Riots or Rebellions? Eric Holt-Giménez Looks at the World Food Crisis

by intern Julia Landau

“Food riot??” asked an indignant Eric Holt-Giménez at a talk he gave in New York City on March 5, referring to protests in response to the 2008 food crisis. According to Holt-Giménez, the Executive Director of Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy, “food rebellion” would be more accurate. 

Between 2007 and 2008, approximately 40 food protests occurred around the world. In Mexico, corn prices made tortillas prohibitively expensive for the nation’s poor. In Haiti, soaring food prices led people to the streets, and eventually to overthrow the Prime Minister.

These protests were not spontaneous outbursts fueled by mob-mentality – hence they were not riots. Instead, they were conscious, political acts: rebellions. The agency and intention implied by the word rebellion are essential: they are not just a reaction to food prices, but a protest against a flawed system. It’s the difference between responding to symptoms and curing the sickness.

The commonly-cited reasons for hikes in food prices are grain speculation, increased use of land for agro-fuel production, increased meat consumption, and a particularly poor harvest season – what Holt-Giménez calls proximate causes. While in 2007-2008 these forces were certainly at work, a deeper look reveals that the food crisis was actually a long time in the making. We have a vulnerable food system – one in which 91% of our crops are maize, cotton, wheat, rice, and soy. With such a lack of diversity in our agricultural repertoire, we leave our crops open to environmental and economic shock. Think Irish potato famine.

There is a danger in conflating the proximate and root causes of the food crisis, Holt-Giménez warns. When we focus only on the symptoms of the problem, we easily reach the conclusion that genetically modified food and industrial agriculture present a “solution,” or an immediate fix to world hunger. But if we look at the root causes, we see that this “quick fix” leaves us vulnerable to loss of crop diversity, market flooding, and farmer bankruptcy. The consolidation of land and power are at the heart of the problem.

More after the jump

One take on the soda tax

by intern Valerie Scott

I wish I was virtuous enough to stick to just water and wine, but I’m not – like most of America, I like soda. So why do I support the controversial proposal in New York to impose a tax on soda? Because taxes like this one are proven to reduce weight and lower risk of diabetes. And I think that’s worth a few extra pennies of punishment for a guilty pleasure.

All week, I’ve been hearing commercials from the Alliance for a Healthier New York in favor of the proposed NY “soda tax.” New York state health officials are aiming to levy a penny-per-ounce tax on sugary soda. New York Governor David Paterson proposed the soda tax in January and last week Mayor Michael Bloomberg urged state legislators to impose the tax.

I was still on the fence until a new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill convinced me that a soda tax is worthwhile. The study followed more than 5,000 participants for 20 years, tracking the average price of fast food and soda in the counties in which the participants lived. The diet, weight and insulin levels of the participants were also analyzed. The results show that weight and risk of diabetes decreased for people in communities where soda and fast food prices increased.

The senior author of the study, Barry Popkin, Ph.D, states, “Our results provide robust evidence to support the potential health benefits of taxing selected foods and beverages as a way of improving public health.”

Of course, at the end of the day, a tax is about raising revenue and the New York soda tax will do that. The tax could raise up to $1 billion annually to fund health care programs across the state. State Health Commissioner Richard Daines told the NY Daily News, “It’s a triple play. We would reduce obesity, earn revenue to support health care and, in the long run, cut health care costs.”

President Obama has said that soda taxes are “an idea worth exploring,” but since the failure of Governor Paterson’s first attempt to tax soda in 2009 and ongoing health care reform woes, the administration has not proposed a similar tax on the national level. A success story in New York would be one step towards changing that.

Bottom line – I think the soda tax could be an important way to reduce obesity and diabetes and fund health care programs overburdened with the high costs of chronic disease.

If you live in New York and want to contact your legislators about the soda tax, click here!

Iron Chef, whole grains edition

by Robin Kerber, CIA Student and volunteer with Slow Food Hudson Valley

As I sat in the car, waiting for my friends, I was thinking about a recipe for winter barley vegetable soup: butternut squash, roasted beets, celeriac, and barley.  After spending all day making pastries in class, nothing sounded more satisfying than a bowl of warm soup made with fresh, local ingredients.  But I wasn’t making the soup for me.  I was about to travel to the Mount Kisco Child Care Center to help with a friendly “Iron Chef” whole grains themed competition.

The first time that we—six students from the Culinary Institute of America—had traveled to Mount Kisco to plan our meal with the kids, I had had no idea what to expect.  What do children know about cooking let alone designing a dish?  It turns out they know a lot.  At least the children of The Mount Kisco Child Care Center do.  They have their own edible schoolyard, which produces a huge variety of fresh fruits and veggies.

