The New York Times Retro Report—a series I’ve always loved—pays tribute to my mother’s influence on the plant-based meat alternatives taking off today. I appear late in the nearly 14-minute video, emphasizing that the core message of my mother’s seminal 1971 book, Diet for a Small Planet, wasn’t actually about food, per se, it was about democracy—about who has the power to decide how land is used, what food is grown, how animals are raised. I try to stress what my mother has always been interested in not what she would love our plates to look like, but what our world should look like. Nearly fifty years ago, my mom was trying to expose the political and economic forces driving the industrial agriculture revolution that spawned the highly inefficient, inhumane, environmentally disastrous system of factory farming. In other words, her message was a much more nuanced story than meat vs. no-meat. With these new products in the marketplace, I think this message is as important as ever: We should remember that what we’re fighting for is real food, produced in a way that’s good for the planet and good for the people raising it—whether it’s from the plant kingdom, or not. I’m glad we got some of that story into this segment—along with a nice shot of my garden office.

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Twenty years ago, I was just one of the tens of thousands of people who descended onto the streets of Seattle in the first major global political action challenging the trade regime calcified in the World Trade Organization. Those days in the streets and in the teach-ins organized by the International Forum on Globalization were one of the defining political experiences of my life. The images of those tear gassed streets with farmers and ranchers, environmentalists, and labor leaders marching together had reverberations around the world.

As my friend and colleague John Peck of Family Farm Defenders put it in his reflection piece about this historic event: In the wake of the demonstrations the global peasant movement, La Via Campesina celebrated that the action in those streets helped to globalize the struggle and globalize our hopes. John went on to say that thanks to that organizing, the concept of food sovereignty was “popularized among grassroots activists” and has come to “radically transform” our debates about food and farming.

I shared the story of the demonstrations in Seattle—what it meant for me personally and what it mean to farmers around the world—in my TEDxBerkeley talk on the “Empathy of Food.”

Featured image: 1999 Dang Ngo/ZUMA Press via Common Dreams

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SAN FRANCISCO — 27 years ago, Roy Steiner was a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation, where he now serves as senior vice president of the food initiative.

He had just finished graduate school, and was tasked with cataloging and analyzing 300 agricultural experiments, as part of an effort to create “a more robust definition of sustainable agriculture.”

Now, Steiner is behind the Food System Vision Prize, which asks organizations from around the world to offer their visions for food systems that will deliver sustainable and nourishing diets in their local area.

“We’ve been so focused on yields, and profitable yields, and so we’ve optimized a food system that delivers very inexpensive calories, but we have not optimized it for environmental sustainability, health, and the flourishing of communities,” he told Devex.

“Who is deciding what products are being marketed to mothers and to children? What regulations are in place in our agricultural systems? What kind of food systems are being incentivized?”— Anna Lappé, food and democracy program director, Panta Rhea Foundation

While the prize will distribute $2 million among the winners, the real impact will come from supporting dialogue at a local and global level, Steiner said. He said he hopes to see the ideas that result from the Food System Vision Prize take the stage at the Food Systems Summit that United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said he plans to convene in 2021. The prize is one example of the role philanthropy can play in building the food system of the future, by supporting promising ideas that can scale.

Transforming the current system

In January, the EAT-Lancet report outlined the links between diet, human health, and environmental sustainability. The findings led to further questions about implementation to achieve such an optimal food system, according to Petra Hans, who leads the agricultural livelihoods program at the IKEA Foundation.

“The report gave strategies that described what needs to be done to transform the current system into a healthy and sustainable food system, but the big question is still how to do this,” Hans said.

The EAT-Lancet Diet is unaffordable, but who is to blame? While new criticism of the EAT-Lancet diet focused on its lack of affordability for 1.2 billion of the world’s poorest, researchers say that food and economic systems are to blame, not the diet.

The Food System Vision Prize will engage stakeholders around the world to start thinking about how, she said.

