Image courtesy of Edible East Bay magazine.

Just back from the Sustainable Foods Institute, a media conference that accompanies the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Cooking for Solutions events, which support the aquarium’s Seafood Watch program.

This is my second visit to this panel-based, fact-filled, food-for-thought confab, now in its 7th year exploring how the choices we make as consumers of food impact not only our own health but also the health of the land and sea.

Stories out of the conference — which features chefs, authors, restauranteurs, advocates, purveyors, scientists, and other experts in the sustainable food world — to come.

For now, I’ll leave you with a nugget from the very first panel presentation by Callum Roberts, a British marine conservation biologist and the author of the forthcoming The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea. Environmental crusader Rachel Carson published a pamphlet in 1943, “Food from the Sea,” advocating less waste of sea creatures and suggesting that people pick less threatened species for their supper.

Proving once again that everything old is new again: Almost sixty years later, sustainable seafood chefs, sellers, and activists are singing the same tune, albeit with different fish.

See for yourself in my most recent story for Edible East Bay magazine: “What’s Cooking with Sustainable Seafood?” Find cookbook recommendations, recipes, and advice on choosing sustainable seafood too.

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By any measure, American are packing on the pounds at an unprecedented rate. Photos: Courtesy HBO

HBO has a history of tackling serious American health-care crises. In recent years, the cable network has taken on addiction and Alzheimer’s to much critical acclaim. And now the network has turned its attention to another huge health problem: obesity and its enormous economic, emotional, social, and health cost on individuals, families, communities, and the country at large.

As Americans have gained weight in recent years, rates of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and other obesity-related health problems have also skyrocketed. Rates of Type 2 diabetes (once known as “adult-onset diabetes”) are soaring among kids. And this is a generation of people that may well die at a younger age than their parents, largely because of medical concerns associated with excess weight.

These facts have become commonplace to those of us who have been paying attention. Still, The Weight of the Nation: Confronting America’s Obesity Epidemic serves as a clarion call to the country to take action — and fast — to combat this pernicious, complex problem that has myriad root causes.

Despite the familiar territory, this viewer gives the filmmakers points for framing the issue in a fresh, visually compelling way through astute story selection. The first episode recounts The Bogalusa Heart Study in Louisiana — a landmark investigation which found that cardiovascular disease can begin in childhood. And in the final installment we meet a Nashville mayor trying to help his city get healthy and a Latino community in Santa Ana, Calif., whose members spend years advocating for a play space for their children.

Bigger than individuals

Some critics (including those who have yet to watch the series) worry that The Weight of the Nation only fans fear, stereotypes fat folk, and doesn’t go after the real villain in the war against weight: the food and beverage industry. But from this critic’s perspective, the program doesn’t lay shame and blame at the feet of the overweight and obese people it features. On the contrary, it presents their struggles in a sympathetic and non-judgmental light, revealing how hard the body fights weight loss despite good intentions, and how current social, economic, and government systems sabotage Americans’ attempts to stay healthy.

A shopkeeper tells of parents bringing children in for highly-processed packaged snacks for breakfast.

Yes, there is the question of personal responsibility, and the films address physical inactivity and poor diet as key contributors to this problem. But there’s also healthy discussion of factors outside an individual’s control — including genetic makeup and evolutionary biology (we’re programmed for scarcity in a time of abundance), workplace changes, fast food marketing strategies, federal farm subsidies, changes in American food culture, and the ready availability of low-cost, high-calorie food.

The series also points a finger at the global corporations that are responsible for peddling the unhealthy, highly processed foods at the crux of the problem. It’s hard to imagine commercial television, hugely dependent on advertising by the makers of such food, taking on this topic in the first place.

To produce The Weight of the Nation, HBO teamed up with some major government agencies battling this spreading epidemic — the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health — as well as the child-focused philanthropy Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and health-care giant Kaiser Permanente.

The series doesn’t sugarcoat matters, but makes it clear that obesity-related health problems will become an unprecedented crisis with dire consequences if left unchecked. They’re also incredibly expensive: At the current rate of increase, obesity-related health-care costs are projected to exceed $300 billion by 2018.

In conjunction with the series, HBO also launched a massive social media campaign to spread the word about what can be done about these health problems, and reached out to more than 40,000 community-based organizations across the country.

Take that, obesity epidemic. And yet, as John Hoffman, executive producer of the series, noted in a discussion after a recent screening in Oakland: One of the first steps that might put a serious dent in this problem would be addressing government subsidies for commodity crops, which have made ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup cheap, accessible, and ubiquitous. He suggested changing the date of the Iowa caucus — a step that would give this farm state considerably less political power. (Such creative thinking didn’t make it into the series. But it’s food for thought — as is the hormonal defect hypothesis, detailed in a Newsweek story last week, which argues that refined sugars and grains are the major players in a problem that no amount of dieting and exercise could correct.)

Students at a school in New Orleans admire their new salad bar.

For kids’ sake

People can argue whether the root problem is corporations and their lobbyists, unfair government subsidies that benefit Big Ag, or cultural forces that keep many of us eating low-nutrient, high-calorie food. But most folks can agree on this much: It’s time to help kids get healthier.

One whole hour of the four-part series is focused on children. School lunch takes a hit, as does a food and beverage industry that preys on America’s most vulnerable population. As Kelly Brownell of the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity notes in one episode, food marketing to children is “powerful, it’s pernicious, and it’s predatory.”

A highlight in the HBO effort is a half-hour film titled The Great Cafeteria Takeover, which runs on Wednesday. It chronicles the actions of a group of preteen reformers in New Orleans, known as the Rethinkers, who set about to improve lunch at their schools. Two other half-hour programs in the children’s series will debut in the fall.

Given the severity of obesity-related health problems and their rapid rise among kids, it looks like HBO won’t be the only broadcaster taking on a topic that has caught the attention of everyone from Michelle Obama to Ellen DeGeneres. The Hollywood Reporter recently announced that Laurie David, author of The Family Dinner and the producer behind An Inconvenient Truth, has teamed up with Katie Couric for a feature-length film about childhood obesity titled The Big Picture, which also promises to examine the impact of the food industry and government subsidies on children’s health. Stay tuned.

View the entire series online for free at the weighofthenation.hbo.com.

This post originally appeared on Grist and was republished on Civil Eats.

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Occupy the Farm advocates clear Gill Tract in Albany. Photo: Subconscious Collective

Stranger things have happened: Maybe six months down the track a crop of winter greens will occupy a stretch of land on San Pablo Avenue along the Berkeley-Albany border known as Gill Tract, site of a nearly two week standoff between the University of California, Berkeley and Occupy the Farm.

And everyone in this growing controversy might be happy. The saga over an often overlooked but special patch of earth began, aptly, on Earth Day. Now, both sides in this brouhaha in the normally quiet enclave of Albany appear to be making noises about having “meaningful dialogue” to facilitate a resolution that could include “shared custody” — though the situation resembles more of a spurned suitor (urban ag activists argue the university has repeatedly ignored requests to use this land for farming) than a marriage gone bad.

