The fruit is so soft, in fact, that it leaves a trail of juice when harvested and moved from the fields. This makes the Marshall difficult to ship and store, but oh-so-good to eat. But Indiana-based artist Leah Gauthier does not believe that the absence of the Marshall in grocery stores means we can’t enjoy it, and her strawberry project introduces a new philosophy of produce distribution.  

The Marshall Strawberry was all but phased out in the 1960s, but there is a renewed sense of interest in not only reviving heirloom horticultural varietals, but in investing in improving the taste of fruits and vegetables. A focus on the strawberry in food publications (including Civil Eats) is proof of the popularity of this bright little fruit, and the extent to which we will go to make sure it remains in our food supply.

Strawberries have become a focal point for a wide intersection of food system discussions, many of them targeting health – the health of workers that handle strawberries, the health of the soil that grows them, and the nutrient content of the strawberries themselves.

For years methyl bromide was the chosen fumigant for strawberries, but as it was found to deplete the ozone layer, an international treaty required its phase out by 2005. Its replacement was methyl iodide, which quickly also became controversial. After a peer-reviewed study focused on the chemical indicated that as a neurotoxin it could cause thyroid cancer and brain damage, the Department of Pesticide Regulation published acceptable exposure levels that were 120 times higher than recommended by its own scientists in the study.

Pesticides used in conjunction with methyl iodide, like Chloropicrin, were found in the air near virtually all of the farming operations conducted by Driscoll’s, the largest strawberry distributor in the country. When the Tokyo-based Arysta LifeScience Corps. announced in March 2012 that it was withdrawing methyl iodide from the U.S. market, strawberry growers and eaters alike were shocked. It turns out the company was on the verge of losing a major lawsuit over the chemical.

However, strawberries are so delicate that they are especially vulnerable to pests and viruses. Without methyl iodide and other conventional pesticides, strawberry production needs to change course. A few small projects to revitalize the Marshall strawberry have come and gone since the species was first discovered in 1883. Gauthier has taken it upon herself to reintroduce the Marshall Strawberry to the public and present it as something new: a project integrating growing, eating, urban agriculture, and cultural identity.

In 2007, she requested a few plants from the USDA’s Germplasm Repository in Corvallis, Oregon, the site of the three remaining Marshall Strawberry plants. Those last plants have grown into the hundreds strawberry runners that Gauthier will be releasing this season. Her Marshall Strawberry Pop-Up Shop allows customers to purchase runners from the plants that she began reviving six years ago.

The delicacy of the strawberry, she explains, is both a blessing and a curse. While its fragility means it can never be shipped thousands of miles and sold a few weeks after being harvested, it also means that in order to enjoy the strawberry, it has to be eaten locally.

“It is truly a local agricultural product,” Gauthier says. “You really have to enjoy it where it is grown, which means a lot of people have to participate.” She aims to distribute the Marshall to growers and eaters who will in turn distribute even more runners to friends and family. The end goal, she says, is that her role in the project will become obsolete, and the Marshall will grow in numbers through an informal, grassroots network of strawberry lovers.

The unstructured distribution that Gauthier has established with the Marshall offers an alternative to the supermarket model. While she is working to revive a forgotten heirloom varietal, the project also blurs the line separating the consumers from the producers. Participants in the Marshall project are one and the same.

Hard to imagine? Well, that’s exactly what has happened in the province of Ontario. With the support of an experienced community organizer, volunteers from emergency meal programs, and food banks (what we call a food pantry in the U.S.) have decided to form a “union.” They’re calling it Freedom 90, a spoof on the “Freedom 55” financial planning advertisements that promise the good life to Canadians who work hard and invest their savings wisely, so they can retire by 55.

Tongue in cheek, yet deadly serious, these volunteers want to “retire” by the time they hit 90. They are tired of the perpetual emergency of having to provide free food boxes every week for the past two decades, but are compelled to continue because of the need they see in their communities.

The union charter states that “poverty is being ‘re-branded’ as ‘hunger’ to mask its cause: inadequate incomes, which are due to low wages, precarious work, and social assistance levels too low to provide adequate housing and food.” It holds that every resident of the province has “the right to health and dignity, including enough income to pay the rent and buy food.”

A “separate and segregated food system for people with low incomes” is undignified, humiliating, unsustainable and inefficient, in their opinion. Clarifying their position on the emergency food system, they add:

“We’re not advocating the closing of food banks, rather we want to make food banks obsolete — unnecessary…. Food banks are not bad, but charity has real limitations. Food Banks are addressing a gap in society and it is the gap that we need to close to remove the need for people to rely on food banks in the first place….”

The idea for the union came out of a five-year old campaign to reduce poverty in Ontario, the Put Food in the Budget campaign. The primary goal of the campaign was to gain an immediate $100 per month increase in social assistance checks, to reduce hunger, and to act as a down payment toward poverty reduction.

The union launched in May 2012 on a wing and a prayer, and has since enrolled 100 members. Knowing that humor can be a very effective organizing tool, their Web site lays out three demands, and is a call for forward-thinking public policy:

1) Lay us off! The Government of Ontario must ensure that social assistance and minimum wage levels are sufficient for everyone to have adequate housing and to buy their own food.

2) Mandatory retirement by the age of 90! Many of us have been volunteering for 20 years and there is no end in sight. The Freedom 90 Union demands the Government of Ontario take urgent action to end poverty and make food banks and emergency meal programs unnecessary.

