Climate Change: A Little Intellectual Ammunition

Spring has sprung, and I come bearing bad news. I’m sure you’re not surprised. It turns out that even though you’re doing everything right, industrial agriculture is still screwing you — and the planet — up.

By: Philip Newell, Climate Nexus

Spring has sprung, and I come bearing bad news. I’m sure you’re not surprised.

It turns out that even though you’re doing everything right, industrial agriculture is still screwing you — and the planet — up.

You’ve abandoned tasteless tomatoes for your own homegrown heirloom beefsteaks, yet Big Ag is still causing you trouble. That early warmth that teases of spring before dashing your hopes of growth against the jagged rocks of March frost? That bloom-deceiving early warmth is climate change.

Even though you obsess over your patch of garden with a pair of tweezers to remove bugs rather than spray pesticide, “The Industry” is bringing more pests to your plot. Their (and, to be fair, everyone else’s) reliance on fossil fuels drives climate change. The higher temps mean your plot is becoming more attractive to new kinds of insects chomping at the bit to chomp down on your ‘cukes.

I could go on, but for your (and my) sanity, I’ll stop here and move on to what’s even more important:

What can you DO about it?

Well, for one thing you can take a look at some of the material we’ve gathered. Think of it as intellectual ammunition. That way next time someone scolds you for being a hippie-dippie, patchouli-scented stereotype, you can ditch the paisley overalls for a white lab coat, and drop on them some science that illustrates how climate change is altering phenological patterns in the U.S.

Further, you can take it on the offensive: surely some of your friends and neighbors, while maybe not growing their own spelt for bread, are interested in gardening.

Take the opportunity to talk about the impacts of climate change on our backyards — while you’re both working away amid them.

For those who do not live and breathe environmental issues, gardening is one issue that illustrates climate change is not a threat for the future but is happening NOW. The more you can show others who enjoy the outdoors how those spaces near and dear to our hearts are changing, the more hope we have for real action on climate change.

And it’s not only gardens being impacted (as I’m sure you know) but also animals, like birds. Everyone appreciates the playful call of their local songbird (unless it’s before 7 a.m. or the first coffee of the day), but few appreciate the potentially perilous impacts climate change is creating for them.

Taking things a step further, we at Climate Nexus would love to talk to you. We’re a non-profit group whose mission is to communicate the science of climate change.

While we have no problem finding the latest scientific research, we are not able to find something vastly more important: the real-life stories of how this science plays out in real life.

That’s where you all come in.

Given that you’re ‘in the dirt’ day after day, we’re sure you have some stories, anecdotes, even tips on how to handle these climate-related troubles.

Have you lived in the same place for all your life and can speak to the changes you’ve seen in your lifetime? Have you watched as birds arrive earlier and earlier every year—or maybe they’ve stopped leaving for winter all together?

We’re making an effort to help amplify and elevate these personal perspectives, so please shoot me an email at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or leave a comment.

Is Organic Better?

An Interview with “In Organic We Trust” Director/Producer Kip Pastor
By Slow Food USA Intern, Adrienne Lewis

We can no longer stomach our food system. It’s killing more and more Americans and costing billions in healthcare. 78% of Americans eat organic food, because they think it’s healthier. But is organic really better for us or just a marketing scam?

When corporations went into the business and “organic” became a brand, everything changed. The philosophy and the label grew apart. Can gummy bears or bananas flown halfway across the world truly be organic?

“In Organic We Trust” is an eye-opening food documentary that looks beyond organic for practical solutions like local farmer’s markets, school gardens, and urban farms that are revolutionizing the way we eat. Change is happening from the soil up.

---

My fellow classmates in “Food Systems: Food and Agriculture,” a component of the Food Studies, Nutrition, and Public Health Program at New York University, sat down with Director/Producer Kip Pastor to talk about the film.

How is soil health related to human health? How do organics play a role in this?

Soil is often misunderstood. People confuse dirt and soil all the time. Dirt is sort of like displaced soil, or soil without the nutrients. Believe me when I say, you can see and smell the difference. Soil is the lifeblood of nature. It contains the nutrients, minerals, and mircobials that plants need to grow and thrive.

There’s a direct correlation between the health of our soil and the health of our agriculture. Healthy soil produces nutrient dense food. If the soil is sick, the plant will be sick, too. In that way, the health of the soil relates to the health of the plant, which in turn relates to our health.

