The Politics of Food
FOOD has become the new buzzword for our times, and even more so on November 19, 2008, when Scott M. Stringer, the Borough President of Manhattan, (www.mbpo.org) and the editor of The Go Green East Harlem Cookbook featured on this blog, convened The Politics of Food: A Conference on New York's Next Policy Challenge. This densely packed day, planned as another aspect of NYC Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's environmental initiatives, broadly and brilliantly covered just about all the most pressing aspects of the subject (See agenda below.)
Politics of Food Conference:
New York’s Next Policy Challenge
AGENDA
Registration
8:30 a.m. - 9:15 a.m.
Morning Session
9:15 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
Welcome
President Lee C. Bollinger
Columbia University
Remarks
Honorable Scott M. Stringer
Manhattan Borough President
H. E. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann
President, United Nations General Assembly
Honorable Michael R. Bloomberg
Mayor, City of New York
Maya Wiley
Director, Center for Social Inclusion
Presentation
Thomas Forster
Faculty, New School Food Studies Program
Breakout Sessions See Page 2 for Locations
10:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
12:15 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. Lunch
Afternoon Session Report from Breakout Sessions
1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Moderator
Ester Fuchs
Professor of Public Affairs & Political Science
Columbia University-School of International & Public Affairs
Breakout Sessions
10:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.
Alfred Lerner Hall
115th & Broadway
Room Floor
Breakout Session #1
From Field to Market: A Blueprint for Food Distribution Cinema 2nd
in NYC
Breakout Session #2
Finding Healthy Food: Supermarkets, Farmers Markets, 555 5th
CSA’s & Food Deserts
Breakout Session #3
The Importance of Nutrition Education 569 5th
Breakout Session #4
Urban Farming: What Does It Look Like? Broadway 2nd
What Makes It Work?
Breakout Session #5
How Schools, Hospitals, and Other Institutions Satow 5th
Can Serve Healthier Meals
Breakout Session #6 477 4th
Recession’s Consequence for the Food Safety Net 2009
Breakout Session #7 Auditorium 1st
The Urban Food Agenda: Shaping City, State &Federal Policy
With almost no advance publicity, a wide variety of people, totaling about five hundred attendees, showed up in the Roone Arledge auditorium of Lerner Hall at Columbia University. They came to hear the excellent roster of speakers, then break into small focus groups that covered seven different aspects of food and eating, and return to munch down on a pretty healthy brown-bag lunch (sandwich, bag of chips, an apple, bottled water, etc.) that was followed by the final part of the enthusiastically received program, the power-point reports on the individual sessions.
It's December now as I post this and, I have to say, I am still feeling elated over the event. After toiling in the trenches of alternative health these past several decades, it is amazingly gratifying to see healthy food become the cynosure of such a giant spotlight. In speaking to the assembled group, Scott Stringer said, "...you can help us begin the urgent work of creating a highly visible, practical, and innovative food policy for New York that puts our great city at the front of this debate, where it belongs."
Mayor Bloomberg was there, according to Scott Stringer, "because he GETS it." And from how the mayor praised Stringer's initiative in setting up this conference and organizing the Go Green East Harlem project that resulted in the beautifully put together, bilingual Go Green East Harlem Cookbook, that appears to be true. Most people in Scott Stringer's job, the mayor said, are just boosters for their territory, but with Manhattan, it's already so much of a tourist destination, it doesn't really need boosters. So, this borough president decided to look around to see how he could improve the lives of his borough's residents, and one of the many ideas he came up with was to start programs to make people healthier, with a better quality of life. (Goals I share, by the way.)
There were so many stunning statistics flying out from the roster of speakers that it was hard to capture them all, but here are a few highlights.
- · Mayor Bloomberg (www.mikebloomberg.com) said that New York City's life expectancy has become greater than the country's as a whole. New Yorkers do walk a lot, that's true, and we do have a lot less pollution when that Northwest wind comes down from Canada and blows fresh air across our oftimes very windy city, but that statistic he quoted is also helped by his anti-smoking initiative—teenage smoking is down 52 percent in the last five years—and his ban on harmful trans fats.
