Twilight Greenaway

What Does It Take to Make an Impact?

Doing without is big in the world of food activism. So the fact that Colin Beavan and Michelle Conlin—the couple behind the recently released documentary No Impact Man—centered their year-long project to reduce their impact on the environment largely around food will come as little surprise to many.

Beavan and Conlin appeared on the big screen in a handful of major cities this week, and their story—converting to locavorism, learning to compost, discovering their farmers’ market, and volunteering in an urban garden—was nothing if not familiar. For all its grandiose promises and dramatic scenes showing the family huddled in their unheated New York apartment by candlelight, No Impact Man may just be the latest high note in a chorus of similar projects.

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Bringing Healthy School Lunch to the Table

Like victory gardens, home canning, and depression-era resource conservation, Slow Food USA’s Gordon Jenkins believes the idea of healthy school lunches is one worth revisiting.

“The school lunch program was created in 1946 as a measure of national security,” says Jenkins. “The goal was to make sure that our nation’s children were healthy, because only then would the whole nation be productive.”

Four decades later, most of us take for granted the fact that schools serve lunch, and that the federal government subsidizes many of them. Whether they have anything to do with students’ health is another story. “A lot of today’s adults remember school lunch when it was institutional Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes,” says Jenkins. “It wasn’t delicious, but no one expected it to be. Now, the cheapest fast food and junk food is in our cafeterias and it’s fueling the obesity epidemic.”

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Farm Labor Experts: The Solution is Not For Sale

“The most important thing you can do if you care about fair food is support an immigrant rights agenda in this country,” said Sandy Brown of Swanton Berry Farm. “There is nothing more important, as far as I can tell.”

Brown was speaking on a recent panel called The Fruits of Their Labor, sponsored by the Center for Urban Education for Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA). She was joined by three other women, all in some way engaged in the struggle to place worker justice on equal footing with other, more well-worn aspects of sustainability.

The panelists included Alegría De La Cruz, a staff attorney for the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment; Maisie Greenawalt, Vice President of Bon Appétit Management Company (BAMCO), Alida Cantor, a research associate with the California Institute for Rural Studies, and Brown, a co-owner of Swanton Berry farm and doctoral candidate researching agricultural labor. Although they brought a range of perspectives to the discussion, the need to raise awareness of immigration reform as a crucial piece of the sustainable food movement was a clear theme. And for good reason.

For the last several months, advocates, authors and doctors have been shining a light on the fundamental connection between food and healthcare. Thanks to Obama’s latest speech and the responses it elicited, the connection between healthcare and immigration is also front and center. The third side of this triangle - the interconnection between immigration and our food system — is perhaps the easiest for many eaters to overlook, making it all the more important to explore.

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If You Build A New Food System, Will They Use It?

Melanie Cheng is waiting patiently. It’s 2pm on a Saturday and the launch party she’s hosting for her new web platform, FarmsReach, on the patio at Americano Restaurant and Bar in downtown San Francisco is just getting going. Chef Paul Arenstam is grilling sliders, and a long table displays a bounty of local vegetables. This could be any old recession-friendly website launch, but today’s guests are farmers and chefs, and the product – a set of online tools to connect local food producers to buyers — is intended to do more than make a quick profit.

“A lot of the chefs have called me to tell me they’re running late because they slept in” Cheng says. Meanwhile, the farmers in attendance are just knocking off after long days of selling at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market across the street, days that started as early 4 am for some. This profound difference in schedules might be one reason why, even in a city known for cultivation strong ties between restaurants and local farms, Cheng believes there’s a role for technology that can strengthen those ties and ensure local food always a solid market.

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The Lesson of ‘Less’: Why ‘The End of the Line’ Seafood Documentary Doesn’t Go Far Enough

I walked out of the screening of “The End of the Line” feeling deeply uneasy. Most of my discomfort had been carefully orchestrated by the film’s director, Rupert Murray, who filled the 80 minutes with straight-talking scientists and image upon image of wild fish being violently removed from the ocean.

Fishermen stabbed endangered bluefin tuna (left) in roiling pools of bloodied water. Giant trawl nets scraped across the ocean’s bottom, decimating coral and seaweed in its wake, leaving pounds of wasted sea life to be tossed back over the side of the boat. Then there was the sheer number of industrial-size factory vessels, crawling ominously over the surface of the ocean with their highly precise tracking systems, often blatant disregard for quotas, and the ability to catch several times the number of fish remaining in the ocean below them.

Read more on the Ethicurean >

The Young and the Landless

They’re not wearing overalls or brandishing pitchforks, but the young farmers who appear in the trailer for the documentary film “The Greenhorns” are the real thing. Their faces are sun-worn, the dirt under their fingernails is visible on camera, and they look like they’ve stopped between sweat-inducing tasks to share agricultural secrets with the audience.

The film’s director, Severine von Tscharner Fleming, 27, appears in the trailer several times, pushing open a farm gate, leading the camera into a greenhouse, and waxing poetic in a field of protected land.

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An Interview with Food, Inc. Director Robert Kenner

Food, Inc. director Robert Kenne spoke to CUESA recently about what he learned while making a hard-hitting film about the increasing corporate control of America’s food system.

CUESA: What do you think about the term “conventional agriculture”?  Does it reinforce the idea that when people are not buying sustainably produced food, they’re doing what’s "normal"?

Robert Kenner: If you call chemical-laden agriculture conventional, yes. But it’s important to realize that’s only been in existence for 40-50 years. For ten thousand years “conventional” was the opposite of what it is now. The world’s food has been fundamentally transformed in a way that these agribusinesses want to keep you from seeing. And that was the most shocking thing for me in making Food, Inc.

Read more in the CUESA E-Letter

The Dirt on Carbon Farming

Can something be old as dirt and the next big thing? According to Helge Hellberg, of Marin Organic, it can.

“I believe the sustainable food movement will be focused more and more on soil,” Hellberg told a group of farmers, food producers, educators and advocates at a panel on carbon sequestration at this year’s Eco-Farm conference. “Farmers,” he added, “are crucial because they’re the ear to the soil.”

Read more on Civil Eats >