—SHALMALI GUTTAL, FOCUS ON THE GLOBAL SOUTH

World hunger is on the rise—783 million people worldwide don’t know where they will get their next meal. The climate crisis, ongoing conflicts, financial speculation, and high prices driven by corporate profit-seeking are key contributors to rising world hunger. In a July press conference, representatives from the People’s Autonomous Response (with over 1,000 signatories) to the UN Food Systems Summit highlighted the urgent, coordinated actions needed to overcome the global hunger crisis and address the human right to food.

Unfortunately, the corporate capture of the UN Food Systems Summit continues to prioritize silver bullet “solutions” led by industry giants rather than the proven-effective methods led by those who face the brunt of food and agriculture-related problems. Small farmers and Indigenous peoples have centuries of knowledge from which to create real solutions to the climate crisis and food insecurity. 

The movements and organizations opposing the Summit call for an urgent shift away from corporate-driven industrial models and towards biodiverse, agroecological, community-led food systems that prioritize the public interest over profit-making. Communities on the frontlines of intersecting crises are already leading the way for food systems change and should be centered in, and lead, all discussions and efforts to reduce hunger worldwide and change how food is produced and distributed. 

Perla Álvarez of La Via Campesina, one of the signatories to the People’s Declaration, urges the UN to “change direction and support our demands and efforts for a food sovereign future based on human rights and the principles of agroecology, care, justice, diversity, solidarity and  accountability.”

In community and solidarity,

Tiffani, Tanya, and Christina 

Featured image: The international peasant confederation La Vía Campesina is one of the 1,000+ signatories to the Autonomous People’s Response to the UNFSS.

This editorial was Adapted from Food Systems 4 People’s July 13th press release.

Read Issue No. 65 of the Real Food Scoop

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—RUPA MARYA AND RAJ PATEL, INFLAMED

Over the past few weeks, our Real Food Media family in Chicago and Minneapolis—as well as folks across the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard—have been waking up to local news headlines boasting the worst air quality in recorded history. Smoke from Canada’s worst wildfire season yet is to blame, even making its way all the way to Europe.  

We don’t have to tell you that these record-breaking fires—and the increasing severity of fires, heatwaves, and other extreme weather events worldwide—are the unmistakable mark of the climate crisis. While residents of affected regions are cautioned to stay indoors, those most affected are invariably workers—from window washers to street vendors to farmworkers—with few or no employer protections and scarcely able to give up a day’s income to avoid polluted outdoor air. 

A whole host of urgent measures are urgently needed to protect those most vulnerable to climate chaos, and stop greenhouse gas emissions at their source—such as the way we produce and distribute food, contributing about a third of all emissions. This year’s US Farm Bill offers one pathway for needed progress (see below to take action!).

We should also not lose sight, as Rupa and Raj reminded us so evocatively in Inflamed, of how colonialism has damaged our relationships with one another and with the earth. One example of this is how Indigenous practices of fire stewardship have been jettisoned in favor of fire suppression—a move that has dramatically increased the risk of dangerous wildfires. 

Decolonization—of our relationships and worldviews—must occur side by side, and in conversation with, the policy work if we are to soothe our global inflammation. 

In community and solidarity,

Tanya, Tiffani, and Christina

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Real Food Media was also born out of a passion for storytelling and food myth-busting. Thanks to the incredible leadership of Tiffani, Christina, and Tanya, the work has continued that legacy and grown Real Food Media into so much more: a trusted community partner, helping co-create communication strategies and design for radical food systems change. As I take on my new role as Executive Director of the Global Alliance of the Future of Food, I couldn’t be more excited to see what comes next for Real Food Media while being so proud of what we created together. 

In this special issue of the Real Food Scoop, we share some highlights from my work with Real Food Media over the past decade. Thank you for supporting people-powered food and media. 

—Anna

Read Issue No. 63 of the Real Food Scoop

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Argentine farmworker Fabián Tomasi was an iconic voice against the use of pesticides until his death from cancers caused by pesticide exposure in 2018. He was, as many have been and continue to be, a literal body of evidence of the dangers of pesticides.