- · The city, said the mayor, is a leader in food initiatives and the New York City government alone serves 225 million meals a year. With so much power, it is incumbent on the people in charge to find ways to provide healthy food because one of the depressing statistics is that one-quarter of the people in minority neighborhoods are obese. These rates, he told us, are GROWING, not diminishing, and the expected, concomitant rate of poor health—diabetes, heart and circulatory problems, etc.—is also growing in those neighborhoods. Bloomberg is a very good, and funny, speaker and kept all of us focused on his message, which he ended by saying he had to go rename a bridge. (True. Later that morning, he participated in a ceremony renaming the Triborough the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. Great to honor this amazing man cut down way too soon, but I wonder if anyone will ever call it that, or if it will just remain the Triboro the same way Sixth Avenue has kept its original name, resisting its formal Avenue-of-the-Americas appelation for more than sixty years.)
- · Father Miguel d'Escoto Brockman, President of the UN General Assembly talked about the new politics of food coming from the bottom up, not the top down, which had always been the case heretofore. Using such phrases as alternative food policies and the right to food, he said that democratizing food, making a Food Democracy, is what he's aiming to do at the U.N. And he believes that New York City can become a model of sustainable existence with an urban/rural partnership. His statistics included the fact that 1 in 4 children in New York City live in poverty and 1 in 5 city children are hungry and rely on food pantries or soup kitchens for some meals (in two years time, this latter number doubled). He ended his well-received talk about making people healthier by saying, "If you have health, you have hope; If you have hope, you have everything."
- · The stats he quoted were among the original springboards for Scott Stringer's decision to focus on healthier food for the residents under his umbrella. He cited what he referred to as food deserts, where about three million people live with little or no access to supermarkets (according to d'Escoto, New York has lost one-third of its supermarkets in the last five years). In these desert neighborhoods, people are forced to shop for food at drugstores or convenience stores where junk food rules and fresh produce is rare. Part of Scott Stringer's plan is to set up a network of greenmarkets in these areas. East Harlem, chosen as a focus because of its astronomically high asthma and diabetes rates, is just the beginning, he says.
- · Food activist Maya Wiley's turn at the podium really drove home some of the city's food-related problems as she cited the daunting fact that New York City is #1 in the nation's wealth INequality. Food prices are not too high, she says, rather wages are too low, and people must be able to afford food.
- · There are 60,000 people working in food-service industries in New York, according to Ms. Wiley, but supermarket earnings are down 9 percent since 1991. The food economy is so competetive that the profit margin for supermarkets can be as low as 1 percent in some low-income areas, and in recent years, one-third of the city's supermarkets have disappeared, disproportionately in "communities of color." This is because supermarket research analysis sees only problems in these neighborhoods (where they should instead be looking at purchasing power), and that tends to frighten potential supermarket owners away. It shouldn't, she maintains, because there is viability in the poorer neighborhoods—overall, there has been a 54-percent increase in small immigrant-owned businesses, a lot of them in food services.
- · What these communities need, Ms. Wiley maintains, is an infusion of more locally owned small businesses, utilizing farm-to-table strategies to create revenue that will stay in these communities. She believes this progressive development will then shift the perceptions of the money people who will come to see these areas as asset-based opportunities, not deficit-based problems. Communities of color are always ground zero in crises, she says—we are not a color-blind society—but in this crisis, she sees an incredible opportunity to completely transform the way these communities function for the betterment of all.
The seven Breakout Sessions that followed the full morning session split the food topics up into manageable chunks. I attended session #3 on the Importance of Nutrition Education, billed as an important way to improve diet-related behavior, because it seemed a logical extension of my work as an alternative writer/editor.
The four panelists basically provided an overview on the local distribution system, starting with the speaker who gave us the history of agriculture-as-manufacture beginning in 1850 when economists built a four-point plan to create food strictly as a commodity, not as food we eat. This disastrous plan loosened the connection of the farmer to the food and the people who eat the food, and has been responsible for the rise of the agribusiness companies that value price and quantity of food over quality of nutrition— a business model which has, in turn, led to the deteriorating health of so many in its thrall. The good news is that this is now changing as people have come to realize how highly flawed the method is. Steps are being taken to change behavior and remove barriers, using a partnership with the media to get ideas out to the public and build new awarenesses.
