With all the dialogue and commentary on Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed health code amendment to limit portion sizes, it seems an important argument in the Mayor’s favor has been missing – that this ban might actually help to put us back on track for a truly free market in our food supply. Yes, that’s right – “anti-consumer freedom socialists” and “the food police” might want to put down their victory flags. The NYC Mayor’s career to date confirms that he is indeed a capitalist, so I am fairly certain that he does not really take well to the “Nanny State” charge.  And if we look one layer deeper at the sweetened beverage issue, it might well be that Bloomberg is helping to FIGHT the “Nanny State” through this progressive effort.

What do I mean?  Well, the data on the increase in sweetened drink consumption, especially over the past 30 years, is very clear.  Americans are consuming about 200-300 more calories today than we did just three decades ago – those calories mostly coming from sweetened drinks. Globally there are over a billion people overweight or obese, and in NYC alone there are 2.1 million overweight and 1.4 million obese.  Even more shocking (and sad), 40% of NYC school children are overweight.  In 1985 less than 10% of New York State residents were obese, but by 2010 more than 24% of NY State residents were obese. We have seen a staggering increase in just the last thirty years.

This data begs the question – what happened around the 1970′s and 80′s that started the skyrocketing obesity epidemic?  Was it an epidemic of blanket laziness across the whole population?  Was it that people lost their human ability to make good choices?   I would argue, No, its a food system built on false economics and corporate welfare – the most powerful Nannies have been lobbying on behalf of Big Ag and Big Food, who have been peddling larger and larger amounts of junk.

In and around 1980, a few key things changed the free market of our food supply and sweetened drinks might be the best example of this.  Before 1980, the U.S. imported close to 45% of the sugar it consumed while it produced only 55% domestically. In 1981, the government instituted price supports for U.S. sugar beet and sugar cane producers, which shut our neighbors to the south out of their biggest potential export market for sugar.  By 2004, domestic production accounted for 87% of the U.S. market for sugar. This means that U.S. sugar, the kind coming to us the “natural way” – from sugar beets and cane – became much more expensive than it would have been if the price protections hadn’t been in place. Because of rising sugar costs many food producers shifted to using cheaper HFCS, a new invention from the 1960′s that, by the 70′s was being produced at industrial levels.

Starting in 1974, U.S.D.A, income support policies encouraged farmers to continuously increase corn acreage.  By November 1984, both Coke and Pepsi switched to HFCS to sweeten their drinks instead of the more expensive sugar.   If you follow the path here, as we began to subsidize corn (initially to benefit farmers and increase food supply, but we can hardly claim cheap soda as the goal of the early corn lobby) and create new ways to use it, we created a false economy for what used to be known as “treats”.

Today, sweetened drinks are almost more ubiquitous than water (and then we usually only have the bottled kind to buy and not free fountains).  If we really are rational economic actors and our human nature is pointing us to crave sugar, the current policies and price indicators are pointing us to drink WAY too much soda and eat way too much junk food.  Someday, the multitude of externalizes that are not embedded in that 20 oz cola – like the environmental degradation and soil erosion from massive mono-cropped corn farms, the real price of the petroleum in the pesticides, fertilizer and transportation, and that drink’s contribution of our $147 billion obesity-related healthcare bill – might actually be factored into the cost of the hapless brown drink. Eventually, many activists, farmers, and entrepreneurs pushing for healthier food want to see a TRULY free market food system, where sugar is priced fairly so that pay for farmers and farmworkers and transportation costs can be covered and corn is used to feed people healthy carbohydrates and fiber (not feed cars or cows or Cokes).  If sweetened drinks were still made from real sugar, they would be more expensive, and most people would only want to PAY for 16 ounces at a time and then, hopefully, not as a daily fix.

When this real free market food supply comes to be, we will realize that Mayor Bloomberg’s ban was actually helping to correct a huge distortion in the market and New Yorker’s might realize how lucky they were that our Mayor IGNORED the Big Beverage Nanny and pushed us to switch away from falsely cheap sweetened drinks before the market’s hand priced them, appropriately, to be back in their place in our diet as just occasional treats.

