For a free country, we’ve got an awfully tyrannical food chain. Our current system of food production is really founded on a contempt for life; it pummels the planet and exploits migrant farm workers, defying the laws of both nature and man. If we truly are what we eat, I guess that makes us a nation of nature-hating misanthropes.

We’ve shoehorned corn into every corner of Iowa, and shoveled it into every cow--or so it seemed to me as I watched the screening of King Corn that Eating Liberally co-hosted this week at the Tank with our friends from the Green Edge Collaborative. We’ve taken the already fertile soil of our heartland and jacked it up on steroids, to grow a bazillion bushels of a variety of corn you can’t even eat till it’s been processed into some sort of by-product.

We coax an astonishing amount of corn from each monocropped acre by saturating this precious topsoil with fertilizers and herbicides, and then we convert this nutritionally bankrupt bounty into high fructose corn syrup, or feed for cows whose digestive systems literally can’t stomach it (hello, E. coli), or the eco-disaster we call corn-based ethanol.

As King Corn’s food court jesters Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis discovered in their pilgrimage to our feedcorn fiefdom, this ultra-efficient method of growing corn has created ever larger farms run by fewer and fewer farmers, draining the soul of our rural communities even as it depletes the soil (and drives our diabetes epidemic, and fuels global warming, and makes cheap spaghetti sauces sickeningly sweet, and--oh, nevermind.)

And this is the model of agriculture that Wall Street, K Street, and Main Street all celebrate as a shining example of good ol’ American know-how that the rest of the world would do well to emulate. Feedcorn is on the march!

We were fortunate to have Ian Cheney on hand at our screening to do a Q & A, and the questions were pretty much the same ones people peppered Michael Pollan with at an Omnivore’s Dilemma reading I attended in April of 2006 (Pollan, an advisor to the King Corn crew, appears in the film expounding on the evils of industrial agriculture against the backdrop of his own abundant veggie garden, including a suitably monstrous patch of dinosaur kale!)

What folks want to know, after reading Pollan’s books or seeing a film like King Corn, is “What can we do about this awful food system?”

The knee-jerk response is, of course, to endorse community supported agriculture and farmers’ markets, but Cheney noted that we run the risk of creating an alternative food chain that serves only those fortunate enough to live in the more affluent communities where farmers’ markets and upscale stores like Whole Foods thrive.

Living at the Ethicurean epicenter of NYC, it’s easy for me to opt out of our crappy food chain; I can walk to Union Square and shop at the Greenmarket four days a week all year round, and whatever I can’t find there I can get at the Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s that are a stone’s throw from the Greenmarket. There are several mom-and-pop health food stores in our neck of the woods, too.

So it’s easy for me to follow Pollan’s advice to stay out of the supermarkets. But a few miles north of us, in East Harlem, they’ve hardly got any supermarkets left to stay out of. As the New York Times reported last Monday:

To us farmers’ market fanatics, the very notion of a New York supermarket as a source for fresh, healthy food seems laughable; the typical supermarket is a food desert to us, with aisle after aisle of mysterious food-like substances encased in plastic and no grass-fed anything. But when your only sources for food are bodegas and fast food joints, a supermarket that actually sells fresh--though far-traveled--fruits and vegetables is a step up.

No wonder more and more city dwellers are becoming urban farmers, as another New York Times article noted yesterday; communities decried as food deserts are creating their own oases by reclaiming unused lots where they grow fruits and vegetables for themselves and even sell the surplus to others.

The Times article heralds the revival of urban agriculture that’s taking root all around the country, with the help of organizations like Milwaukee’s Growing Power, and NYC’s own GreenThumb and Just Foods, two groups who’ve done so much to support our community gardeners and local farmers. I had the pleasure of hearing Growing Power’s founder, Will Allen, speak at the Food & Society conference in Arizona last week and came away convinced that Growing Power’s one-acre farm represents the future of urban agriculture.

As the Times notes, this “one-acre farm crammed with plastic greenhouses, compost piles, do-it-yourself contraptions, tilapia tanks and pens full of hens, ducks and goats…grossed over $220,000 last year from the sale of lettuces, winter greens, sprouts and fish to local restaurants and consumers.”

Allen’s model demonstrates that city dwellers do have the capacity to produce at least some of their own food in an eco-friendly, socially responsible manner. And as more and more folks become aware of the rampant abuse that’s a hallmark of industrial agriculture, from cruelly confined chickens to Florida’s enslaved migrant farm workers, people are seeking alternative food chains untarnished by institutionalized exploitation and environmental degradation.

For a really comprehensive and inspiring look at the enormous potential of this movement to provide less privileged folks with an abundance of fresh, affordable produce while building community, preserving open space and creating an environmentally beneficial habitat, check out “Vitalizing the Vacant” from Thoughts On The Table blogger Annie Myers, who never ceases to astonish me with her clear, beautiful prose and even clearer observations.

Annie’s one of a dozen or so twenty-somethings I’ve met who blow me away with their commitment to changing our world; I was too cynical and alienated when I was that age to do much more than mouth off about our decaying culture. I’m doing that still, while folks like Annie and the Real Food Challenge students and “Greenhorns” filmmaker Severine Von Tscharner Fleming are running around remaking the world the way they want it to be. Considering how badly we've messed things up, it’s the least we can do to cheer them on.

It’s a safe bet that diabetics outnumber crackheads in the U.S. by a big fat margin, but the corn cartel’s got carte blanche to fill us (and our gas tanks) with their Beltway-blessed by-products. So U.S. drug policies focus more on coke addicts than Coke addicts, despite the fact that soda’s the more abused substance.

