Directed by Catherine Gund and starring her daughter, Sadie Hope-Gund, and her daughter’s best friend, Safiyah Kai Riddle, “What’s on Your Plate” is a solution-oriented movie that gets children to ask the basic question “Where does our food come from?” In an unpreachy way, the film introduces kids and tweens to concepts such as “food miles” as well as to locavore solutions such as farmers’ markets and CSAs. (For more info on the film, see my blog for the Atlantic Monthly’s food channel.)

If you live in New York City, you’ll have two chances in the next week to see it: tonight at 6P.M. at the Neighborhood School in the East Village (located on 3rd Street between Avenues A and B) and on March 20th at El Museo del Barrio at 4 P.M. (Future screenings, including one at the Hammer Museum in L.A. with actors/activists Ed Begley, Jr. and Esai Morales, can be found here.) Chipotle (the healthy Mexican restaurant chain) will also be hosting private screenings of the film in elementary schools, libraries, and after-school programs throughout the year.

I sat down with Catherine, Sadie, and Safiyah to talk about “bad” vegetarians, how to get kids excited about farming, and why good food should not be a luxury.

H: What inspired you to make this film?

Sadie: I had become a vegetarian at the end of 4^th grade. And a lot of my friends were vegetarians but they didn’t eat vegetables—they ate pasta and pizza all the time. I was like well, if they’re eating these things and they’re vegetarians…it doesn’t really add up. We were originally going to make the movie about bad vegetarians.

H: Safiyah has been a vegetarian from birth and Sadie has a genetic predisposition to having high cholesterol, but were you both healthy eaters prior to making the movie?

Sadie: Well, yeah, we had salads every night and stuff like that.

H: So making a film in which you traced the food chain didn’t spur you to change your eating habits at all?

Sadie: Well we did a little bit. We joined a CSA.

H: In the film, activist and author Anna Lappé tells you that there are more people in prison in the U.S. than there are farmers. How can we encourage young people to be farmers?

Safiyah: I’m not sure how this would work but it would be cool if you had a program where if city kids who wanted to try working on a farm did a week of farming but they paid for it. So the farmers made money, and the kids learned how to farm and cook— like a day camp. That’d be cool. I would do that. During harvest would make more sense.

Catherine: And also, growing in the house. Whether it’s in a window garden or in your backyard, or however it is—in a pot. (See the Action Points in the Family Cook-In tool kit.)

When you say, “Do you want to be a farmer? “—maybe not. But I could imagine both of you having gardens where you grow all your herbs.

H: Despite your activism and despite various reforms to lunchroom food in New York City (Rachael Ray, Wellness in the Schools, etc.), an article in the Daily News just charged the New York Department of Education is still serving foods such as chicken nuggets and packaged grilled cheese sandwiches that contain high-fructose corn syrup. Have public school lunches really gotten better since you started this project?

Sadie: At our school (Manhattan Academy of Technology) nothing has changed that much. Not yet, at least, because we haven’t shown the movie there.

H: Do you guys eat school lunch?

Sadie: No, we bring our own.

Safiyah: There’s not a very good salad bar. I mean, it’s OK, but it’s not well advertised. Nobody really gets the salad bar. It’s just like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. On Friday’s there’s pizza, there’s hamburgers, chicken nuggets…

H: And the vegetables that SchoolFood orders are rarely local. In the film, you interview Richard Ball, at Schoharie Valley Farms in upstate New York, who eventually wins the contract to supply carrots to the NYC public school system (over bigger farms in California, Canada, and Mexico). Yet it was a big challenge for him to get that contract and the whole process was so bureaucratic.

Catherine: But then this year, it’s gone again. I walked in to the kitchen in November and saw the bags—and they’re not Ball’s.

H: I’m curious to know what you say to those critics out there who say that the sustainable food movement, Slow Food, etc. is somehow elitist, and not geared towards those who are low income?

Safiyah: Well, I’ve never heard that before.

