Column In a locavore diet, where your types of flour come from is just as important as your produce.

Today, people are focused more than ever on the origin of their foods. Maybe you subscribe to a CSA, maybe you try to shop at a weekly farmers market, maybe you have started paying closer attention to labels at the grocery store; in an effort to vote with our forks, many of us have begun to make a concerted effort to think about what we buy and where it comes from.

Yet in this formula for eating more locally, there’s one ingredient that often gets zero attention: flour.

In the gluten-free era, flour has gotten a bad reputation. But we’re also in a revival of artisan baking, home bakers, and professional bakers all with a newfound love of the craft of turning flour and water into something beautiful. On one hand, we have the vilification of all types of flour, and on the other, the embrace of bread. But regardless of where you stand on the issue of flour, there’s no denying that when it comes  local foods, flour is rarely part of the discussion. Until now.

Flour, much like sugar and milk, has for long been a staple of the North American and European pantry. It is the base of many a recipe, and today it’s easy to think of flour as something that just comes in a bag, as opposed to what it starts out as: grain in a field.

However, thanks to the work of a variety of initiatives to reignite an interest in local grains, we are finally starting to talk about flour in a different way, one that focuses not only on where it’s grown, but one that addresses the nutritional qualities that are so often lost in the industrial form of flour that most of us are used to.

Let’s start with the basics of wheat flour.

Traditional white flour that we find at the supermarket is made to last; in order to sell, it has to have a shelf life. And to give it that shelf life, we have to zap it of essentially any nutritional value. When a whole grain is ground, oils are released, and in turn, a freshly ground flour will quickly go rancid. Today’s industrial milling process involves removing the the bran and the germ (the nutritious part of a grain) and separating out the endosperm. This part is then milled into the fine white powder that we know as all-purpose white flour, and while it has an extended shelf life, has a depleted its nutritional value. That’s why you find “enriched flour” – since all of the nutrients are stripped the first time around, they are added back in. A pretty backwards way of doing things.

Part of the local grain movement is to not only grow and source more local products, but to revive an interest in healthier and more diverse grains. “Heritage and other experimental wheat may sometimes have lower yields but higher market value in that it has flavor, character, more genetic biodiversity or even more to the point, that it would allow us to control our seed resources,” writes Nan Kohler on the Grist & Toll blog, Greater Los Angeles’ first urban mill in over 100 years.

While all-purpose flour has been the go-to baking ingredient, there are all kinds of types of flour that our industrial form of flour production has lead us to forget about; rye, spelt, corn, barley, teff, rice, buckwheat… the list goes on. And expanding our grain repertoire could be good for us. As Anna Roth wrote in SF Weekly in a story on locally grown and milled grains, “many in the field believe that whole, organically grown, stone-milled grains are better for the body than processed, hybridized, conventionally grown ones.”

Not only that, but the taste is completely different; compare a freshly ground grain, full of oils and nutrients, and potentially of heritage variety, with an industrially grown wheat that’s produced for quantity, not flavor, and then on top of it, milled to extend shelf life and you have two very different products. That’s what has made bakers excited; branch out from all-purpose flour and there is a whole world of new potential in terms of taste.

But creating a market for locally milled flour involves both milling, grain growing and an interest from customers; the three go hand in hand. This is of course nothing new, if anything, it’s simply a return to how things were done before. That’s not just good for independent farmers, that’s good for our soil, our health and the taste of the baked items on the table in front of us.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Jen R

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Column What if the solution to our health and environmental problems was a matter of just making more delicious food?

“Why eat one donut when I can eat all six in the package?”

I was having a tongue-in-cheek conversation about the standard American mindset to food with a couple of friends, who both happen to love donuts.

Instead of savoring one quality donut, many opt for the cheap, $2.99 box of six industrial donuts. Because six is always better than one, right? And so we stuff ourselves, because in reality, those donuts are disgusting, and after we eat one, we’ve failed to be satiated, so we eat another, and another, in the hopes that just another bite will leave us feeling the way we want to feel.

You can replace donuts with essentially any food product, and the result is the same: in the Standard American Diet quality and taste are our last qualifiers for what food we buy and eat.

This is problematic, an approach to food that’s not only harmful for us as humans, but our environment as well.

There is a growing group of researchers now starting to make a link between taste and overeating, the idea that the more delicious food that we eat, the less likely we are to overindulge. For example, in 2009, researchers in the Netherlands studied participant’s cravings after eating certain foods, in this case, a portion of cottage cheese and a portion of chocolate mousse. Cravings were significantly less after eating the chocolate mousse than the cottage cheese, leading to the conclusion that people were less likely to overeat if they ate foods that they liked, as opposed to more boring, neutral foods.

