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How To Use Microgreens
How To Use Microgreens
February 13, 2018
You’re on a Valentine's date, order a heart-shaped pizza with veggies because your date enjoys the occasional basil or arugula on their pizza. Let’s say you order and expect the normal piece of grown parsley fusing with the cheese…You realize this is not the case while you receive the pizza. You find tiny leaves fusing with the succulent melting cheese. You take your first bite: Heaven. It not only taste good but microgreens look extremely cute. This is your entrance to the world of microgreens! After this you become inspired to grow and use them in more of your everyday foods that you prepare at home. Microgreens will do that to you. Impress you more than your date.
Product Uses
Tasty little morsels that they are, microgreens are quite versatile, and can be used in a number of ways. Put them on sandwiches, in salads, on tacos, pizza, soups, anywhere you’d put lettuce or sprouts or cooked them in stir fry. Use them as an eye-catching garnish or ingredient on virtually any dish, meat and fish included. They are generally intended to be used fresh and raw. They make an excellent salad main ingredient, too....just toss with a balsamic vinaigrette dressing and perhaps a little tomato. Voila! A taste sensation that will have you coming back for more!
Microgreens on Sandwiches
Many people are unsure on how to use microgreens. Sandwiches can be fat and heavy. Microgreens pack a punch of light flavor and freshness, weighing out earthier flavor's and providing added nutritional value. Using microgreens in sandwiches can also provide a blessing through an added crunch of texture. Switch up the variety of microgreens depending on the ingredients of the sandwich to take your sandwich to the next level.
Microgreens in Salads
Microgreens salads are both tasty and nutritious. Because different microgreens varieties hold such different flavor profiles, they can be combined to build salads with a light and spicy flavor, or hit the taste buds with a punch of sweet or mild, it's up to you. Microgreens can also be a fantastic addition to a typical leafy greens salad. Add a punch of flavor and nutrition to your salads with a spicy microgreens like red ruby streak mustard.
Microgreens in Nutritional Shakes
Having a clamshell of microgreens that you can grab and use in nutritional shakes every morning or throughout the day can help you live a happier lifestyle, if that's what you are pursuing. Some microgreens varieties have proven to pack up to 40 times the nutritional value versus mature plants.
Other Uses For Microgreens
Microgreens are often used in Wraps, Sushi, Stir fry's, Soups, Tacos and in meat dishes. Microgreens are versatile and flavorful and can compliment in any dish. And yes, they make powerful and delicious garnishes, but they are more than just garnishes.
You should always stay curious and adventurous while cooking or growing microgreens. Remember microgreens are a lifestyle – a fruitful journey.
Microgreens Recipe
Author: Malibu Kitchen
Recipe type: Breakfast
Cuisine: Gluten-free, Detox, Vegetarian
Serves: 2
Ingredients
2 slices multi-grain or gluten free bread, toasted
1 ripe organic avocado, pitted, peeled, and sliced
1/4 lemon, cut into wedges
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup Asian micro mix or other microgreens
1/4 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
1 teaspoon sesame seeds, toasted
Instructions
Divide avocado slices evenly and place on top of toast slices. Using a butter knife, carefully smash avocado slices. Squeeze lemon slices over avocado, sprinkle with salt and pepper, top with microgreens, drizzle with sesame oil, then complete with a sprinkling of sesame seeds.
Nutrition Information
Serving size:2 Calories:253 Fat:16 g Protein:4 g Cholesterol:0
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Tags: microgreens using microgreens leafy greens urban agriculture
What If We Could Grow Delicious, Nutrient-Dense Food, Indoors Anywhere In The World?
This Computer Will Grow Your Food In The Future
What if we could grow delicious, nutrient-dense food, indoors anywhere in the world? Caleb Harper, director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at the MIT Media Lab, wants to change the food system by connecting growers with technology. Get to know Harper's "food computers" and catch a glimpse of what the future of farming might look like.
Ways We Can Make The Food System More Sustainable
If you’ve been paying any attention to the changing food climate over the past several years, you’ve probably heard a certain buzzword repeated time and time again: sustainability.
Ways We Can Make The Food System More Sustainable
February 7, 2018
Written by Megan Ray Nichols
If you’ve been paying any attention to the changing food climate over the past several years, you’ve probably heard a certain buzzword repeated time and time again: sustainability.
