The vegan diet used to be associated only with eccentric hippies and tofu-loving activists who shop at co-ops and live on compounds. We’ve come a long way since then. Now, fine-dining restaurants like Eleven Madison Park cater to chic upscale clientele with a plant-based menu, and Impossible Whoppers are available at Burger King. But can plant-based food keep its historical anti-capitalist energies if it goes mainstream? And does it need to?

In No Meat Required, author Alicia Kennedy chronicles the fascinating history of plant-based eating in the United States, from the early experiments in tempeh production undertaken by the Farm commune in the 70s to the vegan punk cafes and anarchist zines of the 90s to the chefs and food writers seeking to decolonize vegetarian food today.

Many people become vegans because they are concerned about the role capitalist food systems play in climate change, inequality, white supremacy, and environmental and cultural degradation. But a world where Walmart sells frozen vegan pizzas and non-dairy pints of ice cream are available at gas stations – raises distinct questions about the meanings and goals of plant-based eating.

Kennedy—a vegetarian, former vegan, and once-proprietor of a vegan bakery—understands how to present this history with sympathy, knowledge, and humor. No Meat Required brings much-needed depth and context to our understanding of vegan and vegetarian cuisine, and makes a passionate argument for retaining its radical heart.

The post No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating appeared first on Real Food Media.

In our latest toolkit, Taking On Big Soda, we focus on sugar—especially sugary drinks—and the people-led initiatives taking on Big Soda and promoting public health. In part due to sugary drinks, preventable diet-related illnesses are on the rise in the United States and around the world. To reverse these trends means tackling the root cause of these illnesses. Spoiler alert: it’s not you and me and our lack of willpower to resist Coke or Doritos. No, the drivers of this crisis are the corporations pushing the processed foods and sugary drinks that undermine our health—and the lack of leadership among our elected officials to hold them accountable.

The solution? People power. One example is communities stepping up to pass sugary drinks taxes. In 2013, there were no US cities with a tax on soda. Today, despite serious and aggressive pushback from industry, nearly 9 million Americans—including residents of Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco, and Philadelphia—have measures in place to curb sugar consumption and invest revenues in community wellbeing thanks to successful soda tax campaigns.

While tackling corporate power, we also need to reclaim and rebuild community-based food systems that are not only healthier, but also socially just and ecologically sound as well as honor our cultures. In this toolkit, we offer resources (films, discussion guides, recipes, and more!) to help you learn more and spark conversations about how to give Big Soda the boot and grow healthy communities.

Get the Taking On Big Soda toolkit 

The post Take On Big Soda and Grow Healthy Communities with our New Toolkit appeared first on Real Food Media.

Extortion. That’s what people called it—and that’s certainly what it was. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and other beverage giants just held California hostage and won.

The American Beverage Association, whose largest contributors include those two companies, raised most of the $8 million dollars
backing a November ballot measure that would have required a two-thirds majority vote to pass any local tax increase, including those for public services from parks to firefighters—you name it. As a threat, the backers of the ballot measure said they would
pull it only if legislators signed a bill to ban all local sugary drink taxes in the state until 2031. The pressure was on. One legislator characterized voting for a soda tax ban as a “Sophie’s choice.” Another said he and his colleagues were voting for it “with a gun to our head.”

This all happened fast, but industry deploying a preemption policy, like this one, to thwart democracy is nothing new. Around
the state, organizers who had been working on possible sugary drink tax initiatives woke up Sunday morning, June 24th, to the news of the impending deal. Legislators had until Thursday to vote. By Thursday evening, statewide ballot initiatives would be finalized.

At the legislative hearing on Thursday morning, more than two dozen expressed outrage at Big Soda’s attempt to bully legislators. But the testimony by young people from Stockton, California—a city of more than 300,000 people, 50 miles away from the Capitol—was particularly moving. (The foundation where one of us works had supported some of this organizing work).

“I come to you heartbroken,” said one organizer. Just one of the more than two dozen—including many high school students—who had been working for more than a year and a half to get a soda tax on the ballot in Stockton. They were weeks away from doing so.

“Our goal was to educate our community in order to make a difference,” another said. She described seeing kids—young
kids—affected by sugary drinks, including her own sister who had to have all her teeth pulled at age four because her parents hadn’t known how harmful sugary drinks were.

Like the communities the youth organizers live in, overwhelmingly, communities of color around the country are directly targeted
as consumers by soda companies. Because of this, people of color and low-income communities experience preventable health disparities at a largely disproportionate rate. The soda companies have a strategy. This is not simply an issue of individual choice or
miseducation, it is an issue of predatory marketing and an abundance of access to products that cause harm.