3) Freeze our wages! Or double them! It doesn’t matter because we are unpaid volunteers.

They even have an anthem, a modified version of Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave your Lover” renamed “50 Ways to Close the Food Bank.”

And uniquely in this discussion, after the launch of the Freedom 90 union in 2012, campaign organizers explored integrating emergency food recipients into the union, bringing together both parties as equals. Interestingly, both volunteers and recipients identified the same problems with food banking. When asked to contemplate the possibility that they would be continue to be involved–either as volunteer or recipient–for the long term, it was “like the ceiling fell in. It was like this horrible terrible feeling of oh my god, could that really happen?”

It is commonly believed that charity separates the giver from the recipient. Yet, in this case, both food pantry volunteers and recipients share the same recognition that the charitable food system is unsustainable and undignified, and that the only exit is through the government taking a larger role in ensuring the public’s right to an adequate living.

Both volunteer and recipient know that the charitable food system enables corporations to keep wages low and profits high. They both know that the charitable food system enables the government to tamp down its expenditures on safety net programs, thus minimizing taxes on the middle class and wealthy. This same system has failed both giver and receiver, yet it continues to grow, in part perpetuated by these entrenched interests, and in part because it preys upon the volunteers’ compassion and the recipients’ desperation.

Maybe the Canadian church ladies are like the proverbial canary in the coalmine, an indicator of a dangerous and unhealthy situation. They are showing us that it is high time that we reverse course across North America and make charitable food obsolete in our communities–for their freedom, but more importantly for the health and dignity of the poor who have come to depend on charity for survival.

The story, “A River Runs Through It,” features a first look at some of the key players working to keep nutrients out of the Gulf, from a Minnesota conventional commodity farmer to a leading scientist who has studied the marsh ecosystem for 25 years, to a MacArthur genius grantee in Louisiana, who was one of the first to shed light on the dead zone phenomenon. Greenberg also talks with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, who supports voluntary interventions.

Greenberg explains how, as industrial agriculture and animal feed-lots have spread around the globe, dead zones have been spreading exponentially along with them. He explains: “Dead zones begin when rivers carry nitrogen and phosphorous-based nutrients—primarily agricultural fertilizers—into the ocean. In the case of the Gulf of Mexico, it is the Mississippi River that delivers nitrates and phosphates from the American heartland into the Gulf at a rate of 1.7 million tons per year. Once this stew of nutrients reaches the ocean, algae bloom in prodigious amounts. When those algae die and settle to the bottom, bacteria consume them, sucking life-giving oxygen from the water.”

Greenberg profiles corn and soybean farmer Brian Hicks, who is trying to manage the runoff in his fields through a number of voluntary measures supported by the USDA. “But it’s important to note that none of these efforts is directed at the core of American agricultural activity—the production of corn and soy,” writes Greenberg. “Rather, what the department seems concerned with is a complicated dance with other regulatory bodies, particularly the Environmental Protection Agency, to avoid telling the politically important constituency of swing-state Midwestern farmers what to do.”

Secretary Vilsack defends the approach, telling Greenberg: “If you have a voluntary operation and you are able to measure and quantify the benefits from that voluntary effort, then it may not be necessary that you establish requirements or mandates. This is an incentive-driven system, which is designed to provide a reason for people to do something as opposed to force them to do something.”

“There are some who believe that everything Vilsack is proposing and that farmers like Hicks are executing is nothing more than a Band-Aid on a gaping hemorrhage that started the moment settlers began their free-for-all on the prairie and sliced into the Midwest’s native sod,” writes Greenberg.

He talks with Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas, who explains how planting perennial crops could be part of the solution by absorbing and maintaining nutrients in the soil. And Greenberg examines other solutions, including redirecting the river back to its natural shape so that sediment settles before it reaches the Gulf and rebuilding marshland in Louisiana to absorb nutrients.

While saving the Gulf is expensive, Greenberg posits that the money could come from BP, if it ever settles the federal Clean Water Act lawsuit it faces in the wake of its 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. MacArthur Genius grantee and scientist Nancy Rabalais tells Greenberg that the only way to truly save the Gulf is through USDA reform and changing policies that encourage and support the planting of corn.

Greenberg asserts that doing nothing is not an option. He points out that a similar situation in the Black Sea was mitigated when the Soviet Union collapsed, followed by the waning of fertilizer subsidies. But it might have already been too late.

“The dead zone in the Black Sea has indeed been fixed. The sea has come back to life, but only to a point,” he writes. “According to scientists who studied the Black Sea’s transition, the communities that once lived there will never fully recover.”

This is our second story in partnership with The Prospect. “Part travelogue down the Mississippi River, part intense conversation with those who want to fix the dead zone, part mourner’s prayer for a way of life that is under threat, ‘A River Runs Through It’ is a remarkable piece–and I’m delighted the Prospect is publishing it,” said Kit Rachlis, The American Prospect’s Editor-in-Chief.

The story was photographed by Dennis Chamberlin, a Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist and an associate professor of journalism at Iowa State University, while Switchyard Media of Seattle produced the infographic.

