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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The world has never used as many pesticides as it does today, and 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 a 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. 

The US edition of the Pesticide Atlas is one of five published around the world as part of the Germany-based Heinrich Boell Foundation’s series. Other editions include Germany, EU, Kenya, Italy, and Nigeria.

New chapters in the US edition include:

• A snapshot of pesticide use in the United States and the connection between pesticide production, use, and the climate crisis from Margaret Reeves and Asha Sharma of Pesticide Action Network North America;

• A look at how the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has failed to properly regulate pesticides and how this has led to the heavy use of dangerous pesticides, and subsequent devastation to biodiversity from Nathan Donley and Lori Ann Burd of the Center for Biological Diversity;
• An overview of pesticide industry PR tactics to deter and delay action on pesticides from US Edition editor, Anna Lappé, and journalist and co-founder of US Right to Know Stacy Malkan;
• A story of dedicated organizing for common sense pesticide regulation on the Hawaiian islands from Executive Director of Hawaii Alliance for Progressive Action, Anne Frederick.

“Sixty years after Rachel Carson warned us of the terrible toll of overuse of pesticides here and around the world, the United States continues to use more pesticides than anywhere else on the planet, including some of the most hazardous pesticides banned in other countries. With rising rates of cancer, infertility, and metabolic disorders alongside a biodiversity crisis, taking action on pesticides has never been more important. This report arms us all with the facts, and inspiration, to do so.” — Anna Lappé, editor of the Pesticide Atlas-US Edition and author, funder, and sustainable food advocate   

“With a billion pounds of pesticides used each year in the US, the American public reasonably expects that these chemicals made to kill living things are tightly regulated by the US Environmental Protection Agency. But unfortunately that’s not the case. As a result, Big Ag in the US relies on pesticides that many other nations have banned because of their severe dangers. Tragically, that regulatory failure causes the greatest harm to farmworkers and their children and our nation’s most endangered wildlife, particularly pollinators.” — Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity.   

On April 26, 2023 at 10:30amPT/1:30pmET join Anna Lappé in conversation with contributors to the US Edition of the Pesticide Atlas in a webinar to share key highlights from the Atlas and their implications. The conversation will center on how we can collectively better understand the connections between pesticide use and public health, the climate crisis, and biodiversity as well as dive deeper into how to understand the policy barriers and opportunities for action on pesticides here in the United States.  Register for the free webinar. 

Contact Info

Anna Lappé

Editor, Pesticide Atlas-US Edition

Food Sovereignty Fund Director, Panta Rhea Foundation

Founder, Strategic Advisor, Real Food Media

anna@realfoodmedia.org 

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We are pleased to announce a new report out this week from Stacy Malkan and US Right to Know, with support from Anna Lappé and Kendra Klein, PhD, of Friends of the Earth. 

Based on a comprehensive analysis of documents released in litigation against Monsanto—and many more obtained in a years-long investigation by US Right to Know—Merchants of Poison: How Monsanto Sold the World on a Toxic Pesticide tells the tale of pesticide industry disinformation, including science denial techniques, attacks on scientists, astroturf strategies, online domination of industry messaging, and other spin tactics. 

Since our founding at Real Food Media, we’ve tried to help expose the ways corporations bend the truth to line their pockets, not protect the public good. This report is another piece of that work, showing how pesticide companies—like Big Oil and Big Tobacco—use spin tactics to shape the story about food and farming, pushing the twin messages that pesticides are safe and that we need them to feed the world.

We hope this report adds to the multifaceted, growing effort to expose industry PR tactics and promote the public good. 

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Concerned about what this transition means for the future of food, scientists, farmers, and eaters have sought to protect fruits, grains, and vegetables they consider endangered. They have organized high-tech genebanks and heritage seed swaps. They have combed fields for ancient landraces and sought farmers growing Indigenous varieties. Behind this widespread concern for the loss of plant diversity lies another extinction narrative that concerns the survival of farmers themselves, a story that is often obscured by urgent calls to collect and preserve. Endangered Maize draws on the rich history of corn in Mexico and the United States to uncover this hidden narrative and show how it shaped the conservation strategies adopted by scientists, states, and citizens.

