This past Sunday, the prettiest of the year so far, why would 300 people forsake biking, gardening, or napping for a lecture in the dark Bell Museum Auditorium? To hear Joel Salatin, the “libertarian, Christian, capitalist, environmentalist” grass-farming evangelist of Omnivore’s Dilemma, and the movies FRESH and FOOD, INC. fame.

If you’ve gotten this far, you might be familiar with the ideals of the movement: the industrial commodity system is dangerously wreaking havoc on the quality of our food, health, water, air, and land. Salatin addressed the protective myths and proposed solutions:

1) Sustainable heritage local artisan foods are NOT elitist. Everyone can eat well.
2) Sustainable methods CAN feed the world.
3) The history of where and how we went wrong AND how to change things, quickly and easily, before it’s too late.

Salatin was smart, funny, and irreverently mixed personal experiences with research to present his case. Drawing on examples of his own sustainable system as well as those in Japan and Europe, he showed how using integrated methods employing rotational grazing and “multi-speciation” (lots of animals) symbiotically could allow a lot of food to be produced on small parcels of land. He addressed the issue of price by showing that once we figure out how to aggregate product and become more efficient, prices will become comparable.

Blaming “the food police,” the extremely aggressive regulatory agencies whose policies hamper small farmers and producers, he argued that it is government policies (backed by corporate power and influence) that have cramped innovation and entrepreneurial enterprises.
“If some regulator demanded that the founders of Facebook have desks a certain height and computers wired a particular way and fined them if they didn’t have enough employee bathrooms, the business never would have taken off. Its founders may not even have tried,” Salatin claimed. “Regulations control the marketplace, they aren’t making our food any safer. Who says real or raw milk from a farmer you know is NOT safer than Twinkies or Mountain Dew?” Claiming that the chicken he slaughtered in his kitchen has a lower bacteria count than the one in an industrial slaughterhouse he says, “You cannot legislate integrity.”

Drawing on lessons from the Dust Bowl, Salatin identified the period when he thinks we took the “wrong fork in the road.” Just when Albert Howard, the father scientific composting, had identified natural methods for enriching soil, chemists were capturing ammonium nitrate (used to make bombs, fertilizers, and pesticides). In the face of an overwhelming land crisis, farmers (with government backing supported by corporate “know-how”) chose the “quicker fix.”

Salatin believes it’s one we are paying for in the long run. “If we are serious about having real choices, we need to address the obstacles that prohibit clean, local food. We need to deal with the government regulations, licensing, and insurance programs that make it impossible for small farmers and producers to get their goods to the consumer. We’ve got to dispense with farm subsidies and expose the hidden costs in food. Right now, you can’t buy pickles from your neighbor or milk from the farmer down the street. It’s illegal, yet humankind has been eating this way for centuries. It’s really about choice.”

Joel Salatin’s lectures at the Bell were in conjunction with a week of events around the release of the movie FRESH: New Thinking About What We’re Eating.

If you don’t have television access, you can watch Food, Inc. online (Food, Inc. will be streaming in its entirety from April 22 to April 29, 2010)

About Food, Inc.

American agriculture has in many respects been the envy of the world. U.S. agri-business consistently produces more food on less land and at cheaper cost than the farmers of any other nation. What could possibly be wrong with that? According to the growing ranks of organic farmers, “slow food” activists and concerned consumers cited in the new documentary Food, Inc., the answer is “plenty.” As recounted in this sweeping, shockingly informative documentary, sick animals, environmental degradation, tainted and unhealthy food and obesity, diabetes and other health issues are only the more obvious problems with a highly mechanized and centralized system that touts efficiency — and the low costs and high profits that result from it — as the supreme value in food production.

Less obvious, according to Food, Inc., is the entrenchment of a powerful group of food producers, that sets the conditions under which today’s farmers and food workers operate, in order to maximize profits. The industry also maintains a revolving door of employment for government regulators and legislators to protect its power to set those conditions. Then there is “the veil,” a strange disconnect — propagated in good part by millions of dollars poured into marketing and lobbying by the industry — between the average American and the food he or she eats. As one chicken industry representative puts it, “In a way we’re not producing chickens; we’re producing food.”

