Then check out School Lunch Talk, a blog that focuses on news in school food from the United States and around the world. Written by Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services for the Berkeley United School District, and Deborah Lehmann, a writer and scholar, School Lunch Talk covers everything from what’s being served in European and Japanese schools, to the continuous representation of fast food and processed items in our schools.

Thanks Nina for posting the trailor of Food, Inc. last month and for folk’s comments.

I recently had the fortune to join a group of community members from Boston’s Moishe/Kavod House Food Justice Campaign for a screening of the film. Here’s my review of the film–the good, the bad, and the ugly:

• I was first struck that the film would make an excellent education tool for students in grades 5-12 and beyond. Robert Kenner divides the film into chapters that do a nice job framing and connecting the dots on the key industries in our current food system–livestock issues, genetically modified organisms (GMO), the hidden costs of food and the ubiquity of corn. Showing this in health, science, political science or other classes would be a great way to provide students with a primer on where food comes from as well as a powerful, if at times graphic, illustration of what’s wrong with it.

• It would also be a productive tool for anyone that uses the popular education model. A friend of mine commented that this is the first time he’s seen a publication connect the dots between the core “issues” of big agriculture, big oil, big pharmaceuticals and big genetics–this connecting of dots goes a long way towards reshaping the way people think about the food issue from one in isolation to one that is more about reshaping a society that currently relies on unhealthfulness, fossil-fuel energy, and large corporate dominance to maintain its wealth.

• Gary Hirschberg (see Lisa Fine’s great interview), a native New Englander who sees his Judaism as more about politics than faith, plays a hybrid businessman/radical in the film. At once the founder of the radical New Alchemy Institute at Hampshire College and now a full-fledged supporter of the organic-ization of Wal-Mart, Hirschberg supports the sales of brands such as Stoneyfield, Kashi and Odwalla to corporations such as Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, Pepsi and others to take advantage of economies of scale. I appreciate Hirschberg’s role in the film, and see the integration sustainable foods into the industry as a critical step. However, I hoped for more insight into what I/we can do than his affirmation of Marion Nestle’s cliche “vote with your fork.” For instance, what would it take to transition other companies to Stoneyfield’s economically and ecologically successful business model?

• While I’ve been involved in sustainability work for years, I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma or Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. Food Inc. was essentially a combination of Pollan and Schlosser’s arguments in a different media, and while I haven’t read either work, I learned next to nothing about the issues themselves. The only new issue for me was on the blacklisting of seed cleaners, farmers, and others resisting the pressure to convert to large-scale GMO food production. As Jenna Levy (Adamah ’04) pointed out, it’s amazing that blacklisting hasn’t made it into the public sphere yet because it attacks a fundamental American right to choose our livelihood. The rest of the film felt circa 2006 (a result of Kenner’s six  years developing the film?). This doesn’t mean that other issues aren’t new to folks, but that the branding of the film itself may alienate people who are less aware of our problematic food system.

• The film, playing predominantly at independent theaters in major metropolitan areas, isn’t particularly appealing to the mainstream American. The documentary, who’s cover is of a steer with a life-sized bar code, describes itself as lifting “the veil on our nation’s food industry, exposing the highly mechanized underbelly that has been hidden from the American consumer with the consent of our government’s regulatory agencies, USDA and FDA.” If you don’t already have a critical lens around corporate America and our food system, I can’t imagine that you would voluntarily pay $10 to see the film. Perhaps a new format will increase access to the issues, but I’m unclear if these numbers will be statistically significant.

• What most disappointed me was that Kenner and many interviewees identified “vote with your fork” as the single most powerful act to take. Although the film connected the dots across diverse issues, it neglected to address the serious economic and social disparities created by our food system–the regular immigration raids that tear apart families, the 1 in 2 chance of U.S. minority children born after 2000 getting type II diabetes (barely improved at 1 in 3 for the general populace), the aging farmers forced out of their livelihood and without the financial or social capital to transition to other careers, and others. Many people have begun to identify powerful solutions to address these disparities–from Shira and Yuval Potash’s film Food Stamped, to the inordinate press about the mistreatment of workers by  Jewish leaders at Agriprocessors, to the many Boston-area synagogues like Nehar Shalom that are leveraging their buying power to establish community CSA’s. Food Inc. could have at least touched on these disparities and provided more insightful action items. It is true that education is often a necessary first step to developing a critical consciousness.

