What's For Dinner?

Tonight's Guest: Janet Poppendieck Agricultural surpluses in the 1920s and massive Depression era hunger eventually led to the first federal food aid, but not before baby pigs ran through midwestern city streets. Janet Poppendieck recounts the story told in Breadlines Knee Deep in Wheat: Food Assistance in the Great Depression. A highly regarded scholar and an activist, sociologist and college professor at Hunter College, Jan has worked on poverty, hunger, and food assistance in the United States for 40 years. The interview and her books are deep with anecdote and policy analysis, but they don't stint on ironic unforgettable detail - Free for All: Fixing School Food in America (2011) and Sweet Charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement (1998).

Tonight's Guest: Jill Lindsey Harrison (Part 1) Stakeholders' accounts of pesticide drift in California differ greatly. Regulators and the crop protection industry see an occasional problem resulting from applicator mistakes. Environmental justice activists and community members see a persistent, daily problem affecting hundreds of thousands of people. Sociologist Jill Lindsey Harrison explains how these discrepant readings of reality result from different understandings of justice and ways to achieve it. She links justice concepts to popular food movement values like knowing your farmer and voting for organic and local food with your fork. She finds that by turning their back on fighting chemical intensive agriculture and preferring voluntary actions, activists effectively spurn tools needed to obtain food justice for all eaters.

Tonight: Various anti-Fast Track speakers Early in 2015, strong, seemingly successful citizen initiatives to defeat Fast Track made anti-free trade activists anticipate its defeat. But in early June, the Senate passed Trade Promotion Authority, and a vote was expected in the House in mid-June. It passage would transfer Constitutional authority to negotiate trade pacts from the Congress to the Administration, allowing Congress only an up or down vote. A broad coalition of organizations resisted, concerned with the prospect of the US then passing the TPP and TTIP trade agreements. This What's For Dinner show reprises perspectives of Fast Track opponents, based on their deisre to preserve US government sovereignty to protect labor rights, the envirnoment, food safety, intellectural property, and financial reform.

Tonight's Guest: Jaydee Hanson (Part 2) We return to our interview earlier this year with Jaydee Hanson, co-author of The Principles For The Overesight of Synthetic Biology. Jaydee does policy work on new technologies for the Center for Food Safety. In the business for a long time, he gives a funny, matter of fact, and cynical account of regulators' machinations to shoehorn new technologies into regulatory frameworks devised decades before synthetic biology came along, and of companies' efforts to avoid them altogether. He also addresses questions of synthetic biology's present scope, its relationship to classic ethical questions (the commons, "playing God"), and equity issues raised by products in the pipeline.

Tonight's Guests: Pilar Trujillo, Patrick Jaramillo Acequias are a centuries-old way of managing water in arid places, brought to Spain by the Moors and by the Spanish to the US Southwest, where Native American and Hispanic farmers use acequias built 400 years ago. These human-made watercourses capture and steward water from high mountain snow melt. Their channels to distant fields are maintained and managed as a community resource, shared fairly in wet and dry years. Pilar Trujillo and Patrick Jaramillo grew up in families that used acequias as a primary source of water to farm in northern New Mexico. Now they help maintain the acequia but also work as organizers to resist pressure from development that undermines acequias by undermining land ownership.

Tonight's Guest: Anne Hunt The Alpujarras, southern foothills of Spain's Sierra Nevadas, have threshing floors and communal ovens, but few farmers. This is agricultural land with a thousand year old system of water courses but terrain unsuited to modern farming techniques. We are on location in the Alpujarras with Anne Hunt, who was on sabbatical from organizing arts festivals in London, England when she fell in love with a 400 year old house with terra cotta olive oil pots you could hide in. Anne describes 10 years of restoration to create the guesthouse Casa Ana, getting to know and work with craftsmen and neighbors, and gardening in a common meadow using water from Moorish acequias. She makes doing this sound entirely imaginable.