Robert Kenner’s Food, Inc. has its American broadcast premiere as a special broadcast on Wednesday, April 21, 2010 at 9 p.m. on PBS as part of the 23rd season of POV (Point of View), American television’s longest-running independent documentary series. POV is the recipient of a Special Emmy for Excellence in Television Documentary Filmmaking.

So following Julie’s example, I’ve decided that this year for Lent I will begin the process of sorting through what it looks like to eat ethically. Part of this commitment is sharing the information that I find in this blog. I’m also hoping that those more knowledgeable than me will contribute so that I can learn more and more about eating ethically.

So far I’ve established the following (and I’m sure, imperfect) guidelines for myself:

1. I will seek to buy produce that is organic, locally grown, and/or in-season.
2. I will reduce my consumption of meat. If/when I do buy meat, I will buy grass-fed beef or free-range chicken, locally if possible. I will be intentional about learning all that I can about the treatment of animals from the companies I buy from.
3. I will learn more about the brands that I buy and seek to buy only from ethically-conscientious brands.
4. I will buy from grocery stores with commitments to ethical and sustainable standards.
5. I will buy directly from local farmers when possible through farmers’ markets, CSAs, and co-ops.
6. I will be conscientious about the amount of food I consume and will seek to not overconsume.
7. I will be conscientious about using food before it goes bad, reducing waste.
8. If I eat out I will seek to eat at restaurants that support local and sustainable products.
9. I may consume food that was purchased prior to my commitment (but all new purchases during Lent must be ethically-conscientious).
10. I will happily eat with and receive food from those I am invited to share a meal with.
11. And finally. . . I will share my findings with you!

In this blog I will share recipes, tips, restaurant and grocery store recommendations, articles, book recommendations, and local resources, among other things. I will also share my experiences and the obstacles I run into as I seek to follow Jesus in the way I eat. Hopefully I’ll learn from you as well, and by the end of Lent I will have learned eating habits that will continue far beyond the Lenten season.

So I encourage you to follow her journey, encourage her along the way, and learn from her experiment.

Award-winning food journalist Michael Pollan was invited to speak on October 15 at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo but after pressure from a university donor who is chairman of the Harris Ranch Beef Co., the university changed his speech to a panel discussion.

Pollan, whose works include The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto is the Knight Professor of Environmental Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. He’s also no stranger to attacks from Big Ag.

Pollan used the forum to continue to challenge people to think about the ways in which we are growing food in our current fossil-fuel dependent system of agriculture. “We’re producing ourselves into a hole,” he warned the audience.

Joining him on the panel was Gary Smith, the Monford Endowed Chair of meat science at the University of Colorado and Myra Goodman, the co-founder of Earthbound Farm.

What follows is a transcript of the discussion, edited by the AlterNet staff for length and clarity.

Moderator: What is sustainability?

Michael Pollan: I would be remiss if I didn’t address a little bit the circumstances surrounding this event, which I don’t think we can let pass in silence. But one of the reasons we’re doing the panel and not a conventional speech is that there was a real challenge to the university posed by the government, and what is potentially a real threat to academic freedom. And as much as agriculture is what we want to talk about today, academic freedom under girds the ability to have the kind of conversation about agriculture we want to have.

Let me tie this back to sustainability. One of the things we understand from the science of ecology is that the best way to achieve resilience, in any system, is by diversity: biodiversity and intellectual diversity. And that having a diversity of views on this campus — you know, because universities are the place where these conversations should take place, without any kind of bullying, without any kind of threats. It’s critical to trying to figure out how to deal with the challenges that we have.

You could have a monoculture of a university — one that only tolerated one kind of thinking – and when the world changes, as it inevitably does, you would find yourself in serious trouble. But when you have a lot of different ideas, and they’re all nurtured, and they’re all brought into contact with one another as we hope to do today, that is where you get the resources to withstand shocks to the system. And god knows those shocks are coming.

