Sustainable Agriculture & Food Policy

Editor's Note: Kendra Klein recently published a long-form piece in The Nation about her work with hospitals interested in serving sustainably produced food. We asked her to explain how the article came about so other Fellows could benefit from her experience.

How can hospitals improve the food everyone eats? Kendra Klein is a 2011 Switzer Fellow working at the intersection of public health and sustainable agri-food systems. In this video she explains what hospitals can do to advance the agenda of healthy food and sustainable food production systems for everyone.

There is increasing demand for locally grown and raised food in West Virginia, and a growing number of farmers and local food businesses are working to meet this demand. This report examines the existing local food supply chain infrastructure in the state, including processors, aggregators, distributors, and retail markets. The report includes profiles of some of West Virginia's local food businesses and a directory of local food resources.

At dawn, at the loading dock behind the kitchen at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital of Ann Arbor, Michigan, small lift loaders and handcarts trundle boxes from food trucks to storage rooms. The perishables go straight to immense walk-in refrigerators packed with processed produce—buckets of cubed melons, bags of pre-washed lettuce, packages of onions diced by the quarter-, half-, and three-quarter inch.

Can a celebrity chef find common ground with an urban community organizer? Can a maker of organic cheese and a farm worker share an agenda for improving America’s food? In the San Francisco Bay area, unexpected alliances signal the widening concerns of diverse alternative food proponents. What began as niche preoccupations with parks, the environment, food aesthetics, and taste has become a broader and more integrated effort to achieve food democracy: agricultural sustainability, access for all to good food, fairness for workers and producers, and public health.

Peppers in an array of colors, shapes, sizes and flavors grown at the UC Davis Student Farm are igniting interest in plant breeding and the astonishing botanical diversity of the Capsicum genus, to which all peppers belong. “Fifty-two varieties is a wonderful candyland for me, but it’s just a few of the many varieties in the world,” said graduate student Ildi Carlisle-Cummins, who works on a partnership project between the Student Farm and researcher Allen Van Deynze.

Carlisle-Cummins traces her love of food to the afternoons and evenings of her youth helping her father prepare meals. But it was a study abroad trip to Costa Rica in 2001 that brought her interest in food and agriculture into sharper focus.

"Most natural claims are unregulated and untested, and the minimal regulations that do exist are vague and nearly impossible to enforce," said Lisa Bunin of the Center for Food Safety. Read more

Oxfam, the international nonprofit, issued a report on Tuesday estimating how extreme weather events might affect food prices in the coming decades — forecasting that the prices of a number of food staples could surge far beyond the projected increases. “We will all feel the impact as prices spike but the poorest people will be hit hardest because they often spend up to 75 percent of their income on food,” said Heather Coleman, climate change policy adviser for Oxfam America, in a statement.