Script

Bioneers Series X - Program 01-10

(WFMT #10-27)

Going Locavore: Urban Innovation, Community Transformation

00:00 Underwriting narration (00:13)

Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature is made possible in part by Organic Valley, a farmer-owned cooperative producing local food with the future in mind since 1988. Learn more at organicvalley.com.

00:13 Welcome (00:05)

00:18 Hesterman Teaser (:21)

If you live in a community like where I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and you have enough money, you can live as if the system’s not broken at all. I can travel just 40 miles east to inner city Detroit, where we have a population of close to 900,000 people, the eleventh largest city in the United States without a single major grocery store in the entire city.

00:39 Macy (00:09)

00:48 Billboard (00:28)

01:16 Theme music out (00:10)

01:26 NARRATION 1 (01:20)

Food security. It’s a term we’ll be hearing a lot more.

Food security commonly refers to persistent hunger and lack of access to healthy foods. In the U.S., it’s most acute and pervasive in low-income communities and communities of color. And it’s getting worse.

In the context of climate change, food security is coming to mean much more. A changing climate will destabilize and disrupt agriculture. It is already driving freshwater shortages, topsoil loss and the spread of diseases or pathogens encouraged by a highly centralized and globalized food system. Food security also hinges on the vulnerability and cost of globalized long-distance fossil-fueled supply chains.

One thing is secure: Food IN-security will increasingly affect our lives.

Today, a countervailing movement is rising to transform the globalized, industrialized corporate food system and foster food security writ large.

This movement uses organic and sustainable practices. It favors the local. It weaves equity and justice into the food web.

This is the dawning age of local foodsheds and fair food. It’s about far more than farms and farmers – it’s about redesigning our entire food system.

02:46 Pollan 1 (00:18)

The food system, by which I mean the way we grow food, but also the way we process it and transport it around the world, uses more fossil fuel, close to twenty percent of the total, and contributes more greenhouse gas, somewhere between fifteen and thirty-three percent, to the atmosphere than any other industry.

03:05 NARRATION 2 (01:04)

Best selling author Michael Pollan has done more than perhaps any other single national figure to serve up food for thought about our food systems and diet. His award-winning books including “The Ominvore’s Dilemma” have chronicled the emerging “locavore” movement and portrayed the emergence of a very different future food system.

Across the United States, he reports, communities are busy putting down roots again, re-inventing a more decentralized, diverse and locally self-reliant food system. One that offers a critical path to building prosperous local economies and creating local jobs. People everywhere are doing the work that most needs to be done to truly transform how we feed ourselves equitably within the limits of the natural world.

Join us for “Going Locavore: Urban Innovation, Community Transformation” with Michael Pollan, fair food advocate Oran Hesterman and community activists James Ella James and Victoria Carter.

My name is Neil Harvey. I’ll be your host. Welcome to the Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature.

04:09 Music fade out (00:14)

04:23 NARRATION 3 (00:34)

Michael Pollan’s books and his investigative reporting as a contributing editor to the New York Times Magazine have offered a very different vision of a future food system that’s sustainable. As the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, he’s helping shift science, environmental and food reporting those critical few degrees that allow us to see the real impacts of our food choices.

To Pollan, food is at the nexus of three critical issues: climate change, energy independence, and health care.

04:57 Pollan 2 (00:42)

We’re spending over two trillion dollars a year to treat Americans. More than five hundred billion a year goes to treat preventable chronic diseases linked to diet. The health-care crisis is a euphemism for the catastrophe of the American diet. [applause] And, basically, the leading product of the American food system today are patients for the American health-care system. [laughter] That has to change. So, that’s the bad news. The food system is broken. People know it increasingly. Farmers know it for sure, and what is responsible for this broken system is largely our agricultural policies.

05:40 NARRATION 4 (00:58)

Federal agricultural policies have largely benefitted a handful of giant agribusiness corporations that today produce and manufacture most of what we eat. They’re farming the government - and their real crop is money. There’s no question that food is cheap – in great part because it’s subsidized by taxpayers and does not account for environmental and public health costs.