The session ended with a discussion period where we were asked to provide answers to a list of questions. One question, for example, asked us to list three to five problems related to nutrition education in NYC. My own answer, "first and foremost, the size and scope of New York City," got correctly written down on the classroom's blackboard, but got incorrectly presented in the full auditorium's power-point presentation after lunch as, "The site and scope..." completely missing the point of what I had said in the session. I groaned. But most of the recaps of the session for the full audience were on target, and there was a huge amount to assimilate as we finished up and went our separate ways, armed with assorted business cards and full of resolve to carry the spirit of the conference into our daily lives.
At the end of our breakout session, I had stopped to talk with one of the participants who was connected with a food bank and I asked him what kind of food they handed out now. Was it still of the welfare-cheese sort, I wanted to know. Discouragingly, he answered that, as a food bank, they relied on donated foods and therefore received their full share of canned goods and similar. Not long afterwards, I spotted a December 10th NYT article by Katie Zezima, "From Canned Goods to Fresh, Food Banks Adapt to Demand." It discussed how the people who go to a food pantry in Wisconsin, as well as to other food banks around the country, can now choose the food they bring home, they aren't just given a pre-filled bag of groceries. And the article's accompanying photo did show bins full of fresh produce. Another step forward. I wondered how long it would be before the man I had met was doling out mostly fresh vegetables and fruits at his food bank. The fact he attended the conference said to me that he was aware of the problem and understood the need to change how his food bank worked.
Besides the wealth of information disseminated, one of the best things about the conference was the general agreement among all the speakers that this was just the opening salvo in the establishment of a new, healthier relationship to food promoted by the City of New York that would be rippling out from there. Basically, they were laying the groundwork with this conference, defining the challenges and opportunities, and saying to all of us... Stay Tuned... this is only the beginning, you ain't seen nothin' yet. I sure hope so.
One valuable handout in the packet everyone received was a little booklet called Cultivating the Web, High Tech Tools for the Sustainable Food Movement, put out by the Eat Well Guide (www.eatwellguide.org). This compact compendium lists dozens of Resources and quotes author and environmentalist Bill McKibben as saying, among the "most important points of our food system are the new digital tools that allow us to bypass the big advertisers, the mega-chains, the junk peddlers, and instead find all the myriad other people growing, processing, cooking, and eating actual, delicious food."
In the hall just outside the auditorium, there were expo tables given over to food-related organizations, including one, the NY Coalition for Healthy School Food (www.healthyschoolfood.org) that had just sponsored Healthy Foods for Better Living, a very interesting conference I had attended the previous Sunday. It dealt with diet-related diseases, obesity, students ability to learn, and global warming, this last an enlightening discussion by Mia McDonald, the executive director of Brighter Green (www.brightergreen.org) of the strong connection between global warming and our diet/food. One intriguing fact that stayed with me, and that was repeated several days later at the Columbia conference, was that almost one-fifth of the world's greenhouse emissions, come from livestock and dairy, a rate surprisingly higher than the 14 percent attributed to transportation. Livestock operations, she told us, emit 18 percent of total greenhouse gases (GHGs), which is more than the GHGs from all the world’s transportation systems combined, including private vehicles, public transit, and airplanes.
Amie Hamlin, the leader of this Sunday Healthy Food conference, as well as the director of the sponsoring organization, was highly knowledgeable and effective—a good speaker too—and I was delighted to run into her again a few days later at Columbia where she was speaking at the breakout session on how schools can serve healthier meals. If I ever saw a candidate for a book on the subject of healthy school food, it was her, and I even broached the idea to her in an email and in person. She was too busy, she said, to consider it, though she did add that she'd already been approached by several publishers.
As if in tune with the tenor of the times, there have been subsequent articles in the paper about using food to help elevate populations. One intriguing New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof (www.nytimes.com/kristof) on December 9th, 2008 postulated that cheap iodized salt can actually help raise the world's IQ. He makes the case that cretinism is often a side effect of an iodine deficiency and simply adding iodine to salt can turn that outcome around.