I think that it’s legitimate to conclude that there’s a direct relationship between healthy soil and healthy people. But it goes even deeper than that.

Conventional agriculture uses billions of pounds of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. These chemicals not only damage the health of the soil, but they end up in our air and waterways. Nitrogen fertilizers are part of water runoff from farms and have caused algae blooms in the Mississippi River and the Golf of Mexico. This is an example of a less direct consequence that unhealthy soil has on human health.

On the other hand, soil that is not treated with chemical pesticides and fertilizers can be healthier and absorb water and nutrients more easily. Although nitrogen fertilizers can be used in certified organic farming, the toxic chemicals, for the most part, cannot. Most organic farmers rotate their crops and nurture their soils, though it is not a requirement of being certified. I think that it’s fair to say that organic farming has a profound impact on soil health.

A real issue in organics seems to be political corruption; what can organizations like Slow Food and we, as individuals, do to bring about change in such a broken system?

Since the term certified organic is a legal classification, it can be changed and shaped in whichever way the governing body deems appropriate. As a result, corporations have been involved with intense lobbying and have exerted pressure to influence politics. Some groups and farmers have caused controversies to the USDA certified organic label, and there’s growing criticism that some big organic growers bend the rules. However, I think it’s a bit hyperbolic to say that organics suffer from political corruption. Yet, it is fair to say that the process of certifying organic is also flawed.

Certified organic does not, by definition, follow the philosophies of being organic. To be certified, you are not required to promote healthy soil or conserve water. You can input enormous amounts of nitrogen fertilizers, which impact the soil and waterways. You can also import organics that are out of season or shipped from a far-off land. These allowances split with the philosophy.

But the certification system was not created to address all of these parts of our broken food system. It is imperative that organizations, like Slow Food, take a broader approach to agriculture and food. Slow Food takes the strands of our broken system and weaves them into a complete narrative that connects with individuals and communities. Food access, farmer worker justice, edible education, and many other issues have overlapping themes, but so often we just focus on one.

The food system is fractured. There is not a clear vision on how to fix it. Slow Food builds community in order to foster learning, development, and change. At this point it’s a cliché, but it’s still just as true, you can vote with your wallet. Demand healthy, local, organic food for yourself and your family. Individual choices will have a profound impact on how and where our agriculture is grown in the future. You can get to know farmers and farmer’s markets, engage your community at an urban farm, and educate the next generation about healthy eating habits and how to grow food at school gardens. At the very least, you can grow something by a window at home.

Change will come from the soil up, not from the top down. Corporate interests will push for scale, large distribution, cheaper products from overseas, and anything to increase shareholder stock. In turn, those corporate interests lobby the government to create regulations that favor them – subsidies, crop insurance, etc. In order to change the system, we have to come together as a community. Slow Food is a place and an idea that joins us together.

Do you see a place at all for corporate organic agriculture on the market, specifically when thinking about areas where access to small-scale organic products is limited?

There is a place for corporate organic agriculture in our current situation. Absolutely. Although many corporations don’t care about the organic philosophy or investing in soil and conserving resources, corporate organic doesn’t have to be bad. Above all, they are not using dangerous chemicals that poison us, the water, and the soil. Furthermore, the large growth of certified organic can be attributed in part to these corporations.

Most people don’t get their food from farmer’s markets or CSAs, they get it at Walmart and other big chains. The large companies have the production and distribution networks that get organic food to more people, in more places. That’s a positive thing. As a result, there is a growing awareness that chemical pesticides and their residues on food are dangerous for our health and the environment. This conversion would not have happened as quickly without these corporate supply chains. However, it is my hope that once people understand that organic is the only way to go, we’ll start sourcing it more locally, from farmer’s nearby, and growing it ourselves on our rooftops, balconies, and communal lands. I full-heartedly believe that we can transition away from industrial agriculture and push harder towards more sustainable farming with new methods.

How could the organic system cope with the increasing demands of customers in time?

I think the essence of the question is – can organic feed the world? I’ll get to that, but first, I’d like to reframe it a little. We are reaching a crisis in agriculture – the average age of farmers in the US is fifty-nine, farmland has been consolidated into huge corporate monocultures, conventional farming uses dangerous petrochemicals, food transportation is expensive and harmful for the environment, and water resources are getting scarce – what does the future look like?