“This story was kind of a ‘perfect storm,’ because Paul’s such an exceptional reporter and writer,” said FERN Editor-in-Chief Sam Fromartz. “But we also knew Dennis’s memorable photos and Switchyard’s strong visual storytelling would engage readers as well. The American Prospect worked hand-in-hand with us through the entire process.”

Our previous collaboration with The Prospect, “As Common As Dirt,” about the routine underpayment of farmworkers, recently won a James Beard Journalism Award.

You can read the full report on the dead zone at The American Prospect or here on FERN’s Web site, including this infographic explaining the dead zone’s formation.

“If you’re willing to spend some money, you can have a well-balanced meal,” said a senior from Portland, Oregon, in her school newspaper.

“A lot of the food is oily. It doesn’t look good,” said a sophomore at California’s Oakland Tech, as quoted in her high school paper.

There’s little argument, from any corner, that school food needs to be better—more nutritious, more thoughtfully produced, tastier, and yet still accessible to the 32 million kids served by the National School Lunch program. High school journalists from across the country, whose stories I’ve quoted above, explored the issue this year as part of the first Healthy and Sustainable School Food Journalism Awards, sponsored by the Earth Day Network, the Epstein-Roth Foundation, the UC-Berkeley School of Journalism, and the Edible Schoolyard Project.

Most of the young journalists hit on the crux of the matter. Serving a healthy lunch to millions of schoolchildren, every day, is a highly regulated—and woefully underfunded—endeavor. Schools, no matter how good their intentions, face a number of barriers when trying to improve their food; not merely cost but operational issues, such as complex government reimbursements for food purchases, and infrastructure issues, such as outdated and outgrown kitchens.

But there’s good news at last on the school food front. Despite these hurdles, many schools are finding innovative ways to make school food healthier and more sustainable wherever they can. And parents, kids, and local farms and businesses can work with school districts to help make it happen.

Last fall, the Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves 650,000 meals a day, adopted a Good Food Purchasing Policy, designed to encourage the purchase of more nutritious, local, sustainable, and fairly produced foods. (NRDC helped design these groundbreaking criteria, the first of their kind.)  When a major food buyer adopts guidelines like these, it not only helps ensure that kids have access to healthier foods in school—it also helps support local farmers and producers who run sustainable operations, which are less polluting than factory farms and chemically-intensive industrial agriculture.

Los Angeles Unified schools, as of February, have also stopped serving meat in the cafeteria on Mondays, in an effort to encourage kids to eat more plant-based proteins. And PS 244 in Flushing, New York, recently became the first public school in New York City, if not the country, to serve an entirely vegetarian menu. Going meatless will not only improve students’ health by reducing the risk of cancer, heart disease, and diabetes—it’s also good for the environment. The meat industry worldwide generates nearly 20 percent of man-made global warming pollution. According to the Environmental Working Group, if everyone in the country skipped eating meat and cheese once a week for a year, we would reduce global warming pollution by the equivalent of taking 7 million cars off the road.

Chicago public schools have made great strides in serving better meat in cafeterias. The majority of Chicago schools now offer freshly cooked chicken drumsticks, from birds raised without antibiotics on Amish farms in Indiana. Serving freshly cooked rather than reheated food is in itself a major improvement for Chicago schools. And by making large purchases from farmers who raise antibiotic-free chicken, the school system is helping preserve the effectiveness of medically important antibiotics. The vast majority of poultry and livestock operations regularly dose healthy animals with antibiotics, making these potentially life-saving drugs less effective when they’re truly needed, by humans or animals.

St. Paul, Minnesota, started a similar program to buy antibiotic-free chicken before Chicago’s—it could prove to be a model for other school districts, large and small, to bring healthier foods to school children, as well as help preserve essential medicines.

Connecting schools with suppliers of antibiotic-free meat makes good business sense, too. Suppliers of antibiotic-free poultry usually sell more popular cuts, like chicken breast, to grocery stores and restaurants at a good markup, but are often left looking for buyers for less popular cuts like drumsticks. A chicken drumstick just happens to be the exact portion size of protein required by federal school food nutrition standards. So caterer Chartwells-Thompson, which supplies food for about two-thirds of Chicago city schools, was able to meet nutritional guidelines with fresh, antibiotic-free chicken legs while paying just “a couple of pennies more per portion,” they told the Chicago Tribune, than they would for processed chicken nuggets.

In New York City, NRDC is working directly with the New York City Schools to advise them on sustainable purchasing practices. This work is tied to the larger efforts of the newly created Urban School Food Alliance—a group of six of the largest school districts in the nation that are looking to use their joint purchasing power to bring down the costs of sustainable foods.  These schools serve almost 3 million meals per day –more than 800,000 in New York City alone — so the opportunity to boost sustainable foods in the nation’s schools is enormous.

Since 2004, New York City public schools have been offering more nutritious menus for students, including fresh fruit at breakfast and lunch. Recently, the City has started introducing more whole grains, as per the government’s new nutrition standards for school food, replacing white bread with whole wheat bread, and offering whole grain pasta; it has also installed more than 1,000 salad bars in city schools. About 14 percent of city school foods come from local produce and dairy vendors, including organic yogurt from Stonyfield Farms.

Getting healthier food into school cafeterias is a massive but necessary undertaking. Improving school food is essential to kids’ health, as well an important part of the larger battle to fix our dysfunctional food system. The new nutritional standards being phased in this year by the USDA are a good start, cutting back on fat and salt and increasing portions of whole grains, fruits and vegetables. But schools, aided and prodded by parents and kids alike, need to find ways to make these standards work in their own cafeterias.

