I'm not one of those petro-centric Pollyannas who trumpets the upsides of climate change. That would be creepy--like complimenting a terminally ill person on her weight loss. There are some 'bonuses' we'd be better off without.

But this unseasonably cool spring -- a by-product of global weirding -- is a...

I check in with food politics pioneer and NYU nutrition professor Dr. Marion Nestle, whose most recent book is Why Calories Count, with Malden Nesheim. Read more of Nestle's insights at food politics.com and follow her on Twitter @marionnestle. Nestle is currently working on her next book, Eat, Drink, Vote: The Illustrated Guide to Food Politics, due out from Rodale in September 2013.)

Trueman: We produce more than enough food in the U.S. to feed every man, woman and child. In fact, we've got such a surplus that we throw away almost half of it. But more than 47 million Americans -- including roughly 16 million kids -- struggle with hunger.

And with budget cuts undermining our food stamp program, aka SNAP, this problem's only getting worse. Who has the power to change this shameful state of affairs, and how?

Nestle: I've just seen A Place at the Table (a film in which I briefly appear), which lays out today's hunger problem in a particularly poignant way. It was clear from the film that its low-income participants had to deal with what is now called "food insecurity," meaning that they couldn't count on a reliable supply of adequate food on a daily basis and sometimes didn't have enough to eat. But they also had to deal with another problem: the food that they did get was mostly junk food. So the question really should be worded somewhat differently: How can we ensure that everyone in America can afford enough healthy food?

I'm guessing that the makers of A Place at the Table intended it to do for the 2013 version of food insecurity what the CBS television documentary, Hunger in America, did in 1968. That film showed footage of children so starved and listless that they might as well have come from countries at war or refugee camps.

What seems impossible to imagine in 2013 is the effect of that documentary. It shocked the nation. Viewers were outraged that American adults and children did not have enough to eat. Within that year, President Nixon called a White House Conference on Food, Nutrition, and Health to recommend programs and policies to end hunger, and Congress appointed the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs (the McGovern committee) to develop legislation. This worked. Food assistance and other programs reduced poverty and hunger. Our present-day WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) and SNAP (food stamp) programs are the legacy of that outrage.

Where is that outrage today? Without it, Congress can ignore the millions of people who depend on SNAP benefits and view the nearly $80 billion cost of those benefits as an enticing target for budget cutting.

Who has the power to do something decent about hunger? In a word, Congress. Unlike the situation under presidents Nixon, Kennedy, and Johnson -- all of whom took decisive action to help the poor -- hunger in America today is nothing but a pawn in Washington power politics. We have come to value personal responsibility at the expense of social responsibility. It's hard for many Americans to think that we must be our brothers' and sisters' keepers when our own economic status feels at risk.

If we can't count on Congress to do the right thing, we have to try to create our own local food security and engage communities in helping to care for one another. This means advocacy and coalition-building on two levels: national and local. On the national level, it means exercising democratic rights as citizens to lobby congressional representatives to address poverty and its consequences no matter how futile that may seem. On the local level, it means working with community residents to address their needs. It means engaging the media to get the word out.

That's where Food Bloggers Against Hunger can help. Your job is to generate outrage and to encourage your readers to take 30 seconds and send a letter to Congress asking them to support anti-hunger legislation. Go for it!

cross-posted from Civil...

From Bagdad to bacteria? Launchables to Lunchables? That's one way to sum up the somewhat peculiar career path of Michael Moss, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the meticulously researched, scathing new exposé, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us. A few years back, Moss was risking life...

Environmental advocate/writer Kerry Trueman checks in with food politics pioneer and NYU nutrition professor Dr. Marion Nestle, whose most recent book is Why Calories Count, with Malden Nesheim. You can read more of Nestle's insights at food politics.com and follow her on Twitter @marionnestle. Nestle is currently working on...

Angela Monti Fox is a psychotherapist and social worker by vocation, but she's also an activist by what you might call an accident of birth -- she's the mother of filmmaker Josh Fox. Fox's 2010 Emmy award-winning documentary Gasland exposed the perils of hydraulic fracturing -- aka "fracking" --...

Below I check in with food politics pioneer and NYU nutrition professor Dr. Marion Nestle, whose most recent book is Why Calories Count, written with Malden Nesheim. You can read more of Nestle's insights at food politics.com and follow her on Twitter @marionnestle. Nestle is currently working...

Below I check in with food politics pioneer and NYU nutrition professor Dr. Marion Nestle, whose most recent book is Why Calories Count, written with Malden Nesheim. You can read more of Nestle's insights at food politics.com and follow her on Twitter @marionnestle. Nestle is currently working...

My dad's a lifelong Republican and devout Christian Scientist whose interest in nature is only marginally greater than his interest in Kim Kardashian or Bikram yoga. A retired professor of management science, he lives in Orange County, that conservative California enclave where citrus groves got paved over to make way...

It's a cinch to buy nice presents when money's no object. On a budget? There's no shortage of cheap tchotchkes. But a thoughtful, lovely gift that costs less than five bucks? A limited edition that delivers beautiful blossoms and edible treats you'd be hard pressed to find in a store,...