Let me just talk about sustainability and the agricultural format, because I really do believe that it’s connected. You know, sustainability is a complex concept in one way, but it’s also very simple: A sustainable system is one that can go on indefinitely, without destroying the conditions on which it depends — or without depending on conditions it can’t depend on.

So take for example fossil fuels: a system that is highly dependent on cheap oil may not be a sustainable system when oil prices go up. A system that depends on large quantities of free or cheap water has a problem when those situations change.

So sustainability is really — it’s an ideal. There are sustainable systems. A forest. A prairie. I mean, these are sustainable systems; they can go on year after year. They don’t need inputs. They don’t destroy the conditions on which they depend. But as soon as we get involved and start changing things to feed ourselves, we get into more complicated relationships. So it’s a matter of degree, I would say.

Now the question is, ‘is the system we have sustainable today?’ I just want to offer one little prop to tell you where I think the problem is. I brought along something [laughter] from McDonald’s. This is a double quarter-pounder with cheese. Those of you in front can probably smell it. Anyone is welcome to have it [laughter].

Moderator: I believe the students might.

MP: Whoever asks the first question. And I’ve got some glasses here. Each of these glasses holds six ounces, Okay? It takes a lot of oil to make a modern fast food hamburger. An astonishing amount of oil. And I did a little research to find out just how much went into this.

The oil comes in in several different stages. There is the biggest part, probably: the petroleum needed to create the fertilizer to grow the corn, which is the diet, typically, of these animals. But there’s also the moving of that corn, the moving of the burger, the processing, you know, and getting it to a McDonald’s near you.

So oil. Six ounces. Six more ounces. Eighteen. Twenty-four. Twenty-six. That’s a lot of oil to make the burger! And you have to ask yourself: Is the system that produces that burger sustainable?

Moderator: Thanks, Michael. Myra, sustainability. Could you define it?

Myra Goodman: How do you follow that?

MP: With milk, maybe [laughter].

MG: To me, sustainability is protecting and preserving our resources so that they are there for our children, you know? And I think it feels almost impossible for me as a farmer and a manufacturer of a food product to not be consuming a lot of fossil fuels to get our food to market. And I think a big part of this conversation is the population that we’re supporting now on this planet, and I think if you look at … these perfect systems Michael talks about, I think that those little farms work well in a much less populated planet.

But New York City is our biggest market, and they don’t have the ability to grow any fresh greens there for more than half the year. And we know that eating healthy organic food — organic produce — is a great thing for them to be eating, versus eating this burger with…how many ounces?

MP: Twenty-six.

MG: Twenty-six ounces of oil. So for our company, you know, we feel that we have made great strides in terms of how to farm on a large scale successfully, organically, without all these synthetic inputs, and we work really hard to reduce our use of fossil fuels and water and a lot of valuable resources. And then we’ve made some great strides — mostly with post consumer recycled materials. We’ve switched to post-consumer recycled cardboard and post-consumer recycled plastics with our clam shells. We were the first company to do that. But we’re still using a tremendous amount of resources.

So I ask myself: Am I leaving this planet better for future generations — I think in certain ways I am, we are. But in certain ways, we’re not, and I don’t know how to accomplish that.

Gary Smith: Well, the concept of sustainability has been around a long time. We really only started to use the word in the last five years. If you look in a dictionary, the definition is: “to provide nourishment for.” And the second definition is: “to be able to prolong or continue.” So basically, if you put it together, can you in fact provide nourishment for the foreseeable future?

The word sustainability, unless you qualify it, means nothing because it’s anything you could keep going. So you have to put some words in front of it. It’s really interesting. There’s a wonderful article by Liz Sloan in the last issue of Food Technology. She cited nine studies where they had actually gone up to people and said, “Do you use ‘sustainability’ or ‘green’ in making purchasing decisions?”

Fifty-four to 82 percent of them said yes, we do. They then asked, “What does it mean? What does the word ‘sustainability’ mean?” Sixty percent of them said, “Huh. I really don’t know.” And so they said in many of these studies, “Well, what do you think it means?” Of all the answers they were given, the number one answer was “natural.” Second was “organic.” Third was “locally grown.” Fourth was “humanely treated.” And then it got into small carbon footprint and so on.