This is the ideal time to go organic. We need to rebuild rural America, we need to reinvest in young farmers, expand small farms to urban areas on rooftops, abandoned parking lots, sidewalks, schools, we need to educate our youth about soil and nutritious food choices. Let’s teach them organic and sustainable methods. If we put these things together, we can cut down on carbon emissions from chemical applications and transportation, increase food access, raise public health, become free from petrochemicals, and give jobs to the next generation of growers.

All of those solutions are part of the fabric of the organic philosophy. More than anything, this organic philosophy needs to be disseminated to everyone. Over time, organic production will be able to handle consumer demands. You don’t have to be certified organic to be “organic.”

I believe that all food will be produced organically one day because our current system is based on petrochemicals, which will one day run out. It’s an unsustainable system. However, we have a little time before that happens, and we are already making a strong transition to more ubiquitous use of natural gas. Certified organic agriculture represents about 1% of total cropland in the US. I don’t have the actual statistics, but I’ve been told that non-certified organic represents another 1% or so. It is growing but not fast enough to feed the world… yet.

A combination of education, ingenuity, and technology is the way to move forward. I’m a big advocate of growing food where you live – in your home, balcony, at a community garden, or on your roof. Also, some different technologies make it possible to grow food in smaller spaces while using less water – aquaponics and hydroponics. We must invest more in agricultural research and start using water for farms, not lawns. It’s inevitable that we’ll go back to an organic farming system, the only question is how long it takes. With passionate people and a growing demand, I believe it can be faster than you’d think.

Indigenous Peoples Stand Up to Save Native Corn

Indigenous communities in the Western Hemisphere depend on corn not only as a source of nutrition, but as the center of their cultural traditions and spirituality.

Originally posted by Gilyn Gibbs for First Peoples Worldwide

From time immemorial, indigenous communities in the Western Hemisphere have depended on corn not only as a source of nutrition, but as the center of their cultural traditions and spirituality. This past September, the Yaqui Peoples of Sonora Mexico hosted the inaugural “Indigenous Peoples International Conference on Corn” in the Zapoteca Nation of Oaxaca Mexico. The conference, attended by 48 Indigenous Nations across from North, Central and South America, was created to encourage unity among indigenous communities, restore traditional economies, and ensure the survival of all native varieties of corn.

The Indigenous Corn Peoples are a part of long-standing cultural tradition tied to the natural world. The core principle of the Yaqui Peoples, “is the sacredness, mystery and life-sustaining power of the natural world and living things.” They are deeply connected to their environment and express this through traditional ceremonies, songs, and dances. They consider their relationship with plants and animals as inter-dependent and interwoven. It’s for this reason that corn, the fundamental means of nutrition and healing, is so respected and cherished. In indigenous communities, the people are directly related to all steps of the corn production process. Before the planting of the corn, there are ceremonies to express appreciation for the earth that allows the corn to be planted and for the water to allows it to grow. When it is time to harvest the corn there is a ceremony celebrating corn as the source of life and creation. The harvesting of corn isn’t simply to acquire food, but celebrates the all-encompassing lifestyle of devotion to the earth. One member of the Yaqui reiterates: “Our struggles to protect corn as a source of our lives cannot be separated from our struggles to defend our rights to land, water, traditional knowledge and self-determination.”

Environmental degradation is a global issue, but for the Yaqui community, it comes with devastating consequences. The booming agri-business has not only pushed many Indigenous communities off of their land, but also heavily promoted the use of chemical pesticides and genetically modified (GMO) corn. The Mexican government has been a source of conflict, creating programs that cut off access to land and clean water, and mandating the use of this GMO corn for small farmers. The introduction of these corn variations has dramatically decreased the diversity and resiliency of traditional seed varieties. The new strains of corn require much higher levels of agro-chemicals and water, which the Sonora desert ecosystem cannot provide. These negative effects aren’t only environmental. In 1997 Dr. Elizabeth Guillette conducted a study that detected high levels of pesticides in mothers’ milk and found severe learning and development disabilities in Yaqui children living in these high pesticide areas. The Yaqui people started the Corn Conference as a way to gain support of Indigenous Corn Peoples from the area and to stop the environmental, cultural, and health degradation.

