Secret Seed Society: Reaching Kids Through Vegetables

My good friend Amy spoke at my alma mater, LSE, last week.  She spoke about the techniques that industrial food companies are using to market junk food to us and how these tricks have led us into a battle with obesity.  Her project, he Secret Seed Society uses child power, emotional resonance and humans innate thirst for adventure to get people back into growing, cooking and eating.


Secret Seed Society was setup in 2009 and centers on lessons taught through the world of Seed City, where over 40 anthropomorphic vegetable characters live.  The project uses hands on activities and illustrated storybooks to celebrate vegetables and promotes organic, fair trade and local production. 

Here's Amy's engaging talk on how we can reach kids with vegetables: 

Bloomberg' Ban : The Right to Health vs the Right to Consume

Photo Credit Chang W. Lee/ New York Times

May Day and the American Way of Eating: An interview with Tracie McMillan

Note: This Blog has been reposted from Brooklyn Based.  The interview was conducted by Annaliese Griffin.

Tracie McMillan, an investigative journalist who lives in Bed-Stuy, spent several years living and working with the people who plant, pick, stock, sell and cook our food for her eye-opening recent book, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table. From the garlic fields of California, to the aisles of a Midwestern Walmart, to the busy kitchen of an Applebee’s in Brooklyn, she took a long hard look at our food system from a variety of angles that few of us ever get to see.

The thing that shocked me most in The American Way of Eating is that we don’t actually grow enough fruits and vegetables. I had NEVER thought about it that way. 


Right? That’s crazy! We actually don’t have as a nation–not just as individuals–we just don’t grow enough fruits and vegetables. We grow plenty of corn and soy, more than we need, but not the stuff that we should be eating so that we’re all basically healthy. That’s nuts! That’s built into all the policies and the investments we’re making in the public sector. There’s ways to change that. And there are ways to do that in a way that engages private enterprise and makes it profitable for private enterprise to grow that kind of stuff instead of endless, endless, endless rows of corn that are going into cattle feed and ethanol.

We’ve had all this great food journalism, from people like Michael Pollan, documenting the fact that we grow too much corn, for feed and fuel and junk food, and as a result we have a surplus of calories. But to think that we actually have a deficit of good calories is another thing altogether.


No wonder, we’re all eating crap, right? We just don’t have enough. I see a tendency toward conspiracy theory, that the big agri-business is sitting there and they’re manipulating everything, and there’s that, and lobbyists and corporate power to be concerned about. But the more that I did this research, it must have seemed perfectly sensible, in the mid-20th century. Food had never been something that could make you sick before–why would it? If you had said, oh, but if you eat this other type of food it will make you sick, that would have seemed like crazy talk in 1940.

What are people not getting about the intersection of diet and poverty and health in this country?
 The problem of people’s diets is much bigger than just access. It’s a lot about time. And anyone who cares about food, if they’re serious about it being more than just a luxury thing, for them to enjoy, if people are really serious about food being a community issue, a social issue, we have to start having a conversation about wages and work life. It’s really hard to pay enough money to buy really healthy food if you’re spending a quarter to a third of your budget on food already, which is what the bottom third of America, by income bracket, already does.



What’s the biggest misconception about the people in that bottom third, and food?

I think the biggest misconception about low-income families and their relationship to food it that they don’t know any better and all they do is eat junk food. There’s this idea that there are all these obese people of color lounging around, eating crappy food and not caring. That is pretty much the opposite of what I found the more I talked to people about how do you make decisions about food. In all the time I’ve been reporting on food and diet, which is eight or nine years now, I’ve met precisely one person who actually said, “I’m just going to eat crappy and I don’t care.” I’ve never had someone say, “I think diabetes is awesome and I want this.”

And this is a little touchy feely, but being poor is really exhausting. It’s really boring. You can’t afford to go and pay for a movie, or for fancy technology. It’s hard. And, eating well is so hard, you have to have the energy and not be too tired to do it. If people are being beaten down by everything else in their lives it’s really unrealistic to expect them to say, “I am going to subsist on these great salads that I make from scratch, every day.”

What makes it so hard to eat healthy? I think that’s hard to fully understand from a particular Brooklyn point of view where we have 10 choices of local, artisan pickles and five choices for granola in front of us, and we can afford to eat that way–or at least make the choice to spend our money that way instead of saving for retirement.


