American kids and their right to healthy food

I grew up in a country where over half the the population was farming. As a city kid, I tolled along with my parents – university professor and pharmacist – on a patch of land 30 km outside the city plowing potatoes, watering tomatoes, picking strawberries and hauling home bags of cucumbers on public buses. We ate fresh fruit and vegetable in the season and home-canned preserves off-season. We only ate mom's home-made cooking. There were no supermarkets, just basic grocery stores for milk, bread and, occasionally, meat. Whatever we did not grow in our garden we would get either from our rural relatives (e.g. live chickens, honey, wine) or from greenmarkets scattered around the city.

Eventually I stopped farming and started interpreting for Americans who volunteered to teach Moldovan farmers how to make money. I remember a Monsanto employee who came to advise an entrepreneurial farmer on ways to grow and make money out of his unsophisticated greenhouse business. But mostly he ate deliciously natural water melons and drank home-made wine during candle-lit dinners (candles were often used when electricity was frequently cut off). It was then when I first learned that in America only 2% of the working population was farming. And the few farmers were happy and rich from owning many hectars of corn fields. They invested they profits in stocks and had their own tractors and combines.

While living in Romania and Moldova, I continued to buy my food exclusively at farmers’ markets, which I then cooked myself. Fast food (e.g. McDonald’s) and junk food was becoming increasingly available but still too expensive – and culturally inappropriate – to substitute for traditional food made of potatoes, corn meal, rice and pasta. Finally, when I got to the US and was about to hit a local supermarket for my weekly grocery shopping, I happened to read the Fast Food Nation. After that, I kept mostly in the vegetable and fruit section.

That’s how I grew to appreciate fresh and healthy food. I guess I was lucky. Most American youth aren't so lucky and, as a result, suffer increasingly from obesity and associated health problems. Two out of five major causes of obesity – none of which kids have any control over – have to do with food, specifically with access to healthy and nutritious food.

There are organizations working to address this problem. In New York City, it’s the Council on the Environment (CENYC) that has helped make fresh natural produce and food more accessible to New Yorkers. What began with twelve farmers in an empty lot in 1976 has grown into the largest network of its kind in the country, with rigorous "grow-your-own" standards. There are greenmarkets all over the city and they are very popular.

“CENYC works to bring healthy fresh produce to New Yorkers, to support local family-owned farms and to teach people how to grow their own food. We want to change the food system from ground up in New York , and deliver a product that can’t be found but at the green market,” says Marcel Van Ooyen, Executive Director of CENYC.

Of course, it still takes the parents to be willing and able to afford to buy and prepare food for their kids. For this purpose, the City offers financial incentive for food stamp users through the Health Bucks Program. In addition, there are Youthmarkets where City youth work together with farmers to make fresh food available in their communities. Beside increasing accessibility to farm fresh food, greenmarkets generate a range of other benefits.

Although appreciation for healthy eating is steadily growing, it hasn’t tipped yet. It might take many more greenmarkets or the First Lady planting a garden at the White House , or a movie, or stricter food safety regulations and enforcement, or all of these together to improve the way Americans kids eat.

Photo credit: tacomamama @ CC

We teach fish to eat corn and other Food, Inc. facts

Having watched the Food, Inc. movie, I suggest you do, too.

The movie is about the big problems in the American food industry. They stem from three major phenomena: companies' obsessive chase of efficiency and profit, government’s repeated failure to enforce food safety, and consumers’ ignorant preference for cheap unhealthy food. The result is that most Americans are eating engineered – rather than grown – food, which is causing serious and long-lasting public health problems in the US and having significant impact abroad. The agro-food industry is in denial just like the tobacco industry once used to be. Some of the food sold in the supermarkets is more harmful than the cigarettes. There needs to be a change.

Will Food, Inc. help bring about change? Will this movie be the tipping point for the food industry as the movie An Inconvenient Truth was for climate change? I certainly hope so because the problems in the food industry are quite ugly and won’t go away easily. There is enough work for everybody.

1. Government should stop subsidizing production of corn because there is too much of it at the detriment of other types of healthier and more nutritious food. If there is need to subsidize something, why not locally grown, diversified food? Instead of subsidizing food companies, why not individual farmers? Also, government should free itself from corporate influence and private interest groups, and re-commit to serving the public interest. Today the pubic interest is not in fatty cheap food but in healthy nutritious food.