• But the film didn’t forget to address the issue of “what next”–it suggests a “what next” that is eerily similar to the immigration raids at corporate food production facilities: don’t address the root cause, punish the individual. Popularized by the “Reagan Revolution,” this stance has us dangerously avoid the fundamental question of why our food system is out of balance. In many ways, the Jewish tradition provides an antidote for us: communal responsibility. What happens when an entire community joins together to get congregation to source local produce, eat humanely raised chicken and avoid all beef? When, instead of a single mother advocating for “Kevin’s Bill” for food safety, this same woman organizes victims’ families and allies across the country to pass this same bill? Organizing our communities around issues that are important to us help us to fulfill this Jewish responsibility.

Overall the film was a mixed bag but has its place–a great educational tool for addressing and connecting the diverse problems with the food system, while also leaving a lot be desired in terms of new content and powerful action steps.

But I’m just one person. What do YOU think?

1. Decide for yourself and organize a group screening in your area. Many cities such as Boston are even offering free screenings.
2. Share your thoughts on the film: What did you find most powerful? Least compelling? What place does this film have in a larger effort to mainstream this movement? Are you/how are you going to change your actions after seeing the film?
3. And most importantly, share what your community is doing. How has your community organized around the issue? What motivates people to get involved? Learn about my community’s Food Justice Campaign.
   

Eat The View‘s white house garden broke ground a couple of weeks back, and it’s by no means the only government lawn to go over to edibles. The City Hall in Baltimore, Maryland will give over everything but the tulips to a wide variety of vegetables, including two plots meant to demonstrate backyard growing to feed a family of four. Volunteers will hang around the gardens at lunch time to answer questions about gardening and the chef at a nearby soup kitchen is ecstatic at the prospect of thousands of dollars worth of produce in her kitchen from City Hall’s dirt.

Baltimore insists that it isn’t copying the fed. The article linked above quotes the city’s Mayor Dixon saying, “This was being planned before the White House…We are not copying!” But others are unabashedly hopping on the demonstration garden bandwagon. Among the confirmed government gardens are Sacramento’s, Flint, Michigan’s, Kingston, New York’s, Montpelier, Vermont’s and Annapolis, Maryland’s.  Georgians have a petition going to get their first lady to plant a garden. Pressing their vegetable advantage, chicken-raising advocates are trying to get the Obamas to throw some heritage breeds in with the herbs and lettuces. Take a look at this informative, and yet not terribly politic letter to the Obamas on where to get the goods for heritage Chicken-husbandry.

By far the most hilarious garden-related letter to the Obamas is this one, from the Mid America CropLife Association, posted on La Vida Locavore. I’ll quote a little taste for you, just to let you know what delights of disingenuousness  await:

Farmers and ranchers are the first environmentalists, maintaining and improving the soil and natural resources to pass onto future generations. Technology allows for farmers to meet the increasing demand for food and fiber in a sustainable manner.

The rhetoric of this letter is way below the mark of our executive branch. It’s rife with clear attempts to coopt words like “sustainable,” “local” (later in the letter) and “natural resources” and to fake causal relationships between two unrelated ideas by putting them next to each other in a paragraph (as above). It’s fun to poke at an easy target like this one, where the ideas and language would be pitiable, if authors Bonnie McCarvel and Janet Braun didn’t have lobbyists,  subsidies and plenty PR to make up for their dirth of reason. Ah well, as one commenter on La Vida Locavore pointed out,

Maybe there could be nothing better than allowing big ag to set up a “concept” garden on the White House lawn… a bunch of dirt stripped down with dust flying everywhere as huge machinery moves in to pump a bunch of fertilizer in…row after row of soy beans or corn …clouds of pesticides gassing the lawn and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing downwind; Mansanto “enforcers” standing around the edges so no one can steal the seeds, then ripping everything out so nothing can be planted again.

I’m game. You’d have to go big to get the point across though. As a city kid turned grower, I can vouch that to the untrained eye, a thousand acres of soy planted into black plastic is just as rural-looking and delightful as a twenty-acre mixed production sustainable CSA.

So we’re in a frenzy of municiple gardening all up and down the coasts, with prospects for the middle and the south as well. It’s exciting, but there are a couple of things nagging at me about this municiple garden.

For one thing, has anyone noticed some disturbing gendering of this whole victory garden thing? The garden on the white house lawn has quickly gone from being “the people’s garden” to being something like the hobby plot of the first lady, with, it seems to me, an emphasis on the lady. The Georgia petition, while well thought out and expressed, in general, is also both specifically addressed to the first lady and filled with rhetoric about “our children”. Now I know that whenever you’re talking about politics, it’s customary to mention “our children,” but personally, I think a real challenge in the food movement, in trying to become mainstream, is to talk about growing, cooking and thinking about food without tying the whole conversation down to ideas about identity, especially gender, and domesticity. I like Mayor Sheila Dixon of Baltimore’s take on things, she’s not making the city hall garden the responsibility of her First Man, she’s making it the responsibility of her professional gardener.

