The Growing Liberation Podcast, produced by Midwest Farmers of Color Collective with support from Real Food Media, aims to reclaim the narratives of BIPOC farmers and reveal crucial connections to the land, food, culture, political power, and economic autonomy. Growing Liberation guests come from farming backgrounds and endeavors and share their untold stories to foster a community of farmers of color by sharing stories left out of the mainstream conversation about the food system and land equity.

Learn more about Midwest Farmers of Color Collective, listen to the Growing Liberation Podcast, and look for Growing Liberation on your favorite podcast platform. 

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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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The Landless Workers Movement in Brazil (or MST, its acronym in Portuguese) is one of the largest social movements in the world. Born in the early 1980s at the end of the country’s 21-year military dictatorship and in the midst of persistent land inequality, the movement has been at the forefront of land reform in Brazil for decades. Their work is focused on making a reality of the country’s constitutional promise that land should ‘serve a social purpose.’ Against a backdrop of great inequality – 10% of the largest farms occupy nearly three-quarters of agricultural land – the MST has been organizing families to occupy, settle, and farm throughout the country.

In the four decades since its creation, the MST has organized more than 350,000 families to create communities, cooperatives, farms, small-scale food processing enterprises, and farmers markets. An additional 90,000 families still live in informal encampments on contested land, struggling for official land title.

Education and training in sustainable agricultural practices have always been core to the movement’s work, with its commitment to agroecology deepening in 2000 when the MST identified agroecology as key to its strategy of building resilient food systems. Since then, the MST has been developing training centers for agroecology for its members, and beyond.

At the beginning of the pandemic, MST launched an ongoing national campaign to take food from the settlements to vulnerable populations in cities: this collection center organized by ELAA for people living in the outskirts of the state capital, Curitiba, offers a great variety of fresh foods. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Author Anna Lappé interviewed three members of one of the movement’s agroecology schools in southern Brazil, Escola Latino Americana de Agroecologia (ELAA) to learn more about this history and philosophy. The conversation included input from Amandha Silva Felix, management coordinator and policy director at ELAA, and Vinicius Silva Oliveira and Wellington Lenon from the school’s “pedagogic sector.”

This is the third in a series of interviews with key people leading diverse agroecology training programs around the world, view them all here. This interview was conducted by email, translated from the Portuguese, and edited for clarity.

Mongabay: Let’s start with the movement’s commitment to member education. Can you talk about that work?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Throughout its history, the MST has always had a strong commitment to education. The movement has built more than 2,000 schools in land-reform occupied encampments and settlements. In 2000, agroecology became a cross-cutting theme in all MST schools—from kindergarten to higher education. Today, many MST schools offer courses on agroecology in partnership with public universities.

ELAA launched in the fall of 2005. Together with the Latin America Agroecology Institute Paulo Freire (IALA) based in Venezuela, we launched what became IALA’s network of Via Campesina [the international peasant agricultural movement] schools to mainstream agroecological training for farmers, youth, and adults.

Since its founding, ELAA has trained nearly 200 people, offering a 3.5-year “Technologist in Agroecology” course and a four-year degree in Rural Education, Natural Sciences, and Agroecology.

Drone view of ELAA: classrooms are on the right, occupying the main building of a large estate that was expropriated by MST to settle landless farmers, which is now known as Contestado Settlement. To the left are dining halls and student housing. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: Can you describe the place itself—what is the school like?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: ELAA is located in an MST settlement called the Contestado in the state of Paraná in southern Brazil. It’s truly a movement school: founded by the movement, built by volunteers, and part of the struggle for land reform, the school has 29 acres that include animal production—pigs, cows, sheep, and chickens—a vegetable garden, agroforestry, and field crops such as beans, corn, and manioc.

Mongabay: What is your program’s philosophy?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Our courses are oriented toward young people as well as adults from land reform encampments and settlements in Brazil, and from other regions around the world, including farming communities elsewhere in Latin America such as Paraguay, Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Colombia plus Africa, including Afro-Brazilians (quilombolas) and Indigenous peoples.

The program offers on-campus learning and in-community learning; students spend a portion of their time at school and another portion in their community. During their three months on campus, students learn from teachers connected with partner institutions, including the Federal University of Parana State (UFPR) and the Federal Institute of Parana (IFPR). When students return home, they take back the practices and knowledge acquired on campus. We’ve found this allows for powerful exchange and feedback between empirical and theoretical knowledge.