At the Social Capital Markets, or SOCAP, conference in San Francisco in October, Steiner joined Sara Farley, managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s food initiative, to announce the prize, with winners to be announced on Sept. 13, 2020.

Farley emphasized the importance of a systems-focused approach: “We look at very isolated parts of the challenge and the solution set and we miss the mess — the interconnections between technology, policy, culture, and environment,” she said.

To build a network between applicants, and inform their own future plans as a funder, the Rockefeller Foundation is partnering with SecondMuse and OpenIDEO, two organizations with experience organizing innovation challenges, on the Food System Vision Prize.

“Everybody talks about participatory development, and too often that’s just rhetoric,” Steiner told Devex. “But it’s hard for groups to say, ‘This is what we really want.’ This is potentially a process by which they’ll be able to communicate their vision in a much more systematic, clear way so that funders can tap into that and say, ‘yep, this aligns with what we’re trying to do.’”

The Rockefeller Foundation also plans to pair winners with storytellers, ranging from visual artists to data scientists to science fiction writers, in order to bring those visions to life and help society to envision a better future.

‘A crisis of democracy’

The most recent U.N. global assessment of childhood nutrition found that 1 in 3 children are undernourished or overweight.

“It’s never been a crisis of productivity,” said Anna Lappé, program director for the food and democracy at the Panta Rhea Foundation, noting that the world produces more than enough calories for everyone each day. “It has been a crisis of democracy.”

Speaking on a panel at SOCAP, she asked: “Who is deciding what products are being marketed to mothers and to children? What regulations are in place in our agricultural systems? What kind of food systems are being incentivized?”

The solution has to do with more people, ranging from indigenous communities to farmers, having a seat at the table to ask questions like these and offer answers, she said.

“When I look at what are some of the most innovative technologies that have the greatest benefits to reducing biodiversity loss, averting the climate crisis, really building healthy food systems, those technological innovations have come out of having all of those people in the room,” Lappé said.

Philanthropic dollars play an important role in testing new ideas, which can then be scaled up along with policies that support them, she said.

All hands on deck

At the IKEA Foundation, the goal is to transform linear, extractive, and exploitative agrifood systems to become inclusive, regenerative, and circular, Hans said.

“We need all hands on deck,” she explained, calling the Food Vision Prize an example of an effort that can mobilize people into thinking and action.

While philanthropy can invest in these ideas at the early stage, official development assistance and private sector capital can support their scale.

Bonnie Glick, deputy administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, announced the $35 million Water and Energy for Food Challenge, at SOCAP.

“Part of what this is about is additionality, not replacing where traditional investors will come in, but have us as the ones willing to take that first loss,” she told Devex.

The partnership between USAID, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, and the Netherlands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs will invest in small enterprises that work at the nexus of food, water, and energy, and aims to mobilize $25 million in private investment capital.

While food systems have posed major problems for people and planet, from burgeoning health care costs to greenhouse gas emissions, they can become part of the solution for climate change and global health, Rockefeller’s Steiner said.

“We can sequester carbon in a way no other sector can, we can dramatically reduce health costs using diet, and the other point I like to make is food brings people together,” he said. “We’re living I such a polarized time: How do we use food systems as a way to connect people with different points of view?”

Steiner said he hopes one of the impacts of the Food System Vision Prize will be to ensure that food systems are a source of community flourishing rather than community disintegration.

Originally published by Devex. Header photo by: Aris Sanjaya/CIFOR/CC BY-NC-ND

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For hundreds of years, the people of Mals have cherished their traditional foodways. Yet the town is located high up in the Alps, and pesticide-dependent conventional apple producers were steadily overtaking the valley below. Aided by climate change, Big Apple crept further up the region’s increasingly warmer mountainsides, its toxic sprays drifting with the valley’s ever-present winds and falling on the farms, fields, and people of Mals. The advancing threats motivated a diverse cast of characters to take action in a display of direct democracy that has inspired a movement now coursing its way through Europe, Asia, the United States, and beyond.