At stake: UC-owned land on the last parcel of Class 1 soil (considered the best for growing food) left in the East Bay that, except for a few months every summer when it’s used for corn research, lies largely vacant — aside from a proliferation of wild mustard, wind-carried trash, (often fast food wrappers), and, reportedly, the odd hypodermic needle.

Indeed, a private meeting between Cal representatives, Occupy the Farm advocates, and attorneys for both sides was slated for last Thursday night at an undisclosed location to dig into their differences and come to a compromise over the 15-acre plot, the remaining remnant of a 104-acre area that UC Berkeley bought for $400,000 in 1928. It is named for the family that once owned he land.(No settlement was reached, UC spokesman Dan Mogulof said at 9:20 am last Friday.)

Last week, Berkeleyside talked with representatives from Occupy the Farm, UC, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, about the contested property. All seemed to see the merit in using some of this land for urban farming purposes — including teaching students about soil and plant crops and feeding hungry residents in nearby Richmond or South and West Berkeley.

So far so good. How to get there, however, seems up for debate. Yesterday, as reported here, the Dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, J. Keith Gilless, who in principle is willing to engage with the Occupy the Farm folk who took over the lot April 22, stated that such a constructive dialogue could only happen if Occupy the Farm inhabitants peacefully departed their recently planted plots.

“I firmly believe that biology research and a well-organized metropolitan agriculture program could ultimately not just co-exist on the site, but benefit from interaction…” noted Gilles in a message to faculty. “It’s possible for us to achieve something wonderful together at the Gill Tract. The politics of confrontation also make it possible for us to fail completely.”

Agroecologist Miguel Altieri

Both parties accused the other side of slinging mud. Occupy the Farm organizers aren’t just a bunch of hippie agitators, argued Miguel Altieri, a professor in the college’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management. Many in the movement are former students from UC with an abiding interest in food security, social justice, and sustainable agriculture.

For more than 30 years, Altieri, an internationally-recognized expert in the science of agro-ecology, has conducted research on this land as part of his field work growing crops without external inputs. Working next to him for roughly the same period of time: Sarah Hake, an adjunct professor at UC’s College of Natural Resources and a U.S. Department of Agriculture employee, who studies basic plant biology by growing corn, which is grown on the site during the summer.

Hake noted that all her work is financed through federal grants — not multinational Big Ag companies — and none of her research involves working with genetically modified corn. Both accusations have been levied her way during this showdown over soil, she said. Despite their long history on the same land and their collegial affiliations, the two agricultural researchers keep to themselves.

Hake, who lives on an organic, family farm in West Marin known as Gospel Flat Farm, said she is empathetic to the Occupy the Farm movement’s agenda to feed more needy people. At the same time she’s concerned her research — and the work of her graduate students — won’t get started on time this summer due to their actions.

Corn researcher Sarah Hake

“In the short term these people have made their point,” said Hake, who noted that her dealings with Occupy the Farm representatives have been civil and polite. “But illegally staying on this land is the wrong tactic as a long-term measure and could very well jeopardize the kinds of programs they’d like to see implemented,” said Hake, a member of the National Academy of Sciences who maintains a small edible garden in front of her USDA office.

Meanwhile, Altieri maintained that the university has had no real interest up until the occupation of exploring using this “idle and abandoned” land for urban agricultural purposes. In an op-ed piece for the Daily Cal campus paper, Altieri and his colleague Claudia Carr argued that as a land-grant university, UC has a mandate to educate students, undertake research, and share that research with the public. An urban farm that taught undergraduate classes, conducted graduate level research, and produced food for the greater good would fulfill all of those functions.

The takeover of the tract is a wake up call, in the East Bay and beyond, of growing support for urban farming and local agriculture to feed people close to home, explained Altieri. The university administration has expressed alarm at Occupy the Farm’s tactics — ignoring property rights and illegal encampment for starters — and countered that the young farmers are trying to bulldoze their demands through without consideration for other community interests (Little League, student housing, and retail space, the three most commonly voiced alternative users for the space to date).

Gopal Dayaneni, a spokesperson for Occupy the Farm, pointed out widespread support for their cause from food justice advocates such as Raj Patel, author of Stuffed & Starved, Yoni Landeau, a leader in the campus cooperative movement, and the Ecology Center.  For the record, Dayaneni noted that while some occupiers remain on site overnight to keep the land in their control, this is not a tent-city situation akin to the recent Occupy camps that sprung up in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco.

“This land is supposed to be used for agricultural purposes and we’re just trying to ensure that that remains the case,” said Dayaneni, an Oakland resident whose wife teaches in the Berkeley public schools and whose children attend Berkeley schools. He described the protest as simply a measure to protect a precious resource.

The group has planted herbs, tomatoes, beans, leafy greens, and even corn. UC responded by cutting off the water. The nascent farmers have been keeping their veggies alive with water donations from supportive local residents. Proving, perhaps, that it’s possible to sow seeds (or at least starters) of change, one plant at a time.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside.

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[Update: 04.29.12: PBS' own ombudsman concedes that America Revealed, whose sole corporate sponsor is the Dow Chemical Company, fails to meet the broadcaster's editorial standards and policies "perception test." Find out why here. Or read more in the comments.]

Yul Kwon takes to the skies — a lot — in the opening episode of America Revealed called “Food Machine.” Photo: Courtesy of Lion Television

Let’s begin, shall we, with the first episode of America Revealed, “Food Machine,” which sets out to explore the vast, industrial way food is grown, processed, and transported in this country. The four-part series on systems kicks off with its first episode on food on April 11 (subsequent programs tackle energy, transport, and industry).

The 56-minute program is hosted by the Bay Area native Yul Kwon, a former Survivor winner, among his eclectic accomplishments. Okay, let’s get some of the others out of the way: He’s been featured in an issue of People‘s “Sexiest Man Alive.” A lawyer by training, a graduate of Stanford and Yale, he helped draft the Homeland Security bill, worked for the Federal Communications Commission, and is a now a “daredevil television host,” according to his bio. Oh, and he opened a yogurt shop in Walnut Creek, his childhood hometown.

Regardless, this reviewer has one question for the good people of programming at PBS: What were you thinking?

The episode plays like propaganda (at first I wondered if it was going to morph into mockumentary-like parody, alas no). Everything is bigger and better in this great United States of America, Lion Television, who produced the series, would have viewers believe. (The program is based on an award-winning BBC series Britain from Above, by the independent production company, which has offices in the U.S. and the UK.)

You can practically taste the awe at the sheer scale of things in this land from our brothers and sisters across the pond. America Revealed is beamed at you via bright lights, aerial footage, high-definition video, real-time satellite data — in other words, a bunch of high-tech bells and whistles.