And no sooner had Kristof written about iodized salt than a week later, in his December 11th column, "Obama's 'Secretary of Food'?" he wrote a pitch-perfect argument for renaming the Secretary of Agriculture post. He said, "A Department of Agriculture made sense 100 years ago when 35 percent of Americans engaged in farming. But today, fewer than 2 percent are farmers. In contrast, 100 percent of Americans eat." The reasons he gave for the shift in emphasis reflect all the arguments we have been hearing, including at the food conference, about how the current thrust of the Department of Agriculture is to support a "bankrupt structure of factory farming... that subsidizes the least healthy calories in the supermarket... squanders energy, exacerbates climate change, and makes Americans unhealthy—all while costing taxpayers billions of dollars."
The word Food, often paired with the adjectives sustainable, local, or green, has, as I said, become the buzzword for these times. The widely admired and quoted author, journalist, and professor, Michael Pollan (www.michaelpollan.com), may have even started the ball rolling when he famously said, "Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not Too Much." He put his finger on the immediacy of the word food as opposed to the somewhat abstract, somewhat preachy, alternative—nutrition. In our breakout session on nutrition education, in fact, one savvy attendee, a chef and food-pantry specialist, pleaded, "Can we please say food, not nutrition?" and the whole room murmured its approval.
Food websites and blogs have exploded all over the Internet, articles on healthy, sustainable food now appear with regularity in the press and on the tube, so it seems that quality food's time has come. Let's catch the wave and keep the momentum going so people won't have to keep leading debilitated lives due to poor food and lifestyle choices.
Additional Nuggets for Your Consideration
In amongst the many doers I know who are helping people and the planet, there are two—Jacqueline Wales and Wyldon Fishman—that I'd like to single out for mention at this time. In each case, their creative, non-mainstream work merits attention, not the least for their adherence to values I hold dear. They're both good guys, and it is my pleasure to do what I can to bring what they are doing to light.
FearlessFifties.com
Jacqueline Wales, a dear friend of my daughter's who lives in Bali some of the time and New York most of the time, has this wonderfully upbeat website going that you might be interested in checking out (www.fearlessfifties.com).
I also want to pass on the email below that I recently received from Jacqueline. Although her focus is primarily boomers (she's one herself), I think anyone of any age could benefit from a dose of her amazingly (but not cloyingly) positive outlook and advice. Full disclosure here: I recently edited her latest, truly excellent book, The Fearless Factor, due out in 2009.
A Holiday - and beyond - message from Jacqueline Wales:
Are you ready to thrive and prosper in 2009? Are you ready to overcome your limited beliefs about what you are capable of doing with this thing we call life?
Would you like to achieve
· Solutions to challenges you are currently facing?
· Greater satisfaction in reaching your goals?
· Breakthroughs in long-held belief systems, behaviors and limitations that no longer serve you?
Although these are challenging times, this is not a time to pull back. It’s a time to step forward, and develop the Fearless part of you that knows life is full of opportunities, and you can take advantage of them when you know how.
If you are asking the following questions
What would it take for me to…
· Create a healthier lifestyle?
· Communicate my needs to the people who matter most in my life?
· Find satisfaction in my career?
· Look forward to each day with energy and passion?
AND
· What does next year hold for me in this changing economy?
· What do I need to change so I can feel more empowered?
· Am I really using my full potential?
· Where do I see myself in five or ten years?
You’d want to know there is someone to help you sort through these issues, wouldn’t you?
You’d also want to develop a clear plan of action so you can achieve your goals.
I can help you do it.
For over thirty years I’ve been advising women how to get from where you are now to where you want to go, and I can help you formulate the path of least resistance to reach your goals.
So here’s my exceptional offer available only to readers of this email.
1. 7 hours of Coaching by phone over three months (Individual coaching price is $300 per hour)
2. A Complimentary copy of The 10 Healthy Habits of Fun, Fearless People (value $97)
3. Fearless Confidence (value $47)
4. Unlimited email access (Priceless)
The total value of this package is $2,394, BUT For the first 10 people who sign up for this amazing gift the price is $1,380.00. That’s a saving of over $1,000. But wait. There’s more. This is an exceptional opportunity for you to get the help you need at a price you can afford.