We’ve got a knack for waging the wrong wars, lately, and we can’t even keep our conflicts from conflicting. Just look at how the War on Terror has undermined the War on Drugs; last year, according to the Globe and Mail, Afghanistan’s poppy crops hit a historic high, if you will, providing more than 92 percent of the world’s opium and heroin. U.S. officials estimate that the Taliban derives anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of its income from opiate exports.

Poppy production skyrocketed after we invaded Afghanistan in 2001; at a time when shortages of rice and wheat are shaking things up all over the world, the Globe and Mail reports that this year’s poppy crop “will produce 40 per cent more than the world demand — which means that huge quantities will be stockpiled somewhere.”

Afghanistan’s farmers would actually prefer to grow onions than opiates, but the warlords and the Taliban have pretty much hijacked their fields, forcing them to grow poppies. Talk about a Catch 22—we can’t root out the poppies till we uproot the warlords, whose power is fueled by those fields of fuzzy pods.

And our proposed solution to this problem is to carpet-bomb Afghanistan with an herbicide called glyphosate, aka Roundup, a Monsanto-manufactured weed killer. Ah, the military-industrial complex-is there any world crisis that Monsanto can’t solve?

John McCain’s all in favor of using Roundup to rein in the poppy posse, but the locals look darkly on the prospect of being under a cloud of chemicals. American officials insist that glyphosate is “one of the world’s safest herbicides,” according to the New York Times, which cites a State Department fact sheet claiming that glyphosate is “less toxic than common salt, aspirin, caffeine, nicotine and even vitamin A.”

But Britain, which heads the anti-narcotics effort in Afghanistan, thinks this tactic’s toxic in more ways than one, as does the Afghan government. So the search for a solution drags on while the buds and the bad guys flourish.

OK, so we’re totally losing on the heroin/opium front in the Golden Crescent, but aren’t we making some progress in our efforts to curb South American coke production?

Well, funny story, actually; our campaign to convince South America to stop growing coca leaves and switch to legitimate crops hasn’t made a dent in the world’s cocaine supply, but it’s just about destroyed America’s asparagus farmers.

Sadly, the MSM’s too busy focusing on the follies of those other American Spears, Britney and Jamie Lynn, to soil its shallow soul by reporting that the American asparagus farmer is an endangered species. So it’s left to us lefty, dirt-encrusted bloggers to tell you about the superb “stalkumentary,” Asparagus!, which I’m delighted to announce is now available on DVD after reaping a bumper crop of prizes and plaudits; New York magazine called it “oddly brilliant.”

Asparagus! documents the alternately hilarious and heartbreaking saga of Oceana County, Michigan, which was the asparagus capital of the world for thirty years. Then came the Andean Trade Preference Act, which gave Peru the right to export its fresh asparagus into the U.S. tax-free as an incentive to discourage drug production and trafficking. Thanks to this obscure bit of legislation, Peru’s now overtaken Oceana to become “the world’s largest asparagus industry,” and the good farmers of Michigan are facing bankruptcy.

Filmmakers Anne De Mare and Kirsten Kelly put a poignant and compelling face on this freakish case of collateral damage, letting the local folks weave their tale of War On Drug-induced woe in an entertaining and infuriating film that will leave you shouting “S.O.S.”, as in Save Our Spears!

Ironically, there’s $15 million in aid to American asparagus farmers tucked into the current Farm Bill, in order to offset the unforeseen consequences of the Andean Trade Preference Act. See Asparagus!, and you’ll see why Bird’s Eye is right on target, while Wal-Mart misses the mark. Just say no, indeed! To Peruvian asparagus, that is.

Plants need sun, air, and water—and so do eco-geek bloggers. We grow wan and weak sprawled across our sofas, our bellies encased by a layer of blogger blubber providing a built-in cushion for our laptops as we tap away under sickly fluorescent lights, exhorting everybody else to get out of the house and go grow heirloom tomatoes.

It’s one of the more ironic aspects of being a sustainable ag activist/blogger: how do you find the time to garden and cook when you’re so busy blogging about the virtues of cooking and gardening?

A glut of great stories crosses my virtual desktop everyday, and I stockpile links along with ideas on what I’d like to say about them, creating a stack of what The Ethicurean’s brilliant Bonnie Powell calls “mental cordwood.” On top of that, I am blessed to know all kinds of amazing folks who are doing incredible things to, you know, save the world, and I really want to help get the word out. So that goes onto the pile, too.

But sometimes, I just want to cook and garden. Last week, I spent entire days raking leaves (yeah, I’m kinda behind), sowing seeds, transplanting shrubs and pruning my apple trees and ripping out insurgent bamboo roots and cooking the shoots and generally playing hooky from the Internet.

And now, I’m at the Kellogg Food and Society Conference in Chandler, Arizona along with Bonnie and a bunch of my other fellow foodie bloggers and hundreds of other movers and shakers of the good food movement, including many of my heroes and mentors. It’s an overwhelming experience to be surrounded by so many folks who are dedicated to overhauling our crazy food chain, and, unlike Bonnie—who is far more disciplined than I am and has already managed to blog about the conference—I am too exhausted (though exhilarated) to write about all the stuff going on here.

But more importantly, as I write this, I have to choose between blogging and eating, because if I don’t shut my laptop and get dressed I’m gonna miss breakfast. Sometimes blogging has to take a backseat to, well, living.

Bloggers at the Kellogg FAS Conference

(Left to Right)

Tom Philpott from Grist, Elanor & Bonnie from the Ethicurean, Kat from EL, and Sam Fromartz from Chews Wise

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: Consumer panic in this country over a perceived rice crisis—or, as Jon Stewart dubbed it, C”rice”is—compelled U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer to declare last Thursday that good ol’ American ingenuity holds the solution to the world’s current food shortages. Shafer told Reuters:

(box)"Unless we can convince other nations to accept the biotechnology and the good farming practices and the precision farming methods that we use today in the United States to increase yields across the globe, we're going to continue to have these price structure and problems with food and hunger in the world today."(box)

Of course, a lot of folks are saying that our agricultural policies are, in fact, a big part of the problem, particularly the diversion of corn for ethanol. What’s your take?