“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” – Michael Pollan

“In Defense of Food” – Michael Pollan

“Nourishing the Planet” – Danielle Nierenberg

“Enough” – Roger Thurow

“The End of Food” – Paul Roberts

“Food Matters” – Mark Bittman

“Stuffed and Starved” – Raj Patel

“Unhealthy Truth” – Robyn O’Brien

“China Study” – Colin Campbell, MD

“Appetite for Profit” – Michele Simon

“Food Politics” – Marion Nestle

“Food Rules” – Michael Pollan

“Four Fish” – Paul Greenberg

“Diet for a Hot Planet” – Anne Lappe

“Nourishing Traditions” – Sally Fallon

And a few documentaries have told essential food system stories, too, like:

“Food, Inc”

“The Greenhorns”

“Fresh, the Movie”

“King Corn”

“Forks over Knives”

In Rural Areas, an Opportunity to Innovate

Some key quotes and stats:

“We have some of the worst food deserts in local communities where food is produced,” said Mike Callicrate, a cattle rancher from [Kansas].

“In the livestock industry, more than 50 percent of the smaller slaughterhouses in Kansas have closed in the last 20 years. Callicrate said the consolidation of more than 80 percent of the meat packing industry into four big companies has taken away the market and passion from many smaller cattle ranchers.”

-In 24 Southwest Kansas counties, there are only 8 farmers markets selling fresh food to grown locally.

To see where food deserts are across America, check out this USDA Locator...unfortunately, the agriculture regions do look to be some of the worst affected.

Global Diabetes and BMI charts 1980-2008

Iowa’s northwest corner is home to the agricultural hub of Sioux City, which dominated the meat processing and livestock industries for much of the 20th century. The construction of the railroads and ease of steamboat travel on the Missouri gave Sioux City’s goods and people access to many large Midwestern cities and towns. Opened in 1884 to absorb the livestock traveling across the country for processing in the Sioux City plants, the stockyards constituted a city unto themselves and pulsed with the energy of the animals and the thousands of immigrant workers living in the adjacent South Bottoms neighborhood.

Today, the stockyards remind us of the city’s agricultural legacy, past and present. Though many meat-processing plants have been shuttered, a few still remain and provide us with an interesting cultural context in which to consider the goals of the dinner. As we come together to talk about ways to decrease hunger and obesity in this country, it is important to recognize that all stakeholders should be represented at the table in order to create the most far-reaching prescription for change.

And change, indeed, is necessary. Around 65% of Woodbury County residents are obese or overweight, mirroring the statewide average, and almost 7% diabetic. These numbers, coupled with the highest rates of child and Native American poverty in the state, make efforts by all actors, whether private or public, that much more urgent. Commitments to creating a healthy future for all are widespread, including those by the officials of Woodbury County to providing property tax rebates for farmers transitioning to organic agricultural practices. The Healthy Kids Act is transforming school nutritional and physical education requirements, and the Food Bank of Siouxland is partnering with local companies—many of them in the food and agricultural processing industries—to ensure that all citizens can have access to healthy foods.

Before our Sioux City dinner, we received an email from a local food warrior, Laura Kuennen, who manages Flavors of Northwest Iowa, a regional network for local food producers and consumers housed by Iowa State University Extension.  Check out photos of Sioux City’s farmers markets and the 30 Project dinner! Laura and the Flavors network helped us bring together incredible people and food and is proving that even in the heart of the heartland, change for a better food system is afoot!

With these policies and organizations fighting the battles against obesity and hunger on the ground in Sioux City, The 30 Project is hoping to catalyze the union of active community members over dinner and continue the conversation of change. We’re excited for the Sioux City group to draw from their historical roots and engage that frontier spirit to break new ground on creating a the food future of Siouxland. Read more about the Sioux City Dinner here!

Sioux City 30 Project Dinner kicks off at the St Thomas Community Garden

Here is a beautiful recap from Rev. Torey Lightcap, of St Thomas Church, who graciously invited us to use his garden space.

And check out the awesome mention by food hero Mark Bittman, who joined us at the end of his tour of the Mid-West.

The custom-built, recycled decking table is set in the St Thomas Church Community Garden in downtown Sioux City, IA.

The 30 Project is trying to change the way we look at our current food system so that we can make positive changes to the health of individuals, communities, and landscapes of towns and cities around the world. We’re doing that by asking members of those communities to join us around the dinner table to begin a constructive and proactive conversation regarding the future of food in that place.

It is our hope that these conversations will begin to reveal how inherently connected the food we eat is to the community of which we are a part. The land growing the food we eat only provides us with the beginnings of what we know as our community. We build layer upon layer of social, economic, cultural, and political interactions on top of that landscape to create a community.The land creates food, which creates and sustains our bodies, thus creating and sustaining our communities. So if we’re aiming to change our food and our food system, we must then consider food’s interaction within the community.