Then there’s Kwon who takes to the skies — a lot — to illustrate, well, to illustrate what exactly? Oh, yeah, this is a vast and complex country. And: I am a sexy survivor who skydives.

During the last century, an American industrial revolution has given rise to the biggest, most productive food machine the world has ever known, the show announces. Look at our marvels of engineering magic that allow 80 percent of the state of California’s water to go directly to Central Valley farms — in an area that was previously a desert — to produce 50 percent of the entire country’s fruits, nuts, and vegetables.

Might there be anything misguided about redirecting all that precious water? Just curious. But there’s no time for controversy here, we’re simply going to tell you how it is, with a grin, and move on.

The episode also explores how the U.S. food system feeds nearly 300 million Americans every day — an impressive feat for sure — at a time when less than two percent of the population produces food for the other 98 percent. Well, hello Big Ag.

America has put nature to work, the script explains, with a maddening neutrality that made this writer want to run screaming in frustration from the screen. See how the heartland is composed of massive corn farms, where ag pilots spray more than 40 pesticides — in the bad old days there were only a few! — on crops eventually destined for supermarket shelves.

Find out about the modern invention known as genetically modified corn that fills so many of the products in grocery stores. Could any of this be detrimental to human health or farmland? Just asking. But, no time, we must keep on trucking.

Speaking of corn, discover how clever Americans are feeding corn — not a natural source of food for cattle — to animals who get pumped up supernaturally in industrial food lots, where they’re also given doses of antibiotics and growth hormones for good measure, just so consumers might enjoy a large steak. At low cost. Should we discuss whether all this is good for the animals, land, or humans? Nah. The food machine just “gives us what we want.” Next segment please.

Let’s talk “craveability.” What Americans want, the New York restaurant experts explain on America Revealed, is big servings of so-called “celebration foods” and they want ‘em all the time. Case in point the restaurant hit known as the Bloomin’ Onion — soaked in buttermilk and batter and deep fried, this monster on a plate sells like hot cakes at that embarrassment to any self-respecting Aussie known as the Outback Steakhouse. (Walkabout Soup? Alice Springs Chicken Quesadillas? Chocolate Thunder Down Under? Some marketing guru got rich making this stuff up, but I digress.)

So much of this episode is just uncritical content presented without any context, which does a disservice to viewers like you, who expect more from PBS documentaries.

What if some social studies teacher showed this to a bunch of high school kids? They’d get the impression that the American system of food production and distribution is a well-oiled machine. And that’s just so far from the truth.

To be fair, if viewers stick around to the 40-minute mark, there are a few indications that all might not be golden in The Land of Oz. (Yes, folks, the camera crew visit Kansas and there are even references to Toto in this program.) Colony collapse disorder gets some attention. Those super-size-me steak and fried onion feasts are making Americans fat and fatter we learn. Kwon revisits water in California, but only from the perspective of the expense to farmers. Don’t get me started on the crop-dusting segment.

Towards the end of the hour the show explores the subject of food deserts — places where people can’t find real food to eat, since they only have corner stores that specialize in liquor, Lottery tickets, and cigarettes. One guess where the camera crew is headed? Detroit it is.

The Motor City seems to have become the poster child for urban food renewal for visual media. Pans of vacant lots, abandoned buildings, and graffiti graphically illustrate something went horribly wrong in the home of Motown. Cut to images of urban farmers — many African American — growing fresh food for their people in a place that had little for a very long time and it’s clear that the city is undergoing a transformation.

Meet the aptly named Will Gardner, an enterprising edible entrepreneur, who sells his produce at a Detroit farmers’ market, and one of the few bright spots in an episode where a fourth-generation Midwesterner described himself not as a farmer but an “input-output manager.” Oh my.

What else not to like? The overwrought writing and soundtrack, the frenetic images that begin the episode, the host’s mug filmed from one too many planes.

Consider yourself warned.

Edith Floyd of Growing Joy Garden in Detroit. Photo: Greg Roden

Now, back to Detroit. The pilot of the series Food Forward, which showcases urban agriculture across America, reports on what’s gone down and what’s growing up in the Motor City too. The episode aired April 9.

The sight of Edith Floyd beaming on her bright orange tractor turning what were trash-strewn lots into thriving community gardens loaded with edibles is heart-warming and hopeful.

As are all the stories of urban farmers producing change in their own lives and others, such as IATP Food and Community Fellow Malik Kenyatta Yakini of the Detroit Community Food Security Network. These people don’t pretend they’re going to be able to feed an army let alone the entire country. They just want to do their part to get good food into the hands, mouths, and bellies of the people in their local area. You can’t help but root for these underdogs in this series premiere.

This writer has already covered Food Forward before — in an interview with producer Greg Roden for a previous Bay Area Bites post and in a story featuring writer Stett Holbrook for Civil Eats. Watch this program. Don’t just take this reviewer’s word for it. Food writer Sean Timberlake described the pilot as a celebration of the real food heroes around the country. Indeed.

This 13-part series needs support, just like the people it profiles, who are trying to bring about change in America’s troubled food systems, whether it’s a rooftop gardener in Brooklyn, a hydroponic grower in Milwaukee, or a self-described nugget of deliciousness dropping off boxes of freshly picked produce to neighbors in West Oakland.

This post originally appeared on KQED’s Bay Area Bites.

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Photo of Tracie McMillan by Bart Nagle

Tracie McMillan, who went undercover and worked with low-paid food and farm workers to pen The American Way of Eating, has had perhaps the wildest of rollercoaster rides since her book came out a few short weeks ago.

First came a less-than favorable review in the San Francisco Chronicle, which didn’t do much to calm those new author jitters. Then, mercifully, a glowing critique of the book, which documents her days embedded in a Detroit Walmart stocking produce, a New York Applebee’s restaurant prepping food, and California farms picking grapes, sorting peaches, and cutting garlic. Think hard, poorly-paid work and–ironically–no access to good food.

In the New York Times Dwight Garner called her “a voice the food world needs.” Other critics complimented her prose. “The best thing about this engagingly written tract is its excellent and sometimes moving first-person narrative of the author’s experiences sharing, albeit briefly and under false colors, the daily grind of workers at the bottom of the Great American Food Chain,” wrote Aram Bakshian Jr. in the Wall Street Journal. Not too shabby.

But there was no time to sit back and watch her book, which makes the case that everyone should have access to affordable, healthy grub, climb up the bestseller list. Because Rush Limbaugh decided to have a go at McMillan, who comes from a blue-collar background in Michael Moore territory near Flint, Michigan. The attack came hot on the heels of Limbaugh’s slagging off Georgetown University law student Sandra Fluke as a slut because of her testimony, intended for Congress, about the cost of birth control.

The controversial, conservative radio host with a huge following ranted that McMillan, who grew up eating unfancy food like Tuna Helper, was an overeducated authorette — young, white, and single too, as if these were shortcomings on the part of this gutsy reporter, simply because she asks in her book, which focuses on food and class: What would it take for everyone in America to eat well?