Sadie: But, what about the food stamps at farmers’ markets? In Harlem they get organic food with food stamps!

Catherine: But so many people don’t realize that. That was one of the very first basic questions for these guys. They weren’t saying, “Where can we shop at Union Square or what can we buy that’s the fanciest thing.” They were just saying, “How can everyone eat better?” That was their question.

H: Do you guys find yourselves trying to get your friends who eat in the cafeteria to eat less processed junk?

Sadie: A lot of kids don’t eat it. And they’re like, “Do you have an apple or something? Or, “Can I have half of your orange?” And I’m like, “Sure!”

Safiyah: Some of them eat badly, but well number one, they all exercise a lot. And number two, we can’t really—the thing about the movie, we don’t actually tell people how to eat. I would feel hypocritical if I would tell someone like, “don’t eat that.” They’ be like, “you’re not my mom!” So it wouldn’t help.

H: Are you guys both still vegetarians?

Sadie: Yeah. Definitely.

Safiyah: I have these weird moments where I’m like, I really want to try meat. And then, like, five minutes later, I’ll just be like “I love being a vegetarian.” This is what I’m meant to do!

I’m not opposed to meat. People are like, oh, I’m sorry, I don’t want to eat this in front of you. I’m like, I’m not allergic to it. It’s just, I choose not to eat it. It’s my choice, you have your choice. I’m just as opposed to bad eating. I’m just as against a vegetarian who doesn’t eat well, as a meat eater who doesn’t eat well. The only thing I really don’t like is baby back ribs. I mean, it’s baby. Back. Ribs. I mean, it’s a baby! You’re eating his back ribs! It might taste good, but I’m just like “ewww!”

H: What’s your weakness, when it comes to processed and/or fast foods?

Catherine: You should tell her about Michael Pollan’s rule, the one you mentioned yesterday.

Sadie: You can eat junk food as much as you want only if you make it yourself. Cookies, ice-cream, scones.

Catherine: There’s never packaged cookies in our house. But we make cookies every couple of weeks. I always think, “Oh, that’s so bad—we make way too many cookies!” But when she told me that, I felt so good about it!

Safiyah: My mom makes these types of french fries, it isn’t fried exactly, it’s sort of like scalloped potatoes. But they’re still really good. I’ve also always had a weakness for pretzels.

H: At the end of the film, you lay out the specific projects you’ll keep working on—raising money for Harvest Home Farmer’s Market, pressuring politicians to give more money to school lunches, helping the Angel family organize a CSA —to ensure that your younger brothers will have access to fresher food. Have any of these things panned out?

Sadie: The Angel family got a CSA!

Catherine: We did it last year. We did it at the Neighborhood School — it went last year from May through to November. There were 30 families, and two classes.

But then, wait until you get this.

Sadie: The Angel family also bought their own land

Catherine: Look—I’m getting little goose bumps! With the money they got from the CSA, they bought ten acres of land, right near the land they rent. We hooked them up with Just Food—they’re incredible. They also got them a second CSA. So last year, their first year, they did two: one in Brooklyn and one in Manhattan. And now they’re going to have chickens and there will be eggs and some type of fruit. We’ve said we’ll go up to fifty shares this season.

Safiyah: That was my favorite thing about the movie. Wow—I actually did that. Like, I did that. All the hard work and all the complaining—like, “ah, more voice overs!” Now we just get to look back and be like, this is what I did.

But I want to talk about something more cheering, which is how much money and time they pour into public school lunches in France. Journalist Vivienne Walt, writing for Time, shares her son’s experience of eating multi-course gourmet meals in a Paris preschool. I kid you not.

Each day, her son gets an hors d’oeuvre, salad, main course, cheese plate and dessert. “The variety on the menus is astonishing: no single meal is repeated over the 32 school days in the period,” writes Walt. “One day, when I arrived to collect him, a server whispered for me to wait until the dessert course was over. Out in the hall, one of the staff shouted for ‘total quiet’ to a crowd of 4-year-olds awaiting the next lunch seating.”

