welcome to the westminster town hall forum where for thirty two years we have invited voices of conscience to explore the key issues of our day from an ethical perspective learn more about the forum online at westminster forum dot org you can like us on facebook and follow us on twitter as well my name is nathan dungan i'm founder and president of share save spend in the guest moderator of the forum it is my pleasure to introduce today's speaker low pay leads the real food media project a collaborative movement working for sustainable food and farming across the u s in partnership with her mother francis more le page she co founded the small planet institute which is committed to researching and providing education on the root causes of hunger and poverty around the globe she is the author or co author of three books including the two thousand and ten publication diet for a hot planet the climate crisis at the end of your fork a graduate of brown university she holds an m a in economic and political development from columbia university's school of international and public affairs in her presentation today building real food communities she will explore the economic environmental and social costs of industrial food and farming and offer creative solutions to fostering a just and sustainable food system ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming to the westminster town hall forum and the pay i wake up one morning absolutely panicked it's my first semester in college and i've just missed by alarm clock i jump out of bed i throw my clothes i run out of my dorm room door down the ha across campus dashing as fast as i can i get to a lecture hall right this class is beginning to heave a big sigh of relief i pull out my notebook and get ready to focus and i notice at that point that the person standing at the front of the room isn't my professor but a guest lecturer and i think i didn't i didn't notice that from the syllabus and i started listening to a lecture and she's really really really off topic but i think maybe she wasn't fully briefed on what we're studying in this class and i give her the benefit of the doubt and as i'm taking notes i realize that on the chalkboard behind her there's all of these notes from a history class that i think the teaching assistants in our class have gotten so lazy they didn't even bother to race the notes on the board but ok maybe they were just too busy and after a few more minutes go by the teaching assistant stop the class to pass out course evaluations and i look for my th kind of ready to say hi i don't see her anywhere but i think well maybe she's just out sick that day or it's a big class maybe she's up in the front i don't see  hand out the course evaluations and i notice at the top of the course evaluations it says european history one hundred one which i promptly cross out and write anthropology fifty and think again about these into the nearest today at which point a friend of mine sitting two rows up turns around and says anna i didn't know you were in my history class so i don't know if any of you have ever had this experience maybe you have of how the facts are hitting you right in the face and yet you figure out a way to make sense of them i was so sure that i was in the right class that despite all the in retrospect obvious evidence that i certainly was not i didn't see any of it so why is it that while why do we do that well cognitive scientists have found that one of the ways that we human beings can have found to make sense of the world we are bombarded with so much information every single day that one of the ways that we handle that is to create these frames in our mind what the swiss psychologist talked about as schemas sort of orienting principles and ways of making sense of the world and in a way it's ingenious it's handy it's very smart to do that because we need to when you think about all the information that comes at us but what can happen with those schema in our mind is they can be so powerful and so dominant that we will ignore the facts before we toss out the frame if the facts don't fit our frame and so i'm here today to talk about how we build real food communities how is it that we can create communities where everyone is fed where the food that we grow is good for our bodies and good for the farmers and good for the planet and i'm going to suggest that one of the ways that we do that requires that we focus and talk about how we think about the world and what are the dominant schemas that we hold in our mind about food and farming and what i want to suggest is that one of those most dominant schemas about food and farming that many of us hold is actually blocking us from seeing those facts right in front of us it's blocking us from seeing a crisis and it's also blocking us from seeing incredible possibility so what is one of these dominant schemas that doing that is doing this to our minds it's that industrial agriculture is is the best and the only way to feed all of us and especially on a planet with a growing population so what do i mean by industrial agriculture it's a type of system dependent on chemical herbicides and insecticides and other pesticides a system that dependent on synthetic fertilizer to get soil fertility energy intensive your geisha and when it comes to livestock confining animals into into factory farms or confined animal feeding operations so the second half of this conviction so that's the first part that industrial is to reveal only way we're going to produce enough the second half of this conviction is that sustainably grown foods local foods it might sound really nice i  mean who among us doesn't like to stroll through a farmer's market or eat a just picked heirloom tomato but that that that way of farming isn't practical it's not going to be able to to really deliver on what we need in terms of production that's kind of the other half of this dominant scheme now the word sustainable i know has guitar gets tossed around a lot and fact i was just reading an advertising age magazine the magazine for the marketers out there that they declared last year that sustainable is the