It’s interesting, because when it comes to valuing work, women, farm workers and farmers are all often in the same boat. All are expected to do time-consuming work that is essential for the successful every day life of each of America’s inhabitants, at low or no wages and with little or no protection under labor laws (which reminds me, farm laborer’s rights and domestic worker’s rights are both under consideration in the NYS legislature right now.) Talking about these gardens as belonging to the first ladies, who don’t have much time to actually grow them because they are busy in the public sphere, is buying in to some weird, gendered idea that gardens belong to girls, when the people advocating for, supporting and working in those municiple gardens are surely representative of a way broader demographic.

In the end, I think that placing gardens in the world of idealized families where mom doesn’t work all day just like dad and junior doesn’t jones for red dye number five and corn syrup in all its many forms,  is asking to be relegated to the dustbin of impracticable ideas.

And gardening is practicable, as our Jew and the Carrot readers well know. Especially in economic depressions, gardens get attention. In the Great Depression, federally subsidized scientists plotted the soil quality of virtually every inch of the USA. That survey is still in heavy use. Wouldn’t it be great if we had numbers on the amount of land in production in back yards and community gardens? If people knew their neighbors were doing it, mightn’t that be just as powersul as knowing Mayor Dixon or the White House gardener is? At the moment, several organizations are trying to create surveys of all home and community gardens. The Garden Registry in San Francisco is a local one in CA, while the ACGA is trying to put together a database of all community gardens in the country. You can look for one or add yours here.

Rabbi Sinclair wrote an article on his own blog reflecting on the turkey schechting and describing the slaughter in careful detail. It reminds me of David Rendsberg’s post on the goat schechting last year, in that it’s an excellent writer attempting to bring some of the graphic detail of a slaughter to readers, widening the circle of the experience and communicating with clarity the messiness and import of an action that we here in the food writing world can sometimes seem to get a little misty-eyed about. You can read Rabbi Sinclair’s post on the schechting here, and if you want more (as we bet you will) you can read his D’var Torah on parshah Vayechi, where he discusses the agricultural birthright that Jacob gave to his sons and what it means to us now.

As I already wrote, Christmas Day is an opportunity for Jews and other non-Christians to come together in creative ways.  So, my friend Nadya and I braved gusty winds, dodged tumbleweeds, weathered snow flurries as we climbed over mountain passes and held our noses as we passed CAFOs.  Why would two nice Jewish girls endure such challenges?  To get to the Hazon conference in Pacific Grove, California.  Hazon (vision in Hebrew) is an organization devoted to promoting sustainable agriculture and environmentalism within the framework of Judaism.

So, while Nadya and I were actually pretty shielded from nature’s elements in the comfort of my car, there were some ironic moments on the way to this food conference.  For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to be within range of a CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation), I recommend it because the stench and images are profound.  It really gives you a moment to think about our disconnect from our food sources that has enabled us to live in a society that supports and allows for the industrialization of one of our most precious resources and significant daily ritual. What are the consequences of our industrialized system of bringing food to our tables every day?

The second hair-raising moment was passing Tanimura and Antel and other farms industrial giants in Steinbeck country (aka Salinas Valley, America’s salad bowl).  These corporate farms entice you from your passing car with three-story high wooden cut outs of bent-over smiling white farm workers dressed in their make-shift sun protection garb.  Unless these farm workers are members of the United Farm Workers, these wooden cut outs are more appropriate at a Tanimura and Antel puppet show.

I’m already incredibly inspired by the people I’ve met at Hazon and their efforts to change our food system.  The landscapes I passed on my trip here provide inspiration for what we need to move from. Hazon is already helping to implement their visions for what we can and need to move towards.

Well folks, the Associated Press has reported that the blog, was in fact created by none other than the son of Agriprocessors’ CEO Sholom Rubashkin, Getzel Rubashkin. And according to a professor of government at Harvard, this type of fake-grassroots known as “astroturfing” is common and generally accomplishes its goal.

“There’s not a big penalty associated with doing this and being caught,” said the professor, Herman B. Leonard. “There’s a potentially substantial benefit from being able to get out there with something that seems like a well-informed and active and energetic view that does not seem to be self-interested. So if you get away with it, it’s a plus. If you don’t, they say, ‘Well, it’s not too surprising.’”

Rubashkin claims that at the time, it did not occur to him that he ought to present his name on the blog in conjunction with the views espoused, and he did not intentionally leave off his identification in order to be deceptive. We’ll believe that when we also have all the accurate information about the meat coming out of the plant and the way it’s produced.