2. The large food conglomerates should revise their business models to provide healthier food. Four companies control about 80% of the food supply in the US. They own the crops, meat and produce supplied by farmers. When a company such as McDonald’s is the single largest purchaser of potatoes and meat in the whole country, the impact it could have by changing the standards is huge. What more important social responsibility can a company have?!

3. Each of us should be more curious and demanding regarding the food we buy and eat. Although the market for organic food is growing fast (20% annually), the change needs to happen even faster. Already every one in three people born after 2001 is bound to develop diabetes early in their lives. We should ask from our politicians better regulation of and enforcement in the industrial food industry. We should be more aware of what and why we eat, support farmers' markets and individual farmers, and stop buying that junk food once and for all. If you are doing that already, here is more you can do.

How green are restaurants and cafes in New York?

I first learned about the green restaurant movement in New York when I attended a networking event for sustainability-minded people organized by econventions at Caffe Notte, an environmentally-conscious community wine bar. I recently talked with Steven Salsberg, owner of the bar and charismatic advocate of this movement, about progress and challenges in the process of ‘greening’ the food & beverage industry in New York. These are some interesting facts I'd like to share with you:

1. New York offers an increasing variety of green restaurants, cafes and bars. Although there is no one definition of what a green eatery is, it includes either one or all of the following: having green certification, doing at least something good for the environment and buying from a green market. For instance, check out this Upper East Side map I found on the Upper Green Side blog.

2. Any restaurant can aspire to get green certification. The Boston-based Green Restaurant Association (CRA), founded by Michael Oshman in 1990, awards a "Green Restaurant" seal to restaurants that commit to such measures as replacing polystyrene foam products, recycling as much as possible, and phasing in processes of composting, conserving water, disposing of grease responsibly and using chlorine-free paper products. Here are the standards and here are the Green Certified restaurants & café in New York. In addition, restaurants aspiring to get organic certification can do so under federal regulations through the Northeast Organic Farmers Association (NOLA) like Gusto Grilled Organic in Greenage Village did.

3. Composing is a great thing but might be more difficult in New York. While Boston and Los Angeles already have citywide composting programs, New York City is still considering this possibility. Indeed, some restaurants have their own composting plants, but Steven Salsberg, in his role of vice-chairman to CENYC, thinks that NYC lacks the infrastructure necessary for composting and there are important sanitation issues to be considered with restaurants having their own composting sites.

What do you think about the green restaurant movement in New York City? Have any interesting experiences to share?
Photo credit: foodistablog @CC

Food, Inc.: ready for more inconvenient truth?!

Sincere thanks to Steven Salsberg, a NYC-based sustainability-conscious entrepreneur and influential change-agent, for bringing to my attention the New York City premiere of a very important movie, Food, Inc that took place last week at the Times Center in Manhattan and was followed by a panel discussion featuring Eric Schlosser, one of the movie's producers, and author of Fast Food Nation and Marcel Van Ooyen, Executive Director of the Council on the Environment of NYC.

Fast Food Nation was the first book on my first class' syllabus in my graduate school. I was a fresh-comer to New York and I eager to learn about the famous American capitalism and corporations. I read every single page of that book, got the message about America's fast food industry and never had a hamburger again. I think this is when I became much more conscious about the food I ate.

This is also why I think Food, Inc. is an important movie. Corporations have no choice but to listen to consumers' demand and preferences. We, the consumers, can make the food industry change and become what we want it to be. Until now, we might have been unaware or clueless. Now, with books such as Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, M. Pollan' The Omnivore’s Dilemma and movie such as Food, Inc. there is really no other excuse left but our indifference.

Starting June 12, the film will be screened publicly at Film Forum. If you want to see this movie in a company of like-minded people, join members of the New York Corporate Social Responsibility Meetup on Saturday, June 13 for a fun food-themed outing.

Communicating CSR: Corporate reports, videos and leaders

Early this week, the growing New York Corporate Social Responsibility Group got together for another montly meetup - May CSR Social at our favorite Honey Bar and Lounge in Chelsea. In addition to being the only regular informal after-work place to network with other corporate social responsibility and sustainability professionals in the City, the New York CSR Meetup offers an increasingly engaging, diverse and thought-provoking forum for discussing the hottest topics in this field.