So time, I think, is the biggest obstacle. I keep getting compared to some sort of Soviet, so I’m wary of saying, “Oh, look to Europe.” But, the French spend more money on their food [as a proportion of their income]. They also get five weeks of free vacation every year, plus, free high-quality daycare once your baby is a year old. And they have a slightly shorter work week. That might not seem like a lot if it’s 35 instead of 40 hours, but that’s an extra hour each day–to spend cooking.

Also, vegetables and freshness. And it’s not just low-income neighborhoods; many low-income neighborhoods have ethnic groceries with great produce. If you have crappy produce, it doesn’t taste good. If everything tastes like a winter tomato from Florida, you’re not going to want to eat that because it doesn’t taste good.

How do big stores like Walmart that promise variety and affordability fit into the equation?


We all sort of accept that “Oh, there are food deserts. Maybe we’ll fix them if we bring Walmart into low-income communities.” Well Walmart’s prices aren’t always lower, they have absolutely no reason to charge lower prices, if they don’t have to. There’s research showing that if Walmart has the dominant market share then they don’t really charge lower prices.

At the conclusion The American Way of Eating you suggest that we as a society have a collective responsibility to make sure that the food system is fair. How do we actually do that?
In a lot of different countries there’s more of a mix of public and private involvement in food distribution. So my thinking is, right now we have  a completely privatized system that leaves 23 million Americans without sufficient grocery stores, and we have this huge problem with diet-related disease in the country. So, maybe government could figure out a way to partner with small private enterprise–small producers or small grocers who can’t compete with Walmart and are going to get blown out of the water, because they just can’t structurally develop the transportation and logistics. It’s the distribution and transportation that really makes Walmart competitive.

A lot of it is just mapping, figuring out where the producers are, where there are stores, where distribution centers are housed. You could create a public distribution center, that people couldn’t necessarily use for free, but could go in and use at a really affordable cost and it would be a way to replicate how wholesale community markets used to be. There’s a study I found from the early 20th century and there used to be several hundred wholesale, terminal type markets around the country and they were all funded in part by public dollars. They were in public buildings that had public oversight.

When you’re talking about creating a flexible food distribution system, that has as its goal not just profit, but making sure communities have good food the same way we make sure they have clean water, then I think that’s really important. Given how much money we have to spend on people being sick because of bad diet, maybe we could figure out how to make it not so hard for people to eat well.

Future Faces of the Supermarket - Informing Consumers with Interactive Counters

Supermarkets now offer a dizzying mount of products from across the globe, but details about a products origin, organic and industry standards and/ or the route of transportation are often difficult to discover, if present at all. In recent years, with a increasingly curious and informed consumer population, demand for information about our food is certain to change how we shop for food and our food shopping experience.

Two German interaction design students Benedikt Burgmaier and Fabian Kreuzer have begun addressing some of the issues that are sure to pop up by re-imagine the meat, cheese and fish counter to provide customers with detailed product, origin and recipe information for food items.   Their senior thesis concept visualizes details to make them easily visible for the customer and imagines an interactive counter where customers can point at any item to have the description and price displayed above the product. It also includes interfaces where origin, product type and recipe information can be displayed when customer can lift one of the books on the countertop, information which can be printed by the shop assistant at checkout.

While just a prototype, imagine the further impacts this product could have on consumer choice:  Could it display food miles, farm information, or various certifications for the sustainability-concerned shopper? More importantly, for western populations increasingly concerned with nutrition related diseases (obesity, diabetes, heart issues, etc, and therefore with nutritional/ diet choices, could the counter or related smart phone application display calories, fat, or sodium content for those worried about intake levels?  Could it link to dietary recommendations?    The project presents a thought-provoking look at the future of food shopping and an introduction to innovative ways of including more than just a price-point as a guide to shopping.  The ability of consumers to access many forms of information about a product is sure to influence what we buy in the future, and what we want to see on offer.

Informative cheese, meat and fish counter – a guidance for your purchase from fabian kreuzer on Vimeo.

