TEDxManhattan Talks Are Now Available!

So March 1st was a gorgeous, sunny, mostly-wind-free day here on the North Coast. I tried to be understanding about our low turn-out for the live viewing party for TEDxManhattan Changing the Way We Eat. I really did. The whole week before had been rain, rain, rain, and then here is this sunshine and blue sky all day long.

But really? If you weren't there, you missed out. It was another great year of inspiring talks about how we can make our food and agriculture system work better for everyone.

Luckily for all of us (because there are a few I'll need to watch again some time, too), the talks are all up on YouTube now! You can find them on TEDxManhattan's YouTube channel (is that what it's called?). 

If you don't know where to start and you like spoken word, I highly recommend beginning with Clint Smith's Celebrating Resilience.

Enjoy!

More Good News Grows At Crescent Elk

We've featured successes from the Crescent Elk Middle School garden before, but this time Joe Gillespie and his students have taken things a step further. They have been providing food to the school kitchens on a regular basis and have been featured in a "Know Your Farmer" spot! It's a great way to close the circle and make an impact:

Healthy. Sustainable. Affordable. FAIR. (Part I)

I may have mentioned this already, but in case you missed it, October 24th marks the third annual Food Day, organized nationally by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The four-word tagline for Food Day is "Healthy. Sustainable. Affordable. Fair." It will be on our local Food Day posters this year, and I wanted to write a little bit about what each of those words mean in terms of our food system.

(As it happens, this tagline has some of the same themes as the official Mission of the Community Food Council for DNATL: "The Community Food Council for Del Norte and Adjacent Tribal Lands will build a vibrant, sustainable local food system through opportunity, education, innovation, advocacy, and promotion.")

This blog post will look at what it means for a food system to be FAIR.

A lot of people might automatically think of the Fair Trade labels that show up on coffee, chocolate, and other imported products. Fair Trade USA describes Fair Trade this way: "Fair Trade goods are just that. Fair. From far-away farms to your shopping cart, products that bear our logo come from farmers and workers who are justly compensated."

There are a lot of debates right now about what constitutes "just compensation". Minimum wage laws in many states, including California, are raising the minimum wage significantly above the federal minimum wage, and the Obama administration is asking Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00/hour. One of the arguments for this is that a person working full-time at the current federal minimum wage ($7.25/hour) would still fall below the federal poverty line for a two or three person household. So all those working single parents? If they make the minimum, their family lives in poverty.

But in many parts of our food system, the situation is much worse. Federal minimum wage for farm workers can fall below even the federal minimum wage if they are paid by the "piece". Piece work means that pickers are paid for every crate or box of produce picked. For example, the going rate for orange pickers in Florida is 85 cents per 90 pound box. An average harvest rate for a worker is 64 boxes in an 8-hour shift, equivalent to 5,760 pounds of oranges, and yet the hourly rate works out to just $6.80/hour.

Picking almost 6,000 pounds of fruit in 8 hours is back-breaking work, and fruit picking is not as "unskilled" as many people believe. I've picked both apples and persimmons on a commercial scale and it's not fun. Persimmons, particularly, like many other softer fruit, take a light hand to avoid bruising. In my case, I was also expected to make split-second decisions about whether each individual fruit was export or domestic quality. And yet farm workers are paid so poorly that a full third of farm worker families live below the poverty line. (This is made much worse due to the seasonal nature of much farm work, of course, because workers may not be able to find full-time work year round.)

So what about the rest of the supply chain? It doesn't get a lot prettier as you move through the slaughterhouses, processing plants, and food service industries. 

Consider the front of house in food service as an example. Tipped workers (think wait staff in restaurants) can make as little as $2.13/hour (the federal minimum cash payment). Most states (but not all) have at least slightly higher minimums for tipped workers, but many are still under $3.00/hour. Now, the theory is that these workers will make at least minimum wage once their tips are factored in and this probably works for wait staff at higher-end restaurants where a bill for two people could be 50 dollars or much more. But what about diners and other inexpensive restaurants? If you walk in and order the $2.99 breakfast special, how much are you leaving as a tip? Will the collective tips on inexpensive meals raise that $2.13/hour to a livable wage? (And this leaves out the fact that many wait staff have to "tip out" to busboys and sometimes kitchen staff who do not otherwise benefit from tips.)

I haven't even mentioned farmers and how little of the price of a loaf of bread or box of cereal goes to the person who grew the grain, but trust me, it's not a lot.

So, FAIR. For our food system to be fair, the producers in the system would need to earn a decent (not extravagant, but decent) living for working full-time in jobs that are almost always physically demanding. All consumers would need to have equal access to healthy foods, no matter where they live and how much they make (I'll write more about this when I discuss AFFORDABLE).

That's my opinion, of course, and yours may differ. Please join the conversation in our comments section.