According to Walt, this deference paid to food from such an early age is as good an explanation as any for the “French Paradox” (i.e. the mysterious fact that French people, who eat a lot of butter, good quality meats, and even dessert, don’t get fat or have nearly as much heart disease as Americans do). She writes:

“In a country where con artists and adulterers are tolerated, the laws governing meals are sacrosanct and are drummed into children before they can even hold a knife. The French don’t need their First Lady to plant a vegetable garden at the Élysée Palace to encourage good eating habits. They already know the rules: sit down and take your time, because food is serious business.”

America’s school lunches will probably never achieve this level of sophistication, but it brings a smile to my face to be reminded that some cultures still revere food and bring their children up to take pleasure in eating fresh, proper meals.

During his 18 minute TED talk, British chef and anti-obesity crusader Jamie Oliver illustrates America’s obesity epidemic with photographs of morbidly overweight young Americans who are “eating their livers to death.”

It sounds melodramatic until you realize he’s right. And if his statistics don’t persuade you (”10% of our health care budget is currently spent on obesity-related diseases,” he repeats like a mantra) maybe the photograph of an XX-size coffin will. Or maybe you’ll be convinced by clips from Oliver’s upcoming reality T.V. show, where he shocks families in Huntington, West Virginia (America’s unhealthiest city) out of their fast-food, white-bread lives.

But for a truly shocking reality (and one that Ms. Caitlin Flanagan would do well to watch several times), skip ahead to 11:17 minutes into his talk.  It’s a clip of Mr. Oliver quizzing elementary school kids about vegetables. One kid confidently identifies a bunch of tomatoes as potatoes. Another has no idea what a cauliflower is, and yet another brazenly announces that it is, in fact, broccoli.  Dangling a leafy bunch of beets before the children, Mr. Oliver says, “And what do you think this is?”

“Celery?”  one little girl asks, unsure of herself.

“Noooo….” says Mr. Oliver.

The audience at TED titters nervously.  I suppose it is, after all, important (and necessary) to spend some time educating our kids about fresh fruits and vegetables in the public schools. After we do this, and after we revolutionize lunchrooms around the country (and yes, maybe even plant hundreds more edible gardens), maybe then kids will have the brain energy to study Shakespeare and focus on higher math.

“In my household, there was one simple rule: you ate what was on your plate—good, bad, or ugly,” Mrs. Obama said. “Kids had absolutely no say in what they felt like eating. If you didn’t like it, you were welcome to go to bed hungry.”

I don’t have kids, so I can’t speak from personal experience, but I spent a week in early December with a dear friend and her husband who are raising two boys, Ben and Owen. Ben, who turned three during my visit, eats roasted broccoli the way most kids inhale their french fries. Owen, who was sick during my visit, gobbled up scrambled eggs and whole wheat toast the day I spent with him, and even humored me by drinking some homemade ginger tea I’d made to quell his sore throat. Both boys eat an array of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and other healthy foods that their parents make, with little fanfare, at home.

Susan, my friend, has a philosophy much like Mrs. Obama’s. “My kids have no choice,” she told me, when I praised her kids for being such good eaters. “They know that if they don’t eat what we give them, they don’t get an alternative. And you know what? They usually clean their plates.”

But back to “Let’s Move.” Though Mrs. Obama acknowledges that parents have to take some responsibility for their kids’ diets, she knows that that’s not enough. She announced an ambitious plan with four overarching components.

1. Making Healthy Choices

2. Healthier Food in Schools

3. Access to Healthy, Affordable Foods  (”We need to eliminate food deserts in this country, and we need to do it now!” says Mrs. Obama.)

4. Increasing Physical Activity

The administration is partnering with Walt Disney, NBC Universal, and Viacom to help spread the anti-obesity, pro-exercise message, and also with (of all companies) Pepsi, which will apparently support Let’s Move initiatives.

