What's For Dinner?

Tonight's Guest: Joel Salatin Fields of Farmers, Joel Salatin's 8th book, addresses both prospective interns and older farmers he hopes will follow his lead, learning how to make these enriching and complex partnerships benefit both sides. Joel is a third generation, alternative, full-time farmer in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. Passionate about the urgency of the farm succession crisis and well-trained interns as the solution, Joel has refined his methods and materials for training interns over many years. 3 generations of Salatins run Polyface Farm, raising salad-bar beef, pastured poultry, eggmobile eggs, pigaerator pork, forage-based rabbits, pastured turkey and forestry products and serving "more than 5,000 families, 10 retail outlets, and 50 restaurants through on-farm sales and metropolitan buying clubs, using relationship marketing."

Tonight's Guests: Alexis Baden-Mayer Alexis Baden-Mayer, Political Director for Organic Consumers' Association and a lawyer, describes prospects for Grocery Manufacturers of America legislation pre-empting state labeling of GMOs in food. Did you know US sweet corn is genetically modified? It's because once the GM traits were approved for field corn, they could be applied without returning to the FDA for additional approval. This conversation is an update about GMOs in the US food supply. Baden-Mayer, who has been arrested for trying to deliver petitions for GMO labeling to Michelle Obama, tells how big food influence will result in a watered-down, compromise FDA proposal unless citizens demand pro-labeling stands from their representatives that match voters' preferences to know what's in their food.

Tonight's Guest: Katie Brimm On a food sovereignty tour you see how small farmers are responding in places where their livelihoods are threatened or lost due to globalized, concentrated industrial agriculture. Katie Brimm manages Food First's tours to Bolivia, Italy, Korea, Cuba and Spain's Basque country; she describes her work and her own experience on a tour to Bolivia. The food sovereignty movement believes those who grow food and eat have the right to decide how it will be grown. Staying, meeting and sharing meals with small farmers in this movement offers not so many answers about what should happen as a lens on complex forces that both endanger traditional ways of life and sometimes present new opportunities to renew them.

Tonight's Guest: Activist Elizabeth Warren (NOT Senator) Senator Elizabeth Warren opposes Fast Track because forcing a Congressional vote on the complex Transpacific Partnership without adequate time for open hearings, review, and public scrutiny sets a dangerous precedent. Tonight we speak to Elizabeth Warren, MoveOn Regional Organizer in North San Diego County and National TPP Team Coordinator for a broad coalition of groups which build on the analytical and resistance work of Public Citizen's Global Tradewatch and Popular Resistance/Flush the TPP. On the Hill the coalition obtained 200 members' signatures on letters opposing the TPP. It holds trainings and meetings in legislators' home districts and challenges biased media coverage. Elizabeth gives a powerful account of how efficient the mid-layer between national groups and local action can be.

Tonight's Guests: Niaz Dory, Jaydee Hanson Niaz Dory, Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, and Jaydee Hanson, Center for Food Safety, on 2013's best and worst developments. Niaz describes pushback against NAMA's work to restore and enhance fisheries and the marine life that sustains them. She illustrates collaborative strategies used to enlarge the movement's base and enable diverse communities to eat local fish and participate in marine conservation. Jaydee leads CFS's emerging technologies work (synthetic biology, nanotech, and GM animals). He weighs US and international concern with GM food safety and labeling against agricultural biotechnology's disappointing results. Jaydee directed The United Methodist Church's legislative program and genetics and bioethics work for 23 years, and he comments on the renewed attention Pope Francis brings to world hunger.

Edith Maxwell, former certified organic farmer, author in the genre of cozy mystery, on her work as farmer and writer. Hear how Edith wrote a mystery about a CSA, A Tine to Live, A Tine to Die, and note resemblances between her work as author and other hard creative work. What's growing is always on her mind. Mornings she writes and edits, afternoons she blogs, meets and builds a community (of readers). She solves production problems by mulling them over while doing other tasks. Edith presently writes two mystery series with a third is in the planning stage - all within the cozy mystery framework (seamy and bloody parts don't happen "on the page").