My friends and I arrived with our knives sharpened and our whisks in hand.  My team came up with a recipe that sounded delicious and hearty, with flavors like thyme and parsley.  I’m fairly certain I didn’t know what thyme was until I was much older than these kids but the experience made me realize that something remarkable was spreading slowly but surely across the nation: initiatives to teach children how to live sustainably. The children were gathered around a table, carefully cutting vegetables into chunks.  We immediately got to work in the kitchen, helping the excited children prepare a tasty meal.  And, as dinner - time rolled around, the Center was packed with friends, family, and local purveyors.

Many of the courses featured wheat, oats, and cornmeal that were grown and milled in the Hudson Valley.  Local honey sweetened whole wheat bread and polenta with I&Me Farm pea shoots setting the stage for a fantastic meal.  My team’s vegetable barley soup and an entrée of quinoa pilaf with local apples helped make the meal a celebration of winter flavors.  By the time apple crumble was served, the consensus was clear: local food is simply great.  But it wasn’t just the food that made the night unforgettable.  It was the feeling that we were working as a unified group, rather than as individuals.  By the end of the evening, most would have to agree that life feels more meaningful when you understand the connection between land, food, and community.

Final words from the Mt. Kisco Child Care Center kids-Stephanie, Paulina, Sabrina, Vincent, Benji, Emily, Sam, Nitza, Jocelyn, Emma, Clara and Zachery aged 5-11:

“Everyone got to practice their knife skills.  We ran back and forth from harvesting fresh pea shoots to the busy kitchen.  Yummy taste of peas.”

“Maybe we’ll go to school to become chefs one day, but even if we don’t, we’ll be healthy eaters.”

Middle School Slow Food clubs meet with Josh Viertel

by Daniela Salazar Monárrez, 8th grader at Hillcrest Academy and Slow Food Club founder

Yesterday the Slow Food clubs of Van Avery Prep and Hillcrest Academy got together with the Slow Food USA president Joshua Viertel. Josh kindly came to Temecula to meet our two Slow Food clubs, which are the first middle school clubs in the country. We had prepared our questions and were armed with freshly picked lettuce, organic salad dressing, and lemonade made from school grown lemons. With tasty food and our questions ready to go, both schools felt comfortable for the arrival of our Slow Food celebrity.

Josh was tall. He was warm and friendly, greeting with a smile and handshake. All the members of both clubs got to shake his hand and listen to some information about the Slow Food Organization. The younger members got to ask a few questions, then the twelve chosen representatives went to the round table (which was really squared). The smaller group settled down and got ready to ask questions.

After an introduction by yours truly, the questions began. They ranged from personal specific things like “Do you have a garden?” to bigger more general things like “What would you change about food in the world, and why?” but each student got a chance to ask a question.

We learned about how he believes that the fact that some people don’t buy good food doesn’t mean they have bad morals. “… It says something bad about our society, that people don’t have enough money to buy good food for themselves,” he told us. We discovered that even Josh has bought fast food, when he was stuck at an airport, hungry, and had only fast food available. “No one is perfect,” he said “the main thing is how you act most of the time.” Josh explained his interest in slow food and how he believed in the concept before he heard about the organization.

More after the jump

Eating in: not so hard

A week ago I wrote about Cathy Erway’s book The Art of Eating In and about HuffPost’s challenge to its readers to like Cathy did and eat in for one week.  So, here goes my progress report, day 4. 

For me—as for many of my colleagues—this isn’t so very different from a regular week.  I usually make my lunch at least 3 days, if not all 5 workdays.  Although lunch eats in DUMBO are better than in some neighborhoods, stuff I can make at home will almost always be better.  It seems to be merely a matter of organization/planning, and making the time to prepare something.  True, I’ve been eating kale salad for four days running, but it did have blood oranges and avocado on top, and those sweet potatoes I baked in the office toaster oven sure made the office smell good.

On Monday, Anna Lappe came to our office and wrote this lovely piece about the merits of eating in and how it made her lunch date with Josh (Viertel) more fun and more delicious.

I myself found that the challenge got me:

• Eating at home with a friend in a very casual and potluck-y way that made both of us think: why don’t we do this more often?


• Using up food in my fridge and not throwing out as much as I sometimes do (i.e. no produce was harmed/tossed in the making of this experiment)


• Eating less


• Spending less money

The bog trick will be the weekend, which is often structured around dinners and brunches and the like.  Wish me luck.

Check out The Waterpod

by Emily Vaughn

Gardeners are problem-solvers.  Depending on their circumstances, they become experts on coping with rocky soil, too much shade, rural varmints or limited space.  But very few people besides Carissa Carman and her team of collaborators have firsthand knowledge of how successfully install a garden on the bed of a seafaring barge.
 