As Big Soda has done with similar preemption policies around the country, the industry spun this bill as a ban on “grocery taxes,” the same tactic used to oppose the passing of sugary beverage taxes on Oakland’s 2016 ballot. Said one young person, “Sodas are not groceries. Groceries are foods you need. You do not need soda.” Another organizer made it clear: “People want to change; they want to be better. We were giving them solutions. The American Beverage Association is taking away our right to offer these solutions. They’re taking away our voices and our right to vote.”

This backroom dealing can sound like a far-fetched political scandal until you hear young people whose lives have been directly
affected by the target marketing of Big Soda and the misinformation spread by it.

Several years ago, Kyle Pfister, a public health advocate, wrote about internal Coca-Cola documents leaked to DCLeaks that revealed the company’s global political strategies to kill what the company
had identified as a major threat: Soda taxes.

This play by Big Soda is a sign they were leaving nothing to chance—certainly not leaving the choice for soda taxes to us voters. Soda corporations are throwing millions of dollars at these preemption policies with two more pending in Oregon and Washington, to protect their bottom line. They, too, see the data: Sugary drink taxes are proving to work. In the places where they have passed, soda consumption has dropped, water consumption is up, and revenue dollars are flowing toward valuable health and education programs particularly to communities most affected by sugary drinks. In Philadelphia, the soda tax is underwriting universal pre-K. In Oakland, the city has collected more than $8 million dollars in tax revenue since July 2017. Here, soda taxes will fund clean water in public schools and parks, support year-round meal service in the City’s head start programming, and support community led activities to educate and create healthy alternatives for those who are impacted by diet-related diseases connected to the overconsumption of sugar.

Preemption policies, like the one just pushed by the American Beverage Association and signed by Governor Brown on Thursday, are a time-tested corporate strategy to make a run-around democracy, prioritizing profits over people’s health. Big Tobacco has used them, so has the gun lobby. With millions of people’s
lives impacted around the country by diabetes, heart disease, and other illnesses linked to sugary drink consumption, it’s time we see Big Soda as we have come to see Big Tobacco: As a major threat to public health and—as we saw this week in California—to democracy as well.

Originally published in the East Bay Express

Photo by NeONBRAND/ Unsplash

The post Big Soda Is The New Big Tobacco appeared first on Real Food Media.

“Sohn maash” is the flavors in our fingertips. It is the love and cooking talent that Korean mothers and grandmothers mix into their handmade foods. For Chef Roy Choi, food means love. It also means culture, not only of Korea where he was born, but the many cultures that make up the streets of Los Angeles, where he was raised. So remixing food from the streets, just like good music—and serving it up from a truck—is true to L.A. food culture. People smiled and talked as they waited in line. Won’t you join him as he makes good food smiles?

The post Chef Roy Choi and The Street Food Remix appeared first on Real Food Media.

Eleven billion dollars. That’s the total tally of the national school-food program in the United States and just a small fraction of what public institutions in this country spend every year in taxpayer dollars on food—including food for county jails, hospitals, city parks, and more. Public food procurement is clearly big business. But we also believe it can also be a force for good. On May 16, Cook County—home to Chicago and one of the largest counties in the country—joined a growing movement of public institutions when it adopted a procurement program that does just that: promotes public health, community well-being, animal welfare, social justice, and environmental protection.

It may seem like common sense that public institutions should promote the public good, but when it comes to food purchasing that’s not usually the case. All around the country, in local governments and public-school districts, officials pore over the minutiae of contracts for bread rolls and chicken patties, pizzas and salad greens. The dominant decision-making criteria? The cheapest bid.

In 2011, community leaders in Los Angeles started asking what it would take to transform that decision making so that city leadership could make food purchases based on shared principles, not just price tags. The result is the Good Food Purchasing Program, passed first in Los Angeles in 2012 and now in four cities nationwide. The Good Food Purchasing Program views purchases through five values: public health, local economic development, animal welfare, worker wellbeing, and the environment. The program can also be used, as it will in Cook County, to incentivize public institutions to support under-capitalized businesses—that is, those that have been historically shut out of tax incentives and access to technical and financial support. The idea is to help to correct long-standing inequities in the food system.

In the cities where it has passed, we’ve seen real impact. In Los Angeles alone, with support from the Center for Good Food Purchasing and other partners, program implementation catalyzed 220 new, good union jobs in the local food economy and a $70 million multiyear poultry contract with a producer committed to keeping antibiotics out of its feed. Following adoption of the program, the school district cut meat purchases by 28 percent, reducing water use by 1 billion gallons a year among other benefits. And the district’s largest food distributor rethought the source of its wheat, choosing to buy from California farmers for the first time and milling it in the heart of the city. Now more than 80 percent of all bread products served in LA schools come from California-grown, sustainably produced wheat.