But what does a sustainable food system refer to, exactly?
The answer is complex and composed of many moving parts, but at its heart, a sustainable model in the food system promotes the physical health of the public, the economic health of farmers and producers and the fair treatment of the earth, animals and people.
A sustainable food system also refers to an approach that makes the most of the earth’s resources for future generations. It guards against depleting these resources. Why, then, has sustainability not yet been achieved? Perhaps it’s because not enough folks know how to achieve it.
Here are 10 ways that consumers, food producers and legislators can work together to make the food system more sustainable.
1. Local eating
The cost of transporting food across the globe isn’t measured just in dollar signs, but in carbon emissions too. When you buy food from local farmers, you’re contributing to your community’s economy and also decreasing your impact on Mother Nature. Win-win.
Tip: If you really want to reduce your food miles, we recommend growing your own herb garden. It’s easy, economical and sustainable. Check out this post on growing herbs.
2. Encourage cooking
Since sustainability promotes better health among consumers, learning to cook at home more skilfully — and more frequently — is an essential component. When people have control over their own food, they can eliminate ingredients like added sugars and fats. This, in turn, creates a healthier public.
Tip: Check out the video below that we created to encourage people not only to cook vegan, but to grow their own food too!
3. Design menus to follow seasons
Eaters like to enjoy fruits and veggies year-round which is part of the reason foods are imported from all over the world: to gratify the appetites of consumers. This however is unsustainable. If you stick to seasonal produce, however, you’ll be able to buy almost everything locally — and make sure that you get more variety in your diet over the course of a year. This practice will help to reduce your carbon footprint and boost your health.
4. Rotate crop varieties regularly
When farmers plant the same crops again and again, they eventually suck the nutrients out of the soil, making it near useless and often necessitating chemical-laden fertilizers. There’s a simple, natural and time-tested trick to avoid this, though. Farmers can plant different crops every few years to keep the soil healthy. Consumers just have to get on board with mixing up their diet too.
5. Waste less
If you added up all the food to be produced from now until the year 2050, the sum would equal the same amount of food that’s been consumed over the past 8,000 years. Clearly, as the food industry grows, so will its impact on the earth. In order to offset this impact, consumers should strive to toss out less food at home and make the most of their groceries. Businesses, supermarkets and industry should stop throwing out food too and strive to donate to charity or other organisations.
Tip: It’s important that food isn’t sent to landfill as it adds to the carbon pollution problem as rotting food in landfills help to create methane, a greenhouse gas. So make sure to compost your food. To learn more about the food waste problem, we recommend reading this post which runs through the issue in great detail.
6. Support Fair Trade
Foods that bear the Fair Trade label have been produced in a way that ensures fair treatment of employees and the earth. So if you’re committed to the sustainable food movement, you should opt for Fair Trade foods whenever possible to support the right kinds of producers.
Tip: If you really want to support a sustainable food system, make sure to choose more plant-based foods, reduce your meat intake or try a vegetarian or vegan diet.
7. Consider food’s true cost
The “true cost” of food refers to the often unseen environmental and social impacts that mass food production creates. Although unsustainable foods may be cheaper at the supermarket, they ultimately have a higher “true cost” in their negative impact on people and planet. It’s important to keep this issue in mind when you buy food.
Tip: If it’s more sustainable to support local grocers, farmers and primary producers, why not quit the big supermarkets? This post offers some helpful advice.
8. Invest financially
The Netherlands is a small nation, but it exports the second-highest amount of food in terms of value, second only to the United States. How? The Dutch have invested in sustainable agriculture. They get innovative, using indoor farming techniques to make the most of every square inch of land. They also forego most chemical pesticides so they can keep their soil fertile.
Tip: Vertical farming is a great example of indoor farming. Not sure what it is? This beginner’s guide will bring you up to speed.
9. Avoid additives, pesticides and go organic
Synthetic pesticides, fertilizers and antibiotics take a toll on the earth and on animals, but are used frequently by primary producers and livestock farmers in conventional farming to ensure produce and animals grow – and turnover profit – as quickly as possible. When you have the option, try to buy organically grown and additive-free produce and grass-fed meats where possible This should be clearly marked on the packaging but if it isn’t, make sure to ask an assistant.
