As we mentioned yesterday, Food Day is viewed by its founders as a year-long effort to improve our food systems, locally and globally. In that spirit, we will continue to post news and information following Food Day's four-word tagline: Healthy. Sustainable. Affordable. Fair.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest is the main driver behind Food Day and also works year-round to push for better access to healthy foods. They regularly call for consumers to take action on specific issues.
This week, McDonald's announced that they will remove soda from their kids' menus, after an earlier false start. They join a few other national chains including Subway and Chipotle who no longer directly market soda to children. This is a big step, given how directly soda consumption has been tied to childhood obesity.
But there's more work to do. Most national chains still offer soda as an option in kids menu meal packages. The Center for Science in the Public Interest is asking consumers to take action by sending a message to the CEOs of other national chains asking them to follow suit. You can make a difference: follow the previous link to send your own message.
The founders of Food Day view it a little like a mushroom. The events on and immediately surrounding October 24th are supposed to be the fruiting parts of a year-long effort to improve the local, regional, and national food system.
And so, with Food Day 2013 just two weeks in the past, it's time to start looking forward to next year's celebrations and the work we need to do to get there.
On Tuesday, I got to attend a day-long workshop on culinary and agritourism. As I mentioned the next day, going to an Oregon Wild Rivers Coast tourism event made me ponder our place where the Wild Rivers Coast meets the Redwood Coast. It's a beautiful place to be, as we all know, but how can we forge bonds with both regions in a meaningful way?
One possibility is to create itineraries that highlight some of the best that all four counties -- Humboldt, Del Norte, Curry, and the southern end of Coos, from south to north -- have to offer. Food Day starts on a Friday next year, which lends itself well to expanding the offerings into a Food Weekend.
Travel Oregon is a sponsor of an amazing array of activities that all fall under the name, FEAST Portland. The lineup in Portland is incredible, but I'm taking more inspiration from the "Trails to FEAST" created by the folks at Travel Oregon. These are themed driving itineraries covering beer, cheese, wine, and other specialty foods. They include tips for where to stay, where to eat, what not to miss. Now, I wish (because of the name) they actually LED to Portland and FEAST Portland, but they don't. They're more regionally-based.
But imagine, if you will, cheese trails leading from Humboldt, Rogue Valley, and Oregon's Wild Rivers Coast creameries converging on Crescent City for a cheese making workshop. Or a weekend itinerary starting in southern Humboldt and hitting every creamery and cheese destination from there to Bandon, with tastings, workshops, and tours along the whole route.
This is one of the things we're dreaming of for next year's Food Day celebrations. If you would like to be involved in planning events like this, join us! There are always new places at the table.
Our last day of Food Day events featured six successful DIY Food Workshops. People came to learn about hunting wild mushrooms and keeping backyard chickens, among other things. We heard a lot of excitement in the community for these workshops and so we plan to do more of them!
We asked participants, what other DIY food topics do you want you learn about? People suggested permaculture, meat and fish smoking, more canning, and a variety of other subjects.
And now we're asking YOU! Are there workshops you'd like to see offered? Foods you want to know how to produce or prepare? Or is there something that you know how to do that you'd like to teach to others? We have a variety of resources to make these classes happen, so bring on a list! Let us know in the comments what DIY Food Workshops you'd like to see next.
For two years, I lived in the remote community of King Salmon, AK. There were 400 residents and one road, which led 16 miles to the coastal town of Naknek, with 600 residents. If you were a resident for at least a year, you could get a subsistence fishing license that allowed you to take almost 1,000 salmon, of various types, from the Naknek River and its mouth. This provided a great and almost free source of protein, and if you had the patience, you could gather gallons of blueberries and cranberries from the six-inch-high tundra berry "bushes" for vitamin C. Everything else, however, was flown in via Anchorage or barged in on one of six or seven massive barges that circled around the tip of the Aleutians once a month when the weather allowed.
In other words, food was expensive. Eight dollars for a gallon of milk and seven for a loaf of bread or box of cereal. That kind of expensive. By the time produce reached us, it was long past its prime, but still outrageously priced.
We were a one-income family at that point and even that was an entry-level salary, so we learned tough lessons about affordable food, or lack thereof.
It is a lesson that many Americans live every day, not just for two years because of an extreme location. One in four children in the United States live in food-insecure households, meaning that the adults in their life don't always know where the next meal is coming from. In households considered "very insecure", adults are often skipping meals on a regular basis.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food..." and yet, around the world, many people do not have access to adequate healthy food for themselves and their children.
This year, a high-profile film, A Place at the Table, focused attention on hunger in America. Part of the aim of the film makers is to make Americans as dedicated to ending hunger as they were in the past. Our political leaders have cut funding to SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a federal program that supplies a maximum of $1.50/meal to low-income Americans) and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children, a program that supplies healthy foods to pregnant and nursing mothers and children under the age of five). People who use these programs are demonized in the public conversation about these cuts, despite the fact that most "facts" presented in these arguments are actually myths. One myth is countered in the image above; for more of the myths and misconceptions about the hungry, read this article that includes the entire infographic.
Because of the rhetoric surrounding the hungry in the media, there is a stigma attached to needing nutritional assistance. People don't want to be seen going into a food bank; they don't want their neighbors to know they are unable to feed their families.
In Del Norte and the adjacent tribal lands, there are people who cannot afford to buy adequate food for their families. There are people who live more than an hour's drive from the nearest supermarket. Most of DNATL is classified as a food desert. There are people who need help, but don't seek it for fear of what people will think.
