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

The post Hope’s Edge appeared first on Real Food Media.

When you picture school lunch what comes to mind? Gooey pizza and floppy French fries, or fresh organic produce and chicken raised without routine antibiotics? My guess is the former. But thanks to advocates around the country, someday it may just be the latter.

Every year the National School Lunch Program spends almost $13 billion to feed over 30 million children. For years, school leaders and community activists have been working to improve the food purchased with those public dollars. Now advocates have a new tool to help achieve just such a lofty goal: It’s called the Good Food Purchasing Policy and after its successful passage in 2012 by the Los Angeles Unified School District and the city of LA, school districts and cities across the country are exploring its possibilities for shaping how public food, like school lunch, is procured.

The policy is similar to LEED certification, only for food instead of buildings. It’s a tool for school districts and the city government’s to make purchasing decisions based on a set of core values. Imagine that!

Under the policy, suppliers must meet basic criteria across five values: supporting local economies, promoting health, providing a safe and healthy workplace and fair wages, protecting animal welfare, and promoting environmental sustainability. Like LEED, the policy inspires suppliers to reach higher than the basic minimum, to “score” better and better across these criteria.

“The Good Food Purchasing Program provides institutions with the framework and tools to achieve an alternative vision for the food system,” says Alexa Delwiche, the head of the Center for Good Food Purchasing, a nonprofit launched by the masterminds of the policy to help cities and school districts pass it and evaluate its implementation.

After the City of Los Angeles and LA Unified School District passed the policy, procurement decisions for more than 750,000 meals a day were made with a whole new lens: not just which suppliers are cheapest, but which suppliers best reflect those five values. It’s making a big difference.

Consider the case of Tyson. Two years before the policy was passed, in 2010, the multinational chicken giant was awarded the $60 million, five-year poultry contract with LA Unified. By 2015, when the Tyson contract was up for renewal, the school district had a different set of questions for the company, such as its record on animal welfare, environmental protection, and treatment of workers. Concerns about Tyson’s poor track record on multiple fronts led school board members to question whether Tyson could meet the standards of the Good Food Purchasing Program. Ultimately, Tyson withdrew from the contract process, and the school board awarded Gold Star Foods, which had much better labor and production practices, a contract instead.

It’s not just the source of chicken that’s changed. PolicyLink found that before the policy was in place, only about 10 percent of produce served in LA schools was sourced within 200 miles of the district. Today, that’s grown to 50 to 72 percent, depending on the season, bringing roughly $12 million into the local economy.

Inspired by its neighbor to the south, San Francisco Unified School District became the first institution outside of Los Angeles to formally adopt the policy in 2016. Across the bay, the Oakland school board is poised to pass the policy this year, too. Together, these three cities alone make about $200 million worth of food purchases annually.

Community leaders across the nation are seeing the power and unifying spirit of this policy that brings these five crosscutting values together. Cities across the country – from Chicago to New York City to Minneapolis and Cincinnati are all exploring it.

“The Good Food Purchasing Program has energized food justice activists in Cincinnati,” says Brennan Grayson, director of the Cincinnati Interfaith Workers Center. “It brings a bold vision to food justice activism – one that brings people from all parts of the food chain together. And togetherness is what people need to make changes in the food system.”

Policy change at the national level can move at a glacial pace, if at all. So it’s exciting to see communities take action locally: to put our public dollars toward food that’s best for our bodies, for workers, and for the planet.

Originally published in Earth Island Journal

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On March 20, scientists from 11 countries convened by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer released their unanimous conclusions about the world’s most used herbicide, glyphosate. In a paper that would be published in The Lancet Oncology, the experts concluded that the herbicide is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Yes, you read that right: The most widely used herbicide in the world probably causes cancer in humans. Barely used on US cropland as recently as 1992, by 2012 an estimated 250 million pounds were being used, mainly on genetically engineered corn and soybeans.

The biotech giant, Monsanto, whose main source of profit is corn and soybeans genetically engineered to withstand its proprietary version of glyphosate, Roundup, immediately disparaged the findings, accused the experts of “cherry-picking” the data, and called on the WHO to withdraw the claim.

But for those who’ve been tracking research on the interactions between man-made chemicals in our environment and our health, these results are part of a wave of new understanding about how chemicals, even those previously presumed safe, can harm us.

In just the past two decades, there has been a sea change in our understanding of how chemicals impact our health. In part, this new understanding has come out of decisions in the mid-1990s at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) and the Environmental Protection Agency to fund studies on the connections between children’s health and chemical exposure.

One of these NIEHS grants went to a team at UC Berkeley to develop a study of farmworker women in the agricultural region of the Salinas Valley in Central California. Started in 1998, the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas (CHAMACOS) study enrolled more than 600 pregnant women to measure their chemical exposure and track their children’s health through age 16. CHAMACOS – its acronym means “little children” in Mexican Spanish – wanted to investigate the impacts of pesticide exposure, not only on farmworkers, but on all of us.

