I went to this event several weeks ago and came away with a great feeling about where urban agriculture and the global movement for “cooler” approaches to farming and eating are heading. I’ve written any number of times here about food and agriculture, including this view into the work of one particularly amazing urban farmer.
The morning plenary session began with remarks from the Manhattan Borough President, Scott Stringer, one of the sponsors of the summit and a driver of the NYC Sustainable Food Charter, Jacquie Berger from Just Food, and, via video, Wangari Maathai, Nobel Peace laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, and Vandana Shiva, director of Navdanya International. Shiva has a particularly compelling story to tell about Big Agriculture, and how small farmers, working organically, can produce more food, with hugely fewer chemical inputs to the soil and water and much less of a burden of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
An opening panel was moderated by Anna Lappé, founder of Take a Bite out of Climate Change. Take a Bite is itself a project of the Small Planet Institute, founded by her and her mother, Frances Moore Lappé, author of the seminal Diet for a Small Planet, a book that came out at about the same time as my old, now-dog-eared standby, The Vegetarian Epicure. Lappé fille is, not surprisingly, quite articulate on the benefits of reducing animal agriculture’s extraordinarily negative impact.
Don’t think this perception’s not taking hold? Like the quantum leaps that renewable energy and other clean tech are taking – and I never thought I’d live to see – so too is the recognition that we need to think differently about how we eat and how we produce our food. This is all well beyond the hippie activist stage too. I’ve been reading and hearing more and more about agroecology, and climate change superstars like Al Gore, Rajendra Pachauri and Lord Nicholas Stern are talking about reducing meat consumption. (See these recent posts: Meat, More Meat and Al Gore’s New Book – and Copenhagen.) Don’t think some special interests aren’t concerned? See Food Fight: Big Beef Challenges EPA Climate Change Finding from BNET yesterday.
One of the panelists with Lappé was the world-renowned food policy wonk, Marion Nestle, author of, among other things, the very important Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. (As Eric Schlosser, author of the also very important Fast Food Nation, said about her book: “If you eat, you should read this book.” [Fast Food Nation is one of the best – and most depressing – non-fiction books I’ve ever read.]) Nestle blogged about the summit at her website. She said: “More than one thousand New Yorkers signed up for thirty workshops at the amazing event. Why amazing? Because this summit is about advocacy for a more just and sustainable food system, and right now.”
There was more exciting discussion at the workshops. These brought together some of the top policymakers, wonks, and activists in the fields of urban agriculture, energy and waste management, food and nutrition, economic development, social policy, and other key areas, not just from New York, but throughout the country. I sat in on a session that got me thinking about how “distributed farming” and “distributed generation” could and should co-exist.
This movement’s coming through. The times, they are indeed, a-changin’.