So as those of us in universities begin to tackle sustainability, we say there is a “food supply sustainability;” there is an “agriculture sustainability;” And I like commissions like the Pew commission when they said: “What does sustainability mean to animal agriculture?” And the Pew Commission said: “The management of animal agriculture so that it can be maintained indefinitely.”

Now that doesn’t mean forever. And so our task, as people who are involved in agriculture is: We know things are going to change. We know how we’re doing at the moment. We want to be able to do the things that are necessary to make sure that we are able to feed 9.1 billion people in the year 2050.

So to us, agricultural sustainability is food security: Can we continue to do this the best we can, with all the science and technology we can put into the action, can we continue to feed the world’s hungry people?

[...]

Moderator: What do you believe are the biggest challenges facing the industry? How do we change, or move toward that ideal, that place that you might see out there that’s sustainable?

MP: Yeah, getting from here to there is a tremendous challenge, and I’m sympathetic to any producer who operates under a system that may or may not be working well for them, but it’s very hard to picture how to do it differently. One of the key challenges — just continuing with this oil issue – T. Boone Pickens says we’re going to have $350 a barrel oil within 10 years. We all saw what that did to the food system in 2008. It threw everybody’s input system through the roof. And transportation costs. You had big growers out here, when the price of broccoli went from three dollars per box to ten dollars per box to get it to New York City … buying agricultural land on the east coast to shorten the food supply.

So I think one of the metrics that’s worth thinking about is, to what extent you can squeeze fossil fuel out of your business model, and replace it with the only source of sustainable energy we really have which is to say solar energy. And the more sun in a system – the more energy that’s derived from sun and less from oil, you’re moving in the right direction. So I think that’s very important.

But it’s also very important for people to understand that I’m not an agronomist. I’m not a scientist. I teach writing; I teach journalism. And everything I have learned, I have learned by talking to producers and to academics. This is where my information comes from. And I am out looking for models, you know? Good, bad, medium.

And I think this is really where the university comes in. I think it is the university’s job to be the kind of antenna of the industry. The antenna, you know, looking at what’s next, testing new models. Figuring out, you know, how productive could you be putting cows back on grass? How well could local food systems — foodsheds — feed a given area? What happens to agriculture at $350 a barrel oil? And it’s a reason we all need to support the university, as a place where those questions — scary as they may be, threatening as they may seem, get tried out. Where we do our test tube experiments.

But as an organizing principle, think about that idea of … just to take you back to your grandparents’ age. Pre-war farming: For every calorie of fossil fuel energy we put into the system — the farm system on the farm — we got back two calories of food energy. Calories are just measurements of food energy; they could be anything — could be a Twinkie, could be oil. The modern industrial food system, which I completely acknowledge its achievements in terms of making food really, really cheap … that is quite an achievement, but you have to look at cost, also. As in everything in life, it’s a trade-off. That modern food system, it takes ten calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of fast food, or processed food.

So that again … can we count on that? I don’t think we can.

[...]

I don’t think it’s about “Do we want?” This isn’t about taste. This isn’t about “I like this kind of food and I like that kind of food.” This is about the fact that we’re entering a kind of scary time characterized by less fossil fuel, less water, climate change — which is an enormous threat to agriculture. It introduces a whole new level of uncertainty. There are already wine makers in the Napa Valley … they’re already saying it’s changing their economy, and they have to adapt and figure out new varieties.

So that change is coming whether we want it or not. And the challenge is, do you kind of go into it willing to be experimental, or do you fight?

Now, let’s take the oil example with the oil industry. Detroit did a fantastic job of defending itself against change. And they have the Congress of the United States, and all the representatives fighting back all the forces that said, “You know, you really need better gas mileage. This is a mistake.” And they won. But they lost by winning.

And we have to make sure agriculture — big agriculture, little agriculture, all different types of agriculture — doesn’t find itself in that boat.

[...]

Moderator: Myra … what do you see as the challenges you’re going to face, and how do you think we might be addressing those?