Today, 1.1 billion pounds of pesticides are used in the US annually. This figure comes from 2007 data, the most recent available, and dramatically underestimates the total chemicals in use. It also counts only a pesticide’s active ingredients, though so-called inert ingredients can be just as toxic.

Sixteen years later, the CHAMACOS researchers have published dozens of scientific papers. They have found farmworker women living near areas where methyl bromide was applied had babies with smaller birth weights, and that mothers exposed to organophosphate pesticides during pregnancy had an increased risk of children with attention problems, lower IQs, and poorer cognitive functioning.

Other prospective cohort studies are confirming this chemical pesticide toll. A partnership between NIEHS, the EPA, and the National Cancer Institute has been following nearly 90,000 agricultural workers in Iowa and North Carolina since 1993. The study is finding that chemical exposure for these workers may be leading to higher rates of some cancers and other health effects, from asthma to neurologic disorders to reproductive problems.

The chemical industry has long touted the notion that “dose makes the poison.” But thanks to cohort studies like these, there is evidence that even low-level exposure, especially during pregnancy, has real health implications.

Then there’s this: An international group of scientists, led by a team at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, has found that exposure to some formulations of glyphosate and other common herbicides can lead to antibiotic resistance in bacteria, including resistance to ciprofloxacin, commonly used in human medicine.

In 1962, Rachel Carson wrote: “If we are going to live so intimately with these chemicals … taking them into the very marrow of our bones – we had better know something about their nature and their power.” More than five decades later, we know more of their power, but we still have much to learn. In the meantime, advocacy groups are calling on government agencies to take a precautionary approach to chemical approvals. Says Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, senior scientist with Pesticide Action Network, “We must break the cycle of weed resistance that keeps farmers on a pesticide treadmill, and phase out reliance on health-harming herbicides.”

The findings from the WHO about glyphosate are humbling; the latest news about antibiotic-resistance and the popular herbicide even more so. All of this a reminder that there is still so much to know about the chemicals we live with every day, the ones in the very marrow of our bones.

Originally published in Earth Island Journal

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In the fall of 1962, a group of chemical companies including Monsanto – at the time the largest producer of the cancer-causing chemical compound, PCB – launched a full-throttle public relations campaign against Silent Spring and its author, biologist Rachel Carson.

In Silent Spring, Carson dared to take on the world’s biggest chemical companies, explaining that their products were not only harmful to birds and bees, but to humans, too. In the wake of its publication, the chemical industry PR machine kicked into gear. “Hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent attempting to discredit not only the book but the ‘hysterical’ woman who wrote it,” says Kaiulani Lee, the playwright and actor who wrote and performs the definitive play about Carson, A Sense of Wonder.

In addition to paying spokespeople to tarnish Carson’s reputation, Monsanto also sent a parody to newspapers around the country. In “The Desolate Year,” Monsanto painted a frightening picture of a world without chemicals. It was a bleak place. “Genus by genus, species by species, sub-species by innumerable sub-species, the insects emerged,” the article warned. “Creeping and flying and crawling. … They were chewers, and piercer-suckers, spongers, siphoners and chewer-lappers, and all their vast progeny were chewers – rasping, sawing biting maggots and worms and caterpillars.” It goes on and on like this for five pages. (As we now know, that diatribe was fear-mongering, not fact-marshalling. Organic and low-chemical farmers across the United States are proving that you can eliminate, or greatly reduce, toxic chemical use on the farm without having to worry about being overrun by pests, weeds, or diseases.)

I can’t help but notice that in its recent PR missives against anti-GMO activists, Monsanto, which is today the world’s largest manufacturer of genetically modified seeds, is using the same fear tactics. Only this time, it’s stirring up fear of a world without biotech crops.

In a recent debate on NPR, Monsanto’s Chief Technology Officer, Robert Fraley, sounded remarkably like “The Desolate Year.” “What I’d like to do is [describe] what it would be like to live in a world without GMO crops,” Fraley said in his closing statement. “Without GMOs, farmers would need to dramatically increase their use of herbicides and insecticides. [T]he pressure … will drain more wetlands, will cut down more forests. We [will] have to take tractors and run up and down the fields … and release more greenhouse gas emissions. Banning GMO crops is equivalent to putting 26 million new cars on the road. … I hope, for the sake of all the people … that you vote to … support GM food.”

Despite Fraley’s dire warnings, feeding the future doesn’t depend on GMOs. In fact, the spread of GMOs is actively undermining our ability to feed future generations by locking farmers into dependence on expensive seeds and inputs, by undermining soil health, by reducing biodiversity, and more.

