USDA Guidelines Questioned

  • Professor Paul Marantz says even a small error in the federal food guidelines can have a big public health impact. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

Some people say the government is partly to blame for America’s obesity problem – because of the federal dietary guidelines. Julie Grant reports on efforts to improve how the government offers nutritional advise to Americans.

Transcript

Some people say the government is partly to blame for America’s obesity problem – because of the federal dietary guidelines. Julie Grant reports on efforts to improve how the government offers nutritional advise to Americans.

You’ve probably seen those colorful food pyramids they put out, the ones that tell you how many servings to have of each kind of food each day. Those recommendations are used by schools, nursing homes, and the federal food stamp program to design menus.

Robert Post works with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which puts out the food pyramid.

“IT’S THE CORNERSTONE FOR BUILDING HEALTHY EATING PATTERNS. CHOOSING THE RIGHT AMOUNTS OF FRUITS, VEGETABLES, GRAINS, MILK PRODUCTS, AS WELL AS PROTEIN SOURCES SUCH AS MEAT AND BEANS.”

Post says people need to know how to get all the nutrients they need, without over-indulging in foods they don’t need.
That’s why the guidelines also set specific limits on things like salt and fat.

But some researchers think the guidelines actually have the potential to cause harm.

Paul Marantz is professor of epidemiology and population health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
He doesn’t think the guidelines should give specific recommendations about how much fat and salt people should eat.

“THOSE SEEM TO CARRY PRECISION THAT IMPLIES THAT WE HAVE A GREATER DEPTH OF KNOWLEDGE THAN WE ACTUALLY DO, SO PICKING THESE NUMBERS AND REQUIRING THAT PEOPLE HUE TO THESE GUIDELINES IS A PROBLEM.”

Marantz says even a little bit of error in the food guidelines can have a big public health effects.

He and his colleagues wanted to find out the potential impact of past dietary guidelines.

They looked at 1995, when the nutritionists were telling people to avoid fat.

“MOST OF US REMEMBER IN THE OLD FOOD PYRAMID THAT MADE IT QUITE CLEAR THAT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO AVOID WAS FAT AND ONE COULD EAT GRAINS AND PASTA AND BREAT AND THE LIKE WITHOUT CONCERN.”

Marantz says Americans did eat more pasta and bread – that added lots of calories, and lots of weight.

His research, which was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found what Marantz calls a ‘strong correlation’ between the dietary guidelines against fat and obesity in Americans:

“CORRELATION IS BY NO MEANS CAUSATION. WE CANNOT INFER FROM THIS THAT IT WAS BECAUSE OF DIETARY GUIDELINES THAT WE ARE EXPERIENCING THE EPIDEMIC OF OVERWEIGHT AND OBESITY. BUT THE CONNECTION IS STRONG.”

Marantz wants the government to give general advice for healthy eating, but not specific guidelines. He gives the example of sodium. Marantz says no one really knows how much salt is appropriate for each person. But there’s a push to put specific limits on sodium in the new guidelines.

Robert Post of the USDA says anything that gets into the 2010 recommendations will be based on what he calls the Gold Standard of scientific evidence. He says a committee of nutritional experts has been meeting for two years to create the new guidelines…

“WE CAN BE ASSURED THROUGH THIS VERY INTENSIVE REVIEW OF SCIENCE AND THE WEIGHT OF THE EVIDENCE IT PROVIDES THAT THE CURRENT ADVISE ON CARBOHYDRATES FOR EXAMPLE IS BASED ON THE LATEST RESEARCH.”

Post says any recommendations for fat and sodium will also be based on the preponderance of current science. The committee is expected to make its recommendations this summer, and new dietary guidelines should be published by the end of the year.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Reforming School Food Systems

  • USDA undersecretary of food and nutrition, Kevin Concannon, says today former military generals are concerned because many 17-24 year olds aren’t healthy enough to qualify for military service. (Photo courtesy of the US Navy)

These are challenging times for people who run school lunch programs. A national TV show this spring took on the school food system, and now leaders in Washington are debating how much money the country should spend on childhood nutrition. Julie Grant reports.