It has also been shown that the more we eat of a food, the less we like it. That is to say, if you eat one piece of chocolate cake, you’ll be thrilled. You’ll go back for another one. But with the second piece you will be less satisfied than with the first, and so on and so on.

I don’t mean “delicious food” in the sense of just baked goods. I mean “delicious” in all forms of food. The carrots that you pull from the ground, rinse off, bite into and are so surprised by the crunchy sweetness. The loaf of bread, pulled freshly from the oven, and made with a natural starter. The roasted butternut squash that almost tastes like eating a dessert. The lentil soup on a cold winter day that has been simmering on your stove. Food that blows you away because of its simplicity. Food that is delicious because all of the ingredients that went into it were natural, and good to begin with; no need for additives and preservatives. Food that is real food.

If we focused on quality, rather than quantity, there’s a chance that not only would the food on our plate taste better, but we’d be healthier too. The same goes for the environment.

This is well-discussed in famed-chef Dan Barber’s book “The Third Plate” (if you haven’t read this yet, hop to). As a chef, when focused on good quality produce, he begins to connect the dots between tasty fruits and vegetables and how they were grown. “When we taste something truly delicious, something that is persistent, it is most likely originated from well-mineralized, biologically rich soils,” writes Barber. He continues a few pages later, writing, “chemical farming – and bad organic farming – actually kills soil by starving its complex and riotous community of anything good to eat.”

In other words, our entire system of agribusiness has always operated to reduce costs and increase output, yet it has all come at a serious costs to our health and the environment. Taste has never been a part of the equation in this system – or it’s only part of the equation when food companies, working with base ingredients that have no taste to begin with, have to add a variety of fats, sugars, and salts to get any taste into their product, leaving us with grocery shelves worth of unhealthy food (and even then, I am sure no one is going to argue that it’s “delicious food”). It’s because taste isn’t part of the equation from the ground up that this system has depleted the earth, while keeping our waistlines growing.

As Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills, a company that grows and mills organic heirloom grains, is quoted in Barber’s book, “food and cuisine have to be an important part of our culture, and not just something that fuels the culture in one way. Food as fuel is a dangerous concept. That’s where we are right now – food as fuel. It’s why nothing tastes good, and why our farming systems are collapsing.”

Taste equals diversity, and when we focus on diversity (which means first and foremost, focusing on the soil), instead of one where only a few crops reign, we are better for it, both for our own health and for that of the environment. So think of food not just as fuel, but as the chance to indulge in something amazing. When you cook with good ingredients, or buy foods made from good ingredients, ingredients that are produced with respect for the environment, you need less of them to be happy with your meal. And isn’t it nice that focusing on something like taste can have such positive ramifications?

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Susy Morris

The post If We Ate More Delicious Food, Would Everyone Be Healthier? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnOctober is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and with it comes a slew of advertising opportunities for big companies. It’s called: pinkwashing.

Pinkwashing is a term coined by Breast Cancer Action. According to the group’s definition, a pinkwasher is “a company or organization that claims to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink ribbon product, but at the same time produces, manufactures and/or sells products that are linked to the disease.”

Over the years, during the month of October, companies from Proctor & Gamble to KFC jump on board in the name of breast cancer awareness (I mean, in the name of their bottom line, because when there’s a chance to support a cause, there’s also a chance to make money) failing to point out that often the products whose percentage of proceeds goes to breast cancer awareness are full of the chemicals that cause the cancer in the first place.

Much of this discussion is focused around beauty products – like providing breast cancer care packages with beauty products laden with chemicals known to cause cancer – but there are a wide variety of food brands who get on board as well. Not to mention companies who develop and use pesticides to grow our food in the first place.

Did you know that the primary corporate sponsor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month is Astra Zeneca? Yes, the pharmaceutical company. The same pharmaceutical company who makes a profit off of its cancer treatments (the sales of their top selling breast cancer drug Tamoxifen comes in at $573 million per year worldwide), as well as parenting a successful agrochemical business, developing and selling carcinogenic pesticides.

As the Breast Cancer Fund notes, “Modern food-production methods have opened major avenues of exposure to environmental carcinogens and endocrine-disrupting compounds. Pesticides sprayed on crops, antibiotics used on poultry, and hormones given to cattle expose consumers involuntarily to contaminants that become part of our bodies. Some of these exposures may increase breast cancer risk.”