Pollan says we can improve overall public health and even help solve the climate crisis with what he calls the Sun Food Agenda. His vision would wean the American food system off its heavy diet of fossil fuels – also the source of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides - and replace them with a heaping helping of sunshine. The fix also includes diverse crops instead of vulnerable monocultures, and it’s a lot closer to home. Michael Pollan spoke at a recent Bioneers conference.

06:383 Pollan 3/4 (02:10)

Do you know, right now, if you receive subsidies for corn and soy and wheat and rice, if you want to plant a row of tomatoes, say, or broccoli, you can’t. You’re not allowed to. You lose your classification as subsidized land, indefinitely... So, we are forcing our farmers to plant monocultures. That has to change. We need to reward them for how many different crops they plant, how many days of the year their fields are green, in other words, how many days of the year their fields are harvesting sunlight for rotations, [applause] for cover crops, and that kind of thing.

Diversification of our farms will pay a great many benefits. It will lead to reduction in the need for fertilizers, reduction in the need for pesticides, but it will mean an increase in labor. We’re going to need more farmers, and that’s another set of policies we need. We’re going to need to put ten, twenty, thirty more million people on the land, and that’s also part of a sun-food agenda.

We need four-season farmers’ markets, so the farmers’ market movement isn’t limited to, you know, four or six months of the year. We need to rebuild distribution networks. Right now, it’s very hard to get food grown within, say, fifty miles of any city directly to that city without passing through on these crazy distribution routes.

So, decentralizing the food system. It has a great many virtues. It will allow farmers to diversify. It will shorten the food chain so that healthy food will be fresh. Minimally processed food will make it to our cities and our food deserts and our rural food deserts, as well, because the problem is just as bad in Iowa as it is in west Oakland right now, access to fresh food because it’s all being sold globally and nationally.

Now, the market’s already making this happen, but there’s a lot we can do at the government level to push it. We also need to look at our food assistance programs and add on vouchers to food stamps and WIC that are redeemable at farmers’ markets, and get [applause] access to fresh, real food to people who need it.

08:48 Narration 5 (00:36)

Michael Pollan. Lack of access to healthy, real food is one of the starkest symptoms of our broken food system. Fair Food Network CEO Oran Hesterman agrees that chronic illness is one of those symptoms. He classifies childhood obesity and diet-related diabetes NOT as individual problems to be solved by personal lifestyle choices, but as key indicators of a food system systems error.

Although these danger signs are not limited to low-income residents of inner city neighborhoods, Hesterman says, the disproportionate impacts on these communities are unmistakable.

09:26 Hesterman Int 1 (00:40)

If you live in a community like where I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and you have enough money, you can live as if the system’s not broken at all. If I have the means to do it, I can access food – healthy, fresh, safe food from anywhere in the world within minutes of my house in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

From where I live, I can travel just 40 miles east to inner city Detroit, and there you see the symptoms of that broken system much more severely, where we have a population of close to 900,000 people, the eleventh largest city in the United States without a single major grocery store in the entire city.

10:06 NARRATION 6 (00:08)

Oran Hesterman says the solution to Detroit’s lack of access to healthy, fresh food resides within the city limits.

10:14 Hesterman Int 3 (00:46)

In Detroit, a city that’s 139 square miles in size, about a third of that city is vacant right now, and is unlikely to be repopulated any time soon. That gives us, you know, somewhere between five and 10,000 acres of arable land within the city of Detroit.

Now, is there gonna need testing for soil health and some sort of soil remediation? In some cases, yes. In some cases, no. But it’s good farmland. That’s why Detroit was settled there. It’s got great, fresh water sources, you know. Michigan is surrounded by one-fifth of all the fresh water on the planet, the Great Lakes. So, surrounded by the resource that I believe in the future is gonna be more valuable than oil, especially for that kind of local agriculture.

11:00 NARRATION 7 (00:19)

Picture a cityscape checker-boarded with green zones – farms and gardens at every turn.

If ten thousand acres of the Motor City were put back to work producing local food, might tens of thousands of Detroiters find new work in the food economy? Hesterman says it’s possible.