Animation as Education: Michael Pollan's 'Food Rules'

For the last decade food has become an increasingly talked about political issue, from community meetings to the floor of Congress.  However many of the complexities of our food and our current food system are difficult to digest. Thankfully we have authors like Michael Pollan to simplify issues into bite size pieces.  But now, for those of us who are visual learners, Marija Jacimovic and Benoit Detalle have produced a charming stop-motion film that uses vegetables to visualize Pollan’s “Food Rules” talk (presented at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts (RSA) in 2010). The animation helps to distill and unpack some of Pollan’s key points in an easily comprehendible and engaging 2-minute video. 

Michael Pollan's Food Rules from Marija Jacimovic on Vimeo.

Michael Pollan himself recently went a step further in decoding some of the tricks behind supermarket layouts and how stores are designed to make you buy more in general, but also to buy more high revenue generating and high processed foods.


The food journalist collaborated with Nourish to create 'Supermarket Secrets', a guide to making healthy choices at the supermarket. In the short video, Pollan helps the average shopper navigate the grocery store to find fresh, whole foods and to understand why items are placed where they are.




 For more Nourish videos, click here.

FAO Launches SOLAW Report: Advisements on Agricultural Land and Water

Widespread degradation and deepening scarcity of land and water resources have placed a number of key food production systems around the globe at risk, posing a profound challenge to the task of feeding a world population expected to reach 9 billion people by 2050, according to the new FAO report on the State of the World's Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture (SOLAW) published in January 2012.

The report noted that although there was a three-fold increase in food production in the last 50 years, most areas achieving these results relied on “management practices that have degraded the land and water systems upon which food production depends.”  A number of these systems/ areas now face the risk of a “progressive breakdown of their productive capacity under a combination of excessive demographic pressure and unsustainable agriculture use and practices”. Combined with the complications brought on by climate change, these systems at risk may simply not be able to contribute as expected in meeting human demands by 2050.

This risk is now affecting all regions around the globe and, as natural resource bottlenecks are increasingly felt, competition for land and water will become “pervasive” – not only between urban and industrial users, but within the agricultural sector as well– between livestock, staple crops, non-food crop, and biofuel production.  The challenge of providing sufficient food for an ever-more hungry planet, especially in developing countries, where quality land, soil nutrients and water are least abundant has never been more difficult.

“Worldwide, the poorest have the least access to land and water and are locked in a poverty trap of small farms with poor quality soils and high vulnerability to land degradation and climactic uncertainty,” it notes.

Over 40 percent of the world’s degraded lands are found in areas with high poverty rates. However, degradation is a risk across all income groups, 30% of the world’s degraded lands are in areas with moderate levels of poverty while 20% are in areas with low poverty rates.

The report centers on concern for the increasing imbalance between availability and demand for land and water resources at the local and national levels. The number of areas reaching the limits of their production capacity is fast increasing, the report warns. SOLAW also provides for the first time ever a global assessment of the state of the planet’s land resources: 25 percent of the earth’s lands are highly degraded and another 8 percent are moderately degraded, and only10 percent are ranked as “improving.”  Further more, water scarcity is growing and salinization and pollution of groundwater and degradation of water bodies and water-related ecosystems are rising. “Because of the dependence of many key food production systems on groundwater, declining aquifer levels and continued abstraction of non-renewable groundwater present a growing risk to local and global food production,” SOLAW warns.

The report makes the following recommendations:

·         · Improving the efficiency of water use by agriculture. Most irrigation systems across the world perform below their capacity. A combination of improved irrigation scheme management, investment in local knowledge and modern technology, knowledge development and training can increase water-use efficiency

·         · Encourage innovative farming practices such as conservation agriculture, agro-forestry, integrated crop-livestock systems and integrated irrigation-aquaculture systems which hold the promise of expanding production efficiently to address food security and poverty while limiting impacts on ecosystems

·          · Increasing investment in agricultural development. Gross investment requirements between 2007 and 2050 for irrigation water management in developing countries are estimated at almost $1 trillion. Land protection and development, soil conservation and flood control will require around $160 billion worth of investment in the same period

·         · Greater support for ensuring that national policies and institutions are modernized, collaborate together and are better equipped to cope with today’s emerging challenges of water and land resource management.

