Sustainable Nutrition

Happy & Healthy in 2012

2012-01-25T14:49:00.000-06:00

In Midwinter, dried beans from the garden lead to me reflecting on the amazing but simple power seeds have to nourish our bodies and propogate life. Planting a seed can change your relationship to life. In 2012 I'm planting a few new seeds, of sorts, and I'm immersing myself in a project that will keep me off the blogosphere for awhile...maybe I'll have more to share soon. For now, here's to a happy, healthful, delicious and grace filled year.

Protect the Wilds of Wild Rice

2011-12-16T11:00:00.002-06:00

Photo from a wonderful, in depth article on Wild Rice at Circle of Blue.

Real wild rice is at risk of disappearing.

Manoomin, the “good grain” in Anishinaabeg, the only native grain to Northern America, the richly delicious and nutritious aquatic seed that is a keystone traditional food of Anishinaabeg tribes (Ojibwe/Chippewa, Ottawa/Odawa, and Algonquian) has yet another threat to its existence. Unique to the Upper Great Lakes' region, Manoomin, which is on Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste (and one of only seven US Presidia) for its amazing depth and diversity of flavors and its rich cultural heritage, is respected around the world as a true American food.

But can we protect it here in Wisconsin?

Wisconsin State Assembly Bill 426, said to have been written “for” mining corporations, would repeal several environmental protections and limit public participation to streamline mining projects. Of particular note is Gogebic Taconite's plan to open an open-pit iron ore mine in the Penokee Range in northern Wisconsin—a move which would directly affect the nearby Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Tribe. An open-pit iron ore mine with relaxed environmental standards would be devastating to the tribe’s watershed—including the wetlands that are home to wild rice.

Concerned? If in Wisconsin, contact your legislators. The Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters makes it easy here.

You can also help by supporting producers, read more about wild rice and find Native distributors from our region in a recent post of mine and at Native Harvest..

And, if you need some more inspiration, listen to my friend, writer and environmental advocate Eric Hansen, speak about the risk of mining to the ecology of the Upper Great Lakes here.

Buon Terra Madre Day

2011-12-10T11:02:00.000-06:00

On this day, Slow Food's Terra Madre Day, people all around the world are celebrating their own unique food sheds; supporting the good, clean, and fair foods and producers that are important to their communities.

Here in Wisconsin, we can celebrate the raw milk cheeses, heirloom winter squashes, antique apples, like the rare Milwaukee Apple that keep our agricultural traditions alive. We can celebrate wild things too--venison, blackberries, hazelnuts, wild rice... I'll be heading over to the winter farmer's market to pick up a few things like fairy winter squash, golden russet apples, red wattle pork salami and then will , and Saxon cheeses to share them with loved ones today and throughout the holidays. You can check out how people are celebrating, in over 120 countries at the Terra Madre day website.

Good Food Thanksgiving

2011-11-14T11:11:00.086-06:00

Planning for Thanksgiving—a favorite holiday of foodies across the nation—can be, well, downright frustrating for the meal planners. One guest is watching their cholesterol intake, another their glycemic load, one hates veggies, and one is a vegetarian…. I recognize that to add to this potentially divisive list of demands the esoteric concepts of environmental and social responsibility might seem mad to some, but I believe this holiday devoted to giving thanks should be based on these concepts.

In my book, delicious, healthy, and ethical food is worth any extra effort for the deeply honest pleasures it can provide. And with some planning, it might not seem extra at all. Slow Food USA is trying to make it easy on meal planners trying to please both palate and conscience with a Thanksgiving Guide, replete with recipes, tips for easy meal planning, and thoughts on the origins of the holiday (the story of which was explored here in 2009.)

Top 5 tips to have a Slow Food Thanksgiving:
Shop for fresh, seasonal, and local foods at a farmers market;
Take the time to learn about where your food comes from and how it was raised;
Give thanks for the labor that brought your food to your table and the earth that grew it;
Get all hands on deck in the kitchen. Teach others what you know and learn from them;
And then sit back and savor the meal with family and friends.

When I plan Thanksgiving, there are a few key ingredients—delicious, nutritious, place based ingredients—that I consider the stars of the table. What follows is a bit of musing on some of these fine foods:

Apple varietals, once numbered in the thousands across this land, are now quite limited, with industrial foodways leaving room for only a few varieties in the grocery stores. But a trip to the Milwaukee County Winter’s Farmers Market, or one of our local antique apple orchards, will yield many varieties such as the Wolf River, Autumn Berry, Willow Twig, Lady Apple, Golden Russet, Northern Spy, Black Giliflower, Arkansas Black, Northwest Greening, Snow, Winesap, etc....all autumn varietals in our region. On my table, I might feature local apples on a cheese plate or in an apple cranberry sauce, in an apple crisp, as an ingredient in the stuffing or by serving an artisanal apple cider with dinner.

Pumpkin or winter squash, a truly American food, is a must at Thanksgiving, and need not be limited to the realm of pie. The bright orange flesh (due to all that beta carotene) is a reminder that they sat in the field all season, soaking up sun. Unique varieties of squash, like Sibley, Boston Marrow, Amish Pie, Galeux d'Eysines, Buttercup, Marina di Chioggia, each have their own unique flavors and textures and stories though they are, for the most part but with many caveats, interchangeable. My all time favorite, the Marina di Chioggia, comes from Italy and has dense flesh, and a rich, nutty flavor that finds a good home in biscuits and breads, pies and purees. This year I’m likely to use the Long Pie Pumpkin (otherwise known by the name Nantucket) or Fairy Squash grown by my friends at Pinehold Gardens for a pumpkin and sage bisque. In years past, squash has been served up simply; halved, brushed with real maple syrup, roasted and sliced or diced large and roasted along with root vegetables or baked and stuffed with the next key ingredient, wild rice.

True Wild Rice is precious—an important traditional food of the Ojibwe and Menominee people of this region, it is still hand harvested each year by “knocking” the rice into canoes as they glide through the wetland stands in which the rice grows wild. This tradition is at risk, due to polluted waters, changing land use, and shifting foodways, which is likely why real wild rice has gone up in price in the past couple of years, making it unaffordable to many Native people who don’t harvest it themselves. To seek out and serve wild rice at the table not only supports people continuing an important traditional foodway, but is a truly nutritious and delicious regional food. Always nutty and aromatic, real wild rice flavor will vary from rice bed to rice bed. It’s hard to compare the real thing with the much more common cultivated “paddy rice” which takes much longer to cook and has a very different taste and texture. Wild rice is wonderful served on its own, but I often like to serve it as a dressing/stuffing; mixed with ingredients like cranberries, celery, hazelnuts and apples. Learn more and find distributors of real wild rice here

And then there’s the turkey. Heritage turkey breeds, like Narragansett, White Holland , Bourbon Red, Bronze, are uniquely American and very, very unique. Today 99% of turkeys are the same industrialized breed; the Broad Breasted White is raised to grow so fast, that they’ve no ability to forage, fly, or mate naturally. To serve a heritage turkey supports small family farms and it also yields a much richer, more flavorful meat due to the slow growth rates. The Slow Food Thanksgiving guide has more information on heritage turkeys and through my local Slow Food WiSE chapter, we compile an annual local heritage buying guide to promote the restoration of heritage breed turkeys within our region by pairing farmers with eaters.

“Eating with the fullest pleasure - pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance - is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world. In this pleasure we experience our dependence and our gratitude, for we are living in a mystery, from creatures we did not make and powers we cannot comprehend.” ― Wendell Berry

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy FOOD DAY!

2011-10-24T11:53:00.001-05:00

Food Day, created by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, is a day for everyone to get involved in the movement for healthy, affordable food produced in a sustainable, humane way. Visit the website to find an event in your area or to get inspired by what communities across the county are doing to celebrate, find recipes, watch videos and sign a letter telling congress to support Food Day's goals:

Celebrating Traditional Foods & Stories

2011-10-14T11:14:00.002-05:00

Before french fries, pizza, ice cream and soda became mainstays of the American Diet (with an average of 29 pounds fries, 23 pounds pizza, 24 pounds ice cream and 53 gallons soda consumed annually per person,) before even apples or honeybees were brought by early colonists, there was widely diverse cuisine enjoyed by Native people across the Americas. Foods like wild rice, corn, beans, squash, wild greens, roots, herbs, seeds, berries, fish and game just begin to tell the story of this land and its people. Now the relative rarity of these foods, overshadowed by heavily processed commodities, bespeaks of drastic changes in a remarkably short period of time. Interested in exploring the stories of Native food and people and how they might lead us on a path to wellness, I helped to create a compilation of Milwaukee area Native elders’ stories along with seasonal, healthy recipes to celebrate the traditional foodways of this region in book form.

Years in the making, this project was born of a long-time relationship between my health center, the Gerald L Ignace Indian Health Center (GLIIHC), and the Indian Council of the Elderly through the WOLFE group—a weekly fitness and food group for elders. The project grew with the help of Milwaukee Public Theatre, Native Punx, Southeastern Oneida Tribal Services, and with funding from the Forest County Potawatomi Foundation. At its root, the Mino Ayaa Project supports knowledge sharing of traditional foodways that promote wellness in the Milwaukee area Native community. The e-version of the book can be downloaded for free here. A spiral bound version is available at GLIIHC, where donations are appreciated and go to WOLFE group programming.

As I frequently contend, all cultures have their healthy traditions. But the vast majority if the world’s cultural traditions have given way to the consumer culture and its modern monotonous landscape of sedentary activities and heavily processed, corporate foods. Culture naturally changes over time, but I wonder how we might embrace these changes without losing the core traditions that keep people and places healthy. Of relevance, is The Cultural Wellness Center’s People's Theory that says, “Individualism and loss of community and culture make us sick.” Using this as a premise for understanding how to overcome our challenges, we could then say that reconnection with key aspects of culture (such as food) and building community (such as through foodways) can heal much of what ails us.

We all live in a very different world than our ancestors just a few generations past. The way we communicate, sleep, purchase, move goods, entertain ourselves, travel and commute, feed ourselves, stay warm or cool, work, think, move, seek information has changed. With these changes has come the ability to do some very brilliant things—finding long lost relatives on Facebook, purchasing olive oil at the corner grocer, eating Korean barbeque squid one night and Ethiopian injera with lentils the next, taking women’s literature and nutritional genomics courses in a single college education, build grassroots movements through the internet, view images of people and places from around the world… And with these changes have come some real horrors—global warming, epidemics of diabetes and obesity, patenting of seeds and resulting loss of seed sovereignty, species extinction, rampant pollution, worldwide economic calamity… It’s a brilliant, scary world we live in, in need of balance in so many ways. I think the key in restoring balance lies in shedding the reigns of the consumer-corporate culture and re-embracing traditions that have served people very well for centuries—with a necessary modern twist because we and the world are always changing. In our global society, we have access to a wide berth of cultural wisdom from a wide range of cultures. We can look to these cultures for suggestions on how to live well. And eat well. With good food, the basic sustenance of life, we have an entry point for growing community, understanding, prosperity, and wellness.

What I Did this Summer

2011-09-13T09:30:00.001-05:00

I saw a flock of Canada geese heading south on my morning walk. With kids back in school, apples ripening on the trees, and the fall equinox quickly approaching, I find myself reflecting on the ways in which I spent the long days and warm nights of summer.

In an effort to find some balance during the fleeting, precious months of summer, I tried to limit my time on the computer (as evidenced by a longer lapse than usual between posts.) Instead, I chose to spend as much time out of doors as possible; hiking the woods and prairies, biking on paths and on streets, picnicking in city parks to the sounds of live music, camping in state parks to the sounds of bird song and night creaks, enjoying long meals on the porch or in the backyard with family and friends, swimming in a few of the many thousand freshwater lakes in the region, visiting new and old friends' farms and markets, tending home and work gardens, and taking long, long walks along Lake Michigan.

This seems, to me, a sustainable way to enjoy life; to create more opportunities to make food, grow food, seek out real food, share food with loved ones, listen to the sounds of your neighborhood, meet your neighbors be they people, plants, or wildlife, feel sunshine on your skin,  and celebrate each and every moment of peace. Not to stray to far from the usual format of this blog to wax poetic about the summertime....but it seems to me that I reclaimed a precious, wholesome peace by unplugging from my various e-connections and plugging into my visceral surroundings.

I also found time to read. Fiction and nonfiction alike inspired. Among the several food books whose pages I burrowed into, including books about salmon, cod, chef-fing, and food rebels, I found one of the most enjoyable tommes to celebrate America's fine fare: American Terroir.  Through these pages, I gained a deeper appreciation for the likes of oysters, chocolate, and coffee, and remembered my fondness for wild edibles, raw milk cheese, apples, maple syrup, and honey. Rowan Jacobsen takes North American terroir--the taste of place is the way I like to think about the term--to a new level. I highly recommend this book for anyone who cares deeply about place based foods, farming, pleasure, and soil.

Speaking of terroir and books, my work at Milwaukee's urban Indian health center this summer involved celebrating regional food traditions through the editing and publishing of a new traditional food recipe and storybook; Mino Ayaa. More on this soon, but in brief, the book promotes wellness through sharing seasonal wild and cultivated food recipes as well as stories from American Indian elders. We unveiled the book this past weekend at Indian Summer Festival during our elder group's Three Sisters Stew cooking demo.   The 25th year celebration of Indian Summer, the countires largest American Indian cultural fest, included a new Tribal farmers' Market, several cooking demos, pow wows, and some really great traditionl food (wild rice cakes, bison chili and corn soup, among my favorites.) Our health center was on hand raising awareness on the ways to prevent and control diabetes.

And now its time to make the most of the harvest by canning, freezing, pickling, and drying summer's bounty and toil...to enjoy a bit of sunshine during the long, cold nights of winter.

"food ark" in national geographic

2011-07-13T15:21:00.003-05:00

Our Dwindling Food Variety

As we've come to depend on a handful of commercial varieties of fruits and vegetables, thousands of heirloom varieties have disappeared. It's hard to know exactly how many have been lost over the past century, but a study conducted in 1983 by the Rural Advancement Foundation International gave a clue to the scope of the problem. It compared USDA listings of seed varieties sold by commercial U.S. seed houses in 1903 with those in the U.S. National Seed Storage Laboratory in 1983. The survey, which included 66 crops, found that about 93 percent of the varieties had gone extinct. More up-to-date studies are needed.

I had forgotten how much I loved National Geographic (whose tagline is "Inspiring people to care about the planet since 1888") when I was handed a copy of the July Issue...for it contained an article on a subject near and dear to my heart: food biodiversity. The article Food Ark starts us off with this:

A crisis is looming: To feed our growing population, we’ll need to double food production. Yet crop yields aren’t increasing fast enough, and climate change and new diseases threaten the limited varieties we’ve come to depend on for food. Luckily we still have the seeds and breeds to ensure our future food supply—but we must take steps to save them.

Author Charles Siebert highlights work being done by Seed Savers Exchange: a Slow Food USA partner in the Renewing America's Food Traditions alliance and chief seed source for many of the foods on Slow Food's Ark of Taste. He also re-tells the story of the "Green Revolution" --an effort to feed the world through industrialized agriculture, which in a tragically ironic turn of events, has turned out to put us at risk of the aforementioned food crisis. With climate change and growing pest threats, putting all of our eggs in the proverbial "one basket" of GMOs or any monocrops, leaves us at high risk. No matter what the biotech industry would have us believe, we do not need expensive, resource intensive, patented seeds to feed the world. Thousands of varieties of plants and animals have evolved with traits uniquely suited for their particular ecosystem niche. And people have been feeding themselves healthfully in unique ways for centuries. By industrializing the food system, we've ended up with an industrialized, heavily processed, unsavory diet...and an epidemic of diet related diseases to boot.

As I've mentioned many times before here and when public speaking: biodiversity is a marker of a health in any system... Diversity in the food supply and in nutrition help to keep a healthier planet and population of people. For some ideas on how to protect and restore food biodiversity on your plate or in your own backyard, check out these previous posts. Here too.

a balanced plate

2011-06-28T20:29:00.000-05:00

Earlier this month, I spoke with our local Fox 6 Wake up team about the USDA's new My Plate. You can find the tv spot and my post for Get Active Today's blog below. As I've continued to talk with folks about My Plate and its emphasis on fruits and vegetables, I've heard concerns people have about eating locally and healthfully year round. The worry is that dairy and meat and grains may be the only local foods available during the winter months in places like Wisconsin.

It is true that this is the time of year when its seems easiest to pile your plate high with fresh fruits and vegetables as more and more produce comes into its own in our local farms and gardens. But this is also the time of year to be thinking about the long. cold nights of winter. By "putting by" ripe veggies in the summer, either by canning, drying, or freezing, we can eat locally and promote health all year round. Local, seasonal, just picked, ripe produce grown in healthy soil tends to be packed with a lot more nutrients than the industrially produced produce flown in from all over the world that line our winter market shelves. Buying extra asparagus, strawberries, green beans, kale, collards, spinach and so on picked at the peak of flavor and ripeness in these early months of summer and quick freezing them preserves a lot of their nutrient value for later on when the only fresh, local produce we can find is what keeps in a root cellar (onions, potatoes, winter squash, etc...) Later on in the summer, we can look forward to other "good freezers" like tomatoes, peppers, summer squash... Check out this site that has helped me with a windfall harvest, many a time, for instructions on how to preserve almost anything: Pick Your Own.

USDA Food guides have been around since 1894 and the newest version, in my opinion, represents a major improvement over the past hundred plus years. While the recommendations remain the same, in accordance with the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, as the My Pyramid…the real success of My Plate is that it is easy to understand. Dietitians, such as myself, and other health educators have been using the Plate Method for nutrition education for years because people find it easier to visualize a healthy eating pattern when looking at a meal plate versus a food “pyramid.”

Vegetables are the real winners in this new My Plate model as they are given the largest area of space on the plate. Fruits win too. Basically, we are meant to pile our plates up with fruits and vegetables, leaving a quarter of the plate for whole grains and a quarter for protein foods like meat, fish, chicken, eggs, beans, nuts, and seeds. Dairy is shown on the side and people who drink milk are encouraged to choose low fat options.

This is a great time of year to start eating more produce as our farmer’s markets are getting into full swing. Just last night I piled my plate high with a green lettuce, asparagus and radish salad, and served it with an herb-feta-omelet with whole wheat bread...yum! To find a farmer’s market in your neighborhood you can use the Get Active Today Farmer’s Market tools http://www.getactivetoday.com/fitness-nutrition/5/FarmersMarkets.aspx and be sure to check out the Farm Fresh Atlas of South Eastern Wisconsin.http://www.farmfreshatlas.org/southeast/

Here are the key take home messages from www.choosemyplate.gov:

Balancing Calories

● Enjoy your food, but eat less.

● Avoid oversized portions.