Taking good care of YOU should be your first priority in these turbulent times, so if money is your biggest barrier, I’m offering you three easy installments of $480 per month.
And to make it even easier for you to make this investment in you, I’m offering a 100 percent guarantee. If you have not received ANY value in our coaching sessions after the first month, I will happily refund your coaching fees. No questions asked.
Call me today at (212) 740 7085 or click on this website www.fearlessfifties.com/coaching.php to schedule your first appointment and kick-start your opportunities for expansion in 2009. Remember, you are only limited by what you think, NOT by what you have. Open up your thinking and you open up a world of tremendous possibilities. Don’t waste another day worrying about the future. Taking ACTION is the only way forward.
To Your Success,
Jacqueline
CEO/Founder, Fearless Fifties LLC
Author, The Fearless Factor: Thriving Beyond the Jungle of Life, and When The Crow Sings. International Speaker and Workshop Leader. (212) 740 7085
“Jacqueline is a tour de force in empowering women to face the challenges and opportunities of aging--gracefully, or not. It is only fear itself that we are afraid of, she reminds us. May she continue to break new ground for opening minds and sustaining bodies without fear, to enjoy the hell out of this last exhilarating ascent of our lives.” – Linda Weissinger Lupowitz, virtual staffing specialist, Connect2Pr
New York Solar Energy Society (NYSES)
Wyldon Fishman, a friend since forever, is a wife and mother who has been a leader in many worthwhile groups in the past, but in my opinion, she has hit her stride in this new solar-energy niche she has carved out. An enthusiastic cheerleader for things she believes in, she worked tirelessly, and mostly thanklessly, to establish a viable New York chapter of the American Solar Energy Society. After all the hurdles in her path got cleared in 2007, Wyldon initiated the New York Solar Energy Society (www.nyses.org), investing herself as founder, just as GREEN became the way to go in every aspect of energy and conservation. Now, no self-respecting striver (or any person who has the planet's best interests at heart) wants to be caught without green plans in her or his future.
Having done her homework, when the time came, Wyldon was ready to pounce. She quickly signed up new members, eighty-one at this counting, and forged ahead with plans to make solar energy the must-have get. To that ambitious, and highly desirable, end, she has already held several solar conferences, pulling in outside experts to help make the case. Logically, the first one was about financing energy upgrades to commercial buildings or homes; another dealt with solar matters in general, detailing its many advantages, and outlining how to find, finance, and build a solar system. NYSES visits schools regularly to teach students (and their teachers) about renewable energy and energy efficiency; and they have set up tables with their promos at six Earth Day events in 2008; plus, they have conducted well-received solar tours of energy-efficient structures in and around Kingston, NY.
Future plans include her chapter's participation in a national conference of the American Solar Energy Society to be held in Buffalo, NY in May 2009. NYSES will be providing a full day of public workshops, about thirty in all, to show attendees just what renewable energy is all about.
In the planning stages at this point, the Green Energy Home Living Expo is to be held April 4–5, 2009, at the Westchester County Center in White Plains, NY. Its primary purpose is to educate families and children on alternative energy and new, energy-efficient products. Wyldon and her co-planners want to cast a wide net on this, so if you have any products fitting this description that you'd like to exhibit and demonstrate (or if you just want to know more about solar energy in general), please contact Wyldon Fishman through the NYSES website www.nyses.org. You can also contact Randy, the Expo producer, at 1-917-656-2070 (word has it that he loves to talk about this upcoming show, so he'll be happy to chat with you). So far, the types of products signed up are—and everything here is preceded by the word green—clothing, home-cleaning products, windows... and that's just for starters. Do yourself a favor here: jump in and be a participant in a better future.
As I always say, I'm into solutions, not problems—to me a problem is just an opportunity for a solution—and it strikes me that Wyldon and her NYSES people are taking an opportunity and running with it. So run with them, you'll be glad you did.
.jpg)