However, it’s important that we consider the historical interaction of food within the community before coming together to declare a prescription for change. Our dinner at Archi’s Acres on April 3rd provided us with the opportunity to take a look back at the history of food and community in San Diego County and Southern California.

The city of San Diego as we now know it was christened “San Miguel” in 1542 by the Portuguese explorer, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo. For the next three centuries, the Spanish mission dominated the social, political, economic, and agricultural landscape. But with the advent of the Mexican-American War and the construction of the railroads in the late 19^th century, San Diego’s social structure rapidly evolved to embrace a multicultural community. The turn of the century brought greater economic activity, driven by the city’s port and the construction of several prominent United States Navy and United States Marine Corps bases in the wake of the World Wars.

Those historical events have transpired amidst a physical landscape flush with agricultural bounty, despite the lack of secure, local water resources. Advanced irrigation techniques– developed by Mission priests and still used today, though in more innovative forms, by agrobotanists and farmers alike–are to thank for San Diego’s claim to fame as the #1 avocado-producing region in the country. The county’s most popular crop has also caused the stretch of Interstate 15 between Escondido and Temecula to be christened the “Avocado Highway.”  But these far-away sources of water, including the Colorado River, may not be as dependable in the future and threaten to strip San Diego county of its celebrated agricultural identity.

The agricultural success of San Diego county may very well depend on another fact of its geographical historical—its proximity to Mexico. Tijuana is just 19 miles from downtown San Diego, and this situation allows for the relatively high mobility of people and goods across national borders. As institutions like the World Trade Organization and its policy instruments like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have lauded the removal of barriers to trade, regions like San Diego county have been flooded with cheaper goods produced south of the border.

This threat of displacement occurs alongside a worrisome trend in the negative health consequences of a food-insecure population. San Diego’s proximity to Mexico and its heavily farmed landscape has resulted in the growth of a migrant farm worker community. Furthermore, San Diego is a major resettlement site for international refugees granted political asylum by the United States. These migration phenomena have created highly vulnerable groups within the city whose access to healthy food is exceedingly tenuous. Taking place against the backdrop of one of the top five most diverse cities in the United States, this food insecurity poses a huge threat to the social and economic wellbeing of the San Diego community.  A 2009 survey conducted by UCLA found that one out of every three households in San Diego is food insecure, and that about 55% of the population is overweight or obese.

So although the economy of the city of San Diego has been driven by an institution such as the defense industry concerned with national security issues, it seems as though its local community is becoming ever more insecure. With the health of its constituents at risk, actors from various different sectors of society are creating programs and policies to address the current food insecurity.

Archi’s Acres in Valley Center is taking a unique approach to tackling this problem by seeking to reconnect another vulnerable group in society with the local food landscape—veterans. Colin and Karen Archipley have established the Veterans Sustainable Agriculture Training program on their small organic farm to provide job training for veterans with the hopes that they will use their leadership and hard work ethic, honed by years of service to our country, to fill a much-needed gap in private sector employment demand. By adding to the ranks of sustainable farmers in the U.S., the veteran graduates of Archi’s Acres training program will provide even more for the security of Americans. By addressing community insecurity through relationships with the land and food, Archi’s Acres is The 30 Project’s ideal site for our next dinner. We look forward to hearing the inspiring visions of San Diego’s food future from our guests!

The table is set for the San Francisco 30 Project Dinner

After a rainy weekend, building a greenhouse and custom table with Architecture for Humanity, we had a smashing success of a 1st 30 Project Dinner in San Francisco last Sunday, March 6th, 2011!

Great wrap-up pieces were written by Civil Eats, GOOD Magazine, 7×7 Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Check them out!

GOOD
Creating a Better Food System, One Dinner at a Time

Civil Eats
30 Project: Toasting to a New Food System

7×7
The First Supper: Hayes Valley Farm Hosts 30 Project’s Kickoff Dinner Series

San Francisco Chronicle
Project 30 Dinner Tackles Hunger and Obesity

“The dinners are also a way to make a huge number of people into active participants in food system change.”  The 1st 30 Project dinner will be in San Francisco this Sunday!!!

Michael Hebb preparing the meal for the 30 Project San Diego Dinner. Love those Escondido avocados!