Mongabay: How have the principles of agroecology informed the MST?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: The MST adopted agroecology as a core approach in February 2000. After several decades of organizing, the failures of conventional agriculture in land reform settlements were very clear to us. We also learned much about agroecology from partner movements in other countries. La Via Campesina was a particularly big influence for MST to move in this direction.

MST members in the state of Parana have been at the forefront of the process of creating agroecology schools. In 2004, the MST Coordination in Parana State defined the purpose of these schools to create spaces for learning about agroecological production, presenting concrete results to farmers and encouraging an embrace of peasant culture. Just as importantly, these schools are a place for the development of our movement’s humanist values—a place where people work together, educating themselves, learning new perspectives, and having fun!

ELAA students outside the school in early 2020. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: How would you describe your Center’s learning approach?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: At ELAA we talk about our grounding in rural education or educação do campo in Portuguese. For us, the idea of rural education is based on the pedagogical and epistemological philosophies of popular education, particularly of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. These are the pillars of the pedagogical praxis of rural education, which seeks a critical awareness of the world, contributing to the transformation of social relations necessary for human development. In this sense, both form and content matter—going from the hands-on and concrete to the abstract and back again. It’s a dialectic that not only creates ownership of knowledge, but also motivates action based on that knowledge. As Paulo Freire said: “We struggle for an education that teaches us to think—not one that teaches us to obey.”

Mongabay: What are some of the key agroecology themes of your program?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Our teaching covers a range of content related to agroecology, linking theory and practice, scientific and empirical knowledge. The school also covers content on class, capitalism, the role of social movements in social change as well as gender, sexuality, and more. In 2022, the MST launched the Dictionary of Education and Agroecology [PDF in Portuguese]. With contributions from 169 authors from 68 different institutions—public universities, federal institutes of education, social movements, and research institutes—it aims to act in formal and informal education, bringing conceptual bases to the field of education and agroecology. ELAA is adding this tool to its pedagogy.

Mongabay: Can you talk about your research approach and favorite examples of research coming out of the school?  

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Honestly, for us, every act of research done by our students is remarkable: These students are the sons and daughters of the land, water, and forests—the very people who have historically been denied access to education, especially college.

In terms of our research approach, we work hard at ELAA to ensure that we don’t conduct research for research’s sake, but rather ensure it is a process that gives a return to the community, region, organization, or movement to which the researcher belongs. Our students have conducted research in different areas, including agroecology, politics, gender, sexuality, social movements, and education. Specific research themes have included strategies for environmental protection, sustainable development, digital inclusion of rural families, conservation and management of agrobiodiversity, the saving and sharing of seeds, and more.

Mongabay: What’s one of the biggest challenges you face?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: We need to improve our infrastructure. We are at a moment when we need to expand the school building and improve the old ones. This is necessary to meet growing demand and offer better conditions both for students and teachers.

ELAA occupies 29 acres of land that provide practical training for students, a place for agroecology research, and gardens that supply the dining hall. This photo shows agroforestry production plots at an early stage. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: How do you think about the concept of agroecology?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: When we talk about agroecology, we are not just referring to a way of producing food without pesticides or chemical fertilizers. It is much more than that. We understand agroecology as a broad project of life: We see its political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental dimensions, too.

Agroecology combines sustainable production with a dignified way of life, both for those who produce (rural workers, peasants, traditional communities) and for those who have access to healthy food. Agroecology benefits the whole of society by being based on renewable sources of energy and respecting the biodiversity of the soil, fauna, and flora.

The diversification of production through agroforestry ensures countless benefits to society and the environment: biological insect control; soil biodiversity; long-term productivity from the integrated production of crops; greater financial security for farmers; more nutritious crops; strengthening local and regional economies; preserving of water/groundwater tables to ensure the proper functioning of hydrological cycles. Agroecology is today essential for the mitigation of global warming impacts, curbing the emission of greenhouse gases, and stimulating the sequestration of carbon by biodiversity.

Mongabay: How has ELAA worked to mainstream agroecology and climate action?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: To give one example, ELAA is part of the National Plan of Planting Trees and Producing Healthy Food, launched by the MST in 2020 to plant 100 million trees in a decade. MST partners developed a mobile application called Arvoredo to monitor tree planting across the country, and the agroecology schools’ students are playing a key role in promoting the tree planting in their communities.