She doesn’t say anything here (at least in these clips) about the upcoming Child Nutrition Reauthorization, a bill that will come before Congress soon and that will (or will not) give our schools far more funding to ensure children have access to nutritious, fresh foods, but I bet that she will in the coming weeks.

Letsmove.gov will serve as a resource for parents interested in helping their families maintain good health, with recipes, exercise plans, and so on.

Here’s the full Presidential Memo on the Childhood Obesity Task Force.

According to ObamaFoodarama, the First Lady’s campaign (which she will announce in more specificity soon) will include improving school lunch programs, creating more places for physical recreation (especially in schools), and encouraging changes in food access so that healthy foods are available in every community.

For inspiration, the First Lady (and mayors from other cities) should take a look at Wellness in the Schools, a local initiative here in New York City that gets fresh fruit and veggies into public school cafeterias, especially those in low-income neighborhoods. The organization, which was founded several years ago by three moms who have kids in the New York City public schools, is working closely with SchoolFood to improve the quality of cafeteria lunches in the Big Apple—no easy feat, considering there are 1500 cafeterias and 860,000 children to feed. Recently, Chef Bill Telepan of Telepan restaurant on the upper west side joined WITS as a board member and he has taken an active role in promoting the organization and developing healthy recipes (such as one for vegetarian chili that can be cooked in a convection oven).  (Full disclosure: I volunteer for WITS.)

carrots, cukes, and fresh Romaine are hits

Though WITS is expanding at a rapid pace (it’s already in place at 13 schools and hopes to be adding salad bars and more from-scratch recipes at 13 additional schools this year) and is working on many exciting initiatives (today, in fact, Telepan and executive chef of School Food Jorge Collazo, who were interviewed on Leonard Lopate earlier this week, are cooking up New York-raised grass-fed beef at the IS 44 complex on W. 77th St.), there are major challenges ahead. In case you’re wondering, yes, New York kids still eat breaded fish with plasticky American cheese melted on top, pre-cooked burgers (that are most certainly not grass-fed and not from small family farms), and pre-cooked, frozen, and then re-heated omelets for breakfast. (And we wonder why kids don’t like “real” food. It’s because most of what they’re served has the life processed out of it and tastes horrible.)

Interviewing Telepan and Collazo, Leonard Lopate seemed awed that children would eat their vegetables, but the truth is, they love them. By far the most popular items we volunteers put out on the salad bar are carrot sticks, cucumber slices, and fresh green salad (sometimes with spinach sprinkled in—you have to introduce things gradually). The fancier stuff—marinated garbanzo bean salad with green peppers, tofu stir fry, and so on—might be our favorites but the kids prefer their vegetables simple and crunchy, maybe with a dash of ranch dressing. (And no, I’m not deluded: we actually stroll the cafeteria during lunch to see if the kids are eating their veggies and nine times out of ten, their trays are empty.)

Do you know any local healthy-food initiatives in your school district?  If so, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section below.

I was going to write a long-winded rebuttal to Ms. Flanagan but I see now that I don’t have to. Many bloggers have beat me to it, so I will just quote from a few of the best.

• Ed Levine over at Serious Eats says Caitlin Flanagan’s “hatchet job” on Alice Waters and her Edible Schoolyard project is belligerent, fueled by animus, and wrong, wrong, wrong.  “It’s one thing to employ a healthy, thoughtful skepticism when it comes to Alice Waters. That, I think, comes with the Saint Alice territory. It’s another to engage in character and policy assassination, as Flanagan does in this piece,” writes Levine. “To support Alice Waters, she says, is to be ‘complicit…in an act of theft that will…contribute to the creation of a permanent, uneducated underclass….’ Shame on her and shame on the Atlantic for giving credence to her ridiculously far-fetched arguments. This isn’t thought-provoking journalism. It’s poorly reasoned mud-slinging.”

• Kurt Michael Friese at Civil Eats writes:

“Where the argument really goes off the rails though is when Ms Flanagan posits:

Does the immigrant farm worker dream that his child will learn to enjoy manual labor, or that his child will be freed from it? What is the goal of an education, of what we once called “book learning”? These are questions best left unasked when it comes to the gardens.