10. Be willing to forgo convenience
Supporting a sustainable food system isn’t easy. When you commit to buying locally-produced foods and Fair Trade foods and adhering to other tenants of sustainable living, these conscious choices may cost you time and money. But ultimately, you’re working toward a greater cause that will ensure you pass on a healthy earth to future generations.
Contributing to a sustainable food system may require a personal investment on your part, but when you weigh the benefits, it’s well worth the effort. With just a few minor tweaks to your daily life, you could have a huge impact on the way the food system develops in the coming decades. So pick one or two of these steps that you can take to do your part in living (and eating) more sustainably.
Trump’s EPA Chief is Reshaping Food and Farming: What You Need to Know
Trump’s EPA Chief is Reshaping Food and Farming: What You Need to Know
The legendarily anti-EPA Scott Pruitt is trying to undo the agency’s work through rollbacks, inaction, and decimating its workforce.
BY LEAH DOUGLAS | ENVIRONMENT, Food Policy, Pesticides
02.05.18
Since assuming leadership of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last February, Scott Pruitt has found himself at odds with environmental organizations, community advocates, farmers, and increasingly lawmakers.
Just last week, Cory Booker (D-NJ) confronted Pruitt in a Senate hearing about his recent efforts to roll back regulations that set a minimum age for farmworkers who handle pesticides. The rules include requirements for a minimum age of 18 for applying pesticides and for buffer zones around pesticide-spraying equipment. Booker said he feared that the rollback would have a “disproportionate impact on low-income folks and minorities.”
Booker’s concerns mirror many aired by others invested in the country’s environmental policies. Pruitt has made wholesale changes to the EPA over the last year, and his impact on food and farming have been no less sparing. His rollbacks of Obama-era regulations on pesticides, water safety, and farm runoff and close alignment with the seed and chemical industry has caused deep concern for both advocates and scientists. And as Pruitt’s EPA marches forward in rolling back or delaying environmental protections, many longtime staffers are opting to leave the agency they’ve supported for decades rather than supporting his agenda.
“This EPA is not interested in protecting people from harmful pesticides,” says Karen Perry Stillerman, a senior analyst at the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s more interested in bowing to the wishes of Dow [Agrochemical].”
Before his tenure at the EPA, Pruitt infamously sued the agency 14 times. While most of those lawsuits were focused on preventing new regulations to limit carbon and mercury pollution from power plants, his approach to ending regulation has remained constant throughout.
In November 2016, he signed on to a lawsuit against the Waters of the United States rule (WOTUS), which details which bodies of water are regulated under the federal Clean Water Act, and was updated and expanded with the 2015 Clean Water Rule.
As EPA chief, Pruitt has worked quickly to stop implementation of the rule, which many conventional farm and industry groups have opposed, arguing that it is an example of the agency’s overreach. In June, the EPA began its efforts to rescind the rule, and last month the Supreme Court ruled that challenges to WOTUS would be sent back to federal district courts, several of which have issued stays against implementing the rule. Then, Pruitt responded last week by announcing a two-year delay in implementing WOTUS while his EPA works to repeal and replace it.
Pruitt rejected the EPA’s own scientists’ recommendation to ban the insecticide chlorpyrifos after years of internal and external research on the pesticide’s potentially harmful health effects. The chemical was banned in 2000 for household use, but is still used in some commercial farming. A New York Times investigation found that new EPA staff appointed by Trump had pushed career employees to shift the agency’s position on the chemical, and in early February Pruitt noted he would also urge the federal Marine Fisheries Service to also reconsider its findings that chlorpyrifos threatens fish species. A number of states have sued the agency in an effort to force it to implement the ban; California has also moved to ban the chemical’s use in the state in hopes of skirting the EPA’s inaction.
Pruitt has defended his deregulatory efforts, saying they’re in the interest of “cooperative federalism.” In his view, this type of deregulation empowers the states to take on more regulatory responsibility, while preventing the overreach of federal agencies.
Among Advocates, Anger at Changes and the Status Quo
Many agriculture and environment advocates don’t think Pruitt’s deregulatory efforts will improve the working relationship between the federal government and the states. John O’Grady, president of the American Federation of Government Employees National Council #238, which represents over 1,000 EPA employees, says “we’ve been doing cooperative federalism for years.” But “this administration is kind of twisting it” to justify incorporating direct input from more corporations, and to defund environmental regulatory work that has been happening in the states, he says.