MST farmer delivers food to the collection center organized by ELAA for people living in the outskirts of the state capital, Curitiba. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: How do you respond to the concern that agroecological farming cannot scale to meet the world’s food security needs?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Our MST settlements already show that it is possible to produce healthy and abundant food using these methods. We also see how agroecology is economically more viable, because it prioritizes renewable energy and because it is appropriate for family farming, which is responsible for more than 70% of the food produced in the world. Agroecology is also socially just because it values life in the countryside while promoting the universal right to healthy food. It is culturally necessary because it is in tune with nature’s seasonality, the localization of food systems, and local food traditions. Agroecology has the commons as a core value, which requires participatory governance and the involvement of different agents of civil society and the state to be successful and expand.

Mongabay: What are the greatest hurdles to wider adoption of agroecology?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: Our biggest challenge is to define agroecology as the model for food production to achieve food sovereignty and to further make clear that the counterpoint—the agribusiness model, which prioritizes monoculture plantations with intensive use of pesticides, chemicals, and GMO seeds, plus the international trade of commodities—is unsustainable. To achieve this paradigm shift, we need to make progress on public policies to support agroecology, such as smallholder access to credit, and expand training in agroecology. For us, we are meeting these needs by continuing to invest in agroecological education at all educational levels, including launching the “Education and Agroecology in Rural Schools in Agrarian Reform Territories” initiative whose purpose is to expand access to education and agroecology in settlements and land reform camps all over the country.

See related: Land conflicts in Brazil break record under Bolsonaro

Beans are one of the staple foods of Brazilians, and each region has a preference for one type or another. These were harvested in the Contestado settlement and donated to MST’s food solidarity campaign. Image courtesy of Wellington Lenon/ELAA.

Mongabay: What inspires you the most in your work?

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: What inspires us? To promote the practice of solidarity and social justice on a daily basis, enabling the families of agrarian reform workers to be agents of their own destiny through popular organization. This is the way to promote popular sovereignty in favor of human dignity and respect for fundamental rights.

Mongabay: What is it like to do this work at this particular moment in Brazil?  

Felix, Oliveira, Lenon: The MST emerged decades ago at a historical moment of struggle for the democratization of Brazil. Today, to fight for land reform means to deepen the ongoing process of democratization. Agroecology is at the center of the persistent land reform debate, pointing a way to food sovereignty for those who live in the countryside and for those who live in the city. Faced with the immense recent setbacks in the country—the advance of deforestation, especially in the Amazon, and the genocide practiced by the federal government during the pandemic—the MST has reaffirmed its commitment to fight for social justice and solidarity.

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In 1979, an idealistic 44-year-old Black woman named Nettie Mae Morrison moved with her husband to Allensworth, 75 miles south of Fresno, in California’s Central Valley. 

“She wanted to be a part of history,” said her son, Dennis Hutson, who was in his mid-20s at the time. The town had a distinctive past. It was founded in 1908 by Allen Allensworth, a man born into slavery who became the first African American to reach the rank of lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army. About 3 square miles in size, , it was the first town in California founded and governed by Black people—and it served as a beacon of possibility for Black people all over the nation, its population growing to around 1,200 people. 

But the community soon fell on hard times.

In 1914, the Santa Fe Railroad Company moved its rail stop from Allensworth to nearby Alpaugh, a majority-white town, dealing a major blow to Allensworth’s economy. That same year, Col. Allensworth died after being struck by a motorcycle during a visit to Los Angeles. 

It was access to water, however, that proved the most challenging. 

According to California’s water regulatory agency, “The company that sold the land to Col. Allensworth,” the Pacific Farming Company, “didn’t fulfill its promise to build an adequate water system, leaving the growing population with debt and dry wells. Drought struck the Central Valley soon after the town was founded, which led to poor crop yields and further decreased vital water supplies.”

In 1966, the town suffered another blow when officials discovered arsenic in the drinking water, and by the 1970s Allensworth no longer appeared on most maps.

The town’s storied past and ongoing challenges were what drew Morrison there, Hutson said of his mother. She dedicated the rest of her life, from 1979 until her death in 2018, to Allensworth, where she joined church efforts and nonprofit campaigns against local polluters and rallied to secure clean drinking water for the community. On weekends, her five grown children joined her in her efforts.