Some examples of pink food products you can get your hands on this year: pink pizzas, brownies with pink frosting, pink pancakes, a buttery chardonnay or just get completely decked out in pink Hard Rock Cafe gear and then down a Hard Rock Cafe energy drink. And for those food companies who don’t participate, consumers fail to pull back the layers on what these kind of marketing campaigns really mean, that people rally together to try to get chains like Taco Bell to launch a pink taco.

The food and cancer connection isn’t a new discussion; what we eat matters. Obesity for example has been shown to increase the risk of premenopausal breast cancer by 70 percent, which make the sales of things like breast cancer awareness pizzas and energy drinks so disgusting.

But as Breast Cancer Fund points out “tips to ‘fight cancer’ often list reducing fat intake as a crucial step, but don’t mention that one reason this may reduce your risk is because high-fat, animal based foods are a main route of exposure to cancer-causing organochlorine pesticides and dioxin.”  In other words, there are a lot of chemicals used in modern day food production that are known carcinogens, and whether or not we are watching what we eat, we may still be ingesting them.

Some of the big agricultural players and their favorite pesticides have been linked to increased in risk for cancer, like Monsanto’s Round-Up and Syngenta’s Atrazine (which is so bad the European Union banned it in 2005). You will be very happy to know that, yes, Monsanto does take part in Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and even sends volunteers to Race for the Cure. Pesticides and pinkwashing are a match made in heaven.

Considering the severity of breast cancer – today 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime – this is about more than just eating well. It is about holding companies accountable for putting chemicals into our food system. Because while huge amounts of money have poured into breast cancer awareness and research, these companies haven’t done anything to actually tackle the problem; breast cancer cases are projected to increase by 50 percent by 2030. Huge corporations make money off of the pesticides and herbicides that cause cancer, and then pharmaceutical companies reap the benefits of more and more breast cancer patients needing their treatments. It’s a vicious cycle.

“Pinkwashing has become a central component of the breast cancer industry: a web of relationships and financial arrangements between corporations that cause cancer, companies making billions off diagnosis and treatment, nonprofits seeking to support patients or even to cure cancer, and public relations agencies that divert attention from the root causes of disease,” wrote Breast Cancer Action Executive Director Karuna Jaggar in an op-ed piece last year.

Money for research into finding a cure for breast cancer is essential. Just ask any breast cancer survivor. But as we have seen, often that money is tainted, and if we want to eliminate breast cancer in the first place then we need to do more than just treat it.

We need to regulate (and in many cases, eliminate) the use of chemicals, pesticides and herbicides. As a friend of mine recently put it, “thanks to anyone who has supported cancer research – my friends and I appreciate it. We are living proof that it really does help people. Pinkwashing, however, does not.”

This Breast Cancer Awareness Month, think about what’s on your plate, and think about what companies are doing something to change the status quo of how our food is produced. Boycott the ones who aren’t. Sign a petition calling for change. Support a local organic farmer, and thank them for not putting pesticides into our watersheds.

That’s where the real change is going to come from, not from a plate of pink cupcakes.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: DixieBelleCupcakeCafe

The post Beware of Pinkwashing in Your Food: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

Column A new lawsuit charges three major companies with depending on child labor to produce their chocolate. 

If we want to, it is easy for us to have a direct relationship with many of the ingredients in our modern diet. You can commit to eating more locally and in season, engaging with the farmer who grew your carrots, potatoes, and squash. If you want to know how they were produced, you can ask.

But there are other components of our diets that are not so easy to get to the source, because the source is on the other side of the world. Products like coffee and chocolate have become such staples in most of our homes, that we rarely give them much thought. However, it’s the fact that they do originate from so far away that they deserve our attention.

Chocolate production, for example, is tainted with problems, and considering that Americans eat on average 11 pounds of it a year, what chocolate we choose to buy does in fact have an impact on the state of the industry.

Human trafficking and child labor are both things that the chocolate industry have been charged with before, but the latest dispute over chocolate companies’ abusive labor practices is playing out in California. Three class action lawsuits have been brought against the big chocolate players – Nestlé, Mars, and Hershey – for their use of child labor to produce some of the world’s best-selling chocolate brands. The case is actually brought on behalf of private consumers, who said they would not have purchased the chocolate had they known it had been produced using child labor.