Foods to Increase

● Make half your plate fruits and vegetables.

● Make at least half your grains whole grains.

● Switch to fat-free or low-fat (1%) milk.

Foods to Reduce

● Compare sodium in foods like soup, bread, and frozen meals ― and choose the foods with lower numbers.

● Drink water instead of sugary drinks.

Mediterranean Diet

2011-05-10T21:44:00.000-05:00

A Sicilian farmers market.

May is Mediterranean Diet Month. I spent a few minutes talking to Fox6 Wake Up's Kim Murphy this morning (you can watch below) about this eating pattern that scientists have consistantly found to promote good health; starting back in the 21st century when researchers found people in places like Crete, Southern Italy, and Sicily were living very long and healthy lives and more recently with a large study that finds it is associated with a reduction in cardiovascular disease and mortality, cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease. The key may be in that this eating pattern is based on eating plenty of minimally processed plant foods...Oldways, the organization responsible for creating the Mediterranean Diet Pyramid, explains it best:

Traditional Mediterranean meals are based on plentiful fruits, vegetables, beans and legumes; an abundance of bread, pasta, rice, couscous, and other grain foods, especially whole grains; nuts and peanuts; extra virgin olive oil; fish, poultry and lean red meat; cheese and yogurt; and moderate amounts of wine.

Most, if not all, traditional eating patterns are good for us. An idea shared by many philosophers of food and supported by science is that the only diet that is not good for us is the Western diet of highly refined, processed, fast food. I've certainly learned a lot about traditional food of the Great Lake's region through my work at GLIIHC, Milwaukee's Indian Health Center, and the wild game, fish, berries, nuts, greens, and culitivated corn, bean, squash, and so on, are all super-stars in the realm of health and wellness. Native people around the world are looking to their traditional eating patterns to combat diabetes and other increasingly common chronic conditions. And while it is the Mediterranean Diet that has the support of most major scientific organizations, we can use the traditional foods and activities from our region, from any region to support wellness.

Mangia manjare!

Rec'd reading: Chasing Chiles

2011-04-07T20:41:00.000-05:00

The book Chasing Chiles is not merely a tome dedicated to exploring climate change and it’s impacts on agriculture, though it does this well, it is a celebration of life. By focusing in on the stories of one food, chile peppers, the three authors were able to dig deeply into the complex ways in which all food touches our lives, providing readers (well this reader at least) with enough sustenance to care deeply about the fate of chiles specifically and food, land, and culture, in general through learning about the fragility and import of biodiversity in our food system. I find myself left with not just a taste for more chile peppers, but with a sense of concern, and conversely, a hope for their future.

Written by three active figures in the good food movement—chef and Slow Food USA board member Kurt Michael Friese; author, conservationist, ethnobotanist, father of Renewing America’s Food Traditions Alliance, and local food hero Gary Paul Nabhan; and my friend and fellow Slow Food Biodiversity committee member the agroecologist Kraig Kraft—this work brings together the insights of their varied expertise to explore the vast ramifications of climate change on food.

The three gastronauts take us from Sonora and its Chiltepines, to Florida and its Datils, to the Yucatan and its Habaneros, to the Gulf Coast and its Tabascos, to New Mexico and its diverse Native Chiles, to Maryland and the history of Fish peppers, and to Wisconsin and Southern Illinois and Beaver Dams, telling the stories of peppers and the amazing people dedicated to keeping them available. They weave in language, history, music, art, politics, tragedies, and recipes along the way.

Threats to biodiversity are in the multitude. Loss of small farms, farmers, and farmland, environmental degradation, industrialization of agriculture and our food system, and the decreasing understanding humans have of how land, food, culture, and health are tied together have been major players in loss of biodiversity for decades, but climate change may be throwing a whole host of new threats into play. In Chasing Chiles we learn about how temperature changes, floods, drought, storm damage, pestilence from shifting weather patterns seem to be increasing perils. While each locale will respond differently to climate change, Friese, Nahban, and Kraft remind us that to create resilience in our food system (i.e. to ensure food remains available to make it onto our plates) we must increase biodiversity among all food crops to provide a buffer. As all locales will respond differently to shifting weather patterns, so too will each varietal respond differently to these shifts.

I would be remiss in not mentioning certain personal and professional affinities for this subject matter. For I found it deeply gratifying to experience the synchronicity of burning my tongue on a soup flavored with Chiltepines found on a recent trip to Tucson and visit to Native Seeds as I sat down to begin reading and then to finish the book as I awaited the appearance of dozens of Beaver Dam pepper seedling I started to grow out here in the state they’ve been home to for nearly a hundred years. And as a dietitian, I must note the clear connection between biodiversity and health: as we’ve moved away from diverse diets towards increasingly refined, industrialized, mono-crop diets our health has suffered. By restoring biodiversity to our gardens, fields, and wild places we can restore our health. This book ends hopefully with some meaningful principles to eat and grow food to counter climate change.

Chasing Chiles is one hot, wild ride. And one worth taking.

Grow Endangered Fruits & Vegetables

2011-04-05T21:16:00.003-05:00

Being a champion for food biodiversity is something people can participate wherever their locale....the following is adapted from a message to Slow Food WiSE members and friends in the Milwaukee area.

Slow Food Wisconsin Southeast is encouraging folks in our region to join us in the effort to restore some special foods at risk of being lost. "Eat It to Save It" is the basic idea....

By growing endangered foods in your own backyard and by supporting farmers that do, you can help save these foods from extinction.

Recover Forgotten Fruit

The Milwaukee Apple—just one of hundreds of endangered fruits that have disappeared from our plates and has been replaced by fewer than a dozen commercial varieties.

Last year, our Slow Food WiSE chapter planted the Milwaukee Apple bench grafted trees (along with the varietals Pewaukee, Oneida, Ashmead’s Kernel, Autmun Beauty and one we’ve named the Stahl-Conrad Apple after the last tree standing on the original orchard site) in the spring of 2010 at the Historic Stahl Conrad Homestead in Hale’s Corners. This year, we will be planting more and are especially excited about sharing a couple of trees with Walnut Way! Join Slow Food WiSE in bringing back the Milwaukee Apple by planting your own bench grafted trees—Tony from Maple Valley Orchards said he will continue taking orders throughout the month of April.

Description of the Milwaukee Apple: This seedling apple was found under a Duchess tree and then developed by George Jeffrey of Milwaukee, WI. It appeared in commerce around 1899. It’s tough but thin skin is greenish yellow and marbled, dotted or blotched with reds. Its yellowish white flesh is tender and juicy, with a pleasant acid flavor good for most uses except as a fresh dessert apple.
–Renewing America’s Food Traditions Alliance, Forgotten Fruits of the Great Lakes Region Project

To learn more about Endangered Food of South Eastern Wisconsin, check out Food Biodiversity.

Grow Endangered Vegetables

“300,000 vegetable varieties have become extinct over the last century”
– Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity (from FAO reports on Agricultural Biodiversity)

“The US Ark of Taste is a catalog of over 200 delicious foods in danger of extinction. By promoting and eating Ark products we help ensure they remain in production and on our plates.” For more info: www.slowfoodusa.org

Consider these Ark of Taste heirlooms for your garden:

Ark of Taste Vegetables that have ties to Wisconsin:

Beaver Dam pepper * seeds recently spotted at Outpost’s Capital Drive location

Amish Paste Tomato

Sheboygan Tomato

Additional Ark of Taste Vegetables that may be well suited for growing in Wisconsin:

Amish Deer Tongue lettuce

Grandpa Admire's lettuce

Speckled lettuce

Tennis Ball lettuce (black seeded)

Early Blood Turnip-rooted beet

Bull Nose Large Bell pepper

Fish pepper

Hinkelhatz Hot pepper

Jimmy Nardello's Sweet Italian Frying pepper

Sheepnose pimiento

German Pink Tomato

Red Fig Tomato

Aunt Molly’s Husk Tomato (ground Cherry)

Valencia Tomato

Lina Cisco’s Bird Egg Bean

True Red Cranberry bean

Hidatsa Shield Figure bean

Yellow Indian Woman Bean

Hutterite Soup bean

Mayflower Bean

Turkey’ Hard Red Winter Wheat

Roy’s Calais flint corn

***Most of these seeds may be sourced through Seed Savers Exchange.***

Be a Biodiversity Champion--Volunteer!
Slow Food WiSE notes an array of opportunities for you to get invloved in restoring our region's food traditions--planting antique apple trees, tabling at events, building a simple website for local farmers (such as local producers of Sorghum Syrup on the Ark of Taste), starting seeds, researching heritage breeds …and so much more! Please do et us know if you are growing any of these foods or find others that are....contact me at Jcasey@slowfoodwise.org to get involved.

True Irish Food Traditions

2011-03-16T20:46:00.001-05:00

As the world turns with its tragedies, I found this quote from a Wisconsin good food advocate helpful in considering continuing on in light of emotional, social, and political turmoil... "Our job as advocates for a sustainable food system is to stay the course, even in the face of the tremendous political upheaval that is facing our beloved state."--REAP Founder, Jack Kloppenberg So on with it.

As folks around the country prepare to celebrate St Patrick’s Day with corned beef, cabbage, and green beer, I can’t help thinking that this is a rather impoverished version of Irish Food Heritage. It would be much like limiting our American food traditions to meat and potatoes...or French fries and soda....

Until recently though, this too was my perception of Irish food: I looked to my Sicilian heritage for any culinary cultural inspiration. When I was growing up, my non-Irish mother would honor my father’s full-Irish heritage by making corned beef and cabbage with potatoes and soda bread each year for St Patrick’s Day. I did enjoy it at the time certainly, but as I got older,and my thoughts about food evolved (i.e.; I became a snobby vegetarian cook for many years,) I began to suffer from a misconception that many suffer from: that Irish cuisine is dull, heavy, starchy, fatty, salty, unhealthy, unimaginative…basically, something to be avoided.

What it took me a while to realize is that this misconception was a result of many social, historic, and economic happenings colliding to thin out the rich culinary history of the Green Isle. This history is far too complex to review in this blogpost, but I’d like to take special note here of the Great Famine (Potato Famines) because this exemplifies the importance of food biodiversity so well. The potato (a food of South American origins) was introduced to Ireland in the 16th century and only became important when English and Anglo aristocracy reduced land allotments so drastically that the native Gaelic Irish peasantry could only survive by dedicating their small growing spaces to the nutrient dense potato. When potato blight swept through several years in a row, people were left with little else to eat, but the by-then all too scare wild foods. Over 1 million died. And many, many more emigrated.

But. Irish cuisine has been experiencing a renaissance (much like we are here in the US) of its own beautiful and varied food traditions. People like Darina Allen of the Ballymaloe Cookery School, and Slow Food Ireland, are stalwarts of good traditional Irish Food Heritage and Farm to Table Cookery. The foods of the Ireland have evolved over thousands of years and incorporate a rich blend of agricultural and hunter-gatherer traditions. Wild foods dominated the Celtic diet for eons, but agriculture took root over 5,000 years. The result: a wide variety of healthy and sustainable food ways co-existed until political winds changed and then industrial food systems superceded

A mini list of Traditional Irish ingredients includes: seafood & fish like cockles, smoked haddock, salmon, periwinkles, trout, oysters; fruit and nuts like hazelnuts, blackberries, rowanberries, apples; honey; cultivated vegetables like turnips, parsnips, leeks, potatoes, rutabaga, cabbage, kale, artichokes; wild foods like mushrooms, nettles, asparagus, sorrel, samphire, dulse, carrageen moss; grains and legumes like split peas, oats, barley, rye, wheat; game such as venison, pheasant, goose, wild pig; livestock like lamb, pork (bacon, sausage, pudding) and beef; Raw Milk Cheeses like Cheddars, Mileens, Cashel Blue, Gubbeen; whiskeys and good beer...and on.... This list puts me in mind of Wisconsin and its mix of wild and cultivated foods from woodland, water, and pasture.

To celebrate St Patrick’s holiday at my weekly cooking class, we made a smoked fish soup (recipe below) of mostly local ingredients, but alongside homemade Brown (Whole Wheat) Soda Bread, it reminded us of a land that gave us such lovely food and art and poetry... "The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." — W.B. Yeats

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Green Isle Soup

* 2 onions, diced

* 2 carrots, diced

* 1 large potato, diced

* 1 turnip, diced

* 1 small head cabbage, diced

* 1 tablespoons butter

* ~ 1 lb smoked fish (such as haddock or trout)

* 1 bay leaf

* 2 cloves garlic

* 6 cups of water or fish stock

* 1 tablespoon fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried

* 1 bunch parsley, chopped

* ½ cup half n half

* ¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg

Melt the vegetables in butter. Add fish and other ingredients except the last three.

Simmer until the vegetables and fish are cooked. Remove the bones from the fish and return the flesh to the soup.

Discard the bay leaf and finish with the nutmeg, half n half, and parsley. Serve with brown soda bread.

Local Farmer Open House

2011-03-08T09:43:00.003-06:00

This Saturday, you, your family, and friends, can learn about Local Food & Community Supported Agriculture from area farmers, chefs, and various local foodies at the Local Farmer Open House at the Urban Ecology Center. To spread the word, I asked my friend, the fabulous farmer-philosopher David Koslowski of Pinehold Gardens, to talk to the Fox 6 morning team about the upcoming open house for Get Active Today's "March is Nutrition Month" segment. Why? Because buying local food supports the health of people and places, as well as our community and the local economy (at a time when these things are sorely in need of everyone's support.) We can make a blanket statement about local food being nutritious, because not only does it tend to be fresher than what you find in supermarket shelves it also primarily exists on the "little to no processing end" of the processed food spectrum (as opposed to the gallons of uber-hyper-super-processed foods we consume laden with added salts, sugars, and fats, with little of the original sustenance remaining.) Check out Dave's spot here for a taste of what fun you can expect this Saturday at one of Milwaukee's treasure's, the UEC.

WI Budget Repair Bill Bad for Our Health

2011-02-23T18:43:00.000-06:00

I don't normally explore politics on this blog in quite this fashion..but the historic events going on in my home state of Wisconsin right now demand attention.

Not only could Governor Scott Walker's Budget Repair Bill undermine our communities’ socio-economic vitality by eliminating most public workers’ bargaining rights, reducing pay, and putting our public schools at risk, but our state public health programs could be effectively destroyed.

Because the bill would give the Walker administration power to gut funding to public health programs administered through the Department of Health Services our health programs for the impoverished—essential services our seniors, children, and farmers rely on—could be cut without any input from the legislature. I spoke with a nurse colleague of mine today who expressed concerns that our SeniorCare and BadgerCare programs could be slashed. “Immunization programs, free clinics, medication assistance for seniors, well women’s programs....they’re all at risk.”

This is why so many of my friends and colleagues have joined the tens of thousands protestors around the capital and here in Milwaukee as well. There are so many ways we can raise our voices against the dissolution of citizen rights. You can read the bill here and then take (or continue to take) action....you could start with something as simple as this: Join the Wisconsin Wave.

New Dietary Guidelines for Americans: Eat Less Junk

2011-02-03T10:31:00.001-06:00

When I told someone recently that the new 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) were finally published this week (!) she responded with something like, "So? People are just gonna go on eating what they're gonna eat." Oh ye of little faith... Regardless of the fact that people are ultimately responsible for what they put in their mouth, and knowing full well that the DGAs are created by the same body (USDA) that regulates the food industry, these guidelines are important because they help form the basis for nutrition policy in Federal food, nutrition, education, and information programs--think school lunch & SNAP--and can create tidal waves in the food industry.

At first glance, the 2010 DGAs have not changed much from the 2005 edition, but the changes made are significant. Firstly, these guidelines were not published, as per usual, as guidance for “healthy” Americans, because they then would not be applicable to the majority of the population due to the epidemic of lifestyle related chronic disease. These guidelines were published for an unhealthy population. The document starts off by describing the state of the nation’s health, and though these statistics are well known, they are startling: almost 50% of adults over the age of 20 have type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes, heart disease is rampant with 37% of the population having cardiovascular disease, overweight and obesity affects the majority of adults and a large minority of children, and health disparities abound. In light of these troubling facts, the new DGAs encourage people to consume fewer calories in general, less of them from junk food:

Focus on consuming nutrient-dense foods and beverages. Americans currently consume too much sodium and too many calories from solid fats, added sugars, and refined grains.²These replace nutrient-dense foods and beverages and make it difficult for people to achieve recommended nutrient intake while controlling calorie and sodium intake. A healthy eating pattern limits intake of sodium, solid fats, added sugars, and refined grains and emphasizes nutrient-dense foods and beverages—vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fat-free or low-fat milk and milk products,³seafood, lean meats and poultry, eggs, beans and peas, and nuts and seeds.

That's pretty solid nutrition advice.

These DGAs also address the food environment, exploring the Socio-Ecological Model of Health —there is a whole chapter dedicated to encouraging all sectors of society to work together to improve American’s food intake and activity patterns. One recommendation I enjoyed; "Develop and expand safe, effective, and sustainable agriculture and aquaculture practices to ensure availability of recommended amounts of healthy foods to all segments of the population." The elephant in the room here though seems to be the missing recommendation to stop our current subsidy system; which creates the overabundant supply of cheap SoFAS. But, the fact that the DGAs seriously consider the food environment, means we can probably expect more funds trickling down to community driven, good food programs.

There’s a lot we could go into, and I will explore more of the details, wading through particular food groups in future postings, but for now, suffice it to say that the DGAs do remain very industry friendly. One doesn’t expect to find issues such as resource depletion, food sovereignty, food justice, ecology, or traditional foodways seriouusly considered in the DGAs...but I somehow found myself hoping for it nonetheless. (When the USDA is charged with promoting the meat and dairy industries, how can we expect them to come right out and tell people to eat less CAFO beef or acknowledge the water pollution of large dairy operations or even that much of the American population is actually lactose intolerant???)

So while the DGAs do not really address questions of sustainability, if all American’s switched their diet to one patterned off these rec’s, we’d actually reduce our ecological footprint markedly from where it now stands while improving our health drastically.

Just What are You Eating?

2011-01-25T10:52:00.001-06:00

I do love this graphic of "What the Average American Consumes in a Year" by Visual Economics. The bad news (no surprises really, though startling to be sure) is that, on average, we're eating 110 lbs red meat, 192.3 lbs. of flour and cereal products, 141.6 lbs. of caloric sweeteners, including 42 lbs. of corn syrup, 29 lbs. of French fries, 23 lbs. of pizza and 24 lbs. of ice cream, 53 gallons of soda each year, averaging about one gallon each week, and 2.736 lbs. of sodium. But I was pleased to see we eat 415.4 lbs. of vegetables and 273.2 lbs. of fruit each year, on average. Though I suspect that potatoes (in the form of french fries and chips?) account for the vast majority of the veg intake--they usually do in food frequency questionnaires. Bottom-line is we're eating way too much of highly processed, carbon-intensive foods, and not enough of the whole foods that have been keep humans healthy for ages.