Decades later, two of her children—twins Dennis Hutson and Denise Kadara, felt a similar calling to Allensworth. Hutson, a Methodist preacher and Air Force chaplain living in Las Vegas at the time, remembered his frustration that little seemed to have improved for local residents despite his mother’s many efforts. As recently as 2020, nearly one-third of the population still lived below the poverty line. 

“[I asked myself], ‘Why doesn’t the government do something?’” Hudson recalled. “A voice [in my head] responded, ‘Why don’t you do something?’”

So in 2007, Hutson and Kadara, age 54, and Kadara’s husband, Kayode Kadara, decided to buy 60 acres from a retiring farmer in Allensworth, calling it the TAC Farm (TAC originally stood for The Allensworth Corporation, an entity that has since been dissolved.) Over the next few years, Hutson moved from Las Vegas and the Kadaras from Half Moon Bay, California, to settle in Allensworth full-time.

Their goal was to create a Black-owned, Black-operated farm that would honor Allensworth’s legacy and boost the local economy in the Valley. They began to farm a mix of collards, okra, mustard greens, watermelon and black-eyed peas because, as Hutson said, “I’m going to grow food that I know Black people want to eat.”

The Central Valley is sometimes called the nation’s breadbasket, producing about 8% of total agricultural output and nearly 40% of the country’s fruits and nuts. But climate change poses a serious threat to the region’s farms. Annual average maximum temperatures in Allensworth, and the surrounding San Joaquin Valley, which is part of the Central Valley, increased by 1 degree F from 1950 to 2020. That figure is projected to increase another 4 or 5 degrees F in the next 30 years, according to a state-commissioned report released earlier this year. The region is also experiencing its most severe drought in a millennium, according to a separate study published earlier this year in the journal Nature.

The extreme heat and drought don’t just threaten crops. These conditions make farm work more dangerous for workers and pose critical health risks for surrounding communities, according to Chantelise Pells, a water-systems researcher at UC Merced and co-author of the state-commissioned report.

“When you compound the expenses of air conditioning, poor air quality and limited access to water, [the climate crisis] is a huge economic burden for low-income communities,” Pells said. “They have to make a choice of whether to suffer in the heat or not have enough money to meet their basic needs.”

According to the same report, hundreds of thousands of residents in the San Joaquin Valley—many of whom are farmworkers—do not have access to clean drinking water and instead rely on store-bought bottled water. More frequent heat waves, which are often accompanied by poor air quality, increase the economic burden on low-income communities in the region that already experience disproportionate rates of asthma and heat-related illnesses.

Lack of rainfall and snowmelt runoff also mean farmers rely more heavily on groundwater, a practice that has become unsustainable, experts say. And amid the water scarcity, small-scale farmers like the Hutson-Kadaras are struggling to compete with larger farms.

“Most small-scale farmers don’t have the means to dig deeper wells and compete with large farms for access to groundwater,” said Angel Santiago Fernandez-Bou, a researcher at UC Merced and another co-author of the state-commissioned report.“During a drought, this can be a big problem for small or disadvantaged farmers.”

In 2007, for example, Hutson dug a 720-foot well on his family’s property, only to discover that his neighbors, who operate larger-scale operations, have wells thousands of feet deep. He realized that meant his well—and the farm’s lifeline—would be at risk of drying up long before his well-financed neighbors’ water sources would. (Around 42% of public wells in the San Joaquin Valley are at risk of drying up due to current drought conditions, according to the state-commissioned report.)

”When you are in the midst of a drought in a state that is having severe water challenges, it seems to me that you would rethink how you do your farming,” Hutson said, “—that it would encourage you to consider other ways to provide for your livestock [while] at the same time trying to provide for your environment.” 

In 2011, the Hutson-Kadaras participated in an organic farming training program, where they learned adaptive practices, such as enriching their soil with organic compost and installing windbreaks—hedges of trees to protect crops against wind—that would limit their reliance on synthetic fertilizers, reduce soil erosion and conserve water. 

In the past decade, the TAC Farm has adopted other climate friendly practices, including closed-loop agriculture—a technique in which farmers recycle nutrients and organic matter material back to the soil.The Hutson-Kadaras also raise rabbits, feeding them organic alfalfa and using their nutrient-dense manure as fertilizer. 

Hedgerows and windbreaks reduce soil erosion, minimizing soil disturbance, which in turn leads to less dust and fewer pollutants in the air. Healthy soil increases water retention, leaving more water in the aquifers. The cover crops add fertility to the soil, reducing the need for agrochemicals that pollute the air and water. The benefits of these farming practices, if adopted widely, reverberate throughout the surrounding community, according to Pells.