jargon iest jargon and so let me take a minute to do jargon it a little bit by sustainable farming what i mean is a set of principles that places the farm inside of an ecosystem understand that a farm operates in an ecosystem and it means implementing principles into the farming practice like building soil fertility with natural methods like planting nitrogen fixing legumes and using compost aminu or not synthetic fertiliser it means principles like dealing with unwanted pests and plants with natural methods not toxic chemicals it means doing things like integrating animals back onto the farm and having them eat what they nature intended them to eat not a diet filled with drugs and antibiotics and artificial growth hormones now for the past twelve years i have been seeking to understand the potential of this way of farming these sustainable principles and to do that i have travelled to farms all around the world from poland brazil bangladesh india and to many states across this country including right here in minnesota and it's also this is these questions of also draw me to peer reviewed studies and research reports from all around the world and as i've been doing that research i've also been following how the media talks about sustainable farming and how it how that dominant frame is getting created in the media that we all consume and i've noticed this really big disconnect from what i've been seeing on the ground and what i've been hearing in the media that often in the media sustainable farming is described as this sort of quaint idea again nice to go to the farmer's market but not practical sort of suited only really for those that type of consumer who really likes to buy expensive kale at whole foods markets but again sort of not practical and i could get into a little bit more in the q and a about how we're hearing these messages in the media but for now what i want to do is dive into what are the facts on the ground right what do you hear in see when you talk to sustainable farmers around the world and tap into this incredible body of research that's emerged in the past decade because what i want to suggest is that when you do that when you listen to those facts what you hear is an incredibly good news story about sustainable farming what if i were to tell you that there is a new technology in agriculture one that yields as much and sometimes even more than industrial agriculture methods and at the same time reduces chemical pesticide use by ninety seven percent reduces energy and fossil fuel use by up to fifty five percent and sends biodiversity measurements and soil fertility measurements off the charts that would be pretty exciting right you might say well that technology sounds great where do we get it how do we buy it that technology exists it's called sustainable farming and an incredible study that came out recently by researchers in europe they documented exactly that exactly those results from sustainable practices on the farm and what if i were to tell you that researchers evaluating agricultural programs across the entire continent of africa discovered that the relatively inexpensive practices of sustainable farming were making a huge difference for farmers who started integrating this principals on to their farm increasing the ilands and improving incomes dramatically improving incomes because think about it those sustainable principles i mentioned are principles that anyone with the education and training can implement you don't have to buy seeds you don't have to buy chemicals you don't have to buy fertilizer so it's in a in a way it's a very liberating way of farming for cash poor farmers around the world it's the kinds of good news evidence that came out in probably one of the most important reports about food that no one's ever heard about called the ice dad report maybe some of you have when i ask audiences if anyone in this audience is in this country if anyone's heard of this report i rarely get a hand on one hand up the report is a bit mouthful the full name is the international assessment of agricultural knowledge science and technology for development you can remember it as i studied report and what this assessment involved was research by four hundred experts from all around the world who looked at the best practices in agriculture all around the world over four and a half years it was a report commissioned by the world bank the united nations and what did this body of experts discover they discovered similar things to what i've already mentioned they discovered that sustainable farming is an incredibly effective way to deliver on yields without requiring farmers spend so much money on inputs they discovered in fact their consensus was that we must if we truly are to feed the world in the future we must move in this direction of the sport of supporting sustainable farming so in addition to all this incredible good news that i've been discovering in this body of research that's growing what i've also come across are the really powerful facts about what are the real costs of this industrial model of agriculture that same report found that while industrial agriculture can increase crop yields that if you look at what this does to farming communities and to rural economies and to people's health they found that it does at an incredible cost to public health the environment social equality women's rights and the very basis of food security in fact what we're finding is that this model of industrial culture is actually undermining the very natural resources that we are going to need to feed the future and let me explain what i mean by that there are lots of examples of how this is happening and there are three that i think of the most important one soil so across the united states and just real farms cars are roge in indignation much faster than topsoil can be rebuilt and replaced in fact a new report from environmental working group last year  found that some parts of our heartland are losing sixty four tons of topsoil per acre every single year no soil no food right to water another kind of key part of farming right what we're finding is that in dust