The law firm representing the plaintiffs holds that the companies have broken Californian law by not disclosing that suppliers in Côte d’Ivoire depend on child labor to make their cocoa. The lawsuit alleges that in 2014 over 1.1 million children were involved in the most common worst forms of child labor (as defined by the standards of the International Labor Organization). Despite the fact that all of the companies have acknowledged that child labor is an issue that needs addressing, those levels are up 39 percent from 2008/2009, showing how meaningless those intentions can sometimes be.

While awareness for these issues have increased over the past few years, thanks to the work of organizations like Anti-Slavery, so has global demand for chocolate, only exacerbating the problem. In a report published earlier this year by Tulane University, there were 2.1 million child laborers working in cocoa production in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, an increase of 21 percent over five years. “Relative to the size of the challenge, the pace and scale of change is insufficient,” Nick Weatherill, executive director of International Cocoa Initiative, told  in response to the Tulane study.

There are many solutions to this complex problem, including providing better educational opportunities for children in these countries, as well as better pay for the adult workers. What can you as a consumer do? Just like you think about where those carrots, potatoes, and squash come from, think about where that chocolate comes from too.

There are many chocolate brands out there committed to ethical and sustainable sourcing practices, like Theo Chocolate, Dandelion Chocolate, and Green & Black’s. But as a consumer, when identifying what you should and shouldn’t by, it’s also important to know what labels mean and represent; labels like “organic” only address environmental and processing requirements, without calculating in social impacts.

So you have to start thinking about chocolate from a more all-around approach, one that includes sustainable environmental practices and sustainable social ones as well. Do your research, and know what brands are out there committing to ethical practices. The organization Slave Free Chocolate maintains a list of brands that are committed to sourcing slavery-free cocoa. At the store, look for the shortest supply chain possible – “bean to bar.” This chocolate will come at a price, but it’s a fair price.

Think $8 a chocolate bar is expensive? That’s because you are paying the true cost of chocolate. Those $1 chocolate bars? Full of externalized costs, including child labor. And that is not a sweet deal.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Christian Guthier

The post Is Your Chocolate’s Main Ingredient Child Labor? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnIf you eat at a restaurant or fast food chain, you won’t get served a pill of antibiotics with your meal, but big chain restaurants across the U.S. are full of products that are dependent on antibiotics to get them from the factory farm to your table.

We have taken a look at the issue of antibiotic use before. In the U.S., 70 to 80 percent of the antibiotics go to factory farms, and most of the antibiotic use is preventative, called “non-therapeutic” because the conditions at many factory farms are so bad that giving animals antibiotics is simply a way to ensure animals don’t get sick.

Why should we worry if there are antibiotics in our food? First and foremost, because scientists around the globe are warning us about the severe threat of antibiotic resistant bacteria, what some refer to as the issue of “superbugs.”  For World Health Day in 2011, the World Health Organization took on the issue, noting “in the absence of urgent corrective and protective actions, the world is heading towards a post-antibiotic era, in which many common infections will no longer have a cure and, once again, kill unabated.” But that was 2011 and things haven’t really improved.In November, the WHO will hold the first ever World Antibiotic Awareness Week in the hopes of raising awareness and tackling the issue.

There is also a growing group of scientists who are talking about the link between antibiotic use and obesity, the most recent a study focused on children which showed a connection between antibiotics and childhood obesity.

Knowing that so many of the antibiotics in the U.S. go to factory farms, part of solving the problem is putting pressure on not only the farms that are antibiotic dependent, but also the restaurants and food brands that use their products.

Last week Friends of the Earth published a new report that gives a grim look at restaurants and the use of antibiotics in their meat supply. Of the top 25 American restaurant chains, all but five received a failing grade.

There is some movement, but it’s slow. As you can see from the graphic, the majority of the restaurant chains are right at the bottom. Panera and Chipotle are the only two who publicly state that the majority of their meat and poultry served is raised without antibiotics. McDonald’s has established policies limiting antibiotic use in the chicken that they use, along with an implementation timeline. Other chains like many at the bottom have absolutely no policies in place at all.

Given the ramifications of the overuse of antibiotics, the lack of policies at these huge food chains is significant.

“In order to protect the health and wellbeing of humans and animals alike, the way we perceive animals and how we raise them for food has to shift dramatically,” wrote Cameron Harsh in a blog for Center for Food Safety.

The report is a call to action to consumers to challenge these companies to change their policies. While action from the FDA is crucial in applying stricter guidelines on antibiotic use, we as consumers also need to challenge more restaurants and food chains to rethink and change what products they buy. Want to take action immediately? Sign FOE’s letter calling on Subway to change its policies.