11:18 Hesterman Int 2 (01:04)

If we could shift 20 percent of food purchases to more local sources in the five county area of southeast Michigan surrounding the city of Detroit, that could create 35,000 new jobs -- no additional money spent, just spending food money differently, so more of it is spent on the local economy, you create 35,000 new jobs. When everybody’s talking about what’s the next economy in an industrialized manufacturing center like Detroit, I think about why not make the next economy Detroit’s first economy, which is the food economy.

Everywhere you have people living there is a vibrant food economy. The big question is how we’re gonna use that economy. Are we gonna use it on highly processed and packaged food that’s making people sick? At the same time, it’s evaporating money right out of that community immediately, or are we gonna think about how to organize and redesign the food system so more of those local expenditures are keeping people and families and kids healthy, at the same time, supporting a local food economy and local agriculture.

12:22 Narration 8 - Lead to Mid Break (00:28)

Oran Hesterman. Marrying community health with a healthy local food economy in a vision to revitalize a city.

When we return, we’ll take a tour of urban food innovations designed on principles of equity, diversity, sustainability and environmental health. This is “Going Locavore: Urban Innovation, Community Transformation”.

I'm Neil Harvey. You are listening to The Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature.

12:50 MID BREAK (00:21)

13:11 Narration 9 (00:22)

You can download this and other programs on the radio pages at www.bioneers.org

Before James Ella James relocated to Oakland, California, she grew up near Huntsville, Alabama, in a tight-knit community where everyone ate and shared homegrown vegetables and fresh eggs from backyard chickens.

13:33 James 1 (01:46)

Living there was very simple. We grew most of our vegetables, in fact, all of our vegetables. We had our orchards for our fruits. We went hunting when we wanted to kill wildlife. We had our chickens on the yard, turkeys and ducks, and all of those, so we needed to eat, we just go out and kill one. My grandfather used to kill the pigs in the neighborhood for everybody. We only had beef about twice a year, and that’s when someone decided to kill a calf, and we would divide it up among the neighborhoods. So, we really had a healthy way of living.

We didn’t have to worry about being obese because we didn’t have cars to ride everywhere, so we walked everywhere we went. But it was a very simple lifestyle at that time.

In 1955, I moved to Oakland, California, in West Oakland. And in West Oakland, there were two markets, Swan’s Market, and there was Housewives’ Market, and those markets had fresh vegetables. The farmers came in on the weekend and brought their fresh vegetables, and their- then fish, fresh fish and all of that, so everybody went there to get their food. At that time, I could walk to Swan’s Market or to Housewives’ Market, and people came from the hills.

But, then, later on, when the white people started to move out of West Oakland into East Oakland, then the store that was there, Safeway, also moved. And, then, Lucky Store moved. So, as a consequence, what we had to eat was the food that had been sitting at the corner store maybe two or three days.

15:19 NARRATION 10 (00:20)

James Ella James became a lifelong faith-based social activist. She is currently working on a national program to combat childhood obesity. Teaming up with the Fair Food Network, she has brought some of her rural food ways to the urban foodshed where her neighbors have been hungry for fresh, affordable, local food.

15:39 James 1a (01:37)

But now in Oakland it looks like we’ve gone full circle because I have a garden in my backyard planted by Dr. Hesterman, and I have plenty of tomatoes and cabbage and squash, and all kinds of things that I give to my neighbors.

Also, in Oakland, at this time, we have Mandela Food Cooperative, City Slickers, who help you to start a backyard garden. We have the Fresh Approach, promotes local food systems, and we have the farmers’ market at some of the churches on weekends. They allow the farmers to come and bring their food.

I belong to another organization called the National Council of Negro Women, and we formed a partnership with the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development where we’re working with children to combat childhood obesity, and we’re also working with families.

So, we’re now getting on to obesity. That’s a major, major problem among us, and, as you heard, it’s caused by the foods that we eat because we’re not able to go and get this expensive food.

And another organization that I work with is called Berkeley Organized Congregations for Action. And that organization works with people to empower them to stand up to ask for what we need in our community; because we believe that if the faith community leads the way, we will all be able to get there quicker.