The Indigenous Peoples International Conference on Corn created an atmosphere where all Indigenous Corn Peoples could unite around a single mission to protect their sovereignty and identity. They called “for a new focus on sustainable and respectful use of corn as a basis for our traditional and collective economic, social and cultural development”. The Indigenous Corn Peoples committed to halt the use of pesticides and GMO corn in their territories. They also resolved for all communities to focus on restoring and strengthening local markets and economies by protecting their food and seed sovereignty. The conference attendees decided that the way to do this is by reestablishing Indigenous seed banks and trade relationships so that the seeds with the most resistance and adaptability to climate change can be used, replicated, and shared among communities. They believe that the renewal of an indigenous trading system in the Americas will be the most beneficial way to share knowledge across communities and ultimately, bring change.

Although the conference was only one step in the movement for Indigenous rights, the Yaqui ultimately achieved their greatest goal: to organize fellow Indigenous communities and Peoples to defend Mother Earth and her lands, water, forests and corn against the threat climate change and unsustainable industrial food practices. By embracing their heritage as Indigenous Peoples to protect mother earth, they are also protecting the culture, spirituality, health, and traditions that have been passed on to them for centuries from being lost forever.

SFUSA sends letter to Congress urging support for sustainable farming & nutrition assistance

Slow Food USA sent a letter to Congressional leaders asking them to ensure that efforts to reduce expenditures are not made on the backs of our most vulnerable and protect funding for nutritional assistance programs and sustainable food and farming.

Last week Slow Food USA Executive Director Richard McCarthy sent a letter to Congressional leaders asking them to conserve programs that help the most vulnerable with nutrition assistance and supports sustainable farming and family farmers. Click here to view the letter.

For more information on funding levels for farming and nutrition see the National Sustainable Agriculture’s blog.

Irish Stew for St. Patrick’s Day

In honor of St. Patty’s Day on Sunday, a recipe from Slow Food Ireland

This recipe originally appeared on Slow Food Ireland’ recipe page

Ballymaloe Irish Stew

Stew is something we think of as a winter dish, but in reality, Irish stew is best in early summer, made with youngish lamb and the new season’s sweet onions and carrots. In this recipe, the fact that the meat is cooked on the bone (we use shoulder and neck chops) greatly enhances the flavour.

Serves 4–6

1.3kg (3lb) lamb chops or hogget (gigot or rack chops) not less than 2.5cm (1 inch) thick

6 medium or 12 baby onions

6 medium or 12 baby carrots

freshly ground pepper and salt

850ml (1 1⁄2 pints/3 3/4 cups) lamb stock or chicken stock or water

12 potatoes or more if you like (Golden Wonder or Kerr’s Pink are excellent)

sprig of thyme

about 1 tablespoon (1 American tablespoon + 1 teaspoon) roux , optional

Garnish

2 tablespoons freshly chopped parsley

1 tablespoon freshly chopped chives

Directions
Preheat the oven to 180ºC/350ºF/gas mark 4.

Cut the chops in 50g (2oz) pieces and trim off some of the excess fat.

Set the pieces aside and render down the fat on a gentle heat in a heavy frying pan (discard the rendered down pieces). Peel the onions and scrape or thinly peel the carrots (if they are young, leave some of the green stalks on the onions and carrots).

Cut the carrots into large chunks, or if they are young leave them whole.

If the onions are large, cut them small, if they are small they are best left whole.

Toss the meat in the hot fat until it is slightly brown. Transfer the meat into a casserole, then quickly toss the onions and carrots in the fat. Build the meat, carrots and onions up in layers in the casserole. Season each layer generously with freshly ground pepper and salt. Deglaze the frying pan with lamb or chicken stock and pour into the casserole.

Peel the potatoes and lay them on top of the casserole, so they steam while the stew cooks. Season the potatoes. Add a sprig of thyme and bring to the boil on top of the stove.

Then cover and transfer to a moderate oven or allow to simmer on top of the stove until the stew is cooked, about 1–2 hours, depending on whether the stew is being made with lamb or mutton.

When the stew is cooked, pour off the cooking liquid, degrease and reheat the liquid in a saucepan. If you like slightly thicken the juices with a little roux. Check the seasoning, then add chopped parsley and chives and pour it back over the stew. Bring it back up to boiling point and serve from the pot or in a large pottery dish.

Variation

Irish Stew with Pearl Barley

Add 2 tablespoons of pearl barley to the stew with the vegetables and increase the liquid to 2 pints as the pearl barley absorbs a considerable amount of liquid.