I thought of this graphic this morning after I talked about food labels with Kim Murphy on Fox 6 for Get Active Today (you can watch below.) Its an important food literacy issue simply because Americans eat so much processed food these days. While surveys show that many people look at food labels, they don't show that people really "get" them, and my encounters with clients confirms for me that most people don't understand them well, and therefore don't really know just what they are putting in their mouths. Confusing the issue can be the front of the label health claims....remember these claims ("3 grams fiber!" or "No cholesterol!") may or may not be relevant to the foods overall nutrient value. Reading the ingredient list and the nutrient facts label can help you sort out a packaged food's true nutrition nature.

Whole or minimally processed foods, like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans. fish, dairy, nuts, pastured meats, eggs, and so on, are naturally nutrient dense in their original (or close to original) states. My advice is to choose plenty of these foods and learn to understand food labels. You can go to Get Active Today for a helpful handout on label reading.

What is on the plate for 2011?

2011-01-04T18:50:00.008-06:00


Will Americans get ever closer to a McDonalds or have more access to fresh, local, healthy food in 2011?

The turn of the year always makes me curious for what the next 365 days will hold….


Nitrogen Contaminated Water

Of course, we can expect more of the same problems to unfold: because we can suppose that Americans will continue to watch almost as much television as a full-time occupation (~35 hours each week) and will each drink over 50 gallons of sweetened beverages on average this year—we can expect that public health problems like obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes will continue to grow. And along with many other nasty habits, because our growing population continues to choose a highly carbon intensive diet; high in industrialized meat and highly processed foods sold in highly processed packages—we will continue to raise the level of carbon in the atmosphere while it’s already at dangerous levels. And because American farmers will apply so many pesticides and spread so much nitrogen on their fields this year, we can expect to see the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico expand even further, watch more fresh ground water become undrinkable due to nitrogen levels, and continue to put ag bees and wildlife at risk. Another 27,000 species will likely be lost from our planet this year…with much of the loss due to agriculture.

Milwaukee Farmer's Market

But we can also anticipate more of the positives that make up the burgeoning food movement—farmers markets and the organic sector will continue to expand, as markets grew in number by 16% last year and the organic sector has grown by ~20% in each of the past several. The increases in small scale, sustainable ag support will allow more farmers to grow more produce and to raise animals on pasture and so we’ll have access to healthier foods. More young people will learn about food traditions and how to cook, garden, farm (this last one we’ll have to cross our fingers that more people will someday get into farming than are getting out of it) through the increasing number of programs like school gardens, college curricula, and farm internships. Work will continue to ensure that endangered foods; like the Narragansett Turkey, Milwaukee Apple, Lake Michigan Whitefish, and Beaver Dam Pepper remain.

Will Zebra Mussels taste
anything like these
Sicilian beauties?

And we’ll likely see more innovative solutions come out of the woodwork and into the mainstream—like the invasive species diet . Maybe this idea can be simply defined as eating invasive species so that the pressure of their invasion is reduced. Here in Wisconsin friends and I have enjoyed delicious concoctions like invasive garlic mustard pestos, but what I really wonder about is zebra mussels—will someone find a way to harvest & eat those mollusks that are taking over Lake Michigan? A Spanish marine biologist I met at the Salone del Gusto is successfully marketing invasive yet deliciously edible seaweed along his coast. And a big question for the world of eco-minded nutrition professionals—will the soon to be released, USDA's 2010 Dietary Guidelines for American’s finally address sustainability???

No matter what else happens this year, the more agroecology, nutritional ecology, food biodiversity, traditional foodways, and just plain old kitchen wisdom we invest in, the more we will improve our environmental and collective health…what we put on or plates will help to shape the things to come.

Solstice Sustenance

2010-12-21T13:39:00.000-06:00

Sicilian alter of light....

The winter solstice marks the shortest day & longest night of the year...it is a time to consider our relationship to the sun and all of the energy its light provides; light energy that makes possible life on earth.

Though today is also the first calendar day of winter, we've been in full snow mode for quite a while here in the upper Midwest. Its times like these when our food traditions just seem to make both poetic and actual sense--our bodies crave the nourishing hearty greens, root vegetables, winter squash, and other "good keepers" like apples, onions, shallots, and so on that have graced larders for centuries. All those foods that have undergone the remarkable process of storing up the sun's energy so that we can be fed.

Having recently returned from Terra Madre, Slow Food's international meeting in Italy, I was fortunate to learn about many different countries food traditions. Here in the Great Lakes region, winter fruit and veg are part of our food heritage and the joy of eating in place. As a cook and a dietitian, I encourage people to eat their veggies all year round...not just because they are good for us, but because they taste divine. Earlier this morning I visited the Wake Up team on Fox 6 for Get Active Today to share some of my favorite seasonal produce recipes to celebrate the season. You can watch the clip below and get the recipes here.

Happy Terra Madre Day 2010

2010-12-10T10:00:00.021-06:00

From a letter to Slow Food WiSE chapter contacts:

Terra Madre Day, December 10th, is the day the worldwide Slow Food community has set aside to celebrate our connections to the land; terra madre; mother earth. This is a day to reflect on our relationships to food and community and on ways we can deepen these relationships.

This October, I was honored to attend Terra Madre—Slow Food’s biennial meeting in Turin, Italy. From our own food community, Larry and Sharon Adams of Walnut Way, and myself, a dietitian and good food advocate, joined the more than 6,000 delegates, from over 150 countries. Small producers, chefs, farmers, fishers, educators, and activists, came together to connect, share stories, and strengthen their voices through the collective, international work. Over sixty meetings and workshops took place at Terra Madre, exploring subjects such as Food Policy, Sustainable Education, Healthy Food in Schools, Eco-Friendly Farming, Fair Trade, Agro-biodiversity, Food Sovereignty, Hunger & Poverty, Slow Fish, Cooks & Places, the Youth Food Movement, and so much more. The experience was, in short, amazing.

I ran into other Wisconsinites, such as Chef Dan Fox of the Madison Club, and Joe Sabol of Sabol Family Farm, in the bustling halls of Terra Madre. And while next door at the Salone del Gusto, an incredible exposition hall of place-based foods from around the world, I was delighted to find a larger than life picture of my friend and past delegate, Martha Davis Kipcak, former Slow Food WiSE chapter leader, current Slow Food Regional Governor, and food activist, along with a prescient quote, “To act locally means to know your community and be a part of it.” This led me to think about other past delegates from our community—chef Dave Swanson of Braise, urban farmer Will Allen of Growing Power, farmer Jeff Preder of Jeff-Leen Farms, farmer Katie Bjorkman of Earth Harvest Farm, and student (at the time) Lianna Bishop, now of Slow Food WiSE & Center for Resilient Cities. All people devoted to creating a good, clean, and fair food system, here and beyond.

Terra Madre is not just a simple meeting or conference. It is a network of people from around the globe working together to create a united voice in support of transforming the way we eat. “Food is life. Food is us,” said an Ethiopian elder at the Opening Ceremony. On this Terra Madre day, if not every day, we can take time to remember this concept because food is life. Happy Terra Madre Day to you and yours!

If you’d like to talk about Terra Madre, food traditions, or biodiversity, please contact me at jcasey@slowfoodwise.org.

Peace,
Jennifer Casey

Read more about Terra Madre.

In Gratitude

2010-11-22T14:34:00.001-06:00

Boston Marrow Squash--great for pie!

The world wide web is a flurry of Thanksgiving articles and blog posts. I have added my own to the throng with a healthy, local food themed piece on Get Active Today’s website, replete with recipes made with ingredients sourced at the winter farmer’s market.

This year, I’ve noted that the many people harping on the gluttony and over consumption that can often be involved in American holidays has ratcheted up a notch; some have gone so far as to boycott Thanksgiving. That seems a shame. I like to think that this is one holiday where we can truly, easily, observe and celebrate our eternal connection to the land. To give thanks for the many things that make the act of eating together possible is something I feel we should do more often. So while many feel this holiday has gone too far (and really, its easy to agree when you consider the average Thanksgiving meal holds more than double our daily calorie needs) I think the answer is not to banish it, but to bring it back down to its earthly origin.

While Thanksgiving is an American holiday (and though we get the origin story of the original Thanksgiving wrong over and over again) giving thanks for a good harvest is something all cultures have done for the millennia. More generally speaking, gratitude is something that all cultures, all religions express, and nowadays science has shown us that gratitude is associated with well-being.

So in this spirit of gratitude I reflect on what I am thankful for this year: I’m thankful for the birds and the bees and all the pollinators of our fruit trees and plants, the farmers who’ve worked on bent knee and with sore backs to cultivate food from the soil for my table, the little garden that could still flush with herbs in my yard, the great diversity of lifeforms around the globe, the clean water that flows out of my tap from the fresh water reservoir that is Lake Michigan, and for the people I love both near and far that nourish my soul...

Reflections on Terra Madre 2010

2010-11-03T19:49:00.003-05:00

Terra Madre

Having just returned from Terra Madre, Slow Food’s international conference in Torino, Italy, I find myself in awe of and inspired by the beautiful people I met from around the world—sustainable farmers and fishers, food producers, chefs, educators and activists working towards a food system that is good, clean, and fair. For everyone. Thousands of people from over 150 countries came together to share their stories. At the Opening Ceremony an Ethiopian man said, “Food is life. Food is us.” This seemed to me to sum up the spirit of Terra Madre. The practice of Terra Madre is found in the continuing use of traditional knowledge about food, land and sea stewardship to guide our way forward.

To some, this may sound obvious. To others, it may seem naive, unrealistic. But this is not pure rhetoric. In moving towards an industrialized, anonymous food system over the last several decades, we have lost our close connection to food and land and with great consequences. We are besieged by the problems of global warming, hunger, chronic disease, pollution, resource depletion, loss of biodiversity, and the marked injustices faced by people on both ends of the spectrum—eaters and producers alike. The further away we’ve removed ourselves from the source of our food, from knowing and understanding our food, the worse things have become. A Guarani man from Brazil put it like this, “The world is sick.” But, he went on to say, “There are other ways. The world can and must change.”

Terra Madre stands for change through recognizing our roots—seeking innovative solutions to modern problems through the collective wisdom of our tried and true foodways. Those sane traditions that have kept people and places happy, healthy, and whole for generations; practices like sustainable fishing, ecologically sound farming, gardening, seed saving, cooking, and preserving can tie together the past and the future. Corporate interests would like us to believe that they have the key to feeding the world, but while they may have a monopoly, big ag can never feed the world in a way that fosters true health of people and places. We need the diversity of our worldwide communities instead of “putting all of our eggs in one basket.” The one size fits all mentality found in the practices of industrial ag’s GMOs, monocrops, and seed patenting only compounds the problems we face.

Over sixty meetings and workshops took place at Terra Madre, exploring subjects such as Food Policy, Sustainable Education, Healthy Food in Schools, Eco-Friendly Farming, Fair Trade, Agro-biodiversity, Food Sovereignty, Hunger & Poverty, Slow Fish, Cooks & Places, the Youth Food Movement, and so much more. One of the most exciting workshops I attended was a global meeting of indigenous people working together to create the Terra Madre Indigenous People Network. The TMIP Network will host their first meeting in 2011 to form a united voice, strong enough to take to the United Nations and to be heard around the world. “We have a lot to tell the world,” one woman explained. She affirmed what Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, had said at the Opening Ceremony, “Keepers of traditional knowledge; natives, farmers, women, elderly….should be listened to.”

Next door to Terra Madre was the Salone del Gusto –a vast artisanal food marketplace and exposition of food producers that embody the principles of Slow Food. Here, delegates from Terra Madre, and thousands of other visitors were able to taste food and drink from Europe, Asia, Africa, the America's and beyond. Raw milk cheeses, fruit preserves, cured meats, pastries, breads, dates, wild rice, legumes and beans, nut pestos and pastes, wine, spirits, seaweed, seafood, fermented foods, and much, much more were on display. Foods especially in danger of extinction were highlighted through Slow Food's Presidia projects. (In the USA we have only a few Presidia, including wild rice or Manoomin, but the Ark of Taste, a catalogue of more than 200 foods, works along these same lines of preserving biodiversity.) The Salone helped me to truly understand the concept of terroir-- the unique flavors that come from the soil, geography, weather, of where a food was produced. One cheesemaker said to me, “I want you to taste my land.” And I did.

After the conference was over, I had an opportunity to explore a bit of my own cultural food heritage. Taking the train down to Sicily, I was able to find my grandmother’s birthplace. A small mountain village overlooking the sea with terraced groves of olives and citrus dotted with figs, persimmons, grapes, prickly pears, wild mint, fennel, hens, and sheep. In Sicily I tasted the sea in the anchovy, sardine, octopus, squid, eel, swordfish, and jackfish that the small fisherman had brought to the fish market that morning. I tasted the land in the olive oil, sheep’s milk cheeses, almonds, pistachios, tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, beans, strawberries, grapes, olives, and vino. It was lovely. And the people of Sicily seemed warm and welcoming and truly happy. My friend said of the fishermen at the market, “they seemed the happiest people on the planet.” Imagine, living in close concert with your surroundings, living in balance, and finding pleasure… In my travels throughout Italy I witnessed people eating together. In homes, cafes, street-scapes, restaurants, markets I saw people enjoying each other’s company.

I left Italy at first with some reluctance, but in the end, returned with a renewed passion for seeking out the terroir of my home: the wild rice, winter squash, raw milk cheeses, hickory nuts, apples, organic oats in my pantry, the wild asparagus that will shoot up next spring, and the berries that will follow, the lake fish, the wild game. All places have foods worth celebrating. It is our job as humans to ensure that this food diversity remains. So, as my Sicilian grandmother would say, “Mangiare, mangiare!” Jc

Slow Food on Fox!

2010-10-19T10:10:00.008-05:00

In this morning's interview on Fox 6, as a Get Active Today advisory board member, I got a chance to talk about Slow Food. I will indeed be traveling to Terra Madre (Slow Food's international conference in Italy) tomorrow to meet, share with and learn from farmers, producers, chefs, educators, activists, and youth dedicated to a sustainable food system. Learn more at slowfoodwise.org, terramadre.info, and getactivetoday.com. I will be certain to share upon my return...ciao!

Eat Local Challenge 2010

2010-09-01T10:06:00.000-05:00

The Eat Local Challenge begins today in Milwaukee--everywhere, people will be seeking out their local farms, markets, gardens, and restaurants for sustenance. To celebrate this fourth year of an increasingly successful challenge, I thought I'd share some local food menu ideas I put together for the 2007 challenge...people are always asking me for menu suggestions. Also, you can scroll down to watch yesterday's television spot on Fox 6 where I try to make some connections between eating locally and eating healthfully...

Eat Local Challenge Menu Suggestions
September in Southeastern Wisconsin presents us with the opportunity to choose from a wide array of beautiful locally grown & made foods. The harvest is in full swing & so it becomes easier than one might expect to “eat local”. I’ve compiled some menu ideas to help celebrate the season in a nutritionally balanced way (i.e.; not eating solely tomatoes for a week). Suggested foods range from home-grown to locally-produced and rely heavily upon our local farmers’ bounty. There are a few ideas for those who want to go “100% local” as well as for those who are interested in exploring the idea, but are constrained by time or taste.
Just the main ingredients are listed; the seasonings & techniques are up to you. I’ve assumed use of butter over oil (unless you decide to purchase Wisconsin made pumpkin seed oil or use what’s already in your pantry) and creative use of brightly flavored dairy products like plain yogurt, blue cheeses, sour cream over vinegars & lemons (unless you can find locally made apple cider vinegar), along with heaps of fresh herbs to provide the major flavors. I’ve included some sourcing information at the end. This is in no way a comprehensive list, but one to build upon. Enjoy the challenge…
- Jennifer Casey, Sep 2007

Breakfast
Omelet with Feta Cheese, Tomatoes, & Herbs
Breakfast Red Potatoes
Sliced Watermelon
Milk

Whole Grain Toast with Butter (Apple, Maple, or Cream Butter)
Yogurt sweetened with Maple Syrup
McIntosh Apple
Fair trade, Locally roasted Coffee with Honey & Cream

Locally baked Breakfast Pastry
Homemade Crepes stuffed with Ricotta & Sautéed Pears
Sparkling Apple Wine

Apple Pancakes
Sliced Cantaloupe
Cornmeal-Apple Porridge
Yogurt, Plum, & Granola Parfait

Lunch
Simple Soyman Burger on Whole Grain Bun with Arugula & Tomato
Potato & Scallion Salad

Pita pockets spread with Herb Cream Cheese & stuffed with Sprouts & Bell Pepper
Sliced Carrots & Apple
Yogurt

Chicken & Wild Rice Salad with Broiled Fennel
Grilled Cheddar Cheese & Heirloom Tomato-Basil Sandwich
Mixed Green Salad

Egg Salad & sliced Cucumber Sandwich
Watercress Salad

Toasted Summer Sausage, Button Mushroom, & Gruyere Sandwich
Spinach Salad

Cauliflower Asiago Quiche
Tomato, Basil, Fresh Mozzarella Salad

Dinner
Grass-fed Beef Filet topped with Caramelized Onions
Mashed Potatoes with Rosemary
Sautéed Swiss Chard
Apple Pie
Stone’s Throw Pinot Noir

Creamy Polenta topped with Tomato-Garlic Salad
Pan-seared Chicken wit Thyme & Garlic
Sautéed Onions, Bell Peppers, & Fennel
Honeyed Melon with Mascarpone

Chicken Bratwurst
Sweet Corn
Grilled Zucchini & Eggplant
Blue Cheese & Chive Potato Salad
New Glarus Fat Squirrel Ale

Roasted Butternut Squash or Pumpkin with Sage
Wild “Fried” Rice with Eggs & Scallions
Fresh Shelled Pinto Beans & Green Beans

Pan-seared Brown Trout
Roasted Root Vegetables (Beets, Sweet Potatoes, Red Potatoes, &/or Parsnips)
Green Salad with Goat Chevre & Shaved Fennel

Selection of Wisconsin Cheeses
Wild Grapes, Apples, Pears, &/or Ever Bearing Strawberries

Baked Garlic
Potter’s Crackers

Farmers’ Market Soup
possibly made of
Onions, Celery, Carrots, Garlic,
Potatoes, Tomatoes, Swiss Chard, & Herbs

ocean's decline

2010-08-29T15:28:00.002-05:00

Image Source: Nature article

When a friend recently told me about a new report out showing that phytoplankton, the source of much of the world's oxygen and which stands at the very base of much of the planet's food chain, has declined by forty percent since 1950, I was shocked. Jaw droppingly shocked. Oh my. This is big news. Phytoplankton makes the world go around. The reason for the decline, scientists say, is global warming. You can read about the research in this Nature news piece, "Ocean greenery under warming stress, A century of phytoplankton decline suggests that ocean ecosystems are in peril."