Not “enjoy,” Ms, Flanagan, respect.  This, as I mentioned, is where her disdain for manual labor, something that everyone on the planet (beneath the upper 2% or so of income earners) contends with every day, becomes instructive.  It is predicated on the idea that labor is something to be freed from, ostensibly through strict adherence to “book learning.”  Worse, it perpetuates the misguided dogma of the last several decades that distances us from our food and insists that cooking is a chore, like washing laundry or windows, which should be avoided at all costs as if it were beneath us.  This in turn not only makes her seem elitist herself, but also leaves Ms. Flanagan’s ideas of education as merely a means to create consumers, rather than citizens.”

• Jill Richardson at La Vida Locavore simply says, “I am baffled by the utter stupidity of this snotty Atlantic article criticizing school gardens and Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard specifically.” Richardson goes on to list all the math, science, and history her boyfriend’s kids are learning via their adventures in the garden: the nitrogen cycle, taxonomy, reproduction, and charting the growth of pea plants on graphs, etc. Richardson concludes with something that any teacher knows to be true: “These are all things I remember learning in school, but you almost need to see them to really understand them. And it’s much more fun to do your learning in a hands-on way than at a desk.”

• Finally, Andrew Leonard’s takedown of “Cultivating Failure” on Salon.com is perhaps the most impassioned and the most thorough. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here are some of the best bits:

“But there are some problems with the construct, not least of which is that reference to the ‘hot sun,’ which suggests that even though Caitlin Flanagan was born and raised in Berkeley, she doesn’t recall the East Bay’s climate all that well. But more to the point is that initial word: ‘imagine.’ Flanagan’s concoction is just that; a fantasy made up out of thin air. In her entire 3,500-word article, there is no indication that she talked to a single Latino in Berkeley who might have misgivings as to the merits of elementary and middle school kids spending a mere hour-and-a-half a week tending a garden.”

and

“Her entire case is circumstantial. If the kids are out in the garden, then they are not reading ‘Emerson and Euclid’ or learning ‘hard math.’ The hole in this argument is so large that you could drive a herd of grass-fed cows right through it. If that time is so precious, then why not do away with art and music and physical education classes too?!

You don’t have to be a Berkeley parent to value art and music education, or understand that regular exercise is critical for raising healthy kids. But in Berkeley, and increasingly elsewhere, we also take seriously the idea that understanding what we eat is an essential ingredient in understanding how to live well, healthily and sustainably, in this world, and that it may be just as important, or more, to the prosperous functioning of society as is the ability to play the flute, paint a picture, run the mile or use the Pythagorean theorem. Flanagan rejects that value system, using the poor performance of California schools as a smoke screen for cultural warfare. Her problem with public school gardens is not their effect on test scores, which she can’t measure anyway, but her cultural animosity against the Alice Waters of the world, the foodies, the organic gardeners and locavores and crusaders against factory farms and monoculture agribusinesses.”

If these early blogs are any indication of the cogent, spirited responses out there, then I can’t wait to see the letters that will no doubt appear in next month’s issue of the Atlantic. (The online version doesn’t accept letters, apparently, or I’m guessing there would be a ton already.)

Feel free to continue the conversation below!

So it was with great interest that I listened to this NPR segment on how the milk industry is lashing out at parents at this Boulder, Colorado school for taking chocolate milk off the menu.

“Chocolate milk is soda in drag,” one mom (called “the renegade lunch lady”) says to NPR reporter Jeff Brady, noting that it has 3.1 grams of sugar per ounce. (Soda has 3.3.)

Apparently, this school isn’t the only one to ban chocolate milk. The dairy industry, worried about losing more milk drinkers nationwide, has rather desperately launched a “Raise your hand for chocolate milk” campaign on Facebook including this propaganda-filled video. (Hmmm… I wonder how much these dieticians and actors were paid to say that chocolate milk is just as healthy as regular milk?)

