This is urgent, Internet, so I’m not even going to try to devise a clever post. Straight copy-paste, people, Small Planet has the lowdown:
We thought you might like to see, and take action on, this urgent and exciting message from our friends at One Tray and the Community Food Security Coalition:
CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES NOW AND URGE THEM TO VOTE YES ON CHILD NUTRITION REAUTHORIZATION
If your Representative sits on the House Education and Labor Committee (click here to find out), we need your help!
Today, the House Committee on Education and Labor is marking up their Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill: H.R. 5504, the Improving Nutrition for America’s Children Act of 2010. H.R. 5504 contains significant improvements to Child Nutrition Programs including increases in program access, improvements to nutritional quality and program integrity,and $50 MILLION IN MANDATORY FUNDING FOR FARM TO SCHOOL PROGRAMS. Yes, $50 million!!!
Please make your call today to let your voice for healthy school lunch be heard. Your Members need to hear from you!
THE MESSAGE IS SIMPLE. Tell your Representative to act quickly in marking up the bill and moving it to the House floor for a full vote. Now is the time to improve access to food assistance programs and to enhance the nutrition quality of these programs for our nation’s children.
IT’S EASY. Call the number below, and ask to speak to the Legislative Aide listed. If they do not answer, leave a voice mail with your name, phone number, and the message to vote yes on H.R. 5504 and pass the Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill out of committee.
If kids can do it, so can you! Even if your Representative is not on the committee, get inspired by watching a video of kids lobbying Congress to pass a strong Child Nutrition bill this year.
Questions? Please contact the CFSC Policy Office: 202-543-8602
Thanks for pitching in,
Anna & Frances & the Small Planet Team
Internet, did you know that leafcutter ants are about the best farmers in the world? Or maybe termites are, or it could be ambrosia beetles, I’m not sure. Why am I telling you this? And why do I keep linking you to pictures of bugs? Because bugs are totally neat, and if you aren’t already fascinated by insect fungiculture, you need to get on that pronto. You see, Internet, while it’s very impressive to see the vast, sweeping plains of farm fields in the midwest, or terraced farms in China or Peru, humans aren’t aren’t the only game in town when it comes to farms, and, really, we have never been. The three types of bugs I mentioned above (there are many species of leafcutter ants, termites, and ambrosia beetles, not all of them fungiculturists) are examples of insects that completely blow human farming techniques out of the water. Check out this fine piece of internet journalism from the blog Civil Eats: an interview with the entomologist Mark Moffett. In it, Dr. Moffett talks about the leafcutter ants he saw on a recent trip to Ecuador. Most people who see leafcutter ants carrying bits of leaves back to their nests assume the ants just eat the plants. Not so. They use the leaves as mulch for fungus gardens, which they maintain underground within their nests. The fungus gardens are inside chambers, with each garden about the size of a human brain (so two fists together) and similarly round and squishy looking. Over the years, these ant colonies get huge, going 20 or 30 feet underground and housing thousands (!) of fungus gardens, which feed millions of ants. The fungi they grow are a special species, too, that has adapted so closely to being raised by the ants that it can’t survive in the wild, nor can the ants eat anything else. The ants carefully weed their gardens, and spread pesticides, special bacteria they grow in their bodies, to help keep the fungi heathy. Sounds a lot like humans, right?