(Closer to home we've seen what happens when plankton is depleted. When invasive zebra mussels depleted Lake Michigan's plankton supply, native perch, much beloved for its starring role in Friday fish fries, drastically declined. Local outdoors writer, Paul Smith, wrote about the 90% reduction in Lake Michigan perch in less than twenty years in this Journal Sentinel article.)

This phytoplankton research adds to what we already know about the precarious state of sea life. Earlier this summer, we learned about the massive worldwide decline of the much beloved, warm blooded, blue fin tuna population in an epic New York Times Magazine piece by Paul Greenberg titled "Tuna's End." Blue fin tuna is one among many species that are over-fished world wide. Pair that with suboptimal ocean habitat, due to ocean acidification and ruination of breeding grounds due to industrial fishing practices and pollution, and we can expect to soon see the end of the "Age of Tuna." Many groups are calling for a complete moratorium on blue fin tuna fishing.

What's an eater to do? Of course we know the health benefits of seafood, especially those with flesh rich in omega 3 fatty acids, such as wild salmon and tuna. (It's interesting to me to note that within the sea-food-chain, the omega 3's in fish originate in phytoplankton.) I explored this issue back in 2008 in the blogpost "Finding Sustainable Seafood." That post identifies some options for non-marine sources of dietary omega-3s and includes a link to a sustainable seafood selector tool. Here's another great resource:

Quick Tips from the Sustainable Seafood Guide on the NRDC website.

Eat lower on the food chain
Buy American
Buy wild
Eat local
Buy from trusted retailers
Ask where your fish came from
Look for the blue, Marine Stewardship Council sticker

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line: Obviously, global warming must be halted if we hope to allay the very worst effects of ocean acidification and species decline. As eaters, we can choose to follow a low-carbon diet and to think carefully about our seafood choices. We do have power in the food choices we make everyday. Our appetites shape the world.

Procuring Nourishment

2010-07-31T13:33:00.001-05:00

A trip to the farmer's market this morning, and an afternoon spent in the garden yesterday, left me musing about the procurement of food. The word procure, comes from the Latin term procurare, meanings, "to take care of." Pro = for + cura = care. Just how much care do we, en masse, spend in obtaining our food?

Farmer's market shoppers with reusable bags brimming with gorgeous produce aside, I see evidence all around of just how little time, thought, or care goes into to how, why, and when people get something to fill their bellies or quench their thirst. The good food movement is on the upswing, but most Americans remain out of touch with the source of their nourishment.

Once upon a time humans spent a great deal of time and care feeding themselves. Now we leave it up to a small handful of very powerful food corporations (which bring us factory made burgers and industrial grade sweeteners) to do it for us. In the neighborhood in which I work, as I walk to our health center's community garden plot, I find garbage cans and sidewalks littered with fast food wrappers and empty sweetened beverage containers and people guzzling high fructose corn syrup like it's going out of style. Not to point fingers. Federal policies and corporate campaigns have led to these easily obtainable, cheap, processed foodstuffs. Each convenience store and gas station I walk past proudly announces they accept food stamps inside. Peering down the aisles of these stores, I find little that would qualify as healthy options. You know this scene.

Ironically, or maybe tragically, only two farmer's markets in the Milwaukee metro area currently accept food stamps. There does exist the Farmer's Market Nutrition Program for seniors and WIC participants, but the elders I know who signed up for the SFMNP came home with a $25 coupon for the season. Twenty five dollars won't get people their recommended daily servings of vegetables for an entire season, maybe not even an entire week. Why is it, I keep asking myself, do we subsidize cheap food on the agricultural level with corn and soybean subsidies? (see Gov Ag Policies and Obesity.) Wouldn't the sane thing to do, from a public health perspective, be to make it as easy as possible for all people to get the foods that help to prevent and control obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and such?

Bottomline: The change we so drastically need to make in our food system can't just come from the top down in the shape of smarter food assistance & subsidy policies; it must come from individuals and communities as well. This is why local groups such as the Victory Garden Initiative, Growing Power, Walnut Way, and even our little Circle Garden project are so important--because it is these initiatives that teach people to be more self sufficient by growing nutritious food...to take more care in finding something to eat.

Gov Ag Policies and Obesity

2010-07-06T18:59:00.007-05:00

Just what do government agricultural policies have to do with obesity?

It seems, to me, a short jump from current government ag subsidies to our toxic, obesogenic and diabetogenic food environment. If we are what we eat and we eat what’s available and what’s available is what we grow a lot of (read: subsidized corn and soy) and what’s not available is a lot of whole plant foods (read: unsubsidized vegetables) then we end up eating a lot of the easily accessible, cheap, processed junk. But we know this.

Maybe the thing to ask ourselves is, “why are we eating a lot of cheap junk?” Is it because we are human and born with a sweet tooth and are wired to eat whenever able? I think so. Yes. In part. Eating past our current caloric needs is evolutionarily ingrained. It wasn’t until very recently in history when humans had more than enough to eat. “Feasting” was protective for the once commonplace times of “famine”. We can blame it on our genes. But not completely. Because the genes for problems like Type 2 Diabetes and Obesity are really only expressed when the environment promotes it. It also wasn’t until very recently in human history that we had twin epidemics of diabetes and obesity. Take home point: when we flood the market with consumable junk, we consume it.

In light of this dynamic, I found it interesting to read, on the same day, one article about how the USDA has agreed that a soda tax would help combat obesity, and another article about how the USDA is entrenched in subsidies (which prompt cheap soda.)

In the American Prospect article “Slowed Food Revolution” author Heather Rodgers does a great job explaining why organic/sustainable food costs more, why small farmers aren’t able to make a living, and exploring why our policy makers in Washington are opposed to change.

One of the salient points she makes is that the USDA is trying to support organic while not altering support for industrialed ag. This climate makes it impossible for the small organic farmer, in part because it interferes with the real costs of food to show up at supermarkets. Without changing the way the USDA treats industrialized ag, artificially cheap food (propped up by subsidies and other support mechanisms) will continue to be cheap at the market while small farmers can barely keep their land, let alone pay themselves a decent wage.

If the USDA agrees that a “sin tax” on soda would result in a significant decline in obesity, why would they continue to, literally, subsidize it?

The average American child and adolescent gets 10-15% of their total calorie intake from beverages. With more than a third of our children overweight or obese this is a major problem requiring a significant shift in policy and perspective...

The upcoming 2012 Farm Bill is the major battleground in which these issues will be fought over. Many have argued the name changed to Food Bill because it is the primary instrument of the government to shape national food policy (think school lunch, food stamps, subsidies and so on.) Changing the Farm Bill to include real food policies will make a difference for real people.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line: The vast majority of government support for ag in this country is geared toward big time, industrialized operations. To review: subsidized corn and soy is turned into the vast quantities of processed foods and feed lot animal products that line our supermarket shelves. What if we instead supported sound ag practices? Like growing fruits and vegetables. And pasturing animals. Then supermarkets aisles might not be so crowded with cheap junk. And the nations’ eaters might not be so sick.

Endangered Apple Finds A Home

2010-06-22T16:11:00.001-05:00

The concept of food biodiversity and it's essential role in health of people and planet has been explored here in past blog posts on this site. All food groups have suffered loss of diversity at the hands of industrial agriculture, including the dear pomme. Read about the work we've been doing locally to help recover forgotten fruit on the Slow Food USA blog. And for more information about endangered foods of Southeast Wisconsin, check out Food Biodiversity.

Gulf Grief

2010-05-23T11:45:00.002-05:00

Image from Huffington Post slideshow of oil spill photos.

The BP oil spill warrants the growing outrage with its monstrous impact. While most people I speak with are worried about how this will impact the price of gas, I’m worried about the price of fish. Not about how it will affect my wallet, but what it means for ocean ecology as hundreds of species are at risk. Add this insult to the already injured—the Gulf of Mexico, an important biological, economic and gastronomic region, has not been thriving for quite some time. The notorious dead zone, a hypoxic area the size of New Jersey created by Midwestern industrial ag fertilizer runoff carried to the Gulf via the mighty Mississippi, has already taken a toll on aquatic life and industry. Now, post oil spill, thousands of miles of Gulf waters are closed.

Who knows how this will affect seafood prices at your local grocery store. Sources disagree as to how much of our nation’s fish intake comes from the Gulf catch; I’ve read as little as 1% and as high as one-third. But certainly, we get most of our seafood from places far, far away. Gulf shrimp is one of the many edible sea creatures that will certainly be affected by the spill, and unfortunately, Gulf shrimp is one of the few sustainable shrimp options. Most of the shrimp eaten in the states come from places like the shrimp farms of Malaysia: where the factory like methods of raising shrimp degrade coastal habitats and communities. (See the Environmental Justice foundations article: Farming the Sea - unregulated shrimp farming, the environment and people.) Can we continue to export these ugly practices just so we can buy our seafood cheap?

Even if the cost of shrimp doesn’t go up, this has cost us. At the rate we are spoiling ecosystems and waterways it is becoming increasingly hard to support a growing population on this small planet.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line: Finding sustainable seafood appears to be getting harder, but the nutrition benefits make it worth researching. SlowFood USA recently stated in their monthly Food Chain, “We can also support the ongoing rebuilding of the Gulf and other regional seafood industries by making sure the seafood we buy is domestic and sustainably harvested.” See past post: Finding Sustainable Seafood to learn more. And if you’d like to get involved with relief efforts, consider supporting organizations like the Gulf Restoration Network.

Another Reason to Go Organic

2010-05-18T11:30:00.002-05:00

Crop Dusting Helicopter-(Ironically Beautiful)

Not to be overly dramatic, but toxic chemicals in our food may be messing with our kid's heads.

The newest addition to the growing list of reasons to choose organic food: high urinary organophosphate concentrations have been linked to twice the incidence of ADHD in children 8-15 years old. Organophospates (OP), which are used in agriculture precisely because they attack the nervous system of insects, are known to accumulate in human tissues, though its often believed to be in low enough levels to not impact our health. We are, afterall, a lot bigger than insects. But if size matters, than wouldn't our children be the canaries in the coal mine? A new study in the journal Pedriatrics, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Urinary Metabolites of Organophosphate Pesticides, explores the high rates of ADHD and pesticide metabolites. From the authors:

WHAT’S KNOWN ON THIS SUBJECT: Exposure to organophosphates has been associated with adverse effects on neurodevelopment, such as behavioral problems and lower cognitive function. Studies have focused, however, on populations with high levels of exposure, relative to the general population.

WHAT THIS STUDY ADDS: We conducted a study with 1139 children 8 to 15 years of age, representative of the US population. The findings showed that children with higher urinary levels of organophosphate metabolites were more likely to meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD.

So what does this mean for eaters? Though this study has not shown a causal relationship (meaning we can't say that OPs cause ADHD) I do think it is better to be safe than sorry. I whole heartedly recommend choosing foods grown without toxic pesticides (or at least those grown without a lot of pesticides or those that are known to have lower residues of pesticides.) The Environmental Working Group has published a list, called the Dirty Dozen, of the twelve typically most contaminated fruits and veggies: peaches, strawberries, apples, domestic blueberries, nectarines, cherries, imported grapes, celery, sweet bell peppers, spinach, kale, collard greens and potatoes. These foods would be best to buy organic or to grow naturally in your own garden plot. The foods found by the EWG to have the least pesticide residue, the Clean Fifteen, (sixteen are actually listed) are onions, sweet corn, sweet peas, asparagus, cabbage, eggplant, sweet potatoes, avocados, pineapples, mangoes, kiwi, domestic cantaloupe, watermelon, grapefruit and honeydew.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line: Eat your organic veggies and fruits and plenty of them! For a clear explanation of what organic means and many more reasons why you might want to choose organic, read the past blog post, "Is Organic Better for You?". For those folks who don't have the extra money for pesticide free food at the market, consider growing your own. Check out Kitchen Gardeners International or the Milwaukee's own Victory Garden Initiative for more information and gardening resources.

Earth Day 2010

2010-04-22T18:51:00.001-05:00

Earlier today, someone asked me what they could do to celebrate Earth Day. I responded, "Planting a tree or giving up factory farmed meat for a day (or forever) would be a good place to start." Then I found this brilliantly begun message in my inbox and felt I had to pass it on....

Dear Jennifer,

You are destroying the ocean. We all are. We're polluting oceans with plastic waste and chemicals, we're overfishing, and we're causing climate change to warm and acidify our ocean waters.
But this Earth Day, you can do something about it. Since we are the problem, we can also be the solution. We can change our habits and protect our oceans forever.
We've partnered with our friends at Participant Media, the entertainment company behind such films as An Inconvenient Truth and Oceans, to help start a movement of people dedicated to taking simple steps to reduce three of the main threats to oceans: plastic waste, overfishing and climate change.
This Earth Day, you can make a difference by signing a public pledge to take at least one action to help save our oceans »
Here are the three most important steps you can take to help protect our oceans:
1. Choose reusable bottles and bags instead of plastic ones. Americans together use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour and each use 500 plastic bags annually. These can take anywhere from 1,000 to 1 million years to degrade, and are why plastic constitutes 90% of all trash floating on the ocean's surface.
2. Eat non-endangered seafood. Due to our over-consumption of seafood, 90% of the world's large fish, such as tuna, swordfish, flounder and sharks have been killed in the past 50 years. If we continue at our current rates, all salt-water fish could be extinct by 2048.
3. Reduce your carbon footprint. Carbon intensive activities such as driving, flying, and inefficient home heating are warming ocean waters, which could be catastrophic for millions of ocean species unable to adapt to higher temperatures. The extinction of any number of these species could in turn cause a collapse of the marine food chain, affecting everything from plankton to polar bears.
We can change all this by together changing our own individual behavior. Together we can ensure healthy, clean oceans for future generations. It all starts with people like us deciding to make small changes that can have a big impact.
Sign the pledge today and commit to help save the world's oceans »
Thank you for taking a stand,

– The Change.org Team in partnership with Participant Media

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line: There are many ways to celebrate Earth Day with good food. If you need more ideas, check out last year's post Eating Green for Earth Day.

smaller = < climate change

2010-04-19T13:11:00.001-05:00

"Can we imagine smaller?" Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy, The End of Nature, and now Eaarth, asked in talk last Friday night at the Urban Ecology Center.

Smaller, as opposed to business as usual, is what it will take to mitigate the very worst effects of global warming. Smaller seems revolutionary, but as we are already running into the limits of growth, what is really radical is not doing anything. Smaller is necessary to slow down the heartbreaking losses related to climate change that are already occurring: the arctic melting, island nations disappearing, glacial water supplies being lost faster than they can be replaced, extinction of species, increased flooding & stronger storms. "We are not allowed to bet on this," said Bill. We are not allowed to gamble away the things we collectively need and love as humans.

Bill explained how we have already "built a new" planet in the past 200 years of burning fossil fuels, releasing carbon into the atmosphere that took millions of years to lay down. The result: the earth's temperature has been raised by one full degree, there is 5% more moisture in the atmosphere, and 30% increase in oceanic acidity. Each of these changes has led to myriad of problems, as mentioned, but the things that make it seem real to us are the stories with which we can identify. In the face of all the dramatic stories, I was surprised how deeply I was saddened when Bill shared, very matter of factly while he was really talking about something else, that his home state of Vermont (once my home state) is losing their maple trees. Just imagine; no sugar on snow.

Many people, especially leaders of large nations such as ours (as evidenced by the outcome of Copenhagen,) are in a state of denial, but the science is clear: it's real, we've caused it, and we need to take some drastic actions now. The safe level of carbon in the atmosphere is 350 parts per million (ppm), as found by leading climate scientist Jim Hansen and his team (tipped off when the arctic started melting in 2007.) We're now at 387ppm.

Enter the 350 campaign. Bill Mckibben and a few grad students have started a global campaign to draw attention to climate change. 350.org is home to a global network of citizens of the earth concerned about the present and the future. October 24, 2009, the international day of action on Climate Change, was reported by CNN the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history. Go to 350.org to see thousands of pictures of people from every continent taking action. Maybe you'll see the photo of the Bangladeshi orphans who apparently sent a not along with their photo that said something like, "even though no one cares for us, we care about the earth." The environmental movement is often seen as elitest, but Bill made the (too often missed) point that those with the least resources suffer the worst from environmental disasters; climate change is no different.

The 350 campaign has announced 10/10/10 as a Global Work Day. From the website:

2010 is the year we
Get To Work.
With ideas and input from thousands of organizers from around the world, we've formed a climate action plan for 2010.
We'll get to work to start changing our communities, and get to work to make our leaders realize that they actually need to lead. It's a plan that may well break the logjam and get us moving. But only, of course, if we work together to make it happen.

What will you do in your community?

One final point that resonated with me and I think is important for us all to think about. When asked about personal lifestyles, Bill responded by talking about how our choices do matter, but that we should be, "saving some of the energy we use to perfect our own lives" to get political. Global warming is a global problem. The 350 campaign is a way to move world leaders to the end result of putting a price on carbon to reduce emissions significantly everywhere.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line: The food system accounts for an estimated 20% of carbon emissions. See past blog posts Changing Climate Change, Industrial Nutrition, and 50% Less Meat, and for ideas on low-carbon diets. Changing our food system to one that emits less doesn't have to be all drudgery either. One study found that people, on average have ten times more conversations while shopping at a farmer's market than while at the supermarket. I'd love to see a study exploring how much more famer's market shoppers enjoy their local, fresh food too:)

Jamie's Food Revolution

2010-04-03T09:34:00.002-05:00

If you haven't yet seen British chef Jamie Oliver's new reality show, Jamie's Food Revolution, about trying to change school meals in one of the unhealthiest places in America, you can watch full episodes on ABC.com. It's worth a watch: his earnest desire to help a town combat its alarming rates of overweight and obesity by serving real food instead of processed food at school stirs up mixed responses from residents. While Huntington, WV has been singled out due to a CDC report that named it the most obese city in the country, its eating habits, its school lunch, and its public health picture is found in the towns and cities across America. Jamie's show uncovers some of the shocking realities of school lunch, like french fries counting as a serving of vegetables. It also puts a face to the "obesity epidemic" by featuring residents whose lives have been severely impacted by obesity.

Jamie (and viewers) may not realize that there is a long standing grass roots food movement in America, one arm aimed directly at improving school lunch. He might have a better chance of success if he calls on the expertise of people like Ann Cooper, the Renegade Lunch Lady, and Chef Greg Christian of Chicago's Organic School Project.