Transcript

These are challenging times for people who run school lunch programs. A national TV show this spring took on the school food system, and now leaders in Washington are debating how much money the country should spend on childhood nutrition. Julie Grant reports.

The national school lunch program started after World War II because the military was concerned. Many young men had been rejected from the draft because of childhood malnutrition.

Kevin Concannon is undersecretary of food and nutrition at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

He says today former military generals are getting concerned again. That’s because many 17-24 year olds aren’t healthy enough to serve.

“Twenty-seven percent of them in that age group are so overweight, they don’t qualify for military service.”

And part of the reason so many have gone from being malnourished from not enough food, to malnourished from too much junk food, is the school meals program.

Everyone from first lady Michelle Obama to celebrity chef Jamie Oliver is pushing for improvements in the foods served in schools. Chef Oliver spent three months in Huntington, West Virginia for his program Food Revolution – because it was dubbed the unhealthiest city in America.

In this scene, he started by working in an elementary school cafeteria – and goes with one of the workers to check out the freezer.

“The freezer was just an aladdin’s cave of processed crap….So this is pizza for breakfast, and then they have it for lunch tomorrow?”

“I would not ever feed that to my kids, ever.”

“I’m not getting a good feeling about this…”

“Do you honestly think that we could go from raw state every day?”

“Yes.”

In his efforts to improve the food in this one school district, we see how many barriers there are to doing something as simple as getting kids to eat vegetables and fruits.

There’s resistance from cafeteria workers, the school administrators, the parents, and the kids.

When Oliver serves roasted chicken instead of chicken nuggets, most of it ends up in the trash. And when the schools do start using his menus, more and more parents send their kids in with brown bag lunches – many filled with candy and potato chips.

Kevin Concannon at the USDA says the government cannot do anything about the lunches parents send with their kids. But it can do something about the food served by schools. And he says there is a big push right now to serve healthier foods.

“The direction we’re going in is more fruits, more vegetables, less fat, less sugar, less sodium.”

But, there’s a catch:

“Better, healthier foods cost more.”

So President Obama is proposing adding 10-billion dollars to school food programs over the next decade. The Senate is looking at adding a little less than half that – 4.5 billion. Either way, Concannon says it’s more money than has ever been added to the program.

“It’s no longer a political climate of ‘I’m OK, if you’re OK.’ I think it’s more a realization that this affects health costs, this affects national security, and many of these health conditions are preventable if we get people to eat healthier and to exercise.”

Chef Jamie Oliver agrees more money is needed to provide healthier foods in schools. But right now, he says the government is part of the problem. It offers schools cheap processed food for almost nothing.

“The donated food that you get that is so cheap that you can’t resist it. And it’s from the government. The government is saying ‘We want change.’ ‘Here, why don’t you have some really lovely, cheap processed food.”

The USDA says the government food being sold to schools has improved over the years. But many people say it hasn’t improved enough to ensure that most U.S. students are offered nutritious meals every day.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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A Hidden Danger in the Garden

  • Reporter Karen Kelly and her daughter, Hannah, gather soil from their garden to be tested for toxins. (Photo by Karen Kelly)

All over the country, first-time
gardeners are harvesting their ripe
tomatoes and leafy greens. Gardening –
especially in cities – is thriving.
But Karen Kelly reports on a hidden
danger that isn’t always easy to detect:

Transcript

All over the country, first-time
gardeners are harvesting their ripe
tomatoes and leafy greens. Gardening –
especially in cities – is thriving.
But Karen Kelly reports on a hidden
danger that isn’t always easy to detect:

(sound of little girl in garden)

It’s our first vegetable garden and my daughter and I are looking for some ripe veggies to have for dinner.

It was the highlight of our summer – planting the cucumbers and the eggplant and watching the tomato vines grow higher and higher until we couldn’t even reach the top.

Then I read a story that they had discovered lead in the White House vegetable garden. Exposure to too much lead can cause brain damage, especially in children. And as I read the description of the type of yard that would likely contain lead, I realized that our garden met all of the criteria.

We live in a house more than 50 years old. It’s in an older neighborhood that would have been exposed to residue from leaded gasoline. And we live in a fairly large city -Ottawa, Canada – near a busy road.

So I decided to get our soil tested for lead.