“It would never have occurred to me that Rush Limbaugh would go after me,” said McMillan, following a panel appearance at the recent Edible Institute in Santa Barbara. “Nobody would have paid any attention if he’d only talked about the book, but he just couldn’t help himself from saying something else really offensive and dismissive about women.”

Along with Nikki Henderson of People’s Grocery, McMillan was invited to discuss food justice concerns at the conference, a meeting of the publishers of the Edible Communities magazines which celebrate regional eats (locally these quarterly magazines include Edible San Francisco, Edible East Bay, and Edible Marin & Wine Country).

“Walmart controls 25% of the nation’s food supply,” McMillan told the conference. “In some parts it’s 50% or more,” she added, and explained that stocking food is a loss-leader for the corporation, but also a way to get folks into their stores. “I think it’s dangerous to trust something that’s as vital as our food supply to one massive institution. And particularly, to a private corporation whose only accountability is to its shareholders.”

Throughout it all, the 35-year-old investigative journalist with a penchant for covering poor people, has stayed on message, as she did in a rebuttal to Rush Limbaugh on The Rachel Maddow Show and in a first-person piece for The Atlantic, where she attempted to make sense of it all. “As a reporter, I take it as a point of pride that Limbaugh apparently found little he could challenge in my reporting; he does nothing to discredit the facts I found in my work,” she wrote. “And that likely explains why Limbaugh turned his critique away from my book, and aimed fire instead at me.”

As McMillan explained it, Limbaugh seemed to take umbrage at the central political point of her polemic: That both private enterprise and government have failed Americans when it comes to providing all of us with good, healthy food. “Food is not like the other things we buy. It’s not like sneakers,” she said. Everyone needs to eat, but as McMillan makes clear, many of the people who are feeding us can’t afford to.

An award-winning poverty and welfare reporter, McMillan is a current darling of the progressive food press. In the past couple of weeks she’s been featured on Civil Eats, Grist, and Salon, and her book has also caught the eye of online food sites such as Bon Appetit. (Find excerpts over at Slate, Gilt Taste, and Edible San Francisco.)

The Brooklyn-based McMillan, whom a conference colleague dubbed “scary smart,” is scheduled to speak in San Francisco this week at 18 Reasons, Omnivore Books, and CUESA.

It’s also clear she’s committed to covering a subject area on the edible beat that frequently gets overlooked: The plight of the people who grow, sell, and serve our food.
“We need to make it easier for people who want to get good food, who don’t identify with the food movement, to have that option,” said McMillan. “It’s hard to eat well when you’re earning less than minimum wage and your life is stressful.”

And she takes issue with the common assumption that people of little means are content to eat crap in this fast-food nation.

McMillan, who lived on food stamps while writing the book, which took three years from woe to go, knows firsthand just how exhausting — and demoralizing — low-paid food work can be. She wanted to nap, she said, after a long shift, not go home and tend a pot of beans on the stove. Work in the fields was back-breaking stuff, her Walmart gig included handling fruits and vegetables of questionable quality, and at Applebee’s little real cooking takes place in the kitchen. It’s enough, she implies, to make anyone lose their appetite for a nourishing meal. And it’s that hopelessness that McMillan believes needs attention. Lectures from the food elite to the food insecure to “eat more greens” just aren’t going to make a difference.

But McMillan doesn’t just lay out the problems, she also offers a framework for how our food system challenges might be solved. Enforce labor laws to protect workers, and pay them minimum wage, for starters. Address the lack of public infrastructure for food distribution. Offer adults and children access to cooking training; since kitchen literacy is a basic life skill in McMillan’s mind. “We need to think of learning to cook as a form of self-sufficiency,” she said. It’s as important as making sure people have access to affordable, healthy food.”

Such massive social change, of course, won’t happen overnight. And much of what McMillan exposes in her book is far from cheery. But like Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed) and Jessica Mitford (The American Way of Death, whose title McMillan’s book pays homage to) someone has to tell it like it is. Fortunately we have McMillan reporting back from the frontlines on the dark side of of the American way of eating.

This post originally appeared on KQED’s Bay Area Bites.

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College students enjoy homemade food and create community. Photo: Courtesy CoFED

Taking matters beyond burritos, pizza, and beer, a boot camp for college food activists from across the country kicks off today at Berkeley Student Cooperative‘s Cloyne Court Hotel. The intensive, three-day retreat is designed to help train students who want to run campus co-op food cafés and stores stocked with wholesome foods for college kids seeking something other than a steady diet of fast food.

The event, dubbed “Occupy Your Plate,” is sponsored by the year-old Cooperative Food Empowerment Directive (CoFED), a Berkeley-based program that was inspired by the launch of the Berkeley Student Food Collective (BSFC), across the street from campus on Bancroft Way. Speakers at the training include People’s Grocery executive director Nikki Henderson and cookbook author Mollie Katzen.  CoFED supporters include Cal professor and author Michael Pollan.

We spoke with CoFed co-founder and UC Berkeley graduate Yoni Landau — who was instrumental in getting the BSFC up and running and, in 2009, lead a protest to keep the Chinese fast-food chain Panda Express off campus – about what’s cooking with the CoFED crew this weekend and in 2012, which has been dubbed the International Year of Cooperatives by the United Nations.

What were some highlights from CoFED’s first year?

At the University of Seattle students secured a rent-free café space for a co-op cafe in their nutrition sciences department. At UC Santa Barbara, students received funds for a mobile-powered solar food cart. And at George Washington University in DC, CoFED training attendees won the top student enterprise grant on campus. These things happened within six months of these students being inspired to start a food co-op at a CoFED training.

Raising our first 200k, having Forbes.com list us as one of the top five ideas in food and sustainability, a Huffington Post nod, and electing the dream team board of directors was also pretty great.

Probably the most lasting highlight: when we had a one word, “how do you feel” check-out at the end of our very first workshop and the quiet kid said, “inspiregized.”

CoFED co-founder Yoni Landau. Photo: courtesy CoFED

Who is coming to the training this weekend?

College students from all over the U.S. and Canada who want to learn how to create cooperative, sustainable food enterprises will attend. They are grad students and freshmen, economics majors, geography majors, sustainable agriculture majors and nutrition sciences majors.

For the most part, they are ambitious, idealistic and won’t take no for an answer. They want to help the world around them get to a great big “yes.”

Why hold the training here in Berkeley?

If you want to learn how to play jazz, you go to New York — it’s not like that’s the only place that jazz is played. Berkeley is an incubator for the food movement.

Can you give us an update on the Berkeley Student Food Collective?

Sales have steadily grown at the new storefront towards break-even, leadership has turned over, the education and event planning is thriving.  Maybe most surprising: several fridges broke in the first month the store was open. At its November fundraising gala (and one-year anniversary for the store) over 100 people dropped 50 bucks a head to watch students sing the food co-op fundraising song (mainly a capella). They rule.