The topic of May CSR Social was Communicating CSR: Option, law or strategy? We started out by aknowledging the currently ongoing debate around the most effective means of communicating corporate responsibility practices. Many think CSR reports are the best means, others think genuine corporate leadership voices are increasingly influential in bringing about change. Yet others believe that the future of CSR communications is in telling the story in video format. The discussion was extremely interesting and here are some highlights I want to share with you:

1. CSR reporting is very much alive and rapidly evolving. The more tailored the report to its target audiences, the better. The more focus on core issues, the better. The more evidence of actual work/process/results, the better. The shorter, concise and straightforward, the better.

2. Regulated CSR reporting is unlikely in the US. Shareholders, employees and customers should be able to require the most appropriate form of CSR communication. Whatever the format, CSR communicaiton should address the real issues facing the company and would ensure a two-way communication process. Of 14 group members, only 2 would were in favor of mandatory CSR reporting.

3. Effective communication is a two-way road. Companies should learn to listen to and act upon stakeholders' perceptions, including complaints and criticism from local communities and various segments of customers. Shareholders should use their right to issue resolutions more often. If none of these works, government will eventually impose stricter rules such as the latest automobile emission and mileage standards.

4. Finally, an open-ended question that you are welcome to answer as well: Why Citi's and Barclays' reports are so different in their scope and focus in the same global context? While Citi's report provides a comprehensive coverage of everything except its approach to mitigate the adverse impact of the financial crisis on its customers, Barclays' report - which is in a much better shape than Citi - is all about that.

Greening New York City Bike-by-Bike

Happy to share with you an article I wrote for the Green Edge Collaborative NYC's first Leaflet. The article is about a great non-profit that is successfully promoting bike culture and sustainability in New York City.

The spring is back in the New York City and so are the bikers! You will find them all along the Hudson River Greenway, an amazing bike route that stretches from Battery Park all the way to Washington Fort Park, with little secrets such as the Cherry Walk. You, too, can explore this route if you rent or buy a bike. One place we suggest you do this is Recycle-A-Bicycle, an organization that, in addition to operating two bike shops in East Village and Dumbo, is helping the City to become greener, more bicycle-friendly, and is teaching young people to do the same.

Recycle-A-Bicycle promotes everyday bicycle use by recycling used bikes. New Yorkers donate about 1200 old bikes every year which are then refurbished by Recycle-A-Bicycle’s mechanics and volunteers. About half of these bikes are re-sold, and the rest are either used for parts or transformed into jewelry, crafts, or art installations through RAB’s recycled arts program. The revenues are used to fund Recycle-A-Bicycle’s youth programs, such as professional training, bike-maintenance courses offered in partnership with New York City schools, after-school programs, and chaperoned group rides for younger kids.

Recycle-A-Bicycle shares a powerful vision with many of us, that of a sustainable New York City. It is doing an excellent job at realizing this vision by promoting bike culture throughout the boroughs among children, parents and educators. Through initiatives such as the Earn-A-Bike program, teenagers get a direct and integrated educational experience. For example, when a student volunteers 18 hours on bike repair, they earn their own bicycle frame, which they can build and ride for themselves. Through bicycle riding, students learn first-hand about the importance of being fit and active and also learn to respect their immediate environment by not polluting it. The hope is that the children of today will continue to promote positive bicycle culture as they grow and become influential in their communities. Recycle-A-Bicycle estimates that they work with about 1,000 young people a year and ride about 500 miles during this time. In the fifteen years they’ve been around, this amounts to direct outreach to thousands of New York City youth!

Recycle-A-Bicycle has helped New York City become a much more bike-rider-friendly city than it used to be by encouraging bicycle riding. “We introduce a lot of people to cycling for the first time, young people and adults alike. Being a community-based bike shop we want to get people riding bicycles. It is not uncommon for people to come to our shops to buy the first bike that they’ve had in years – something we very much support,” says Pasqualina Azzarello, Executive Director of Recycle-A-Bicycle.