Try reaching out to your school’s food service manager to get a better idea of the challenges they face in improving school lunches, and where you might find opportunities for improvement. Pay a visit to your school cafeteria and find out for yourself what’s being served to your kids. There might be a salad bar, but can the first graders reach it? What exactly is in those hot dogs? Is the first ingredient in that dipping sauce high fructose corn syrup? Advocacy group PEACHSF has a solid, practical collection of how-to guides for parents on school lunch reform. You can also check out the Renegade Lunch Lady, Ann Cooper, whom I met at the TED-X Manhattan conference earlier this year, and her Lunch Box toolkit.

Raising awareness of where our food comes from, and how it’s made, as these award-winning high school journalists have done, is also an essential part of improving school lunches and helping kids eat healthier. As the contest’s third-place winner, Aditi Busgeeth, of Houston’s Alief Taylor High, said: “Sustainability is truly within reach, and school lunches are a progressive first step toward a healthier and environmentally aware generation of Americans.”

This post originally appeared on the NRDC Switchboard.

Photo credit: Shutterstock.

“There is overwhelming scientific consensus that overuse of antibiotics in livestock is a health hazard to people,” said Dr. Thomas Newman, a member of the Academic Senate who spearheaded the resolution with the help of the non-profit San Francisco Bay Physicians for Social Responsibility. He is in good company. Independent experts ranging from the World Health Organization to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences agree that the routine use of antibiotics in animal agriculture cultivates antibiotic-resistant bacteria, threatening the long-term efficacy of antibiotics for human use.

Two-thirds of the drugs that animals in our food supply get in their feed and water, from penicillins to macrolides, might sound familiar to anyone who has been to the hospital recently. In fact, eighty percent of all of the antibiotics sold in the U.S., almost 30 million pounds on an annual basis, are used for meat production. The majority are given to otherwise healthy animals in order to promote faster growth and to compensate for unsanitary and overcrowded living conditions.

“We believe that health care is best positioned to lead our society away from its addiction to antibiotics in animal agriculture,” said Gary Cohen, President of the non-profit organization Health Care Without Harm. He added: “Hospitals have both the mission-critical rationale and the economic clout.” Health Care Without Harm works to leverage both health care’s healing mission and purchasing power on a range of sustainable food issues, from organic production to local food purchasing. UCSF is one of over 440 hospitals across the country that have signed Health Care Without Harm’s Healthy Food in Health Care Pledge, which states that healthy food must come from a food system that is ecologically-sustainable, economically-viable, and socially-just.

However, hospitals attempting to purchase sustainable food face serious supply chain challenges. In the case of meat produced with non-therapeutic antibiotics, the market to date has been small in the U.S., making these products costly. For now, UCSF is taking a two-pronged approach to procurement. “We have reduced the amount of red meat being served,” stated Jack Henderson, Associate Director of Nutrition and Food Services at UCSF, “And secondly, we are pursuing a source of beef that is grass-fed, raised without non-therapeutic antibiotics, and that still fits within our budget. It is a complex maneuver, but we believe it is the right thing to do for our patients, our staff, and our visitors.”

Health Care Without Harm is working with nearly 100 other hospitals nationwide that have committed to this “less meat, better meat” approach. Leading the pack is Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington, Vermont which created a long-term antibiotics reduction plan in 2005. Currently, close to 100 percent of Fletcher Allen’s beef has been raised without non-therapeutic antibiotics, and the hospital hopes that all of its chicken will soon meet this standard. Fletcher Allen estimates that its food service budget rose by $75,000 when it switched to a line of chicken products raised without the routine use of antibiotics. The cost of treating a patient infected with a resistant bacterial infection like MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus), however, is not far off.

While purchasing initiatives by hospitals can generate much-needed market demand, smarter shopping alone cannot solve agriculture’s role in the antibiotic resistance crisis. A true and comprehensive solution will only come when federal policy bans the routine, non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock production. Unfortunately, there have been minimal public policy gains in this arena. The only policy in place is a 2012 guidance document from the Food and Drug Administration that asks the livestock and pharmaceutical industries to voluntarily reduce the consumption and sales of antibiotics in favor of more “prudent” use.

The most comprehensive policy under consideration is the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA). PAMTA would ban eight classes of medically-important antibiotics from non-therapeutic use in animal agriculture. Along with Health Care Without Harm, more than 300 organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association, stand behind the bill. However, due to lobbying pressure from pharmaceutical companies and agribusiness, keen on continuing the injudicious use of antibiotics to speed up the pace of meat production and earn profits, PAMTA has failed to pass in Congress three times since 2007.

As hospitals like UCSF push for change in the market, demanding that we put public health ahead of profit, Congress and the FDA should take note and act, before medicine’s wonder drugs become a thing of the past.

We gathered for trainings, conversation, and immersion in Detroit’s urban farms and gardens. We delved into issues of food justice and inequity, both local and national. We heard from local leaders about their organizations and companies, and the career paths they’ve followed. And, of course, we got our hands dirty on some field trips.

It’s not easy bringing everyone together in person, but these meetings are an important part of the experience for our service members, and they’re critical to helping FoodCorps learn as we grow.