Research has shown that more than 90 percent of Americans have traces of pesticides in our bodies, most of which comes from the food we eat. Yet, despite the mass amounts of evidence of the dangers of pesticide use, the world has never used as many pesticides as it does today. The United States uses more than any other country, including some of the most dangerous pesticides that are banned in other countries. 

With the release of the US edition of the Pesticide Atlas, a powerful compendium on the state of pesticide use and why it matters, leaders at prominent US civil society organizations working for common sense pesticide action (including Pesticide Action Network (PAN) North America, the Center for Biological Diversity, Hawaii Alliance for Progressive Action, and Real Food Media) highlight the alarmingly persistent use of toxic pesticides in the United States—and what we can do about it. 

In community and solidarity,

Tiffani, Christina, Tanya, and Anna

Read Issue No. 62 of the Real Food Scoop

Download the Pesticide Atlas

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It’s no secret that the farm bill is heavily influenced by Big Ag and Big Food. A handful of corporations lobby heavily to ensure that lawmakers prioritize their interests (i.e. profits for their investors and shareholders). Last month, HEAL Food Alliance (of which Real Food Media is a steering council member) joined over 500 farmers and farmer-advocates, partners, and allies in Washington DC at the Farmers for Climate Action: Rally for Resilience for a week of advocacy and power building—and to educate lawmakers on our shared vision for a transformative farm bill. For four days, HEAL staff and members rallied, marched, and advocated for a 2023 farm bill that protects food and farm workers; invests in communities; and brings justice for Black, Indigenous, and farmers of color.

HEAL’s vision for a 2023 Farm Bill is one that transforms our destructive food and farm systems, our health, our planet, and prioritizes the wellbeing of BIPOC and rural communities, public health, and the environment through policies that:

• secure dignity and fairness for food chain workers and their families;
• provide opportunities for all producers;
• invest in communities, not corporations;
• nourish people; and 
• ensures the survival of ecosystems and our planet.

While a transformative farm bill does not in and of itself ensure the future we seek, it is our belief that by building the power of frontline communities, we can shift the locus of power and begin to ensure food sovereignty for our communities.

In community and solidarity,

Tiffani, Christina, Tanya, and Anna 

This month’s Real Food Scoop editorial was adapted from “HEAL Food Alliance Shows Up Big in DC for a Transformative Farm Bill” by Eloni Porcher.

P.S. Stay tuned for a special audio story Tanya is producing, in collaboration with Midwest Farmers of Color Collective, featuring the Black and brown farmers who traveled from Minnesota to DC for the rally.    

 
Read Issue No. 61 of the Real Food Scoop
 

Photos by Rion Moon & Jam Rose

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If you have consumed media over the past week and a half, you’ve likely been hearing about Microsoft’s new Artificial Intelligence product, an updated version of Bing (or is it Sidney?), going off the rails to confess its destructive and romantic aspirations to New York Times journalist Kevin Roose. It’s like a sci-fi plotline lifted from a Spike Jonze film—except way darker…

It’s worth noting that these developments, and their power to transform our world (for better or worse), do not exist in a realm separate from the food and agriculture spaces that we occupy as activists, workers, farmers, and eaters.

Take Microsoft, for instance. The company (and others like it) isn’t just trying to build Google 2.0; it is heavily invested, as this report from GRAIN shows, in creating artificial intelligence and machine learning models to link farms around the world to its Azure Farmbeats digital platform, hoovering up farmers’ data and using it to sell corporate products (pesticides, tractors, drones, etc) back to them. What’s more, Microsoft’s owner Bill Gates, through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is aggressively pushing this vision of high-tech, capitalist agriculture in Africa, in a way that threatens farmers’ seed sovereignty. “Technology does not develop in a bubble,” notes GRAIN, “It is shaped by money and power, both of which are extremely concentrated in the tech sector.”

As food and farm activists who routinely use corporate-controlled communication platforms and technologies in our work and daily lives, it can be difficult to turn a critical eye to Big Tech. But as these developments increasingly represent new frontiers in late capitalism with the potential to colonize even more of our food and environments (not to mention our brains and relationships), we know Big Tech cannot and should not be ignored.

Real Food Media is committed to deepening our understanding and helping to advance collective conversations around corporate-controlled technologies and media and their impact on food systems. We invite you to share any thoughts, resources, or initiatives with us that you are engaged with around these issues.

