A Year of School Lunch

image credit: "Fed Up: School Lunch Project"

So apropos of the gathering storm around our school lunch cafeterias, and in the great tradition of documentarian Morgan Spurlock and his seminal Super Size Me, an anonymous blogger/school teacher known only as Mrs. Q, has pulled out a machete to sharpen the debate with the appropriately named blog: “Fed Up: School Lunch Project”.  As of the time of posting, she is only 9 days into a year of eating nothing but school lunches, but already her blog is attracting some critical attention.  It’s not hard to see why her tack is so deadly effective-the prospect of voluntarily consuming what our children have no other choice but to-only serves to highlight what we already know: that American school lunch is at large both completely unappetizing and severely lacking in basic nutritional value. Aside from the deadpan and oddly amusing daily commentary of Mrs. Q, the collected imagery of the wilting and oily food offerings crammed unceremoniously onto a small Styrofoam tray are perhaps the greatest testament to just how bad the situation has remained.  Nothing like actually being presented with direct physical evidence. Checkmate Caitlin Flanagan.

image credit: "Fed Up: School Lunch Project"

So lets hope Mrs. Q survives the year without suffering some serious health repercussions. And furthermore, lets hope her project attracts some much needed attention to one of our most critical public-health issues. If we are going to leave the next generation with an enormous sovereign debt, depleted resource base, rising sea-levels, and the prospect of chronic under-employment, the least we can do is give them a school lunch that’s better than pet food. I mean come on. The Lateral Hippogriff approves !

Fed Up: School Lunch Project

Raj Patel on Colbert Nation

Raj Patel is a political economist who wrote Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System and who has recently has published new book on consumption, called The Value of Nothing. Patel describes how the hidden cost of our consumption causes a great deal of environmental harm and social destruction.

Pollan on the Daily Show

via grist:

Michael Pollan has for a while now been pointing to a way out of the reform stalemate caused by the power of lobbies: that space for reform opens when powerful lobbies turn against one another. Pollan appeared last night on the Daily Show, promoting his new book Food Rules. He made a point he has made before: if even a modicum of health care reform passes, one that bars insurers from denying coverage to sick people or purging them when they get sick, than the interests of the mighty insurance industry will turn against those of the mighty agribusiness/processed-food industry. The insurance industry, forced at least on some level to deal with the chronic illnesses caused by the U.S. diet, will join the food-reform movement, Pollan predicts. Backed by a well-heeled industry lobby, the movement will be empowered to create real change.

Dustup on the Urban Prairie

Urban Farming in Detroit

One of the greater ironies of the early 21st century might be that Detroit, oft considered the poster-child for post-industrial blight and decay, may well end up as a cutting edge example of how Urban America can best respond to the difficult realities of the emerging post-abundance paradigm. Recently, a growing chorus of voices has begun to sketch the outlines for the metamorphosis of Detroit into a shimmering “Urban Prairie”, a thriving agrarian hub rising from the denuded ruins of the once proud industrial mega-city. Detroit, with over 103,000 vacant lots, clearly is a prime candidate for urban agriculture, although the most ambitious plan for sparking this renewal, a working commercial farm in the heart of the city proposed by former financial guru John Hantz, has raised several issues that illustrate the difficulties of implementing any wide-scale systems change.

The subject of a flurry of recent articles, Hantz Farms aims to eventually convert over 5,000 acres of now deserted land into a fecund expanse of organic crops, all to be consumed within the local foodshed. Although many local leaders are encouraged by the prospect of new farm-labor jobs in Detroit, several community activists have taken issue with the structural inequities that they perceive as emblematic of such large-scale ventures. The project clearly offers some public benefit in the form of economic activity and community re-development, but many feel that private enterprise by its very nature ends up exploiting community members rather than offering opportunities for empowerment. One vocal critic speaking at the Food & Society Conference in San Jose lat April went so far as to describe the Hantz proposal as nothing more than a “plantation” amidst several hundred thousand poor and challenged urban residents.

It’s an understatement to say that the future will hold some serious challenges as we shift into a lower energy world, and the responses that we enact will often represent compromises based on pragmatic realities rather than Utopian “solutions” that promise to continue the status quo into infinity. Within this new headspace, we need to have the ability to see past the public-private dichotomy, and start realizing that what we perceive as polar opposites are in fact two sides of the same coin. Absolutist ideology provides grist for extremist politicians on both sides of the aisle, but the real world works in much more subtle and nuanced ways. Systems change exhibits emergent characteristics that do not follow the rules and expectations of previous cognitive models, and we must adapt our understanding of these new conditions to form a clear vision of how the transitions can be best managed.  There is always a danger that power will be abused, but bereft of an organizing entity of some sort, it would be impossible for any type of collaborative effort to be realized. This threat exists in all forms of political organization past, present, and future.

I think we have to realize that although Hantz Farms will probably not please everyone or make good on all of its promises, it nevertheless represents a positive step towards acknowledging our predicament and crafting a creative solution to deal with the future pro-actively rather than re-actively. As a high profile experimental model, it will doubtless serve as a test case that will flush out land use and zoning and tax issues and create new legal precedents for the re-allotment of public and private spaces that will be immensely valuable. Urban farms of the future hopefully will likely be heterogeneously imagined, as communal co-operatives, individual micro-farms, private entities, and everything in between. There is no quick fix to anything, but if we are able to think beyond the wall of our previous psychological investments, it might be possible to craft a new consensus reality in which a sane a sober path through the rapidly changing world can be found.

Hot Organic Farmers

Michael Grady Robertson, director of agriculture at the Queens County Farm Museum in New York City.

Annie Novak tending to her Brooklyn rooftop farm.

Since most people who might be reading this blog are either: a. knee deep in some sort of snow-mageddon trying desperately to secure last minute holiday bestowals or b. have been zoned out in a zombie-coma since a weekend viewing of Avatar in 3-D fried 30% of their neural cortex-I thought this would be the perfect time to trot out some Holiday Fluff. The above photogenic agronomists come to us from a Huffington Post poll which asks you to pick out the “Cutest Organic Farmers”. I’ve only plucked a few of the eligible Farmer RockStars for display here on the Hippogriff, but it’s definitely worth a visit.

Here at HuffPost Green, we think organic farmers are heroes and rock stars. And nothing is sexier than someone who likes to get dirty AND supports the good food revolution. We thought we’d celebrate some of the cuties who are farming across the country and are easy on the eyes as well. Check out this slideshow, and vote for who you think is the cutest. We’ll invite the winner to blog about about his or her farm.

Michelle Obama "breaking ground".

In many ways I like the direction we are heading in this country. It does seem like we are at a watershed moment in our cultural history, one in which the need to re-connect to the land and our own human ecology has become paramount. The White House Kitchen Garden demonstrates that the Local Food Movement has gone mainstream, and the larger meta-narrative of sustainability has begun to percolate into the consciousness of mainstream America.

However I would like to remind everyone that local farming is not all about slinking around in cute J-Crew pullovers with artfully mussed hair and dirty fingernails. It’s great that the cutting edge is embracing sustainability and localized food production, but let’s remember that there still is a hard plow ahead of us. Farming is actually pretty tough work, and currently it still is pretty difficult to even break even as a small farmer. If we are going to advance into the next phase, the immensely intensive process of re-scaling will have to begin, and I have the feeling that a great deal of these efforts will be very behind-the-scenes and unsexy.

So yes, lets fluff out today, but remember that sowing is not as difficult as reaping.

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