Urban Agriculture in Brooklyn Center from Fourth Sector on Vimeo.

Check out this short video that Fourth Sector recently produced to promote the idea of urban agriculture in Brooklyn Center.

Via Civil Eats:
On Wednesday, Michael Pollan appeared on Oprah to discuss the food system and the film Food, Inc. At the beginning of the program, entitled “Before You Grocery Shop Again: Food 101,” Oprah said that she saw Food, Inc., and it inspired her to host this discussion. “We all have to start paying more attention to what we’re putting in our bodies,” she said. “Do you know where you food really comes from? What’s been added, what’s been taken out? What goes down before they put a label on it?” Interspersed throughout the show were clips of the film, including the film’s introduction on the disconnect between our idea of food production and its reality; chicken production, featuring a farmer speaking out against the industry; and a family that can’t afford to eat real food and is forced to choose fast food.

Here’s a longer clip:

First Lady Michelle Obama kicks off a campaign to confront the problem of childhood obesity at a YMCA in Alexandria, VA. She is joined by Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Dr. Judith Palfrey, President of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Public Domain

Public, private, and  for-benefit institutions can learn from the conversation happening on the ground about the ideas, initiatives and products that are in need of change. They need to equip the people on the ground who are excited about their ideas with a strategic, focused message and the tools to communicate that message far and wide.

A case study of an institution recently undergoing a huge shift in how they talk to their supporters, how they intake information from their base, and how they leverage emerging technology to change the playing field and win is the democratic party in the US.  Recently, I gave a presentation to Prof. Jonathan Selzter’s Interactive Marketing class at the St. Thomas Business School about the infrastructure the democrats began building and how the Obama for America campaign was posed to win based on this infrastructure. We also chatted about how elected officials have begun integrating emerging technology into how they communicate with their constituents and how that is changing the conversation. Check out my presentation and lets plan the next tsunami of people using technology to change how the system works.  Sometimes all it takes is someone screaming for change to begin.

Did Jamie Oliver meet his match in ‘America’s Fattest City’?

When last we saw British superstar chef-turned-food-system-reformer Jamie Oliver, he was in the midst of teaching “the fattest city in America” how to cook. How did it go? Well, thanks to the miracle that is reality television, we’ll find out one episode at a time. The series—Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution—doesn’t premiere until the end of March. But ABC has provided us a sneak peak. Key takeaway? The recalcitrant residents of Huntington, West Virginia have driven poor Jamie to tears. Tom says check it out:

full article here via grist

Michelle Obama’s Anti-Obesity Movement

photo wikimedia commons

and there is no shortage of links to one of the biggest stories of the week:

“This isn’t the kind of problem that can be solved in one year, or even one administration,” said Michelle. But make no mistake about it, this problem can be solved. We don’t need to wait for some new invention of discovery to make this happen. This doesn’t require fancy tools or technologies. We have everything we need right now– we have the information, we have the ideas, and we have the desire to start solving America’s childhood obesity problem. The only question is whether we have the will.”

full article here via examiner.com
also see The Washington Post, abc news

and on to the relationship between the two above news items:

From Sesame Street to Iron Chef

Students marvel over a potato at the White House garden last fall. (Photo: ZUMA Press)

During the first lady’s recent visit to Sesame Street to help Elmo and some kids plant vegetable seeds, Big Bird asked if he had heard correctly that she eats seeds. Not exactly, she replied, but “I do eat what grows from these seeds.” She encourages the kids to eat all their vegetables, telling them that if they do, they’ll “grow up to be big and strong just like me.”

The garden also inspired a culinary showdown on an episode of Iron Chef America. Filmed partly at the White House, the contest paired White House chef Cristeta Comerford and Bobby Flay against the duo of Mario Batali and Emeril Lagasse.

full article here via mother nature network

School Lunches: We Can Do Better Than $1 Per Meal

photo by SpecialKRB via flickr

Yet lack of funding isn’t the only problem. Many argue that the U.S.D.A. has a looming conflict of interest since one part of the agency is responsible with providing school children nutritious food and another helps agricultural companies sell surplus meat. One USA Today article reported that schools have received millions of pounds of meat from the government that wouldn’t even meet quality or safety standards of many fast-food restaurants. And a followup article reveals that the chicken sent to schools by the USDA are otherwise used in pet food and compost.

full article here via Huffington post

Mrs. Q and Fed Up: School Lunch Project Snowballs

photo by back_garage via flickr

Even after only a few weeks of posts, Fed Up paints a devastating picture of how the school lunch program is failing kids. Mystery meat, still-frozen fruit cups, “pizza” with cheese that separates into fat layers. Everything is individually wrapped and, if it’s hot, it’s been microwaved. Weird pairings are rampant: Pizza and pretzels? A hot dog, cookie, and Tater Tots? The pictures are disgusting enough, but the descriptions are even worse: “I guess the green beans had some kind of butter sauce. I didn’t taste a sauce but there was a little buttery residue on the bottom of the paper package.” Is this food supposed to be fueling the next generation?

link to story (mentions Ann Cooper)

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 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.

image credit: Los Angeles Times

excerpt:

One of the more pleasing developments of the last decade has been the long-overdue beginning of a national conversation about food — not just the arcane techniques used to prepare it and the luxurious restaurants in which it is served, but, much more important, how it is grown and produced.

full article here via The Los Angeles Times

It takes a community to sustain a small farm

image credit: wikimedia commons

excerpt:

These days it seems the most popular person to be in the food system is the “local farmer.” Farmers markets are popping up everywhere, and their size and popularity grow all the time. Local food is trendy—even the First Family is in on it.

But as anyone who has ever raised grain or livestock can tell you, the farmer is not the only person in the chain of players from her farm to your fork. In addition to producers, your food chain includes processors, distributors or transporters, and retailers.

full article here via grist

Three Things To Watch With The Social Innovation Fund

excerpt:

The New Year is bringing with it an accelerated buzz and excitement around the forthcoming Social Innovation Fund. A few weeks ago, the Corporation for National and Community Service released funding guidelines and asked for public comment. Sean has been curating that conversation on Tactical Philanthropy and an excellent guest post by nonprofit consultant Adin Miller prompted me to think about the three things I’m watching for with the Social Innovation Fund.

full article here via Social Entrepreneurship

St. Augustine School Chicken Project

excerpt:

In fact, the 200 students at this parochial school know more than many city kids do about where the food on their plates comes from. Behind the four-story brick 1905 school building is St. Augustine’s own chicken coop, where 15 hens with black feathers and speckled breasts lay large brown eggs. In the community garden across the street, students this year grew beets, cucumbers, tomatoes and broccoli. If all goes as planned, by June tilapia will be swimming under a blanket of hydroponic herbs in a tank in a new greenhouse. And, yes, even live turkeys are a possibility for the future.

full article here via changeobserver

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.

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.