If we're such a "family values"-friendly nation, why are we so willing to let our kids be abused for the sake of making money?

According to the allegations in the Penn State scandal, a pedophile was allowed to brutally assault/molest numerous young boys because no one dared to upset...

Who says America's lost its manufacturing edge? We may not make things like sneakers or TVs anymore, but there's one industry of which we're the undisputed king: the doubt industry. And what an insidious industry it is, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway reveal in The Merchants of...

Americans may be deeply divided about what ails our country, but there's no denying we're a nation of unhappy campers.

Danes, on the other hand, consistently rank as some of the happiest people in the world, a fact attributed at least in part to Denmark's legendary income equality and...

Laurie David is a force of nature when it comes to lobbying on behalf of Mother Nature. An author, film producer and environmental advocate, she's best known as the producer who convinced Al Gore that his climate change slide show could reach a lot more folks if he made it...

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally's kat, aka Kerry Trueman, corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of What to Eat, Food Politics, and Feed Your Pet Right):

KAT: As one of our most influential advocates for healthier food choices,...

Isn't a 'jobless recovery' as preposterous as a fetus-less pregnancy? We've got a bloody pile-up at the intersection of Wall Street and Main Street, where reality collides with such corporate conceits. And it's the workers who wind up on life support, while the suits speed away from the wreckage undented...

Poor Uncle Sam's got a lot on his plate these days: a curdled economy, an overcooked climate, a soured populace. It's enough to give a national icon a capital case of indigestion. And anti-government sentiment's running so high right now that half the country...

Forks Over Knives is, in its own eat-your-spinach kinda way, a feel-good movie. Roger Ebert's declared it "a film that could save your life." So, once you get past the inevitable indictments of our disease-inducing diet, and the stock footage of headless obese people waddling down the street, you'll find yourself ultimately uplifted by the vitality the film's formerly sick and unfit subjects exude as they embrace a plant-based diet.

Unless, of course, your heart's been hardened by all those artery-clogging animal fats that the film implores you to rethink. The premise of Forks Over Knives--that we could save millions of lives and billions of dollars simply by switching to a diet of fruits, whole grains and vegetables--offers a compelling solution to both our financial and physical woes.

Mark Bittman made essentially the same case in his recent column How to Save a Trillion Dollars, in which he noted that "a sane diet alone would save us hundreds of billions of dollars and maybe more."

The film's vegan agenda may inflame the meat and dairy industries, but when it comes to inflammation, Forks Over Knives has got nothing on meat and dairy. The film makes effective use of graphics, animations and case studies to illustrate how animal proteins adversely effect our health in multiple ways, from inducing inflammation that appears to spur tumor growth, to blocking our blood flow. And not just the blood flow to our hearts, but to the rest of our bodies as well--which doesn't bode well for you, whether you think with your brain or other appendages located further south.

In fact, the film notes that erectile dysfunction is "the canary in the coal mine" for heart disease. Can't you just hear those hipster "hegans" having the last laugh--and maybe, the better bonk?

It's hard not to be impressed by the vigor of the two veggie-touting seventy-something nutrition pioneers whose research forms the basis of the film: Dr. T. Colin Campbell, author of the eternally best-selling China Study, and Dr. Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr., a highly regarded surgeon and author of Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease: The Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven, Nutrition-Based Cure. It's Dr. Esselstyn Jr., along with his colleague Dr. Dean Ornish, who inspired Bill Clinton to adopt the mostly vegan diet that helped him lose weight and keep his heart healthy.

The film also features Esselstyn Jr.'s son, Rip Esselstyn, the Austin firefighter who's got his own best-selling vegan cookbook, The Engine 2 Diet. Rip Esselstyn studiously avoids the 'vegan' label, preferring the term "plant-strong." And that's probably just as well, because asking Americans to forego all the animal-based foods that form the cornerstone of our diet--including cheese and dairy--is a pretty tough sell as it is.

But Forks Over Knives doesn't just dwell on the harmful consequences of eating anything that "has a mother or a face." The movie devotes equal emphasis to the many life-enhancing, disease-fighting nutrients and other compounds contained in the fresh, whole foods that most of us don't eat enough of. As comedian Bill Maher notes in the film's opening segment:

There's no money in healthy people. And there's no money in dead people. The money is in the middle: people who are alive, sort of, but with one or more chronic conditions...Someone has to stand up and say that the answer isn't another pill. The answer is spinach.

The film's writer and director, Lee Fulkerson, serves as one of the case studies in the movie, working with a pair of physicians who successfully treat his high cholesterol and elevated CRP level (a risk factor for heart disease) by putting him on a whole foods, plant-based diet. Fulkerson's numbers improved dramatically in a matter of weeks, further proof that such health issues can be addressed through diet instead of drugs.

Other folks featured in the film overcame diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer. The film does not imply that conventional medicine can't be effective at treating these illnesses, but rather faults it for too often treating the symptoms while ignoring the underlying causes.