(sound of phone call)

I started by calling the city and other government agencies– no luck. I tried looking for labs in the yellow pages. Those didn’t work out. I moved on to garden centers, a local university, and a local research farm. No one could talk to me.

Finally, I got in touch with a lead expert in Indianapolis, Indiana. He asked me to send him some samples in plastic lunch bags.

“Okay, I just scraped off a place with no wood chips. Okay, so we tested the eggplant, the tomatoes, the lettuce and the cucumbers. Well, we need to do the peppers too, because the peppers are way over here.”

I sent the bags to Gabriel Fillipelli at Indiana University-Purdue University – and waited impatiently. Ripe tomatoes and cucumbers were piling up.

Finally, he got back to us.

“What I found with the samples you took from your soil was relatively high lead values. I was a little bit surprised. Some of them were actually above the EPA levels for playground soils, which is 400 parts per million.”

Great. I figure there’s no chance we could eat these vegetables. But Fillipelli says that’s not the case.

“The other vegetables, like the cucumbers, the eggplants, and peppers – they have very resistant outer skin so as long as you wash them well, very little lead can absorb inside those. The biggest risk you find with vegetables is not lead being sucked up by the roots and poisoning you, it’s actually the soil particles that cling on to the some of these vegetables, meaning beets or carrots or potatoes or, strangely enough, lettuce.”

In terms of children, Fillipelli says the real problem is letting them play in the bare dirt. He actually says covering it with grass or mulch would be safer.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t grow vegetables in a city. You can use containers, or build raised beds with clean soil, and use mulch in between.

It’s still a cheap source of healthy food, and a great way to teach kids about nature, biology and, unfortunately, pollution.

For The Environment Report, I’m Karen Kelly.

Related Links

Tomato Blight Spreading

  • The blight hitting tomatoes is actually the same blight responsible for the Irish potato famine in the mid-19 century. (Photo by T. A. Zitter, courtesy of Cornell University)

If you’ve been waiting all season
for that quintessential taste of
summer – a juicy, ripe tomato from
the garden – you might be disappointed.
This year a tomato blight has swept
across the Northeast and is moving
into Midwestern gardens and farms.
Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

If you’ve been waiting all season
for that quintessential taste of
summer – a juicy, ripe tomato from
the garden – you might be disappointed.
This year a tomato blight has swept
across the Northeast and is moving
into Midwestern gardens and farms.
Julie Grant reports:

Walk around this outdoor farm market in Cleveland and just say the words ‘tomato blight’ – nearly anyone in earshot has a story to tell.

Susan Myers says her home garden has given over to what she thinks is late blight.

“But it’s pretty serious. I mean, it’s like wiping out everything. I have lots of tomatoes and all the leaves are dropping. I’ve never, ever had that before.”

It doesn’t look like the farmers here are having trouble with tomato blight. Most tables are piled high with bright reds and yellows.

Skip Conant has a beautiful display of heirloom tomatoes – but he’s not sure how many more weeks he’ll have fruit to offer.

Conant: “We definitely have tomato blight. It’s been a cool, wet spring, so, yeah. There’s a fair amount tomato blight.”

Grant: “What does it look like?”

Conant: “You’ll see a yellowing and curling on the leaves and then the stem will turn brown. The plant will become a very brown. Die from basically the inside out or the bottom up.”

It’s hard to tell yet if these Midwestern growers are starting to see the same blight that decimated the northeast tomatoes.

Bill Fry is a plant pathologist at Cornell University. He’s studied late blight for 35 years. Fry says it looks like irregular shaped black spots, and can appear on the leaves or the fruit. It can destroy an entire crop in just a few days.

This is the same blight responsible for the Irish potato famine in the mid-19 century. Growers have seen late blight since then. But Fry says, not at these epidemic proportions.

“The fact that it’s just everywhere is, I think, is the major difference from previous years.”

This wasn’t the first cool, wet spring on record. So, why has the blight so bad this year?

It’s kind of ironic. Fry and his colleagues have been studying the problem and think it’s probably because so many people are gardening. Millions more than just last year. And lots of those people bought tomato plants at stores like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart.