Dr. Nestle: It's mantra time again! From their beginnings in the early 1990s, to head off critics, agricultural biotechnology companies intoned the agbiotech mantra: biotechnology--and only biotechnology--can produce enough food to feed the world. So far, the results have been less than impressive.

The industry has focused on temperate zone agriculture, rather than tropical agriculture, for two reasons: it's easier to do and people in developing countries don't have the money to buy expensive seeds every year. Temperate zone soybean producers love using genetically modified seeds because they don't have to apply pesticides as often and their yields are good.

But researchers who do such comparisons say yields on organic farms are lower, but only slightly. So now corn farmers are being encouraged to grow corn for ethanol? The nutritionist in me says that's better than growing it for high fructose corn syrup, but not much corn gets used for that purpose anyway. Most of it goes for animal feed.

All of this is unsustainable and needs a major re-think. Maybe it's time for everyone to start growing food, even if it's just in window boxes. In the meantime, we have a farm bill that still hasn't passed and gets worse by the minute. Our agriculture policies are a mess. I hate the idea that it will take a food crisis to bring on better agricultural policies but let's hope some good will come out of rising food prices.

I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but this whole Earth Day thing is really just a front for a cabal of dirt-loving luddites determined to destroy life as we know it in America. Dig down below that crunchy granola surface, that coalition of fruits and nuts (so annoyingly high in moral fiber) and you’ll find a half-baked conspiracy to deprive us of some of our most cherished traditions: lush lawns unblemished by dandelions or dangling laundry; easy-to-heat, awful-to-eat cuisine; four wheel-drive vehicles with single digit gas mileage, and so on.

These terroirists hate our freewheeling ways, and, no, that’s not a typo. It’s a homegrown insurgency inspired by the French notion of “terroir”--the way that a specific region’s soil and climate influence the foods and beverages produced there.

Wikipedia loosely translates terroir as "a sense of place;” locavores, aka food mile fanatics, describe it as “the taste of here.” It’s a foreign concept to most Americans, whose terroir tends to be the suburban supermarket; there’s no “here” there, just overprocessed, overpackaged food that’s traveled thousands of miles by truck, ship or plane.

We’ve been awfully piggy about our oil consumption, as Jad Mouawad noted in the New York Times last Sunday:

Keep in mind that we’re only 4% of the world’s population. A graph accompanying Mouwad’s piece showed that other developed nations have managed to keep their consumption levels in check or even lower them significantly; Sweden and Denmark have reduced their oil use by 32% and 33% respectively.

Our oil consumption, on the other hand, rose 21% as we hitched our wagon to a fantasy of infinite—and cheap—fossil fuels, and went on building bigger houses, buying bigger cars, choosing longer commutes, eating more fossil-fueled fast foods.

Along the way, we glorified wastefulness and gluttony, converted fertile farms to sterile sprawl, stopped building sidewalks, marginalized mass transit, banned backyard clotheslines and front yard food gardens, and sent our soldiers off to die defending what is, at the end of the day, a pretty indefensible way of life.

And now we’ve got an agri-culture war here at home. Rising fuel and food costs, along with concerns about global warming, have given a growing army of “front-yard farmers,” as the Wall Street Journal calls them, plenty of ammunition in their war to replace resource-hogging, planet-polluting lawns with food gardens. Read the objections from grass-addled neighbors who view these minifarms as a blight, and you’ll see why Michael Pollan qualifies growing one’s own food as a “subversive” act.

Pollan’s the most high-profile combatant in the grow-your-own guerrilla campaign, his latest contribution being a piece in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine’s “green” issue that cites planting a vegetable garden as one thing an individual can do to combat climate change and shorten the food chain. But he’s got plenty of company; Rip-Out-Your-Lawn-And-Grow-Veggies is a hot literary genre these days; in addition to Pollan’s best seller, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, there’s Heather Flores’s Food Not Lawns and Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates: Attack On The Front Lawn.

There are websites to inspire the would-be urban homesteader, too, such as Kitchen Gardeners International, whose founder, Roger Doiron, is on a mission to convince the next occupant of the White House to revive the wartime tradition of the victory gardens that provided us with plenty of homegrown produce during World War II. And The Path To Freedom website documents the astounding quantity of food one family produces on a fifth of an acre in Pasadena, California.

But the curb-your-carbon-footprint campaign doesn’t stop at the curb; it’s infiltrated the institutional food sector, too, as an article in Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times noted. Enlightened eaters are encouraging university and corporate campuses to drop the mass-produced glop and start serving “real food,” i.e. meals made with as many fresh, local, organically grown ingredients as possible. Efforts to reduce waste and compost kitchen scraps are becoming more common, too.

At the forefront of this movement is a coalition of students who are launching a national campaign called The Real Food Challenge, whose goal is to “create a food system that truly nourishes people, communities, and the earth.”

In other words, a food system diametrically opposed to the one we have now; you know, the one that nourishes obesity, diabetes, animal abuse, worker abuse, pollution, and global warming. The one that our tax payer dollars have been underwriting even as it undermines us all, as Christopher Cook, author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis points out in an op-ed in today’s Christian Science Monitor.

So how do these wild-eyed idealists define “Real Food”?

Aha! You see, they even admit that overthrowing our uber-consumer culture is part of their agenda. So don’t be fooled by the rash of feel-good festivities and token tree hugging that inevitably breaks out around Earth Day. It’s really an all-out assault on your right as an American to plunder the planet. Alert Homeland Security! Code Green! There's an elevated risk of attack by trowel-toting terroirists.