We cultivate plant and animal species for food, care for them, over time they become more and more adapted to domestication, until we rely on each other, as species, to survive. There’s one big difference with leafcutter ants: the ants go to incredible lengths to care for the environment they live in. Since they eat only one plant, and it cannot live without their care, this attention to the environment as a whole has been evolving in leafcutters for 50 million years and is the biggest reason they thrive today. They weed very carefully, and any fungus that becomes diseased is taken away to waste chambers buried deep underground, and the original garden chamber sealed off. This is why they farm their fungi in so many separate chambers: if a blight were to spread throughout the whole colony, the ants would all die. The backup plans and failsafes in these colonies are incredible, as is the ants’ attention to detail in their colonies. What humans could learn from leafcutters is this: the difference between living from drought to bumper crop is in how much care you put into keeping the environment healthy. These ants have lived in underground colonies long enough, and with a stable enough cultivated food supply to dig 30 feet down and half the size of tennis court (27′x39′ for doubles), with some waste chambers (those deep underground ones where diseased fungi go, as well as all the colony’s waste) big enough for a human to fit in. Think about it, Internet, just think about how long it would take ants to build that kind of thing, and how many ants must live in there to keep it all running. These colonies are enormously complex and efficient societies, all living on a monoculture food source, and they make it all work because huge amounts of that efficiency, the engines of ant progress, if you will, are focused on maintaining a healthy environment for the colony. They do nothing farmers don’t do, but there are no oil spills, no food poisoning debacles, no blights. Not because they don’t have the resources to let environmental disasters happen, on an ant-scale, but these things happen through neglect. And leafcutters don’t neglect their environment.
A prime example of both insect agriculture and humans causing their own food problems are bees. As you may already be aware, Internet, bees pollinate flowers, which is the only way those flowers can reproduce. Bees are the sole pollinators of many, many plants, including over 100 commercial crops just in the U.S. Bees are also dying like crazy. Scientists aren’t quite sure why, either, but most theories point to human causes, from pesticides to cell phone radiation to climate change. This ain’t a conspiracy theory, folks, bees are just dying and nobody knows why. It’s mostly bee colonies kept humans at this point, and organic bee farms are still doing alright, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t time to panic, because it is absolutely time to panic. Without bees, humans would be left with rice and cereal grains to eat, and that’s really it. Everything else is either pollinated by bees, or eats something that is. People of the internet, bees are heading for extinction, it’s probably our fault, nobody really knows why, and if they die, we’re gonna starve. I hate to be so melodramatic, but Colony Collapse Disorder (the vague term for whatever it is that is killing large numbers of bees) is terrifying.
So please, Internet, let’s be like the leafcutter ants. Let’s put as much work into caring for the environment around our farms as we do growing food on them, maybe even more work. It’s simply a matter of realizing that we need a new set of goals, and we need to get used to doing a little more work here and there. There is absolutely no way around it.
Internet, please direct your attention to the following piece of hogwash, a glimpse of an ad industry not yet accustomed to subtlety: For those of you who can’t read the tiny print, the block text underneath the baby reads:
HOW SOON IS TOO SOON? Not soon enough. Laboratory tests over the last few years have proven that babies who start drinking soda during that early formative period have a much higher chance of gaining acceptance and “fitting in” during those awkward pre-teen and teen years. So, do yourself a favor. Do your child a favor. Start them on a strict regimen of soda and other sugary carbonated beverages right now, for a lifetime of guaranteed happiness. – The Soda Pop Board of America
Frankly, Internet, holy crap! That first line in bold really speaks to what I think is the worst part of the advertising industry: ads are not designed to answer our questions about a product, or to provide us with information useful in deciding whether or not to buy a product, ads choose questions that assume desire and preclude choice. In an ad clearly directed toward concerned parents trying to look out for their children’s health, the question “Is soda healthy for my child?” does not exist. Instead, the question is “Am I giving my child enough soda?” the answer, of course, is no.
This ad has everything we’re all familiar with in ads, perhaps a little more obvious: happy customers, a directive from the company (at the top), a prompt for the consumer (we are supposed to ask “how soon is too soon?”), false statements in tricky language that can’t really be traced (“laboratory tests”), outrageous claims that are too vague to be technically wrong (“a lifetime of guaranteed happiness”), it should all sound pretty familiar. Compare with this Gatorade commercial, where the product is presented as an integral part of playing sports, and the company is portrayed as having invented some kind of miracle elixir (it’s just sugar water, right? Green sugar water. Wikipedia was pretty vague on what the heck “electrolytes” are, and I’m far from a biochemist, but they seem to be abundant in, you guessed it, fruits and vegetables). Shake your head and frown, if you dare, at the demise of New York’s sadly quixotic soda tax, which is getting its cavity-free teeth kicked in by as slick and vicious an ad campaign by a very, very wealthy industry.