Pruitt has supported Trump’s budget proposals, which would cut 20 percent of the funding states rely on for staffing and environmental program work, such as one program established in 2009 to restore and clean up contamination—from agriculture and other sources—in the Chesapeake Bay. More environmental regulations have been targeted for rollback than in any other sector.
And despite his stated interest in diffuse governance, Pruitt is reportedly keeping a tight rein on the EPA’s ongoing work. Michele Merkel, co-director of Food & Water Watch’s Food & Water Justice program and Tarah Heinzen, a staff attorney of the program, note that since many top positions at EPA remain unfilled, much of the agency’s business is flowing through Pruitt himself. Heinzen says that, consequently, there is “far less autonomy at the regional level,” and that state agencies are finding it challenging “to even gather information.”
Conventional agriculture groups, however, are mostly in agreement with the newly defined priorities of Pruitt’s EPA. When Pruitt addressed meetings of the American Farm Bureau Federation and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association in early 2017, he was reportedly given standing ovations. Others say it is still too early to tell whether the changing priorities of this EPA will dramatically affect the relationship between the EPA and farmers.
On the one hand, the biggest players in the “[agriculture] industry have always had the EPA pretty captured,” says Merkel. Indeed, EPA’s regulatory trends have shown a shift toward more self-regulation in the agribusiness sector. There has also been a decline in the number of inspections and enforcement actions by the agency against concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) since the final years of the Obama administration.
And while many farmers have traditionally had an antagonistic relationship with the agency, Tom Driscoll of the National Farmers Union says the idea that farmers have a “knee-jerk distrust of EPA is a bit overstated.” He adds that the farmers he works with are “invested in a clean and healthy environment” and many farmers are still hoping to work with the EPA toward better conservation practices.
Plummeting Morale Inside the Agency
Between April and December, 770 employees left the EPA, many taking buyouts and early retirements. O’Grady says that some of these departures could be unrelated to the political environment. But, he says, some could be “related to people being disgusted with the program that this [administration] is putting in place.” Regardless of their reasons for leaving, many are not being replaced—barely one-third of the 624 EPA positions that require Congressional confirmation have been filled, with another third sitting vacant with no nominees.
Other EPA employees have gone to the media or other forums to speak out against the current administration—but not without consequence. Several employees who’ve spoken out publicly against the recent actions of the EPA have had their emails scrutinized. Many reports suggest that the internal staff morale is low. While the administration fears information leaks, many employees fear the agency will retaliate without proof if they are suspected of leaking information.
Pruitt has repeatedly condemned the EPA under Obama for treating states and industry as “adversaries,” preferring to see them as “partners.” That philosophy has translated into bringing many former industry representatives in to fill major EPA roles.
A November 2017 Center for Public Integrity investigation into 46 political appointees at the EPA found that the majority had worked for an either an organization with a history of climate change denial or an industry commonly regulated by the agency. The appointees include a former senior director of the American Chemistry Council (whose members include Dow, Monsanto, and Bayer), former senior counsel at the American Petroleum Institute, and former legislative affairs director for the National Association of Chemical Distributors.
And the appointees go beyond the agriculture and energy industries. In May, Pruitt appointed his friend and personal banker Albert Kelly, to lead the new Superfund Task Force. Just two weeks prior, Kelly had been fined by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation for financial misdeeds that resulted in his being banned from rejoining the banking industry by the FDIC.
Pruitt has also reportedly spent much more of his time in meetings with industry reps than environmental organizations or citizen groups. A trove of documents detailing his schedule during his first three months at the helm of the agency show dozens of meetings with or travel to events sponsored by General Motors, Shell Oil executives, CropLife America, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Cement Association, and the National Mining Association. Meanwhile, between March and September, Pruitt met with just five environmental groups.
Some of Pruitt’s deregulatory actions, particularly those targeted at Obama-era executive orders, could only last for a short while if they were soon overturned by a new administration. But others, like unwinding WOTUS, would take years of litigation and rulemaking to get back to where the Obama administration left off.