My hope is that the show will get more people involved in ongoing projects to improve school food or to start their own project. A starting point may be to find out about a school's (federally mandated) wellness policy.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line: Kids do spend a large amount of time at school and the food served there has a dramatic impact on their overall diet quality. School lunch funding is not adequate to serve quality meals. The federal Childhood Nutrition Act, which regulates the school food spending, is being reauthorized and so this is an important opportunity for change. Let your congress people know you support healthier food in schools. Learn more at Slow Food USA's campaign for good food in schools website: Time for Lunch.

Food Biodiversity

2010-03-30T13:34:00.002-05:00

Ag Biodiversity in FAO

Food biodiversity (variation of life forms within the food system) is essential for good nutrition and global food security. Traditionally, humans have relied on a wide diversity of plants and animal species foods. Today over 98% of foods have disappeared or are at loss of disappearing. This is due to a multiplicity of factors; our industrialized food system has been built on principles of uniformity and effieciency. The result is our monocrop agriculture has led to monocrop diets. People have little variety in their diets, with a few varieties of corn, soy, and meat filling the national appetite for convenient and cheap meals, but our health is suffering.

The United Nations has declared 2010 as the International Year of Biodiversity. It's time recognize the extent and the scope of the problem and find a way forward.

Joining the many initiatives working to protect and preserve agricultural biodiversity worldwide (such as the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity and the Food and Agriculture Organization) is a local educational effort to promote at risk foods linked to Southeast Wisconsin. Building off the work of Slow Food USA and its RAFT Alliance and Ark of Taste, is Endangered Food of SE Wisconsin.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottomline: To be a bit kitchy--variety is the spice of life. But in all seriousness, the wide variety of food traditions that is our human heritage can help us to address the epidemic of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease and offer alternatives to the current food system's destructive effects on the environment and our communities.

Grains

2010-03-08T15:18:00.006-06:00

This post is part of a series exploring the primary environmental and health issues in a particular food group.

Bread made from Turkey Hard Red Winter Wheat, an heirloom grain on Slow Food's Ark of Taste.

The cultivation of grains can arguably be called the most influential happening in the history of human kind. When the farming of cereals began, so did civilization.

Grains are an important part of a healthy diet, but much of the grain we eat today is in a refined form and heavily processed to offer us little of the nutritional benefits of whole grains. And much of this grain is grown unsustainably, profiting only agribusiness, with the ecosystem, family farmers, and eaters reaping little reward.

The Health Benefits of Whole Grains

Whole grains like whole wheat, rye, barley, spelt, oats, stone ground cornmeal, brown rice, wild rice, quinoa, popcorn, buckwheat, teff and millet support wellness. In their intact form, grains provide carbohydrates, dietary fiber, vitamins, minerals, lignans, phytoestrogens, and phenolic compounds. When the outer bran and inner germ of the grain seed kernel are removed, as in the case of white bread and white rice and the like, we are left with solely the starchy endosperm. Stripped of the rich B vitamins and antioxidants of the germ, and the fiber of the bran, carbohydrate is the primary nutrient left. In refining, the whole grain easily goes from a nutrient dense food to a source of empty calories.

The Dietary Guidelines for American’s recommendation is to “Make half your grains whole.” At least. The DGA’s go on to say, “Consuming at least 3 or more ounce-equivalents of whole grains per day can reduce the risk of several chronic diseases and may help with weight maintenance.” The benefits of whole grains stretch from reduced risk of certain cancers to lowered cholesterol to improved gastrointestinal functioning. Whole grains have been found to reduce the postprandial blood sugar surge and to increase satiety; these effects can aid in improved diabetes control as well as weight control.

The ever popular refined white flour, pasta, rice, cereals, snack foods, and sweets can be eaten without the negative consequences of high blood sugar or chronic weight gain, but the amount of these refined grain we eat as American’s is way too much for our own good and too often is joined by added sugars, fat, and sodium; contributing to higher risk of weight increases, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. People who choose to eat whole grains at most meals reduce their risk of these problems. Unfortunately, there is confusion about what constitutes a whole grain, so here are some tips to help identify whole grains:

Ø Check the ingredient label as described above: the first ingredient should be a whole grain.

Ø Look for the grams of fiber listed on the Nutrition Facts Label: a good source of whole grains will have a higher fiber content. A good rule of thumb is to look for 3 grams of fiber for each serving, like a one ounce slice of bread.

Ø Watch for the whole grain council label. This is voluntary labeling so while anything with the whole grain stamp will be a source of whole grains, not every whole grain has a stamp.

Ø Buy raw whole grain ingredients from the bulk bins or directly from a farm or mill. Steel cut and rolled oats, whole wheat berries and flour, quinoa, wild rice, or brown rice are all clearly whole grains.

A Step Towards Sustainable Choices

If eating whole grains helps protect your own health, then choosing local and organic whole grains is a step towards protecting the health of the planet.

Locally grown grains can reduce transportation emissions as well as support your local and regional farmers. Organic grains are grown without synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and fungicides, toxic pesticides, sewage sludge, and are not genetically engineered. Both reduced transportation and reduced chemical use helps to reduce toxic runoff into our increasingly susceptible waterways. The run off from the industrial farms of the Midwest drains into the Mississippi River and is one of the major contributors to the notorious “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico—an area the size of New Jersey in which life has basically been suffocated; destroying biodiversity and the livelihood of many of the Gulf’s fishing communities. Closer to home, organic farming allows for more life to flourish on the farm and in nearby ecosystems like birds, bees, and small mammals.

Organic foods, by law, cannot contain any GMO ingredients, which is useful to those consumers looking to avoid GMOs because they are not labeled in this country. GMOs, Genetically Modified Organisms, are defined as “organisms with manipulated genes to introduce new, or alter existing, characteristics, or produce a new protein or enzyme” by Food Processing Technology. The biotech industry promotes GMOs as the answer to just about everything, but especially to feeding the world’s growing population while solving our environmental crises. But there is much reason to be skeptical about the claims of this very controversial industry. Around the world, people are protesting GMOs for environmental, food sovereignty, health, cross contamination concerns, and more.

“Agricultural biotechnology has been promoted as the key tool to combat global hunger and poverty by increasing the productivity of farmers worldwide...The biotechnology industry promised that farmers could increase their yields, lower production costs and reduce agrochemical use. Instead, American farmers have faced higher costs without higher productivity, risked law suits from seed companies, and applied more agrochemicals as weeds and insects have developed resistance to the genetic crop traits.” - Food and Water Watch

While the biotech industry courts favor with high level players interested in solving world hunger, it is important to keep in mind that hunger stems from the inability to afford food, not lack of food in the global supply. While global hunger increases, large agro-companies like Monsanto and Cargill are making record profits. Even the American Dietetic Association, a fairly conservative and industry friendly organization, acknowledges there may be a problem with biotech. While the 2007 ADA Position Paper on Sustainability states, “ADA affirms that food biotechnology has many potentially positive applications,” the paper goes on to say, “genetically engineered seeds present some significant contradictions regarding ecological sustainability.”

The ADA shows no concern over the potential human health impacts of GMO consumption, though certainly there have been cases of novel allergens introduced into foods like corn and kiwi. To date, there are no long-term studies that can show us that the regular consumption of the most commonly eaten GMO foods (corn, soy, canola, and cottonseed oil) is absolutely safe. We will find out someday as most Americans are now eating GMO foods on a daily basis.

At its most basic level, the fundamental problem with biotechnology seems to be that it perpetuates an industrial paradigm that furthers the pollution of our waterways and leaves the soil bereft of nutrients, requiring huge inputs of fertilizer to grow anything at all. This is no way to move forward in the face of climate change in a world of finite resources.

Finding Good Whole Grains

Local sources of grains can be found in much of the U.S. When Milwaukee’s Eat Local Challenge began a few years ago, we sought out local sources of every food we could, but had some difficulty finding local wheat. We found some freshly milled wheat flour in a farm store at the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, but that required a 45 minute drive from the city—not all that environmentally friendly.

Since that first ELC in 2007, the market for local grains seems to have expanded; now we can buy organic whole wheat flour from Illinois at our local Co-op, we can find rolled oats at our farmers market’s year round, and one of our farmer friends shared a pound of wheat berries he grew in his nearby fields last year. The ability to find one of our region's indigenous foods, wild rice, has expanded as well. A few years back, it seemed you had to know someone, travel “up north” where wild rice grows, or special order it from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota--where the tribe protects and maintains the sacred wild rice, known as Manoomin in Ojibwe. Now, we can purchase real wild rice from Wisconisn at a local “Trading Post” or the White Earth Wild Rice is now easily from the Outpost Co-op.

Another Great Lakes food tradition is the White Corn tended by the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. Originally from the New York area, tribal members brought Iroquois White Corn with them when they migrated to Wisconsin as their land was taken by colonists. White Corn is eaten primarily as a grain in its dried form (when fresh it’s known as “green corn.”) It is enjoyed in White Corn Soup or as a wheelshaped delicious cornmeal bread, studded with kidney beans, known as Kanastohale. Each year at the Oneida organic farm Tsyunhehkw^, elders, youth and adults come together for the Community Harvest and Husking Bee—a tradition that has been carried on for generations.

Growing your own grain is also a possibility. While wheat, rye, or barley may be a challenge if you do not have much land or a thresher, it’s pretty simple to grow a row of grain corn in your backyard. This past year, partner grew Pennsylvania Dutch Heirloom Corn for popcorn and Hopi Blue Corn for flour. We now have a few quarts of beautiful grey-blue cornmeal, ground on a friend’s borrowed mill attached to their food processor.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line:

Eat whole grains for your own health. Choose organically and locally grown grains for the health of the planet and of future generations. There is a continuum of food choices within any food group: at one end of the Grains continuum, you may find heavily processed foods like snack cakes and white bread and on the other end you may find locally grown, organic oats, homegrown corn, and real wild rice. Though the reasons to choose well are plenty, change does not easily happen overnight; take small steps in the direction you'd like to go. Wherever you are on the continuum, there is room to grow. If you currently eat white bread regularly, consider switching to whole grain bread. If you currently eat whole grain bread, but don’t cook, try making wild rice, brown rice, quinoa, or barley for dinner two or three times this week. If you eat and cook whole grains regularly, it might be time to seek out local sources at your farmers market or on localharvest.org.

Science and Public Health Take a Good Look at the Food System

2010-02-23T18:38:00.006-06:00

February has been ripe with discourse about the transforming the food system to one that can feed the world equitably and healthfully while mitigating the effects of climate change and environmental degradation.

On Feb 12, a special edition of the journal Science devoted to the question of feeding a growing population with finite resources was made available online for free. I’ve just begun getting through pieces like Food Security: The Challenge of Feeding 9 Billion People, What It Takes to Make That Meal, Measuring Food Insecurity, and Sustainability and Global Seafood, but I can wholeheartedly recommend it as an important resource for those interested in taking a serious look at our global public health and environmental crises and considering the solutions. The introductory article Feeding the Future starts off dramatically:

Feeding the 9 billion people expected to inhabit our planet by 2050 will be an unprecedented challenge. This special issue examines the obstacles to achieving global food security and some promising solutions…. We have little time to waste. Godfray et al. (p. 812) note that we have perhaps 40 years to radically transform agriculture, work out how to grow more food without exacerbating environmental problems, and simultaneously cope with climate change. Although estimates of food insecurity vary (Barrett et al., p. 825), the number of undernourished people already exceeds 1 billion; feeding this many people requires more than incremental changes (Federoff et al., p. 833).

Then last week, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement sponsored a web program in their WIHI series, titled “ Tipping the Scales: Fresh Ideas to Combat Obesity.” The program focused on our food environment and it’s impact on our food intake. In it, I was impressed to hear Dr David Kessler former FDA Commissioner and author of The End of Overeating say, “Unless we dramatically change our relationship with food, including the environment..” ...the epidemic of obesity will go unresolved. Then Charles J. Homer, MD, MPH, said, “overweight is not a matter of personal choice…we live in a toxic environment and we need to change it.” And Rachelle Mirkin of the National Initiative for Children’s Healthcare Quality talked about how a big, systemic change will be needed to make a difference in the epidemic of obesity. She said, that for “real change” to happen, “we’re going to need to change the environment.”

And today an exciting webinar on Bridging Food Systems and Public Health was aired. The hosts promised it would be available online tomorrow. For now you can access the special issues of the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition that the webinar explored: Food Systems and Public Health: Linkages to Achieve Healthier Diets and Healthier Communities. David Wallinga, MD, MPA, of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Michael Hamm, PhD, of Michigan State University, and Angie Tagtow, MS, RD, LD, HEN/ADA Managing Editor were the featured speakers. I can’t say enough about this webinar. Not only did the speakers address opportunities for positive changes in local and federal policy and ways for health professionals to “dig in”, they shared visions of what a healthy and sustainable food system might actually look like.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line: Our environmental and public health crises intersect in the food system. And there is a lot of work to be done to tackle these crises. I loved when Michael Hamm of the JHEN webinar defined our food system challenges as a “wicked problem”--a problem that is "difficult or impossible to fix…. because of complex interdependencies.” But in acknowledging the scope of the problem we should not give up. Each and every one of us has opportunities to make positive changes on the individual, local, nationwide and global level. If we find ways to act quickly and act together to support good policies that can help us to change our collective and individual foodways, we just might be able to create an equitable, healthy, and sustainable food system.

America's Move to Raise a Healthier Generation

2010-02-11T15:53:00.003-06:00

This week Michelle Obama helped launch a national campaign to fight childhood obesity—Let’s Move: America’s Move to Raise a Healthier Generation of Kids.

What's refreshing about this high profile initiative is that it not only includes a focus on Healthier Choices and Physical Activity but also Healthier Food in Schools and Healthy Food Access. This moves the issue of healthy food access (or food insecurity) from what some might call the fringe to the spotlight. Though healthy food insecurity has long been recognized as a problem in public health and community activist circles, this increased attention, funding, and acknowledgment that obesity is tied to lack of healthy food access may have positive results. With Will Allen of Milwaukee’s very own Growing Power and many other high profile Americans including the president of the American Acadamy of Pediatrics at her side, the first lady outlined the program priorities.

From the Let’s Move Website:

Accessing Healthy, Affordable Food
More than 23 million Americans, including 6.5 million children, live in low-income urban and rural neighborhoods that are more than a mile from a supermarket. These communities, where access to affordable, quality, and nutritious foods is limited, are known as food deserts. Lack of access is one reason why many children are not eating recommended levels of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. And food insecurity and hunger among children is widespread. A recent USDA report showed that in 2008, an estimated 49.1 million people, including 16.7 million children, lived in households that experienced hunger multiple times throughout the year. The Administration, through new federal investments and the creation of public private partnerships, will:
Eliminate Food Deserts: As part of the President’s proposed FY 2011 budget, the Administration announced the new Healthy Food Financing Initiative – a partnership between the U.S. Departments of Treasury, Agriculture and Health and Human Services that will invest $400 million a year to help bring grocery stores to underserved areas and help places such as convenience stores and bodegas carry healthier food options. Through these initiatives and private sector engagement, the Administration will work to eliminate food deserts across the country within seven years.

Increase Farmers Markets: The President’s 2011 Budget proposes an additional $5 million investment in the Farmers Market Promotion Program at the U.S. Department of Agriculture which provides grants to establish, and improve access to, farmers markets.

The initiative goals also include Healthier Food in Schools. Again, from the Let’s Move website:

Serving Healthier Food in Schools
Many children consume as many as half of their daily calories at school. As families work to ensure that kids eat right and have active play at home, we also need to ensure our kids have access to healthy meals in their schools. With more than 31 million children participating in the National School Lunch Program and more than 11 million participating in the National School Breakfast Program, good nutrition at school is more important than ever. Together with the private sector and the non-profit community, we will take the following steps to get healthier food in our nation’s schools:
Reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act: The Administration is requesting an historic investment of an additional $10 billion over ten years starting in 2011 to improve the quality of the National School Lunch and Breakfast program, increase the number of kids participating, and ensure schools have the resources they need to make program changes, including training for school food service workers, upgraded kitchen equipment, and additional funding for meal reimbursements. With this investment, additional fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy products will be served in our school cafeterias and an additional one million students will be served in the next five years.

Slow Food USA has been addressing the poor quality of US school lunches with it’s Time for Lunch Campaign since early last year—you may remember a blog post about labor day “Eat Ins” to call attention to the issue. In a press release on Feb 9^th, Slow Food USA’s president pointed out that while this additional $10 billion is progress, it is not nearly enough in the grand scheme of things:

“President Obama’s proposal to add $1 billion per year to the Child Nutrition Act is an important step forward,” stated Josh Viertel, president, Slow Food USA. “But, it’s not enough to give America’s kids a healthy future, especially when nearly one third of our children are overweight or obese and when Congress spends at least $13 billion per year subsidizing the production of unhealthy processed foods. The public needs to speak up and tell Congress to make real improvements to school lunch.”

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line: The burden of obesity does not lie solely, or even mostly, with personal choice. A large body of research points to the powerful role the environment plays in our personal habits. The socio-ecomonic model of health places the individual and their own modifiable layers of influence (things they have control over) within a sea of influences: living and working conditions, agriculture and food supplies, education, access to good and services like healthcare and water and sanitation, and the overall economic, cultural and environmental influences. With this model, we can see that the burden of obesity lies within our society. The changes in our way of life over the last few generations has re-shaped us, literally.

My practice affords me the opportunity to talk with parents and kids struggling with childhood obesity (and diabetes, hypercholesterolemia and hypertension.) What I see in my conversations with these families are the same problems, over and over, stemming from a food system in disarray. The barriers people have to overcome to resist or reduce obesity are overwhelming—which is why we have such a problem in the first place. Yes, guardians should ensure their kids have daily active play, wholesome snacks, plenty of water, and the chance to sit down at the table together often for meals, but if we do not make drastic changes to the way we nourish ourselves en masse, the epidemic of obesity will only get worse until we run our of land, food, or resources. The more resources, programs, initiatives, and so on we can use to provide sustainable real food to real kids, the better chances our kids will have at living long, healthy lives to face the challenges ahead. So this initiative, Let’s Move, seems to provide a ray of hope in a worrisome time…

WIll Real Food Experience the Oprah Effect?

2010-01-28T13:49:00.000-06:00

Yesterday, Michael Pollan gave Oprah fans a clear explanation of the common western diet when he defined it as, "lots of processed foods and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of everything...except fruits, vegetables, and whole grains." He went on to say, "before the Western diet...around the turn of the last century...populations did not have high levels of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity..."

The western diet, the only diet known to cause chronic disease, is full of empty calories (lots of calories with little or no nutrition.) And it's brought to us by corporations using unsustainable means.

So how do we remedy this? Pollan explains that it's simple in his new book "Food Rules." "It's all about whole foods," he said on the show (whole foods meaning minimally processed foods, not the store) and he's right.