Food On Film

In my previous life as a chronic academic, I taught a class called Anthropology Through Film and Fiction. We took four major cultural topics and viewed them through a variety of lenses, including films. Food is a central concern in anthropology -- from how it's produced to the rules governing when, where, and how it can be cooked and eaten -- and it was my favorite of our subjects.

There are so many great films and books about food. We watched Babette's Feast and Eat, Drink, Man, Woman. We read Like Water for Chocolate and Farmer Boy, a great view of the tremendous work involved food self-sufficiency. One year, we also watched Tampopo, which is a wonderful movie about food obsessions, but the raw egg scene freaks me out too much, so after the first year it was on a list of films they could watch on their own if they wanted more. I chalk that up to my years in food service, which were pretty much smack-dab in the middle of the Northeast's salmonella scare when over-easy eggs were featured in nightmares.

Today, there is a vast cultural shift taking place on the screen. Movie after movie is vilifying industrial agriculture; celebrating the local, the organic, the small; and shining a spotlight on how we eat. After decades of growth in industrial agriculture following World War II, people are starting to say no and the movement is being both documented in and driven by films that inform and/or expose industrial agriculture and the diet it supports. We have seen our national government resisting these changes, in the fight to continue to count pizza sauce as a serving of vegetables, for instance. This cultural shift, like so many, is being driven by grassroots action and even grassroots documentation.

There are too many films to name, but here are links for many of the films that have crossed my radar and that I've either seen or want to see:

King Corn
Forks Over Knives
Food, Inc.
Supersize Me
Fridays at the Farm
Dirt: The Movie
Fresh
Food Stamped
The Garden
As We Sow
Food Matters
In Search of Good Food

There are many others out there. Have you seen any of these? Do you have a review to share? Do you know of other movies that should be on this list? Use our comments section to share!

Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food

Small and mid-sized farms create more jobs than large scale farms. The USDA's Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative has been re-tailored this year to stress this point, with hopes to make it into the Farm Bill again. The initiative got it's start in 2008, and was met with oposition, as it has been associated with giving federal funding to niche farms that don't feed a large percentage of the population.

But every million dollars spent on food from local and regional sources, goes to support 13 jobs. That's in significant contrast to the three jobs supported by every million dollars spent on foods from farms without a regional focus.

The USDA is working to strengthen the connection between farmers and consumers. They're not just doing the obvious, providing funding for smaller, regionally-funded projects. They've provided an interactive map that shows the local projects they've helped along since 2008, which could potentially connect a consumer to a farmer in his or her region. Consumers and farmers alike have also been invited to take part in the discussion on local agriculture and job creation, using social media. On March 5, they held a forum on the key themes of the Know Your Farmer Compass:  local food infrastructure, stewardship and local food, local meat and poultry, farm to institution, healthy food access, careers in agriculture,  and local food knowledge. Hundreds of people used the Twitter hashtag #KYF2 to join the discussion, and asked questions of the Agriculture Deputy Secretary, Kathleen Merrigan, and 60-some others - experts on food policy and local food practioners. All of this is aimed at getting people connected with their food, the producers, the consumers and the policy-makers together.

International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day. It is a celebration, a call to action, a time for reflection, a day to inspire. In the past year, as in all years, women have made new discoveries in science; acted to change their communities; taught children to read and write; worked with their partners to create loving homes; gained new freedoms; and grown and cooked food for their families and local markets. In the past year, as in all years, women have also been hungry; struggled to feed their children; suffered from preventable illnesses; died in childbirth; survived violence both inside and outside their homes (and sometimes, not survived); and faced unequal access to agricultural land, tools, knowledge, and credit.

This year, the theme for the United Nations celebration of International Women's Day is "Empower Rural Women: End Hunger and Poverty".  In explaining the theme on their website, they write:

"Key contributors to global economies, rural women play a critical role in both developed and developing nations — they enhance agricultural and rural development, improve food security and can help reduce poverty levels in their communities. In some parts of the world, women represent 70 percent of the agricultural workforce, comprising 43 percent of agricultural workers worldwide.

Estimates reveal that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, they could increase yields on their farms by 20–30 percent, lifting 100-150 million out of hunger."

In some parts of the world, women produce most of the food grown for home use. Research has demonstrated that women who have secure land tenure -- that is, women who own or otherwise have full control over their agricultural land -- produce more food per acre, put more time and resources into improving their land, and are more likely to live above the poverty line. And yet women are often denied land ownership, access to agricultural education, and development dollars that are poured, instead, into high-value crops for export.

When women are given access to business opportunities, whether it is through micro-enterprise programs like the Grameen Bank and Kiva or through non-profit development organizations like Bead for Life and Heifer International, they are less likely to live in poverty. And because poverty is one of the best indicators of food insecurity, women with opportunities are also less likely to be food insecure.

Women have the ability to raise their families out of poverty and food insecurity, but if women continue to have restricted access to land, capital, opportunity, and education, "ending hunger and poverty" will remain a theme of International Women's Days for years, if not decades, to come.