Pick Chow section to the Chef Recipes to the activities in Play, ZisBoomBah seems to be all about getting off the internet and into a healthy, fun lifestyle, and you, Internet, should get excited about that.

Eggmergency? Eggpedemic? ArmEGGeddon? Maybe not, but right now, we are in the middle of the biggest egg-borne Salmonella outbreak in U.S. History. At least 1300 people are sick, a prom was ruined, the FDA is furiously telling us that everything is cool, eggs are being recalled left and right, egg prices are skyrocketing, and the whole nation is trembling at the feet of Salmonella. This whole fiasco makes me think about two things. The first is a little I-told-you-so sounding, but the reason this epidemic is so widespread is because the American food industry is dependent on a small number of huge factory farms that distribute food to the entire country. The infected eggs, it seems, came entirely from two farms in Iowa. Basically, this wouldn’t have happened, at least not as badly, if we got our eggs from local farms. I know we always talk about local farming at WOYP, because that’s what we’re all about, and it’s obnoxious for me to talk about how right I’ve been all along. But seriously, Internet, when two farms are sending eggs all over the country and some chickens in those farms get sick, those diseases get put on trucks and sent to grocery stores thousands of miles away, and we get this. And it makes it harder to track an epidemic when people are getting sick simultaneously on opposite sides of the country. Replace the small number of huge farms with a huge number of small ones, and if you do get Salmonella in some eggs, the epidemic will be small, and the source will be easy to trace.

Of course, it’s easy to say that a few huge farms are easier to keep safe and healthy than a vast number of small farms scattered across the country, and that would be an excellent point. Which brings me to my second thought about the egg recall: as linked above, the FDA does not think it is necessary to start vaccinating chickens against Salmonella. I get that it’s dangerous to over-medicate livestock (antibiotics in my milk! gross!) but chickens depend on farmers to keep them healthy, and getting your shots is part of staying healthy these days. Sure, I think factory farms and cruelty to animals cause most food problems, but this really never would have happened to such an alarming degree if we didn’t depend on huge farms and watched out for our chickens’ health. So, People of the Internet, it’s your job, as it always has been, to seek out local farmers for your eggs, and FDA, it’s your job, as it always has been, to regulate a food system that takes care of its chickens. Go forth!

Internet, check it out. Outlandish claims? Is there really a connection between school food and the overall climate of the school? I’m leaning toward believing this one. Maybe the results wouldn’t be so dramatic, but what we eat affects how we feel, and through that how we interact with each other in general. It really isn’t so weird to think that by eating better, a whole school worth of people could start acting more calm, even-tempered, and even more friendly towards each other. I always worry that food activists make organic food sound like a magical cure-all for health problems and social ills, but really, food is fundamental enough to effect every part of our lives.