Has it really gotten so bad that parents can’t persuade their kids to drink plain whole milk?  Oh—that’s right, whole milk is not an option anymore, at least in New York City public schools where city education officials removed it from cafeterias in 2006. At PS 157, the only choices kids have are low-fat or skim milk and low-fat chocolate milk. If I were them, I’d probably choose chocolate milk, too. Who wants to drink blue-ish skim milk or watery-tasting 1% milk?

The truth is, kids are not getting fat from drinking whole milk.  (When was the last time you saw a 3rd grader guzzling whole milk? I think that’d actually be cause for celebration.) I’m with Nina Planck on this subject—you need the saturated fat that’s in whole milk to absorb the calcium and fat-soluble vitamins in milk. Whereas sugar (and an early addiction to it) leads to everything from ADD to cavities to diabetes.

As we say at the P.S. 157 cafeteria, one step at a time. We’ve got the kids eating fresh veggies on a daily basis—maybe next semester we’ll figure out how to get some seasonal produce from New York state farms. And maybe, like that Boulder school, we can tackle the chocolate milk issue soon.

Second-grader Ella Lyons says it best, “No one’s going to get regular milk if we have chocolate milk, because, I think, they’re going to like it better because it tastes better…But it’s not good for you, so I think we shouldn’t have chocolate milk.”

Reporters Jason DeParle and Robert Gebeloff describe an Ohio electrician named Greg Dawson who recently found himself filling up on cereal, eggs, and Spam so that he could afford to feed his five children and wife. (Dawson, unlike many Americans, has not lost his job but when his overtime recently vanished, the family budget was strained.) “When an outreach worker appeared at his son’s Head Start program, Mr. Dawson gave in,” write DeParle & Gebeloff. The stigma has not entirely vanished: though Mr. Dawson now accepts the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” allowance (snappy new acronym, SNAP, courtesy of the Obama administration), he hasn’t breathed a word of it to his own parents.

Hunger is a very real issue in our country right now and surely many Americans are turning not just to spam, spam, spam, and eggs [see Monty Python video, below], but to McDonald’s, Burger King, etc. and to all sorts of cheap and filling yet nutrient-poor “foods.”

All this is depressing news for a vegetable-obsessed health nut like me, until I remembered Rebecca Blood’s project (in which she ate organic meals on a Food Stamps budget for several months) which I wrote about back in June. Blood stuck to the USDA’s budget for Food Stamps (in 2007, that came out to $320 a month for two adults) and managed to cook nutritious, affordable, organic meals for her hubby and herself. (Presumably, Mr. Dawson’s $300 monthly allowance is comparatively meager because he still has a full-time job, just not the extra padding over overtime income.)

Yet still, feeding a family of 7 on a limited budget, it’s hard to see how all but the most committed (and resourceful) parents could follow Blood’s inventive series of healthy menus (heavy on couscous, lentils, and carrots and other low-cost vegie staples) without breaking down and going to Dairy Queen or Micky D’s.

Two paperback cookbooks have come across my desk recently that may serve as inspiration for out-of-work home cooks across the land. One, Ellen Brown’s $3 Meals: Feed Your Family Delicious, Healthy Meals for Less than the Cost of a Gallon of Milk ($11.21 on Amazon), covers a range of dishes that are both satiating and simple to prepare. (And a heck of a lot healthier than a Big Mac.) The recipes range from comfort food staples such as chicken pot pie and the Italian classic Aglio e Olio to ethnic fare like chicken Molé and lamb Moussaka.

The second is Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating ($9 on Amazon) by Lisa Jervis. Though a little too obvious for anyone who knows her way around a kitchen, this lithe guide contains some streamlined versions of better known recipes as well as a “nonrecipe recipe” section that includes stream-of-consciousness variations for main course salads, “toast + spread” ideas, and superquick stirfries. It’d be the perfect gift for the non-cook in your family.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the cookbook I grew up with (and which my dad gave me for Christmas a few years ago): More-With-Less, first published in 1976 as a response to the world food shortages of the time. International in scope, it includes lots of basic recipes but also some unusual ones, too: Kusherie (Egyptian rice and lentils), Indonesian fried rice, and Argentine spinach pie.