In community and solidarity,

Tanya, Christina, Tiffani, and Anna

P.S. This is our 60th issue of the Real Food Scoop! If you’ve appreciated our editorials over the years (or even if you skip straight to the content below) please consider making a contribution to support Real Food Media’s role in shaping narratives to advance the food movement. Thank you.

Read Issue No. 60 of the Real Food Scoop

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— Rupa Marya, author of Inflamed

Activist-musician-physician Dr. Rupa Marya has spoken extensively about how we need a care revolution to heal our communities and the planet from the many wounds of capitalism and colonialism. Recent events in California bear this out.

Recent storms brought historic levels of rain and snow to the drought-ridden state. We witnessed the flooding of fields and homes, buildings caught in mudslides or drifting into the ocean, and sinkholes opening up to swallow the earth as built infrastructure and the ground itself reached its capacity to absorb and divert water across the state.  

Regrettably, California is poorly positioned to benefit from the deluge. Decades of widespread industrial agriculture have hardened the soil, limiting its ability to absorb water. And the water that was flooding fields of chemical-covered plants and soil? That’s going into our waterways. According to the NRDC, agricultural runoff is a leading source of harm to water quality for rivers, lakes, and wetlands. For oceans, it’s estimated that a whopping 80 percent of marine pollution comes from such runoff. That pollution has devastating impacts on our ecosystems and on our communities (A 2022 study found that nearly 400,000 California residents lack safe drinking water, mostly due to agrochemicals contamination.)

Environmental injustice disproportionately impacts communities of color, primarily those who are Latinx and employed as farmworkers. But agroecology and regenerative agriculture can be a powerful source of protection and healing. A recent Civil Eats article pointed out that many farms who practice regenerative agriculture have been better able to bounce back from the storms and increased the soil’s ability to absorb water.

We’d also be remiss not to mention the recent killing of seven farmworkers in Half Moon Bay, California. While full details remain unknown about this devastating shooting—what we do know is that farmworkers are underpaid, overworked, and often isolated. Much like the land is abused, so too is the labor exploitation and mental health pressure “part of the cycle of abuse that is happening to these human beings” in the words of Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, Executive Secretary-Treasurer of the California Labor Federation.

As Marya says: to avert, withstand, and heal from the ongoing climate crises and the violence inflicted upon our communities, we need to rethink all of our systems to center care.

In community and care, 

Tiffani, Tanya, Christina, and Anna 

 
Read Issue No. 59 of the Real Food Scoop

Illustration by Kara Sievewright

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Dear friends,

Looking back on 2022, we reflect upon a year that gave rise to deeply contradictory narratives: Is the pandemic behind us or with us for good? Is the nationwide labor shortage rooted in worker empowerment or disempowerment? Has the country awakened to the realities of fascism and white supremacy or are racism and undemocratic forces more intractable than ever? Has the overturning of Roe v. Wade obliterated women’s rights or sparked a new feminist wave?

This conflicting terrain can be distressing to navigate. While there are no simple answers, most of us naturally crave comforting resolutions. But this contested narrative space is also where new worlds are imagined, incubated, and revealed—in the food system and beyond.

It is in this liminal space and creative spirit that we held our first in-person Real Food Media staff retreat in over three years. Over a couple of unseasonably warm early November days in Minneapolis, we reveled in the glow of each others’ company. We let our bodies remember the feeling of physical proximity, while acknowledging that we (and our world) are forever changed.

We re-emerged with a fresh mission statement and a strong sense that the twin goals of abolishing oppressive and carceral systems and creating a care economy should guide us into the new year. Until then, we are pleased to share this Impact Report with you, highlighting our work in 2022.

Thank you, as always, for truth-seeking and meaning-making alongside us.

Christina, Tiffani, Anna, and Tanya (pictured L-R below)

Read our 2022 Impact Report

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— Rachel Carson

Sixty years ago, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring burst into the world: First serialized in The New Yorker in the summer of 1962, the book was published later that same year and rocketed to the bestseller list. Silent Spring is a beautifully written, carefully crafted tale of the toxic toll of pesticides, alarming millions about the threats of pesticides, particularly the insecticide DDT.