Tonight's Guest: Yan Jairong There are not as many protests about food in China as about other issues - in all around 180,000 demonstrations a year. But middle class mothers demonstrate against having Genetically Modified Organism's (GMO's) in food, and some grow their own food. Yan Jairong is a co-founder of the Chinese Food Sovereignty Network and an anthropologist in Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Department of Applied Social Sciences. In this fascinating account you hear concerns surprisingly similar to those elsewhere, as she distinguishes between food security (a huge concern for decades) and food sovereignty. She also describes the young network's efforts to learn from food sovereignty movements in the rest of the world and recent food safety legislation.

Tonight's Guest: Brett Tolley For many yearrs fish have been marketed by industrial scale fish producers to make a relative few species familiar and popular. Other species have been so invisible to consumers that even fishermen have called them "trash fish". Now local food and fishing advocates and the Chef's collaborative are featuring them in community supported fisheries and restaurant menus, and locally available species like sand dabs - each region has its equivalents - are becoming more well known. Brett Tolley, organizer for the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance and son of a fisherman, explains how the trash fish concept helped cause other species to be overfished and describes names that have been tried in this rebranding effort.

Tonight's Guest: Arthur Stamoulis Guest Arthur Stamoulis, director of the Citizen's Trade Campaign, hopes to see a movement of movements once again deny corporations the degree of power they would get by a "massive power grab" through trade agreements. The show gives Arthur's take on implications of, and prospects for, Fast Track, the shortcut proponents of the TTP hope will enable them to get the secret treaty terms approved in a mere up or down vote by Congress. He gives reasons for calling Fast Track undemocratic and the TPP bad for the economy environment and democracy. With the Senate passing Fast Track, the alliances Arthur describes and his call to action to work on the Congress is more urgent.

Tonight's Guests: Rosalinda Guillen Washington State strawberry pickers sued Sakuma Brothers Berry Farm for wage theft, won $850,000, and created Familias Unidas por la Justicia. The union is supported by Community to Community (C2C), whose Executive Director, Rosalinda Guillen, describes its organizing stance. It follows in the tradition of Caesar Chavez and also employs the international partnerships and ecofeminist values and methods used today to confront global capitalism and empower oppressed people. Familias Unidas is now boycotting Sakuma and its distributor, Driscoll Berries. Rosalinda Guillen grew up and worked as a farm worker in the US and Mexico and began her organizing work when she was 38. C2C won the 2014 Food Sovereignty Prize, and the interview demonstrates why.

Tonight's Guest: Nancy Alexander (Part 2) Nancy Alexandee monitors the Group of Twenty (G20), the forum whose member countries account for 85% of the world economy, 76% of global trade, and two-thirds of the world's population, including more than 59% of the world's poor. Specializing in "economic governance" for the North American Office of the Heinrich Boell Foundation, Nancy stressees the importance of activists' following the money. She focuses on how financing approaches used to achieve economic goals - economic cooperation, financial reform, improved global economy) shape the outcomes and must be carefully framed to meet needs of all proposed beneficiaries. Tonight she describes megaprojects for infrastructure development - the model used now for strengthening developing country economies. She emphasizes the importance of provisions for sustainability, participation, transparency and gender equity.

Tonight's Guests: Jill Overdorf The show tells how Los Angeles got the most comprehensive food purchasing guidelines for food service institutions in the US - and reflects that trade agreements currently under negotiation would do away with local procurement policies. Jill Overdorf describes the Food Policy Council working group decision to address all its objectives (nutrition, sustainability, animal welfare, worker justice and economic development) and develop its own policy, when it found nothing for a model. Colleen McKinney describes getting buy-in from city departments to assure success when City Administration adopted it as policy. Jill is Corporate Executive Chef and Director of Business and Culinary Development for Coosemans Shipping of Los Angeles. Colleen is Policy Analyst for the LAFPC.