Detroit provided an important backdrop for this event. Like many of the communities we serve, Detroit faces high rates of childhood obesity and food insecurity, economic hardship, and institutionalized inequality. At the same time, Detroit is a place where local solutions to these problems are taking root. Detroit is addressing its challenges through strategic and thoughtful community organizations and leaders who have stepped up to build thriving new communities centered on food and agriculture. We’re proud to be a part of this through partnerships with organizations like the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network––one of our service sites in Detroit, where FoodCorps service member Whitney Smith is spending her year.

While together, we celebrated our accomplishments since August: reaching nearly 55,000 children in 300 schools, giving them opportunities to gain knowledge of what real food is in the classroom, to engage hands-on with fruits and vegetables in school gardens, and to get access to farm-fresh ingredients in their cafeterias. And while our metrics of success this year are strong (13 football fields worth of school gardens! 2,000 volunteers! 230 healthy items added to lunch menus!), our proudest accomplishments come in the form of stories.

That’s why, while in Detroit, we held our first ever “FoodTalks,” an evening of storytelling that we recorded, and can be seen on YouTube. We had a chance to hear from service members in each state about how they see FoodCorps service working in their communities; about students who have taught them as much as they’re teaching; about the people in their lives who inspired them to get involved in food and farming; and about where they see themselves headed after FoodCorps service. Jen Rusciano, another of our FoodCorps service members in Detroit, explained to us how her student, “Jay,” who usually struggled with school, found connection and pride through the small food business he created with his peers.

These are the stories that fuel our service members to keep doing what they do. Each of them could tell a similar story, about a child who fell in love with gardening, about a school food director who was willing to think outside the box.

We hope you’ll take a moment to watch some of these beautiful stories, and maybe feel inspired to start telling your own.

“What attracted me to sustainable agriculture,” the Harvard-trained family physician continued, “was looking outside of that reductionist approach and seeing colleagues who were thinking about the sun, moon, rain, microbes, animals, and humans in this incredible, complex ecosystem. They were thinking in a way that I, as a physician, wanted to think.”

Jaded by modern medicine’s emphasis on isolating symptoms rather than treating the whole patient, Dr. Miller went back to the land to inspire her practice and set out on a journey to visit farmers who are eschewing business as usual. She shares her stories and discoveries in her new book, Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us about Health and Healing.

In her travels, she met Erick Haakenson of Jubilee Biodynamic Farm, who transformed a depleted plot of land into a thriving vegetable and fruit farm. As a beginning farmer, Haakenson at first followed the conventional “test-and-replace” method of soil management, sending samples to a lab for testing and then adding nutrients and minerals to compensate for deficiencies.

After dumping some 50 tons of amendments in the earth and seeing little progress, he turned to the holistic farming methods of Biodynamic pioneers such as Rudolph Steiner. He traded in nitrogen-based fertilizers for cows and compost and started farming in concert with nature’s cycles. Over time, he was able to build healthy, bioactive soil yielding vibrant, nutrient-dense plants.

Dr. Miller shared a parallel story from her medical practice. A patient named Allie had shown up at her office plagued by exhaustion and gastrointestinal problems, caught in a diet of energy bars, prescription pills, and over-the-counter supplements. Rather than take the test-and-replace approach that many of Allie’s previous doctors had used, Dr. Miller prescribed lifestyle and diet changes such as subscribing to a CSA program and gardening. Just as Haakenson’s farm sprang back to life, Allie’s health improved.

Like any farm or ecosystem, the human body is greater than sum of its parts, and according to Dr. Miller, the similarities between farm ecology and human health run deep. For example, the ideal pH and the carbon-to-nitrogen ratio in humans and soil are almost identical. The interplay of micoorganisms in healthy soil is not unlike our own human microbiome. And where do those carbs, fats, and proteins that compose our bodies come from? The food we eat and the soil it’s grown in, naturally.

Reconnecting with the soil is one of the most basic ways we can support our bodies to heal and stay healthy. Dr. Miller provided a few pointers:

1. Eat a little dirt (and even a couple bugs). If you’re eating from healthy soil,don’t scrub your vegetables. The nutrients and beneficial microorganisms are not just in the food itself, but they’re also in what the food was grown in. Conversely, unhealthy, chemically treated soil can contain toxins.
2. Buy with your nose and taste buds, not with your eyes. Pick your food up and smell it. Smell is an indicator of nutritional value, and good food should smell good. If it doesn’t smell, it might be because the seed it was grown from was selected for productivity or ease of transport instead of taste and nutrition. Food that comes from sustainable agriculture might look imperfect, but those bug-nibbled bits can be the most nutritious and delicious.
3. Choose food that has a story. Know the faces behind your food. Wendell Berry says a good way to find healthy food is to ask whether the farmer lives on the land. Farmers who live on and eat from the land, and who want to pass it down to their children and grandchildren, are more likely to take care of their soil than farmers who live off site.
4. Cook. Put simply, cooking is a way to get to know your raw ingredients and connect with the farms. See Michael Pollan’s new book to learn more about why cooking matters.
5. Give back to the soil and farms. Even if you live in the city, you can contribute to the soil cycle by joining a composting program, so your greens go back to the farm. You can also conserve water in the home, so that it can be saved for agricultural use.
6. Bring the farm to you. Whether it’s tending a vegetable garden or bringing plants into your school or workplace, being around plants can actually make people happier and healthier (a phenomenon known as biophilia).
7. Treat your body and your house with things that you don’t mind finding in your food. Sunscreens with lauryl sulfate and paint with VOCs not only enter our bodies through our skin and lungs, but they eventually wind up in our water supply. Those chemicals make their way back to the farm and ultimately into our food.
8. Enjoy fermented foods. Instead of taking expensive probiotics in pill form, eat fermented vegetables. Fermentation is controlled rotting that uses the beneficial bacteria that live on foods and in the soil they were grown in. Ferment vegetables yourself or support a local fermenter. You only need a tablespoon a day to support healthy microflora in your gut.