MG: On the macro scale, of course, knowing that our fossil fuel resources are limited and are going to get more expensive, going to get more limited. We’re going to get huge water problems in the state. Climate change terrifies me, especially as an organic farmer, because we don’t have these silver bullets to deal with pests. And everyone talks about climate change making pests a much bigger problem.

I also think when you’re a business owner, you also have to look at financial sustainability. And have to look at making an ethical profit, so you can afford to pay your workers a living wage, and get them to return to the farmers that they stay in business. And I think especially in California, what’s happening now is that retail has consolidated so much that the last thing I heard was five major retailers own eighty percent of the supermarket space, and there’s so many different farmers, and we have no power in these negotiations. There’s an auction system for a lot of this business, and you’re seeing our margins get really squeezed, and so I think our agenda for financial survival is something that we need to balance with these long term threats. And it would be great, like you were saying, in universities like this, where you’re not trying every day to make ends meet and make your payroll and make your company happy, to have some help with some of those big issues that we’ll be facing in the future.

[...]

GS: There’s no question that fossil fuels, and the emissions that are called greenhouse gases, are a huge problem. EPA did a study in 2009, and they said, “Where is most of the fossil fuel used, and in which sectors are the most greenhouse gas emissions created?” Number one on that list was the electricity generation. Number two on that list was transportation. Number three on that list was manufacturing. Number four on that list was eight percent of fossil fuels from agriculture.

It’s very, very difficult for those of us in agriculture – and I have owned a wheat farm; I own part of a natural beef company; I own a laboratory testing company that serves the food industry. Why do we out of our eight percent have to make the price of food increase in order to save fossil fuel? No. Let’s don’t have a “meatless Monday.” Let’s have a “no electricity Tuesday.” Let’s have a “nobody can drive a car Thursday.” Why do we focus on eight percent of fossil fuels? I want to feed people. And to tell them we’re going to solve their problems by making the cost of food higher?

Thirty-one states increased the level of poverty in this last economic downturn. Increasing the price of food is not the route by which to provide food security to us and the world.

[... ]

MP: It’s not as if this system is working so well for farmers. If you look at … what dairy farmers are doing — the fact that hog farmers today are losing forty-six bucks for every hog they’re growing. Corn and bean farmers this year are projected to lose eight dollars per acre on what they’re planting. This regime, based on high efficiency, expensive inputs and overproduction — sometimes done in the name of feeding the world — does not really serve the farmer very well. We’re producing ourselves into a hole. And yes, there is a larger population coming, but according to the UN, last year, we grew enough food in the world to feed — as things stand now — to feed 11 billion people, if we used it as food.

We didn’t. We put a lot of it in our cars, in our gas tanks. And we fed a lot of it to animals.

So we have to look at this question of overproduction. It’s almost like built into the DNA of how we do it in America. All of our foreign policies are about “faster, quicker, cheaper.” Has that really served us? Has it served us as eaters, and has it served us as growers?

The people who have managed to get out of that commodity trap … figured out another product — something that was, at the time you started, a really specialized niche, and found new markets. They built new markets. The problem is, over time, you’re another commodity, and it’s hard to keep innovating that way.

Also, cheap food. We all like cheap food. But if you look at what cheap food has done to us, it’s not all good. It’s true that we spend less than any people who have ever lived on this planet on food. As a percentage of income, it’s under 10 percent. I don’t know what other industry boasts about the fact that their products are so cheap. And cheap food has given us all sorts of health care problems. Three quarters of the money we spend on health care in this country goes to treat preventable, chronic diseases. And not all of those are food related, but most of them are.

So we can pay the farmer, or we can pay the doctor. We’re moving toward paying the doctor … and wouldn’t it be better to pay the farmer?

Walmart and the Kroger supermarket chain have severed ties with one of the country’s major blueberry growers after an ABC News investigation found children, including one as young as five-years-old, working in its fields.

The children were discovered at the Adkin Blue Ribbon Packing Company, in South Haven, Michigan, this summer by graduate school students working with ABC News as fellows with the Carnegie Corporation.

A five-year-old girl, named Suli, was seen lugging two heavy buckets of blueberries picked by her parents and brothers, aged seven and eight.