Carman, a social practice artist and seasoned gardener, was the Living Systems Director & Designer for The Waterpod—a stunning biodynamic sculpture and autonomous living structure organized by artist Mary Mattingly. As it toured the waterways of New York City last summer, the Waterpod fed, powered, and watered itself by virtue of innovative technologies like a bike-powered electricity generator, and a series of gardens that others have only imagined.
 
The original plans for the living systems included a contained garden bed, and were outfitted with detailed co-designs from an engineering class at Humboldt State University. But as the project took shape, constraints emerged-- like high winds, salty air, Waterpod residents’ food allergies, and lack of space—that changed the planting methods used, and the plants themselves. 
 
Carman viewed the group’s ability to evolve its designs to meet such obstacles as one of the project’s greatest successes. “There were so many systems that were exciting and new,” says Carman. “Some of the basic construction was one of our biggest challenges.” With the help of volunteers and visitors, the Waterpod food system expanded to include a wide range of growing methods, like self-irrigating planters (SIPs), companion planting (like a three-sisters garden and a “stacking and packing” bed), and hydroponic installations. Even the flowers (“aesthetic pollinators”) contributed to the central mission of the gardens: “make sure there’s plenty to eat!”
 

More after the jump

It’s not too early to start planting! Jonesing for green…

by Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, Slow Food Boston

February is tough on even the most chlorophyll-phobic among us. The other day, I caught my brother-in-law—the guy who’s enacted a total ban on houseplants and helivacs the floral arrangement from the dining room table—stuffing my Seeds of Change catalog down his pants.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Um, planning a garden?”

Ordinarily, I would have been supportive, but we’re talking about fodder for late night fantasies featuring Armenian cucumbers and Kurota Chantenay carrots.

“Not with my catalog you don’t,” I said, ripping it out of his hands. “But I’d be happy to give you a few pointers.”

Here’s what I told him:

A first-time gardener can’t go wrong with a lettuce and greens patch. The case in a nutshell: 1) They’re far and away the easiest vegetables to grow. 2) They yield the greatest bang for the buck, since you eat the whole thing except for the root. 3) They’re a cinch to prepare: just pick, wash, dress and eat.

My favorites are the old-time varieties with their distinctive flavors, cool looks and funky names. There’s Deer’s Tongue—mild taste, velvety texture and eponymous shape. Forellenschluss, crisp Romaine-type leaves spattered with crimson. And Bull’s Blood Beet, crinkled wine-colored tops with an oxalic zing. Round out these three (all from Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste, our catalog of endangered foods) with a handful of peppery, fast-growing arugula, beloved by humankind since the Roman Empire, and you have yourself a killer salad—every day for months!

But that’s not all.

By growing heirlooms, you’re helping to preserve biodiversity—and wresting a smidgen of control over the world seed market from big corporations. Today, a staggering 82% of the $36.5 billion seed market is “proprietary,” owned by a mere handful of companies (that list starts with Monsanto). Consolidation began in the 1940s with the development of supermarket-friendly hybrids (good looking! will travel!) and accelerated in the 1990s with the introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

to read the rest of this article, on Boston’s “Public Radio Kitchen,” click here.

Youth food summit discusses food justice

by Slow Food on Campus member Julia Yerkovich

I have a confession to make:  I am not an activist.  I read my local Edible magazine and Michael Pollan’s books, and I shop at farmers markets.  But I am not an activist.  Because activists don’t buy, read, or eat their way out of their problems; activists, well, act.

This notion was probably the most important thing I realized this weekend at the “Strengthening the Roots” Convergence at UC Santa Cruz.  At first I was content with my self-contained actions of buying and eating local, and being a self-proclaimed escapist with ideals of aiming to live a self-sustaining lifestyle on my family’s farm.  I was satisfied with claiming the impossibility of toppling our capitalist government-run food system as a reasonable excuse for my refusal to act. I was frustrated with the isolated success of the food and health movement as being one that was possible only amongst those with the good fortune to have read the right books and buy the right foods. 

Then I met someone who told me of a place called the People’s Grocery in Oakland whose goal is to make healthy clean food accessible to ALL people.  And I met others who had organized against their campus food service providers, or had installed a campus garden, or student run food co-operative.  All of a sudden my actions of buying and eating local and my goals of escaping seemed selfish.  And I no longer saw the status quo as something discouraging, but as the exact reason for action.

And then I realized it is imperative to hear and tell success stories throughout this movement; without them we lose hope.  We have to be reassured that our efforts can lead to change. It is so easy to be inspired, only to choose not to act because of all the “realistic” roadblocks that stand in our way.  After hearing stories of students pairing up with farmworkers through the Student/Farmworker Alliance or the success of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, I was reminded that no one is ever too powerful, not even government or big business, to silence our attempts to improve our food system; because, after all, we are the ones who grant them their power, and without our support, they are nobody. 