“Infected plants were sold throughout the northeast in the box stores. They were transplanted to home gardens and from there the pathogen disbursed to other home gardens, to conventional and organic farms.”

Fry says you might not even notice at the supermarket. Commercial tomato growers spray lots of fungicide to keep away the blight. But organic tomatoes are getting harder to find.

But chefs and tomato lovers who’ve waited all season for those locally-grown heirloom – and especially organic – tomatoes aren’t finding what they want in markets in the northeast.

Back at the Cleveland market, chef and restaurant owner Karen Small has been waiting for tomato season – and it finally hit. She depends on this market for her produce and stops at just about every stand.

But as Small hears farmer after farmer describe what they think is late blight – she’s worried about the weeks to come.

“We’re accustomed to having tomatoes well into September, and maybe that’s not going to happen this year.”

Small plans to go home and rip out the tomato plants in her home garden – after hearing late blight described so many times, she’s pretty sure her tomatoes are infected.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Investigating the Organic Label

  • Some organic watchdog groups say the National Organics Program has been too loose with its rules. (Photo courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)

Congress wants to dig deeper into an ongoing investigation of the National Organics Program. The program puts the little green “USDA Organic” label on products. Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

Congress wants to dig deeper into an ongoing investigation of the National Organics Program. The program puts the little green “USDA Organic” label on products. Mark Brush has more:

Congress passed a bill that will put more money toward investigating the USDA’s organic program.

Some organic watchdog groups say the National Organics Program has been too loose with its rules.

Mark Kastel is with the Cornucopia Institute. He’s one of those critics.

“They have been accused by reputable independent auditors of having ignored the will of Congress in how they are managing the organic program – favoring large factory farms – favoring unscrutinized products being imported from China – all this competing with our family farmers here in the United States.”

Kastel says that’s not the way it’s supposed to work.

But he says the USDA organic label is still the gold standard. And most producers follow the law.

He and some leaders in Congress say an expanded review of the program will make sure that little green label keeps its credibility.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

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Greening the Capital City’s Rooftops

  • This high-rise green roof in Washington DC required a large crane to lift the soil and gravel onto three floors. (Photo courtesy of DC Greenworks)

Green roofs are increasing in popularity across the US, especially in cities, where
there’s not a lot of space for gardens. Sabri Ben Achour explores the trend in
Washington, DC, where the city government is promoting the practice for it’s
environmental benefits:

Transcript

Green roofs are increasing in popularity across the US, especially in cities, where
there’s not a lot of space for gardens. Sabri Ben Achour explores the trend in
Washington, DC, where the city government is promoting the practice for it’s
environmental benefits:

In Washington, you can see flowers and vegetables growing on top of homes,
businesses, even government buildings throughout the city. DC officials say
Washington has nearly 70,000 square feet of rooftop greenery. Only Chicago has
more.

One big fan of these so called green roofs is a popular small hotel, Tabard Inn, just a
few blocks from the White House.

“There’s about 10 varieties of sedum on this roof.”

Sarah Murphy is giving a tour. She’s a horticulturalist.

“This is a very pungent oregano here on the corner, it looks heavily used.”

The city of Washington pays building owners about one-fourth of the cost of
incorporating greenery on rooftops. One big reason? Rainwater runoff.

Sarah Loveland works for an environmental consulting non-profit called DC
Greenworks.

She says Washington has what’s called a combined sewer system. The sewer
system doesn’t just take in what’s flushed down the drain, but also all the rain
running off roofs and streets.

“If you imagine that our sewage treatment plant has a dam, and the sewage system
combines with the storm water system before the treatment plant.”

So, when there’s a heavy rain, that dam at the sewage treatment plant overflows.

“You have both raw sewage and runoff from the streets going directly into the river
untreated.”

Three billion gallons of it a year, at one point.

The EPA sued the District of Columbia.

The city had to spend $150 million to address the problem. Part of that money goes
to green roof grants.

The green roofs slow down rain water – give it some place to soak instead of just
running off straight down the gutter. The city says roofs in the city prevent a million
gallons of storm water runoff from entering the Potomac River.

The roofs also insulate buildings – especially during the summer. Some studies
show they reduce energy costs by 20-30%. And they reduce the heat island effect in
the city, since they don’t get blisteringly hot like traditional roofs.