An 11-year-old boy in the Adkin fields told the Carnegie fellows he had been picking blueberries since the age of eight.

The owner of the company, Randy Adkin, was once featured on a Walmart billboard advertising his “locally produced and locally sold” blueberries.

“Walmart will not tolerate the use of child labor,” said a spokesperson who said the retailer was unaware of the children at the Adkin facility until contacted by ABC News.

“We will not purchase any additional product from Adkin Blue ribbon Packing Company pending the outcome of an investigation by our ethical sourcing team,” the Walmart spokesperson said.

Separately, the Department of Labor cited Adkin this week for violating federal child labor laws. Inspectors reported they found a six-year-old picking blueberries in Adkin’s fields this summer.

As part of the ABC News investigation, the four Carnegie fellows spent weeks in fruit and vegetable fields in Michigan, New Jersey and North Carolina.

“What it really comes down to is small fingers picking the smaller fruits and vegetables,” said Joel Stonington, a recent graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

In Michigan, a legal aid attorney who works with migrant families, Teresa Hendricks, said the enforcement of the federal child labor law is “very lax.”

On Friday, the United Fresh Produce Association sent a letter to its members referencing the “alarming” ABC News investigation, urging members to “redouble your efforts to ensure that no young children are ever working illegally on our farms.”

The Law & Child Workers

The law prohibits, with only a few rare exceptions, the use of any child under the age of 12 on large agricultural operations.

Yet, as migrant families try to scrap by on meager earnings, they often put their children to work with the tacit acquiescence of growers and their foremen.

“Everybody knows that’s the economic reality for the families,” said Hendricks, “and so it’s something that happens and people just put their head in the sand and know that it happens, a nod and a wink and we look the other way.”

Adkin, the Michigan grower, told ABC News he “would fire” anyone who allowed children to work in his fields. Indeed, Carnegie fellows Angela Boyd, from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and Kieran Meadows, from the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, saw a sign in Adkin’s fields one day saying children were prohibited.

The sign was lying in the back of a truck the next day when the Carnegie fellows videotaped the children in the fields.

Human rights groups say the use of child labor is widespread in fruit and vegetable fields across the country.

“Americans think of child labor as a problem elsewhere, but in fact we have that problem in our own backyard,” said Zama Coursen-Neff of Human Rights Watch, which is conducting its own investigation of child labor practices in the U.S.

“There is child labor in agriculture in almost every state in the United States,” she told ABC News.

In North Carolina, Carnegie fellows Stonington and Linsay Rousseau Burnett, of the U.C. Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, recorded children working in tomato fields in the western part of the state.

The nurse with a migrant health clinic program, Josie Ellis, told the fellows she is concerned for the health of the young children given the widespread use of pesticides in the fields.

“A lot of the chemicals that the kids are around cause respiratory illness, neurologic impairments, contact dermatitis, really severe rashes on their bodies,” Ellis said.

The nurse said her complaints to the U.S. Department of Labor office, several hours away in Raleigh, rarely resulted in any action.

“They just don’t seem to really care,” she said.

The Obama administration’s Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, promised a crackdown on child labor violations after taking office.

This summer, labor inspectors cited blueberry growers in North Carolina, Arkansas and New Jersey for using children in their fields, with fines averaging $1,100 per child.

While advocates for children welcomed the enforcement efforts, many say the fines levied by the Department of Labor, are so slight they’re little more than a slap on the wrist.

“I think it’s shameful that our nation tolerates child labor,” said Ellis, the North Carolina nurse.

Human Rights Watch investigators say the law needs to be broadened so that it is illegal for children who are 12 and 13 to work in agricultural settings.

“We don’t let them work in factories,” said Coursen-Neff, “only in agriculture are kids allowed to trade in their health and education.”

The executive director of the North American Blueberry Council, Mark Villata, said the industry “does not condone the use of child labor.”

But, said Villata, “we cannot control the practices of every one of the more than 2,000 blueberry growers in the United States.” He said he believes the ABC News report “represents only a tiny segment of our industry.”