On that note, I would like to leave you with a quote I heard this weekend, originally spoken by Lila Watson, an Australian aboriginal woman.  It’s a quote that truly illustrates the importance of community outreach in the success of the slow food movement: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together” What will move the sustainable food movement beyond being a trend is encompassing all classes.

Julia Yerkovich is a Nutrition Science Major, in the Department of Food Science and Nutrition in the College of Agriculture, Food, and Environmental Sciences at California State Polytechnic University, in San Luis Obispo California.

Get Cooking with The Art of Eating In

Thanks to Cathy Erway I right now have bread dough rising on my kitchen counter. 3 years ago I read Mark Bittman’s NY Times article with Jim Lahey’s phenomenally easy bread recipe, but it took sitting down with Erway’s new book, “The Art of Eating In,” for me to get cracking.

Right around when I was reading Bittman’s article, Cathy Erway was making a radical decision; in this capital of restaurants, in this city of buying and spending, she was going to stay in and cook.  Every night for 2 years. So while other twentysomethings blogged about which new restaurants they’d tried, she chronicled her home cooking adventures on “Not Eating Out in New York.” But there are a million home cooking blogs out there—why did hers capture people’s imaginations?  Why did it capture mine?

Well it turns out that the somewhat odd and haphazard parameters she set up for her experiment allowed her to explore (and then blog about) NYC’s emerging DIY food renaissance.  She discovered and then immersed herself in a world of cook-offs, takedowns, park foraging, underground supper clubs, and dinner parties. She even hung with the dumpster-diving freegans once or twice.  In the process she became entrenched in a new community of bloggers and foodophiles, becoming a kind of mini-celebrity herself.  You know, “that girl who decided not to eat out anymore.”

And this is a young girl, a cute girl. One who the fellas might want to take on a date. In this town, a date basically equals a restaurant trip.  What’s a girl to do?  I am reminded of the Beavans of No Impact Man, and how when they gave up eating out, they sort of fell in love with dinner parties and family time.  Erway, too, reminds us—both on the blog and in her book—that there are many more fun and creative ways to court a person than going to a restaurant. Her #25 reason for not eating out? Creative dating.

She also learned that if you are making your own food for breakfast, lunch and dinner, you had better get good at it, and learn new techniques and discover your creative side. What she makes plain is that cooking is fun, yes, and delicious, yes.  And it will also save you a hell of a lot of money. And you’ll also create less waste—something she actually calculates, by ounce, in her book.  And guess what, you’ll also probably spend more quality time with people, and build community and make new friends and be healthier all around. The blog and the book inspire through storytelling, hence the bread dough growing on my counter and the parsnip pancakes I am making for dinner tonight.

More after the jump

Celebrating an Artisan Cidermaker

by Ben Watson, Chairman, Slow Food USA Biodiversity Committee

Terrence Maloney (1940-2010)

A few days ago I received the sad news of the death of Terry Maloney, 70, of Colrain, Massachusetts. Terry died suddenly at home on January 29, ironically enough as the result of an accident that occurred while he was filtering a batch of his West County Cider.

Terry and his wife Judith began making cider more than 25 years ago, after they moved from California to western Massachusetts. In Franklin County, the area where they settled, there weren’t any of the wineries that they had worked on out west, but there was a long local tradition of apple growing and cidermaking, and the Maloneys set out to produce high-quality hard ciders, in an effort to both reflect and revive a New England cider-drinking culture. Along with New Hampshire’s Stephen Wood and other early producers, the Maloneys today are recognized as among the first pioneers in what has truly become an American cider renaissance. New producers – making increasingly brilliant and sophisticated ciders – have sprung up in the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes region, the Piedmont South, and other areas of the country. Many of them owe thanks to Terry Maloney for inspiring them through his example and by setting a high standard of excellence for every American cider producer.

The community of cidermakers and cider-lovers is very close-knit (though we are all fiercely independent and opinionated too!), and the news of Terry’s death has shocked and saddened all of us. He will long be remembered by everyone who knew him as a gentle, soft-spoken, thoughtful man and as someone who was always ready to share his own knowledge with others and to learn from their experiences. Part of his legacy will be Franklin County Cider Days, which started out as a modest regional event for local home brewers and amateur cidermakers; in 2009 the festival celebrated its 15th anniversary, and although it still is rooted in the hill towns and orchards of western Massachusetts, it has become one of the world’s premier cider events. No doubt Cider Days 2010, always held on the first weekend in November, will be dedicated to the life and work of this great and good man. But it won’t be the same without him.

More after the jump