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Finding Hope in New Food Movements Coming home today through thick New York City heat, I pass a sign tacked to a telephone pole for a new farmers market. A few blocks further, past a community garden tucked between looming brownstones, I pick up my community-supported agriculture share (CSA), and pile my bike with strawberries, carrots, and a bunch of basil that leaves a scent trail all the way home. Tomorrow I’ll get the rest of my week’s food from my local Coop and in a few minutes I head out to meet Bryant Terry, founder of a non-profit teaching youth about healthy eating. The farmer’s market is one week old. The garden is one of 500 now protected by the city. A year ago the CSA (where I invest directly in a local farm and receive fresh food weekly) didn’t exist. The Coop has experienced its largest expansion in history, topping 9,300 members. And Bryant Terry? He is not alone. In dozens of cities across the United States and Canada, people are re-building local food networks, from Slow Fooders preserving artisanal cheeses to hip-hop activists mixing up environmental justice and food democracy. In a nine-country journey with my mother, the author Frances Moore Lappé, we saw a parallel emergence from the foothills of the Himalayas to central Brazil. In every community, we met people building food democracy, reclaiming their food traditions and plant diversity and embracing healthy food as a right — not a luxury. Yet, at the very same time, our food system is moving toward ever more concentrated power, with a few companies controlling food production to retail. (In the United States, we now have so few farmers that our national census no longer has a line for their profession.) How can both these observations be true? It is easy to grasp either/or; it is harder to get our minds around both/and. But the truth is we are moving in two directions at once. Walk into any North American supermarket and you are bombarded with seeming abundance. Yet almost half the typical 30,000 supermarket items are brought to us by just ten corporations and an estimated one of every 10 dollars we spend on food is going to just one — Altria (the former Phillip Morris). Concentration in food processing is also tight. University of Missouri professors Mary Hendrickson and William Heffernan tell us that by 2002 the top four U.S. beef packers made up 81% of the market, the top four pork processors and producers 59%, and the top broilers 50%. From a farm family herself, Hendrickson explained: "Twenty years ago we could drive up in our truck with 23 hogs. Today, even 200 is considered a small load." Hendrickson and Heffernan also do the math on the retail industry. The top five biggies, with Wal-Mart at the top, now command 38% of the market. They use this power to charge fees to distributors and manufacturers for putting their products on the shelves and even to compensate for products that don’t sell, totaling $9 billion annually. Ultimately, of course, we stomach the bill. This concentration affects us in more ways than just adding a few cents to the price of potato chips. It affects the very fabric of rural community. In Hendrickson’s 350-person hometown in Nebraska, "we’re lucky, we still have one small market," she said. "In most of rural America, you drive 45 miles to get to the nearest store." More dramatically, many rural areas are now wracked with drug and alcohol problems commonly associated with cities, and suicide is a leading cause of death among farmers in the United States. Concentration among food companies has had political consequences as well, with industry lobbyists shaping everything from nutrition guidelines to what gets talked about at American Dietetic Association meetings. At a recent ADA gathering, workshops included: "Developing Consumer Messages to Battle Portion Distortion and Fat Frustration," sponsored by the National Cattleman’s Beef Association. (They wouldn’t have any stake in getting us to think differently about fat content, would they?) The ADA website includes such informational pitches as "Flavor Enhancement: For Taste and Health in the Later Years" about the benefits of mono-sodium glutamate and sponsored by Ajinomoto (who happens to be the world’s largest MSG producer). According to Professor Marion Nestle, head of NYU’s Nutrition and Food Studies Department, this corporate power has had disastrous, sometimes even deadly, consequences on food safety. In her book Safe Food, Nestle describes an American Meat Institute injunction in the 1990s against an FDA requirement to label meat with cooking instructions for the prevention of foodborne illnesses. The AMI argued the labels would unnecessarily frighten the public. The injunction held. Nestle reports that the week of the court’s decision, "three children in Texas died from eating ground meet contaminated with E. Coli." One of the most far-reaching examples of corporate influence has been the sudden and widespread introduction of genetically modified foods with no consumer demand and little public understanding. (A few years ago pollsters found most Americans thought they’d never eaten GMOs, though they were already in 60 percent of supermarket foods). GMOs now grow on 96.3 million acres in the U.S. and 8.6 million acres in Canada and millions more in fourteen other countries, yet only a handful of companies benefit. Five — Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, Aventis and Monsanto — control three out of every four GMO patents issued in the past ten years. But this is only half of the story. Alice Waters, founder of California’s Chez Panisse and earth-mother of organic cuisine, tells us: "Saying I’m going to make a choice about the way I eat, this is a giant step. This decision can send you down a beautiful path — a delicious revolution." With more consumers across Canada and the United States taking this "giant step," a quiet revolution is underway, one that embraces a local, organic, and democratic food system. Ann Gillespie, from the Vancouver-based Farm Folk/City Folk explained the impetus behind emergent food movements this way: "There is a growing sense that we’re losing control of our food. People want to take that control back, to buy local and know where their food comes from." The signs of this other direction are everywhere. In the past decade, farmers markets have increased dramatically in Canada and by 79 percent in the United States. CSAs have grown from an idea in 1985 to more than 1,000 across North America today. As I write this article, I read that New York