Throughout the SOLAW report there are multiple examples of successful actions undertaken across the globe that illustrate a multiplicity of available options that are potentially replicable elsewhere. Inevitably stakeholders will need to evaluate trade-offs among a variety of environmental goods and services, but the highly differentiated options highlighted provide a good start for matching options with local experience and knowledge. 

You can read the executive summary here

The Health of the Nation: New Article on Regional Foodsheds

After recently attending a Food Empowerment conference at Rutgers in Newark, I was left to consider the necessity of  cities to secure sustainable and resilient foodsheds and the types of policies that would go hand in hand with supporting these structures.  In researching ideas I came across a new 2011 law review article from the Fordham Environmental Law Review: Regional Foodsheds: Are Our Local Zoning and Land Use Regulations Healthy?  The article explains some of the reasons why its so important to focus on agriculture as a solution to our recent environmental, health and social equity issues and also inventories some local communities efforts (within the USA) and the policies they are experimenting with to create and sustain local foodsheds.

The most crucial point the article makes, and one which policy makers, activists and local communities should take note of, if they want to create an inclusive, broad reaching and sustainable foodsystem, is the idea that planning for regional foodsheds should be a collaborative process: “Regional foodshed planning must be comprehensive, and it should ―approach food not just [as] a commodity but as an infrastructural system. . . that needs to be managed and considered in all urban and regional planning efforts.”

Currently, in most situations, food is viewed exclusively as a commodity.  This understanding of food is as unsustainable and unhealthy as it is  incorrect, and we should be as concerned about the present dysfunctional state of our food supply system as we are with other forms of our crumbling infrastructure - roads and foreign-oil dependence.  Consider our current dependent on foreign oil and how stressful the situation has become, now imagine being dependent upon foreign food.  We would soon find ourselves in the situation faced by the majority of the global south, where crops are grown for export and the farmers growing these crops cannot afford to buy imported staple crops to feed themselves.  It is past time to consider how we can improve our current food system structure, and our relationship with food itself.

The article begins by providing an overview of local and regional foodsheds, reviewing not only the environmental and public health benefits, but also highlighting the economic benefits:

In 2009, U.S. households spent more than $526 billion on food produced outside of the home, indicating a significant economic market for locally grown and processed food. Local sourcing can supply a significant amount of food. A recent Michigan State University study posits that by converting vacant urban land to a host of urban agriculture related…, Detroit residents could be supplied with 76% of their vegetables and more than 40% of their fruits… Strong regional food markets economically support labor-intensive small and medium sized farms, which have been overtaken in the past several decades by mechanized, large-scale industrial agricultural operations. Local economies are also reinforced as the foodshed movement spurs the need for local food processing facilities and agri-businesses providing supplies, equipment and services… In addition to job creation and economic development, regional food markets reduce transportation costs and provide some insulation from volatility in the global food market. Furthermore, regional markets for production and processing can decrease costs for healthy foods, which can in turn produce economic benefits by preventing health care costs from diseases associated with poor diet and obesity.

Following this overview, the authors go on to detail strategies that local governments might attempt: creating food policy councils/task forces and incorporating food policies into their comprehensive planning.

Some local comprehensive plans contain sections…that touch on regional food policies, such as agriculture, sustainability, or economic development elements. For example, in Marin County, CA the plan supports “the production and marketing of healthy, fresh, locally grown food.”

The article also delves into a number of other policies being tried across the country, including policies that many larger cities (including NYC) have begun to explore: employing the purchasing power of local governments (and also large institutions):

Procurement policies that favor locally grown foods can help establish a market to support regional food production. In Cleveland, for example, an ordinance was passed in 2010 that requires the commissioner of purchases and supplies and each contracting department to develop a list of local food producers and businesses and to ―endeavor to maximize purchases from these sources. It also favors contract bidders that are locally based and purchase twenty percent of their food locally. Albany County, New York, has also enacted a policy to increase the percentage of local food consumed at the county‘s residential healthcare and correctional facilities. The policy recognizes that locally produced food supports the regional economy, requires less oil and gas, and provides nutritional benefits. Furthermore, in early 2011, a proposal was introduced in New York City to increase purchases of New York state food by city agencies.

The article is a great general starting place for anyone wanting to view a broad array of possibilities for their local communities.  It is also an invaluable tool for those in Newark’s city government and others involved in the redevelopment of the city’s food system and the new sustainability plan.