New York City is witnessing a shift in the public consciousness which is becoming more open to different forms of transportation and lifestyles. The numbers of bike-lanes and bike-riders are increasing. Recycle-A-Bicycle works in support of Transportation Alternatives, who advocates for more bike lanes and helps to introduce bicycle safety issues to the main stream. In addition, Recycle-A-Bicycle helps many people get fit and comfortable with riding the streets of New York City by offering Bike Maintenance classes in partnership with Bike New York. “The presence of more riders on the streets of New York really helps to encourage our local government to want to accommodate that. If people weren’t riding, then bike lanes would be a good idea in an abstract way,” says Azzarello.

Bike Month in New York City

I enjoy biking a lot. So imagine my satisfaction when I learned that May was the official Bike Month in New York City. That means a great variety of biking activities organized throughout the five boroughs. Last Thursday, May 14, was the National Bike to Work Day.

This WABC Bike to Work video features the main groups promoting the bike culture in New York, and they are doing a great job in increasing bike ridership, biking safety and amenities. Tomorrow I'll post an article on this topic I wrote for the the first newsletter of GreenEdgeCollaborative, a social network of sustainability enthusiasts in NYC.

Clinton Global Initiative: creating value for business and society

An interesting CSR event happened in New York City on Monday, May 11. The Clinton Global Initiative together with The Economist convened the meeting Global Challenges, Corporate Solutions: Creating Value for Business and Society, the aim of which was to discuss ways to help the world’s leading companies identify profitable and sustainable approaches to the world’s most urgent social and environmental challenges.

Check out who participated and what was discussed. I attended the Developing Human Development session which is a cross-cutting theme throughout four action areas where CGI helps companies utilize their core business expertise when addressing the major global challenges: climate change, education, health and poverty.

CGI provides a leadership forum where partnerships between governments, companies and non-profit organizations are nurtured and supported. Once a year, representatives from across these sectors from all over the world gather for the annual meeting to discuss progress and welcome new commitments. CGI members join with a two-year project which - because organically embedded into the company's culture - continue beyond this timeframe. For example, the HIV/AIDS Prevention, Treatment and Care program of Levi Strauss & Co. goes back decades ago when the disease didn't even have a name and grew into a global program with significant influence in improving the social and economic life of vulnerable populations such as people with HIV/AIDS worldwide.

And, finally, a nice video from CGI Commitments to Action from Clinton Global Initiative on Vimeo.

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Richard Edelman: A stakeholder society considers the views of NGOs, employees and consumers

At an event I attended a couple of weeks ago, I took note of what Richard Edelman said regarding the importance of effective, multi-pronged communication in today’s marketplace. Because effective communication is a big part of corporate social responsibility and because Edelman is one of the world’s leading independent PR firms, I asked Richard Edelman, President & CEO, to offer us his view on the importance of communications in the realm of corporate responsibility. I invite you to read the interview below and check out Richard's latest blog on this topic.

Why is it important that companies communicate their commitment to CSR?

First, employees are usually interested in working for companies that are not just interested in making money but also in improving our society. Therefore, if companies want to get the best people, they need to communicate well what they do and how they do it. Second, smart consumers are now demanding companies have a purpose. For example, they will buy a product if they see it as having a sustainable supply chain or appropriate packaging, even if more expensive. Third and most importantly, we’ve moved now from a shareholder society to a stakeholder society, in which the views of NGOs, employees and consumers are being considered.

What are the most effective means of communicating CSR?

It is a combination of speeches by top executives, employees’ blogs that tell their stories and mainstream media. However, telling the story only through words is not enough. Companies need to show what they are doing in video, too.

What are the most common shortcomings in CSR communications?

Just talking about CSR is not enough. Setting specific guidelines and performance measures is key. Everyone is expecting companies to make a commitment and then prove they follow through. It’s one thing to make a promise and another to keep it. In communicating CSR companies have to be quantitative.

What is the one thing that companies need to remember when communicating CSR initiatives?

First, companies should acknowledge where they are and show where they want to go. Even if they are not perfect today, they should be willing to be open and quantitative on their human rights policies, supply chain, etc. Also, companies should strive to be part of the broader solution. For instance, if a firm is trying to fix its supply chain in China, it should educate its suppliers to make them better. One should consider the broader solution, not just the immediate narrow little world.

How will communicating CSR change in the near future?