And staff at EPA could also prove hard to replace. John O’Grady points out that the agency has shrunk from 18,000 employees in 1999 to around 14,500 today, and he predicts the Trump administration will cut several thousand more jobs. After all the cuts, “there’s still the same amount of work,” he says. The staff that remain at EPA “are dedicated, they’re trying to get the work done.” But as morale falls, many are burning out. And those who stay must face an agency that seeks to unwind decades of its own efforts to fight climate change, regulate harmful chemicals, and protect the country’s waterways.
Top photo CC-licensed by Gage Skidmore.
These 10 Companies Control Everything You Buy
These companies — Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg's, Mars, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez — each employ thousands and make billions of dollars in revenue every year.
These 10 Companies Control Everything You Buy
Oxfam created a mind-boggling infographic that shows how interconnected consumer brands really are
Only 10 companies control almost every large food and beverage brand in the world.
These companies — Nestlé, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Danone, General Mills, Kellogg's, Mars, Associated British Foods, and Mondelez — each employ thousands and make billions of dollars in revenue every year.
In an effort to push these companies to make positive changes — and for customers to realize who controls the brands they're buying — Oxfam created a mind-boggling infographic that shows how interconnected consumer brands really are
Here's a further breakdown of the companies that own the brands and products we use every day:
Kellogg's
Boxes of Kellog's Cereal (Flickr; Mike Mozart)
2015 revenue: $13.5 billion
Forget Froot Loops and Frosted Flakes — Kellogg's also owns noncereal brands including Eggo, Pringles, and Cheez-It.
Associated British Foods
2015 revenue: $16.6 billion
This British company owns brands such as Dorset Cereals and Twinings tea, as well as the retailer Primark.
General Mills
2015 revenue: $17.6 billion
General Mills is best known for cereals like Cheerios and Chex, but it also owns brands like Yoplait, Hamburger Helper, Haagen-Dazs, and Betty Crocker.
Danone
2015 revenue: $24.9 billion
Best known for yogurts like Activa, Yocrunch, and Oikos, Danone also sells medical nutrition products and bottled water.
Mondelez
2015 revenue: $29.6 billion
This snack-centric company's brands include Oreo, Trident gum, and Sour Patch Kids.
Mars
2015 revenue: $33 billion
Mars is best known for its chocolate brands, such as M&M, but it also owns Uncle Ben's rice, Starburst, and Orbit gum.
Coca-Cola
2015 revenue: $44.3 billion
Coca-Cola is moving beyond soda, with beverage brands including Dasani, Fuze, and Honest Tea.
Unilever
2015 revenue: $59.1 billion
Unilever's diverse list of brands includes Axe body spray, Lipton tea, Magnum ice cream, and Hellmann's mayonnaise.
PepsiCo
2015 revenue: $63 billion
In addition to Pepsi and other sodas, PepsiCo also owns brands such as Quaker Oatmeal, Cheetos, and Tropicana.
Nestlé
2015 revenue: $87 billion
Brands you may not have known that Nestlé owns include Gerber baby food, Perrier, DiGiorno, and Hot Pockets — plus, of course, candy brands including Butterfinger and KitKat.
Italy Among virtuous Nations Against Food Waste
Italy Among virtuous Nations Against Food Waste
How much food do we waste every year? The BCFN foundation invites us to reflect, on the occasion of the Italian National Day Against Food Waste, held on February 5, every year.
Across the world, food waste costs 750 billion euros per year, that is almost twice the Italian GDP for 2017. This figure is even scarier if we translate it into kilograms. Focusing on Italy, we discover that household waste "weighs" 145kg per person each year, which is equivalent to 1,000 small apples (100g each) or 1,500 pasta dishes (circa 100g ) or just under 750 tinned beans (200g tins), much more than the average consumption of a 3-member household. But waste does not just come from households.
In Italy, the fruits and vegetables binned by retailers waste over 73 million cubic meters of water (used to produce them), that is 36.5 billion 2-liter bottles. According to the Food Sustainability Index, the research developed by The Economist Intelligence Unit with BCFN, Italy is scoring significantly in its fight against food waste, and with the help of national policies against industrial food loss and waste, such as the Gadda Law, it is 4th in the ranking of virtuous countries tackling food loss and waste.