with the industrial model that so heavily reliant on water is draining one of the most important in this country at a rate so fast that if we continue along this path within thirty years that aquifer will be empty empty and i like to think about an opera for as sort of like fossil water right once you deplete that were for for all intents and purposes that water is gone for our use no water no food three climate so the food system when you look at it holistically contributes directly and indirectly to nearly one third of all greenhouse gas emissions that are driving the climate crisis and i write about this in my most recent book and when you think about that number that's huge that that's so important to be wrapping our heads around how do we reduce the food systems impact on the climate because you don't have to tell you don't have to tell a farmer who was hit by record droughts last year that a stable climate is key to a healthy farm climate instability if you are crops so this is powerful stuff i think so why don't more of us believe that the industrial path is leading us in a way that is to use a jargony word unsustainable you know why don't more of us believe in the potential of sustainable food systems remember our frames can be so powerful that will dismiss the facts before we toss the frame now this isn't to say that facts are not important it is simply to say that facts aren't enough so how do we change our frame how do we do with called a comedy how do we do that really really hard work scientists have found that one of the most effective ways to change our frame are through moments of cognitive d so what is cognitive dissonance it's that moment you experience that inescapable contradiction between what you think you know what your frame might be telling you and what reality is telling you so back in that college lecture hall i had my moment of cognitive dissonance when my friend a few rows up informed me i was in the wrong class i had to shed my frame and shut it pretty fast in my travels i've had many of these moments of cognitive dissonance of what i think i've what i think about food what i thought i knew about food and what i have been forced to understand by seeing that reality in my face and i have talked to farmer after farmer after farmer who has shared with me there are moments of cognitive dissonance with how they farmed and in the case of the farmers i've met one of the most common moments of cognitive dissonance has been those moments where a farmer has realised that the chemical pesticides that they've been using on their industrial farm has been the cause of an illness or cancer for themselves their husbands their wives their children and it has forced them to ask isn't there another way what's fascinating about the power of these moments of cognitive dissonance is also the research and understanding that we don't have to experience these moments ourselves that we can experience them virtually through the power of story through hearing the stories of those farmers who've made those transitions you're hearing the stories like i'll share  with you one of my favorite moments of cognitive dissonance for myself and my favorite stories of farmers who are really showing us a different path so it was the summer of two thousand and eight some of you may remember this summer the midwest had been hit by record floods and i was in the state of wisconsin right after the flooding and the state was looking at millions of dollars of recovery funds for especially for the farmers in that state and i was traveling to mit to visit a sustainable farmer named mark sheppard as i was driving to his farm i passed field after field that looked like a lake because it was still completely underwater so by the time i got to mark's farm i had a huge knot in my stomach i was expecting to talk to a devastated farmer when i pulled into his farm up this dirt driveway i pulled in right at the moment where mark and one of his farm interns were lounging on the porch of his solar powered cider mill with grinned from ear to ear these were not the faces of devastated farmers so i was eager to know how was mark's fate different from the farmers i could see across the road who had gullies torn out of their fields from the powerful rain and that day what he showed me is he showed me sustainable principles at work and what he showed me is when you implement those sustainable principles what you create is a farm with healthy soil and healthy soil like an incredible sponge that's able to absorb all that water what you create is a farm that has incredible biodiversity so that yes his bell peppers did pretty badly but they were only a small part of the farm and the rest of his farm was doing great and what you see is that kind of farm that frankly we are going to need in the future when that flooding that hit us in two thousand and eight no longer becomes a freak once in a hundred years flood but becomes an every year flood and so i left mark's farm that day realising what i saw on his farm was the face of the kinds of farms we need for the future so this might leave you asking well then why are there a million marks out there if this is working so great in part i believe the reason is that we still are trapped in this dominant schema about food and farming and that trap is affecting everything from what programs exist to support mark and farmers who want to be like mark everything from the kinds of banks that will and won't loan to farmers like mark who want to do the kinds of sustainable innovations that he's doing so as a result farmers like mark don't get what they need to thrive and grow and and even to start their farms when a young farmer wants to learn about integrating sustainable principles there are only a handful of schools that will teach them and a relatively small number of farmer training programs like the one i was just learning about yesterday run locally here by the land stewardship project when its team wants to investigate the benefits of sustainable principles there is less than five percent of federal research dollars set aside for studying how to integrate sustainable principles