Are there other successful food co-ops on campuses around the country?

There are over two dozen examples on campuses in the US and Canada. Maryland’s Food Collective is one of our favorites. It’s been running since the ’70s, does over $700,000 in sales annually, and is a thriving part of the campus “scene.” Students can volunteer for an hour to get a local, organic lunch — it’s a low barrier of entry into the community.

How is CoFED funded?

Last year we got 115 people to commit to giving 10 or more dollars a month and it was a large part of our funding.  This year we’re going to triple that with 212 new monthly donors.

Much of the non-profit industrial complex will come down with crony capitalism. If we’re looking to create a new world, we have to build it on foundations that are aligned with our ends. Too many non-profits are stuck in foundation worship mode — it’s a death stroke if you ask me. Not that I’m not grateful, and I love spending time with these people, they’re usually pretty wonderful.

But in five years, we plan to be primarily funded by monthly supporters and the ownership shares paid by our members.

Berkeley's student co-op is across the street from campus on Bancroft Way. Photo: courtesy BSFC

What is going to happen over the weekend and what do you hope to achieve?

The magic that happens at these things is hard to pin down — young people leave changed. Part of that is the weird eye contact exercise and part of it is finally finding that community of real peers that they may never have had before. Part of it is definitely learning basic accounting and business planning. Our goal is to help students leave with the inspiration and tools to create the change they want to see on their campus in the form of a cooperative, sustainable food enterprise.

What does “Occupy Your Plate” mean to you?

By occupy, we mean to remove what we don’t like and create what we do like. Western, secular culture is the first human culture to lose its dinner-table rituals. Thousands of years of cementing cultural norms over food are basically gone with us. Bringing back gratitude, honesty and empathy to our most basic social function — eating with loved ones — is the most important thing we can do to shift our culture in a holistic way.

The occupy movement has reinspired us, or me at least. It hasn’t always been easy to make every decision based on my highest values; you want to take short cuts. My friends sleeping in the cold are reminders that you can’t take shortcuts to create a more democratic, just and sustainable world. You just have to do it.

There’ll be more on CoFED’s occupy stuff coming soon — here’s a hint though, we’re being outdone by Istanbul.

In this video Landau discusses CoFED’s mission on college campuses across the country.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside.

You might also like:

Berkeley Student Food Collective: Education & Eating
Nikki Henderson: On the Front Lines of Edible Education
Mollie Katzen: Get Cooking Author Dishes

I’ve been so busy compiling “top food stories of 2011″ lists for KQED’s Bay Area Bites and Berkeleyside, I almost forgot to compile a similar list here. So, as 2011 comes to an end let’s take a trip through the Lettuce Eat Kale archives at, arguably, the year’s best blog posts (horn toot alert).

It’s been a different kind of year here at LEK, as regular readers may have noticed. I’ve had an abundance of paid freelance work (no complaints) and thus much less time to write original pieces for my own site. So, you’ll see some crossover on my end-of-year lists this year, as most of my working days have been devoted to turning stories for other outlets, which I reprint on LEK.

I do miss penning personal posts here, and I’d like to make it a goal for 2012 to try to do more such pieces, but given my lousy track record (see exhibit A) with New Year’s resolutions, consider it an intention rather than a guarantee, okay?

Some of this year’s LEK posts spurred lots of comments, others pointed to national trends or local enterprises, some profiled well-known people and their culinary pursuits, still others focused on little-known folks who worked without fanfare on worthy food causes. Some I picked for this list simply because something about the subject or person particularly resonated with me, and I hope it does with you too.

Feel free to check out a post you may have missed, chime in on your favorite piece, or comment on those featured in this list.

And don’t be shy about letting me know what you’d like to see more (or less) of on this site in the year ahead.

I am grateful to Berkeleyside, Civil Eats, and Bay Area Bites, for sharing my stories with a wider audience on a regular basis. Thanks, as well, to other outlets who have published my work this year, including AFAR, Bay Citizen, Eating Well, Edible East Bay, California, Diablo, Great Schools, Grist, San Francisco, and Shareable.

Here’s wishing you, my loyal readers, a healthy, well-read and well-fed 2012.

Top Ten LEK Highlights of 2011 (in no particular order)

1. Covering the business of food blogging: Two posts I wrote for Bay Area Bites struck a nerve with readers — or at least other food writers. Will Write for Food, Payment Preferable generated so much attention I was worried I’d win the underpaid, underappreciated food writer of the year honor (which, seriously, would be okay if there was a big check attached.) A post later in the year, So You Want to be a Successful Food Blogger? Here’s How., annoyed some male bloggers, spoke to others, and appeared in BAB’s top 5 viewed food posts of the year. Oh, and the irony of The Huffington Post (see Will Write for Food) choosing my seafood story as its first BAB feature was not lost on me.

Artisan preserver June Taylor. Photo: Sarah Henry

2. Interviewing dozens of food folks for Berkeleyside’s Friday food column: I’ve been so fortunate to have the chance to chat with some of the most enterprising people in my hometown who work in the food and farming world, as part of my weekly food series for Berkeleyside. Highlights this year (a baker’s dozen) include Q&As with gleaner Natasha Boissier, urban farmer Kim Allen, artisan preserver June Taylor, community activist Joy Moore, culinary couple Wendy Brucker and Roscoe Skipper, jam maker Dafna Kory, cooking instructor MikeC, pasta maker Eric Sartenaer, baker Eduardo Morell, cheese purveyor Cathy Goldsmith, ghee artisan Matteo Girard Maxon, and pop-up restauranteur Nigel Jones.

3. Having a whole lot of fun with Whole Foods Parking Lot: What can I say? Sometimes a story comes your way that is just a blast to write. That’s exactly what it was like with the viral hit Whole Foods Parking Lot in two stories also for Bay Area Bites, the first of which appeared in that site’s top 5 viewed food posts of the year as well. Bonus: The fact that Dave Wittman was a super sweet interview and the story earned me cool cred with my son and his friends.

These guys had fun at a vegan speed dating event. Photo: Karine Brighten

4. Going undercover to document the perils of speed dating with a food focus: Just as well I was on assignment for Berkeleyside for this one, because social anxiety might have prevented me from attending a speed dating event for vegans and vegetarians, if it wasn’t the subject of my food column for the very next day. As you’ll see, this night was not for the faint of heart — or the hungry.

Nikki Henderson of People's Grocery. Photo: Rick Gilbert

5. Continuing coverage of the food insecure: My social justice reporting roots had me ferreting out stories about people working to get affordable, healthy food to the hungry in our communities. I penned pieces on James Berk of Mandela Marketplace in Oakland who brings produce to his people, chef Andre Green, who feeds the homeless in Berkeley, and People’s Grocery executive director Nikki Henderson, who educates people in her community and beyond about food security matters. I also stayed on the school food beat and covered the opening of the first faith-based urban farm in my area, Urban Adamah, and reminded readers on Thanksgiving to give thanks for farmworkers, the people who pick our food, often under difficult and dangerous conditions.