Barbie and I don’t have a lot in common. For one thing, I’m biodegradable and she’s not. But we do agree on one thing; math is hard. For example, how is it that Lisa Simpson’s been a vegetarian for thirteen years when she’s only 8 years old? Is it possible that an anti-oxidant-rich plant-based diet has the power not only to delay the aging process but actually reverse it?

But while eternal tweener Lisa’s the token treehugger in the Simpson household, it’s Bart who’s got the perfect prescription for how to cool Mother Nature’s fevered brow: don’t have a cow. Literally. The less meat you grill, the more you help the planet chill.

Now, before you dismiss me as some kinda free-range Chicken Little, clucking about the catastrophic consequences of our fossil-fueled food chain, you should know that I’m not the only one warning that burgers do more harm than hummers.

Activist/author Anna Lappé’s been looking up at the sky, too, but while I’ve been running around squawking that it’s falling, her brand new campaign Take A Bite Out Of Climate Change looks up and sees a sunny solution--a plant-based food chain founded on the ultimate renewable energy source, solar power.

Lappé’s upcoming book, Eat the Sky: Food, Farming, and the Climate Crisis, will no doubt help spread the word about the wonders of foods grown through the natural miracle of photosynthesis instead of that man-made marvel, synthetic fertilizers, and the power of a naturally biodiverse, balanced ecosystem to protect plants from pests and disease instead of pouring on toxic pesticides.

But in the meantime, she’s put together a wonderful, non-wonky website that lays out for the layperson why switching to a diet dominated by locally grown, organic fruits and vegetables is one of the single most significant things you can do to curb your carbon footprint.

This is a huge public service and a tremendous boon to me, personally, because my endless chanting of the “eat-less-meat” mantra elicits plenty of puzzled looks from folks who can’t grasp the notion that a veggie-centric diet does more to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions than driving a hybrid car. I have been trying to get this message out for a while, now (which, in the interests of full disclosure, may be why Lappé put me on Take A Bite’s advisory council,) but now I can just say, “Go to takeabite.cc and see for yourself!”

Lappé is on a mission to liberate us from a food chain that relies on a systemic abuse of land, animals and people. Industrial agriculture is essentially a failed coup on Mother Earth, a tragically arrogant attempt to overrule the laws of nature, and now it’s coming back to bite us on our ever-expanding asses. It’s fouled our air, water and soil, spoiled our health and worsened global warming.

But Take A Bite’s raison d’etre is not to bum you out about the ecological disaster we call Agribiz; its purpose is to provide you with all the information and resources you need to lighten up your carbon footprint in the most delightful and delicious way. So thanks to Anna and her crew for stepping up to the solar-powered plate. Now even us Henny Pennys can look up and say, here comes the sun!

Oh, you car-crazy, meat-mad Americans, look what you’ve done now! Everybody else wants to live the way you do, wolfing down Whoppers behind the wheel. So they’re ripping up rainforests to grow more grains for cars and cows, and that’s just accelerating global warming, which is worsening the droughts that are ruining crops from Australia to Zimbabwe.

As Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, told NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday, the current global food crisis wasn’t caused by some sort of temporary setback such as crop failure, but rather “systemic change” due to increased worldwide demand for meat and the fool’s gold rush to produce more biofuels, which Brown cites as the proverbial last straw:

Meanwhile, the subdivisions where so many of us park our precious cars--and our dreams--have proven, like Beanie Babies and Thomas Kinkade paintings, to be a less than stellar investment, leaving millions of Americans looking for a new bubble to float their boat while Wall Street and the rest of the world blanches at the prospect of a global recession.

But though our carnivorous, fossil-fueled lifestyle’s inadvertently worsened a worldwide shortage of grains and other staple crops, it’s also created some terrific investment opportunities! As the UK website everyinvestor recently declared, “Buy Food…It’s The New Gold:”

My unequivocal answer is yes! But not in the conventional, commodity crop sense that everyinvestor meant. Forget about corn and soy shares; buy yourself a share of the harvest from one of your local family farmers instead.

It’s called a CSA--Community Supported Agriculture--and in return for an investment of a few hundred dollars upfront this spring, you’ll be rewarded all summer and fall with fresh-from-the-farm produce picked each week at its prime and packed into a box just for you.

Good as gold? I’d argue that it’s even better; after all, when food’s in short supply, you’re better off with carrots than carats. You can’t make stock out of bullion.

Here in the land of milk ‘n’ honey, milk prices are soaring and the honeybees we need to pollinate our crops are all going AWOL. The Washington Post reports that the cost of milk’s shot up so high that one school district in North Carolina’s gone back to serving its kids Yoo-hoo drinks, “which had been taken off the shelf in favor of healthier options…Sure, officials would rather the kids chugged milk. But each Yoo-hoo sale brings in 36 cents of profit.”

American institutions and individuals alike have been addicted for decades to cheap processed foods, aided and abetted by our own agricultural axis of evil: Agribiz, Big Food, and bottom-of-the-pork-barrel politicians. But with higher food and fuel costs looking likely to be the new normal, we may finally be ready to shed the shackles of this corrosive food chain.

Community Supported Agriculture offers an alternative model of farming that nourishes us, the land, and our local economies. It produces fresh, healthy food, preserves open space, and enables small family farmers to actually make a decent living. In short, it’s the one bright spot in an otherwise bleak food forecast.

Ironically, uber-urban New York City’s at the vanguard of this pastoral phenomenon; we’ve got 60 CSAs right here in NYC and another 120 elsewhere in the state, giving New York the highest number of CSAs in the nation.