While the nutrition industry has rightly been accussed of confusing eaters with nutritionism which can praise or vilify a nutrient from one year to the next, many dietitains have been espousing this same sort of simple advice for decades. "Eat a well balanced diet by choosing a wide variety of foods from each food group," is standard dietitian speak. However, it hasn't been so easy to translate. Michael Pollan, Mr "Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not too Much," translates this message better than just about anyone else. And now he's done it on Oprah.

NY Times Article: Pink Slime Beef

2010-01-16T12:40:00.006-06:00

Back in December, the New York Times published it's article on beef processing, Safety of Beef Processing Method Is Questioned, and people have been rethinking their consumption of ground beef ever since. In a shortsighted industry solution to an industry problem of E. coli and salmonella, a major meat processor has been using ammonia (a substance classified by EU as "irritant", "corrosive", or danger to the environment" dependent on it's concentration) in an effort to kill pathogens without actually reducing levels of contamination in beef. This processed beef-like substance, referred to as "pink slime," has made it's way into the majority of fast food burgers and into school lunches. Grist.org food editor Tom Philpott wrote a predictably smart and angry piece in response. From his Lessons on the food system from the ammonia hamburger fiasco:

To make a long story short: Beef Products buys the cheapest, least desirable beef on offer—fatty sweepings from the slaughterhouse floor, which are notoriously rife with pathogens like E. coli 0157 and antibiotic-resistant salmonella. It sends the scraps through a series of machines, grinds them into a paste, separates out the fat, and laces the substance with ammonia to kill pathogens.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line: Pink slime, of course, is not healthy for us or the planet. Factory farmed beef is the largest environmental polluter in the food system (see previous posts Changing Climate Change or Meat's Deep Eco Footprint ) and the end product is high in saturated fat and goodness knows what else. A better choice for dinner would be grass fed beef or bison—higher in healthy fats like omega 3 and conjugated linoleic acid. Or choose beans—inexpensive, high in protein, fiber, and antioxidants, and low in fat and impact.

Resolutions for the New Year

2010-01-01T18:50:00.014-06:00

Wintery Kale

For the past two years, this blog has explored issues of food, health, politics, and the environment. I've had many readers tell me they enjoy reading the posts because it makes them think about food in a new way. This post is all about how to turn those thoughts into action. Whether you are already "eating green" or new to the idea that our food choices play a role in climate change and ecological degradation, if you want to reduce your footprint, setting a resolution can help you focus your energy.

The new year is a busy time for dietitians, as people's motivation to make changes they've been considering for a while seems to peak, they seek out the help of professionals they trust. While the most common resolution is to lose weight, I thought I'd share some sustainable nutrition resolution ideas (these are actually tips recycled from an Earth Day post a couple years back--how appropriate.)

Research shows people tend to be more successful when their goals are "SMART", Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. For example, if you want to increase your consumption of locally grown foods, your goal could be, "I will visit the winter farmer's market at least four times this winter," or, "I will have at least one local food at each meal," or, "I will purchase a CSA share in a local farm..." you get the picture, right? When you are accountable to a goal (and to yourself) you can check in, see how you are doing, and revise to suit your life as needed. So the following goals are just to get you started. Research also shows that making your resolution public can increase your chances of success, so If you set a goal, leave a comment and let me know your progress.

My personal resolution is to write a monthly blog post highlighting the issues surrounding individual food groups; grains, vegetables, beans, fruit, meat, dairy, fish, water, and so on. I will, of course, include additional posts on timely food related articles, issues, and updates, but each month readers can expect a blog post focusing on one food group with tips on how to choose foods for personal, community, and planetary health.

Ten Resolution Ideas for A More Sustainable Diet:

Eat More Locally. Support your community by buying locally. Local foods are high in flavor and nutrition as well as "low carb"-- low in carbon emissions.
Buy Organic. Not just for the birds and the bees; our entire ecosystem (ourselves included) benefits from responsible agriculture.
Grow your own food. In your garden you can plant heirloom seeds, grow them organically, and eat them quite locally in your own backyard.
Eat less meat. Feed lot meat is carbon-intensive. Go grass fed or vegetarian.
Cook more often. Make more time to be in the kitchen. Highly processed and packaged foods take a lot of energy to make and transport.
Compost. Take your food scraps out of the landfill and turn them into "black gold" for your garden.
Bag it yourself. Instant karma. Bring bags with you when you shop.
Pay more, eat less. Consider paying a higher percentage of your income on food. Food insecurity is a real issue in many households in this country and the world beyond. However, we spend less time working to get food on our plates than ever before in history. (Is that cable t.v more important than the organic milk?)
Plan ahead. From packing a lunch to preserving apples, planning ahead can help you avoid buying energy intensive convenience foods that you don't really want.
Educate. Share meals and ideas. Request local, organic, and sustainable foods at your favorite restaurants and grocery stores and encourage others to join you.

Changing Climate Change

2009-12-07T10:54:00.010-06:00

Leaders from 192 nations are gathered in Copenhagen for what has been called "the largest and most important UN climate change conference in history." Certainly the stakes are high. And the science is telling us dramatic action must be taken to prevent the worst effects of a warming globe. The worst, because the climate change ball is already in motion...

What does this have to do with nutrition? A whole heck of a lot it turns out.

Agriculture is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The livestock sector alone accounts for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions- more than transportation- according to the FAO.

Climate change is also a public health issue. "The Environmental Protection Agency has concluded greenhouse gases are endangering people's health and must be regulated."

And as the effects of climate change become more drastic, we won't have a choice in rethinking the way we feed ourselves- plant hardiness zone changes, drought patterns, flood impacts, and more are already shifting the way we are able to grow food.

National Public Radio's Marketplace has been airing a series recently called the Climate Race with a companion web portal in which you can listen to the series and explore an interactive US Climate Change map (compiled by the US Global Research Program.) Open the map on the region you live and you'll find effects of climate change that are already occurring and what we can expect by the end of the century if the pattern continues. The Midwest region has already seen two record breaking floods in the past 15 years (many of our local farmers were impacted.) If that isn't scary enough the forecast shows, "Great Lakes water levels to fall 1 to 2 feet by century's end, depending on emission levels." The Great Lakes-- our greatest supply of fresh water. The fresh water situation in other parts of the country looks even more grim.

These are just some of the reasons that so much is at stake in Copenhagen right now. Rising sea levels, already affecting countries like Maldives, will also dramatically change the way we live. Sweeping change is only possible if leaders around the world agree to reduce our collective impact. (And unfortunately, the popular cap and trade solution seems to only switch the pieces on the chess board.) But as individuals, I believe we have some power to create change as well.

Choosing a "low-carbon" diet is one way to reduce your personal carbon footprint. Locally grown foods tend to be lower impact- both in transportation cost, but also, importantly, in processing and packaging costs. Fortunately, the side effects of increased consumption of local foods could turn out to be stronger communities and healthier people. Check out the Center for Food Safety's Cool Food Campaign for more tips on stopping global warming with the food we eat.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line: Our food choices impact the world around us. Less meat, more local, less processed, more home made.... you get the drift. While global politicians continue their politicking, we can choose to reduce our own impact while building the resilience of our communities. Maybe, just maybe, our choices will help our voices trickle up to our leaders.

The Thanksgiving Story

2009-11-26T08:07:00.006-06:00

This year, as we sat around the table with family and friends, enjoying the American Bronze Heritage Turkey, Sibley Squash, home grown potatoes, just picked brussel sprouts, and the many more delights that graced our table, I gave thanks for the health and wellness of our group and reflected on the origins of the very first Thanksgiving.

Certainly, humans of all cultures have been giving thanks for a bountiful harvest throughout the millennia, but the holiday we Americans celebrate each November commemorates a real occurrence- the survival of Plymouth colonists due to the generosity of the native Wampanoag people, who shared their knowledge, skills and food with the starving settlers. This is where our bucolic image of the “first Thanksgiving” usually ends- a large 3 day feast of venison, wild game, pompion, and brotherly love between the Pilgrims and Indians. This story is, of course, incomplete. The “survivalist training” provided by the Wampanoag was rewarded with massacre only a generation later. The first Thanksgiving was actually a scene in a horror story.

Even so, showing gratitude at the end of a harvest season remains ever appropriate. But the story we tell ourselves about our celebrational food is often much like the fairy-tale version of Thanksgiving. On the surface (or on the package) our food appears bucolic, yet underneath it’s a bit more sinister with corresponding environmental, health, and ethical horrors. This is especially so of the industrial holiday turkeys that grace most American’s plates.

Barbara Kingsolver, in her book detailing a year of local eating, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, famously penned her quest to establish a breeding flock of heritage turkeys. In describing why, she writes about the state of the turkey industry.

“Of the 400 million turkeys Americans consume each year, more than 99 percent of them are a single breed: the Broad-Breasted White, a quick-fattening monster bred specifically for the industrial scale setting. These are the big lugs so famously dumb, they can drown by looking up at rain. (Friends of mine swear they have seen this happen.) If a Broad-Breasted white should escape slaughter, it likely wouldn’t live to be a year old: they get so heavy, their legs collapse. In mature form they’re incapable of flying, foraging, or mating. That’s right, reproduction. Genes that make turkey behave like animals are useless to a creature packed wing to wing with thousands of others, and might cause it to get uppity or suicidal, so those genes have been bred out of the pool. Docile lethargy works better, and helps them pack on the pounds. To some extent, this trend holds for all animals bred for confinement. For turkeys, this scheme that gave them an extremely breast-heavy body and ultra-rapid growth has also left them with a combination of deformity and idiocy that renders them unable to have turkey sex. Poor turkeys.”

Rather excitingly, Barbara’s Red Bourbon turkeys do end up mating naturally by the end of her story, but the lineage of the Broad Breasted Whites continue to be left up to human “sperm wranglers.” It is for this and many other frightful reasons that I gave up eating turkey even at Thanksgiving for more than decade in favor of what I presumed was the only sane alternative: vegetarianism. For much of my life I avoided factory farming and it’s moral, environmental, and health atrocities by avoiding all meat. It wasn’t until I moved to a community in Vermont, teeming with small scale farms, that I realized there existed a viable alternative to factory farming aside from altogether abstaining from meat: pasturing animals in the brilliant out of doors. In the case of birds, pastured poultry can result in a healthier animal, food, community and ecosystem.

The American Bronze heritage turkey we enjoyed (after a quick brine and simple oven roast) came from JenEhr, a local family farm whose turkeys are raised on pasture have an opportunity to do what turkeys do best: walk around in the fresh air and eat grass and bugs. In the process, their meat develops a rich flavor and healthier nutrient profile than grain fed industrial birds. Pastured poultry has increased beneficial omega 3 fatty acids, conjugated linoleic acid, and beta carotene from the diverse diet they’ve had access to as well as less fat overall. Our Bronze turkey yielded a remarkably tiny amount of fat in the pan as it roasted, but what drippings it did yield were very rich in flavor and made a delectable gravy.

Heritage breeds are making a comeback due to dedicated conservationists- chefs, farmers, and eaters. Groups like the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy and Slow Food are working to maintain biodiversity and prevent further food extinction in our food system. Our local chapter of the national organization, Slow Food Wisconsin Southeast, pairs local eaters with local growers of heritage breeds like the Standard Bronze, Red Bourbon, and Narragansett, with the Heritage Turkey Project- a basic list of heritage turkey growers. Heritage Turkeys in other parts of the country can be located on the ALBC and Local Harvest websites.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line:
It costs more to buy a heritage breed- they take more time and skill to raise. And takes more time to purchase than simply picking out a cheap bird from a pile in the freezer section of mega-mart. But it is a mistake to believe that a cheap price is a bargain. All down the food chain, the cost of cheap meat is felt- in the waters polluted by factory farm waste, in the unsafe conditions and poor wages paid the to industry workers, in the effects of chronic diseases on the eaters whose options are often limited to industrialized, processed foods. My recommendation is to buy better meat less often or just altogether skip it- and all the problems associated with cheap meat can be avoided. I choose quality over quantity and reserve my meat eating to those rare occasions when I’m comfortable it was raised in a way I can stomach. And when we do eat heritage meat, it is something we can truly be thankful for...

Native Alaskan Wellness

2009-10-22T20:45:00.006-05:00

Beluga Point, Cook Inlet, Alaska

While in Anchorage for an Indian Health Services conference, I had the chance to meet many extraordinary Alaska Native people working to preserve their traditional food ways and lifestyles.

One such man, a tribal councilman from the Sitka tribe, generously shared with me his herring roe. Collected by laying hemlock branches deep under water during spawning season for the herring to lay eggs on and then gathered and frozen for safe keeping, he told me the Clupea pallasii is considered the first “big food” of spring; before the green shoots and leaves begin to show. The roe tasted like droplets of ocean breeze.

One beautiful woman artist and jewelry maker gave me a tiny fish made out of fossilized ivory to wear around my neck.

Another man, a cultural artist and teacher, shared with me a story about two elders he once met in a remote village. They were a traditional married couple who didn't appear to be nearly as old as their stated age of 90 years of age. He asked them what the secret was to their apparent youth and they replied, "food and love." He then shared with me how his aches and pains of “old age” (he’s 50) were cured one day when his brother gave him a jar of salmon roe. The salmon roe was so delicious, he ate half the jar in one evening- the next morning he awoke without pain. Now he makes a point to enjoy fish more regularly and he takes fish oil daily- he does not need aspirin any longer to be pain free. But the same brother who gave him the roes had to close up his salmon fishing operation earlier this year- a lifelong fisherman, he apparently had never experienced a salmon population so low.

In this land of ocean and lakes and rivers and streams, foods of the water are central to the cultural identity and health of the people as well as the ecology of the region. Along with berries, greens, roots and mushrooms and wild meat, fish, seaweed, and marine mammals make up a significant part of the many Alaskan’s traditional diets. We know that omega 3 fatty acids found in fish are cardio protective. We know that antioxidants in berries protect against cellular damage. When colonization forced changes in diet and lifestyle, these, and other protective effects of the traditional diet began to wane. There are many different tribes in Alaska, but one thing in common is their rates of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are increasing, along with alarming rates of suicide.

The reasons for these changes are many and complex, and so must be addressed on many levels. One group working to address these problems from a wholistic health perspective is the Southcentral Foundation, an Alaska Native owned healthcare organization. Southcentral Foundation's vision is a Native community that enjoys physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellness; its mission is to work together with the Native community to achieve wellness through health and related services. One visit to the site showed happy staff and clients in an environment celebrating native heritage and values in the art and architecture, traditional healing services, and models of care.

I found another group working to address the wellness issues of people and places of the region at the Alaska Federation of Native’s trade show: the Nunamta Aulukestai.

Nunamta Aulukestai means Caretakers of the Land in Yup'ik. The group is made up of eight village corporations that have come together with this common goal of carefully managing the future of Bristol Bay. We are the people who live here year round. Our people have lived here for thousands of years. At the forefront of caring for our land is stopping the development of an open pit mine, Pebble Mine. This mine would sit precariously at the headwaters of the Kvichak and Nushagak Rivers. These rivers are the largest sockeye salmon producing rivers in the world. Millions of fish come back every year to spawn. Native people have been subsisting off of these fish for thousands of years. To put this resource at risk for an unsustainable resource such as gold is not only foolish but it endangers the livelihoods of the residents, animals and plants that live here.

The Nunamta Aulukestai shared literature that included the technical background of the proposed pebble mine, salmon ecology 101, DNR reports showing declines in the majority of Bristol Bay salmon species, and a flyer titled “Protecting Subsistence in the Age of Mega-Development.” The flyer captured my eye with a photo of a painted, pink, protest sign stating, “YOUR LAND LOVES YOU. LOVE IT BACK.” Across the room was a coalition of mining proponents.

I thought about the work of the Nunamta against the proposed mine on a trip north of Anchorage to the Eagle River. There my traveling companions and I witnessed a rare sight- a grizzly bear catching and eating a spawning salmon. Bears are the largest of the many species that directly or indirectly benefit from salmon runs. As our brown grizzly feasted away on his prize, I wondered how his relatives in the Bristol Bay watershed would fare if the mine went through.

Salmon aren’t the only marine species in trouble. Along with such stars as the endangered leatherback sea turtles and stellar sea lions, there is downward trend in several whale populations. The Oct 15, 2009 Turnagain Times headlined, “Cook Inlet beluga population declining; Scientists alarmed by recent count of endangered whales.” Loss of habitat and pollution (from development and mining) are cited as two key reasons for population declines.

Protecting endangered and threatened species is an issue of food sovereignty and environmental justice. Sustainable nutrition is not just about choosing sustainable foods, but also about choosing to raise our voices against unsustainable resource development and buying less “stuff” made from these processes (mining in Alaska yields copper, gold, molybdenum- all used in many industrial processes such as refining petroleum, making plastics, stainless steels, flame retardants, light bulbs and agricultural chemicals.)

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom line:

We do not live alone on this fair planet of ours. Personal and environmental health depend on each of us understanding how our choices affect the people and places of the world. For info on choosing sustainable seafood, see prior post form April '08; Finding Sustainable Seafood. For a great video on how our seemingly harmless little purchases impact the globe, see the award-winning online video, the Story of Stuff.

Take action for School Lunch

2009-09-07T10:03:00.013-05:00

Labor Day is the National Day of Action to Get REAL Food into Schools. The Time for Lunch campaign, Slow Food USA's first national political campaign, is a truly democratic effort to improve our children's health by improving school lunch. With its greatly limited resources, the National School Lunch Program struggles to provide anything but cheap, processed food to the more than 30 million children its feeds each day. Getting healthy, real food into schools could help to stem the tide of diabetes, obesity, and heart disease already plaguing our youth. The Time for Lunch Campaign urges our legislators to invest in our nation's health by prioritizing real food in schools when the Child Nutrition act is reauthorized later this year.

Feeding kids better food in schools is one of many greatly needed steps towards growing healthy people. We are now in crisis mode-- lifestyle related chronic disease rates are skyrocketing. One in 3 American children born after the year 2000 is expected to develop diabetes. Nearly a third of children are overweight or obese and these rates are expected to climb. The Robert Wood Johnson foundation recently came out with their 6th annual report on obesity: F as in Fat: How Obesity Rates Are Failing in America 2009.

The current economic crisis could exacerbate the obesity epidemic. Food prices are expected to rise, particularly for more nutritious foods, making it more difficult for families to eat healthy foods.

The report includes an extensive list of specific recommendations of how to "Make Obesity Prevention and Control a High Priority of Health Reform" and how to "Launch a National Strategy to Combat Obesity."

Clearly, we can not continue chalking our dramatic rates of diet-related diseases to personal responsibility. Our food environment matters. Our food system is currently perfectly designed to do what it does best-- deliver large amounts of cheap, processed food. And this is making us collectively sick. We must do something entirely different if we are to expect different outcomes. I believe that getting real food into schools takes us one step closer towards building a food system that keep us healthy, happy and whole. So lets get to it.