Tim Wise, just back from 9th Ministerial meeting of WTO, on what makes multilateral trade talks important right now. The 158 WTO members surprised the world by reaching a trade agreement this year. Tim, Director of the Research and Policy Program at Tufts University's Global Development and Environment Institute, attended the Bali WTO meeting. He also attended WTO in Cancun in 2003, where developing countries also held out against developed countries, and a Korean farmer shouted that the WTO kills farmers and stabbed himself to death. Tim closely follows free trade consequences in Mexico and Latin America, and we discuss ways the past and possible future trajectory of the WTO meetings offer reason for hope.

Karen Hansen-Kuhn discusses TAFTA, proposed EU-US "NAFTA-type" trade agreement. Karen describes December's simultaneous international trade talks - including World Trade Organization negotiations and meetings on both proposed Transpacific Partnership and US-European Union free trade agreements. Stakes are high. US legislators haven't seen drafts of TPP and TAFTA. Secret horse-trading means negotiators trade off laws and regulations on everything from patents to food safety. Agreements establish permanent rules. Negotiators try to carry their wins from one to another set of negotiations. Describing how trade issues cut close to home, Karen notes how US corporations' attack on European GM labeling could hurt US consumers and looser agricultural imports could allow EU suppliers to undercut US "buy local" programs.

In the US, endangered plant conservation is carried out by a network of 39 leading botanical institutions through the Center for Plant Conservation, and its Executive Director botanist Kathryn Kennedy has brought 750 of America's most imperiled native plants into its care since 2000. Off-site, hands-on conservation involves collecting live plant material from nature; maintaining it as seed, rooted cuttings or mature plants; and conducting horticultural research to grow and return many plants to their natural habitats. Kathryn operates as scientist, program developer and manager coordinating this work, acutely aware that 80 percent of the at-risk plants of the United States are closely related to plants with economic value somewhere in the world, and more than 50 percent are related to crop species.

Nelson Carrasquillo and Elizabeth Henderson spoke with us after their workshop on "Farm Worker Movements Past and Present" at a summer organic farming conference. Nelson is General Coordinator of Comite De Apoyo A Los Trabajadores Agricolas, the Farm Workers' Support Committee. Elizabeth represents Northeast Organic Farming Association to the Agricultural Justice Project. They draw parallels between farm workers' and part time service workers' wages under present policy approaches. Under proposed immigration reform, undocumented farm workers will face much greater pressure - required to make 125% of poverty level wages for up to 20 years to get permanent work permits. The conversation explores key ways consumers, farmers, farm workers and citizens share common interests.

Diana Robinson describes the Food Chain Workers Alliance and its Thanksgiving 2013 actions. Nearly 20 million men and women in the US grow, harvest, produce and serve food at every stage from field to table. Yet farm workers aren't covered by US labor relations laws; law enforcement to protect immigrants and undocumented workers is poor; and the majority of food chain workers lack benefits, earn poverty wages, and have difficulty unionizing. Diana shows how the US food system, developed on slave labor, still exploits its workers, the majority of whom are members of minorities. Projects she describes are a fine example of what a diverse coalition membership committed to social and economic justice can accomplish.

The first new food safety legislation in 70 years, FSMA, the Food Safety Modernization Act, passed in 2011, after 3 high-profile foodborne illness outbreaks in 2006 and 2007. Now FDA has prepared regs to implement it, with comments due November 15th. Aimed at preventing micro bacterial pathogens in produce (not at safety issues related to meat, poultry, eggs, pesticides or antibiotic resistance), FSMA is meeting wide resistance. Hear webinar accounts of rule details, Kathy Ozer of the National Family Farm Coalition, and Jack Kittredge of NOFA. They describes a one-size-fits all approach that makes key organic farming practices illegal, omits due process, and may renege on the Tester-Hagan amendment exempting smaller producers from requirements likely to bankrupt them.

Food + Justice + Democracy - Fall IATP Conference models food justice work. Food activists say effective collaboration among current food system insiders and outsiders is the toughest, most crucial challenge to overcome to create a system that's fair for all. The show offers conversations from the Sept 2012 Minneapolis Food + Justice = Democracy conference organized by La Donna Redmond and Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Speakers describe doing unusual self-reflection and believe it was different from any other US food system meeting - starting with the way plenaries all concerned the experience of people of color. The show conveys the careful planning involved and how attendees felt what they experienced here may offer leverage for that core, very hard work.

