2009 June | Center for a Livable Future

Meeting local needs in a movement for global change

In addressing far-reaching global issues like public health, nutrition, social justice and the environment, the road to creating positive change in these areas often begins in our own neighborhood.

Baltimore City, home to the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future and the School of Public Health, suffers from stark disparities in access to healthy foods. A 2008 study found predominantly black and low-income neighborhoods offered significantly fewer options for healthy foods than their predominantly white and higher-income counterparts. This phenomenon is not unique to our city, and the downstream effects to conditions like obesity and diabetes are all too familiar among low-income and minority neighborhoods across the nation.

There is, in the eyes of some, a touch of irony in the proximity between the country’s premier school of public health and some of the most severe nutritional and health disparities. A converse perspective, however, highlights an opportunity – and a responsibility – to bring the school’s ample faculty of mind, energy and capital to bear upon these concerns. A strong company of faculty, staff and students, working alongside community leaders, businesses and laypersons, has been continually engaged in a concerted movement to meet the nutritional and health needs of a city that hungers for genuine sustenance.

Demand for Organic Food Continues to Outgrow Supply

Now is the time to grow organic. According to a new report released by the USDA, the demand for organically produced food continues to outpace supply. Organic food sales have increased more than five-fold since the late 1990s, while organic production has slightly more than doubled in that time.

Organic food accounted for three percent of total U.S. food sales in 2008. Organic produce and dairy products were popular items, accounting for over half of total organic sales. Organic grain also remains in particularly high demand, representing a major bottleneck for use as feed in the organic livestock sector.

‘Operational Sustainability’: EPA Official on How to Get There

Image Courtesy EPA

On Thursday evening, I ventured over to the National Academies of Science for the June edition of its monthly lecture series as part of its Network for Emerging Leaders in Sustainability. I particularly wanted to go to this event because the speaker was Alan Hecht, the director of sustainable development for the Environmental Protection Agency, in the Office of Research and Development. Come September, I will be working with that same office as a fellow, focusing on the environmental and regulatory concerns surrounding biofuels.

Before an audience of about 20 professionals representing several federal government agencies, consulting firms and nonprofit organizations, Hecht led an engaging discussion on EPA’s role in promoting sustainability. Hecht referred to a definition of sustainability from an executive order on government operations: “ensur[ing] that society is protected in the future by well-planned efforts and the reduction of risks.”

Hecht talked a bit about the foundations of the environmental movement, the history of the EPA, and the challenges of incorporating a broader, more integrated framework focusing on sustainability into an agency whose authority is largely based on legislation from the 1970s.

“Everyone embraces sustainability…the difficulty is how to make it operational,” he said. “That will be the challenge for the next decade.”

Hecht noted the challenges of environmental regulations and the inevitable balancing act that requires juggling the public’s well-being, business interests, finances and politics. In fact, when President Nixon created the EPA in 1970—he didn’t believe in the importance of the agency, but saw it as a necessary political move (according to notes taken by an aide during a discussion with Nixon).

Today, the EPA is still working from a 1970s framework, Hecht said. Environmental issues are often segmented into water issues, land issues, air issues, etc., but a cohesive framework that recognizes the connectedness of all these systems is lacking, as is an effective utilization of its manpower and expertise to work together. There also is a need for experts (read: environmental lawyers) to help delineate the agency’s legal authorities and advise on an efficient way to modernize its mandates from Congress. (For more on environmental law reform, Hecht recommended www.breakingthelogjam.org, a website of NYU Law School.)

Any thoughts out there on how the EPA should move into the future? There are a certainly a lot of daunting issues to overcome, but with a growing awareness of climate change, concern about peak oil and the growing body of technical knowledge about renewable energy sources (not to mention a need to revitalize the economy with new innovation) , there’s no time like the present, right?

WHO Raises H1N1 (Swine Flu) Pandemic Level to Highest Point

Dr. Margaret Chan

The World Health Organization (WHO) has decided to raise the level of influenza pademica lert from phase 5 to phase 6, the highest level. The level was heightened, according to WHO, based on “available evidence and expert assessments of the evidence, the scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met.”

“The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic,” WGO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan said in a statement to the press today. “We are in the earliest days of the pandemic. The virus is spreading under a close and careful watch. No previous pandemic has been detected so early or watched so closely, in real-time, right at the very beginning.”

Dr. Chan emphasized that many, but not all, severe cases have occurred in people with underlying chronic conditions. “At the same time, it is important to note that around one third to half of the severe and fatal infections are occurring in previously healthy young and middle-aged people.”

Despite the heightened level, WHO says it continues to recommend no travel restrictions or border closures.

“Farmacology” is Cover Story in Hopkins Magazine

An interesting article by Associate Editor Dale Keiger in the latest issue of Johns Hopkins Magazine explores the links between industrial farming and antibiotic-resistant pathogens. It covers researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who are investigating the use of antibiotics in factory farming, which cultivates more than poultry and livestock. Support for the continuing research comes from the School’s Center for a Livable Future.