Slow Money: A Q&A With Woody Tasch

Slow Food USA sits down with Woody Tasch, the Founder and Chairman of Slow Money to talk about resourcing good, clean, and fair enterprises.

Q: What first inspired you to create Slow Money?

A: During the 1990s, first as Treasurer of the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and next as Chairman of Investors’ Circle, I had promoted the idea of patient capital, an approach to venture capital that looked away from where’s-the-next-Apple and towards a time horizon that was more in synch with natural cycles and intergenerational equity. Then, in 2000, I had the wonderful good fortune to visit Slow Food headquarters in Bra. I was immediately struck by a few questions:  If we want Slow Food, and all of the small food enterprises that are necessary to preserve and restore it, aren’t we going to have use our investment dollars as well as our consumer dollars? And how can we enjoy our Slow Food while our money is zooming around the planet invested in companies of the monoculture? At a more visceral level than that, I was so utterly impressed by the beauty and depth of Slow Food’s vision and the power of Carlo Petrini’s voice that it was obvious: Patient Capital plus Slow Food equals Slow Money. Little did I know that after several years of gestation, this would lead me to write Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered, and, thence, to the emergent Slow Money network.

Q: Slow Money is supporting Slow Food’s Gardens in Africa program. What is it about the program that you find compelling?

A: When I told Carlo that we were interested in doing a bit of fund-raising for Slow Food, this is where he asked that we focus. Over time, I hope Slow Money will become one of Slow Foods’ best friends, exploring collaboration on multiple levels.

Q: How have you seen the changes in the economy in the past few years affect small food enterprises?

A: I don’t see the local food movement in the U.S. as a response to short-term economic challenges. Rather, I see it as a response to a few generations of industrialization and globalization. That said, it is surely true that if I had stood up in public ten years ago and starting talking about “Slow Money,” it would have been a very different conversation. The 1,000 pt. drop in the Dow, Bernie Madoff, the derivatives craziness, ultra-fast trading—all this creates a different context within which to put the word “slow” together with the word “money.”  I see investing in small food enterprises—small and mid-size organic farms, grain mills, creameries, restaurants and the like—as part of a larger process of economic restructuring. Fixing what’s broken in the food system is a critical step in fixing what’s broken in the economy as a whole.

Q: The Slow Money annual gathering coming up in April. What are you most excited about this year?

A: If you think of Slow Money as “the CSA of investing,” you get a feel for how important our national gatherings are.We are about relationships, direct personal knowledge and trust, place-based investing, with soil fertility as an ultimate metric. There is no mutual fund that can do this. Only a bunch of us, thousands of us, rolling our sleeves up, getting to know one another, sharing learning across locales—buoyed by the conviction that lots of small investment decisions are part of a much larger process of restoration and preservation—will get the job done. I’d like to think that our national gatherings have a teeny, weeny dose of Terra Madre in them—thought leadership, grassroots activism, entrepreneurship and just a plain old dose of appreciation for the beauty of food well-produced and the joys of convivial sharing. Of course, Terra Madre is magic and you can’t bottle magic. But in our own way, inspired by Slow Food and Terra Madre, we bring people together around core issues and opportunities, adding, of course, the money piece, the investment piece, and focusing around a few dozen food entrepreneurs who are seeking investment.  We couldn’t be more pleased to have Carlo and Richard McCarthy joining us this year.  This will be a wonderful opportunity for our two networks to connect and cross-pollinate.

Woody Tasch is Founder and Chairman of Slow Money. Slow Money’s Fourth National Gathering is taking place in Boulder, Colo on April 29-30. More information visit the website.

Slow Food USA partners with The Media League for Good Eats competition

We’re excited to announce our partnership with the only varsity creativity league for high schools.

Game 4 of The Media League’s inaugural season – Good Eats – kicks off on March 9th as Media Teams from high schools in Canada, the UK and the USA will all start working on songs, stories, poems, videos, paintings, drawings, photos, skits and more – all exploring the intersection of art and food in their lives.