on the farm when a sustainable rancher wants to grow their business and process their livestock there are only a few slaughterhouses left in many states that can handle their products and in some states like montana where i just visited there is not a single one education research infrastructure these are just three of the ways that the playing field for farmers doesn't make it easy for the marks of this country to launch their farms and thrive and grow now i am suggesting that changing all of this means serious paradigm shifting work now does it seem impossible to some of you that we can do that i would suggest that we as a society have changed our paradigms before we do it all the time so like some of you possibly i've been watching a lot of episodes of mad men lately on television and if you have two you might know exactly what i'm talking about you watch mad men and everyone smokes and when i mean when i say everyone i mean everyone pregnant women smoke new mothers smoke in the nurseries with their babies executive smoke in their offices in their lobbying is in the elevators not too long ago smoking was seen as cool seen as innocuous in fact my grandmother's doctor even advised her to start smoking to help her and my uncle when he was a resident in his hospital he was considered absolutely crazy for suggesting that maybe cigarette vending machines shouldn't be inside the hospital and i remember in my lifetime having to be sure whenever i bought an airplane ticket that i checked the box that said i'd like to be in the no smoking section because there used to be a smoking section inside airplanes it's crazy now to think about that that paradigm shifted and it shifted big time now this shift didn't happen easily of course it didn't happen overnight and remember it didn't happen in til decades after we had the scientific facts about smoking but eventually enough facts piled up a nuff said auris we're told enough of us had those moments of cognitive dissonance and enough pressure was put to change policy so i'm not saying that will make this paradigm shift about food overnight but i know because i've seen it with my own eyes that this shift is already happening all across the planet from leaders in the buddhist nation of new time of bhutan who've just declared that they want their country to be the first one hundred percent organic food country on the planet to the department of the environment  launching incredible farmer to farmer training programs to bring sustainable principles across the country i've seen it in our country i've seen this consciousness consciousness shift happening in every single one of the seven thousand eight hundred sixty four communities that now have a farmer's market in them i've seen it in the hundreds of schools and every single state in the nation that now connect with food from local farmers i've seen it on two hundred ninety college campuses that now have students organizing to bring sustainable food into their cafeterias it's happening everywhere and so i believe seeing all of this happening that there is incredible hope there's incredible hope that we are making the shift we all can be part of it and that moving toward sustainability moving toward those real food communities where all of us have access to food that's nourishing for our bodies and nourishing for the planet that it begins in our minds it starts with how we think and i'm here to tell you it's you pay you are listening to the westminster town hall forum broadcast from westminster presbyterian church on the necklet mall in downtown minneapolis learn more about the forum online at westminster forum dot org you can like us on facebook and follow us on twitter as well i'm nathan dungan the guest moderator of today's forum our speaker is sustainable food and farming activists and pay will be taking questions for our speaker from the radio audience through twitter and facebook our twitter handle is westminster t h f and you can find us on facebook at westminster town hall forum while the officers collect the questions from the in house audience i want to thank the co sponsor of today's program minnesota food chair whose annual march campaign raises more than half the food that will be distributed this year by minnesota food shelves to learn more about minnesota food share visit their website minnesota food share dot org we invite the radio audience to join us at westminster for our next forum on thursday april eighteenth at noon when president and i feel bad for our radio audience they can't see how beautiful it is in here so if the political leadership is currently lacking on the issue of climate change what types of action do you suggest that employees and businesses students in schools residents and neighborhoods citizens and municipalities and others might take right now to address climate change and the food crisis i love starting off with those really easy questions with quick answers so i mean we could we could spend all day talking about the ways people can connect because what is exciting about this moment is while we all might be very frustrated that we're not seeing more change at the international level in terms of really bold action on greenhouse gas emissions reductions really bold action on climate change there is a lot happening in communities across this country and as i mentioned in my talk there is this very big connection between climate change and food there is the connection of how much our food system currently contributes to climate change and how do we support sustainable farmers that are reducing those on farm emissions and food system emissions but there's also what i also talked about in the in  my lecture about the importance of supporting our sustainable farmers because they are going to be the resilient farms that are going to be providing us the food we need in the future and that climate and future so the question is what can we do  and depending on where you are and where you sit whether it is in business or whether it's a student in a university or in a local government there is so much you can do and i think first and foremost the thing that we can