Internet, check this article out. Scary graphic, right? But it got me thinking. What this means, essentially, is that the way we eat is determined by a larger system of food production, which limits our choices as consumers. I think most people have known this for a long time, but bear with me. I think we pretty much asked for the food system we suffer from today. Not that we deserved it, but we voted with our dollars, with what we payed attention to and what we ignored, we gave our tacit approval (intentionally or not) to this food system, and now we live with it. What I think that means, is that it is possible to create a healthy, sustainable food system in the not-so distant future that will be every bit the unstoppable corporate leviathan that our current one is. People didn’t always eat the way they do now, and processed food was never actually forced down anyone’s throat (figuratively speaking). What happened was that these foods were invented, or a few early ones were, and made cheaply available because of the production cost, and people bought them. Then, as people began making money off processed food, the idea that people valued low cost and availability over anything else in food, processed food grew in popularity. As the industry grew, it built manufacturing infrastructure, advertising infrastructure, and lobbying infrastructure to go with it, which became entrenched and encouraged more growth in the industry until things reached the food world of today. To me, that is a story of a disastrous and harmful system built around a society that kept encouraging it, not a story of conspiracy or devious mustache twiddling on the part of food companies. What needs to happen is that we need to be extremely clear about the change in the food industry, and that will only happen with slow, deliberate cultural change. We ended up with all this terrible food because we bought it without knowing what it would do to us, and to create a new food system that is not only healthier and more sustainable, but won’t end up completely backfiring on us, we need to be better consumers. Every time we buy food or don’t buy food, that sends a message to food producers. As a country, we are still sending the message that we like our food cheap, heavily processed, and tremendously unhealthy, and that is exactly what we’re getting.

Attention, Internet People of New York City! There will be a bake-in to protest Chancellor Regulation A-812 at City Hall on Thursday, March 18th, from 4-6pm.

As you may or may not know, A-812 bans homebaked goods from bakesales at NYC public schools, while allowing store-bought junk foods. If that makes you hopping mad, head down to city hall on the 18th. There will be two tables, one with homemade treats with a list of ingredients, and one with a heap of junk food. To arms, New York! Bake for freedom!

Just hours ago, the Center for New York City Affairs hosted “School Food Matters: Hunger, Obesity and the Reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act,” a great panel discussion on the state of school food in New York City. Especially as this very week, Congress is holding the first hearings on the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act. This is a huge opportunity for school food reform, as the Child Nutrition Act dictates how schools approach the goal of feeding kids. The old act (from 2004) expired last fall, and the current hearings in congress will look at whether or not the school food system is working, and how we can make it better. There are petitions all over the internet, and sites that tell you how to contact your legislators, to let congress know how badly school lunch needs to be improved. This is a huge deal, Internet.

Anyway, the Center for New York City Affairs put together this great event just this morning, with a panel discussion featuring some big names in education and food from NYC and elsewhere. The topic of conversation was how to ask congress for what we want, and how to convince congress that a strong Child Nutrition Act is vital to the future of the country, and you can be sure WOYP was there taking notes on the whole thing.

The panel consisted of Kevin Concannon, the undersecretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services in the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Eric Goldstein, the chief executive officer for the New York City Department of Education, Office of Nutrition and Education (he was in What’s On Your Plate?); Jan Poppendieck, professor of sociology at Hunter College (City University of New York) and author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America; Jonathan Stein, general counsel for Community Legal Services (CSL) of Philadelphia; Jim Weill, the president of the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC); and Fred Mogul, the healthcare and medicine reporter for WNYC Public Radio, who acted as moderator.

The conference covered a huge range of issues, so our plan is to post in-depth about a few of them in the coming days. If anyone was actually at the conference, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Once we start posting our takes on the issues discussed this morning, we hope that people will respond with their own comments, and the blog can turn into a continuation of the discussion at the conference.

New York Times readers shoot down a scary idea.

Food-miles reevaluated.

Together, we’d all make a great cookbook.

The American Beverage Association makes excuses (remember, Internet, being less bad isn’t the same thing as not being bad at all, which is still different from being good)

Okay, before you read any further, Internet, I want you to get a picture in your head of what school lunches looked like through the ages. Remember that the National School Lunch program started in 1946, but some schools served lunch much earlier. Okay, got the picture in your head? Check this out. It’s a girl eating a school lunch in 1936, during the worst of the depression, and it looks like she’s got some soup, an apple, a tall bottle of milk, and maybe a sandwich in that little package on her left. Unless my eyes deceive me, that’s a simple, healthy lunch made from fresh, inexpensive, (probably) locally sourced ingredients. Were you expecting some ghastly gruel-sludge? Perhaps a hamburger where the meat is dry and the bun is inexplicably soggy? That’s what I thought I’d see. How did we get where we are today? That little girl’s lunch from the depression seems like the simplest, most effective solution to feeding kids at school. What happened here?