You may have only just started to hear the buzz about CSAs, but this grass-fed, grassroots movement’s been growing for more than twenty years now, as one of its pioneers, Columbia University nutrition professor emeritus Joan Gussow, noted at the recent CSA in NYC conference held at Columbia and hosted by Just Food, the powerhouse non-profit that’s done so much to promote the growth of CSAs in New York.

Gussow, author of This Organic Life: Confessions of A Suburban Homesteader and a mentor to Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan and the rest of us progressive foodie activist types, calculated that currently, a CSA feeds one out of every 727 New Yorkers, prompting Just Food’s executive director, Jacquie Berger, to reply, “Yeah, but we’re aiming for one out of 7.”

The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik described Berger as “startlingly young-looking” in a piece last fall on the local foods movement, and she is, but as Gussow’s anecdote illustrates, Berger and her colleagues at Just Food are also wildly ambitious--and rightly so, according to Gussow, who’s been living La Vida Local for decades.

You might expect Gussow to be just a bit weary of fighting the good food fight after all these years, but she may in fact be more optimistic than she’s ever been about the prospects for our food culture shifting to a more sustainable model. As she told those of us who gathered for the Just Food CSA in NYC conference:

And hope, as we all know, is a hot commodity these days. Maybe even hotter than corn and soy. So log on to Local Harvest or the Eat Well Guide and find the CSA nearest you! Your investment will be rewarded with some of the sweetest dividends ever.

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: Frito-Lay’s commemorating this Earth Day, April 22nd, by launching a solar-powered snack food factory in Modesto, California. “A football stadium-sized farm of solar collectors” will start harnessing the sun’s energy to produce the company’s corn-based multigrain SunChips, according to the Modesto Bee.

The project, which called for a “significant” investment on the part of Pepsi-co-owned Frito Lay, was a collaboration with the California Energy Commission, which hopes to showcase Central California’s potential to be a leader in the use of solar-powered farms for manufacturing. And Frito-Lay is laying out another big chunk of change for the obligatory ad campaign to trumpet its solar-powered snack food.

Since America's hooked on salty, crunchy chips, Big Food will keep cranking them out--as long as Agribiz has the petroleum, chemicals, land, and water to keep growing corn for dubious "foods," along with boneheaded biofuels. So, given that reality, should we celebrate the arrival of the pseudo-carbon-neutral empty carb? Or is this just one more case of a corporation putting the “con” in “conservation”?

Dr. Nestle: I hadn’t heard of this but your question reminds me of its food equivalent: Is a better-for-you junk food a good choice? Just because it’s a little bit healthier, does that make it good? Let’s hand it to PepsiCo (Frito Lay’s parent company) for once again getting ahead of the pack in promoting itself as green as well as healthy. PepsiCo was first to get rid of trans fats, and first to self-endorse its “better-for-you” options for snack foods and drinks. It is now trying to position itself as a wellness company, and green to boot. Alas, I can’t help but see this as much more about marketing than about health or environmental sustainability.

If PepsiCo was really serious about health issues it would stop marketing junk foods to kids and stop marketing junk foods in developing countries. I was in India last fall and could not believe how Frito Lay chips managed to be for sale everywhere—even in the most remote villages where nothing else was available. PepsiCo has a truly awe-inspiring distribution system. If PepsiCo was really serious about environmental issues, it would stop wasting the planet’s resources on junk foods altogether and would stop selling tap water in plastic bottles. And I’d love to see it stop marketing to kids too, but that’s another matter.

Yes, there’s gloating galore in our Mac-happy household over the news that “even the briefest exposure to the Apple logo may make you behave more creatively,” according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. No wonder we are just bursting with ideas that our cramped Manhattan apartment can barely contain; we’ve got more Macs per capita than you’ll find anywhere outside of an Apple store. (My Mac consultant husband) Matt would put one in the bathroom if I let him, which I won’t, because that’s my one tech-free haven in our hyper-wired world.

The study, conducted by researchers at Duke University and the University of Waterloo, Canada, found that even a split-second glimpse of the iconic Apple logo is enough to inspire folks to “think different”:

As Duke professor Tanya Chartrand noted, “Apple has worked for many years to develop a brand character associated with nonconformity, innovation and creativity.” IBM’s logo, on the other hand, conveys an image to consumers that is “traditional, smart and responsible,” i.e., safe and dull.

Apples have a long tradition of tempting mankind to flout convention—just ask Adam and Eve. And don’t forget Johnny Appleseed, who was running around literally sowing the seeds of the conservation movement a couple hundred years ago, before voluntary simplicity and animal rights were even trendy.

The Beatles beat Steve Jobs by a few years, too, leading to a branding battle between Apple Corp. and Apple Inc., which rocked our collective world with their revolutionary music and machines, respectively.

That lawsuit was settled last year, but now Apple’s gone and picked another fight, this time with the Big Apple, which unveiled a new apple logo for its GreeNYC campaign to inspire New Yorkers “to walk, bike and unplug appliances when not in use,” as the New York Times reports.

Apple is reportedly concerned that the supposed similarity between the two logos could create “consumer confusion resulting in damage and injury.” But as the Times notes, the two apples are decidedly distinctive varieties. Yeah, they’re both apples, but New York City’s hasn’t had a bite taken out of it, and it’s green, whereas Apple’s trademark logo has evolved from its hippy-dippy rainbow phase into the more minimalist black/white spectrum.

Steve Jobs is reportedly worried that GreeNYC’s logo is going to lead to “dilution of the distinctiveness” of the Apple brand. Will people really confuse the two logos? I doubt it, but I’d be happy if they did; after all, if just flashing folks with an image of an apple is enough to encourage our brains to be more receptive to new ideas, it can only boost GreeNYC’s prospects for encouraging conservation. It seems only fair that the fruit that got us evicted from Eden in the first place should help us find our way back.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulsen’s proposed overhaul of our financial markets was unveiled on Monday, a day too early to qualify as an April Fool’s Day prank, but it was a joke, nonetheless. Forget about voodoo economics; this is doodoo economics. No wonder the rest of the world is turning up its nose at our once-almighty dollar as if it were dipped in dung. Paulsen’s proposals do nothing to address the mortgage mess, and they won’t prevent the next free market free-for-all, either—or freefall.