Inspired by this impact, the Chicago Food Policy Action Council and a coalition of over 40 organizations have led the way in Cook County. As a first step, the groups helped press—and win—the adoption of the program in the City of Chicago in 2017 transforming the way food is purchased by its public schools as well as its parks department. Now, with leadership from Cook County Board Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, the county is following suit, making it the first in the nation to adopt the Good Food Purchasing Program. The Chicago Food Policy Action Council estimates that the county spends $20.6 million on food annually across its agencies.

In Cook County, enthusiasm for the program came in large part from those businesses, workers, consumers, and farmers that have long been marginalized in the food system. Under the program, the County will incentivize contracts with minority- and women-owned businesses, help to preserve urban farmland with community ownership, and transition publicly owned vacant lots to minority-owned social enterprises and public land trusts. Says the Chicago Food Policy Action Council’s Rodger Cooley, “The Good Food Purchasing Program has the power to transform the food system in every region where it is implemented as it will in Cook County where we are creating a model for food procurement that supports frontline communities most impacted by existing inequities.”

This all sounds good, you might be thinking, but these are tax dollars at work; shouldn’t public institutions entrusted to use money wisely make the most economical choice? Well, here’s the rub. Cheap food isn’t always so cheap. Consider the costs in the United States of the illnesses and deaths linked to unhealthy food (blights that fall mostly on low-income communities and communities of color, where millions live either without access to good food or in food environments with too much unhealthy food). Health-care costs from diagnosed Type 2 diabetes total a staggering $327 billion a year—a cost we all share.

Or consider the price to taxpayers when private-sector employers fail to pay living wages. Around the country, food-sector workers are among the most underpaid and exploited and are twice as likely as workers in any other sector to rely on government assistance to put food on their table. With the Good Food Purchasing Program, good food means good jobs.

But let’s also be clear: While the program incurs a range of community benefits, it doesn’t always cost more. Analysis of the Good Food Purchasing Program has found that food costs don’t necessarily go up after implementation. In Oakland, for instance, the school district’s choice to buy better and, yes, more expensive meat—increasing the amount of 100 percent grass-fed beef and antibiotic-free chicken purchases, for instance—was coupled with a reduction in meat purchases. The result? The more expensive choice was actually cost neutral and the customers—those finicky kids—reported high rates of satisfaction.

Cook County’s groundbreaking decision to adopt the program is just the latest sign of the momentum nationwide for tapping the enormous buying power of public institutions for the public good. Another 13 cities across the country—including Austin and New York, Cincinnati and Washington, DC—are actively pursuing the program. If all pass it, the program will reshape a whopping $880 million worth of food purchases annually.

Cook County’s adoption of the Good Food Purchasing Program is a huge leap forward in the quest of good food for all. Who’s next?

Originally published in The Nation

Photo by Mike Blake / Reuters

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What’s for lunch? If it’s Thursday and you’re a part of Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), it’s a locally-sourced, #CaliforniaThursdays meal.

Focused on dishing out healthier meals, decreasing their carbon footprint, and increasing access to good food for all students, OUSD Nutrition Services is changing school meals for the better. Nutrition Services Director Jennifer LeBarre’s thoughtful and innovative leadership has made OUSD a rising star of the Good Food Purchasing Program–a program that helps institutions source food that supports five values: nutrition, local economies, animal welfare, valued workforce, and environmental sustainability.

Recently, Jennifer led Oakland Food Policy Council members on a tour of kitchens. We started with a brief history of the national school lunch program and a tour of Prescott Elementary’s kitchen—where a small but mighty crew prepare a whopping 20,000 meals a day for distribution to other schools in the district. Next stop was the site of The Center—a central kitchen, farm, and educational center. The Center, set to open in 2020, will be the site of innovative programming which will provide training and education to everyone from elementary-aged children to adults with special needs. This site will even have its own fruit & vegetable and meat processing rooms, which will decrease reliance on frozen, pre-packaged and processed items.

Our last stop was Madison Academy in East Oakland where the smell of chocolate chip cookies greeted us all the way out in the parking lot. I got to enjoy my first school lunch in many years (no need to get specific here), with a #CaliforniaThursday lunch: mixed vegetables, the sweetest apple I’ve had in a while, and no-antibiotics-ever BBQ chicken. It definitely surpassed my expectations.  

