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.