Keep in mind that the main GM traits that have been commercialized convey just two qualities, or a combination of them: pest- and weed-resistance. Industry promises for big nutrition or yield improvements have not borne fruit. Studies show that non-GM corn and soybean yields in Europe, for example, are similar to the yields achieved with GMOs here in the US.

What’s more, we know that the ecologists who warned that GMOs would spur weed and pest resistance were right. As Jonathan Foley, the head of the California Academy of Scientists, has said: “You can’t put out a weed-resistant crop and expect the weeds to sit still. They will evolve.” They will, and they have. Today, we have Roundup-resistant weeds, some with stalks so thick that they can damage farm equipment. And we have Bt-resistant bugs so defiant they’ve got corn growers in our Midwest worried. “Every ecologist predicted that,” Foley says.

As with the chemicals Carson raised the alarm about, when it comes to genetic engineering, the risks are too great, the rewards too minimal, the alternatives too ample to do anything but to stand up to this latest wave of industry fear-mongering.

Originally published in Earth Island Journal

Photo by Mike Mozart/Flickr

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by Anna Lappé

At 1:00 p.m. on Sunday, September 21, the 400,000 people gathered for the People’s Climate March in New York City took a moment of silence for those whose lives have already been lost because of climate change. The silence swept up Central Park West from Columbus Circle to 85th Street. A quiet fell among the Indigenous activists and solar power advocates, the high school students and octogenarians, all packed shoulder-to-shoulder. Ten seconds, 20 seconds, nearly a minute passed. Then, in the distance, a sound, quiet at first, but growing second-by-second until it surrounded us: shouts, hollers, and whoops sounding the alarm about our overheating planet. People around me cheered and hugged, tears streaming down faces. It was heartbreaking; it was exhilarating. We were not alone. We were legion.

The People’s Climate March in New York City in September was the largest expression of popular concern about the climate crisis the world has ever seen. But a march alone doesn’t make history.

Organizers called the New York City march the largest climate demonstration ever. Add to that the 2,646 satellite demonstrations from Berlin to Burundi, and the day’s actions were certainly the largest expression of popular concern about the crisis the world has ever seen.

Of course, a march alone doesn’t make history. To do that will require directly confronting the powerful fossil fuel interests that are central culprits in the crisis. Such a confrontation will, among other things, mean kicking the carbon polluters out of the climate negotiating rooms. A huge task, for sure. But we can take courage, and learn lessons, from the brave public-health activists who took on Big Tobacco.

For much of the twentieth century, Big Tobacco had done what Big Oil and King Coal are doing now: stalling regulation of a product that was killing millions a year. By the 1980s, the outcry against Big Tobacco had resulted in movement at the global level as The World Health Assembly began to develop the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

Civil society organizations such as Corporate Accountability International (for which I am an adviser) understood that in order to ensure the treaty had teeth, Big Tobacco couldn’t be involved in its framing. But there were divided camps. Some felt it would be impossible to kick Big Tobacco out of the negotiations. Others held steady – and they won. The result was 30 words that changed the tobacco fight for good. Article 5.3 in the Framework Convention states: “In setting and implementing their public health policies with respect to tobacco control, parties shall act to protect these polices from commercial and other vested interests of the tobacco industry.”

Compare Article 5.3 to what’s permissible in climate negotiations. At the annual climate meetings – called “Conference of Parties,” or COPs – Big Energy organizes pavilions, din- ners, and breakaway meetings. Some industry representatives have even attended COPs as official members of country delegations. Corporations have been granted official observer status and given key roles through industry trade associations. At last year’s COP in Poland, the World Coal Association partnered with the Polish Ministry of Economy to promote coal as a solution to climate change. At the 2011 COP in South Africa, the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, made up of fossil fuel and power companies, lobbied for and won carbon credits for new coal plants, even though carbon offsets for coal are known to be counterproductive.

Hundreds of organizations from around the world are pressuring the United Nation to heed the lesson from tobacco advocates and end the cozy relationship between Big Energy and climate negotiators. As advocates wrote in a November 2013 letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon: “We urge you to look at such examples and take commensurate action to protect climate policy-making from the vested interests of the fossil fuel industry – or companies whose core business model depends on the excessive emission of greenhouse gases – and their attempts to undermine and subvert urgently needed action.”

After the raucous moment of celebration at the People’s Climate March, the Corporate Accountability International contingent nearby cheered: “1, 2, Article 5.3: Let’s kick out big energy!” I know, it’s not exactly the catchiest chant, but it does zero in on a key to helping us turn that energizing day in the streets into the real stuff of history making.

Originally published in Earth Island Journal

Photo by South Bend Voice/Flickr

The post Smoke ‘Em Out: Time to Kick Big Oil From the Global Climate Talks appeared first on Real Food Media.

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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