There are 3 Steps to Time for Lunch:

Sign the Petition
"I believe that change can’t wait: It's time to provide America's children with REAL FOOD at school."
Spread the Word

Tell your friends and legislators about Time for Lunch.

Attend an Eat-in

TODAY! Over 300 Eat-ins are happening in all 50 states!

From Slow Food USA:

An Eat-In (part potluck, part sit-in) takes place in public and gathers people to support a cause - like getting real food into schools.

On Labor Day, Sept. 7, 2009, people in communities all over the country will sit down to share a meal with their neighbors and kids. This National Day of Action will send a clear message to Congress: It's time to provide America's children with real food at school.

Getting Congress' attention is a big job, and we need your help. On Sept. 7, attend an Eat-In taking place near you.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line: As a dietitian, I believe it is imperative to do more than encourage people to eat more nutritiously-- we must all take part in building a healthier food system that delivers more nutritious food.

How Local Can You Go?

2009-09-01T12:01:00.008-05:00

Today kicks off the start of the Milwaukee Eat Local Challenge- an effort to promote local food as an integral path to community wellness. For the first two gloriously harvest-able weeks in September, people across Milwaukee (and beyond of course) will be challenging themselves to increase their consumption of local food because- more matters. To celebrate (in addition to enjoying good local fare) I've included a round of local food pics recently taken. Bon appetite!

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom-line:
Healthy local food systems= Healthy people and places. To learn more visit the Eat Local Milwaukee website.

Buried Treasures

2009-07-27T09:47:00.005-05:00

Unearthing potatoes makes one think of buried treasure. Our row of Austrian Crescent and New Red elicited cries of delight as spud after glorious spud made its way into the light. We were digging for true sustenance.

The poor potato too often gets a bad rap. I hear often from clients who have been sadly misinformed that there’s no nutritive value to a potato. Whether this is a hangover from the Atkin’s diet craze or a result of misunderstood diabetic education, I’m not sure, but, “potatoes are just like white sugar” seems a common misconception. And while all things carbohydrate will eventually break down into blood glucose (our body’s preferred source of fuel) the potato has a lot more to offer than just the energy from it's storage of complex carbohydrates...

Potatoes are a good source of vitamin C, B-vitamins, potassium, phosphorous, magnesium as well as providing dietary fiber and cancer fighting antioxidants. Unfortunately, the most common form of potatoes enjoyed in the U.S.- french fries- do not get distinguishing marks for good nutrition. Ditto for processed potatoes like flakes and other such nonsense. The nutritive value remains highest when the potato remain whole- skin and all.

And while not a substitute for whole grains, unlike wheat, rye, barley, quinoa, and so on, potatoes are a good source of carbohydrate energy that can easily be grown and processed (processing is the key here) by home gardeners. Home grown carbohydrates = very local and very delicious.

Originally hailing from Peru, potatoes are now one of the world's largest crops- likely owing to the economic virtues of the energy dense tuber. The few varieties grown on a large scale and found in the grocery store (yellow, russet, and red) belie the wide diversity of potatoes that exist- there are literally thousands. A few of my favorites- Purple Peruvian, La Ratte, Adirondack Blue, Rose Finn apple, Red Norland, Russian banana, Russet Burbank. The lovely Ozette potatoe has made it’s way onto Slow Food’s Ark of Taste- a catalogue of delicious foods in danger of extinction. Farmers and gardeners keeping these varietals growing and in circulation improves biodiversity- a marker of health and resilance in our food system.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottomline:
Eat potatoes. Eat a wide variety of them. Eat them roasted, grilled, baked, and steamed. Seek out new varieties from local farmers- 'tis the season! Grow them at home- if not this year, maybe next. Seed Savers Exchange gorgeous catalogue can get you started.

If you have diabetes or suffer from “portion distortion”- a reminder: ½ cup of potato counts as one serving of carbohydrate and balanced meals include 3-5 servings of carbohydrate.

Exporting our Flawed Food System

2009-07-10T08:57:00.014-05:00

NPR shared two significant stories about our food system today. One story told of an industrial farm community's lack of good food, and the other told of a plan to boost industrial farm aid to poor nations.

From the ongoing series Hidden Kitchens by the Kitchen Sisters came Central Valley Disconnect: Rich Land, Poor Nutrition. The story details how California's Central Valley, one of the largest producers of fruits and vegetables, has very little healthy food to eat. "... the children of this valley rarely taste those fruits and vegetables." The poverty of these farming communities creates major health disparities. Residents and public health workers are trying to overcome the obesogenic environment through walking clubs and farm stands at schools and farmer's markets.

And from the news: the G8 meeting pledged 20 billion dollars in food aid for Africa. President Obama said, "There's no reason why Africa shouldn't be able to feed itself." NPR's Planet Money blog seemed to laud the decision in the post G8's New Approach to Hunger.

"Today's G8 announcement of $20 billion for food aid actually takes a fairly revolutionary step. Instead of just delivering food, G8 countries are going to help poor countries develop their agriculture industries. It's almost like a farming stimulus, only provided by outside countries rather than local governments. The American share of that pledge is about $3.5 billion, which would be a doubling of previous hunger spending."

It sound great- right? "Teach a man how to fish..." But here's the problem- the biotech industry in behind this aid push and the biotech industry doesn't have a good track record in helping to feed the world's poor. Environmental, economic, and human woes have been the primary outcomes of the biotech agenda. Basically, with biotech, instead of growing food to feed themselves, the small farmers grow food for the world market The industrial farming techniques bankrupt the soil and the farmers. Instead of saving seed, like farmer's have done since the dawn of agriculture, farmer's must buy patented GMO seed and fertilizer and pesticides, year after year, form giant corporations like Monsanto, then they are subject to world market forces larger than themselves, ultimately reaping prices for their crops that can't sustain them. They go hungry while biotech gets rich. In India- the disastrous result has been horrific epidemics of farmer suicides and food riots.

Civil Eats explored this topic back in June in the article, All That Glitters is Not Gold: Biotechnology Has Failed Us, So Why Promote It Abroad? In the post, Paula Crossfield connects some of the dots between big ag and food insecurity. "Meanwhile, here in the US, 36 million people are food insecure, and yet we are one of the biggest agricultural producers in the world." In her interview with global food policy expert and Stuffed and Starved author Raj Patel, he says, "Everyone agrees that African farmers need support. But this story is like the vacuum cleaner salesman who dumps dirt on your floor to show you how his product can pick some of it up."

While food policy folks have been arguing for years to solve the problem of hunger by increasing aid for agriculture, this move by the G8 seems more like aid to biotech. Industrial ag can not feed people without lots of oil and water and profits for big ag companies. Real agro-ecological alternatives that respect a culture's food traditions are the only long term solution.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottomline:

Industrial ag does not solve world hunger, in many cases it perpetuates it as it keeps control of resources in the hands of the few. If millions of people across the United States are going hungry each day and millions of people are overweight while undernourished-why would we export our flawed food system? Feeding people nourishing food requires a transformation in the way we grow and think about food.

Placing good food within reach

2009-06-22T13:11:00.008-05:00

With our summer solstice dinner featuring spinach, mache, lettuces, mustard, snow peas, strawberries, garlic scapes, and herbs, from the garden, it was easy to believe for an evening that good food is within easy reach. Though this backyard garden harvest was not truly easy, per se, as many hours go into planting, tending, harvesting, cleaning, preparing food from the garden- the unfortunate reality is that the food within easy reach for most Americans is bad food. The food that is most easily accessible, both financially and most convienently, is processed food that offers little nutrition- in schools, in the corner stores, and in the fast food outlets that litter our streets. So how can we design our lives, individually and collectively, so that our food actually nourishes us?

What we must consider in order to create a functional food system is a fundamental shift in the way we go about procuring our food. Eating real good food takes some thought. On a personal level, this means spending more time on food preparation and planning- planting, visting farms and markets, cooking, preserving...or spending money for someone to do this for you. On a community level it can mean making land available for urban gardens, supporting neighborhood programs to teach kids and adults to grow and cook food, changing ordinances to allow composting and hen keeping and opening community kitchens. On a national level it means reprioritizing nutrition and changing our industrial-get-big-or-get-out-cheap-food farm policies.

And certainly, we must first acknowledge that our food system is dysfunctional. Not only has the quality and safety of our food system suffered by making production so large, energy intensive, and cheap, it has hidden environmental, health, and financial (in current subsidy system) costs that disproportionately harm people with little incomes or social safety nets.

In an exciting development in the movement to change our food system, the new food movie, FOOD Inc, promises to "lift the veil on our nation's food industry" and offer up some solutions. Watch the trailer here and visit the website to learn more.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottomline:
Learn about your food, share what you learn, and act on it- work to get more good food within reach. Spend more time planning and making your meals- for the week, for the season, and for the years to come. Weekly plans can include visiting a farmers market, cooking dinners, and bringing your lunch to work. Season plans can include getting a CSA share, farm trips, preserving food and growing a garden. And long term plans can include planting perennials or fruit trees, moving to a location that allows for more food production, or investing in local farms.

Industrial Nutrition

2009-05-19T21:15:00.036-05:00

Good food guru Michael Pollan was recently interviewed on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now show. You can watch, listen, or read the transcription on the Democracy Now websit e. In the interview, he mentions having to revise the rules he urged readers to consider when choosing real food (as opposes to edible-food-like-substances- think yogurt vs. gogurt.) in his book “In Defense of Food- An Eater’s Manifesto.” Apparently, food industry marketers read his book too: in response to Pollan's rules urging folks not to eat any food with more than 5 ingredients and to avoid high fructose corn syrup, the ever clever marketers have come out with products that co-opt these ideas: he names Hagen-Daz "5", and the “real sugar” (not HFCS) campaigns of Snapple and soon Coke. What this all means is “business as usual”: bad products still get sold and our real underlying problems don't get addressed.

While the food industry continues to deliver new and improved products that promise to bring consumers health and happiness with some even claiming to be "green", this status quo approach does little to address the underlying problems related to the general public's food illiteracy or our environmental woes. Most people have little understanding of where food comes from or how our food system impacts the planet, let alone their own health. As a registered dietitian, I've taken it upon myself to add this type of basic food system education to my job description as a nutrition educator. By exploring the very foundations of our industrial food system, we all can better understand all the ways in which this system fails to deliver healthy, sustainable, and delicious food for everyone. When health professionals learn the basics of the food system, they can more effectively address the compound issues their clients and communities are facing. What follows is an explanation of certain key issues related to health and the food system and resources for further information.

Industrial Nutrition 101: A system both inefficient & unsustainable

Our modern, industrial food system has become increasingly complex since the industrial revolution. This energy intensive, heavy input system creates huge amount of waste—each step in the elongated process of getting food to mouths requires the use of fossil fuels, fertilizers, and/or chemicals and ends up creating waste problems in the form of CO2, trash, chemical run-off, and animal manure. One problem that exemplifies this system’s inefficiencies is the problems that result when manure becomes a waste product instead of valuable farm input. In an almost ironic twist, the nitrogen that makes manure such a great fertilizer makes it absolutely devastating to rivers, lakes, and streams when large amounts of untreated animal waste from factory farms is allowed to seep into our waterways. But at each step, this system operates without regard to climate change and as if the earth’s resources are inexhaustible—which they most certainly are not.

Not only is the industrial food system energy intensive, wasteful, and convoluted- it is inefficient at it's very core. The US food system uses more energy than it creates. Over 7 times more—meaning that when you eat food produced in the industrial food system, for every kilocalorie of food you eat, 7 kilocalories (or equivalent) have been used up to produce and transport that food to you. See the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems Fact Sheet, “US Food System” for further details on this and for references.

These ineffieciencies can’t go on forever. The twin problems of climate change and peak oil force us to change strategies. You know about climate change certainly, even the most skeptical scientists will acknowledge its existence, if not it's cause. But what is this epic problem "peak oil," you might ask. It’s simply the peak amount of oil we can produce within nature and humankind's limit. Peak oil is an un-debatable physical phenomenon- the only piece of this reality that can be debated if when its going to happen and who it will hurt first. Some peak oil experts say the peak of our ability to produce oil has already occurred, others forecast it in the next few years. The end of our oil based economy doesn’t just mean we have to wean ourselves off big cars- it means we have to change the way we farm, produce, and procure our food- or many more people in the world go hungry. It means that we will have to change the way we go about our lives- from buying presents to building homes to accessing healthcare.

Industrial Nutrition: Public health takes note

The world of public health is beginning to take peak oil seriously- not only for concerns surrounding food security and hunger, but also healthcare delivery. This past March, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health hosted a conference on Peak Oil and Health. Speaker’s included a congressman, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, economists, and public health officials. The conference aimed to connect the dots between peak oil, climate change, the built environment, and declining ecosystems, to describe the potential impacts of peak oil on the public health sector, and to explore solutions. Presentation slides are available online.

Industrial Nutrition: Resources & Solutions

Interested in learning more about peak oil? Check out the Oil Drum- an important resource for peak oil activist's whose opinion I hold in high esteem. This will link you to an Oil Drum article on Ecological Economics and the Food System. For communities and people interested in building resilience and finding solutions; Transition Town offers a construct to help people, neighborhoods, cities, and so on to work together to address issues relating to transitioning to a more sustainable human-scaled economy.

Sustainable Nutrition Bottom Line: The industrial food system has little to offer in the way of real solutions to our health and planetary problems. It is essential we begin working to drastically change the dynamics of our food system. What can you do? Learn. Build your local, sustainable food economy by supporting local farmers using low energy intensive growing methods. Plant food. Connect with others in your community and work collectively to find creative ways to address climate change, peak oil, and health.

Planting the Seeds of Hope

2009-04-14T10:19:00.006-05:00

Gardeners across the country are giddy with spring: watching life sprout from seeds always fills one with hope.

This must be one of the reasons why so many people are returning to gardening this year: record seed sales, garden initiatives, organized seed swaps, and a much hoped for kitchen garden on the "First Lawn"! On April 9th, the Michelle Obama planted the first seedlings. The vegetables grown are meant to be eaten in the White House and shared with a local meal site for the homeless. On the garden, Mrs Obama said "In many countries they really believe in the importance of planting and growing their own food." She also emphasized the economic benefit of kitchen gardening. You can see a map of the garden by clicking here.

A kitchen garden is one of the most healthful, economical, and ecological options for filling your plate.

For your own edible landscape project check out the Kitchen Gardeners International.

Locally, in Milwaukee, the Victory Garden Initiative is growing. Check it out for resources, updates on the Memorial Day Gardening Blitz, and to learn how you can get involved.

Renewing Food Traditions

2009-03-30T11:56:00.007-05:00

Kanin Rouston teaching apple grafting. Photo by Mark Dohm

Renewing America's Food Traditions (RAFT) alliance is a network of people and organizations dedicated to identifying and restoring food and food traditions that are in danger of being lost...

From a nutrition professional's perspective, this loss of food traditions in inseparable from the decline in our collective health: the rise in type 2 diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and certain cancers can be traced to our change in food ways. Not only have the foods we eat changed, but the way we go about procuring food and eating food has changed dramatically in the past several decades. RAFT initiatives help restore some of our important traditional foodways to our landscapes and our plates.

RAFT has become a true force for good under the watch of author, ethno-botanist, and advocate Gary Nabhan. Founding members of the RAFT alliance include the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, the Center for Sustainable Environments, Chefs Collaborative,Cultural Convervancy, Native Seeds/SEARCH, Seeds Savers Exchange, and Slow Food USA. Each organization contributes in their own area of expertise. An example of this synergistic work is the Ark of Taste: Slow Food USA's catalogue of delicious foods in danger of extinction. Slow Food facilitates the Ark of Taste program, Seeds Savers Exchange offers Ark of Taste heirloom seeds to their customers, and Chefs Collaborative encourages chefs to use Ark of Taste foods on their menus.

Recently, I was privelaged to attend several RAFT events in Madison, WI, focusing on heritage apples. What follows is my excerpt from the Slow Food Wisconsin Southeast spring newsletter.

While perhaps the most beloved of American fruits, our dear apple’s diversity is in decline.

“The diversity of heirloom apples historically found in American orchards, backyards and hedgerows—upwards of 16,000 distinct named varieties—is greater than the diversity found in any other crop domesticated here or introduced to this continent. Now, the bad news: the number of apple varieties considered to be at risk of being lost from American landscapes and tables is also greater than that for any other kind of food— fruit, vegetable, livestock breed, fish or game.”

- From the Renewing America’s Food Tradition Forgotten Fruits Manual & Manifesto

But recently, apple advocates gathered at the UW-Arboretum in Madison to collaborate on ways to restore biodiversity to our orchards, markets, and plates. The Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) alliance, Slow Food USA, and Slow Food Madison coordinated a series of events dedicated to this fair pomme. A Forgotten Fruits Summit, a Heritage Orchard Restoration Workshop, an artisanal cider tasting, and a Great Lakes Food at Risk Workshop all took place in late March.

Of the Forgotten Fruits Summit, Slow Food Madison’s Heidi Busse said, “It was a truly historic event and the first (and possibly only) time that this group of fruit experts come together. Had it not been for the gathering that Dr. Gary Nabhan organized, this fruit knowledge may have been entirely lost and forgotten. This was a national gathering of apple growers, historians, authors and advocates who came together to talk about threatened apple varieties and discuss strategies for restoring apples in the landscape (and how to train a new generation of orchardists).”

At the Heritage Orchard Restoration Workshop, beginning growers learned from apple experts. A visit to Dan Bussey’s orchard (with over 200 varieties of apple trees) and an abandoned homestead orchard gave participants some field experience in grafting and tending trees.

The cider tasting featured delightful cider and cheese pairings, including an artisan cider made by Aeppeltreow, a winery located within Brightenwoods Orchard here in SE Wisconsin. http://www.aeppeltreow.com/ The tasting was preceded by inspirational readings by RAFT’s Gary Nabhan, Ark of Taste co-chair Ben Watson, and Aldo Leopold land conservationist Curt Meine.

The Great Lakes Region’s Food at risk workshop brought together wild food experts, fisherman, farmers, orchardists, health professionals, educators, and chefs to review, edit, and add to a list of all foods at risk in the region. A draft version of the list can be found on Slow Food USA’s website. A publication of Renewing the Food Traditions of the Great Lakes is due to come out later this year.

To learn more about RAFT and the Ark of Taste, visit Slow Food USA’s program pages at slowfoodusa.org.

Industrial Grade Sweeteners

2009-02-15T08:02:00.012-06:00

The Corn Refiners Association was recently dismayed by a study finding detectable mercury in 31% of sampled products sweetened with High Fructose Corn Syrup. After a multi million dollar industry ad campaign to promote HFCS's safety "in moderation... just like any sugar", written about here last year, the CRA is now hard pressed to to make the "just like any sugar" case when their product has a secret ingredient most people don't want to ingest.

