By Phoebe Connelly and Chelsea Ross
    In These Times

    Friday 24 August 2007

In cities across the country urban farmers are growing communities, greening the landscape and revolutionizing food politics.

    At 9 a.m. on a cool, bright Saturday in mid-June, Robert Burns and Diana Baldelomar set up a farm stand outside the YMCA in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood. The stand is simple: a tent to keep out the sun, two folding tables set in an L-shape and a handful of zinc washtubs filled with two inches of water. In the tubs stand heads of green and red lettuce, greens, broccoli, and bunches of mint and basil.

    When two women approach and ask the price of the greens, Baldelomar tells them that the turnip, mustard and collard greens are a dollar a bunch. "Honey," the woman says, "in this neighborhood, if someone asks you for greens, they are only talking about the collards." Her companion asks, "Did you ship it in from the country?"

    "No ma'am. These are from right around the corner, West Cottage and Brook. We went out and harvested them this morning. You should stop by sometime."

    Burns and Baldelomar work with the Food Project, a community-based urban agriculture program founded in 1991 to get Boston's youth involved in food production. Their West Cottage plot is one of four farms on vacant lots in the Dorchester neighborhood.

    The Food Project is part of a growing urban agriculture movement to improve access to quality food in cities by creating local sources of fresh produce. The movement is showing that sustainable, local food systems are not only a way to ensure food security but also a means of addressing social justice issues.

   
    By David Moberg
    In These Times

    Monday 04 June 2007

    The farm bill, which Congress will likely vote on this fall, will affect environmental, consumer, industrial, trade and anti-poverty policies as well as the prices and subsidies farmers receive for producing commodity crops such as corn, wheat and soybeans. Legislators are now conducting hearings and readying proposals, but the outcome is "more up in the air than it has been in 30 to 40 years," says senior policy analyst Dennis Olson at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. A small opening exists for a new progressive farm policy based on some old principles.

    The Winners

    Conventional wisdom says that the villains in farm policy are American farmers, who have in recent years collected about $20 billion a year in subsidies. But the government provides the subsidies because commodity prices have been so low that most farmers would have gone bankrupt without them. And prices have been low because legislators have written farm policy to drive those prices down to aid big business rather than farmers - or anyone else.

    "The important thing for policymakers and the public to be clear on is that the people who get checks written for them under the farm bill are generally not the beneficiaries of those programs," says Timothy Wise, deputy director of the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. "So the obvious question is: 'Who benefited?'"

   
    By Nicole Winfield
    The Associated Press

    
    By Michael Pollan
    The New York Times

    Sunday 22 April 2007

    A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person's wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?

    Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods - dairy, meat, fish and produce - line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.

    As a rule, processed foods are more "energy dense" than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them "junk." Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly - and get fat.