Food Day is not just about a single day each year. Food Day is an ongoing attempt to make our food system better for everyone. Wouldn't it be great if, because of work we do over the next year, everyone in DNATL would have enough healthy food by the time Food Day rolls around next October 24th?
To join this conversation and action, please come to a Community Food Council meeting, follow this blog, "like" us on Facebook, and help our neighbors. As a community, we are only as strong as our weakest members: Shouldn't we work to make everyone strong?
Food Day's four-word tagline is Healthy, Sustainable, Affordable, Fair. We're doing a series of blog posts leading up to Food Day (October 24th!) about what each of those words mean.
In my last post, I talked about what FAIR means in terms of our food system. Today, I'm combining a short discussion of SUSTAINABLE with something new I learned this morning. So what does a sustainable food system look like?
Wikipedia provides this definition of sustainable farming: "an integrated plant and animal production practices having a site-specific application that will last over the long term." The blog, Sustainable Table, defines it as follows:
"In simplest terms, sustainable is the production of food, fiber, or other plant or animal products using farming techniques that protect the environment, public health, human communities, and animal welfare. This form of agriculture enables us to produce healthful food without compromising future generations' ability to do the same."
It can be hard to know exactly what won't compromise future production, but there are some agricultural practices that clearly will. What comes to mind most clearly for me are the crop circles I sometimes see from airplanes. I'm not talking about alien crop art, but of irrigated perfect circles of green amid an otherwise brown landscape.
This National Geographic photograph of Nevada is a perfect example. Water pumped from underground aquifers is sprayed by a moving radius-irrigation system to produce perfectly green circles in the midst of a desert. Aquifers tend to replenish very slowly, so removing lots of water for irrigation like this is most definitely not sustainable. I think many people would look at a feedlot or CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation) and also think, unsustainable.
So much of our industrial agricultural system relies on practices like these, so how do we move away from them towards systems that resemble the definitions of sustainable farming?
Well, this morning, I learned of a fast-food chain that is taking large steps in that direction. I knew that Chipotle Mexican Grill talks up its commitment to healthier foods, but I didn't know much about what they meant by that. Then I saw a link to this article about why Big Ag "hates" Chipotle and watched the animated short movie the article is about. The Scarecrow shows a bleak future agriculture and a simple Scarecrow who moves to defy it. After watching it, I needed to learn more about why Chipotle would make a film that could be quite controversial, so I went to their website.
It turns out Chipotle has an entire section of their website devoted to their Food With Integrity beliefs. According to Chipotle, they have been working towards better sourcing for their foods for over a decade, including sourcing 40% of their beans from organic sources, all of their dairy from cows not treated with rGBH, and most of their beef and chicken from farmers who do not use antibiotics in animal feed. They also have new initiatives to increase their local food purchases and use a 350-mile radius to define local. You can learn much more about their Food With Integrity standards on their website.
I don't eat much fast food ever, but sometimes when traveling, there are few options. I'm glad to know that there are better options even in the fast food category.
Better, that is, in terms of sustainability. This is definitely not an endorsement of Chipotle on all levels. I did a quick calorie calculation for a chicken burrito with brown rice and black beans. I included cheese and guacamole, but not sour cream, and it came to a grand total of 1,095 calories (about half a day's worth) and a whopping 2,960mg of sodium (more than the recommended daily intake). There are certainly ways to eat healthier at Chipotle (the vegetarian burrito bowl I've eaten clocks in at 615 calories on the calcultor), but I don't think the chain overall would get an A-plus for that first word in the Food Day tagline: Healthy.
The folks over at the Food Day website have devised a 14 question quiz designed to show how healthy your diet is for you, the planet, and the animals. I have a few issues with the quiz. They don't, for example, ask if you produce any of your own food or how much of your food is locally-produced, which could have a fairly significant impact on the environmental footprint of your diet. Aside from a few other quibbles with their methodology, though, I think the quiz is a great starting point for a conversation about the health consequences of our food choices.
I got a solid A when I took the quiz, but that's not too surprising since I eat an overwhelmingly vegetarian diet. I answered that I eat fish once a week, but it's really more like once a month. Given that the quiz takes the environment and animal welfare into consideration, I was almost guaranteed an A.
My vegetarian diet is mostly about the environment, not animal welfare. I do love animals and certainly became a vegetarian in high school because of my concern for animals. But when I became an outdoor educator in college, it became clear that the environmental toll of industrial meat production is a more important reason to avoid meat. Many people, from Paul McCartney to a former chief economist at the World Bank to the United Nations, have called for people to reduce meat consumption and move toward a vegetarian diet in order to mitigate against climate change. I am not militant about vegetarianism (obviously, since some fish sneak into my mouth occasionally), but I do think it's important to talk about the connection between eating meat and the environment.
I worked for a summer as the head cook at an environmental summer camp run by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. I quickly learned that my coworkers were hard-core meat-eaters who demanded meat at every meal. It was disheartening, given that most of them were environmental studies majors in college and planned to stay in environmental education as a career. It was a frustrating summer. The last straw for me was when two of them were complaining about waking up in their tent on federal (probably BLM) land out west and finding cattle surrounding their tent. Even after I pointed out that those cattle were certainly beef cattle, not dairy, they could not see the connection between their desire for meat at every breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and the grazing of cattle on federal lands.
There are consequences to our food choices beyond our personal health and well-being. Take the quiz and share your score (if you'd like) in our comments section. Let's start this conversation!