The lengthy and well-researched article provides a comprehensive look into the complex issue of antibiotic resistance and other dangers posed by Concentrated Animal Feeding Opeations (CAFOs). In the article, Kellogg Schwab, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Water and Health, says of a typical pig farm manure lagoon he sampled: “There were 10 million E. coli per liter [of sampled waste]. Ten million. And you have a hundred million liters in some of those pits. So you can have trillions of bacteria present, of which 89 percent are resistant to drugs. That’s a massive amount that in a rain event can contaminate the environment.” He adds, “This development of drug resistance scares the hell out of me. If we continue on and we lose the ability to fight these microorganisms, a robust, healthy individual has a chance of dying, where before we would be able to prevent that death.” Schwab says that if he tried, he could not build a better incubator of resistant pathogens than a factory farm. He, Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environment health, and others assert that the level of danger has yet to be widely acknowledged. Says Schwab, “It’s not appreciated until it’s your mother, or your son, or you trying to fight off an infection that will not go away because the last mechanism to fight it has been usurped by someone putting it into a pig or a chicken.” The complete cover story “Farmacology” is available here. Additional information on the use of antibiotics in animals can be found in the report, “Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America,” a project of The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Hollywood Takes On Big Food in New Hard-Hitting Documentary

foodinc1

“We put faith in our government to protect us, and we’re not being protected at the most basic level,” strong words from a mother whose two-and-a-half-year-old son died just days after eating a hamburger tainted with E. coli O157:H7. Barbara Kowalcyk’s personal fight to ensure that the food we feed our children will not endanger their health or their lives, was just one of the many powerful stories told in the soon to be released documentary Food Inc. The hard-hitting film takes a critical look at the industrial food production system and the many risks it poses on society from public health threats and environmental degradation to social injustice.

Food Safety Needs Nuance

If you are not yet passionate about food safety, it’s time to get your gusto going. If you need a little push, I suggest watching Food, Inc. (discussed in detail by my colleague Ralph Loglisci on this blog). Part of the film features the tragic death from tainted meat of two-and-a-half-year-old Kevin Kowalcyk and the seemingly Sisyphusan efforts by his mother to get Congress to create better food safety laws. Her hard work, and that of many other advocates, is finally paying off. Consumers (read: constituents) are increasingly concerned with the issue and Congress is listening. Numerous bills have been discussed in the past few months, and now it seems one piece of legislation is taking hold: the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009. Word on the street is it’s due for mark-up as early as today.

While I normally bemoan the slow moving ship that is our democracy, the rapidity with which this legislation is moving forward raises some concerns. Mostly because the kind of legislation we need to protect and promote a sustainable, healthy food system should be nuanced. And nuance takes time. Read More >

CLF is reading…

Growing Power in an Urban Food Desert
by Roger Bybee
Will Allen is bringing farming and fresh foods back into city neighborhoods.
“Growing Power is probably the leading urban agricultural project in the United States,” says Jerry Kaufman, a professor emeritus in urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Growing Power is not just talking about what needs to be changed, it’s accomplishing it.” Growing healthy food is part of a larger transformational project that will create a more just society, as Allen sees it. [Allen] also works on the Growing Food and Justice Initiative, a national network of about 500 people that fights what he calls “food racism,” the structural denial of wholesome food to poor African-American and Latino neighborhoods.

The City that Ended Hunger
by Frances Moore Lappé
A city in Brazil recruited local farmers to help do something U.S. cities have yet to do: end hunger.
In just a decade Belo Horizonte cut its infant death rate-widely used as evidence of hunger-by more than half, and today these initiatives [farmers markets, peoples' restaurants and cost-controlled markets] benefit almost 40 percent of the city’s 2.5 million population. One six-month period in 1999 saw infant malnutrition in a sample group reduced by 50 percent. And between 1993 and 2002 Belo Horizonte was the only locality in which consumption of fruits and vegetables went up.
“I knew we had so much hunger in the world,” Adriana [former manager within the city anti-hunger agency, Adriana Aranha] said. “But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

Baltimore, Philly Pioneering School Food Initiatives

“This is not rocket science. You put some seed in the ground. Water. Add sun. Plant grows. Eat food.”

The quote above is from Tony Geraci, the charismatic new director of food and nutrition for Baltimore schools, in a City Paper article from last week which does a pretty good job summing up his no-nonsense philosophy on improving the food the city feeds its school kids.

Geraci is part of a growing movement to revamp school food by teaching kids to appreciate where their meals come from by growing and cooking themselves. He wants to put cafeteria stovetops back to work actually cooking meals from scratch and not reheating frozen packages. Geraci has his work cut out for him: he promised to make all Baltimore City school food locally grown and freshly prepared. Beyond that, he wants to create a model that can be used in cities across the country.

Baltimore is leading the way in the movement, and a school near Patterson Park is one of the first to employ a teacher who teaches nutrition and cooking lessons to students as part of its Food for Life program. Read the linked article above for the full scoop, including quotes from CLF’s own Anne Palmer, and check out City Paper’s accompanying video. Read More >

Help Fight Climate Change (and more) With Meatless Mondays

Check out the op-ed in the LA Daily News. Writer John Boal notes that our diet could use a “reorganization” not unlike the way America has decreased household debt and becoming more thrifty in the last seven months. He mentions the UN report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” which documents the effect of livestock on climate change, and the contribution of raising livestock to pollution in our nation’s waterways, citing the Pew Commission Report on Industrial Farm Animal Production. He also gives a nice nod to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Meatless Monday effort. “Just as we shifted our savings and spending habits, why can’t we make changes in our eating habits? We can start with ‘Meatless Mondays,’” he urges.

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