We at Real Food Media know that to turn our collective energy into people power, we need to organize. From community gardens to town halls across the country and beyond, nothing is more powerful than people coming together to break bread, share ideas, and create the kind of world we want to see.

Our organizing toolkits offer resources to help you bring your community together, spark impactful conversations, dig deeper, and take action. (Last updated Spring 2019)

If you believe a just, healthy, and environmentally sustainable world is possible: let’s get busy.  

TOOLKIT THEMES:

BUILDING POWER WITH FOOD WORKERS

TACKLING CLIMATE CHANGE THROUGH FOOD

WHAT YOU’LL FIND IN EACH TOOLKIT:

• Curated film reels you can watch or screen for a group on the people, places, and stories at the heart of each theme
• Guiding questions to facilitate reflection and discussion
• Engagement activities to turn your film screening into a community-building, action-oriented event
• Downloadable resources to share with your audience
• Ideas for ways to organize in your own community for food system change
• A glossary explaining key terms used in the toolkit
• Tips for individuals and organizations interested in hosting their own event around these themes

TOOLKITS ARE GEARED TOWARDS:

Individuals

• Who care about good food and want to dig deeper to understand how our food system works (or doesn’t work) and how food can be a starting point for building a better world.

Groups

• Food, health, labor, and climate activists who are eager to organize their communities around concrete campaigns and actions
• Students and educators looking for tools that combine learning with action, inside and outside of the classroom
• Faith-based groups interested in fostering support for healthy, just, and sustainable food systems
• Neighborhood associations and other local organizations looking for ways to strengthen community through informed engagement with food issues
• Offices, unions, and other workplace groups that want to facilitate conversation among co-workers about their place in the food system

Have something else in mind? The sky’s the limit! Toolkits include materials accessible to people from diverse backgrounds and levels of experience. Tell us about your group and let us know if we can help you get organized by contacting info@realfoodmedia.org. 

Header photo: Annette Bernhardt, Oakland Fast Food Strike, December 2014.

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Our December podcast will feature two contributing authors, Joann Lo and Tanya Kerssen, and co-editor Alison Alkon. This will be a good one!

The post The New Food Activism: Opposition, Cooperation, and Collective Action appeared first on Real Food Media.

Fifteen years ago, when I was giving my first public speech—in front of 2,000 people no less—I terrifyingly prodded everyone I knew for advice. One friend offered me simple advice that has stuck with me ever since. “Do you feel like you have something important to say?” she asked. I replied a quick “Yes, but…” Before I could continue, she said, that’s all that matters. It doesn’t matter if you’re nervous, or not. Stumble on your words, or not. If you have something you think people need to hear, just remember that.

When I was asked to speak at TEDxBerkeley on the theme “constellate,” I knew I had something I wanted to share. Was dying to share. For years, I’ve been writing and researching food—what we grow and how we grow it and what impact all of that has on our bodies, our planet and the workers and farmers along the food chain.

Over these years, I’ve come to see the power of food to connect us and unite us. I’ve also seen an explosion in activism to bring justice and sustainability into the food system alongside record-setting consumer food trends, from a three-decade decline in soda consumption, to a boom in organic food sales to the growing demand for humane meat (58% of consumers say they seek out humanely raised meat and dairy, by latest count).

But some of the conversation about food action, I felt, was still stuck in a “me-first” framework. Food choices are often presented as just about you. And the choice for organic food—food raised without toxic chemicals or meat and dairy produced without antibiotics or pharmaceuticals—organic food is often seen as a choice you should make for your health. Or, it’s maligned as the choice for the most out-of-touch foodie: people who care more about the temperature of their goat cheese than the homeless person down the street.

I had come to see this food choice differently—as an expression of our collective empathy. For me, the choice for organic food is a choice for farmworkers who shouldn’t have to face toxic chemicals to do their job. It’s for farmers who shouldn’t experience higher rates of Parkinson’s, certain cancers and other illnesses because of the chemicals they use. It’s a choice for communities that shouldn’t have to live in the shadow of chemical manufacturers.

This and more is what I decided I had to share in my TEDx talk, The Empathy of Food. It’s definitely my most personal talk yet.

