The Good Food Purchasing Program from Real Food Media on Vimeo.

Every year, public institutions across the United States—from school districts to city governments—spend $150 billion dollars on food with virtually no oversight over, or awareness of, under what conditions these foods were produced. Without accountability tools in place, companies that routinely cut corners along the supply chain continue to receive substantial public contracts at the expense of community health, worker wellbeing, animal welfare, and the environment.

The lack of transparency in the public procurement process and food supply chains denies communities the right to ensure shared community values can help shape how their own taxpayer dollars are spent, which is particularly important for low-income students for whom the majority of their meals come from school. Until institutions and the communities they serve are armed with better information about their supply chains, business as usual will continue.

First adopted by the City of Los Angeles and the LA Unified School District in 2012, the Good Food Purchasing Program provides a metric-based, flexible framework and set of tools that creates greater transparency and accountability in public food procurement and encourages large public institutions to direct their buying power toward five core values—local economies, environmental sustainability, valued workforce, nutritional health, and animal welfare.

Following adoption in Los Angeles, the Center for Good Food Purchasing was created to help respond to interest around the country, providing cities support for evaluation and implementation. In the last two years, the Center has partnered with three other national organizations—Food Chain Workers Alliance, the HEAL Food Alliance, and us at Real Food Media—to respond to interest in the Program from across the country. Thanks to all of us working together, and with partners on the ground, the Program has passed in public institutions Chicago, Oakland, and San Francisco. Today, the Program influences over $300 million in taxpayer dollars to improve the food system and increase access to healthier school meals for millions of students.

At Real Food Media, we work with partners across the country and local coalitions to build public support for Program adoption. We work closely with local coalitions at various stages of campaign development to tailor resources that address local political context and communications priorities. We also help tell the story of the local, and national, impact of the Program.

Learn more about how to bring the Good Food Purchasing Program to your city at GoodFoodCities.org and follow the Program on Facebook and Twitter!

“Interest in the Good Food Purchasing Program has spread like wildfire, sparking efforts in Oakland, San Francisco, Austin, Chicago, the Twin Cities, New York, Cincinnati, and beyond. The scale of this expansion is nothing short of inspiring: the collective nationwide reach of these initiatives is soon expected to pass over 2 million meals every day.”

—Ricardo Salvador, Union of Concerned Scientists

Header photo by USDA

The post Good Food Purchasing Program appeared first on Real Food Media.

The post Storify: The Good Food Purchasing Program Celebrates #FoodDayEveryDay appeared first on Real Food Media.

How often do you really stop to think about chicken?

In this month’s Real Food Reads feature, award-winning journalist and critically-acclaimed author (Superbug; Beating Back the Devil) Maryn McKenna brings us the eye-opening story of this frequently overlooked food. In Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats, McKenna chronicles how the use of antibiotics in industrial farming turned chicken into an industrial commodity—and a threat to public health—as she shows us the way to safer, healthier eating for ourselves and our children.

The post Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats appeared first on Real Food Media.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Originally published in Earth Island Journal

The post Good Food Rising appeared first on Real Food Media.

by Fiona Ruddy

In Soft Slaughter, director Allison Milligan takes viewers behind the scenes into the world of humane slaughter. Butcher Mary Lake, of Vermont’s The Royal Butcher, narrates a literal and philosophical tour of the slaughterhouse floor and the growing movement to produce “ethical meat.”

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, over 88% of hogs in the United States are slaughtered in industrial-scale operations with livestock raised in confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). These factory farms house animals in inhumanely tight quarters, causing stress and disease among herds and flocks. Their overuse of antibiotics breeds dangerous resistance; they cause water and air pollution; the list goes on.

But all around the country, bucking incentives from the USDA, farmers and butchers are embracing more humane and ecologically sound methods of animal husbandry, even slaughter.

Read (and watch) the full story here.

This piece is part of a series in partnership with Food & Wine Magazine.

Soft Slaughter | 2015 Real Food Media Contest Winner from Real Food Media on Vimeo.

The post Food & Wine Blog: One Farmer’s Story of Discovering Humane Livestock Slaughter appeared first on Real Food Media.