City has banned junk food from school vending machines and plans to trim fat from its 800,000 school lunches served daily. No more Snickers, Mountain Dews, or Twinkies. With the Centers for Disease Control claiming 20 percent of New York City third graders and 21 percent of sixth graders are obese, this decision comes none too soon. I learn, too, about food policy councils emerging from Berkeley to Toronto to New York City, about a town in Iowa prohibiting the sale of non-organic produce in town limits, about voters in North Dakota who had made it illegal for any corporate entity to farm land in the state. And thanks to the eye-opening investigative work of Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) and Marion Nestle (Food Politics, Safe Food) we’re learning there’s more to our food than what’s on the end of the fork. Thirty years ago when Chez Panisse had just opened, my mother’s Diet for a Small Planet had just been published, and back-to-the-landers were only starting to trade granola recipes, researchers were beginning to predict the consequences of industrial farming. But the evidence wasn’t in. Today, decades after the introduction of chemical pesticides, the evidence is all too real. In the United States, agricultural run-off has created an almost 8,000-square mile "dead zone," roughly the size of New Jersey, in the Gulf of Mexico. When North Carolina was hit by massive flooding in 1999, spillover from hog-farm "lagoons" — large pools of waste from factory farms — helped to create one of the state’s worst public health crisis in history. Our food system has radically changed our bodies, too. The OECD estimates that 31 percent of Americans and 15 percent of Canadians are now obese — a figure that rises to 61 and 50, respectively, if one includes the overweight — and obesity-related diseases take the lives of more than 300,000 people a year. For all of these reasons — from the personal to the global — many more of us are taking steps to help move us in a healthier more sane direction. Andy Fisher was an urban planning student in Los Angeles ten years ago when the riots rocked the city. Seeing the grocery stores burning and the growing lines for food, Fisher started thinking about urban planning in terms of access to healthy food. In a year-long study with fellow graduate students, Fisher explained, "We saw how grocery stores literally abandoned South Central." That was his seed. Fisher, now 40 years old, began bringing together people who had never been in the same room before: anti-hunger activists, community gardening folks, and family farm activists to talk about how to build urban food security — ensuring access to healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate foods for everyone. He helped write legislation that became the federal Community Foods Projects, which now gives $5 million annually to community-based efforts and he launched the Community Food Security Coalition. Today, the Coalition has 250 members from the United States and Canada and is a key link among people working to connect farms to educational food service programs, bring gardens into schools, and improve access to healthy foods in inner cities. On the other side of the country, in Brooklyn’s low-income, predominantly African-American neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, 29 year-old Bryant Terry is making these connections, too. Last year, while working with low-income youth, Terry became increasingly frustrated that no one was talking about the food the kids were, and were not, eating. So the Memphis, Tennessee-native decided to create b-healthy! — a non-profit educating young people of color about healthy eating and the politics of food. Terry often begins workshops by asking the youth to think of every food advertisement they see in a typical day. "They come up with 50 in five minutes — and they’re not ads for broccoli." No surprise, really. From 1991 to 2000, advertising on food doubled from $6 billion to $12 billion annually. Terry says, "I think of this bombardment as a form of psychic violence." His workshops are consciousness-raising and they’re practical, with cooking classes using whole foods and organic produce. "I celebrate what may seem like small wins, like getting them to drink water." Terry explains that the young people he meets rarely drink water, unless it’s in Kool-Aid or Slurpees. When I went to the b-healthy graduation for its first class in a bustling downtown Manhattan youth center, three of his students served me a delicious organic smoothie. They had put a couple on the side for themselves. It was a far cry from a Slurpee. Back on the West coast, Malaika Edwards, Brahm Ahmadi, and Leander Sellers, three community organizers in their twenties, also started sharing their frustration with access to food in their community. Though 30,000 people large, West Oakland has only one grocery store (with 50% to 100% mark-ups) and 36 liquor stores. Interested in creating a model that could be helpful for other North American inner cities where access to food is often a critical issue, the three launched the People’s Grocery. What Ahmadi calls a "movement-based business," the People’s Grocery, now a year and a half old, provides health education and job training, has created community gardens and connections with local farmers, and is launching a mobile market (think: "Mr. Softee" meets an organic food coop). "Organics and GMOs can feel far removed for young people in our community," Edwards says, "but when we ask if anyone in their family has diabetes or asthma and 80 to 90% say yes, they see the connection." "We’re part of a growing food justice movement looking at the roots of hunger — asking why isn’t there access?" Edwards explains. Ahmadi adds: "And we’re empowering our community by building an economic base using food — because it is so universal and so intimate." Edwards often leads tours of the community gardens. "No matter the age or mood," she says, "everyone leaves happy. It’s like natural Prozac." I’m not going to argue we’ll see change overnight or that Wal-Mart will go away anytime soon. (With five of the ten richest people in the world from the Wal-Mart founding family, that seems even more unlikely). But we also must believe our eyes, ears, and tastebuds and as our society heads in two directions at once, we can choose. We can turn in the direction of hope, choosing a path that is healthy for ourselves and our planet. Each of us has that power. We can each become part of this emergent delicious revolution. © 2003, Dragonfly Media <www.dragonflymedia.com> |