A few weeks ago, before I took the stage at the cavernous 1,500-seat Zellerbach Hall, I channeled my friend’s advice. I took a deep breath… and took the stage. See my talk here. I’d love to hear what you think!

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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

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by Anna Lappé

On Nov. 7, Martin Sheen’s latest film, “A Prayer for Rain,” will be released in U.S. theaters. It brings to life the story of the tragic chemical disaster 30 years ago in Bhopal, India, and raises the question, Are we safe from a similar tragedy unfolding again? Chemical safety advocates say not very.

At 10 p.m. on Dec. 2, 1984, a gas leak started at Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in Bhopal, releasing more than 40 tons of methyl isocyanate and other chemicals. Within half an hour, nearby residents were coughing, experiencing burning eyes and having difficulty breathing. It would take another two and a half hours before sirens alerted the city of the disaster and six before the leak was brought under control. By that time, the damage had already been done: More than 10,000 people died in the immediate wake of the disaster, many from cardiac and respiratory arrest. Officials estimate hundreds of thousands of people have been affected over the decades, in the form of birth defects, increased infant mortality, learning disabilities and respiratory and vision problems.

The Bhopal plant — operated by Union Carbide and now owned by Dow Chemical — was similar in design to many chemical plants here in the United States. Bhopal was alarming to US chemical safety advocates and the American public. We realized we didn’t know what was in our own backyard.

Since then, federal regulations were supposed to protect Americans from a similar disaster unfolding here, but government interventions have been too few and far between. Thirty years on, public safety advocates say the U.S hasn’t done enough to improve the safety of chemical manufacturing. But a new regulation up for public comment might finally change all that.

A recent study found 473 chemical facilities that would each put more than 100,000 people at risk if there were a serious accident. Of those, 89 jeopardize the safety of 1 million people or more. One-third of Americans, the study found, live close enough to a chemical facility that they’re at risk of being affected by a toxic leak caused by accident, natural disaster or terrorist attack.

Today advocates say we’ve finally got regulation on the table that could dramatically improve how the industry is regulated. Based on an executive order to improve chemical facility safety and security that President Barack Obama signed last year, it calls for improving the monitoring of and reducing the risks posed by chemical manufacturing around the country.

And we the people finally have a voice. The Environmental Protection Agency’s public comment period, which closes on Oct. 29, gives everyday Americans a chance to weigh in. It’s an opportunity to let regulators know that we want real enforcement of safety regulations at our country’s most dangerous chemical plants.

Uneven History

In 1984, shaken by Bhopal, legislators began exploring regulations in the U.S. to prevent a similar accident here. Two years later, Congress passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act, which established various monitoring and reporting systems to improve safety protocols, including the Toxic Releases Inventory (TRI), which requires companies to report if they produce more than 25,000 pounds of a listed chemical or handle more than 10,000 pounds of it. A few years later, in 1990, amendments to the Clean Air Act, known as “Bhopal” provisions, established the Risk Management Program to help prevent chemical accidents an authorized the Chemical Safety Board to investigate such accidents and recommend safety procedures.

But these interventions haven’t created the kind of protections that advocates say we need. The Chemical Safety Board, for instance, may only study accidents and produce recommendations; it can’t issue violations or fines. The TRI doesn’t have any real teeth either, and it covers only 549 chemicals, though more than 70,000 are on the market. As Rick Hind, the legislative director at Greenpeace told me, “With the Toxic Releases Inventory, we got the right to know, but we also wanted the right to ban.”

As for the Risk Management Program, companies are required to report on their production volumes just once every five years, on only 140 chemicals. Though the program requires companies to develop an “off-site consequence analysis” — a gauge of how many people would be affected by an accidental chemical release within a certain radius of a plant — it’s based only on that small subset of chemicals and on the single largest tank of each.

Finally, one of the most important elements of the Bhopal amendment, known as the general duty clause, states that facilities must be designed and operated in ways that prevent a catastrophic release of dangerous chemicals. It sounds like common sense, but the clause has been enforced sporadically.

The revisions to the Risk Management Program, up for public comment now, would at long last put real muscle behind the general duty clause, ensuring more regular inspections of facilities, protecting whistleblowers and modernizing worker protection programs. In addition, the EPA is considering requiring facilities to switch to safer chemicals or processes, as the Clorox Co. did voluntarily when it agreed to phase out the use of chlorine gas in its U.S. facilities from 2009 to 2012. According to Greenpeace, the company’s decision “eliminated catastrophic risks from chlorine gas to 13.6 million Americans living downwind of its facilities.”