Note to self: Be sure to investigate the last names associated with all so-called front group blogs. Maybe it will be clear that they are barely even front groups after all.

A long tradition of Jewish thinkers has emphasised the importance of protecting the natural environment, but Jewish voices have failed to reach a consensus since GM food hit the shops in 1996. . .

As Jonathan Sacks puts it, God and man are “partners in the work of creation”. The ancient covenant is mirrored in the modern concept of sustainability which seeks to “meet the needs of the present [generation] without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Or, in biblical terms, the environment must be preserved l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation.

While the facets of GM technology that may lead to environmental degradation may place it generally at opposition with Jewish emphasis on preserving the earth, and potentially undiscovered negative health consequences would contradict the importance of saving a life, it seems like there is little that Judaism has to say directly about GMOs. Clearly this is because they are the epitome of modern technology which could not have been imagined back in the biblical/talmudic day.

I don’t agree with Green’s use of the prohibitions: “You shall not let your cattle mate with a diverse kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed” (Leviticus 19:19) and “You shall not sow your vineyard with two kinds of seed” (Deuteronomy 22: 9-11) because some of the best sustainable and organic farming practices traditionally (and scientifically) rely upon planting complementary (and very different) crops together, to promote healthy soil and to eliminate the need for fertilizer through nitrogen-fixing crops. Any solid argument against GM foods generally considers its emphasis on monocropping, tendency towards monoculture and subsequent future harm to the environment and to the security of the food supply. Since these arguments apply to any monocropping in general, the use of these biblical prohibitions does not seem like a logical defense against further use of GMOs, since it would also eliminate all healthy farming practices.

That said, it is worth continuing to think about the relationship between morality, religion and new biotechnology, and any potential religious precedent for the precautionary principle, a mechanism used to guide policy in the EU and other parts of the world, which has the potential to preserve morality and prioritize social welfare over profits if it is used effectively.

Props to Green for his previous references to Jcarrot about organic (and therefore GM-free) matza.

Next week, Eat Local Challenge and the Locavores are sponsoring a Penny-Wise Eat Local Challenge, from April 23 to 29. Many people are under the impression that eating local (like organic), requires a large food budget. The point of the Penny-Wise challenge is to eat local, as defined by a 100-mile radius, on what some consider a small budget.

The Penny-Wise challenge uses numbers from the Department of Labor’s Consumer Expenditures, which allots $68/week for a one-person household or $144/week for a household of 2+ with 2 wage earners.

Having just attended a seminar on the USDA Thrifty Food Plan last week, which is the basis of the monthly food stamp allotment, I think these numbers are a bit high for an attempt at being “penny-wise.” In a similar experiment, Half Changed World tried a month of sticking to the TFP, which is for a family of 4, and succeeded. US Food Policy‘s family (including his two cute children who I’ve met) tried it and came close, but fell short in the area of restaurant food. This is a key difference, because food stamps may never be used for restaurant or other prepared food. In his highly captivating blog, Hungry for a Month halved the Penny-Wise rate and chronicled a month of food for $30.

Nevertheless, it is a great idea….maybe we could sponsor our own jcarrot Penny-Wise Tzedek Hechsher Challenge some time, highlighting current constructions of ethical Kashrut within a budget. Althought I’ll be out of town next week and can’t participate, I’m thinking about the timeliness of the upcoming September’s month-long Eat Local Challenge.

Click for full rules for the Penny-Wise Local Challenge.

I admire the new twist on the old tradition (in similar fashion, a good friend of mine used the Omer one year to do one more pushup every day). But these lists of “10 reasons to be green” or “365 things you can do to save the planet”…are they really helpful? Are they really telling us something new? Is lack of information really the problem, and are ‘the people who don’t know’ really the ones who will read these lists? I’m not entirely convinced – though regardless, the site is worth checking out, even if just to remind yourself of stuff you already know.

The neat thing about blogs is that people who leave comments often also do neat things themselves. Here are two bits about Purim worth sharing:

Carly from Peel a Pomegranate offers us a Mishloach Manot Swap:

In the spirit of the mitzvot of both giving gifts to the needy at Purim and also giving gifts to friends and acquaintances — I hereby dedicate the great Shalach Manot Swap of 5767. Read more

And Gluten-Free By the Bay offers us Gluten-free Hamentaschen

This is a recipe for gluten-free, cane-sugar-free hamantaschen. I was inspired partly by a recipe by user “debmidge” on Celiac.com, as well as by my own instincts as to what would taste right and work for my gluten-free, no cane sugar diet. Read more