Tom Philpott has written an excellent article outlining the peer-reviewed report published by the journal of Environmental Health on Gristmill.

The CRA of course finds fault with the study, you can read their outraged press release here.

One might ask at this point, how does mercury get into HFCS in the first place. The CRA would tell you that the mercury found could have come from anywhere and furthermore, "the amounts of mercury the authors and the IATP purport to have found in food products containing HFCS are far below levels of concern set by the U.S> FDA and the EPA." But the fact of the matter is that this highly toxic chemical can be traced to two of the many chemicals used to create HFCS. And the millions of parents with HFCS-guzzling children may want to rethink how "natural" this sweetener made from corn truly is...

Now the American Dietetic Association, which is in part bankrolled by food industry moguls such as Coca Cola, stands by the assertion that HFCS is "nutritionally equivalent to sucrose." And this is true, strictly speaking, when talking about weight or blood sugar control. But when are we as a profession, going to admit that food is more than the sum of its parts? While calorically similar, HFCS is a product of the industrialized agricultural and food system. The ADA states in a white paper on the subject, "HFCS is a controversial topic and although not all nutrition professionals will readily accept the scientific evidence, this paper represents an evidenced-based, balanced perspective." Well- this nutrition professional believes this is a very narrow view of one of the quintessential controversies of our time.

Bottom line:

While HFCS is calorically equivalent to other sweeteners, it may contain traces of mercury and stems from an industrial food system that does not support health and wellness of people or places. Choose more sustainable options such as honey, maple syrup, and organic, fair-trade sugar to sweeten your day, in moderation of course ;)

50% less Meat

2009-01-14T15:10:00.003-06:00

The next twenty minutes you have free, you should watch this online video of food writer Mark Bittman on TED. Bittman’s work has been featured in an earlier blog post: “Meat’s Deep Eco-Footprint”.

The Center for a Livable Future explains:

He calls attention to the lop-sided USDA food pyramid, the contribution of
industrial food animal production to climate change, and gives a pretty good
recap of how the American diet has changed in the last century.

Many gems can be found in this short segment. He connects the hyperconsumption of animal products and junk food to our health and climate crisis as well as the “death of the real community.” On the subject of nutritionism he says, “Its not the beta-carotene, it’s the carrot.”
He also proposes American’s cut their meat consumption in half and that we stop raising animals industrially and "stop eating them thoughtlessly". Bravo!

We all need to act individually and collectively if we want to improve the world we live in. Eating less meat and more plants is an individual action that, collectively, can have major impact.

Animal products are not needed for health, but they can be a part of a healthy diet. Animals raised right, such as grass fed beef and bison, can actually improve an ecosystem. But our planet cannot support our current (and growing)meat habit.

Sustainable Nutrition Recommendation:

If you eat animal products, choose small amounts of appropriately raised meat- grass fed beef and bison, organic pastured chicken and eggs, heritage pigs fed a varied diet, and wild fish not at risk of extinction.

Gardens for Change

2009-01-08T13:15:00.005-06:00

A Victory Garden on the White House lawn seems a no brainer to me:

the most influential house in the nation + edible garden

= inspiration for more gardens

President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to "open the doors of government" and asks us "to be involved in your own democracy again" on his change.org site. To speed this along, staffers have created an open forum to propose and vote on ideas for change. The 10 ideas with the most votes will be presented to the Obama on Jan 16th. Ideas for change range from "Free Single payer Healthcare" to "End the War in Iraq" to "Make the grid green in 10 years" to "Forgive student loans" and many ideas in between.

I cast my first vote for "Victory Gardens 2.0"- not because the other ideas aren't important, they are, but because in a time when a we are facing several major crises, simple, practical, and beautiful solutions should be considered. Gardening for change addresses health, environmental stewardship, resource conservation, hunger and economics. As a dietitian, I like to start health promotion and disease prevention from the ground up.

Voting ends on January 15th. Vote now.

Celebrate the Seasons with Local Flavors

2008-12-25T09:16:00.003-06:00

My contribution to the December Slow Food WiSE newsletter...

Imagine what it must have been like, a century ago, for a Wisconsin boy or girl to get an orange in their Christmas stocking. The exotic scent of citrus, the hint of sun, the golden juice... In a time when oranges are ubiquitous year-round, it might be hard to understand how special a short seasoned, far flung fruit might have been for a child. Eating locally and seasonally, for the great majority of history, has been the only option. The truth is that so many of our familial, food, and holiday traditions have gone by the wayside in lieu of bigger portions, faster foods, more gifts... The food traditions of the holiday season have long been connected to the ecology of the immediate world around us- and if we keep this in mind when choosing our celebratory foods, we might gain a deeper appreciation of the place we call home.

Winter in Wisconsin (with nary a ripe tomato to be found) is home to many lovely cold weather, and year round foods. Highlighting some of our region's special foods for menus and gifts at holiday gatherings promotes community and often inspires story telling. Nationwide, Slow food USA's Ark of Taste and Renewing Americas Food Traditions Alliance are two important programs that are aimed at saving endangered foods and preserving America's Food Traditions. Many Ark of Taste products, such as Sorghum Syrup, are grown, raised, or produced in the Mid-west. To learn more, go to the national website: www.slowfoodusa.org.

Consider the following Wisconsin foods for your winter gatherings:
* Cheeses
* Jams, Jellies and Preserves
* Storage Fruits & Vegetables
* Grains
* Maple syrup and honey
* Meat, Fish, and Fowl

Resources for finding local Wisconsin foods:
Farm Fresh Atlas of Southeastern Wisconsin
Local Harvest
Savor Wisconsin
Eat Wild
Milwaukee Community Supported Agriculture Initiative

Sickeningly Sweet

2008-12-12T16:52:00.009-06:00

Two of this year's food marketing campaigns have captured my attention for their sheer audacity.

The first, a "documentary" style ad portraying the introduction of Burger King's Whopper to people around the world unfamiliar with fast food. The second, a series of industry ads to promote high fructose corn syrup.

The premise of the Whopper Virgins piece is a team (including an "independent researcher") traveling the world to find people who have never tried a hamburger (aka; the virgins) for a Whopper vs Big Mac taste test. The Hmong, Inuit, and Romanian taste testers seemed to prefer the Whopper enough to warrant helicopter-ing in an authentic Burger King flame broiler for a town wide Whopper party in each taster's community. The ad shows people trying and liking the burgers so much they offer gifts and extend invitations for many happy returns. What it doesn't show us is the long term affect of eating poor quality, factory farmed beef on a refined flour bun on a regular basis.

History shows us that the colonization of peoples' traditional diet with the western diet of highly processed, refined foods leads to chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers. Time and time again, the transition of people from their tried and true traditional diets of naturally lean meats, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables to our fast food culture has been detrimental to their health. No story seems more drastic to me than that of the Pima Indians of the Southwest United States- a people with almost no recorded Type 2 Diabetes at the turn of the 20th century now have the highest rates of Type 2 Diabetes in the world. As their traditional farming and gathering practices diminished due to governmental policies and their reliance upon commodities of white flour, sugar, and lard increased, their rates of chronic diseases skyrocketed.

Over two thirds of American adults and one third of American children are overweight or obese. The CIA World Fact Book estimates that in 2008, the U.S. ranks 46th for life expectancy world wide. Our diet related chronic diseases continue to rise to epidemic proportions. These are all issues that warrant consideration as we continue exporting our food ways to the rest of the world.

In a slightly different vein, the promotional ads for High Fructose Corn Syrup brought to us by the Corn Refiner's Association are designed to counter the negative press HFCS has been getting over the past several years by deflecting and confusing the audience.

In one unsettling piece, a concerned mother confronts the hostess mom serving HFCS sweetened juice drink to children at a party. The concerned mom lacks any data to explain her concern and the host mom smugly explains that HFCS is made from corn, doesn't have artificial ingredients, and, just like any other sugar; is fine in moderation.

The problem with this is that of course, high fructose corn syrup is not enjoyed in moderation-Americans consumed over 60 pounds of it per person in 2004. As the preferred cheap sweetener of food manufacturers, HFCS has made it's way into most of our convenience foods and sweetened beverages. There is a huge amount of controversy over HFCS in both political and scientific realms. Some say we can blame our skyrocketing obesity rates on HFCS's easy accessibility while others stick to the refrain that a calorie is a calorie whether its cane sugar, honey, or syrup...

While it can be debatable that HFCS accounts for our nation's excess pounds, what is definitely true is that our governmental policies promote the manufacturing and use of HFCS. Both our corn subsidies which provide the bankroll for monocrops of corn and our tariffs on imported cane sugar keep HFCS cheap and easy. Not only is this a problem from a nutritional perspective (we should be subsidizing fruits and vegetables if we want people to eat better) this creates a huge environmental impact. Energy intensive, pesticide laden, genetically modified corn planted fence row to fence row is eroding our topsoil, polluting our water, and spewing carbon into the atmosphere. While scientists continue to debate whether HFCS promotes excess calorie consumption, insulin resistance, and harmful carbonyls compounds in our bodies we must broaden the conversation to include the harmful impact the over consumption of this sweetener has on our planet.

In response to the Corn Refiner's ads, several parodies have been posted, including one that seems to compare HFCS to the Nazi scoundrels from an Indiana Jones movie.

Petition for Change

2008-12-11T09:30:00.005-06:00

The nation's next president is expected to soon decide on his Secretary of Agriculture. This important role impacts food, nutrition programs, jobs, and the environment. A petition to request that Obama consider certain key candidates outside the fold of the industrial ag lobby is circulating on the web. Brought to us by many of the same folks who drafted the Food Declaration, I urge everyone who cares about good, clean, and fair food to sign the Food Democracy Now petition.

Pollan on PBS

2008-11-28T21:01:00.004-06:00

This evening on PBS, Bill Moyers conducted a captivating interview with sustainable food guru Michael Pollan on his weekly show. The lively discussion highlighted the effects our food system has on our health, the economy, the environment, and global food security. As solutions to our failing food policies, Pollan recommended (as he has done in his articles and books) that by engaging in the simple, yet powerful acts of gardening and cooking, "you declare your independence from the culture of fast food."

To read the transcript, listen to the podcast, view the vodcast, and find links visit the show's website.

Thankfully

2008-11-27T22:59:00.008-06:00

Heritage turkeys from Top o' the Hill Farm in Northwestern Illinois.

This Thanksgiving, I am most thankful to share good, clean, and fair food with loved ones.

Thankfully there is healthy soil, sun, air, and water for food.

Thankfully there are mindful people to raise the plants and animals that ended up gracing our plates...

I am especially thankful for these things because they are at risk: our topsoil is quickly disappearing, our climate is changing, our air and water has become unsafe in communities all over the world. The irony is that the very food system dependent upon these natural resources is ruining them.

While our holiday table bounded with roots and vegetables from our garden and our farmer friends' fields, possibly our biggest, or maybe our newest, adventure was finding the locally raised, organic, heritage Bourbon Red turkey we feasted on. After seeking out this treasure, it was comforting to see the farm our turkey was raised on and to know that the way it was raised led to healthy meat. Grass fed, foraged birds, that are supplemented with organic feed, and who have access to plenty of fresh air while roaming the wide out of doors are naturally better for the eaters.

Heritage breeds preserve tradition and flavor and our health. Find out more about heritage animals from the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy which works to promote the preservation of these endangered breeds. Heritage turkeys can be purchased through Local Harvest or Slow Food Chicago's Turkey project.

Seeds of Hope

2008-11-11T12:13:00.008-06:00

The seeds of hope have been planted with Obama's election to the presidency. Now the world is watching to see if these seeds will grow and the sustainable food community is abuzz with the recipes for growth (literally). Politics determine the policies that determine the health and wellness of our society. Whether Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green, Independent, or Other, the next president of the United States will have an impact on your world.

A number of recent articles & weblogs celebrate Obama's position on food while others urge reform and offer recommendations to the new administration for promoting food justice, public health, and sustainable agriculture.

From Slow Food USA: Yes We Can: Change Our Broken Food System
From Grist: Michael Pollan and other food authors and activists offer their elevator pitches for Obama
From FamilyFarmed.org: Obama to Support Local and Organic Food
From FarmAid: Willie Nelson's Open Letter to Obama
From Marion Nestle's What To Eat Blog: Who Will Obama Appoint?

Food & Politics

2008-10-15T15:32:00.005-05:00

Michael Pollan's open letter to the next president "Farmer in Chief" is required reading for anyone intersted in how our food system plays into the healthcare crisis, the energy crisis, and the climate crisis. My hope is that the candidates are interested enough in the topic to read it...

The above picture parody comes from a recent article posted on Grist "Politics and the Dinner Table-Weighing Obama's and McCain's stances on food and farm policy".

The Practicality of Local Foods

2008-09-29T09:49:00.006-05:00

As part of the Live Local Milwaukee initiative, yesterday the Paths to a Sustainable Future Group held a free Sustainable Living conference at the Urban Ecology Center. I participated in a panel discussion titled “Are Local Foods Really Practical? For Me? In SE WI?” along with Young Kim of the Fondy Food Market, Jay Salinas of Growing Power and the Wormfarm Institute, David Kozlowski of Pinehold Gardens and the CSA Initiative and moderated by Martha Davis Kipcak of Slow Food WiSE & the Kitchen Table Project.

I answered the question put to the panel by saying, “From a time & money perspective; no, local foods are not practical. However, it is impractical to continue business as usual.”

Business as usual when it comes to our foodways will only sink us deeper into the mire of climate change, land loss, water pollution, malnutrition, chronic disease, depletion of our precious topsoil, devastating loss of biodiversity and cultural diversity. We have gotten too big for our britches and we can’t expect to continue a food system that is propped up by cheap oil.

Re-localization of food systems is our only hope.

Our panel discussed many of the challenges facing us in terms of local food systems; capacity, land preservation, training farmers, creating distribution systems & small processing facilities, time, money, and general resistance to doing things differently. One of the themes that surfaced was our social value system- currently speedy, efficient, cheap foods allow us to get on with our hectic schedules of multitasking until we collapse in front of the tv where we are blasted with ads for more speedy, efficient, cheap stuff.... Its time for a makeover.

Here are some further thoughts on the matter:

Cost:
The hidden costs of industrial agriculture and fast food are unbearable. We spend less percentage of our income on food now than ever in history. Only we end up paying for it in the end with healthcare costs, environmental costs, as well as the direct cost of subsidies for the tax payer.

Public Health:
We have an epidemic of chronic diseases that are directly tied to our food system. Diabetes, heart disease, obesity are all related to the way we eat.

In my day job, I work with people with chronic diseases to help them make healthy lifestyle changes to improve their health outcomes. The picture seems to me quite grim. I can tell you that it is almost impossible to improve your health when your community foodways have been replaced by fast food outlets, convenience stores or liquor stores, and commodity distributors.

Our species are not immune to the laws of nature. When you have bad food available, people will, most often, eat it. You can study genetics and hormones and such, but it all comes down to the fact that we are wired to eat. We need gardens, farmers markets, co-ops in every neighborhood. And people need to relearn what to do with real food. We need to build skills around growing, buying, cooking, and eating. These are essential tools for health promotion and disease prevention.

Nutrition:
We have well over 3000 calories available to each of us in this country. Most of that comes from substances formerly known as corn. This breakdown of calories does not support the dietary guidelines. Local foods tend to be less processed, more wholesome, and more pleasurable on every level.

In Wisconsin, It is possible for those dedicated locavores to have a well balanced diet by eating 100% local foods (the only true exception is salt) year round. All of our food groups are represented: grains & starches, fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat, beans, nuts, fats, sweeteners, even beer, wine, liquor! We live in a land of plenty and yet our commodity food comes from and creates lands of scarcity around the world.

Global Warming:
Our food system is a major contributor to global warming in the fertilization and chemical application of crops as well as the transportion of food stuffs around the globe. The average meal travels 1500 miles to from farnm to fork. When it come sto the standard American plate of meat and potatoes, I’ve seen figures as high as 22,000 miles. Purchasing foods from your region can reduce your carbon footprint.

Peak Oil:
Industrial agriculture relies on oil to make its engine go. Oil is a finite resource and many experts believe world wide production has peaked or is near peak levels. Re-learning how to grow and process food without major oil & petroleum inputs will ensure a smoother transition into a post carbon future.

Biodiversity:
Poly-culture can ensure good nutrition, support wildlife and soil conservation, and it can also put out a lot more food stuff than the monocrops of high yield corn that seem to be planted fence post to fence post around farming communities.

Elitism:
Do not let people tell you that local, good, clean, and fair foods are bourgeois. These are the foods of the people. Our globalized food system strips people around the world of their food sovereignty. The cheap processed fast food costs a lot for the folks who no longer subsistence farm, for the folks with clogged arteries and pending diabetes, for the planet and for future generations. 35 million Americans are at risk of food insecurity- this in the wealthiest nation in the world with an excess of food.

We need to be valuing our food and this means making good food more accessible to everyone. One of the first practical steps to make this inevitability equitable would be to subsidize the good food. A current practice example is the Senior Farmer’s Market Nutrition Program- which doesn’t give much to individual seniors to use at farmer's markets, but it’s a step in the right direction.

We can make a better food system by creating and supporting action & policies:

Conserve land.
Teach people to farm & garden.
Make it affordable for young farmers to get started.
Promote gardens in schools, churches, front lawns, neighborhoods, porches, and rooftops.
Allow chickens & bees in urban areas.
Farm Bill: Improve upon the newly enacted bill with increased local foods initiatives and nutrition programs..
Demand that your local and national policy makers to make sustainable food a priority.

How a person can eat locally:

Redesign your life. Make time for food.
Ask for local foods at restaurants and stores.
Pay more for food. Make it a much larger percentage of your income.
Garden: get unplugged and dig in. This is good exercise too.
Learn to cook and preserve foods.

Think|Taste|Trust

2008-09-11T17:35:00.003-05:00

Think about where your food comes from and the power that lies within your choices.
Taste the difference of delicious, locally grown, & sustainably produced foods & beverages.
Trust the source of your food by meeting the people that grow and produce fresh, local foods.

These are some of the founding principles behind the local foods movement. And while the food system challenges we face are drastic and complex, it is important to remember that there are solutions and that they should be celebrated...

This Saturday in Milwaukee, we will be celebrating local flavors, farmers, chefs, producers, retailers, and food activists who are working together for a more sustainable food system at a local food festival.

Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture

2008-09-04T17:54:00.003-05:00

An important effort in the world of sustainable food political activism was unveiled last week at Slow Food Nation: the Declaration for Heathly Food & Agriculture. You can read it, leave comments, and sign it online...

Draft Declaration

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