Hey, Internet! Check out this cool contest. Make a healthy and delicious lunch to serve at school cafeterias, yours could be the winner! The basic requirements are that the lunches be well-balanced, nutritious and tasty, and that they cost $5 or less. Really, all lunches should meet those requirements.

Internet, soon there could be an organic garden at New York City Hall. Yes, I’m serious. A vegetable garden right in front of City Hall in the middle of the grimy, smoky, concrete hive of New York City. In the summer, when I put a fan in my window, it takes about a day for a layer of black soot to form on the fan blades, just from the New York City air. And I live in the suburbs. I knew New Yorkers were getting interested in urban farming, rooftop gardens, keeping chickens in their tiny back-lots. This movie is a great example of that movement. But could City Hall really plant a vegetable garden? It seems contrary to the city itself, but it could really happen. Not yet, of course, it’s just a petition right now. Daniel Bowman Simon, the guy behind the petition to the white house that had a hand in making the white house vegetable garden a reality, is gathering signatures to send to mayor Michael Bloomberg in the hope that the mayor will give the city an official garden, right on City Hall property. a few other big cities across the country have city hall gardens now, and the idea isn’t so far-fetched for New York either. Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer (as featured in What’s On Your Plate?) has just released “FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System,” a major survey of New Yorkers’ food access as well as an analysis and set of suggestions for the future of New York’s food systems. The Mayor himself has made food legislation into a major campaign, seeking bans for some of the major culprits of obesity and poor health in the city (like salt and trans-fats). Believe it or not, it looks like New York City is actually ready to embrace better, more sustainable foods, and an organic garden in front of City Hall could be an important symbolic element in the city’s new attitude toward the health of its citizens.

I just watched television’s Jamie Oliver give a TED talk (TED talks, by the way, are always worth watching) and it left me with some thoughts about food education. Mr. Oliver gave a good talk (it’s interesting to see a tv star stumbling over his words a little when he speaks about something he’s really passionate about) and my favorite thing he kept coming back to was how we learn about food. Jamie Oliver recently made a tv show where he went to a small town in West Virginia with a serious obesity problem, and tried to do something about it. The families he talked to had terrible food habits, and he talked about how we learn those habits, how some kids are never exposed to cooking at home, and therefore never teach their kids to cook, and new generations are essentially cut off from any knowledge about food. During his talk, Jamie Oliver shows a few pictures and videos of people he met, and the video of him talking to a mother, surrounded by the piles of pizza and chili dogs her family eats is particularly chilling. But it occurs to me that Mr. Oliver chose, as he was probably right to do, the worst examples of America’s obesity epidemic. I’m guessing that most people who read this blog don’t eat fast food every day, but it’s still important to recognize that even if you’re better off than the people Jamie Oliver shows us, you still live in and are affected by America’s food culture. We can all learn more about food, and we can all teach more about food. The culture that has caused this obesity epidemic is one in which we all separately accept food from the same sources. We go to supermarkets and restaurants and vending machines and bodegas and we trust them. We believe that if we buy a package labeled “lettuce” we are holding lettuce, with nothing extra and nothing missing. We watch cooking shows (like Jamie Oliver’s) and assume that when they tell us how to make a meal, there’s no reason to cook otherwise. The truth is that food knowledge is communal: we have much more to learn from each other about the food we eat than we think.

Virtually, I mean. Though actually sharing your food with people is a fun and exciting thing to do at lunchtime, but I’m talking about this great post from the blog Fed Up. The post is about a flickr group, where you can post photos related to school lunches. Take a picture of the great lunch you had today, or the terrible one, or the one you just made to feed a whole cafeteria, or the cafeteria itself, or whatever you please. Just remember to get permission from any person who is in the picture. It’s a great way to learn more about what everybody is eating for lunch across this great internet of ours, and to talk with each other about school lunch in the U.S.A.