Providing over 40,000 healthy meals every day is a challenge when you have to balance budgetary constraints, differences in taste and perception, outdated infrastructure, and limited capacity. But OUSD, in partnership with the Oakland Food Policy Council and the Good Food Purchasing Program, is pushing boundaries, making changes, and engaging the community. Community engagement has been particularly strong thanks to the Oakland Food Policy Council, which has been leading the charge for good food for all in Oakland, from partnering with the school district for better school food, to organizing the community to fight back against Big Soda.

We celebrate the work of the Oakland Food Policy Council, food policy councils all over the world, and #goodfoodchampions like Jennifer LeBarre and the folks at OUSD and the Good Food Purchasing Program who have been pushing the conversation forward.

The post Good Food Purchasing Program in Action: A Tour of Oakland Unified School District’s Kitchens appeared first on Real Food Media.

Anna Lappé is a national bestselling author and a founding principal of the Small Planet Institute and Small Planet Fund. Anna’s most recent book is Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, named by Booklist and Kirkus as one of the best environmental book’s of the year. She is the co-author of Hope’s Edge, which chronicles social movements fighting hunger around the world, and Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen, with seasonal menus by chef Bryant Terry. A popular educator about sustainable food and farming, Anna has participated in hundreds of events, from hosting community dinners to delivering university keynotes to emceeing a food-focused fundraiser at Sotheby’s. She is currently the director of the Real Food Media Project, a new series of myth-busting videos about the real story of our food. 

The post TEDxManhattan: Marketing food to children | Anna Lappé appeared first on Real Food Media.

Scary? No doubt about it. But together, we can work to curb this predatory marketing and stand up for real food.

We believe that marketing targeting to children and teenagers is a public health crisis. Watch our movies and dig into our Food MythBusters resources and citations in our script to understand why.

• Script and citations: English | Español
• Screening Guide and companion materials

The post Food MythBusters: The Myth of Choice | How Junk Food Marketers Target Our Kids appeared first on Real Food Media.

Industrial agriculture and processed food corporations are flooding supermarket shelves with seemingly endless choice. But this abundance of packaged products and sugary drinks is deceiving. In reality, we lack real choice: the choice for fresh, local, and far more nutritious foods.

Around the world, roughly 2 billion people are overweight, consuming too many calories from unhealthy sources driving a global public health crisis. One of the biggest culprits? Sugar and sugary drinks pushed by a handful of big corporations, with Coca-Cola and PepsiCo in the lead. These brands, which many have dubbed Big Soda, spend billions every year on a range of marketing and political tactics—including advertising, lobbying, and free trade agreements—to expand their reach in the United States and around the world.

These tactics are reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s decades-long fight against regulation and public education about the dangers of smoking. Like Big Tobacco, Big Soda has a vested interest in increasing sugary drink consumption despite the tragic and costly public health consequences. Like the tobacco industry, Big Soda markets aggressively, especially to young people and communities of color.

The good news? People power everywhere is taking on Big Soda. Strategies like soda tax campaigns, spearheaded by the communities most affected by health disparities, are spreading and making big wins. As part of a range of community-based strategies to reclaim our food systems, soda taxes have been successful in reducing consumption and generating revenues to support public health.

The resources in this toolkit will help you organize a fun and engaging film-based event, shine a light on Big Soda’s tactics, explore people-powered strategies, and offer ideas to counter Big Soda’s influence in our lives.

Photo by Andy Schultz/Flickr

The post Organizing Toolkit: Taking on Big Soda appeared first on Real Food Media.

At Real Food Media, we work to debunk some of the key food myths pushed by food and agribusiness corporations, which face an existential threat from the growing interest in, and demand for, greater sustainability and fairness in food.

We produced short films to take on two of these myths. We encourage you to watch them, share them, and dig deeper. The transcript and citations for each video are included, along with a companion reading guide to learn more about the issues. Since we first launched these videos, they have been seen by more than 1 million people online and have been used in classrooms, workshops, conferences, and more.

Myth: We need industrial agriculture to feed the world.

In this video we take on the persistent myth that we can’t feed the world without toxic chemicals or genetically engineered seeds. And, we showcase the power of sustainable agriculture to address the root causes of hunger in a world of plenty.

 Downloads:

• Script and citations: English | Español
• Screening Guide and companion reading materials

Myth: We want the junk food and packaged products filling our shelves.

In this video we expose the billions at work to influence what we desire, what we buy, and the particularly pernicious marketing of soda and junk food to children and teens.

 Downloads:

• Script and citations: English | Español

The post Food Mythbusters appeared first on Real Food Media.