I wanted to confirm the powers of a plant-based diet to prevent and even reverse illness from a credible source who wasn't affiliated with the movie. So I spoke with Dr. Kelly A. Turner, co-founder of Shuniya Health & Healing, where she treats cancer patients with a holistic approach that combines the best of eastern and western medicine.

Dr. Turner told me, "I have seen many, many cancer patients help turn their health around by changing to a whole foods, plant-based diet. And although the woman in the film chose not to have western treatment, I've seen this diet change work wonders for many cancer patients who are in the midst of their western treatment. The two are not mutually exclusive, not at all."

She added that for those of us who aren't facing a life-threatening illness, it may seem like too much of a sacrifice to give up all animal products cold turkey." Yes, doing that will have a profound effect on your health," she said, "but most people who feel fairly healthy won't feel the need to do that. I would encourage them to see the film and hopefully be inspired (and informed) to make small, gradual changes to their diet...even gradual changes will have very healthful effects on your cell membranes, your blood glucose level, and your colon health."

But fresh, unprocessed, wholesome foods haven't got K Street lobbyists and Madison Avenue marketers to promote them, while Viagra and Lipitor are making a fortune for Big Pharma, helped along by Big Food's low-cost, high-calorie, nutrient-poor products.

Forks Over Knives could have been subtitled "Pork Over Lives," because it highlights the addled agricultural policies and industry meddling that keep our government agencies more focused on protecting corporate profits than promoting good health. Michelle Obama's Let's Move! campaign may be wholehearted, but our government's overall efforts to halt the diet-related diseases that are crippling Americans young and old have been half-assed, to be blunt. The Federal Trade Commission's latest dietary guidelines are as toothless as a gummy bear, and only marginally more sound, nutritionally.

The free-market fanaticism that lets our children to be shamelessly targeted by food corporations sets them up for a lifetime of ill health. The end result is profits for those companies, their shareholders and the health care industries who profit from disease.

Meanwhile, our politicians insist that we're bankrupting our childrens' future with our reckless spending. They're slashing budgets left and right, pulling the plug on crucial programs, all so that little Ethan and Emma won't be saddled with crushing debt in a few decades.

But forget about unbalanced budgets. It's unbalanced diets we really need to worry about. Because the soundest economy in the world won't save a nation of ballooning bellies and mushy muscles.

Cross posted from Alternet
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The much-anticipated documentary The Greenhorns makes its New York City premiere this Wednesday evening at the Anthology Film Archives, and it couldn't hit the screens at a better time. The Greenhorns aims to do for farming what All The President's Men did for journalism: make it look so cool that it becomes a hot vocation.

Kids thrilled by the Deep Throated exploits of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein -- rendered sexy and cinematic by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman -- dreamed of becoming the next hotshot investigative reporter. Registration went through the roof at journalism schools all over the country.

Will The Greenhorns set off a similar stampede of fired-up youths? We can only hope so, because, once again, we've got an awful lot of dirt in need of digging. Greenhorns director Severine von Tscharner Fleming has spent the past several years filming young farmers all over the country who are proudly employing their brain and brawn to grow real food for their fellow citizens, and make a decent living in the process.

But The Greenhorns is so much more than just a movie, it's a movement -- specifically, a national grassroots nonprofit organization of young farmers. And Wednesday's premiere of The Greenhorns is a benefit for The National Young Farmers Coalition, which fights for federal policies to help young people succeed in a farming career, facilitates peer-to- peer learning through Farm Hack, and strengthens young farmers' social networks through regional organizing.

This is no small thing. The rise of the young farmer movement has the power to address some of our greatest problems as a nation: it creates the jobs we so desperately need, at a time when there are reportedly five unemployed folks for every available job opening; it produces fresh, wholesome food at a time when diet-related disease is skyrocketing; it reduces our dependence on fossil-fuel intensive factory farming; it offers young people an alternative career path to being cooped up in a cubicle or tethered to a laptop (not that there's anything wrong with that -- oh, wait, there is! Turns out it just might be killing you!)

The Greenhorns remain undaunted by land-access limitations, capricious weather and the unrelenting 24/7 nature of farm work. Nor are they swayed from their mission by hostility from the entrenched commodity crop cabal that views these cultivators of wholesome fruits and veggies as radical upstarts looking to upset industrial ag's pesticide-laden apple cart.

These idealistic neophytes are reinventing the vocation of farming to fit our current ecological and economic realities. They need our support, and that's why Severine, a young farmer/activist herself, has thrown herself into this project with all her heart and soul.

Severine's eloquence and exuberance inspired Josh Viertel, president of Slow Food USA, to dub her the "Oscar Wilde of the good food movement." But I'd like to suggest another nickname for Severine: Janey Appleseed. Because she's tirelessly traversing the country sowing the seeds for the next generation of farmers, who only want to serve our country well.

So if you're in NYC, won't you please step up to the plate and help them hit a home run? Come to the premiere, and stay for a discussion with the folks from the National Young Farmers' Coalition. I promise you'll dig it!
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