The expectation is that CSR become part of normal business and not a philanthropic act. CSR is becoming necessary - or what I call the ‘table stakes’ - required to play the game. Smart companies will accept this, make a virtue of it and talk about it as benefit. The one thing that’s going to change in communications is that you will need to show, not just tell, your story. This means taking people to where you are doing your business, making a video and becoming accountable in a visual sense as well.

New York CSR professionals about corporate sustainability

Last night the New York CSR Meetup got together for another of its regular monthly meetings - April CSR Social. We met at Honey, a lounge bar with interesting history, great fondues and own sustainability plans in Chelsea/West Village.

Because of interesting trends in corporate sustainability area, we chose to discuss the progress and, particularly, the challenges companies face in their efforts to develop, manufacture and sell greener products. We used the case of Procter & Gamble as example of a company known to do a good job and tried to answer some of the questions raised by Mallen Baker's "Procter & Gamble - how far does the sustainable product revolution go?".

In 2007, P&G announced a sales target for "sustainable innovation products" of $20 billion by 2012. P&G’s net sales in 2008 were $83 billion, including $2 billion of sales of such eco-products. The way P&G decided to achieve this target was primarily through the compaction of liquid laundry ingredients. More concentrated formulas mean smaller quantities need to be used to achieve the same results, less transportation required to ship the product to the point of sale, and less energy and water embedded in the product. Only products launched since July 2007 and having more than ten percent reduction in one or more inputs (energy; water; transportation; raw material) qualified under the company's target as eco-products.

Our group agreed that, although the actual environmental impact of the $2 billion sales target is rather small, it is however important that a global company voluntarily set a goal like this. P&G sets an example of companies harboring a wholistic approach of their environmental impact and attempt to reduce it. In addition to Mallen's questions, our group identified an additional set of issues:

1.Packaging is an important aspect that is often neglected. Being able to pump eco-detergent into washing machines does not sound like such a crazy idea. Ikea is known for great progress in reducing packaging.

2. Cleaning the manufacturing processes is more important than ever as this MIT study suggests.

3. Consumer education is key in achieving sustainability targets. In case of P&G products, people might buy compactified laundry detergents or cold-water detergents but still use if as regular products.

All in all, we had a great CSR Social. Thank you everyone for participating! And if you, too, want to express your opinion, network and socialize within the New York CSR community, please join us here to be informed about our next events.

How tabacco companies can help end the teenage smoking epidemic

I've been long wondering what the social responsibility of tobacco companies should be. On one hand, it is counterproductive to discourage their CSR efforts in areas such as health, education, disaster relief or community development. On the other hand, applauding these efforts in the context of their main product - cigarettes - is, softly speaking, morally inappropriate. So what could tobacco companies do if they genuinely wanted to become socially responsible?

I found an answer to this question in Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point. How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference which I've greatly enjoyed reading. He says we should stop bedeviling tobacco companies and wasting enormous amounts of money on educating teenagers about the harmful effects of smoking. Apparently, we've been doing this for years but the teenage smoking epidemic has only expanded. Instead we should make cigarettes less addictive, or to use Gladwell's terminology, less 'sticky.' He bases his argument on scientific research that suggests that:

...tobacco companies be required to lower the level of nicotine so that even the heaviest smokers - those smoking, say, 30 cigarettes a day - could not get anything more than five milligrams of nicotine within a 24-hour period - adequate to prevent or limit the development of addiction in most young people, while providing enough nicotine for taste and sensory stimulation.

This to me sounds like a great compromise: tobacco companies could continue their business while the product they sell would become less dangerous. "Cigarette smoking would be less like the flu and more like the common cold: easily caught but easily defeated." This is would be an example of a little thing that can bring about big change. Would the regulators and tabacco companies be willing to do this? What do you think?

Photo credit: CC@Valentin.Ottone

My printer ignored the Earth Day

I did not do much today to celebrate the Earth Day. Actually, my printer completely ignored the significance of today and wasted some paper while I was multi-tasking. I'll make up for today on Saturday when I will be volunteering with the Council of the Environment of New York City helping kids learn about solar ovens.

I am, however, very much interested in what others have been up to today. Quite nice and exciting stuff happened out there. See Motorola's cell phone recycling initiative, Enterprise Rent-A-Car's tree planting project or AnalySYS's achieving carbon neutrality.

Also, I found this Earth Day-appropriate video, The Story of Stuff. It exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. Enjoy!