I digress, Internet, I don’t need to tell you that advertising is insidious, despicable, and manipulative, that it’s always been that way, and that it got that way on purpose. Here’s my point: branding is a part of our lives, and it is a huge part of every choice we make. When I was little, I was (thank God) not allowed to drink soda at the dinner table. I would sit there with my glass of milk, and I remember thinking it was a bit unfair that my dad could choose to have a beer with dinner. This was not because I didn’t like the milk, or wanted to party hard at 8 years old, I am almost entirely certain that it was because of branding. I saw my dad pour the bottle with the label on it, that looked like a glass soda bottle, into a glass, and he could have it at dinner. I wanted to be a grown up and drink a grown up drink with a brightly colored logo. I’m being completely serious, I was a brand-conscious kid from day one, and I’m certain that every kid in this country is too. The end of my story is that my parents took the hard line and told me that soda was unhealthy and I couldn’t have it for dinner, and they kept telling me that until I was old enough to understand it for myself, and at 22 years old I would rather have milk for dinner because it’s delicious. Happy ending. But I’m telling you, Internet, that when kids want sugary food and soda, it has almost nothing to do with the way the stuff tastes. There’s sugar addiction, and that’s it’s own kind of bad news, but the real story here is branding. What would childhood be like in a logo-free house, I wonder? What if the fridge of my childhood was full of plain glass bottles, big reusable ones, so the logos could never get in the house. It’s not so far-fetched, simply buy the stuff at the store, pour it into the blank bottle, and throw the logos out (recycle them and get your 5 cents, of course) I’ve heard of some places that will fill big glass jugs with milk or juice or beer or whatever you keep in your fridge (there should be more of those places). When the logo is gone, you have to call a food what it is. Without the bright red label and the icy-cool pictures on the vending machine, Coca-Cola isn’t Coke, it’s fizzy brown sugar water, and that’s sort of gross. The world is full of branding, and you’ll never escape it, you’ll never protect your kids from it completely, but there is something to be said for parents who eat food and not brands, and for kids who learn that being a grown up means making food decisions based on the actual food, not the exciting label, not the happy looking people in the ads, not the snappy product name, just the food.
P.S. The kid in the ad looks a little creepy. Mouth hanging open, eyes fixed on a point in space somewhere above and past his mother, mind a complete sugar-crash blank. Mom smiles at Jr. with an air of anxious non-comprehension, as if he were telling a joke she does not understand. Weird.
Hey there, Internet! It is a lovely day just outside the WOYP windows and I can’t think of anything substantive to blog about, yet I feel the need to share. The sun is shining, the plants are growing, the CSA is up and running. The CSA is the best part of the summer, Internet. I just made some lunch from the WOYP fridge, which is packed with incredibly fresh, green vegetables, and oh-muh-gawsh it smells so nice in there. The CSA is cool for two very good reasons: it brings wonderful fresh food (which is what summer is all about – seriously, Internet, I dare you to think of a single great summer memory in which there was not delicious fresh food) from the farm to the city, and it’s given us some totally excellent, totally unexpected recipes. Sometimes we get foods we’ve never heard of in our CSA shares, but it turns out that someone always seems to know what to do with them. We got a recipe for purslane potato salad! Wild! That’s pretty much all I had to say, Internet, that and playing in the dirt is scientifically good for you, so act accordingly. I’m going out into the sun now.
I’m talking about chickens, Internet, keeping ‘em, caring for ‘em, making ‘em part of our lives. Regard, if you will, this sad tale from Jill Richardson of La Vida Locavore (a top-notch blog about folks living the locavore lifestyle all over this great land, with loads of great stories and information useful to any locavore). The condensed version of the story is that Jill woke up one morning to an email about two chickens free to a good home, and of course she thought “Yippee! What on earth could be better than two chickens of my very own!” (I’m paraphrasing). The chickens had been found in the street by someone who was not up to caring for them, but wanted to see them taken care of, and Jill was just the woman for the job. Unfortunately, the plot thickens: chickens are illegal in Jill’s town, and her boyfriend, who is running for city council, does not want his ambitions to serve his community dashed by a potential chicken scandal (though he would love to keep chickens once they are legal).