Modern medicine has its place in treating many diseases and health issues, Dr. Miller acknowledges, but ideally, there should be a balance between holistic and scientific approaches. “There are two ways to get your information both in healing and in farming,” she said. “One is through experience and one is through scientific method. The true art for both the physician and the farmer is knowing when to use one, when to use the other, and when to meld them.”

Learn more about Farmacology. Listen to a recording of the talk here.

Photos courtesy of Daphne Miller, MD.

This post originally appeared on the CUESA blog.

At the root of the problem is this: about half the chemical fertilizer applied to boost the growth of crops is not taken up by the plant– essentially adding unwanted, unneeded fertilizer to our natural systems with disastrous results. Think of it as a shape-shifting Miracle Gro monster run amok. Waste from livestock operations also creates nitrates that affect drinking water safety, and ammonia, which is disastrous for air quality.

If you care about clean water, your lung or heart health, or whether your favorite wildflowers will still be growing at your favorite camping spot in 10 years, check out the following sources to learn more about nitrogen.

1. Agriculture can play a major role in preventing fertilizer from getting into waterways. Here’s a quick primer about farm-based solutions on Resource Media’s Nitrogen News. The website also contains a US map with state-specific problems and solutions.
2. In the 16-page booklet, Excess Nitrogen in the U.S Environment: Trends, Risks, and Solutions, top US science experts review the major sources of reactive nitrogen in the U.S., its health and environment impacts, and solutions. Published by Ecological Society of America, 2012.
3. A team of science advisors to the Environmental Protection Agency released this seminal report in 2010 that details nitrogen pollution’s environmental impacts in the United States. The recommendations on page 74 are especially worth reviewing. They include a call to end the federal corn ethanol mandate that’s spurring more fertilizer use, and a multi-agency reactive nitrogen management task force. Word on the street is that EPA and USDA reps are meeting soon to discuss the latter.
4. Green slime – the stinky toxic algae that’s the byproduct of excess fertilizer and manure in waterways – got more attention recently when National Geographic described the rampant growth of algae across the globe, including the US.  The article contains an impressive photo slide show, from a kid in a neon-green algae-ridden pond in China, to photos of Lake Erie’s scourge that could be seen from space. (To be accurate, it’s usually the phosphorous, not nitrogen, from fertilizer and manure that spurs these freshwater algal blooms).
5. And, some good news. In March, five Yakima Valley, WA dairies reached an agreement with the EPA to reduce nitrates from their livestock operations and improve water quality. They will provide alternative drinking water for residents whose water has nitrates levels above the EPA’s drinking water standard. For the long-term, they’ll take steps to improve fertilizer and manure management and regularly test for soil and groundwater for nitrogen levels.

Speaking for Chipotle, Appleman was confident that it can and said that while a lot of companies might claim to do good, Chipotle stands behind that claim by sourcing their food more responsibly.

With a steely gaze and unimpressed attitude, Marion Nestle disagreed. “There is an inherent conflict of interest,” she said of Chipotle and other big food companies. She argued against the large portions of food at Chipotle as evidence. “They are contributing to people’s over-consumption of calories and are stuck in that model. If anything affects their bottom line, they don’t do it,” she said.

Koch brought up the myriad conflicts in supporting good food causes and selling food. He explained his criteria for rating restaurants in Clean Plates, a sort of Zagat survey that judges not by taste but by what measures a food establishment has taken to ensure the sustainable, local, safe, and ethical quality of its food. Apparently speaking for Appleman, Koch said that Chipotle will admit that they’re not perfect in every sense, but that we should try to support companies that are trying to do a better job.

The question of whom to trust to ensure this was being done was the elephant in the room. “We don’t have someone accountable,” Nestle stated. “We have a broken government that can’t even get bills passed,” she said, bringing on one of the only moments of comedy relief for the panel. “The job of food companies is to sell food. They’re not social service agencies. It’s unreasonable to assume them to be social service agencies.” So, according to Nestle, the only way to intervene is through third-party regulation. It was a somber admission of hopelessness, it seemed.

Kim noted that Wal-Mart is currently the largest buyer of organic milk and that buying power can wield big changes “across the board.” But is there enough supply? Right now, Appleman admitted, there’s not enough grass-fed beef to supply Chipotle, hinting at some of those imperfections to their model. But he turned the obstacle into a “when life gives you lemons” argument, explaining that that’s why Chipotle has been buying whole animals and using extra cuts to supply its new Southeast Asian spin-off chain, Shophouse.

It has also slowly begun to roll out an organic tofu offering in some of its Chipotle restaurants. “We started it in seven restaurants, then in 90 restaurants,” he said of the tofu’s menu appearance, in order to test out the water. So that rises the demand for organic soybeans and tofu, Nestle said, nodding.