“Using regenerative practices [like cover cropping and reducing tillage] is a win-win,” Pells said. “It improves water and air quality, while lessening the economic burden on the farmers themselves.”  

The experiences over the past 15 years have convinced the Hutson-Kadaras of the importance of small-scale and cooperative farming. The benefits aren’t just environmental, Hutson said. Surrounding communities have been shown to benefit economically as small farms generate jobs and circulate income among local establishments. 

State officials are now looking to the Hutson-Kadaras’ farm as a model for developing a new generation of small-scale, sustainable farmers. Earlier this summer, state lawmakers earmarked $10 million in funding to help Hutson and Kadara develop a farmer training program that focuses on sustainable practices and cooperative methods that can help fight the tides of climate change and transform the Central Valley into a more economically and environmentally sustainable region. 

The program will primarily recruit burgeoning Black, Indigenous and other farmers of color in an effort to close some of the racial disparities that are rampant in food and agriculture. After 7 months of training, participants can lease a small plot of land on the Hutson-Kadara’s farm for the next 2½ years and sell their goods to local cooperatives. (While land access has been, and continues to be, an issue for many beginner farmers, organizations like Minnow exist to facilitate the transfer of land into the hands of California’s farmers of color while advancing Indigenous sovereignty.) 

Drought and extreme heat notwithstanding, Hutson said his dream—to make Allensworth once again a beacon of hope for Americans of color—is slowly becoming a reality. In June 2022, California state Governor Newsom set aside an additional $32 million dollars in the state budget for Allensworth—a majority of which will go to building a new visitor center that will connect the town’s history of Black self-determination with its future as a sustainable and equitable farming hub.

“I want Allensworth to be known for training and producing the next generations of cooperative, small-scale, sustainable farmers—whether they are Black, Latinx, Indigenous or Asian,” Hutson said. “That’s what I hope for and that’s what we are working toward.”

This article was made possible by a grant from the Open Society Foundations for Nexus Media News.  Nexus Media News is an editorially independent, nonprofit news service covering climate change. 

Header image: LA Times

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Fifty years ago, while experts published scary tomes about imminent world famine, my mother was a 26-year-old researcher curious about exactly why there was so much hunger around the globe. She buried herself in the stacks at the Giannini Library on UC Berkeley’s campus. What she discovered was so shocking, she felt she had to share the news with the world: There was actually enough food (there is still today). We humans were actually creating scarcity through then-just-emergent grain-fed, industrial livestock production systems. 

She turned her insight into a pamphlet, which became a longer essay, which became the book, Diet for a Small Planet.   

Last year, as Covid-19 kept our family thousands of miles from each other, I set out to help my mom celebrate the 50th anniversary of this seminal book with a new, special edition.  

This edition includes a new opening chapter by my mom—trying to distill her life’s work into just 15,000 words! And, with the expert hand of the wonderful and talented recipe developer, Wendy Lopez—and loads of Zoom calls and dirty dishes—we also refreshed the recipe section. No more soy grits and margarine! The 85+ recipes include more than a dozen from some of our very favorite cookbook authors and chefs, including several beloved Real Food Reads authors!  

You can pre-order your book today at www.dietforasmallplanet.org and please join us with friends and family for one or both of our book launches: 

• Monday, September 20th Frances Moore Lappé in conversation with Bryant Terry at 5:30pm PST / 8:30pm EST
• Thursday, September 30th Frances Moore Lappé in conversation with Raj Patel at 4:00pm PST / 7:00pm EST

The post Diet for a Small Planet — 50 Years Later appeared first on Real Food Media.

In 1971, Diet for a Small Planet broke new ground, revealing how our everyday acts are a form of power to create health for ourselves and our planet. This extraordinary book first exposed the needless waste built into a meat-centered diet. Now, in a special edition for its 50th anniversary, world-renowned food expert Frances Moore Lappé goes even deeper, showing us how plant-centered eating can help restore our damaged ecology, address the climate crisis, and move us toward real democracy. Sharing her personal journey and how this revolutionary book shaped her own life, Lappé offers a fascinating philosophy on changing yourself—and the world—that can start with changing the way we eat.