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Fisher lays out a vision that encompasses a broader definition of hunger characterized by a focus on public health, economic justice, and economic democracy. He points to the work of numerous grassroots organizations that are leading the way in these fields as models for the rest of the anti-hunger sector. It is only through approaches like these that we can hope to end hunger, not just manage it.

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by Anna Lappé

Nearly two decades ago, I stood on a train platform in the city of Bhatinda in the north Indian state of Punjab at sunrise. Flies buzzed. Young men dozed nearby with legs curled up for warmth. Next to me stood Afsar Jafri, an organic farming advocate who had been with us for days, taking my mother and me on a tour of nearby farmlands devastated by decades of chemical agriculture and communities thrown into crippling debt as a result. It had been a bleak journey. Yet, there in that train station, as the sun rose, I couldn’t help but notice our guide wasn’t exuding hopelessness. In fact, quite the opposite.

Curious, we asked how – in light of all we had seen and all he and his colleagues were up against – he seemed so hopeful. Jafri answered with a clarity that surprised me at first: His source of hope, he explained, came from being engaged, from working every day to change the fate of all those farmers we had met, and the many more beyond them. Action itself, he said, was his wellspring of hope, not any sure promise that the dire conditions we witnessed would lift anytime soon.

Until that moment, I had thought of hope as an emotion for the naïve, for people either too closed-minded to see how bad things were or too flip to realize the gravity of it all. I thought that to absorb reality – a warming planet, billions going hungry, endless war, persistent bigotry – meant tossing hope out the window.

I see hope differently now – and that morning in India was a turning point. Hope is not derived from a calculation: Are things bad, and getting worse? Or good and getting better? Hope arises from action.

But hope isn’t synonymous with optimism. Optimism, or pessimism for that matter, comes from a sort of hubris that you know how things will turn out – for better or worse. Hope, instead, grows from knowing the future has yet to be been written, and hope emerges from doing our part to write it.

At this moment, facing an administration whose leaders have trumpeted racism and xenophobia and denied climate change, and who have attacked immigrants and Muslims along with women and people with disabilities, I must say, this seems a particularly hopeful take on hope. But it’s also a radical one. As the author and activist Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark: “Your opponents would love you to believe that it’s hopeless, that you have no power, that there’s no reason to act, that you can’t win. Hope is a gift you don’t have to surrender, a power you don’t have to throw away.”

And consider Howard Zinn’s wisdom: “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic,” wrote Zinn in his autobiography You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. “It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness…. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

Let us then be victorious together.

Originally published in Earth Island Journal

Photo by Mandias, Richard Ha

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by Anna Lappé

An estimated 27,500 people in Los Angeles, 20,000 in Seattle, and 18,500 in the Bronx: Bernie Sanders is sparking some of the biggest crowds in primary history. For millions across the country, his message is clearly resonating. It’s refreshing to hear someone running for the country’s highest office finally articulate (without any prodding!) core progressive policies: from taking on Wall Street to reforming campaign finance to making college affordable—the list goes on. So it stunned many progressives to hear Sanders attack Philadelphia’s plan to tax sugary drinks; he called soda taxes regressive and came out swinging.

Like health advocates across the country, I think Sanders got it wrong: These taxes in fact reflect the progressive values he holds dear.

It’s the very communities Sanders says he’s trying to protect that have been at the beating heart of campaigns for soda taxes.

As a resident of Berkeley, California, the first city in the United States that has passed a tax of this kind, and as someone who has been working to sound the alarm on the epidemic of diet-related illnesses for years, I have had a ringside seat at the battle against Big Soda. And I think that if Sanders had firsthand knowledge of the fight, he too might be moved to see these taxes differently.

Sanders claims soda taxes will “disproportionately affect low-income and middle-class Americans.” But here in Berkeley, as with other places soda taxes are being proposed, it’s the very communities Sanders says he’s trying to protect that have been at the beating heart of the campaigns.