Internet, I’m sure you’re as confused here as I am: what the heck is so wrong with keeping chickens in your backyard? I mean, I can understand a regulating how many chickens you can keep, and I would actually support laws regulating how much space you need per chicken, but a chicken ban? Exiling chickens? What gives? Well, something must give because it turns out that chickens are pretty highly regulated in these United States. And that totally sucks! Keeping chickens in your backyard is pretty easy and very excellent. Plus, they eat weeds, bugs, and maggots in your yard. Could it get any better? It does. Chickens that eat weeds and bugs lay healthier eggs, eggs that you can give to your neighbors for a healthier, happier neighborhood (stronger communities are a real, wonderful benefit of local food in any form, but neighborhood eggs are just about the best thing ever). And really, why not keep chickens in your backyard? True, roosters can be aggressive (confession: I was attacked by a rooster at a young age and I still don’t trust them) but really, you run the same risk having kids or a dog.
There’s more, Internet. Witness this blog post from Slow Food USA (warning: the video on the post is very sad, and not really kid-friendly). The post is a dispatch from the Department of Justice/USDA hearings in Normal, AL about competition in the poultry industry. The gist of the hearings is that big poultry companies, which run huge monopolies, in which individual farmers are basically serfs, are accused of threatening and intimidating farmers, and finally sending them into financial ruin. Those familiar with stories of depression-era tenant farmers and sharecroppers will find a similar story: chicken farmers are given non-negotiable contracts by companies that are the only game in town (contracts which are often replaced a few years on by new ones with worse terms) and end up forced to spend huge sums of money on farm “improvements” (some of which are real improvements, some are debatable). To spend that kind of money, many have to take out loans, put their houses up as collateral, and few ever make the money back. This cycle of ever-increasing input costs and diminishing returns could actually be disrupted, at least a little bit, with a few backyard chickens. The reason that chicken farmers are forced to work for these companies is that we are used to getting our food from huge, global production structures. There simply aren’t ways for farmers to sell chickens close to home without huge companies as middlemen (or, at least, there aren’t enough ways). But what if the model for chicken farming was a little more “backyard”? Farmers closer to their customers, raising fewer chickens, spending less on raising them, cutting out the terrifying corporate middle-man. It’s not so far-fetched, Internet. Hopefully, Jill’s husband isn’t the only city council candidate who wants to raise chickens, because we could use more of them in our backyards.
That’s all it takes, a simple chicken coop. It doesn’t even have to be painted to look like a barn either, though that’s pretty cute. And the whole thing looks like it’s 8-feet long, max. Doesn’t even need a big yard.
This picture isn’t real. It is totally possible for humans and chickens to live together in harmony in urban areas.
This puppy comes to you courtesy of Marion L. Bell, of the Metropolitan Hospital Center and the Go Green East Harlem Cookbook, edited by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, which is filled with recipes by East Harlem residents. I did not choose it because of the name, but I could have. Thankfully, it’s also delicious, so you’re welcome.
You’ll need:
Serves 6-8. Enjoy!
This morning, on my way to the WOYP clubhouse, I saw some orange juice ads. That isn’t so unusual, of course, and neither is the fact that the orange juice was advertising itself as pure, non-concentrated, unsweetened, organic goodness, that’s what orange juice generally advertises itself as. What was interesting was that this was only the latest in an serious trend towards green, sustainable, and organic themes that I can only assume is sweeping the advertising world. Internet, I’m actually conflicted about this trend.