17:16 Narration 11 (00:34)

James Ella James, nourishing the emergence of a healthy, fair urban food system in Oakland, California.

In New Orleans, Louisiana, 150 students at a youth-based nonprofit organization called “Rethink” are feeding the rebuilding of that city’s public schools.

Food is among their most serious concerns. Faced with a long litany of chronic problems, “Rethink” invited chefs, architects and food experts to serve up a menu of recommendations. Victoria Carter presented it to the school superintendent.

17:50 Victoria Carter (01:29)

Recommendation one: get rid of the useless utensil called spork, a half spoon and a half fork. [laughter] Recommendation two: Buy fresh, tasty food. Recommendation three: Buy fresh food from local fishers, farmers and shrimpers. Recommendation four: Present more local dishes on the school menu. Recommendation five: Present tasty, healthy food alternatives for vegetarians. Recommendation six: No more Styrofoam trays. [cheers/applause] Recommendation seven: Future school designs should include outdoor vegetable gardens. Recommendation eight: Use leftover food to make compost for school gardens. [applause] Recommendation nine: Design cafeterias that you adults would like to eat in yourselves. [applause/comments] Recommendation ten: Install sinks so we can wash our hands before eating. Recommendation eleven: Enough time to enjoy our food and our friends. Recommendation twelve: No more silent lunches for any reason. Do not tie punishment to food in cafeterias. [applause]

19:18 Narration 12 (00:30)

The result of these recommendations from the Rethinkers is that every new public school built in New Orleans will have garden space, lunchroom sinks, and reusable utensils and trays. And no more sporks.

Victoria Carter is part of a powerful wave of urban food innovators around the U.S. creating local solutions that make economic good sense, build community action, and connect communities to local resources for healthy living. Again Oran Hesterman.

19:48 Hesterman Wkshop 1 (03:39)

The positive signs are in communities all over the country, like in Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York with an organization Added Value, that, literally, on a three-acre playground that had been abandoned, the city of New York parks department gave it to this nonprofit organization, said if you can do something with it, go ahead. So, after sweeping up the needles and the used condoms, I kid you not. This is what they did, and cleaned off the lot. They then made a deal with the Bronx Zoo who brought all of their bedding and manure from the zoo to this park, and on top of the asphalt now, about 18 inches to 24 inches of beautiful, organic composted soil, they’re growing a beautiful organic garden. Kids in the neighborhood earning money growing food and selling at the farmers’ market, selling to high-end restaurants in Brooklyn, as neighborhood CSA, kids from the elementary school come into that playground, growing food now. So, a great innovative project happening there.

But it’s not only in Brooklyn. Holyoke, Massachusetts, one of the poorest communities now in the northeastern United States, about 90 percent Puerto Rican population. Nuestras Raices, means “Our Roots” in Spanish. So, this grassroots organization now has community gardens all over Holyoke tended by grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren, three and four generations involved. They have a 30-acre urban farm along the Connecticut River now, and they have created 40 new, small businesses related to this local food system owned and run by people in that neighborhood. [applause]

Urban farmers all over the country. We see it in Detroit. We see it in New Orleans. We see it in Chicago. We see it in Baltimore. All over the country, people taking back land that is sitting vacant and growing good, healthy food on it.

In Detroit, we have a program that we’re leading called Double Up Food Bucks, just as an example. In Detroit, where you have, literally, as Jean said, not a single major grocery store left across the entire city, the eleventh largest city in the United States, we now have a number of farmers’ markets, and at those farmers’ markets, anybody who comes with it used to be called food stamps, but it’s now an electronic benefits transfer card, there’s 450 million dollars of federal benefits coming to the residents of Detroit, to help them buy food. If all they can access is convenience stores, liquor stores, and party stores, that federal food assistance is not helping them. If they come to the farmers’ market, any one of five farmers’ markets in Detroit now, and use that same card, they get double their money. [applause] All right? Double their money’s worth. If they want to spend ten dollars on produce at a locally grown produce at farmers’ market ten dollar is debited off their card, they’ll get 20 dollars worth of buying power. So, a project called Double Up Food Bucks that we’re starting in Detroit, but it’s expanding across the country.