The urgency for supporting these improvements to the Risk Management Program is even more apparent since the 9/11 attacks, when lawmakers realized that 12,700 chemical facilities in the country could be easy targets for terrorism. The following spring the EPA prepared to issue guidance for safer technologies and facilities, but the George W. Bush administration blocked the proposals, the chemical industry lobbied against them, and Congress stalled any further progress.

What Now?

It has taken more than a decade for renewed political leadership to take up the matter. Last year’s fertilizer explosion in West, Texas, which killed 17 and injured more than 100 others, issued a wakeup call. The accident revealed just how weak the protocols are for public safety. The anhydrous ammonium that caused the accident, for example, is not one of the 140 chemicals required for reporting under the Risk Management Program, though it is highly explosive.

The accident spurred Obama to issue his executive order, reviving the general duty clause. Advocates have been urging the public to speak up for chemical safety during the EPA’s comment period. More than 100 environmental justice, labor, public health, national security and environmental organizations that form the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters are calling on the EPA to support the order to “prevent chemical plant disasters rather than ‘manage’ them.”

“This is now a once-in-a generation opportunity to finally activate the Bhopal amendment in the Clean Air Act,” said Hind. (His organization, Greenpeace, is a member of the coalition.) Let’s hope the EPA agrees.

By the time Sheen and Mischa Barton hit the big screen in “A Prayer for Rain,” the public comment period will be closed, and the EPA will be setting to work on drafting new policy. We’ll have to wait and see whether the call for serious action is heard louder than industry’s continued call for less regulation.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Simone.lippi at Italian Wikipedia

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Today hundreds of thousands of people around the world — from Burundi to Berlin to Brooklyn — will take to the streets in what organizers are calling the biggest climate march in history. This outpouring of action in the lead-up to this year’s global climate summit in Lima, Peru, is a reflection of the growing frustration with lack of progress in the fight against global warming, from stalemate on emission reductions to an impasse on commitments of support for affected communities.

Progress has been stalled in part because the biggest polluters in the world — those oil and gas companies responsible for the lion’s share of emissions, for example — have been given a seat at the negotiating table, treated as partners and stakeholders at the annual global meetings called the Conference of Parties, or COP. Over the years, these COPs have featured industry-sponsored pavilions, dinners and breakaway meetings. And companies have been granted official observer status through their industry trade associations, which are considered nongovernmental organizations under current climate meeting rules. Some have even attended as official members of country delegations. (For instance, a representative from Shell joined the Nigerian delegation to COP16 in 2010 and Brazil’s to COP14 in 2008.)

As climate activists call for governments to take real action on climate, the decades-long fight against Big Tobacco — specifically, how public health advocates successfully kept companies away from the negotiating table — holds powerful lessons for the role industries should have in these key talks.

Keeping Big Tobacco at Bay

It’s almost impossible to fathom it now, but the first state ban on smoking in hospitals passed only in 1989. By then, decades of research had long proved the connection between nicotine and addiction and shown that smoking causes harm to nearly every organ in the body. The science finally managed to break through industry-funded misinformation campaigns, and in 1998 the United States reached a master settlement with the tobacco industry, which included annual payouts to 46 states of $10 billion for education and public health programs and strict regulations on marketing and advertising cigarettes. Several years later, after still more campaigning, the World Health Assembly unanimously adopted the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. Since then, more than 179 countries have ratified it, including Iran and China, although notably not the United States.

Civil society organizations such as Corporate Accountability International (CAI), for which I am an adviser, understood that in order for the convention to have teeth, Big Tobacco could not be allowed to interfere. To that end, CAI and other civil society groups and governments — especially those of Panama, Thailand and South Africa — fought for and secured the inclusion of 30 words that were the jumping-off point for an extensive set of guidelines (PDF) that spurred serious government action. They state, in Article 5.3, “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.” These guidelines were adopted unanimously at the 2008 COP (PDF) in Durban, South Africa.