do is get people to realize that to change our food system it's going to take a lot more than just shopping differently that we really need to look at what are the policies at the local level at the state level and the federal level that are going to make it possible for a million marks to emerge for a million sustainable farmers  to emerge and be supported and and so that's where i think the energy needs to be and i'll just point out one really positive example i think of this happening on college campuses for those of you who are either administrators or professors or students there is an incredible new movement just a few years old called real food challenge of young people working with their colleges to try to bring more sustainable food purchasing through their schools and their goal is twenty percent real food by two thousand and twenty and on some cans this is they've already exceeded that goal as i mentioned there are two hundred ninety campuses now that have some organizing around this cause and it is really exciting to see it happen and we were already starting to see as i mentioned some really incredible impacts so you mentioned policy so what are the most important policy discussions and really issues that can help shift our culture toward deliberate on what this bill says and does and where the lion's share of our public money our taxpayer dollars go into the food system and we're in this very peculiar political fight right now around this farm bill it was supposed to be  tied up in a bull and passed last year in the has not happened and so there's still a lot of debate and policy organizing around this farm bill and what i think a lot of people don't understand that the farm bill has impacts across the food  em so it's not just a bill that sets policy for farmers but it's also what sets policy for our nutrition assistance programs and we as advocates are really trying hard to protect those nutrition assistance programs  moment historical moment where we have almost more than forty three million americans now needing nutrition assistance and also trying to talk about farm bill farming policy to emphasize the importance of sustainability and so one of the biggest fights in the farm bill policy right now is that the current bill as it stands has a program for crop insurance for farmers and the crop insurance program as as one of my colleagues puts it is essentially  revenue guaranteeing program for the insurance industry that it requires nothing of farmers in terms of being sure that they're conserving their water conserving their soil or taking measures to ensure that they are protecting their farmland but it guarantees  guarantees essentially their income now advocates who are critical of crop durance are are incredibly supportive of farmers and understand that farmers of all people absolutely need that kind of safety net and that kind of insurance but they say that you need to bundle that kind of insurance with a set of requirements that ensures that farmers are taking protective measures for their farm one of the policy groups that's done a lot of work on this is based here it's called the institute for agriculture and trade policy and they had a great analogy about this they said the way the current crop insurance policy is written it's like guaranteeing homeowners fire insurance but not requesting that they have a single fire extinguisher in their house not making sure that they don't have open flames going in their kitchen so it's not it's so again it's saying not that farmers shouldn't have that protection but saying that with all of the policies that are in the farm bill let's look at it through that sustainability lens and through a lens encouraging farmers to make the right steps to protect the land so kind of continuing that thread then and so don't many colleges depend on research right and so this person asked can you discuss the relationship of colleges to the whole sustainable farming movement well one of again one of the really exciting trends that i'm seeing across the country are more and more universities and colleges getting interested in teaching sustainability principles so a couple of years ago i was in washington state where they were a university in washington state was just announcing their first master's program in organic agriculture it was the first in the country at the time there a growing number of farmer apprenticeship programs in colleges that are again teaching farmers these principles and that to me is very encouraging because as my farmer friends like to tell me another way you could define sustainable farming is knowledge intensive farming so if industrial agriculture is input intensive meaning you really need to buy those inputs the fertilizers the past aside to invest pay a lot for the water you need to input a lot to get that high productivity with sustainable farming you need to think a lot you need to understand ecologies you need to understand your watershed you need to understand so much about how your ecosystem works and that requires education and training and i mentioned this land stewardship project program that's farmer to farmer teaching so it doesn't just happen to have to happen at the university level that there are a growing number of these grassroots farmer farmer teaching programs that are helping farmers learn these methods too so this is a fairly common question one for a couple from the audience one from facebook please comment on the process production and consumption of meat regarding sustainability yes that is a very important question and as the daughter of francis marlowe pay who wrote what became a best selling book diet for a small planet forty years ago if you can believe it that was one of the first look at what is the impact of intensive animal operations on the planet and was really critical of that way of of raising livestock you know i have strong opinions about this i mean that the message that i think is really important for us to understand by us i mean those of us in this room those of us in this country is that when you talk about sustainability you're talking about not only what are the