We do have power; we just have to use it.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Mike Mozart

The post Antibiotics are Everywhere in American Fast Food: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnIs food porn helping or hurting us?

Look around you. There’s food everywhere. Glamorized food. Sexy food. Food that makes you drool. Food that speaks to some primal, internal part of you.

There’s food on the Internet, on the television, there’s probably a photo of a perfectly cooked dish of exotic ingredients popping up on your Instagram feed as you read this. Or at the very least, some latte art.

But with all this attention on food (I’d go so far as to say, obsession with food), we’re still spending less time in the kitchen. We’re still eating poorly. There are still millions of people who go hungry.

I enjoyed reading a recent interview with Alton Brown, the Food Network’s famous chef personality in which he spoke to the spiritual act of serving food. “There is more to the act of sharing food with one another than simply saying ‘Here is some food.’ I do believe that there is a spiritual act in breaking bread and sitting down and being thankful. The pornification of food takes away the importance of sharing it with one another and instead focuses only on the food.”

This idea of “pornification” stuck with me. It’s true: in today’s modern world we objectify food like never before. We choose food porn over actual food. We remove food from its natural habitat – a farm, a table – and make it as sexy and appealing as we possibly can. We joke about the absurdity of putting cakes on rosemary nests and cropping out people to make the food look more visually appealing, and yet we all still keep doing it, perpetuating an image of food that has absolutely nothing to do with what food is for: nourishing us.

While part of the global population is busy watching celebrity chef shows, buying the latest cookbook that they will never use, and debating on what garnish would be more cutting edge – kale or cilantro? – most of the rest of the world can’t even put enough food on the table. Even in our own country we deal with a severe hunger problem. And if they’re not hungry, then there’s the other end of the scale: obesity. Our food makes us sick, and with our conventional methods, we destroy the world in making it.

Maybe our objectification of food, and the proliferation of food porn, is actually at the root of some of our food-related problems.

I choose the word “objectification” on purpose. The ramifications of objectifying food are of course not the same as our culture’s severe objectification of women. But there are certainly similarities to be found.

The objectification of women exacerbates an unrealistic expectation of what a woman should look like.

The objectification of women leads to eating disorders.

The objectification of women helps with huge corporate profit; why else do you see so much advertisement with scantily clad women?

Unrealistic expectations, eating disorders, corporate profit… sound like anything the food world deals with on a regular basis?

The more we objectify food the more detached from it we become. We are detached from the process of growing food, and the work that growing requires, and from the people who grow our food, knowing little, if anything about their everyday livelihoods. We are detached from what food actually looks like; we throw away a perfectly good peach because it isn’t “perfect” looking. We are detached from the real flavor of food. We are detached from seasons.

We’re also detached from the work that is required to prepare food. It’s easy to look at a stylized photo of food. That you can do in a matter of seconds. Put a home-cooked meal on the table? That’s going to take a bit longer.

We have this sexy image of food that’s entirely removed from reality, and entirely unattainable. Sort of like the body image that we as women are told we should try to achieve. Women are photoshopped and so is food. And if it’s not photoshopped, it at least got a fancy outfit of twine and herb sprigs to wear.

We get rid of the dirty, messy stuff. The real stuff. We see a mixing bowl and a spotless counter and nothing else. We see a serving bowl in the middle of a table, maybe a hand reaching casually for it, but no people to eat it, no community. And have you ever seen anyone sharing a great photo of compost? No, but compost is an amazing and beautiful thing. Maybe if we got a little more used to seeing it we could better deal with our problem of food waste.

Brown is absolutely right. There is more to food than just the food. It is about the process, it is about the time put into producing the food and the time put into cooking it. It is about gathering together, food the building block of community.

The more that we objectify food the more neurotic about eating we become. We subscribe to diets that require fancy tools. We choose one ingredient over another, simply because it has a better marketing campaign behind it. We carefully pick and choose what we want for dinner, forgetting that it’s the season and proximity that really should be dictating what’s on our plates.

Talking about food and promoting healthy habits is a part of helping to change the system–to ensure that everyone has access to sustainably produced, real food. But we could all do with a little less objectification.

Related on EcoSalon

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Neil Conway

The post What’s So Wrong With Food Porn? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnIt’s easy to focus only on the fruits and vegetables that make their way to our plate. They are after all what we touch, smell and taste. But there’s an essential component to sustainable food that is often forgotten, perhaps because for most of us, it’s something we rarely interact with: soil.