On one hand, it is fairly obvious that many large companies – producers of orange juice, food, and anything else that can be made sustainably – have no intention of changing their manufacturing or distribution practices to reflect anything resembling a social or environmental conscience, and the ads are disingenuous, manipulative, and exploitative of many a well-intentioned consumer. On the other hand, ads appealing to conscientious consumers could represent the growing influence of environmental and social concerns over consumer trends. Perhaps this is the start of an exciting progression, and in a few years it will be impossible to sell anything that doesn’t come with some kind of promise of sustainability. It sounds unlikely, but why not be optimistic?
Well, because lots of smart people like Heather Rogers aren’t being optimistic for some very good reasons. Heather Rogers, who has a new book out, in which she decries what she calls “armchair environmentalism.” She’s justifiably annoyed with “green” products and ideas that at best hardly do any good, and at worst actually hurt the environment. For instance, the infinitely annoying “carbon offset” credits where you can pay someone to plant enough trees to balance out all the carbon you left in the atmosphere when you rode an airline or drove your car. The trees in question won’t absorb enough carbon for a good hundred years, if they aren’t cut down before that. And personally, I’m pretty sure carbon offsets are a lot like knocking the planet in the head, and then getting it an icepack. It doesn’t change the original offense, it just sort of makes us feel better. Heather Rogers’ point, in the interview I read, is that many of these “green” initiatives, like hybrid cars and food labeling, just help us ignore the larger problems cause by the way we live. Hybrid cars help us drive more and worry less, organic labels on food help us buy more and think less about what we buy.
But let’s go back, for a minute, to my optimistic take on organic themes in advertising. I think we are in the middle of a crucial time, when the current enthusiasm for conscientious consumption can either become a shallow passing fad, or grow into a new framework for how we conduct ourselves as consumers. What companies are doing with these ads is recognizing that people want to buy “green” products, figuring out how to frame their existing products as “green,” and courting consumers with ads that present those products as “green.” What we, as consumers, must do, is seize this moment when companies are looking at sustainable values and movements, and looking for how we decide if products fit these values. If we tell them that we decide based on what their ads say, or based on whether or not their ads “seem trustworthy” (which usually means getting actors and models for the ads, and ceos for the companies, that look and act like the target market) or whether or not the product has an “Organic” label of some kind stamped on it, (another of Heather Rogers’ points: many of the organizations that certify products with those labels aren’t exactly legit, and anyway a lot of those labels were just put there by the manufacturer and don’t mean anything) if we judge products based on advertising, spokespeople that look honest, or dubious labeling, what looks like a movement now will be a passe trend before you can say “focus group.” HOWEVER, if we do our homework and judge the products we buy based on where they come from, how they’re made, and who makes them (and I mean actually look that information up and don’t buy anything unless you’re certain you know it’s whole story down to every detail) I have faith that companies will realize that consumer attitudes are changing, and that conscientious products are the only ones people want to buy.
Before I end this post, I want to mention, briefly, this bit of news: Santa Clara County, CA, supervisors have passed a law prohibiting restaurants from selling meals that contain toys for kids if those meals do not meet minimum nutrition requirements. This law sends an important message to food producers: “if you want to sell food with toys in order to lure kids, that’s fine, but we expect you to uphold a standard of nutrition for those kids, and we are going to actually test your food to make sure you do so.” Similar nutrition laws have already passed here in New York and elsewhere, but point that these laws make, and that we can all help make by carefully choosing what we buy (vote with your dollar, to appropriate a free market mantra), is that we will judge products not on their advertised qualities, but on the factual details of their origin.
Earth Day is fast approaching, Internet. In fact, it’s tomorrow. In the holiday spirit, check out this article on supermarkets and what they throw away. It turns out that when food reaches its “sell by” date, supermarkets tend to just throw it out. That means a single store can throw out tons of food (literally tons) per year. However, some community-minded stores have started programs in which the expired food (which will probably be safe to eat for a few days at least after the sell by date) is donated to food banks and homeless shelters. Not only does this cut down on waste, but donations of perishable food are incredibly valuable for these organizations, which get a lot of non-perishables, like canned foods, but really lack fruits, vegetables, and meats. The article lists five major supermarket chains and details their food disposal policies.