1) Make a reasoned list: before shopping, check what you really need, make a list - and stick to it - remember that wasting food means wasting money
2) When you are cooking, keep an eye on quantities and only cook what you can eat
3) Check your labels: always monitor the 'eat before' dates
4) When storing food in the fridge, put the short-life food in front and store in the freezer what you are not likely to eat soon
5) Recipes against food waste: don't bin leftovers and food waste, they can become new creative dishes
Ketogenic Diet: Fighting Back Against Cancer
Ketogenic Diet: Fighting Back Against Cancer
October 4, 2017 in Eco-Farming, Eco-Living & Health, Eco-Philosophy, GMOs, Interview, Opinion
Nasha Winters is a naturopath based in Colorado and the co-author of a lucid, persuasive book called The Metabolic Approach to Cancer. She is an articulate, energetic and unstoppable advocate of the ketogenic diet as a therapy for cancer and a host of other maladies. Ketosis — not to be confused with ketoacidosis, a life-threatening condition — is a metabolic state in which some of the body’s energy supply comes from ketone bodies in the blood, in contrast to a state of glycolysis in which blood glucose provides most of the energy. Ketosis is a nutritional process characterized by serum concentrations of ketone bodies over a certain level, with low and stable levels of insulin and blood glucose. Longer-term ketosis occurs when people stick to a food regimen that is extremely low in carbohydrates and can be medically induced to treat a patient for diabetes or epilepsy. Along with a growing cohort of medical practitioners and ordinary citizens, Winters believes it holds the key to reversing some of the scourges that threaten to bankrupt our health care system. Herself a cancer survivor, Winters approaches her work with the fervor of one who knows it in her bones. She graciously made time for a long chat in between seeing patients, lecturing and writing.
Interviewed by Chris Walters
Understanding Cancer from a Metabolic Level
Photo courtesy of Kyla Jenkinson, PhotoDivine
ACRES U.S.A. What do you think is the biggest barrier to our understanding of cancer? For many years we’ve been hearing that millions of dollars are being spent and many millions more are needed for research. There are occasional stories of research breakthroughs and less frequent stories of significant new therapies. Yet cancer marches on. It is a subject of fear and incomprehension for most people.
NASHA WINTERS. Yes, exactly. I don’t know if I have the answer, but I have my thoughts and a quarter-century of personal experience with thousands of patients and hundreds of colleagues. First of all, when you hear the big C, when you hear “cancer,” it conjures up terror. It conjures up fear, and it conjures up a certain value and belief system. In the United States the only people who are allowed to say they treat cancer are oncologists and dental surgeons. Even your family practitioners are not allowed to treat cancer. It’s a turf war, if you will. If somebody’s diagnosed with cancer, they have to be referred to an oncologist. Well, that’s great. Oncologists know a lot about the actual cancer cell, the cancer cell cycle and the tumor itself, but frankly, they do not have any training in the terrain, in the medium in which that cell or tumor grows. That’s where we have the biggest disconnect and biggest loss in the past 70 years of cancer treatment, certainly since Nixon declared War on Cancer in the early ’70s. We have not made any headway. Just to back up and give a few statistics, one in two men and one in 2.4 women in the United States are expected to have cancer in their lifetime. When you have cancer in places like the United States, you also have a 70 percent chance of having a recurrence. Not only do you get to deal with it once — you have a high likelihood of dealing with it again. We’ve seen a 300 percent increase in brand-new secondary cancers in patients who’ve already been treated for cancer. Months to years later, they have brand-new cancers that are not related to the original diagnoses, and we find those are secondary to the treatments they received the first go around.
ACRES U.S.A. Is that a recent trend?
WINTERS. Yes, it’s a recent trend. In our book we give out the references to this research. Everything I’m telling you is referenced, and most of it comes directly from the American Cancer Society, World Health Organization and the CDC, as well as the IARC, which is the main investigative body for cancer research. So this is big. And yet, we haven’t made very much headway. We’ve not seen any change in survival rates basically in 50 years. We are seeing people being diagnosed earlier because of certain technologies, but it’s not changing their outcomes. So early diagnosis is not changing survival rate, unfortunately. What we’ve focused on for the past 70-75 years is the tumor and the tumor cell, and we’ve gone at it with all this traumatic theory or the DNA damage theory of cancer, as seen in Dr. Vogelstein’s work out of Johns Hopkins and people like him. They say that cancer is simply bad luck, that it’s a genetic mishap, and you’re just more or less a sitting duck, waiting for it to happen to you. I completely disagree, as does a growing body of knowledge, including researchers from Vogelstein’s group. Dr. Peter Pedersen’s work at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Thomas Seyfried at Boston College, Dr. Dominic D’Agostino out of Florida University and others are really picking up the momentum where Dr. Otto Warburg left off in the 1920s. He was looking at cancer as a metabolic disease back in the ’20s, but shortly thereafter Watson and Crick came onto the scene and pushed us into the world of DNA and genetics.