Soil is essential. It’s full of life. There is a complex web of organisms beneath our feet that is responsible for keeping us alive. And we simply destroy it.

Conventional agriculture has certainly played a big roll in the demise of soil health. Think back to the 1930s and America’s Dust Bowl. The environmental disaster that ruined farmland, and left millions homeless (by the time it was over, 2.4 million people had left the Plains), was the result of years of unsustainable agricultural practices, farmers essentially working the soil to death. In its wake the government worked to put policies in place that would prevent such a disaster in the future, and created the Soil Erosion Service, which would later become the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

But while the Dust Bowl is a history lesson, our mismanagement of soil is an ongoing, current problem, and it is one with severe consequences. According to the Organic Consumers Association, “Without protecting and regenerating the soil on our four billion acres of cultivated farmland, 14 billion acres of pasture and rangeland, and 10 billion acres of forest land, it will be impossible to feed the world, keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, or halt the loss of biodiversity.”

Soil as it turns out, is at the root of everything, and it’s the key to a laundry list of our modern day ailments. If we respect the soil, and start to implement agricultural policies that work on regenerating the earth beneath us, instead of extracting what we need and destroying the rest, we can begin to find a sustainable path forward. And that is a path that’s not just about food.  “Regenerative agriculture provides answers to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the health crisis, the climate crisis and the crisis of democracy,” said activist and author Vandana Shiva.

Even the United Nations is calling for a radical shift in how we do agriculture. A 2013 report (titled “Wake Up Before Its Too Late”) from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development called for a “paradigm shift… from conventional, monoculture-based and high external-input-dependent industrial production towards mosaics of sustainable, regenerative production systems that also considerably improve the productivity of small-scale farmers.”

With better agricultural practices that benefit the earth — which can involve leaving land untilled, and planting cover crops to increase the amount of organic matter in soil — we can reduce or even eliminate the use for pesticides, make crops more productive, and be better able to deal with things like drought. We can literally turn back the clock on the destruction that modern agriculture has done, and farmers benefit financially in the process. “Nature can heal if we give her the chance,” Gabe Brown, a farmer in North Dakota, told the New York Times in an article earlier this year on the topic. The important thing to remember is that healing nature isn’t just good for nature, it’s good for us too.

But sustainable food and agriculture isn’t just a question of whether or not you can get heirloom tomatoes at the local farmers market in August, it’s a question of global food security and addressing an environmental crisis.

Regeneration International is a group of researchers, activists and farmers which has formed to “promote the multifunctional benefits of regenerative forms of agriculture such as agro-ecology, holistic grazing, cover cropping, permaculture, and agroforestry.” This group is working hard to challenge the agricultural status quo.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the topic of climate change. What we do in the face of crisis isn’t always an easy solution. But the point of regenerative agriculture, is that it all starts from the ground up. That if we started rethinking how we did agriculture, then we could deal with some of the serious problems that we are struggling with today. The solution is literally right under our feet.

According to the Rodale Institute, “recent data from farming systems and pasture trials around the globe show that we could sequester more than 100% of current annual CO2 emissions with a switch to widely available and inexpensive organic management practices, which we term ‘regenerative organic agriculture.’ These practices work to maximize carbon fixation while minimizing the loss of that carbon once returned to the soil, reversing the greenhouse effect.”

So what can you do? Start supporting and advocating for organizations that work on the topic of soil health and regenerative agriculture. Respect the soil in your own garden, learn how it works and learn how to make it as healthy as possible. Boycott agribusiness and support farmers going against the status quo.

There is a sustainable path forward, we just have to choose to walk it.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Natural Resources Conservation Services

The post Care About Sustainable Food? Start Thinking About Soil: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

Column Do our favorite healthy foods come at a social cost?

We live in a world where we care less about what’s good for us and more about what’s trendy and supposedly good for us. Instead of seeking out foods and ingredients that make us feel good, we just do what the latest food trend du jour tells us to do. Which is why you have way more people sipping on kale smoothies than chard smoothies. Poor little chard.

If that kind of decision making only lead to problems related to overdosing on almond milk cappuccinos (for the love of god: please just order black coffee) and discoloration from consumption of too many açai berries (I mean, that has to happen, right?) that would be one thing. But our taste for these sought after healthy foods, the foods that will solve all of our problems if only we add them to every single meal and snack in between, has an impact, far beyond our plates.

When society decides that a certain food is good for it, big business flocks immediately. And when big business is involved, you can be sure that something or someone is suffering.