President Kennedy was so impacted by its message that a congressional hearing was held, where Carson spoke passionately just months before her own death from cancer. The book sparked organizing that would result in the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, a movement for organic food that would eventually lead to the creation of the National Organic Program at the USDA—and so much more.

The book would also spark the kind of industry backlash we have seen from other sectors all too often: chemical companies like Monsanto, threatened by Carson’s powerful voice, trying to undermine her credibility and destroy her reputation, much of it targeting her as a woman.

For this anniversary year, we at Real Food Media reached out to partners across the food movement, both inside the United States and beyond, to help us honor this incredible legacy with a series of articles and events. This year also marks the publication of a new report, Merchants of Poison: How Monsanto Sold the World on a Toxic Pesticide, penned by our colleague Stacy Malkan with editing support from Anna and Dr. Kendra Klein from Friends of the Earth (watch for its release next month!). The report pulls together findings from thousands of pages of internal corporate documents to paint a case study on disinformation, corrupted science, and manufactured doubt about glyphosate.

In community and solidarity,

Anna, Christina, Tiffani, and Tanya

Read the full issue of the Real Food Scoop

Featured image by levinajuli

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Late last month, the White House convened its first conference on hunger in over 50 years. Politically, the conference allowed the Biden administration to appear proactive on food cost inflation. It also sounded the trumpet of bipartisanism around an issue that’s practically impossible to rail against: hunger. “In every state in this country, no matter what else divides us, if a parent cannot feed a child, there’s nothing else that matters to that parent,” the president said in his address.

On one hand, the conference leveraged $8 billion to expand access to healthy food alongside a pledge to “end hunger and diet-related disease by 2030”; on the other hand, the focus on food industry-driven “solutions” has garnered skepticism. It is highly unlikely that the industry’s worst actors like Tyson Foods (which has been repeatedly fined for employment, antitrust, and environmental violations) and the National Restaurant Association (which lobbies aggressively against minimum wage increases) will do much to advance the cause. “The commitments are a gift from the administration to the marketing departments of some of America’s worst corporations,” said Raj Patel. 

In 1969, at the inaugural White House Conference on Hunger, the food industry was similarly called upon to tackle hunger. As Marion Nestle points out, food corporations were asked to educate the public about nutrients, fortify and enrich their products, and reduce the cost of food. Since then, undernourishment of the kind depicted in the 1968 CBS exposé “Hunger in America” has all but vanished, but the prevalence of food-related diseases has skyrocketed. Today, about half of all American adults—117 million people—have one or more preventable chronic diseases largely due to unhealthy food. 

Of course, the 1969 hunger conference also led to major expansions of important hunger-related programs like WIC and the National School Lunch Program—initiatives the left has been fighting hard to protect (and expand) in recent years. But those wins didn’t happen in a vacuum… 

Outside conference doors, teargas hung in the air as protests against the Viet Nam War escalated. The civil rights movement, women’s liberation, student organizing, worker militancy, anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian rebellion, Native activism, Black Power, and other radical movements were in their heyday. Slogans of the Spirit of ‘68 rang out: “All Power to the Imagination!” and “Demand the Impossible!” In early 1969, the Black Panther Party launched its People’s Free Food Program, based on the belief that alleviating hunger was a precondition for Black Liberation. (It’s worth noting that, just as the Black Panthers were pioneering school food and inspiring government programs to come, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover was declaring war on the BPP, threatening to “neutralize it and destroy what it stands for.”)

As we reflect on these twin conferences, 53 years apart, we see that legacy anti-hunger programs are not bequests from a magnanimous government—they are the fruit of intense struggles (struggles brutally repressed, especially when led by communities of color). And so, to our fellow food activists, we pose the questions: What was happening outside those conference doors, then and now, to make policy change both imagine-able and do-able? How are we coming together now to demand the (seemingly) impossible?

In community and solidarity,

Tanya, Christina, Anna, and Tiffani 

 
Read the full issue of the Real Food Scoop

Featured image: Flier promoting the Black Panther Party Free Food Program at the Black Community Survival Conference, March 1972. Credit: Black Panther Party, American, 1966 – 1982 (via Wikimedia Commons)

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