When Berkeley took on the soda tax, the campaign connected people from all walks of life. The NAACP, Latinos Unidos, the entire school board, every single city council member, and dozens of other groups were all united in their support. Across race, class, and age, the community came together against a deluge of Big Soda money to defend a strategy to help take on one of the biggest public health crises of our time.

Supporters of these taxes understand they are “regressive” only in the most simplistic sense. As with any tax that could lead to higher prices to consumers, from cigarettes to carbon, one could allege they make the poor pay disproportionately more. In Philadelphia, the 3 cent per fluid ounce excise tax on sugary drinks levied on distributors could raise a $0.99 12-ounce Coke to $1.35 if the tax were passed on entirely to consumers. For a $7.25 hourly minimum-wage worker, that price hike would therefore be a bigger relative burden than for, say, the CEO of Coca-Cola who made roughly $7,000 an hour last year.

Philly’s soda tax could prevent 2,280 new cases of diabetes and 36,000 new cases of obesity every year.

But it’s wrong to leap from that simplistic calculation to call these taxes an encumbrance on the poor. It’s not like this tax is for something people have to buy—a tax, for instance, on water or fruits and vegetables. No one needs Coca-Cola to survive and, in fact, drinking soda is a key driver of serious illness. Indeed, a study of the effect of a soda tax in Philly found that the potential price increase could reduce soda consumption, preventing 2,280 new cases of diabetes and 36,000 new cases of obesity every year. Over the course of a decade, the levy could save the city $200 million in averted health care costs. That’s yuge! as Sanders would say.

Progressives have long understood that one of the ways to take on predatory industries whose products hurt the most vulnerable among us is through consumption taxes—something Sanders understands when he speaks in favor of taxing cigarettes.

So maybe Sanders just isn’t hip to the evidence about the harm caused by sugary drinks. And I get it: Many still don’t perceive soda as being as troubling as tobacco. But the science is in. Long-term, peer-reviewed studies have clearly demonstrated the links between sugary drinks and a wide range of illnesses, from diabetes to heart and liver disease to weight gain—not to mention the damage to dental health. Drinking just one or two sugary drinks a day can increase the chances of developing Type 2 diabetes by 26 percent. And reducing soda consumption is increasingly seen as the best first step to halting weight gain. (I experienced this myself when I cut out sugar-sweetened beverages as a cash-strapped grad student. No longer able to afford my habit of multiple Snapple drinks a day, I went cold turkey and dropped 15 pounds. Save for my two pregnancies, I have never gained them back.)

We also know the burden of these diet-related diseases is not evenly experienced by race and class—and that’s putting it mildly. I bet the CEO of Coca-Cola doesn’t live in a community where 1 in 2 residents either have diabetes or are on the way to being diagnosed with it, as is the case in many low-income communities nationwide. Consider this shocking fact: According to the American Diabetes Association, African Americans and Latinos are 70 percent more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than their white peers. In other words, the potential benefits of these taxes will be greater for the communities whose health has been most undermined by soda.

The potential benefits of these taxes will be greater for the communities whose health has been most undermined by soda.

The most powerful moments of the Berkeley versus Big Soda campaign were hearing community members describe their direct experience with the costs of diabetes: from forfeited wages because of days spent caring for parents or kids to lifelong health problems including heart disease, comas, infertility, vision loss, insulin replacement, even amputations. (Yes, amputations.) At least 73,000 lower-limb amputations were performed nationwide in 2010 on people with diagnosed diabetes. The economic toll of this rising epidemic cannot be stressed enough.

These taxes are beneficial—and reflect progressive values—in another way: Revenues reaped can disproportionately benefit a community’s most at-risk residents. Here in Berkeley, our tax on distributors (one penny per fluid ounce) is on track to bring in $1.5 million annually, which will be used to support health education and diabetes prevention. In Philly, the mayor would use the revenue to fund universal pre-K.

The other charge Sanders makes against these taxes is that they are job killers, leading to “the loss of thousands of good-paying jobs.” There is no evidence this would be the case. Here in Berkeley, where the soda tax was implemented March 1, 2015, there’s been no indication of jobs lost.