6. Ongoing reporting of promising food phenomenons: This year saw the launch of several food swaps, crop swaps,  food book clubs, an heirloom produce resource sharing project, and community supported aquaculture, all of which were covered here.

Talking Head David Byrne and a waiter wearing one of his designs. Photo: Christina Diaz

7. Chronicling the adventures of Alice: It was all about Alice in August. Alice Waters that is, the local food icon whose landmark restaurant Chez Panisse celebrated its 40th anniversary this year with a series of fundraisers for her edible education programs. Personal paparazzi moment: Greeting rocker David Byrne and immediately introducing him to a surprised waiter wearing a T-shirt he designed to support the Edible Schoolyard, all for a photo opportunity. Phew! (Those pics were taken by Christina Diaz, the wonderful photog I collaborated with on several occasions this year. Working with such a talented photographer was a highlight in itself.)

Scenes from the film Toast, released this year in the U.S.

8. Reviewing food films and books: There was less time for these posts this year than in 2010, but I still managed to sneak in a story about Serve Yourself author Joe Yonan and his solo suppers. I also covered an intriguing conversation between Gabrielle Hamilton, who penned the popular Blood, Bones, and Butter, and New York Times writer Kim Severson (so much left unsaid). And I had a chat with Food Rules author Michael Pollan. On the film front, I reported on screenings of the documentary Corner Store, the pilot episode of the TV series Food Forward, the couple behind The Perennial Plate online video series, and Toast, the theatrical release of British author Nigel Slater’s memoir of the same name.

Snapshots from a Wild Onion farm dinner. Photos: Heidi Gross Sandvoll

9. Turning the infrequent original post here: On rare occasion I wrote a post that just appeared here — whether it was an homage to the humble potato, a report on a visit from Michelle Obama or the U.S. Surgeon General, a reflection on the simple pleasures of a country dinner, or a reprint of a previous post (this time with awesome images of my grandmother attached) on the joys of listening and leftovers.

10. Winning an award: I was delighted, surprised, and honored to receive this year’s Karola Saekel Craib Excellence in Food Journalism award in recognition of my food writing on LEK and elsewhere. The San Francisco chapter of Les Dames d’Escoffier, an international philanthropic society of female leaders in the culinary world, established the fellowship in honor of Karola Saekel Craib, the San Francisco Chronicle reporter whose writing helped to define food journalism as we know it. Saekel Craib died earlier this year.

The $2,000 award was presented by Saekel Craib’s daughter, Anne Craib, whom I connected with over excess backyard citrus and local gleaning efforts designed to share that surplus with those in need. The award check, which came with no strings attached, was immediately put to good use: I updated my website and bought my growing teen a bigger bed. Speaking of beds, compiling this list makes me feel tired. Time to take a nap.

And that, dear readers, was the year in food over here at Lettuce Eat Kale. Let me know below if you have a favorite LEK story from 2011.

Author Michael Pollan. Photo: Fran Collin

Sometimes a spoonful of sugar does, indeed, make the medicine go down. Though you won’t find that catchphrase in the just-released hardcover edition of Food Rules, Michael Pollan‘s best-selling little eater’s manual.

Food Rules does sport the sweetly whimsical and witty illustrations of well-known artist Maira Kalman, however. And the new book also boasts 19 new rules — many gleaned from eaters around the country that Pollan wished he had thought of and included the first time around.

Take two is again full of commonsense kitchen wisdom such as If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re probably not hungry; No labels on the table; and When you eat real food, you don’t need rules.

The takeaway message: food need not be complicated, and the act of eating is as much about pleasure and communion as it is about nutrition and health. In other words: lighten up a little and enjoy your food.

In case you’ve been living under a compost pile, Pollan is a champion of small-scale, sustainable farming, humanely-raised livestock, and access to real food for all. A foe of what he calls highly-processed, edible food-like substances, Pollan’s food philosophy is famously simple: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

He is the author of five previous books including the popular In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and Botany of Desire, and he writes regularly about food matters for The New York Times. Pollan is also the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley and co-instructor of the Chez Panisse Foundation funded Edible Education 101 at Cal this fall.

Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world last year and everyone from students and grandmas to Oprah and the Obamas listen up when the mild-mannered man speaks out about corporate food, Big Ag, school food, factory farming, eating culture, and food safety.

We talked, briefly, following an Edible Education lecture given by former Berkeley School Lunch Lady Ann Cooper, whom Pollan introduced before taking her to dinner at — where else? — Chez Panisse. And we spoke again a few days later, at length, via phone.

Pollan, 56, dedicates his latest work to his mother, former New York Magazine style columnist Corky Pollan, “who always knew butter is better for you than margarine.” He lives in North Berkeley with his wife, the artist Judith Belzer. His formerly picky eater son, Isaac, recently dispatched to Wesleyan, misses family meals.

Why Food Rules Two?

I wanted to work on a more visual version of Food Rules to reach more people and continue the conversation that the first edition started. My wife and I saw an exhibit of Maira Kalman’s work at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and Judith suggested we collaborate.

When you look at Maira’s work — like a painting of a Snickers bar on a pink ground or a framed collection of onion rings — it often manages to be poignant, funny, and sad, all at the same time.

Eating is important to her but she doesn’t take food too seriously and is not politically correct about it in the least. We’re already neurotic enough about our eating; I wanted this book to be fun while it covered some serious ground.

Can you give us some insider insights into Edible Education 101?

It’s been an interesting experience for me personally because I’ve not taught undergraduates before, though I should note my co-instructor Nikki Henderson is carrying most of the load as I’m technically on leave. I’ve found the students terrific; they ask questions that are sharp but well phrased and polite. In a community meeting with corporate food people you might expect to hear the Berkeley hiss, but there’s been none of that. They’re an engaged and impressive group.

We’ve learned things too. We might have had a more effective dialogue in the case of the corporate food lecture, which included Wal-Mart, if it hadn’t been webcast. That had an inhibiting effect on the conversation. I’m also used to three-hour classes; these 90-minute ones go by really fast. I think they work best when we have just one guest so we can really drill down and expound on the issues. At this stage of the semester I wouldn’t be sorry if one of our guests had to cancel just so we had some time for reviewing and contextualizing the material with the students.

And, it has to be said, what a gift this is from the Chez Panisse Foundation to the community as well as the students. The list of speakers and the subjects covered is impressive.

Has interest in the food movement peaked in the popular culture?

It’s hard to know where we are right now but I don’t think so. I remember when I was trying to finish The Omnivore’s Dilemma, published in 2006, I thought I was coming to the subject a little late. It took me forever to finish that book. I do feel a sense of urgency to keep writing about food. We’re just beginning to see the impact of our food choices on health care and insurance costs — obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are soaring — and we need to keep the pressure on the government and corporations for change. If anything, I only see the conversation deepening, and that’s especially encouraging given the economic situation since 2008.