“You’re on my side now,” Appleman said, incredulous.

But he spoke too soon. Nestle took Chipotle to town for its confusing calorie labeling, whereby a burrito–depending on what you decide to put in it–could contain as few as 300 or as many as 1,200 calories. “That’s not helpful,” she said. When Appleman offered the advantage of customers’ choice in what they could add to their meal, Nestle refused to take the bait. “If it’s the same price when you add everything, who wouldn’t take advantage of that?” she asked.

Let alone identifying potential or actual conflicts of interest in the food industry, there was a true conflict of interests among the panelists. Nestle’s and Koch’s work could be grouped as public awareness advocacy, while Appleman’s or Chipotle’s was to feed, foremost. And feed more and more people year after year. “Why do companies have to grow?” Nestle mused early on in the discussion. “The pressure to grow is responsible for enormous food marketing that I attribute to the rise of obesity–corporations pushing food at all times of the day. I don’t see growth as being a value that everyone should be subscribing to.”

“But what about the “growth” of buying more local food?” Appleman asked.

When questions were taken from the audience, the elephant emerged more than once.

“How do you ensure or enforce those standards with your farms and how easy or difficult is this for other big corporations to follow?” I asked Appleman. Haplessly, Appleman didn’t have an answer. “I’m just in charge of culinary,” he said.

But another audience member had a nearly identical question a few minutes later, to which Appleman threw up his hands and pointed to a colleague in the audience, named Josh, who apparently handled those things at Chipotle. Josh rose and gave a two-minute elevator speech: “We look directly at every single thing we buy and continue to… it’s quite complex, but we are very reasonably trying to strive for sustainable practices in labor,” he said, not addressing how difficult this was for big corporations to do. He also noted, “We typically are engaging with our suppliers instead of individual farms directly to ensure that they’re following those practices.”

Another audience member spoke up to plug B Corporations, a tool by the non-profit B Labs to certify sustainable and fair business practices. It was news to all the panelists except Koch. Like Clean Plates, the tool’s existence alone is telling of a lack of clear definitions and transparency as to how exactly food companies practice “sustainability.”

Sure, you could have Willie Nelson sing in all the commercials you can buy, and serve up tofu burritos as long as it makes financial sense, but a self-imposed standard of “sustainability” from a fast food chain is bound to carry conflicts and raise many questions. This was the prevailing takeaway from the panel. That, and coupons from Chipotle, which were passed out to all attendees as they left the room–embossed gift cards for buy-one-get-one-free burritos.

Koch is bringing these ideas to a wider, more mainstream audience, something that’s bound to be good for us all. Clean Plates’ approach, through Koch’s concept of “bio-individuality,” shows that eating healthier can be an easy, pleasurable, and sacrifice-free adventure. We recently talked with Koch about what inspired him to help everyday folks live more conscious, healthier lifestyles

What has the reaction been to including extensive nutrition information in the front of a restaurant guide?

You’d think that people wouldn’t want nutritional information at the start of a restaurant guide, right? But the reality is that nearly everyone we spoke to loved it and wanted more of it. It was important to us to keep it friendly and easy to follow—no dogma or preaching—we want it to be simple for anyone to eat healthier, whether at a restaurant or at home.

Tell us more about the Clean Plates philosophy and your concept of “bio-individuality.”

Clean Plates is about eating healthfully as well as deliciously. We believe that food tastes best when it has a lot of nutrients, is sustainably produced, and is lovingly and artfully prepared. The quality of ingredients is what matters most, whether you’re a carnivore, a vegan, or somewhere in between.

The idea of “bio-individuality” is based on the idea that every body is different, which means there’s more than one right way to eat. Embracing healthy eating means finding the way of eating that makes your body thrive. We’re all different: we have different genetic makeups, our cultures and backgrounds are different, we have different lifestyles, and we’re at different places in our lives. We also live in different climates and have various levels of day-to-day physical health.

So the philosophy is that there is no single way of eating that is right for everyone. It’s not new, but I’ve come to this approach based on my own experiments on my clients and myself. I healed myself from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) through experimenting with different diets, from raw to vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy- and sugar-free. Over time, I was able to figure out for myself what worked best, for my individual factors. In my case, it turned out there was no one diet, but a combination.

The factors started to click for me and then, studies came out to back up some of my own experiences. For example, one study shows that some individuals metabolize caffeine from coffee differently than others. Another study shows that some people take up the phytochemical compounds in broccoli better than others. I realized that each of us has unique factors that make any certain “diet” really not appropriate for others.

My overall big picture advice to mostly all my clients is to reduce animal foods. That, and eating more organic produce and eliminating most canned foods is pretty critical. But, I look at the overall picture of a person’s health and I know that being dogmatic about eating is really doing a disservice to the overall mission.

There seems to be a lot of conflicting nutrition advice out there and general confusion about what to eat. How do you help clients navigate these waters?

Nutrition science is a new science and a lot of it is inconclusive at the end of the day. There is a lot of conflicting information about whether we should eat meat, gluten, and dairy—the jury’s out on a lot of this. My job is to give people the lay of the land to help them make informed choices and decisions.