It’s perplexing to me that Sanders would embrace an anti-soda-tax stance. His particular volleys—”It’s a jobs’ killer!” “It’s regressive”—are straight from the pages of the beverage industry’s PR playbook. And they echo tobacco industry misinformation that came before them. When cigarette taxes were first proposed, the industry cried foul, too, claiming the poorest people would be most burdened by rising costs, that jobs would be lost. Instead, we’ve seen one of the most positive public health success stories of a generation as smoking rates have plummeted.

Sanders argues that instead of soda taxes we should tax corporations more. Today’s effective corporate tax rate, he notes, is just 22.8 percent, down from 31.7 during the Reagan years and resulting in the loss of an estimated $166 billion every year. What progressive would disagree with Sanders here? But I’m not sure why Sanders presents these positions as either/or. Soda taxes are just one tool in progressive toolbox to take on corporate power and address the devastating epidemic of diet-related illnesses.

The soda industry’s trade group has spent an estimated $64.6 million since 2009 fighting soda taxes.

And what a tool they can be. The soda industry knows this. That’s why its trade group, the American Beverage Association, has spent an estimated $64.6 million since 2009 fighting soda taxes, according to analysis from the Center for Science in the Public Interest. (That doesn’t even include this year’s lobbying spend in California’s capital to fight a proposed statewide tax and more going to undermine fledgling efforts in Oakland, California, Philadelphia, and beyond). In Berkeley, a city of 116,000 people, the trade group spent $2.4 million in an onslaught of negative ads, misinformation, and paid supporters. Big Soda even got in-kind donations from Landmark Theaters to play anti-tax ads before movies in local theaters.

Despite this big spend and thanks to an incredible community effort—the kind of people power I would have thought Sanders would love—we won, and we won big. (Even San Francisco—where the industry outspent the community 31 to 1, shelling out $9.2 million to oppose the tax—55.6 percent of voters supported it, with the vote only failing because it fell short of the two-thirds needed there.)

I wonder whether things would be different if Sanders had been at the Berkeley versus Big Soda headquarters on election night. There, under the bare bulbs of a cavernous room on the main strip of downtown Berkeley, hundreds stood shoulder to shoulder watching as the election results rolled in—and cheering and hugging as the number of precincts crept up.

We stood, a community united, listening to what this campaign had meant to the people at the heart of it: A pediatric dentist recounted how the campaign had transformed her despair at the deterioration of dental health into determined action. A young Latino organizer whose aunt had been hospitalized that very evening from complications from diabetes, shared that the effort had given him a tangible way to use his agony about the illness ravishing his family to make a difference. An African American reverend shared how the grief of losing his 29-year-old son to diabetes propelled him to work tirelessly for the campaign; no other father should lose a son to this disease, he said.

If Sanders had been at the Berkeley soda tax HQ on election night, listening to these voices and more like them, I wonder if he, too, would have been brought to tears—and, whether he, too, would have joined in the thunderous applause as the final results came in. Despite Big Soda’s big spending, the people had triumphed. The final tally: 76.2 percent in favor of the tax.

Just like the city had done in setting policy precedent by being the first to voluntarily desegregate its schools, and to provide curbside recycling, to create curb-cuts for wheelchair accessibility, now Berkeley had passed the first tax on sugary drinks in the United States. There will be more.

Communities across the country are taking up similar taxes, from Philadelphia to Boulder, Colorado, to Oakland. In response, Big Soda will redouble its efforts to confuse the public, distort the science and undermine the credibility of advocates—and they’ll undoubtedly take on the dual mantras Sanders echoed. They have nearly bottomless pockets to do so. (Coca-Cola alone spent $3.5 billion in marketing in 2014.) But Berkeley has shown that strong coalitions can take on even the world’s largest corporate behemoths. It’s a David versus Goliath battle that any progressive should love.