Let’s take a look at coconuts for a minute. There’s no denying coconut in all of its forms – oil, milk, water – has been incredibly popular in the healthy food and lifestyle circles. In fact, as journalist Maddie Oatman recently pointed out in an article on the coconut craze on Mother Jones, between 2008 and 2012, the number of coconut oil products, both for cooking and for beauty, grew by 800 percent. But that all comes at a cost, and I am not talking about the cost of your $90 coconut oil facial moisturizer.

“In the Philippines, the world’s second-largest coconut producer after Indonesia, nearly two-thirds of small-scale coconut farmers live in poverty. Though harvesting the fruit requires a perilous climb, often up trees treated with harsh pesticides, they make just $3 a day at the height of the harvest,” writes Oatman. “Each coconut yields around 500 mL of liquid; a 12-ounce bottle uses about two-thirds of a nut. Of the $2 that you pay for a bottle of the stuff, the farmer makes between 7 and 14 cents. And don’t forget that all that coconut water must be shipped across the planet, adding considerably to the product’s greenhouse gas footprint.”

Standing in front of the grocery shelf, with only our personal interests in mind (I want something that’s good for me!), it’s easy to push these other costs out of sight and out of mind. But coconuts aren’t the only culprit.

According to the Almond Board of California, in 2013, almond product introductions were so big, that they outpaced overall food and nut introductions around the world, growing 35 percent compared with only 10 percent the previous year. Sales of almond milk alone come out at $700 million a year. Almond milk, almond flour, almond butter: all things that we choose to buy because we want to replace something else, often for the best intentions, but those intentions still have an impact. Almonds is one of many thirsty crops that despite being in the midst of a staggering drought, California farmers managed to have an all-time record year, selling $54 billion worth of crops. How? Because they’re reaching far down in to the groundwater, which is having consequences like sinking farmland. According to the New York Times, “scientists have no real idea if the groundwater supplies can last until the 2040s.”

Gluten-free is another healthy food trend that has boosted big business. Sales of gluten-free products are projected to grow upwards of $2 billion in the coming years. But has access to more gluten-free products made us feel any better? While cutting out conventional flour, stripped of its nutritional value, certainly has its benefit, switching out one processed product for another certainly doesn’t. Turn that gluten-free package around and if you see a questionably long list of ingredients whose names you can’t pronounce, put it right back from where it came from. Many of those products don’t benefit your health in the slightest, but they definitely help the businesses behind them prosper.

Which all brings us back to the question of our taste for healthy foods. As I wrote recently, when it comes to thinking about healthy foods, we can’t just think about me. Inevitably, we have to branch out and think about the us, about the good of not just our immediate community but our global one as well. If our healthy habits depend on externalized environmental and social costs, then they’re not really so healthy after all.

Kick your coconut water habit and get back to real water instead, from the tap, not bottled. Don’t want to eat gluten? Don’t buy the processed gluten-free cookies. Want to go on a plant-based diet? Find options that are locally sourced, and not imported all the way from across the planet. And when there’s an ingredient that you just can’t live without? Use it in moderation, not in every single meal, every single day.

There’s a solution to most of our problems, and that solution is real food. Food which doesn’t have a marketing campaign behind it, doesn’t have the word “product” in it, doesn’t come in sexy packaging and doesn’t make a whole lot of money for big business. If we really want to eat healthy, for us, for our community, for our planet, then that’s the route that we need to go.

Related on EcoSalon

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Mike Mozart

The post Are Healthy Foods Good for Us or Just Big Business? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

Column Ever thought about illustrating food instead of photographing it? Here are a few essential tips from illustrator Jessie Kanelos Weiner. 

In a world where we are regularly inundated with food porn, I find food illustrations refreshing. Particularly when it comes to recipes, food illustrations allow a way of guiding the reader as to what the food should look like, but without any judgment attached to the end product. Follow a recipe in a cookbook with a photograph, and you might be disappointed by the end result, which is normal, given that you didn’t spend 18 hours styling and shooting it. Follow a recipe with an illustration on the other hand, and the comparison of your culinary creation and the image is easier to digest.

While I am no food illustrator, I do love sketching food, and it’s something I would like to be better at, so I figured there was no better way of doing just that than by talking to a professional. My friend Jessie Kanelos Weiner is a talented illustrator and stylist, and while she doesn’t just work with food, her food illustration portfolio list is long. Her new book “Edible Paradise: A Coloring Book of Seasonal Fruits and Vegetables“ is out next February.