Nationally, we have proposed to US Department of Agriculture, and our congressional delegation from southeast Michigan something we’re calling a Healthy Food Systems Innovations Initiative to build a fund so that projects like the ones I was just talking about can be supported all over the country. It’s time for these small projects that we know can be very successful to be able to expand, to have the resources to expand and move into greater financial sustainability by moving into the regular market stream.

23:12 Narration 13 (00:22)

Communities across the United States are growing a new healthy, fair food system. They’re mapping their foodsheds – where food comes from and how it gets to their plate. They’re connecting the dots by developing systems of food entrepreneurship, training and finance. Because it’s a whole system. And because it takes a village to feed a village. Oran Hesterman.

23:34 Hesterman Int 5 (02:17)

Food becomes a vehicle for community transformation. I’ve been working on issues of sustainability and food systems for my whole career, and, you know, not too long ago it was a little hard to get people really energized around this issue. Somehow, a lot of people are waking up about it, which I’m thrilled about. But people say, well, what can we do? You know, now that I know it’s an issue, what can I do?

I like to say to people, start wherever you are. You know, if it means organizing food buying clubs, do that. If it means asking where your kids’ food is coming from at school and getting better food because you have kids in school, do that. If you’re on a college campus and you’re interested in getting better food and locally grown and organic food in the college cafeteria, work on that. Something called The Real Food Challenge where students all over the country are doing that.

If you’re interested farmland and open space protection, work with your local jurisdictions on purchasing development rights and other programs that are going to preserve farmland for the future.

Try to convince your city and county and state governments to do more procurement of good food with public funds. That’s a huge area of policy. You know, we spend a lot of public money on food. I mean, I just think about the conversations I’ve had in Michigan with some of the people in the Department of Corrections. One of the largest buyers of food with state money in Michigan is the Department of Corrections. Well, you know, we could be using that public money to support more local agriculture and healthier food if we were using some of that money preferentially to buy locally grown and produced food for our prison cafeterias. And, at the same time, we know that where much of the action is around policy in the food system is at the federal level…

It’s not just about changing our own habits in our own home. It’s about shifting an entire system, and that the most important step for people to take is to shift from being a conscious consumer to an engaged citizen around issues of food and agriculture. keep up all the stuff you’re doing as an aware and conscious consumer, and start making the shift toward engaged citizenship around this issue at the same time.

25:47 NARRATION 14 (00:19)

Oran Hesterman, Michael Pollan, James Ella James and Victoria Carter. Transforming the food system. Inviting us all to make the change from conscious consumers to engaged citizens. “Going Locavore : Urban Innovation, Community Transformation”

26:17 Bioneers X - Program Close/Credits (1:57)

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[Credits]

The Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature is a production of Collective Heritage Institute.



Executive Producer: Kenny Ausubel

Written by Catherine Stifter and Kenny Ausubel

Senior Producer: Neil Harvey

Managing Producer: Stephanie Welch

Production Management: Aaron Leventman and Chuck Castleberry

Station Relations by Creative PR

Distribution is by WFMT Radio Network

Original Recordings provided by Focus Audio Visual

Interview recording engineer: Jeff Wessman.



Our theme music is taken from the album "Journey Between" by Baka Beyond and used by permission of Hannibal Records, a Rykodisc label. Additional music was made available by Acoustic Music Records at www.acoustic-music.de . For more music information, please visit Bioneers.org



The opinions expressed in “The Bioneers Revolution from the Heart of Nature” radio series are those of the presenters and are not necessarily those of Collective Heritage Institute, the underwriters, or this radio station.



My name is Neil Harvey. Thank you for listening. I invite you to join the Bioneers in inspiring a shift to live on Earth in ways that honor the web of life, each other and future generations.



This is program number 01-10



28:17 Closing Underwriting (00:13)

Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature is made possible in part by Organic Valley, a farmer-owned cooperative producing local food with the future in mind since 1988. Learn more at organicvalley.com.

28:30 END