Relatively speaking, a “healthy” food can make some people sick; we see this with celiac disease or lactose intolerance. Ultimately, as a society, we have an incredibly dysfunctional relationship to food: We are confused about what to eat, we feel bad and guilty about what we eat, and we’re stressed out about food. Stress about food is also harmful to the body. I want to help people heal their relationships with food.

I also try to get people to the point of being more connected to the food they eat, to help them make decisions that are aligned with their values. I know if I eat better, I’m going to feel better. It’s neither perfect nor extreme—I explain this with my 80/20 rule: aim to eat really healthfully 80 percent of the time so if you indulge in habits that may not be as healthy the other 20 percent of the time, your body will have the nutrients to better deal with it. The end goal of life is not to have a perfect diet, but to eat well and to serve a greater purpose while we’re here.

How have you seen consciousness change about our food choices?

People are starting to realize that the food we put into our bodies matters for personal health, for the environment, and for social justice. I believe that the biggest impetus for change around food will be economic. When it hits home in our pocketbooks due to rising healthcare costs is when the real change will happen. To stay out of the doctor’s office, we’ll all need to start eating healthier. I meet more people who are realizing that, and improving their diets, every day.

What do you tell people who don’t have easy access to the ingredients and ideas in the books?

There are more Whole Foods markets and more farmers’ markets growing in areas across the nation every day. We’re making progress, and I tell people to just try to make the best decisions with what they have. Ideally, I would advise people to eat local, organic food, but if you can’t get organic, just make sure you’re eating vegetables.

What’s next for Clean Plates?

Our main focus is expanding our free e-mail newsletter (sign up here). We’re working on answering all your big food questions, from which fats can actually help keep you slim, to what’s a great recipe for dinner. We want to be your nutrition coach in your inbox.

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The new Clean Plates cookbook includes loads of healthful recipes from some of both coasts’ finest establishments, including Pure Food & Wine’s raw pad Thai (recipe included below), Northern Spy’s kale salad, and Bill Telepan’s broccoli pasta salad. If you can’t get to the restaurants to eat these delicious and nutritious dishes, learn how to make them yourself!

Recipe reprinted with permission from THE CLEAN PLATES COOKBOOK © 2012 by Jared Koch with Jill Silverman Hough, Running Press, a member of the Perseus Books Group.

Raw Pad Thai

Since opening in Manhattan in 2004, Pure Food and Wine has become one of the country’s most acclaimed restaurants and continues to revolutionize the world of raw food. Of its entirely plant-based vegan menu, nothing is heated above 118°F, to preserve valuable vitamins, minerals, and enzymes. Co-owner and executive chef Sarma Melngailis shares her kelp noodle pad thai recipe, which proves that raw cuisine can be delicious, inspiring, and much more than just salads.

SERVES 4 TO 6

2 limes
1 (11⁄2 inch/4 cm) square tamarind pulp (see notes)
1⁄2 medium-size tomato, chopped coarsely
1⁄2 small shallot, quartered
2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
11⁄2 teaspoons raw agave nectar
1⁄4 Thai chile, seeded, or more to taste (see notes)
1⁄2 garlic clove
6 tablespoons/90 mL organic naturally brewed soy sauce or organic wheat-free tamari, divided
1 medium-size orange bell pepper, cored and cut into matchsticks
1 medium-size baby bok choy, cut crosswise into 1⁄4-inch/0.65 cm shreds
1 medium-size carrot, cut into matchsticks
1 large king oyster mushroom, cut into 1⁄4-inch/0.65 cm slices
1 cup/90 g snow peas, cut into 1⁄2-inch/1.25 cm pieces
1 medium-size zucchini, cut into matchsticks
3 scallions, sliced thinly
1 tablespoon organic extra-virgin olive oil
2 (12-ounce/340 g) packages kelp noodles, chopped into 4-inch/10 cm pieces (see notes)
Bean sprouts, for garnish
Microgreens, for garnish
Chopped raw cashews, for garnish

Cut one of the limes into wedges. Juice the remaining lime to yield 41/2 teaspoons of juice.

Set the wedges and juice aside separately.

In a small bowl, combine the tamarind pulp with 1⁄2 cup/120mL of very hot water. Use a fork to work the mixture into a paste, removing any seeds. Set aside and let soak for 15 minutes.

In the jar of a blender, combine the tomato, shallot, sesame oil, agave, chile, garlic, 2 tablespoons

of the soy sauce, and 11⁄2 teaspoons of the lime juice and process to a puree. Add the tamarind mixture and process until very smooth. Add more chile to taste and set aside.

In a large bowl, combine the bell pepper, bok choy, carrot, mushroom, snow peas, zucchini, and scallions. Add the olive oil, remaining 1/4 cup/60 mL of soy sauce, remaining 1 tablespoon of lime juice, and 2 tablespoons of the pureed sauce, stirring to evenly coat. Chill in the refrigerator for at least an hour.

Add the noodles to the vegetable mixture. Add more sauce to taste, tossing with tongs to evenly distribute the sauce.

Serve garnished with bean sprouts, microgreens, cashews, and lime wedges.

Notes:
Tamarind pulp can be found in Asian, Latin, and Indian markets and at some natural foods supermarkets. Look for it packaged in blocks wrapped in cellophane.

Thai chiles can be found in Asian markets.

Kelp noodles can be found in the Asian section or the refrigerated produce section of most natural foods supermarkets.

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