Originally published in Mother Jones

Photo by Miranda Pederson/Daily News via AP

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by Anna Lappé

At Tuesday night’s Berkeley vs. Big Soda victory party in the heart of downtown, the results rolled in slowly, but spirits were high. Early returns around 8:00 p.m., with only 8 percent of precincts reporting, showed the people beating Big Soda by a huge margin. The margin held.

The massive industry campaign to defeat the tax works out to $409 for each vote industry got in its favor. This was a big fail for Big Soda — and an expensive one.

The final tally had the Yes on D campaign winning with 75 percent of the vote, but not for Big Soda’s lack of trying. According to the most recent data available, Big Soda had poured $2.3 million into its fight against this simple and modest tax of one cent per fluid ounce of sugar-sweetened beverages, a proposal that was supported by every single elected official in the city. The massive industry campaign to defeat the tax works out to $409 for each vote industry got in its favor. This was a big fail for Big Soda — and an expensive one.

By last week, the soda industry was starting to unveil its new spin on the impending loss: Berkeley is weird. A win here, Big Soda would like us to believe, is an aberration. With the win locked in, the industry is pushing hard on the “wacky Berkeley” meme. It’s doing so because the other lesson from this resounding vote is that it’s a game changer — a signal of the beginning of a seismic shift in how we treat soda and sugary drinks in this country. That lesson is a huge threat to Big Soda. So the drumbeat of Berkeley weird will continue. After the results were announced, Roger Salazar, a representative from the industry’s campaign told the Associated Press, “Berkeley is very eclectic;” he told the San Jose Mercury News that Berkeley “doesn’t look like mainstream America.”

But Salazar wasn’t at Berkeley vs. Big Soda HQ on Tuesday night. Had he been, he would have seen just how wrong he was.

He would have seen the face of soda tax supporters: young and old, African-American, Latino, immigrant — people from all social and economic classes. He would have heard from people like Kad Smith, a recent Berkeley High School graduate, a staffer at the non-profit Ecology Center and a key force in the campaign. And from Lolis Ramirez, a trained organizer with a background in nutrition, who was the powerful campaign field director. And Josh Daniels, a key player in the coalition for the tax and a member of the city’s School Board. And Joy Moore, a long-time public health advocate, and one of the original members of the soda tax coalition. He would have seen the gathered crowd of supporters. He would have seen that the face of Berkeley vs. Big Soda is the face of mainstream America.

Whether the soda industry wants to admit it or not, the public health crisis associated with the overconsumption of sugary drinks, including skyrocketing diabetes is mainstream: One in three children born today is now predicted to develop diabetes at some point in their lifetime; the figure jumps to one in two for African-American and Latino children. Sugary drinks are key culprits in this crisis, the single largest source of added sugars in our diet with no nutritional benefit.

What Salazar would have heard last night is what it means for these statistics to touch down in our communities and in our lives. He would have heard Reverend Marvis Peoples share why he’s passionate about this work. “My son,” Peoples said, “died from diabetes.” He would have heard Dante Kaleo, who at 21 is one the many young people who campaigned for the tax, tell the crowd: “In 2011, my grandmother died of diabetes. Tonight, my aunt is in the hospital because of complications for diabetes.” He would have heard Eric Gorovitz, a lawyer, father of two, and volunteer with the campaign, say: “Three years ago, I was diagnosed with diabetes. This is personal.”

What Salazar would have learned is what everyone sensed Tuesday night: What happens in Berkeley won’t stay in Berkeley. Berkeley may be weird, at times, but it’s also a bellwether. It was the first city in the nation to voluntarily desegregate its schools, to provide curbside recycling, and to create curb-cuts for wheelchair accessibility. Now, it’s the first US city to pass a tax on sugary drinks. This win, like those that came before it, will spread across the country. As Joy Moore told me on Tuesday: “The conversation has changed. There’s no going back.”

Originally published in  Earth Island Journal

Photo by Robert Galbraith/Reuters via NPR

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