Green Roofs even offer some habitat for creatures, like bees.

Sarah Loveland with Greenworks, the consultant agency, says rooftop gardens are
also increasingly popular for growing food.

“Veggies are really popular, herbs are really popular – this is a trend that’s taking off
in the restaurant industry. There’s a lot of buzz around it.”

Blueberries and herbs abound in the rooftop gardens of the Tabard Inn, where Paul
Pell is executive chef.

(sound of celery chopping)

“Yeah, we go up and get whatever we want, so it’s fresh. We just climb out the
window when we need it. Chocolate basil goes with ice cream, nasturtiums go with
soups and salads.”

Washington has an advantage over some larger cities in its promotion of rooftop
gardens because federal law prohibits skyscrapers in the nation’s capital, so most
buildings don’t cast shadows over their neighbors.

As a result, most rooftops are sunny – all they need is greenery to soak up the rays.

For The Environment Report, I’m Sabri Ben-Achour.

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Shape-Shifting Fruits and Veggies

  • van der Knaap's team tests tomato starts for the SUN gene - the gene they isolated. SUN is responsible for tomato length. (Photo by Julie Grant)

Vegetables can be really odd shapes.
But what if you could alter fruits
and vegetables into just about any
shape you wanted? Some avid gardeners
come up with strange looking hybrids,
but Julie Grant talked with a researcher
who’s taking the shape of produce to
a whole new level:

Transcript

It’s time to start planting your garden this year. But maybe you’re tired of long, thin
carrots, huge watermelons, and round tomatoes. Julie Grant spoke with one researcher
who’s trying to give us some more options in the shape of fruits and veggies:

Ester van der Knaap steps gingerly around the greenhouse.

We’re at the Ohio State Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster.
The plants here are as tall as we are.

Van Der Knaap points out short, round tomatoes – and some odd-looking long, thin
ones.

“That’s one gene. One gene can make that difference.”

Van der Knaap’s team discovered that gene and isolated it. They call it the SUN gene.
And they’ve been able to clone it in tomatoes.

“You see this one is pretty round. It does not have the SUN gene. And that first one
makes a very elongated fruit, and it does have the SUN gene.”

Van der Knaap’s research could lead to square-shapes – something she thinks the
tomato industry might like. Square tomatoes fit better into packages. And, overall,
square tomatoes might be easier to work with than the common round tomatoes.

“They are mechanically harvested. So if you have a very round tomato, it would roll off
conveyor belts, it’s not very handy.”

So far money for her research has come from the National Science Foundation – not big
ag.

Van Der Knaap is quick to note – her tomatoes are not genetically modified.

You might remember the Calgene tomato which was made firmer by manipulating the
tomato genes with a gene from chickens. Van der Knapp’s just isolating the genes that affect the
shape of the tomatoes. Turning them on or off alters the shape.

Designer fruit shapes are gaining popularity. Check out any seed catalog, and there’s
a huge variety – some large and segmented, some pear-shaped, some oval, some
resembling chili peppers.

People have been cross-breeding tomatoes to make the shapes they want for a long
time. But this is not the same thing.

“It’s just funny, ‘cause my brother was working with some genetic things with tomatoes in
our attic.”

Dick Alford is a chef and professor of hospitality management at the University of Akron.

The difference between what his brother – and lots of other folks have been doing – and
what van der Knaap is doing is the difference between cross-breeding and locating a
specific gene that affects the shape of tomatoes.

The only other gene like this that’s been found so far was discovered by van der Knaap’s
advisor at Cornell University.

[sound of a kitchen and cutting veggies]

Chef Alford watches students as they cut yellow crookneck squash and carrots.

They’re trying to make uniform, symmetrical shapes out of curvy and pointed vegetables.
There’s a lot of waste. Chef Alford hates to see so much get thrown away. So he’s got
a request of Dr. van der Knaap.

“If we could get square carrots, it would be great. If you could get a nice long, a tomato
as long as a cucumber, where you could get 20 or 30 slices out of it, it would be great.”

In a country that loves hamburgers, Van der Knaap has heard that request before. But
the long, thin tomato hasn’t worked out just yet. She says there’s more genetics to be
studied.