sustainable principles like that i mentioned on the farm but you're also talking about what does this say about consumption look like and what you find in this country is that we are overconsuming meat and dairy almost more than any other nation on the planet and that nutritionists will tell you if you look at what the average american consumes we're consuming about twice as much protein as we need and so we all some of us more than others but we all could reduce overall the amount of meat and dairy we're consuming without a single impact on our health there of course many ways to get high protein diets without relying on meat and dairy but to me i think that that conversation about sustainable consumption goes hand in hand with a conversation about sustainable production that no matter how little meat and dairy are we are consuming if the way we are producing it isn't confined animal feeding operations that are highly polluting that are in you mean to the animals that you don't have a sustainable equation that it needs to be on both hands i was one of the most powerful studies i read recently was a study out of the e p a that found that the air quality outside of confined animal feeding operations  livestock factory farms was worse than in our most polluted cities so again we're talking about the meat and dairy conversation i think always needs to marry the consumption part with the production part are there any companies leading the way in sustainable farming recognizable companies  that is a really good question and and i would say yes there there are and one of the companies that i think is a great example of of a true sustainability in all senses including kind of ensuring does as a company is it really involves farmers in the decision making about what prices they want to set for the the milk and the meat and the produce that they're getting and it really puts a farmers into the process and when i've talked to organic valley farmers across this country what i have heard is that because of having that connection to organic valley that they're able to have stable prices for their product they're not selling their product into a commodity market where you could work all year just as hard as you did the year before and the commodity price might drop so far that you do worse than zero in your balance sheet in the year and so having the kinds of  e price mechanisms that are going to has and those guarantees you're able to have farmers be able to invest in their farm to know how much they're going to get the next year and the farmer that i mentioned in my speak speech mark sheppard he's  farmer and he explained to me that one of the reasons why he is able to farm the way he does and to have that kind of biodiversity has in his farm is that he sells his produce into the co op and they bundle a lot of farmers products together to sell to really big buyers so because of that again that infrastructure and that market mechanism mark is able to do the kinds of sustainability practices on his farm that makes sense for for his land makes sense for his farm one of the students in the crowd today you stated that agriculture is responsible for one third of greenhouse gas emissions can you explain how is that machinery livestock transportation kind of some combination of all of the above again one of those questions that it's hard to answer quickly because i ended up writing a whole book about it but but in a in a nutshell if i were to kind of give you the cliff's cliff notes version of  my book what i would say is that it is it is really quickly it is about where we're farming what we're farming and how we are farming so the where one of the reasons why the food system is such a big impact on the climate is because agribusiness is expanding large commodity farming into some of the most precious and important rainforests on the planet so palm oil now most of you don't even realize you're eating it palm oil is in most of the processed foods in our supermarkets palm oil is now being produced in these large plantations in malaysia and indonesia on land that was formally really really carbon rich pe land and those plantations are directly causing those two countries especially malaysia to be in indonesia to be among the highest greenhouse gas emissions in the world and so so it's the where where we're farming it's the what we're farming that we're not growing the kinds of bio diverse crops that are good for our bodies we're growing monocultures that need a lot of chemicals and need a lot of synthetic fertilizer and it's the how it's raising animals in confined feeding operations is incredibly energy intensive so it's those pieces that are most important when people hear about emissions and food they tend to only think about transportation i found that oh it's because we're shipping food you know cross vast distances but when you really get into it you realise that it's more about these bigger decisions about where we're growing our food how are growing in what we're grown so what role should food manufacturers play in the shift shifting of this manufacturers understanding the importance of sustainability thinking about how can they reduce their own carbon footprint so i interviewed for my book some folks at stonyfield farms for instance or make yogurt and one of the things that they're very committed to is looking at their own carbon footprint and how can they reduce it from everything from thinking about the packaging they used to how their cows are being raised and so there are things like that that that food manufacturers can do but on the other hand what i think we all need to remember is that the food that is truly best for us and the food that's truly best for the climate is actually the food that is the least manufactured and so to the extent that we are going to move towards sustained bill we are all going  to have to cook a lot more for ourselves and work with a lot more whole foods again and and for most of us who learn about cooking again and who bring those practices back into our families it's not some burden that oh no i have to make a delicious salad again tonight you know it's something