Here at What’s On Your Plate?, we’re happy to field questions from folks interested in finding out more about issues raised in the film. Recently, Valerie from Miami, FL wrote to us:

I’m the Program Coordinator for an Environmental Center in Miami, FL. We’re having a “You Are What You Eat,” theme at our Center to teach families around the community about eating sustainably. I am creating an exhibit using a large globe that will show families where the ingredients from popular foods that they consume come from. Families will find where the ingredients from their pizza, for instance, come from and how far those foods travel to make it to Miami, FL. This information will translate into energy consumption and how many homes, schools, TVs (or whatever) could be powered if those ingredients were purchased locally. Problem is, I can’t find these statics anywhere! Can anyone point me in the right direction? I really think concrete numbers will drive this point home, and I’m hoping an organization such as yours has the answers. Please help! Thanks so much!

Nate and Mary got around to scouring the internet this afternoon to try and find some answers about how to go about measuring their carbon footprint in the food they eat. Here is what they found:

Mary says:
I decided to profile Brighter Planet.com’s Footprint calculator. There’s a ton of information on their methodology page, and their calculator is really nice and makes a great stab at being comprehensive about your residence, travel and food. Since Valerie asks about food, I’ll just say that this section is made to create a profile for a person’s overall footprint. Instead of asking questions about the specific food you eat, (pizza) instead it asks you to average how much of what types of food (beef, poultry, vegetable, etc.) you eat in a diet profile. It creates calculations that are further outlined here. There’s a lot of concentration on American habits, but rating my consumption based on averaging a population made it hard to feel accurate. Am I eating more than an average amount of fish per day? Less than the average sugar/fats? Hard to know without breaking down an actual profile of the meals I eat regularly. There is another metric which gets closer to getting a more accurate foodprint: what is the percentage of food that you consume that is organic versus standard. Organic generally have a smaller footprint as they are produced without harmful pesticides, and other nasty-to-the-environment practices. There isn’t a metric within the calculator to measure how much locally produced food you consume, but there is an “action” that can help improve your overall score.

Benefits include that you can have multiple diet profiles and apply them to different times during the year. This means that you can potentially watch your footprint change over time. There is a place to checkout and pay money to offset your footprint, although we prefer making lifestyle changes to writing checks. You can also add actions to your footprint which in some cases, reduced the overall carbon profile. I tried adding using sustainable ornaments and set my schedule to repeat once a year. I like this way to affect your numbers by taking actions.

What I’d like to see is a calculator that asks me what I had for lunch today. I could then say “potato” and detail that I added butter or salt or vegetables. This would help me know about each component of the food I’m eating which helps in the overall examination. Which leads me to say: The calculator IS really good at being comprehensive about your life- I’ve never had a calculator ask me how much kerosene I use, or how many miles I fly on what aircraft. I think overall, Brighter Planet makes great leaps towards making a great calculator, but lacks the right metrics to help find out how far our food is traveling/how much of a carbon footprint is on our plates. We need something more precise to us.

Nate says:
Unfortunately, getting accurate information on where your food comes from can be a little tough. Most of the bigger companies are a little reluctant to share that kind of information with their customers. I remember calling one company and asking where my milk came from, and they said the cows were “local to my area.” I asked how they knew where I was calling from, and they put me on hold. It isn’t always that the company is trying to hide something from you, more like most companies aren’t used to the idea that people would want to know where their food comes from, so finding things out requires some patience. Strategies range from endless call-transfer loops, to indecipherable laboratory chemist/tax attorney jargon pdf’s, to simply claiming “proprietary information.” I’d suggest doing things the most straightforward and simple way: go to the grocery stores and restaurants and ask where they get their food, then follow the trail right back to the farm. You can do this on the phone, but actually showing up really shows people you’re serious. If you want generalized-type statistics about, say, where the average pizza ingredients come from, I’d actually try googling each ingredient and finding out where they tend to come from.

Wikipedia tells me that most of the world’s tomatoes come from China. Wikipedia isn’t exactly unimpeachable, but it’s a start. If you’re feeling very adventurous, try wading through the corporate websites of some of the major food distributors (I’ve been trying Cargill for the past 20 minutes: nothing so far), though they may not be forthcoming. The thing to remember is that information about where food comes from is most often highly politicized. The big point is that to find out how far your food travels, and how much energy it uses, you’ll need to do some pretty heavy research, and you may run up against some dead ends. But it is completely worth it to try and find out. The more we know about how our food connects us (and disconnects us) with the world, the better perspective we gain on the world around us.

After scratching around today, we’d like to open up to our readers. If there are any great ideas out there internet, we’d like to hear about them in the comments. Let’s brainstorm down in the feedback!