Once we know all the genes responsible for making different shapes in tomatoes, Van
der Knaap says we’ll have a better idea of what controls the shape of other crops, such
peppers, cucumbers, and gourds.

And maybe then we’ll get those square carrots.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Zapping Germs Off Your Food

  • Researcher Kevin Keener has been working on a device that turns the air inside food packaging into ozone (Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)

Researchers are working overtime to find ways to kill dangerous bacteria in food such as Salmonella and E. coli. Rebecca Williams reports one researcher has found a new way to kill bacteria:

Transcript

Researchers are working
overtime to find ways to kill dangerous bacteria in food such as Salmonella and E. coli. Rebecca Williams reports one researcher has found a new way to kill bacteria:

Food processors expose produce like lettuce to ozone for a few seconds or minutes to kill bacteria.

Kevin Keener has been working on a device that turns the air inside food packaging into ozone.

Keener is a food process engineer at Purdue University.

He attaches the device to the outside of food packages – like a bag of lettuce – and applies electrodes that send high voltage through the bag.

“Visually it’s very Frankenstein-ish. It’s a safe process, there is a high voltage, but it’s similar to a spark you’d get with an electric fence.”

Keener says the ozone spends more time with the food so it kills more bacteria.

There’s a problem though – in some of their tests the device turned green spinach white.

So there are a few kinks to work out. But food companies are interested and we might see this commercialized in a year or two.

For The Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Finding Green Space in the Downturn

  • Foreclosed houses are being demolished, leaving open spaces that some neighborhoods are turning into gardens. (Photo by Julie Grant)

It might be hard to think about a “silver lining” when so many people are facing foreclosure on their homes. But in some cities people are using foreclosures and the demolition of those homes to turn neighborhoods greener. Julie Grant reports that all the open space is encouraging some people to start gardening:

Transcript

It might be hard to think about a “silver lining” when so many people are facing foreclosure on their homes. But in some cities people are using foreclosures and the demolition of those homes to turn neighborhoods greener. Julie Grant reports that all the open space is encouraging some people to start gardening:

We’re watching the huge arm of a backhoe smash into the front of a house. The air is thick with dust. So many houses in this Cleveland neighborhood have wood nailed to where the windows and doors should be – it’s hard to tell which one is next for the wrecking ball.

25 year old George Hannett is NOT happy about what’s happening on his street:

“It’s not good. It’s bad for the neighborhood.”

The City of Clevelend does not want these abandoned homes left to rot or attract crime – so it plans to demolish 1,200 homes this year.

Morgan Taggart works with the Ohio State University extension office. It’s her job to help people create urban gardens.

She says tearing down so many houses is starting to leave a mark on neighborhoods in lots of cities – Pittsburgh, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland.

“These spaces become very difficult for neighborhoods to manage because they are an attractive nuisance to all sorts of illicit and illegal activities that aren’t really great for the community.”

Taggart says lots of people want to start growing their own food. The economy is luring them back to gardening. Especially in neighborhoods that don’t have big supermarkets with fresh produce. These vacant lots
are giving them new places to plant. But they’re not sure how to go about planting a garden.

Vel Scott has lived in Cleveland 30 years, in a neighborhood with lots of unused land. She sees people on the bus struggling with shopping carts, carrying babies – doing whatever they have to do to get groceries home. But last year Scott realized – there’s another way to feed people. And she started her first garden since she was a kid.

“And I thought about, well, we have this land so why not go over and clear it and use it?”

It was a great idea. But, Vel Scott pretty quickly realized it was easier said than done.

“And after I got over there and it’s such a huge piece of land and I thought ‘My, God, where do I start?’ You know, I don’t know what to do. So we did a V– V for victory, V for Vel,whatever you wanted it to be.”

Scott says wants her land to be a place where they grow vegetables – and cook them right there. She teaches a cooking class so it made sense to her to show people in the neighborhood how to use the vegetables from the garden.

There are some concerns about gardening on vacant land. After all, the land usually belongs to the city. People don’t want to put lots of time and resources into cultivating the soil – if the city is going to turn around and sell to a developer at the first opportunity.