I caught up with her to learn her essential tips for people who want to get into food illustration, not only for some useful insight, but more importantly, for some inspiration.

Invest in the best materials within your means. 

“It is the same « you are what you eat » mentality . Good work isn’t a reflection of expensive supplies, but it can take the quality to the next level.  I use a set of 30 or so Windsor & Newton pot watercolors.  I replenish only once or twice a year so it isn’t a huge hit on the wallet.  However, good quality watercolor paper adds up.  I stock up on 100-page blocks of Canson Montval 300 g/m2 watercolor paper which clears up my mind from ever worrying about running out.”

Think about what makes food appetizing to the eye and try to recreate the same qualities.

“Color, reflection, contrast, depth and texture are all qualities that go into the creation of a successful dish.  And they are all vital to recreating it 2–dimensionally, too.”

Learn the basics of Photoshop. 

“Because a huge component of creating and sharing work now is digital, learn the basics in Photoshop to clean up images before posting them to the internet.”

Look look look draw. 

“A few years ago, in a grueling interview for an MFA program at NYU (which unfortunately didn’t come to be), the distinguished professor interviewing my portfolio told me  « you don’t look enough when you draw. You draw what you think something is, but you don’t back it up with enough  firsthand information ».  She was right. Really look at the subjet at hand.  How do the elements interact ?  Study the positive and negative spaces.  What are the darkest and lightest areas ? Drawing what you « think » an eggplant looks like is mental block when you can actually look at it firsthand.”

Start a blog, an Instagram or a Tumblr. 

“I started a food blog about my life in France in 2011.  Knowing my embarrassing photographic abilities, I added illustrations instead.  It gave me the confidence and the platform to start considering pursuing illustration professionally.  When I finally did, I had a body of work and plenty of feedback from readers to give me a boost of confidence to do so.”

Find inspiration. 

“I love Instagram for following illustrators’ processes, techniques and new projects.  For example, I was recently inspired by Clym Everden (@clymdraws) who has started creating short illustrated GIFS, inspiring me to think about simple animation.  Now I just have to figure out how to do it.”

You can follow Jessie on Instagram for more illustration inspiration.

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This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Illustrations: Jessie Kanelos Weiner

The post How to Draw Food: Essential Tips from a Food Illustrator – Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

Column Want to build a more sustainable food system? Think a little less about yourself and a little more about your community. 

We live in an individualistic culture, where everything is about me, me, me and very little about us, us, us.

In the Western world, our important life questions are most often about what studies we do, which get us thinking about which job we will have, and whether or not it will be well paying enough so that we can buy a big house, and so that hopefully there will be enough for us to take fancy vacations to help us relax.

Our general cultural dialogue is very rarely about our impact on our community. Instead, it’s about what we as individuals need and want. You could look at this individualistic way of thinking as biological; we are trying to survive, and therefore, to each their own. Of course we make decisions based upon our own well-being. But there’s also the other way of looking at it, considering the necessity of more communal thinking for our success and survival; if we tribe together with those around us, we protect ourselves, better our situation.

The me is a part of the us.

We are all a part of a community, and our actions that affect the community in turn affect ourselves. When we only consider the me, we don’t consider our individual impact on the people and planet around us. We take, take and take some more, because there are no immediate consequences to pay. But someone, somewhere in the world, pays those consequences.

In food, this plays out in many ways. When people argue about the benefits of organic, it’s about whether or not organic produce is healthier for them the consumer, as opposed to healthier for the environment and the producer, whose health isn’t threatened by pesticides. When people talk about buying local, it’s often about how the purchase makes them feel good, not that it actually helps to improve the social network and economy of the community around them.

Your actions have a larger impact than the nutritional value of what’s on your plate. Fortunately, thinking about the impact of those actions is good for your health too. What’s good for the community as a whole is also good for us as individuals.

If we started putting communal benefits in front of individual, not only would we create a food system that was better for the environment and people producing the food, but we would build one that would improve our own lives as well, providing us access to healthier, more sustainable food.

When we focus on more sustainable food, we build community. And when we focus on the benefit of our community, we build more sustainable food systems. The way forward isn’t an individualistic one, it’s a communal one.

Building a more sustainable food system means more collective thinking. It requires thinking about the whole – the soil, the plant, the animals, the humans – and not just the me.

Related on EcoSalon

For More Sustainable Food, Women Farmers Are a Big Part of the Answer: Foodie Underground

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Food Builds Strong Community: Foodie Underground

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Mosman Council

The post For a More Sustainable Food System, We Have to Start Thinking Communally: Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.