I bet there are a lot of locavores out there who are on Food Stamps. Speak Up!  I’d love to hear your ideas for stretching your SNAP money without resorting to fast food. (Or worse, Spam.)

So here’s what I’ve been reading in the realm of Food Politics this week and last.

• Gleaning Makes a Comeback. The Christian Science Monitor has a great article about the re-emergence of “gleaners”—i.e. people who harvest leftover crops for the poor, taking slightly bruised apples or misshapen carrots from orchards and fields and donating them to soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Reporter Gregory M. Lamb focuses on Corinne Almquist, a young Middlebury College grad who is organizing volunteer gleaners across Vermont. In recent weeks she and her volunteers have delivered about 6,000 pounds of squash, carrots, potatoes, and apples to food shelves or senior centers around the state, according to Lamb. “Gleaning is as old as the Bible,” writes Lamb. “In the story of Ruth she gleans in the fields of Boaz and the two fall in love. Leviticus urges farmers to leave the corners of their fields unharvested, providing food for the poor and strangers. The practice was common in 19th-century France, too.”

• Ending Food Deserts one Bodega at a Time. There’s also a growing movement in urban areas to sell fresh produce (and whole wheat bread, apparently) in bodegas and corner groceries across the U.S. (Stores that many low-income Americans rely on for their groceries.) The Times ran a detailed piece last week about new initiatives in Newark, New York City, Cleveland, Hartford, and Louisville that encourage bodega owners to push aside the Pringles and Entenmann’s and make room for healthier offerings (especially near the check-out). Kai Siedenburg of the Portland, OR-based Community Food Security Coalition was quoted as saying, “If you are educating people to make good choices, but those choices aren’t available nearby and they don’t have a car to drive out to the suburbs to the supermarket, or an hour to ride two buses to get there…it’s really hard for them to make good choices.”

These programs aim to reinforce those good choices. Some, like Newark’s, are funded by city grants; Cleveland’s Corner Store Project is jointly run by the city’s public health department and Case Western Reserve University.

• The Truth About Meat and Global Warming. Vegetarians often argue that they don’t eat meat for environmental reasons: the amount of land and energy needed to raise cows for slaughter is far more than it takes to plant and nurture vegetable crops, they say. (Various studies have found that anywhere from 18%-50% of human-caused greenhouse gases are caused by meat production.) Which is why I was so interested to read this Op-Ed in The New York Times two weekends ago. Rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman argues that producing meat can be less detrimental to the environment than planting and harvesting some vegetable crops (in particular, Brazilian soy and wetland rice fields, which account for 29% of the world’s human-generated methane production).

Unsurprisingly, most of the statistics we have about meat production having a gargantuan carbon footprint is based on data from industrial CAFOs (Contained Animal Feeding Operations) that crowd animals together in tight spaces and feed cows a bad-for-them diet of grain. Hahn Niman, who runs BN Ranch with her husband Bill Niman, ticks off the evidence that traditional farms that graze cows on pasture produce less methane than CAFOs. (And they typically integrate manure into the farm rather than creating “liquefied manure systems” and the concomitant food-safety issues that inevitably follow.) Small farmers can also reduce methane production by giving cows nutrient-laden salt licks, and adding certain proteins to the cows’ diets. Niman writes:

As the contrast between the environmental impact of traditional farming and industrial farming shows, efforts to minimize greenhouse gases need to be much more sophisticated than just making blanket condemnations of certain foods. Farming methods vary tremendously, leading to widely variable global warming contributions for every food we eat. Recent research in Sweden shows that, depending on how and where a food is produced, its carbon dioxide emissions vary by a factor of 10.