Tonight's Guests: Nancy Alexander (Part 1) Global south countries have created new development institutions in response to the World Bank and IMF's (Bretton Woods institutions) historic hold on development finance. Does this improve prospects for environmental sustainability and equity for women and the poor? Nancy Alexander, Director of the Economic Governance Program at the Heinrich Boell Foundation-US, isn't optimistic. Her policy work involves monitoring how powerful countries and corporations make rules in the G8 and G20 that optimize their investment opportunities - at the expense of the public sector and those services that would support non-industrial agriculture. She also describes how trade agreements now under negotiation will have additional adverse consequences - making "pariahs" of and recolonializing the economies of countries left out.

Tonight's Guests: Jaydee Hanson (Part 1) Jaydee Hanson is co-author of The Principles For The Oversight Of Synthetic Biology and leads the Center for Food Safety's work on emerging technologies (synthetic biology, nanotech, and GM animals). Jaydee responds to criticisms of the oversight principles as utopian, showing that they promote what consumers reasonably expect safety regulation to achieve. The conversation offers an Unalarmist but frustrated discussion of how plants created by Synthetic biology do - and more often don't - fit within today's regulatory context and approaches. Jaydee also describes the way he regularly discusses CFS concerns with representatives of companies using synthetic biology in developing new food ingredients.

Tonight's Guests: Kathy Ruhf Kathy Ruhf describes her experience with the crucial topic of farmland access as the former Executive Director of Land For Good, which supports farmland access, tenure and transfer for the spectrum from new to retiring New England's farmers. The average age of US farmers is now 58 years; in the next decade when many of them will leave farming, will their land remain farmland? Trends (such as the increasing price of farmland) militate against it. Kathy describes all that must happen for farm transitions to work for the benefit of retiring and new farmers, their communities, and consumers. The many interests and skills required recall the idea of its taking a village to raise a child.

Tonight's Guests: Kathy Ruhf Kathy Ruhf describes her experience with the crucial topic of farmland access as the former Executive Director of Land For Good, which supports farmland access, tenure and transfer for the spectrum from new to retiring New England's farmers. The average age of US farmers is now 58 years; in the next decade when many of them will leave farming, will their land remain farmland? Trends (such as the increasing price of farmland) militate against it. Kathy describes all that must happen for farm transitions to work for the benefit of retiring and new farmers, their communities, and consumers. The many interests and skills required recall the idea of its taking a village to raise a child.

Steve Suppan (IATP Nanotechnology in food)

Tonight's Guests: Clara Mareschal, Khristian Mendezm (Part 2) Clara Mareschal and Khristian Mendez are young people likely to work in international non-governmental organizations. They are getting their start attending international meetings as students with their professor - here, at the UN FAO Committee on Food Security (CFS) Rome meeting. Khristian, College of the Atlantic junior, compares the CFS to UN environment committees he has attended. And, in a time when the UN is no longer the only entity advancing international development initiatives, he points up the important difference between operation of the UN system and the Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bank and IMF) that work in association with the G-20's major economies' governments and central banks.

Tonight's Guests: Diana Robinson Diana Robinson is the Campaign and Education Coordinator of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, a coalition organizing for improved wages and working conditions for all workers in the food chain and for a more sustainable food system. More than half of US food chain workers - who make up 1/6th to 1/7th of the US workforce - aren't paid enough to keep them out of poverty; employers retaliate when they join or form unions. Diana describes the food chain worker activism that is making a difference to this picture - bottom up organizing in worker-based organizations, many, many partnerships, and creative media strategies like a comic book called Food Chain Avengers.

Tonight's Guests: David Andrews, Clara Mareschal, Khristian Mendez Clara Mareschal and Khristian Mendez, College of the Atlantic students, describe attending the 42nd meeting of the UN's FAO's Committee on Food Security last October in Rome. The CFS is a very unusual UN committee for having civil society members both represented and able to speak at its meetings. Being able to talk to - and talk back to - country representatives at such meetings, after 38 years of having no voice, is a very big deal. We also share part of an intervew with a well-loved food leader Brother David Andrews, who did just that at the CFS in 2012. Brother David Andrews, a Catholic priest and lawyer, past away just a few weeks ago.