That’s why Cleveland has created a new zoning category to protect its urban gardens. Morgan Taggart with the extension service says this is a post-industrial vision for cities:

It’s an opportunity for us to reimagine our neighborhoods, our city, our county and how we can integrate more sustainable principles into the planning of our neighborhoods.”

Back at the house demolition, people watching the workers tear down the structure say it’s hard to imagine a vegetable garden where this house used to be. But Vel Scott says that in just one season of gardening, her neighbors and local children have seen what she’s done. They’ve started clearing more land and this spring they’re planting their own gardens.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Farming the White House Lawn

  • Some farmers think this spot is a perfect place for a White House organic farm. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Some people think American agriculture needs a makeover. They question why we waste so much fuel moving food long distances. A growing movement is calling for farmers and everybody else to produce more locally-grown, organic food. Shawn Allee reports some people want the President to set a good example:

Transcript

Some people think American agriculture needs a makeover. They question why we waste so much fuel moving food long distances. A growing movement is calling for farmers and everybody else to produce more locally-grown, organic food. Shawn Allee reports some people want the President to set a good example:

Last October Michael Pollan published a letter to the President in the New York Times.
Pollan is a sort of agricultural policy gadfly. His open letter to the President was full of big, policy-wonkish ideas about how to encourage local food production. But Pollan also wrote one small suggestion. NPR’s Terry Gross picked up on it.

GROSS: “You would like the next president to instead of having a White House lawn to basically have a White House garden. The president would set an example for the rest of us by having this garden of locally-grown foods?” (laughs)

POLLAN: “Now why is that preposterous, Terry? I mean, that’s actually one of the more practical things I proposed.”

Pollan went into how the President could even share some of his veggies with food banks.

POLLAN:” So you have this powerful image of the White House feeding Americans. What could be better than that?”

Some people heard this interview or read Pollon’s article and thought, “right on” – there should be a White House farmer. One family from central Illinois was especially intrigued. Terra Brockman talked about it with her father and sister.

BROCKMAN: “Well, it’s a great idea, but why don’t we bring it down to earth and make it real?”

ALLEE: “So, basically you translated it into reality by creating a contest on a Web site. White House Farmer dot com, as I understand it.”

BROCKMAN: “Yeah, we figured it was a way that we could get it out nationally without much time or money and ask people all across the country, ‘who do you think would be a good White House farmer?’ and have people nominate their farmers.”

Now, Brockman built her contest Web site even though President Obama never even talked about the idea of a White House farmer. But she’s hopeful because the White House actually has an agricultural past. At one time sheep grazed on the White House lawn, and during World War II Eleanor Roosevelt grew a Victory Garden there.

BROCKMAN: “It’s not like this is so, so way out there. And really, whatever the President does is pretty symbolic and people do pay attention.”

People paid attention to White Houser Farmer dot com, anyway.
The site gathered around 57 thousand online votes in just a few days.
And exactly who is the unofficial new White House Farmer?
That would be Claire Strader, from Madison, Wisconsin.
Strader invited me to see the land she works.

STRADER: “We’re at Troy Gardens. It’s in a parcel of land in the city of Madison, on the North Side. I haven’t actually seen the farm for a few months because the snow’s been so deep.”

ALLEE: “Can we get closer to the farm area?”

STRADER: “Yeah.”

Strader is the head farmer at Troy Gardens. She trains city people to grow food here. She also makes the soil fertile through organic growing techniques.

STRADER: “You can just start to see now, the green flush over the whole field. That’s our cover crop of rye. It looks really good. I’m happy to see it.”
ALLEE: “Could you tear yourself away to go to DC and leave all this behind?”
STRADER: “It would be difficult to pick up and leave it behind, but it would be a tremendous honor and a lot of potential to spread the good word of organic agriculture and the positive impacts that would have on our country in the future. It would be hard to accept and hard to reject.”

Even with a White House Farmer chosen for him, President Obama still hasn’t said anything about the idea.
But Strader says she and some top contest vote-getters are trying to sway him – even if he’d pick someone else to run his garden.
Strader says she loves the idea of cucumbers and zucchinis growing at the White House… even if she’s not there to pick them.

For the Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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