But I’m facing an ethical dilemma. What do I give? I refuse to support human trafficking and child slavery by buying chocolate from one of the big name distributors. And as the buzz around the new documentary The Price of Sugar raises awareness of slave conditions inflicted on Haitians in the production of our sugar, I don’t want to just go with pure sugar stuff either (and of course trying to avoid high fructose corn syrup as well). It would be easier to be a hypocrite, but that’s not sitting well with me. So that means I need to find fairly traded organic Halloween candy to give out this year.

Halloween is a $2 Billion dollar a year industry for candy and the average household spends around $17 each year on the candy supply to give out. To break it down – each piece of mini brand name candy costs you between 8-13 cents and the “fun size” pieces are between 20-30 cents each. Depending on the size of your neighborhood, that adds up. When I first started searching for fair trade Halloween candy a few years ago, the cheapest stuff I found in my search was $.50 a piece. I realized that attempting to have an ethical and green Halloween could really cost me. So at the time I turned to the internet.

Thanks to the groundwork done by the wonderful Candy Blog I found what I was looking for. While there doesn’t appear to be loads of options out there, there are some pretty good choices available. Apparently Global Exchange carries an entire Fair Trade Halloween Kit full of candy, decor, and info postcards. Pretty spiffy. I’m also a fan of their fair trade gold coins which will go well with the pirate theme Emma is insisting upon this year. Also available are Endangered Species Bug Bites. These mini-chocolate bars come in milk and dark chocolate varieties and are high on the yummy scale. I let Emma try one and asked if if she thought other kids would like them. She said, “no, just Emma, I eat them all.” We’re working on the sharing thing. Plus each piece comes with a bug trading card which I think are rather fun. If you are looking to avoid chocolate altogether, Yummy Earth carries organic lollipops and hard candy in a variety of interesting flavors (watermelon, pomegranate…). And of course, the Natural Candy Store carries all sorts of fairly traded, organic, and allergen free options.

But in addition to these online options, I am beginning to see some in store possibilities available this year. My local Whole Foods is offering individually wrapped organic gummy bear packages as well as large bags of the yummy Earth lollipops. Ten Thousand Villages carries bite size chocolate bars. It’s a start at least, and hopefully each year other stores will join in green Halloween offerings.

(this is a revision of a post that first appear at onehandclapping)

Read the whole conversation over at Jonathan’s site.

Exchanges like these bring a couple of things to mind. 1. Working for justice is messy. Even when one group tries to do what is right and help people, there are others out there working against them. And 2. It can be hard to know who to trust. Can we believe that Chipotle is doing everything they can to pay the workers fairly, or are they hiding behind the messiness of the system in order to not make changes. It’s complicated and it’s the workers who continue to pay while the mess gets sorted out.

I recently headed out to a sold-out showing of the documentary Food, Inc. at Austin’s own Alamo Drafthouse. Generally, getting dinner and drinks along with my movie is my favorite “night out” activity, but in watching a film which critically examines our industrial food system, it was a bit strange. Granted, all around me I heard orders for veggie burgers and the local organic veggie platter and there wasn’t a high fructose corn syrup soda to be seen, but I was glad to have finished my (veggie) burger by the time the previews ended. Although I have sought to inform myself about the injustices in our modern food system, Food, Inc., presents the most comprehensive and disturbing summary of that system I have seen yet. It is a necessary film for basically anyone who eats food.

A film which took three years to make with a large part of its budget going to pay the legal fees defending itself against lawsuits from the industrial food companies, Food, Inc. takes a hard look at how corporations now control the production of our food, resulting in generally unhealthy, environmentally hazardous, and completely unsustainable food that in truth threatens the very well-being of our country. From the animals that are confined in inhumane cages, left to stand in their own mire, fed unnatural diets and cocktails of drugs and hormones to the impoverished workers who are treated with the same disrespect this system has sacrificed the respect and well-being of living creatures and people for the sake of profit. But Food Inc. doesn’t just stop with detailing those atrocities, it delves into the problems with government subsidies and the ways the fearmongering enforcement of genetically modified food copyrights are destroying the small farmer. People are being hurt by this industrial food system that dumps chemicals into our environment with reckless abandon and produces unnatural and unhealthy food for our consumption.