I think articles like this are really cool. First, I totally hadn’t thought of donating expired food that is still perfectly edible, and I just like that idea. Second, I think lists like these comparing supermarkets can potentially be a big help in changing food systems. Part of what WOYP is trying to accomplish is to show people the ways that local, organic food systems can benefit communities. If people start thinking about the larger community when they choose where to buy groceries, big supermarkets will take local and organic ideas into account when they decide how to run their stores. There aren’t laws requiring extra food to be donated to those who need it instead of thrown away, but if people look at this article and keep it in mind when they shop at one supermarket instead of another, even big companies like Wal-Mart might have to wake up and realize that people expect supermarkets to be responsible within their communities.
Hey, New Yorkers of the Internet, have you heard about the New Amsterdam Market? It’s a monthly market, with all kinds of vendors (seriously all kinds, from meat and produce to readymade soups and sandwiches, bread, seaweed, anything edible) that’s trying to be a permanent one. New York used to have a few year-round markets like that one, and the Fulton Fish Market is one of the surviving ones, and such markets still exist all over the world, but New York is in dire need of a year-round all-kinds-of-food public market. If you’ve ever been to a big public market, you probably know they’re awesome. Huge, often maze-like places filled with stalls and stalls of vendors, with delicious food to take home and cook with, or eat right there, and lots of people yelling at you to buy something awesome. It’s kind of like a farmers’ market that is there every day, but with much more stuff for sale (wholesale as well as resale, and cooked food as well as ingredients). They’re meant to be places you spend a few hours at, or maybe half a day, and you can never see the whole thing. Markets like these draw vendors selling food you can’t get anywhere else, as well as stall for your favorite restaurants and farms. I’m getting really excited here, but seriously, I love the idea of a huge public market in New York City, pulling the best of the city’s food and more from miles around into one overwhelmingly crowded mass of delicious food. It would be worth it for the smell of walking through it alone. The point of this post is that City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is on the case, pushing for the New Amsterdam Market to be a 365-day institution in this great city. Go to the market’s website, donate a few dollars, tell your friends, and get excited.
Our pal Marie sent us an email yesterday asking about places that deliver fresh fruit. Marie works at a library, and there are cookies delivered every day, but every once in a while, they get fruit instead of cookies and everyone seems much happier. So, Marie asked us, are there places that deliver fresh fruit right to your door every day? There totally are! Fruit Guys is a San Francisco-based company that delivers to homes, offices, and schools across this great nation. That’s great and all, but it seems a little weird that there aren’t smaller local fruit delivery services all over the place that take food from local farms to local people every day (or week). Somebody should totally start that business (hint hint).
Which brings me to my next rant. One of the things that really bugs me about our crappy food system is the idea of buying in bulk. It’s fine for things like grains, or dried fruit that will keep for a while, but as a rule, we expect to buy food as infrequently as possible, and to stock up on food when we do. So we get food with lots of preservatives to make that possible. Really, the whole idea doesn’t make much sense. I really like the idea of having fresh food delivered daily, especially in big cities. I think milkmen are pretty cool. You get a small amount of milk every day or every couple of days, you drink it before it goes bad, it works out. Food goes bad, that’s just what it does, and by trying to buy things like fruit and vegetables in bulk, we’re pretty much asking to get our food saturated with preservatives. Fruit delivery sounds like an excellent idea to me (or daily trips to the grocery store if you prefer) I think offices and schools could seriously use a regular supply of fresh fruit straight from the farm. And I think we should readjust our eating and buying habits to stop trying to stock up on fruits and vegetables. Fruit only stays fresh for so long, no matter what the supermarket would like you to think, so it makes perfect sense to have a little but of fruit delivered every day or every few days (or to go out and buy it) eat it before it goes bad, and get more. That’s the schedule the fruit works on, so why not adjust to it?
let’s make this happen.