In Endangered Maize, historian Helen Anne Curry investigates more than a hundred years of agriculture and conservation practices to understand the tasks that farmers and researchers have considered essential to maintaining crop diversity. Through the contours of efforts to preserve diversity in one of the world’s most important crops, Curry reveals how those who sought to protect native, traditional, and heritage crops forged their methods around the expectation that social, political, and economic transformations would eliminate diverse communities and cultures. In this fascinating study of how cultural narratives shape science, Curry argues for new understandings of endangerment and alternative strategies to protect and preserve crop diversity.

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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

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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

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It’s time to take action on every sector, including food.

As I wrote in Diet for a Hot Planet, food systems are at once climate casualties, culprits—and a key to the cure. The food system is responsible for an estimated third of greenhouse gas emissions, particularly a significant source of nitrous oxide and methane emissions, gases with many times the heat trapping qualities of carbon dioxide. Research in the intervening years has only underscored the need to rethink food systems if we are to get the climate crisis under control. As a recent study exposed, even if we got everything right in terms of limiting emissions from other sectors; we ignore food at our peril. But how? Here are some of our ideas!  

As our Twitter feed fills with grief and alarm about the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report, we can heed the call of labor organizer Joe Hill: “Don’t Mourn, Organize.” We might amend this sentiment in an era of climate grief amidst an acute pandemic: we can mourn and organize.

1. Decarbonize the Food System, Fund Agroecology: All around the world public and private funders are stepping up to support the research, advocacy, and learning necessary to unlink food production from an addition to energy-intensive synthetic fertilizer, petrochemicals, and unhealthy monocultures. Knitted together under the umbrella of “agroecology,” you can find these efforts in every corner of the world. Learn more at www.agrecologyfund.org or watch this short video with voices of agroecology from around the world. 
2. Take on the Petrochemicals in Food: Some of the biggest players in the food system are agrochemical giants like Bayer and Syngenta. Pushing antiquated and toxic pesticides, their products are destroying biodiversity and contributing to the climate crisis. Join Pesticide Action Network North America to be part of the movement of people around the world calling for the abolition of petrochemicals on our farms. 
3. Target Agribusiness: Big Oil companies deserve our wrath, for sure. It’s clear that these companies have known for decades that their practices would lead us off this climate cliff, but agribusiness companies too need to feel the force of our fury. Companies like ADM and Cargill have been driving deforestation in climate-critical regions for decades. Learn more about taking on these food giants at RAN. Industrial meat giants, like Tyosno and JBS, are also deadly contributors to the climate crisis—not to mention animal welfare and human rights abuses. Learn more about factory farming and the environment at Foodprint.org. 
4. Focus on the Financing. These companies are only able to keep operating because they’ve got the immense reserves of the world’s banking and insurance industries behind them. For years advocacy groups have been working to undermine this financial support. Rainforest Action Network, where I’ve served on the board for 10+ years, is just one of these groups. Learn more about Banking on Climate Chaos here.  
5. Support Farmers Doing it Right: Thankfully, there are countless organizations and thousands of farmers who are embracing a way of farming that’s good for people and planet. Here are some of the fabulous groups doing this essential work: SAAFON, Practical Farmers of Iowa, Black Farmer Fund, Soul Fire Farm, and so many more. 
6. Eat with the Climate at Heart: On September 21st, my mother’s new edition of her 1971 classic, Diet for a Small Planet, will be published. A celebration of planet- and plant-centered cuisine and a call to arms that if you care about fixing food you have to engage in democracy, the book will hopefully inspire you to think differently and (filled with 85 recipes) to cook!  
7. Bust the Myth that We Need Industrial Agriculture to Feed the World: An oldie but a goodie, our Food MythBusters video takes on this entrenched myth.  

The post The IPCC report on Climate is Here. The News is Bad. But We Knew That. 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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