that feels great when you get those skills again so i think yes food manufacturers need to be looking at their own carbon footprint but we as food eaters also really need to be looking at a different whole sector of the supermarket and looking at whole foods as a way to bring sustainability into our diets so your mother frances morley has been a significant thought leader in this space obviously for some time to that and she's probably had some impact on your thoughts and values around this topic so is the part of a young child what would you say to other parents and grandparents about how they can influence attitudes habits and values of their children and or grandchildren  oh i have a four year old and a one year old daughter so i think about this a lot these days and what i have discovered and is that it with my own children that having exposed them from a very early age to the kind of food that i'm talking about today that they have a really strong desire for it that they are lots of wood they are eating a really good diet they eat lots of fruits and lots of vegetables and  i as a parent have so benefited from the kind of activism that i'm talking about so i used to live until a few months ago in brooklyn new york not exactly the place that you would necessarily think local foods are are booming and yet because of the activism of a small group of new yorkers starting about twenty years ago we started bringing into the city programs called community supported agriculture programs where you could become a member of a farm and get fresh food from a farm every week and as a result there are now dozens of these c s a is almost one hundred now actually serving about forty thousand people in new york city and that as a young mom i was able to have my daughter's first tastes of raspberries and peaches and strawberries and apples and pears and zucchini and tomatoes and corn in spinach and kale come from a farm that i knew and trusted and be the most delicious flavor food flavorful fruits and vegetables possible and that was her first exposure to food so the my message is that actually it is very easy to turn young people on to good food unfortunately in our food environment we as parents are our challenge not by the desire of our children to eat this way but by the fact that we operate an environment where our children bombarded with food marketing in so many ways beyond our control the food industry is spending about two billion dollars a year in marketing to children and teens and many billions more in marketing they see anyway so that while i might be doing it right at home what's happening in her school what's happening in her friends homes it's this bombardment of marketing and advertising that again i'm excited to say that there are many people saying that this is harmful practices and deceitful practices that children should advertised to in this way many people have asked this question and there's by some estimates this person it's nearly seventy million kids who are in the u s who are food insecure and so what are their options you know for people and families with limited financial resources how do they participate in the shift either having access to that you know quality food or what role of a player in this shift as well yeah that's a greeley great question and  was just listening to an interview with the director and a participant in a new film called a place at the table about hunger in america and they were saying that about one in four children i think it is  is hungry at some point in their young lives in this country which is just really hard to to wrap one's mind around and and so what what i think is another area of this advocacy work that that gives me so much hope is seeing how people are working to figure out ways to improve access to good healthy food for everyone not just as i mentioned those folks who want to spend a lot on organic kale at whole foods so the work that food share is doing here in minneapolis and in the state and so thinking about how do we improve that access how do we do things like pilot where now people on food nutrition assistance using snap what used to be known as food stamps can use snap at farmers markets and piloting programs like they now have in new york and in michigan and many other states where the states have stepped in and created incentive programs where in new york city if you use your food stamps at a farmer's market for every two dollars you spend you can get five dollars worth of produce so it's incentivizing people to use their use their n assistance on the food that is most nutritious to them and we're also seeing all across the country local projects working with people across the economic spectrum in teaching them how to grow food for themselves and that's another area that i think is really exciting time for one final question as someone who is relatively new to the issues what other resources would you recommend to help build insight a question to end on so my latest project is called the real food media project and we're creating a set of educational tools to help people especially those people who are relatively new to these issues understand them and get connected with groups working to make change so that's real food media dot org but there are also just a lot of incredible resources on these issues it's really an exciting time to be asking these questions so documentary films like this recent want to place at the table that's in theaters now you can download it and i there are a lot of really incredible books and websites and we have a lot of those listed at our website and i also know that there were ever i have gone in this country there has been local activism on these issues and so if you are new to these issues where ever you may find yourself i promise you with just a little bit of searching a little bit of asking you can find folks in your community working on these issues and carette connecting directly to other people working in your community i think is the number one way to understand how you can fit in to making this paradigm shift and being part of this move toward sustainable food for everyone