Pati Mortensen and Terrie Bad Hand are co-directors of the Taos County Economic Development Center, host of the 2013 Gathering of GFJI. Holding a GFJI meeting to celebrate and share the approach and work of the TCEDC (Taos County Economic Development Center) has been a long-standing dream of its two co-directors and Will and Erika Allen and their organizations (Growing Food with Justice for all Initiative is the food justice organizing arm of Growing Power). The gathering brought together people of all colors and ages with very different spiritual values and manners of doing business, and they discussed water rights, genetically modified seeds, and organizing in powerfully urgent and specific ways. Terrie and Pati describe how TCEDC's mission and programs over its nearly 30 years have embodied Food Justice principles.

Eileen Schell is the co-author of Rural Literacies - Studies in Writing and Rhetoric (2007) and Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy (2011). Eileen teaches writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University. She and her co-authors grew up on farms --- Eileen on a Washington State apple farm – and have stakes in examining portrayals which further corporate or political agendas. She explains how they distort the complex circumstances faced by American farmers and draw attention away from agricultural policies that caused families to lose their farms. We discuss several “narratives” about farmers, including Jefferson’s idea of farmers as chosen people of God and 20thh century accounts of the “tragedy” of farm losses and farmers as victims.

Shirley Sherrod has worked for change for black Americans in southwest Georgia in the face of extreme racism - and for opportunities for black farmers, because agriculture is the life of rural communities. This is a US story chosen to highlight the Food Sovereignty Prize ceremony. A black farmers' daughter in the 1950's, Sherrod wanted to escape rural life, but her father's murder in 1965 redirected her to civil rights activism and then co-founding New Communities, a 6000 acre land trust modeled on a kibbutz, on which black Americans could farm and live. She describes working with the conditions black farmers faced - during those years, at the USDA, and now fostering opportunities for women farmers and creating the new site for New Communities.

A-dae Romero, Cochiti Pueblo/Kiowa, and Paul Nicholson, Basque farmer, share food sovereignty experience rarely recounted in the US. A-dae works as a lawyer to undergird traditional Pueblo farming's role in sustaining community. She highlights food sovereignty's importance for Native American farmers in light of reservations' extreme food insecurity and describes implications of FSMA (the Food Safety Modernization Act). If applied to tribal food enterprises, it would break constitutional and treaty protections of tribal sovereignty and cripple farming done for economic development. Her words and Paul Nicholson's account of the relevance of food sovereignty in the western European country of Spain frame discussion of this year's awarding of the Food Sovereignty Prize and its opposite, the World Food Prize.

Martin Dagoberto, Chris Stockman, and Kalia Lydgate campaign for transparency about GMOs in the US food supply at Lobby Day for GM Labeling in MA. MA Right to Know GMOs' event was standing room only. Scientist and activist, Marty touches on key reasons labeling is both important and contentious and describes "trigger clauses" authorizing labeling in ME and CT, contingent on similar laws passing in other northeastern states. Also hear Kalia Lydgate effectively wrap up the public session and Chris Stockman illustrate the deep roots in practice that make this movement powerful. She and partner/campaign co-founder Ed Stockman began the learning that culminated in this campaign in 2000 at BIO protests in Boston.

Farm Aid 2013 held its 28th concert on Willie Nelson's 80th birthday - with Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young, Dave Matthews, Jack Johnson and many more. Farm Aid is the longest running benefit concert series in America, raising more than $43 million to help family farmers thrive while inspiring millions of people to learn about the Good Food movement. This year more than 26,000 people attended the concert at Saratoga Springs, NY. The show describes some of the good eats available and what farm support groups did. It shares parts of headline musicians' performances, the press conference, and Homegrown Village Stage conversation between Jim Hightower and Charlene Carter.

Teresa Mares is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at University of Vermont and affiliate of its Transdisciplinary Research Initiative in Food Systems. We discuss why citizens engage in tough and complex food justice issues like the fight against corporate promotion of GMOs in Africa and the severe conditions migrant workers experience due to immigration enforcement in New England. The interview draws on Teresa's experience during her Ph.D. studies working with Community Alliance for Global Justice in Seattle and her current development of a new project on food access and food security among Vermont Latino & dairy workers. Teresa's work focuses on food and migration studies and changes in diets and foodways as a result of migration.