Do you ever want to write about something other than food?

I haven’t always written about food but I find it’s a good place to talk about other things like the environment, the economy, health, culture, and politics. Food is a very big tent as subjects go. That’s why it’s held my interest.

How — and what — do you cook?

I make simple food. I grill more nights than I don’t and my wife and I typically cook together. We work well in the kitchen together. One of us makes the main and the other the sides. We’re fortunate to work from home so we’re able to make dishes that require slow cooking like braises and soups.

Some of our readers view you as an elitist foodie and roll their eyes at such stories as your New York Times Magazine piece, The 36-Hour Dinner Party. Is that unfair?

I reject that characterization while I’m sensitive to the fact that not everybody has access to good food. I appreciate that food and class are intimately tied: that story is set in Napa, which implies a lot of leisure in certain circles. But I don’t think Americans should be afraid of aestheticism; as a culture some times we can have an aversion to pleasure.

To eat healthily in this country — by which I mean consuming food that contributes both to the eater’s health as well as to the health of the environment — costs more than it does to eat poorly. That situation is a public policy problem. We need farm policies that will correct this imbalance, so that healthy calories can compete with unhealthy ones.

There is no question that there is an elite strand within the food movement, but a lot of social change movements in this country — I’m thinking of abolitionists, women’s suffrage, and civil rights as examples — have been started by the affluent because they have the leisure and resources to do so.

#76: Place a Bouquet of Flowers on the Table and Everything Will Taste Twice as Good. Illustration: Copyright (c) Maira Kalman 2011. Reprinted with permission from The Penguin Press from FOOD RULES by Michael Pollan.

As a recognized leader in the food movement how do you handle the rock-star status?

A sense of humor helps, so does remembering that this type of attention is fleeting. And regardless of what people say about my books, the next morning I still have to get up and face the page and come up with sentences I like. All that other stuff, doesn’t help with writing, which can be incredibly hard.

What’s the subject of your next book?

It’s about the transformation of food through cooking methods such as baking, fermentation, and cooking with liquids or heat. So it focuses on the science of cooking, the classical elements; I’ve been doing research about fire, for instance. It should be out in early 2013.

What gives you hope on the food front?

I see movement happening all around the country, like grass-fed beef in supermarkets and young people taking up farming. I’m asked to speak in places like Troy, New York, Cleveland, and Lubbock, Texas, that’s new. They aren’t your typical food towns. People in their 20s are as engaged with this issue as their parents, whether it’s for their health, the environment, or both. I have a lot of faith that as consumers we can change things by voting with our forks.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside and was republished on Civil Eats.

You might also like:

Michael Pollan Talks Food Rules at the Ferry Building
Nikki Henderson: On the Frontlines of Edible Education
Reassurance for Parents of Picky Eaters

Food Day, October 24th, highlights the good, bad, and ugly of the way we consume food in this country.

Can Food Day, on October 24th, do for the growing food movement what Earth Day did for the nascent environmental movement back in 1970?

The organizers, the Center for Science in the Public Interest in D.C., certainly hope so. A national, grassroots campaign, Food Day is designed to celebrate what we eat while drawing attention to the need to overhaul this country’s food system from farm to fork. In this way it is similar to Earth Day which sparked widespread interest in the fragile nature of our planet.

Events planned for Monday, including in Berkeley and around the Bay Area, will highlight the good, bad, and ugly of the way we consume food in this country.

Simply put, how we grow, transport, process, market, and eat is not sustainable for the environment or our health, said Michael F. Jacobson, executive director of CSPI and the creator of Food Day in a recent piece for The Atlantic. Dietary diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks are rising at alarming rates. Industrially raised meat sucks up energy, pollutes the land and water, and is cruel to beast and worker alike.

Even in places like Berkeley where local, seasonal, organic, sustainable, and fresh food is available in abundance, too many people lack access to good grub and/or go hungry or malnourished.We are a nation, to quote UC Berkeley visiting scholar Raj Patel, of the “stuffed and starved.”

Food Day, whose advisory board includes Michael Pollan and Alice Waters, local heavy hitters on the edible revolution front, seeks to mobilize citizens to step up efforts to reform what’s wrong with our food system (hello Farm Bill). The campaign has six admirable goals:

1. Reduce diet-related disease by promoting healthy food.

2. Support sustainable farms and cut subsidies to agribusiness.

3. Expand access to food and end hunger.

4. Protect the environment and animals by reforming factory farms.

5. Promote health by curbing junk-food marketing to kids.

6. Obtain fair pay and safe conditions for food and farm workers.

The Berkeley City Council voted to proclaim October 24th Food Day, and to adopt the Seattle Farm Bill Principles. This is a set of six guiding principles that could serve as a framework for policy discussions around the renewal in 2012 of the federal Farm Bill, the primary piece of legislation that determines the nation’s food and agriculture policy.

“Sometimes it takes action at the local level to help to create change at the federal level,” said Ecology Center Executive Director Martin Bourque. “This may be a case — as with the Kyoto Protocol and climate change — where cities lead the way with innovative government strategies. We need a Food Bill not a Farm Bill.”

On Monday, the Ecology Center will mark Food Day with a tour of local women-owned farms for its members, as part of a series of activities in honor of what many hope will become an annual event.

Food Day activities will get major play in and around the UC Berkeley campus on Monday, said Kristen Rasmussen, a workplace wellness dietician for faculty and staff at Cal who serves as the university’s Food Day coordinator. Highlights include a BYO Lunch Picnic. (Read the full list of events.)

Speakers include Food Day co-organizer and UC alum Lilia Smelkova and Appetite for Profit author Michele Simon. “This is an excellent opportunity to talk about what’s wrong with our broken food system,” said Simon. “But we don’t want to do a lot of complaining. We also want to talk about solutions and what individuals can do to improve food for themselves and their communities, both locally and nationally. The time is ripe to organize around this issue.”

The Berkeley Student Food Collective plans on hosting a sandwich-making event during the day (11 am-4 pm) at its storefront at 2440 Bancroft across from campus, and in the evening will co-host Edible Occupation 101: Careers in Sustainable Food and Agriculture, a panel discussion featuring Sprouts Cooking Club founder Karen Rogers, local farmer Esperanza Pallana, and urban agriculture planner Nathan McClintock.

Every Monday the student stand The Local sells fresh organic produce on campus. Photo: Courtesy The Local

The Local, the student-run organic produce stand that is on campus every Monday (Upper Sproul Plaza, 10 am-2 pm) will be open for business as usual and will also distribute free samples of Cheese Board wholegrain bread.