The foreclosure fiasco’s left a landscape littered with pre-fab ghost towns, a NeverLand of never-lived-in condos and sorry-we-had-to-split-levels. Folks are drowning in debt, our consumer-fueled economy’s lurching into obsolescence, but the Powers That Used To Be can barely bring themselves to say the “R” word.

More daring, less deluded folks are tossing around the “D” word. My favorite economics columnist, David R. Francis, wrote a column last week entitled “Recession is a Given. Can We Avoid Depression?”

Francis cites economist Robert Parks’ recent remark in an e-mail to colleagues “that there was more than a 60 percent probability the current financial meltdown in the United States would lead to the "Bush depression." Parks’ pessimism sent tremors down the it’s-not-our-faultline from K Street to Wall Street. But while the Federal Reserve’s frantically trying to jumpstart our stalling economy, Parks thinks the Fed’s interest rate cuts aren’t gonna cut it:

Starvation. Crazy talk from some crackpot Cassandra? Consider the source:

Here in New York, the newly needy are showing up at food banks and soup kitchens in droves, just when donations are dropping to the lowest they’ve been in decades. Same thing’s happening all over the country, according to the Wall Street Journal, and there’s a global food crisis brewing beyond our borders, from Argentina to Africa. The World Bank estimates that 33 countries are facing social unrest fueled by higher food and energy prices.

Are we facing an upheaval here at home? For many tapped-out Americans, rising food and fuel costs are catastrophic. But for “the food-should-cost-more cadre,” as food writer Kim Severson calls us in today’s NY Times, the demise of the dollar burger would be cause for celebration. Admittedly, we’re in the minority in a culture that views low-cost food “as a national triumph.”

As Ephraim Leibtag of the USDA’s Economic Research Service tells Severson, “If you think that mass production and vast distribution predicated on cheap energy is a good system, then the dollar hamburger is a good thing."

Severson cites the hopes of folks like Michael Pollan and Alice Waters that the advent of not-so-cheap fast foods could help level the playing field for locally grown fruits and vegetables and pasture-raised meat and dairy products:

Oh, and while we’re at it, could we have a chat about the high cost of cheap oil, too, now that it’s not so cheap? A congressional committee held a hearing yesterday to ask the heads of our five largest oil companies how they can justify raking in record profits and receiving $18 billion in tax breaks at a time when average Americans are struggling to fill their gas tanks and independent truckers are seeing their profits vanish.

John Hofmeister, the president of Shell Oil, smugly told ABC News, “When our costs are too high for Shell, we make choices about what not to do. And one choice that consumers could make is to drive less.”

Sure, because, you know, we’ve got such great mass transit. And we’ve built all those communities where walking or biking to work is a real option. Oh, wait! That was just a dream I had. Nevermind.

Sadly, an awful lot of folks can only get where they need to go by car. So they can’t cut back on their gas consumption. I guess, to paraphrase Mr. Hofmeister, one choice that consumers could make is to eat less.

Or at least to buy less food. What better way to offset the high cost of your commute than to save on your food bills by eating weeds? It’s high time for lawn-loving suburbanites to just say “whoa!” to Roundup and start harvesting those delicious and nutritious weeds they’ve been treating like trash.

Not sure what’s edible? Martha Stewart’s got a “wild edibles” guide in the April issue of Martha Stewart Living. Sure, life as we know it is ending, but there’s a whole new world of possibilities opening up right before your eyes! So go forage for food in your front yard—it’s a good thing.

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: When it comes to the importance of eating breakfast, you are an unrepentant (and enviably slender) breakfast-skipper, believing that what we eat matters far more than when we eat.

So what's your take on the article in Tuesday's NY Times, "Skipping Cereal and Eggs, and Packing on Pounds," which cites a study showing that "the more often adolescents eat breakfast, the less likely they are to be overweight"?

Dr. Nestle: I read the original paper in Pediatrics, and you can too by clicking HERE. The excellent research team from the University of Minnesota asked a simple question of 4,700 middle- and high-school students: “During the past week, how many days did you eat breakfast?” The researchers correlated the answers, which ranged from 0 to 7 days per week, with the kids’ BMIs. They did a follow-up 5 years later, capturing about half the original respondents. As the New York Times reported, the kids who ate breakfast were thinner to begin with and gained less weight than those who didn’t.

I’m not at all surprised by these results. Nutritionists always say kids need to eat breakfast and I do too. There are loads of studies that correlate breakfast-eating with better learning and general health. Many of these were funded by cereal companies, but no matter. I believe the results. What I’m less sure about is whether the results have anything to do with breakfast itself or with education, wealth, and other markers of socioeconomic status. Breakfast-eating is a marker for a lot of other family characteristics. The Minnesota researchers know this. They point out that studies generally find that kids “who skipped breakfast on a daily basis had a higher BMI, were older, nonwhite, and from a lower SES.” Breakfast eaters, in contrast, eat better diets and are more physically active. So breakfast-eating tracks with other healthful practices in kids.

But what about adults? As I keep saying, one of the great things about being an adult is that you get to eat what you want when you want to. I, for one, gave up eating breakfast as soon as I could get away with it. I don’t start getting hungry or even remotely interested in food until 11:00 or so in the morning and that’s when I want to eat—not before. I wrote about this in What to Eat and cannot count the number of not-hungry-in-the-morning types who have thanked me for taking the pressure off. If adults ate only when they felt hungry and didn’t eat when they didn’t feel hungry, weight control would come a lot easier.

