The food movement is an unstructured and unorganized movement that has grown over the last several years through the convergence of separate independent, grass-roots, regional and national-level efforts to bring greater awareness and activism to food-related issues. From its varied origins have emerged, and continue to emerge, a wide array of strategies and practices for tackling issues of production, distribution and accessibility to sustainable, local and fresh foods.

Jill Richardson, a well-known food activist and the indefatigable blogger behind La Vida Locavore, is a proponent of food policy and legislation activism as an important tool for pressuring local and national level government officials to take note of public demands around food. More importantly, she sees food policy and legislation activism as critical for holding public officials accountable to public concerns, and for preventing the powerful lobby behind the industrial food and industrial agriculture systems from shaping policy in a way that favors large producers. The consequence of which is often the enactment of food policies that exhibit a reckless disregard for human health, the needs of communities on the ground, and the well-being of small-scale food producers and distributors committed to more sustainable methods.

Yesterday, Jill arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area for a series of talks and activities. Her first appearance took place in the Joyce Ellington Branch of the San Jose Public Library, where she was hosted by Veggielution, an urban community farm in San Jose that is working towards the creation of a local sustainable food system.

She began her talk by introducing her own personal journey into food politics and food activism. Several years ago she observed that many individual and community-based solutions were beginning to emerge around food problems, but noted a lack of activism at a larger systemic level. Recipe for America is the result of her own self-education on food policy issues, and an attempt to fill an activist and knowledge gap in the food movement.

Getting Readers Involved

In Recipe for America, Jill offers a quick and accessible overview of the numerous problems that plague our food system. She touches on the existence of food desserts across the US, the rise of the American chemical industry and its connections to the Green Revolution, as well as the effects of heavy agricultural chemical inputs on the environment and our bodies. She also explores the variety of solutions emerging around the creation of a sustainable food system, including new organic farming techniques, farmers markets, CSAs, and food policy councils. These solutions, however, are not without their challenges. Thus, Jill concludes her book by offering a “Recipe for America,” a call for reforming our food system through food policy activism.

The second-half of her book provides readers a quick introduction to the major policy issues on the table. She offers a critical overview of food labeling regulations, food safety organizations and legislation, policies affecting childhood nutrition, human and animal rights issues, and the U.S. Farm Bill. Some of these policies have complicated histories that date back to the 1930s, but continue as important sites for the enactment of new legislation today. Recipe for America does a service to food-concerned citizens by offering a critical summary of a complex set of food policy issues and institutions most of us would find daunting to undertake on our own. In addition, Jill offers her readers an easy way into food policy activism through a closing appendix that lists websites providing food policy action alerts, legislation tracking, and critical analyses.

Last night, Jill offered an assessment of the current food policy climate and key policy issues. She sees in the Obama administration a great opportunity for making some real headway on food policy and legislation, as this is the first administration in a long time to exhibit a willingness to exert greater regulation over the industrial food system. She cautioned, however, that food legislation and policy enacted during the Obama administration can only be as good as public political pressure is brought to bear on the administration and regulating agencies.

According to Richardson, the food industry has itself taken a pro-regulation stance because it finds operating within a market with one set of regulations much easier to maneuver than a market complicated by a disperse set of local rules. A single set of national standards favor industry by establishing a uniform set of market standards to which industry has to respond in their marketing, production and distribution protocols. At the local level, this could undermine regulations set by communities to protect small-scale and sustainable approaches to food production and distribution.

Richardson sees two food policy areas as particularly worthy of public attention and activism. The first are demands for the improvement of school lunch programs. Current rules governing the nutritional standards of school lunches are extremely loose. The rules, for example, call for a certain number of fruit and vegetables to be served, yet allow for fruit and vegetables to be treated as interchangeable. They also fail to specify what can and cannot count as a serving of vegetables or a serving of fruit. Because of these ambiguities, on many school lunch menus French fries make frequent appearances as a vegetable.

Recently, however, the Institute of Medicine has issued a suggestion for a new set of standards by which to redefine the National School Lunch Program, which the USDA has announced its intention to implement. The institute’s standards focus on whole foods, and the regulation of the fat, sodium and sugar content in school lunches. Already, there is opposition to this from the dairy lobby, which seeks to avoid regulation of the sugar content in school lunches. Because chocolate milk sales to schools make up a good portion of the milk market, the lobby is afraid that such a regulation will have adverse effects on their sales figures.

Another issue plaguing the reform of school lunch standards is the complicated issue of reimbursement. Currently, the government reimburses schools $2.68 per each child that qualifies for a free lunch and less for those who can pay for their lunches. The rates are so low that few schools can afford to pay for the staff, training, equipment and foods necessary to provide healthy lunches to children. In fact, most public school lunch programs rely on free food commodities (food purchased by the USDA and given to schools), often in the form of highly processed foods, to provide them with enough food to serve children. Therefore, with the challenges of high operating costs and poor access to quality food, only an estimated 6-7% of schools actually meet all of the existing national standards for school lunches.

According to Richardson, setting tighter nutritional standards does not mean schools will be able to comply. It is therefore necessary to advocate for an increase in the school lunch reimbursement rate at the same time that we advocate for the improvement of standards, so as to ensure greater resources for schools to provide children with healthy meals.

A second area of food policy that Richardson considers a hopeful site of action in the contemporary political climate is the Food Safety Modernization Act (S. 510). This act is designed to address the increasingly frequent outbreaks of food contamination by microbes, such as e. coli and salmonella, many of which originate in large-scale industrial food processing facilities. If passed, the bill would give the FDA greater regulatory authority over food processing facilities. While greater attention to food safety is welcome, the bill could prove dangerous to small-scale producers.

The facilities targeted by the FDA include small and medium-sized farms that process some of their own agricultural products for distribution to the public. These small facilities have not been the major culprit in food contamination outbreaks; rather, it has been the large-scale industrial facilities. By subjecting small farmers to the same regulations, the bill threatens to impose a set of fees and administrative burdens that small farmers may not be able to subsume into the costs of their business operations. In other words, the bill does not account for scale-related risk factors, nor does it provide scale-related solutions. This could significantly affect many of the small and medium-sized farmers and food producers that distribute within our local food systems to farmers markets, local food coops, restaurants and schools.

You can read more about the details of National School Lunch Program reform and the Food Safety Modernization Act, and ways to take action, as Jill Richardson tracks them on her blog at La Vida Locavore. San Francisco Bay Area Residents can also catch Jill this week at the following events:

• Wednesday March 10: UC-Berkeley, 101 Morgan Hall at 7:30-9pm, a panel discussion with Bonnie Powell, cofounder, editor and writer of the food politics blog The Ethicurean, sponsored by the Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology
• Thursday March 11: San Francisco, 998 Valencia St. at Viracocha at 6:30-8pm, a discussion with writer-farmer Jason Mark of Alemany Farm, hosted by Nourish the Spirit
• Saturday March 13: San Jose, 647 South King Road, Work Day at Veggielution, an urban community farm in the Emma Prusch Farm Park, 10am