“Though the food movement is growing, many still see it as exclusive,” said The Local’s Mickey Davis, a 21-year-old senior in the Nutrition Sciences Department. ”Not everyone is aware of the peril our food system is in, and a dangerous number of people do not understand the severity of the situation we are in health-wise, environmentally, or economically, and how the food system is closely related to that. It is important to invest time, celebration, and awareness to these issues on Food Day, to help spread the word to others who may otherwise not know.”

While Berkeley has much to celebrate on Food Day, there’s still plenty of work ahead on the food front, even in this food-focused and food-forward town.

“We can take pride in being early adopters as far as farmers’ markets and CSAs, and for being leaders on school food reform, and on the forefront of community gardens and urban agriculture,” said Bourque at the Ecology Center. “But even in Berkeley, with its very advanced alternative food system, we have large numbers of people dealing with diet-related illnesses and huge disparities still when it comes to access and affordability. We need to keep fighting to make good food available to every person in our community.”

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside. You might also like:

Berkeley Student Food Collective: Education Through Eating
Sprouts Cooking Club: Growing the Next Generation of Chefs
Author Raj Patel’s Food Revolution: From Crisps to Salad
Alice Waters’ 40 Year Campaign for Good Food
Michael Pollan Talks Food Rules at Ferry Building
Berkeley Farmers’ Market Man, Ben Feldman
Cheese Board Collective: 40 Years in the Gourmet Ghetto

Nikki Henderson strives to keep it real in a new course at UC Berkeley this fall called Edible Education 101. Photo: Rick Gilbert

People seem to have an insatiable appetite for food matters right now. Case in point: the public tickets for Edible Education 101 at UC Berkeley were snapped up in 12 minutes on Monday, according to a tweet from Alice Waters, who played a key role in bringing the curriculum to the university.

The 13-week course, co-taught by J-school professor and The Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan and Nikki Henderson, the executive director of People’s Grocery, a food justice organization in West Oakland, will examine the rise and future of the food movement. Student enrollment for the one-semester course also filled within minutes after it was listed online, as Berkeleyside reported earlier this month.

Why such interest? The class offers undergrads, grad students, and regular folk a chance to critique current food systems and dissect food politics with Pollan, Henderson, and Waters, as well as a slew of other big names in the food movement, including Marion Nestle and Eric Schlosser. The course kicks off with a lecture by Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini on August 30. The class also coincides with the 40th anniversary celebration of Chez Panisse restaurant.

“UC Berkeley is my alma mater so I feel a real connection to the institution,” Waters explained to Berkeleyside earlier this week. “The opportunity arose to develop this course and we pulled this program together quickly. We also wanted to show our support for the university and public education.” Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation (soon to be renamed The Edible Schoolyard Project) is footing the bill for the fall semester course to the tune of $30,000.

“I hope that students will have a stronger grasp of the concept that what we eat has consequences for our health, culture and the environment,” Waters said, adding that she hopes that the course will continue beyond the fall.

If Waters is the iconic idealist and Pollan the affable academic, Henderson is the unapologetic activist. She’s also young (26), African-American, and spends her work days at a nonprofit devoted to dealing with food security issues for low-income people of color.

Prior to coming to People’s Grocery 18 months ago, she worked for Slow Food USA and Green for All, the environmental organization co-founded by Van Jones. Not surprisingly, Henderson, who grew up with seven older foster brothers and two blood brothers in L.A., brings a different perspective and sensibility to the Berkeley bourgeois food scene.

Berkeleyside recently met Henderson for lunch — in Oakland — to learn more about why she decided to come to the table with Waters and Pollan.

Members of the People's Grocery team meet with Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

How did your involvement with this course come about?

Well, the Chez Panisse Foundation came to me and asked me if I’d be interested in doing it. This class was important to me because it’s an opportunity to have a real exploration of the issues of race, power, class and privilege in relation to food, which is something we do every day at People’s Grocery. When Chez Panisse approached me I told them I was only interested in teaching the course if we hit those bases and a good third of the curriculum does that.

It was also important for me that people speak for themselves. The whole class could have been taught by people who have written books about other people’s experiences. But we’ll have practitioners like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers [immigrant farm workers who have brought about historic changes for tomato farmers in Florida], for instance, who will come and tell their stories themselves. It’s important for the students to experience that, because one of the dynamics of not having privilege is that you don’t get to tell your own story. Those with means and access get to spend their time telling your story.

I wanted to ground the syllabus in the struggle for food justice and food security. There wouldn’t need to be a movement if there weren’t deep injustices happening and divisions within the movement. This college course explores the complexity of these issues within the context of the food movement.

How involved have Waters and Pollan been in shaping the curriculum?

Alice Waters really laid the groundwork for this to happen and her message is so consistent that you know what she’s going to say, so she just sort of gave me her marching orders and made a lot of suggestions, but then she just leaves it in your hands.

Michael wanted to make sure that the course was academically rigorous and that it involved deep, critical thought. He wanted the mix of practitioners and academics. He didn’t want it to be just a good conversation about the food movement but that there was a component that explored the complex question: what is there to do now?

They both made it clear since the beginning that they wanted me to feel it was very much my course too. And they’ve been generous with their time and expertise. Michael’s been coaching me through putting the lecture series together. One piece of advice he gave me: don’t have the same format every week or people will fall asleep.

Can you tell us a little about your personal connection to food?

We grew up eating very healthy food. We ate home-cooked meals that consistently included a grain, a protein, and a vegetable, usually something like brown rice, baked chicken, and steamed broccoli. My mom was a kind of ’70s hippie, though I don’t think she’d classify herself as such, she is vegetarian and has a deep interest in health and nutrition, and she passed on those good habits to her children.

My great aunt and uncle were diabetic amputees. My aunt has the disease and my grandfather, who is no longer alive, almost lost his feet to the condition. With this exposure to diet-related diseases it hit me early on: what you eat is not something to play with.

What can young people interested in the food movement learn from those who have worked on this cause for decades?

There’s a lot of context that younger people need, of what’s actually happened so far in the food movement, like the current middle-class mainstream food movement is very much centered in an older struggle for food security and it’s important to have that context. You need to be grounded in the history. I’ve only been in the food movement the past three or four years and I’m well aware of how much there is to learn about what’s happened historically, so we in this younger generation can be truly effective in bringing about change. I want to soak up every bit of that in this course.

Is this the right time for this class?

It should have happened two years ago because the window of opportunity is closing. The mass media switches from one thing to the next pretty quickly and food has been hot for the last two years and it’s probably only going to be hot for another year or two and then it’s going to fade into the background. I’m going to do everything I can to move some things along while I can.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside and was republished on Civil Eats,  The Bay Citizen, and SFGate.

You might also like:

Alice Waters’ 40 Year Campaign for Good Food
Cultivating Controversy: In Defense of an Edible Education
Michael Pollan Talks Food Rules in San Francisco
First Lady, Food Deserts, and New Fund for Hungry
Author Raj Patel’s Food Revolution: From Chips to Salad