But kids going to school? That’s another matter. The Minnesota researchers did not fuss much about what the kids were eating as long as they were eating at all, but it breaks my heart to see kids eating sodas and chips first thing in the morning. We need to do a lot better job of making sure that kids eat decently, a health practice that tracks with all kinds of health behaviors and learning.

America suffers from a collective case of do-gooder deafness: we have a hard time hearing a message when it's delivered by a dorky academic or an unattractive activist. We're all ears, though, when celebrities speak out about their pet causes, or their pets, or whatever. So, in acknowledgement of the fact that I, as a mere blogger, can only hope to influence so many people, I'd like to enlist the aid of some of our most ogled and Googled celebrities to help America combat climate change and overconsumption:

1. Britney Spears: Britney's evidently on the road to recovery after some much needed r 'n' r. Here are three more "r's" I'd love to see Britney promote: reduce, reuse and recycle. Our landfills are overflowing with post-consumer crap and the oceans are clogged up with plastic; what better time for Britney to redefine white trash! Recommended reading/viewing: Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte; The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard.

2. Paris Hilton: A rolling stone gathers no moss, but a globe-trotting Paris Hilton gathers dross. You're just fossil-fueling yourself, sweetie; stop running around the world making geographical gaffes and hyping your hybrid SUV. Take a page out of No Impact Man's playbook and see if you can stay a little closer to home for a year. Borrow a bike from Ed Begley Jr., and pedal your way to penitence. Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping will bless you.

3. Lindsay Lohan: Lindsay confided to Elle magazine last fall that she feels bad about the fact that media coverage of her shenanigans "is distracting from the other things that are important, like global warming and that kind of stuff." So, Lindsay, why not use that media glare to highlight the hazards of climate change? You'll get a glow, and it won't be from global warming. Go on David Gershon's Low Carbon Diet, school yourself with the hot eco-doc Everything's Cool, and you'll be cool, too.

4. David Beckham: The soccer superstar and style icon's receding hairline has the blogosphere all abuzz. Stressing about your thinning tresses, Becks? Imagine how folks in West Virginia feel about the bald spots the coal-mining industry's leaving on their beloved Appalachian mountains. The tragedy of male pattern baldness pales besides the heartbreak of mountaintop coal removal. Once you've covered your semi-nude noggin with pricey plugs, why not get out and stump on behalf of your adopted home's oldest mountain range before they blast the last tree to smithereens? Recommended reading/viewing: Coal River by Michael Shnayerson, Burning the Future: Coal In America.

5. Madonna: America's most famous ex-pat has set down roots as deep as her brown hair in Britain, so she's the perfect candidate to publicize the plight of Britain's endangered red squirrels, whose very future is imperiled by an invasion of deadly pox-carrying gray American squirrels. How about an animated PSA to the tune of "Who's That Squirrel?" in which she helps Squirrel Nutkin knock Rocky J. Squirrel's block right off the island? At the very least, the pop princess could follow Prince Charles' royal lead and become a patron of Save Our Squirrels.

6. Donald Trump: The Lowbrow Baron of the High-Rise isn't getting very far with his bullying and bulldozing these days. From his proposed golf course development in Scotland to his Long Island "Trump on the Ocean" project, The Donald's grandiose plans keep running aground in the face of stiff opposition from locals. Is his stature diminishing? Here's a new mantra for the author of Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life: Think small and DO GOOD. Recommended reading/viewing: Deep Economy by Bill McKibben; Garbage Warrior, coming to a theater near you on April 2nd!

7. Rush Limbaugh: Yes, Limbaugh's a noxious gasbag, but scientists are making great strides these days converting methane gases from manure into energy. Limbaugh is the nadir of climate change naysayers, and it's a safe bet that he'll continue to pooh-pooh the notion that global warming's a threat to the planet, so why not harness the harmful nonsense he spews and turn it into a useful source of energy? Recommended viewing: Biogas, The Movie:

8. Amy Winehouse: Winehouse is, alas, goin' back to rehab, so she presumably won't be available to do any kind of pr for awhile. But once she's bounced back from her latest crack-up, I'd love to see Amy put her beehive'd head to work on raising awareness of colony collapse disorder, the mystery disease that's killing bees all over the U.S. and Europe. Come to think of it, she'd be a great spokesperson to raise awareness of white nose syndrome, too--that's the deadly illness that's decimating the northeast's bat population. Recommended viewing: Every Third Bite, coming soon!

9. Chuck Norris: Now that Mike Huckabee's presidential bid is over, Norris presumably has some free time, so I'd like to suggest that the legendary martial arts megastar turn his attention from black belts to green belts and use his status as America's number one action star to slay the developer dragons and strip-mall monsters. Who better than a diehard conservative to champion conservation? Recommended reading/viewing: The Long Emergency by James Howard Kuntler; The Unforeseen.

10. Richie Sambora: Sambora was arrested last Tuesday in Laguna Beach after his black Hummer was spotted weaving in and out of traffic. The Bon Jovi guitarist went to rehab twice last year; will a third time be the charm? Drinking and driving is never a good idea (especially when your 10 year-old daughter's in the backseat) but alcohol can be a tough demon to shake. Maybe Sambora would have more luck if he swore off driving instead? Ditch the Hummer, Ritchie, get off the Lost Highway, and become an advocate for Transportation Alternatives.

Originally posted on TakePart.com.

Americone Dream, it’s not. Aqua Colbert is a conservationist’s worst nightmare: a bottled water with a carbon footprint that stomps on sustainability and kicks it senseless in its quest to quench America’s insatiable thirst.