Over the subsequent 2 weeks, many talented young artists will upload their work to The Media League website and many more fans will rate and view and share that media to score points for their favourite teams. See the Good Eats Game Page here: http://www.themedialeague.com/game/4


The Media League is the world’s only varsity creativity league for high schools. They mashed up varsity sports with digital youth culture and out popped The Media League, an organized competition in which high school Media Teams compete by producing and sharing original creative media. The Media League season includes Players, Fans,  Teams, Coaches, Games, Playoffs and – later this year – Champions! Participation in The Media League is 100% free.

$48 million and rising: student campaigns transform cafeteria food service

David Schwartz, Campaign Director for Real Food Challenge, highlights the success of campus-based campaigns to bring Real Food to school dining halls.

This post is from David Schwartz, Campaign Director for Real Food Challenge, and was originally posted on the Real Food Challenge blog.

Arizona State. Bunker Hill Community College. Ole Miss. UPenn. Gonzaga. No, this is not an odd new athletic conference. But, following a recent 200+ student summit in Baltimore, teams on each of these campuses are competing—for the most ambitious campus food policy in the nation.

As part of the national Real Food Challenge, student campaigners are urging their college presidents to sign on to the Real Food Campus Commitment, a pledge that would ensure complete transparency in university food supply chains and shift at least 20% of a college food purchasing budget to real food for their campus dining halls. Since the 2011 launch of the Commitment, 9 colleges and university presidents have signed on, opening new markets and incentives to local, fair, ecologically sound and humane food producers.

This spring, student activists expect to win an additional $4 million in real food commitments, bringing the total to over $50 million since the campaign’s inception—a historic tipping point in the broader food movement.

“This is a critical moment”, says Carleton College student Lindsay Guthrie. “Our generation is inheriting a climate crisis, extreme economic inequality, and unacceptable health disparities—climate disasters, debt, and diabetes are becoming our new normal. But we’re not standing idly by.”

Indeed, student activists at UNC Chapel Hill were anything but idle as they campaigned to break up the exclusive deals between their university and conventional pork-producing factory farms. After months of negotiation, they celebrated a precedent-setting deal with a local women-owned pastured livestock operation.

At the University of Vermont (UVM), a recent Real Food Campus Commitment signatory, the school now leads the state with over $600,000 in farm-to-table procurement, a new-farmer training program and countless courses on relevant food justice topics. Upon signing the Commitment, Interim President John Bramley commented, “UVM can play an important role not just in educating students or researching the issues but by actually seeking to be part of the solution, in the way we choose to feed the 15,000 members of our community. I am proud of the part UVM and its food providers are playing, and of the leadership role our students have taken, in this important initiative and global challenge.”

This change has not come without pushback from the conventional agribusiness sector. When students calls for change led top-rated Virginia Tech Dining to switch to cage free eggs, the university soon received angry calls from the state’s industrial egg layers association and their allies in the state’s political establishment.

The campaign has also seen resistance from Aramark one of the largest multi-national food service companies - which operates cafeterias at 500+ universities.Unlike some of their competitors, this company has refused to sign on to the movement’s basic transparency standards.

Despite these challenges, in 2012, the movement swelled to nearly 100,000 strong, when students, staff and faculty organized events on 300 campuses across the country as a part of Food Day, a national day of action for healthy, just and sustainable food. Since then, successes at Macalester College and the University of Cincinnati have only fueled the growing fire.

In another surprising twist, the most recent campaign success comes from the Hotchkiss School, a 9-12 grade boarding school in Massachusetts and the first high school in the country to sign the Commitment. This precedent-setting victory illustrates just how far this movement stretches: with 14 and 15-year-olds pushing for a just food system. Oberlin College in Ohio is set to be the 10th signatory in just a few weeks.

This spring, all eyes will be on schools like Johns Hopkins University, Duke University and Williams College, where students are urging their university leaders to sign on to the Real Food Campus Commitment as UVM did. If they are successful, it’ll mean $4,000,000 in additional purchases for local farms and sustainable food businesses, annually. And, for a whole generation of young people who’ve taken diet-related disease, climate change, and corporate control of food as the norm, it’ll mean a new sense of hope and possibility for real change.

“For many of us who’ve been in the food justice movement for 10, 20 or 30 years now, the Real Food Challenge points the way towards a new phase in our collective work,” comments Anim Steel, formerly Director of National Programs at the Food Project in Boston. “If we focus on organizing our communities to influence strategic institutional targets, we can foster new leaders for our movement and grow our power so as to truly challenge and change the established order. That, to me, is the real meaning of real food.”