Building on these guidelines (PDF), many governments around the world have gone further to keep the tobacco industry away from policymaking. Colombia passed laws barring tobacco industry representatives from policy negotiations. Australia strengthened transparency laws regarding government interactions with the industry. And in 2009, Norway was the first nation to divest government pension funds from tobacco stock in response to the World Health Organization guidelines that specified governments “should divest all holdings in tobacco companies in order to keep public health interests apart from economic influence.”

Big Tobacco is not granted official observer status at tobacco treaty meetings. In fact, tobacco companies and their trade groups are not allowed to attend or observe the meetings at all. This is made clear in the WHO’s memo (PDF) on attendance policies, which reads, “Persons affiliated or having any relations with the tobacco industry or entities working to further its interests would not be permitted to attend any session or meeting of the COP and its subsidiary bodies.” When industry representatives have attempted to use public badges to gain entry, they have been removed by the Secretariat. The WHO is working on screening public badges to prevent such breaches in the future.

This stark line between negotiators, governments and industry helped create a tobacco treaty with real impact. One of the most widely embraced treaties in U.N. history, it covers almost 90 percent of the world’s population and is projected to save as many as 200 million lives by 2050 — and many millions more thereafter.

As people take to the streets to demand substantial action on climate change, it’s time to take this lesson from the fight against Big Tobacco. Bold action on climate policy is possible only if a stark line is drawn between climate negotiators and the industries driving the crisis: no revolving doors between regulatory positions and corporations, no so-called partnerships with industry that constitute a conflict of interest, no seat at the table in writing the rules of regulation and transparency in all industry engagements with public officials.

Untangle Industry Involvement

Instead, the fossil fuel industry is deeply involved in and actively influencing climate negotiations. For example, the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (whose members include BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell, among other major oil and gas companies) has hosted official side events to the COPs, produced their own reports on strategies for adapting to climate change and advised governments on climate policy. Meanwhile, its members are working in direct opposition to reducing global emissions by expanding oil exploration: BP and Shell, for example, are moving into offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean. Its members have been at the forefront of undermining climate science, with ExxonMobil alone funneling at least $22 million toward climate denial efforts from 1998 to 2011, according to a Greenpeace investigation (PDF).

Last year’s COP19 in Poland saw the participation of the World Coal Association (whose members include General Electric, Rio Tinto and Glencore), including partnering with the Polish Ministry of Economy on an international coal summit to convince U.N. negotiators to embrace coal as a solution to climate change. Out of this partnership came the Warsaw Communiqué, which promotes so-called clean coal, a process that critics point out is no less polluting than standard coal production and is just “a blunt attempt to keep the coal industry in business while governments and taxpayers continue to foot the bill for the damage it causes.”

At 2011’s COP17 in Durban, South Africa, the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, made up of fossil fuel and power companies such as Shell, GDF Suez and Siemens, lobbied for and won carbon capture credits for new coal plants, even though carbon offsets for dirty coal are known to be ineffective at reducing emissions.

Untangling industry’s involvement in global climate negotiations will require taking on some of the biggest trade groups in the world. Members of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, for example, have combined annual revenue of more than $7 trillion and include Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Shell, Duke Energy and BP. While the council presents its 200 corporate members “as part of the solution to climate change,” it has consistently lobbied against legally binding standards at every major United Nations environmental summit since the council was founded in 1992. And the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), which has been granted privileged access at the United Nations, has “consistently blocked attempts at regulating emissions,” according to the Corporate Europe Observatory (PDF). Unsurprisingly, the ICC’s members consist of the world’s biggest polluters, including Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil and Duke Energy.

The European Parliament, at least, has recognized the need to rein in such industry influence. In a resolution presented on the eve of the 2013 climate talks, it called for vigilance “concerning efforts by economic actors that emit significant amounts of greenhouse gases or benefit from burning fossil fuels to undermine or subvert climate protection efforts.”

After last year’s climate talks, 78 organizations from around the world penned an open letter to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres, calling on them to “to protect climate policymaking from the vested interests of the fossil fuel industry.” Ban has announced he will be joining climate marchers in the street. Here’s hoping he also listens to the call to action. As sea levels rise and millions are displaced, as species disappear and extreme weather sweeps the globe, it’s ever more clear we need an Article 5.3 for climate talks — and we need it now.

Originally published in Al Jazeera America

Photo by Spielvogel/Wikimedia

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