Nonetheless, Hahn Niman concludes that those of us who want to lessen our individual contribution to climate change should eat less meat (no matter the kind). But more vital, Hahn writes, is making common-sense choices when it comes to eating: “avoid processed foods and those from industrialized farms; reduce food waste; and buy local and in season.”

• Can You Support Sustainable Meat as a Vegetarian? New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert has written an insightful review of Jonathan Safran-Foer’s new book “Eating Animals.” Having not read the book yet (I plan to in the next two weeks; stay tuned for coverage here), it’s hard to assess her piece, but I do take issue with her charge (and seemingly Foer’s) that locally-raised, sustainable meat “depends on its own denial of reality.” Sure, there’s not enough nonfactory meat to feed the country yet, but if regular Americans were to start buying sustainably-raised meat once a week instead of going to McDonald’s and Burger King five times a week, there would be more demand and eventually more small farms raising this type of meat. (It’s not as if this is going to happen overnight, either.) As Kolbert says, most Americans by now know how industrial meat is produced (and if they don’t, they have no excuse not to, with films like Food, Inc. and Fast Food Nation playing nationwide): is it too outrageous to dream that these citizens (not wealthy, not elitist) will start voting with their forks, too? It’s fine with me if regular folks everywhere choose, instead, to become vegetarians or vegans. My point is that change is possible and that we won’t starve or be malnourished without CAFOs, despite what agribusiness would have us believe.

• Grist’s Tom Philpott wrote an interesting piece earlier this week questioning our government’s lack of progress in testing pig CAFOs for swine flu. As Philpott writes, “Given the public-health threat, one might expect the government to step in and perform tests. Is it happening? Stunningly, no. All the USDA has done is to create a voluntary program—which…no hog grower has an interest in using.” He also deconstructs this Washington Post’s article (”Back Where Virus Started, New Scrutiny for Pig Farming”), wondering why reporter David Brown does not back up his assertion that “CAFOs such as Schott’s are inherently safer than backyard pig farms, where the animals mingle with people and birds fly overhead.” Philpott writes: “In an otherwise lavishly sourced article, there’s absolutely no scientific evidence presented to back up this claim.”

• Seed Magazine reporter Maywa Montenegro wrote a well-researched article on the reasons food activists should not buy into the organic-is-better ethos hook, line, and sinker. According to Montenegro, GMO-free crops and organic crops are all very well and good for us “foodies” in the west but we are being naive if we think that organic farming (and GMO-free foods) will yield enough food for impoverished people in the developing world. Among the biotech inventions we should welcome are grains that require less water and utilize nitrogen more efficiently, drought-resistant maize varieties for sub-Saharan Africa, and rice that can tolerate flooding in Southeast Asia. Watch this column for a more thorough response to Montenegro’s article next week.

• Finally, Jill Richardson of La Vida Locavore tackles the politics of raw milk with a six-page article at Alternet.org. (Yes, I still print out lengthy articles…) Richardson calls for reason over rhetoric in the raw milk debate. Does it make sense, she asks, for the government to outlaw raw milk, which is illegal in certain states and cannot be shipped over state lines, and not raw oysters? (Especially when you consider that oysters are the 4th leading cause of food poisoning in the U.S., and milk—raw or pasteurized—doesn’t even make the top ten list?) Don’t Americans have a right to eat what they want, as long as they are aware of the risks? As Richardson points out, no one is forbidding parents from buying fast food for their kids, even though a diet comprised primarily of Wendy’s and McDonald’s is one of the main reasons so many children in this country are obese and have diabetes and/or heart disease. (Some, like Jamie Oliver, believe feeding kids crap like this is tantamount to child abuse.) Raw milk, on the other hand, has all kinds of health benefits. As I found out several years ago when I reported on the subject for Salon, this seemingly innocuous beverage riles people up. If you doubt me, skim through the 70 comments on Richardson’s piece.  (Some of them are blaming her for a mistake she did not make that was in an earlier version of the headline, but others are furious, critical, and prosleytizing.)