I appreciated though how Food, Inc. didn’t simply present the issues with industrial food as a clear cut, good vs. evil scenario. It acknowledged that poor workers have no choice but to take jobs on the factory farms, and that farmers have no choice but to give into the pressure to work with the huge industries. Those industries have so altered our nation’s laws and have so many lawyers working for them, that any farmer who resists joining their ranks finds themselves out of work at best, and sued penniless for simply encouraging people to not buy the big company’s products. The farmers and workers are desperate for a better system where real freedom and healthy standards exist, but for now they have to work with what they’ve got.

Food, Inc. also explores why for the average working class family in America, buying healthy food isn’t an option. It is far cheaper to buy the cheeseburger from the drive-thru dollar menu than it is to buy fruit or vegetables. That is because everything in that cheeseburger comes from corn which our government subsidizes so much that farmers can sell it below the cost of production. So the poor American eats the extremely unhealthy food because it is cheaper. But the rising epidemic of type 2 diabetes shows the hidden cost of that value meal. The poor in our country – those with no health or job insurance – are getting sick at alarming rates due to the unhealthy cheap food they eat. This is injustice of the highest extreme – but it’s all part of our industrial food system. It’s a complicated system that gives us unhealthy, unsustainable food that disrespects the earth, animals, and people all in the name of making the greatest profit for a handful of corporations. This is the story of the food we eat every day.

But in truth, I have a lot of friends who don’t want to know anything about their food. They shelter their kids from knowing the whole “circle of life” stuff, but also tell me point blank that they don’t want to know the story behind their food. In their mind, what they don’t know won’t hurt them. Unfortunately, as Food Inc. shows, that isn’t always the case. I wasn’t expecting this film to be a tear-jerker, but hearing a mom talk about how her toddler son ate a hamburger and was dead in 12 days had me weeping. This mom, was the typical middle-American Republican mom on vacation, but the hamburger they bought their son on the way home was tainted with e. coli 0157:H7, a deadly antibiotic resistant bacteria common in factory farmed cows. These cows, fed unnatural diets of corn develop diseases (like e.coli) and are treated regularly with antibiotics, which leads to drug-resistant strains like this one. This mom has become the unlikely activist for food safety. The meat company who sent out the tainted meat knew it was tainted and didn’t issue a recall until two weeks after her son was dead. As she puts it, all she wants is an apology from the company and a guarantee that they are doing everything possible to prevent it from ever happening again. Instead she finds the companies fighting for more lax food safety laws and herself under threat of a lawsuit under the “veggie libel” laws for discouraging people to buy meat products. Yeah, look up these laws – express fears about the safety of your food and you could be sued for causing these companies loss of revenue. So much for free speech, much less safe food. It’s hard to know the truth if you are not allowed to talk about it.

But for all the doom and gloom that Food, Inc. rightly covers, I was grateful that it didn’t end the story there. Instead of throwing up it’s arms and admitting defeat or even insisting that we all go join some intentional community/ hippie commune immediately, Food, Inc. details the practical ways we can start changing the system from within. It profiles the organic dairy farmers who although they had boycotted Wal-Mart all their lives, were now selling their product to the them. Some may call them sell outs, and they are under no illusion that Wal-Mart jumped on the organic bandwagon out of the goodness of their hearts, but to get a store with a distribution as huge as Wal-Marts means significant amounts of pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics are kept from polluting our ecosystem. That’s a really big deal, and one of the main reason to buy organic to anyway. Working within the system, even if it is with Wal-Mart, makes progress happen faster and on a much larger scale. Similarly, the movie concludes with the reminder that we can each make a difference every time we go to the store. The point isn’t to abandon the food system, or stop buying food, but to simply demand healthier, sustainable food. We can choose to vote with our pocketbooks for the type of food we want to support. Do we want to support the food that oppresses animals, workers, and the environment or the food that does its best to care for all those things? We have that choice, we just have to be willing to make it.

Food, Inc. opens across the US during Summer 2009. Check the Food, Inc. website to see if it is playing near you.