This new edition features eighty-five updated plant-centered recipes, including more than a dozen new delights from celebrity chefs including Mark Bittman, Padma Lakshmi, Alice Waters, José Andrés, Bryant Terry, Mollie Katzen, and Sean Sherman.

For all press inquiries, please contact Maya Franson: mfranson@penguinrandomhouse.com

The post Diet for a Small Planet: 50th Anniversary Edition appeared first on Real Food Media.

It was the early 1970s. With books like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb captivating readers across the country, fears were growing that the world faced imminent, widespread famine. My mother, Frances (at the time a 26-year-old grad school dropout), wanted to understand why. As she sought out the answer in the stacks of UC Berkeley’s Giannini Agricultural Library, she realized she was asking the wrong question: there was more than enough food to feed the world. Yet she was also alarmed to discover the vast resources going to raise livestock in industrial operations—and creating such waste at the same time.

As she dug deeper, her animating question became: Why does hunger persist in a world of plenty? That question would lead her on her life’s path and the answer she uncovered would become one of her most-quoted mantras: Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food, but a scarcity of democracy.

She shared her insights in what would evolve from a one-page handout into her 1971 book, Diet for a Small Planet. In its pages, she would help readers connect the dots between the then-emergent industrial animal agriculture system and injustice in the food system. It also gave people a tasty way to buck that system with more than 100 plant-based recipes.

Fifty years later, my mother’s book still feels so relevant. Today, a whopping 80 percent of global agricultural land is used to feed livestock while providing less than 20 percent of our calories. Compared with 1970, we’ve increased our meat intake—with the average American now eating twice as much protein as their bodies can even use. And our food system, including environmentally destructive factory farming, has an enormous climate toll as well: as much as 37 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the sector.

With a new opening chapter that shares lessons my mother has learned over these past five decades, the 50th Anniversary Edition of Diet for a Small Planet includes a fully revamped recipe section showcasing some of our favorite plant- and planet-centered chefs, including Real Food Reads stars like Yasmin Khan, Chef Sean Sherman, Bryant Terry, Mark Bittman, and Luz Calvo and Catriona Esquibel (made possible thanks to the careful curation of recipe developer Wendy Lopez).

We at Real Food Media are thrilled to share this book with all of you as the work is a reminder of the power of going deep on big questions about the world around us. We love it when those questions bring us to the delightful tastes and textures of the abundant, delicious, and diverse world of plant-centered eating.

In community and solidarity,

Anna on behalf of the Real Food Media hive

P.S. Join us at one of the book’s launch events. And don’t forget to pre-order the book and dive into the website to learn more!

Read the full issue of the Real Food Scoop
 

Photo credit: Paige Green for Diet for a Small Planet

The post Real Food Scoop | No. 47 appeared first on Real Food Media.

The agricultural industry has been scrambling to protect crops, too—for instance, Washington state’s cherry orchards—from drying out and causing major economic losses. And while this is an undeniably tragic effect of the climate crisis, the most urgent reality is: people are dying.

In Oregon and Washington state alone, 180 deaths and counting have been attributed to the recent heat wave (it’s also had a devastating impact on wildlife). Other severe health impacts from the heat are also reported: from heatstroke to breathing difficulties caused by smoke emitted from wildfires to kidney issues that worsen pre-existing conditions like asthma and heart disease.

Those most at risk? Farmworkers and migrants. Humanitarian organizations on the US-Mexico border report dozens of heat-related migrant deaths in the past month—a tragedy likely to worsen “as the world grows hotter, as countries in the Global South become more unstable, and as more folks head north.”

For the largely-immigrant agricultural workforce, very few US states offer heat protections—and dangerous heat is increasing rapidly: June 2021 was the hottest June on record in the United States and farmworkers die of heat at roughly 20 times the national rate, according to the CDC. This has prompted farmworker advocates to redouble efforts to enact state and federal heat protection legislation to guarantee adequate shade, water, and rest breaks for workers.

As another dangerous heat dome is set to descend on parts of the United States, this should be a wake up call to listen to farmworker-led organizations and enact not only heat protection, but broad labor protections, increased wages, access to healthcare, and legal status for frontline food and farm workers (not to mention halting the fossil fuel expansion and industrial ag model causing climate chaos to begin with). Do those who bring food to our tables deserve anything less?

In community and solidarity,

Tanya, Tiffani, Christina, and Anna

 
Read the full issue of the Real Food Scoop

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