Thankfully, unlike Stephen Colbert’s vanilla-fudge-caramel concoction for Ben & Jerry, Aqua Colbert is only a fossil-fueled figment of Colbert’s fevered imagination, created in honor of World Water Day, today, March 22nd.

Colbert devoted Thursday's entire show to the subject of water, with uber-innovator Dean Kamen demonstrating a cutting-edge water filtration system that could be a life-saver for the millions who are sickened and killed annually by contaminated water.

Originally posted on TakePart.com.

Ah, politicians and dirt, that delightful duo. I’m talking horticulture, not whores. Forget about the soiled legacy of Eliot Spitzer; consider, rather, the contrasting agricultural approaches of Prince Charles and President Bush.

Prince Charles has been an organic farmer for decades; his Highgrove Estate farm provides some of the ingredients for Duchy Originals, the line of food products he founded in 1992. On Duchy’s 10th anniversary, Charles explained why he’d decided to get into the sustainable snack trade:

President Bush’s 1600-acre Crawford ranch, bought in 1999, produces bumper crops of something called “brush,” which has no known culinary use in any culture’s cuisine. Bush has reportedly said that “the property is only good for grazing, and it’s pretty thin at that.”

Tell that to the permaculture advocates who’ve established productive food gardens on poor soils in arid regions from Arizona to Africa. Where others see vacant lots and barren land, gardeners visualize an oasis of food and flowers. These pied pipers of produce can lure neighbors of all ages and aptitudes to pitch in and turn desolate, junk-filled urban lots and asphalt rooftops into edible edens of homegrown fruits and vegetables.

In communities where crappy convenience foods are the norm and grocers won’t carry produce ‘cause it hasn’t got a shelf life of forever, community gardeners are working the soil, and working miracles. While famous foodies like Alice Waters, Jamie Oliver, and Michael Pollan lead the War on Terrible Food, there’s an army of unsung heroes who make up the muckboots on the ground, if you will.

You won’t find them writing influential op-eds or popping up on Oprah (although that would be nice.) But once in a while, they get to share their stories, as a group of NY’s ground-breaking community leaders did on Tuesday night at a forum on community-grown solutions, “Taking Health Into Our Own Hands,” held at the CUNY Graduate Center. The forum, sponsored by World Hunger Year (WHY), a non-profit dedicated to fighting hunger and poverty, featured a multi-cultural and generational panel that was a treat to hear from.

Soft-spoken Jason Thomas started out as a teen intern at East New York Farms! and is now its Market Manager. Thomas, still in his teens, expressed gratitude for the positive self-image East New York Farms! gave him in a neighborhood where negative stereotypes about young people abound.

East New York Farms! offers “a safe environment and a chance to create change and be productive,” Thomas said. In a community where rampant arson left gaping holes on many blocks, Thomas and his peers have turned those blackened lots into green, open spaces that yield fresh, affordable produce for the East New York Farms! weekly farmers’ market.

Flor de Maria Eilets, Community Life Program Director for the Little Sisters of the Assumption Family Health Service in East Harlem, talked about the health problems that plague so many immigrants who move here and adopt our bad habits, trading home-cooked meals for high calorie, low-nutrient convenience foods. There’s a naïve faith, she said, that the supermarkets “wouldn’t sell something if it wasn’t good for you.”

This misplaced trust in our not-so-supermarkets contributes to East Harlem’s disproportionately high rate of diabetes and obesity, a statistic that Eilets and her colleagues are striving to reverse by encouraging the immigrant women she works with to grow and sell fresh produce, and to revive their own culinary traditions.

Reverend Robert Jackson, president of the Brooklyn Rescue Mission and the Bed-Stuy Farm, acknowledged that his foray into urban agriculture initially baffled folks who were more accustomed to seeing him collect old clothes than break new ground. Jackson’s Bed-Stuy Farm provides free organic produce for his Brooklyn Rescue Mission Food Pantry Program.

Jackson, seeing the need all around him, asked, “Why wait for food? Why not grow our own food?” He collared everyone he could, from seniors to substance abusers, to help convert empty lots to thriving food gardens. Call it a soil revival, or a soul revival; either way, Reverend Jackson’s giving folks the means to wean themselves off of junk food and other junk, too.

“We’re trying to save America!” Taqwa Community Farm founder Abu Talib declared, and asked “how the hell did we get so off track?” Talib talked about the toll that hunger takes. “When you’re hungry, you can’t think,” he noted, adding that when you raise food, you raise people. An extraordinarily energetic 73 year-old, Talib is living proof that working in a garden is a great way to achieve longevity and good health.

Springing out of his seat, he mimicked a stiff, arthritic shuffle and said, “that ain’t living, that’s existing.” Talib attributes his vitality to the herbal remedies he’s an expert in, but his lifelong passion for sharing his gardening know-how and building community clearly energize Talib, too.

My own creaky knees could use a dose of his tonic, whatever it may be, but the faith of Talib and his fellow panelists in the power of community gardens to heal and nourish our neighborhoods bolstered my conviction that if you’re looking for a leader with vision, you’ve gotta go with the folks who know how to nurture things, not the doofus whose idea of fun is to hack away at stuff with a chain saw.

Originally posted on TakePart.com.

Ever wonder if you’d still have anything in common with your friends from high school if you ran into them today? In my socially retarded Valley Girl youth, I hung out with another maladjusted misfit named Greg Graffin. We hated high school and loved punk rock. I brought my Telecaster over to his house a coupla times to jam, but I never graduated from garage-band land.

Greg, on the other hand, went on to form Bad Religion, and became one of punk’s more articulate and eloquent lyricists. I became an anti-Agribiz blogger. Both of us rant about monoculture and mindless consumerism; Greg just does it more tunefully, as he does here, in The Grains of Wrath:

Originally posted on TakePart.com.