ACRES U.S.A. Does the genetic mutation idea, the bad luck thesis, have something to do with our incomplete record of the past? If we had a better record of the past, wouldn’t it be clearer that our cancer rates have gone up so much that simple bad luck can’t explain it?
WINTERS. You got it. I also think, boy howdy, we really didn’t figure out the genome until the late ’80s, early ’90s. We really expected that to be a home run for us, and it’s fallen very short of that. The people who are still pushing the gene theory alone are standing on the Titanic saying, “This is the way to go. We’re fine. Everything’s good here.” Yet we are coming to understand from the metabolic approach that it doesn’t throw the damaged DNA out with the bathwater. It says the DNA damage isn’t because of cancer. The cause of cancer is damaged mitochondria.
What Are Mitochondria and How Do We Damage Them?
ACRES U.S.A. Can you refresh our memory from high school biology?
WINTERS. Mitochondria are the little organelles within each and every one of our cells that create energy, that make adenosine triphosphate or ATP, which is our energy source, from what we feed it, from our diet. The discussion is changing from 75 years of saying, “Gene damage equals cancer.” Now we’re saying, “Damaged mitochondria equal DNA changes, which equals cancer.” We’re backing it up a notch by saying the problem is a little more upstream than we’re giving it credit for. This is the power of the metabolic theory of cancer and the metabolic approach to cancer — looking more at prevention and truly understanding how each and every one of us can tune up our mitochondrial function and help us become more resistant to cancer and chronic illness.
Damaged mitochondria equal DNA changes, which equals cancer.
ACRES U.S.A. How do we damage our mitochondria?
WINTERS. The biggest offenders doing damage to our mitochondria are our diets and our lifestyles. This is where we’re able to show in the research that upwards of 95 percent of all chronic illness, and especially cancer, is secondary to our diet and lifestyle choices. We have come to trust and believe in our government giving us good information about our food, and yet we’re one of the few countries that doesn’t label GMOs or outright ban them. We’re one of the few industrialized nations that doesn’t ban or label glyphosates. We’re one of the few countries that doesn’t ban certain chemicals added to our food, or hormones and antibiotics added to grain sources that feed the animals we eat. We have a way in the United States of saying, “We’ll keep doing it until proven otherwise,” whereas the rest of our industrialized colleagues say, “Prove it to us that it’s safe, and then we’ll use it.” They take a little bit different approach, just like I’m trying to put out there that we should probably take a different approach to cancer, that it’s not DNA damage that equals cancer. It’s cleaning upstream that prevents the DNA damage that causes cancer. It gets into the politics. It gets into Big Ag. It gets into chemical companies. And it gets into the medical system. When I talk about food, I mean it on all levels that impact our world.
ACRES U.S.A. Do people in the field resist the metabolic understanding of cancer because they are reluctant to accept that genome research just didn’t pan out as hoped? It’s not the master key to the most challenging locks. A scientist who has put a couple of decades into a certain way of thinking about something would be as reluctant as anybody else to abandon it if it’s not working.
WINTERS. Well, that’s just it. By the year 2020, the cancer industry — because that is the reality, it’s an industry — is expected to surpass a trillion dollars. We’ve invested a lot of time, money, effort and research dollars, as you say, into the gene model, the epigenome model, and it hasn’t panned out as we had hoped. Now, being a person who sees those sides of that equation, I don’t think we necessarily have to throw that out entirely. I just think it should not be our central focus. You still can have actionable targets within that genetic expression. But we need to be thinking more globally. We need to back it up from the tumor and the tumor cell, and we need to understand how we got here and how to get away from it. That’s what the emerging science is doing. Thankfully, at the end of the Obama administration, Joe Biden helped launch a concept called the Precision Medicine Initiative, which basically said, “We have money to give a bunch of scientists, but they have to talk to each other.” Because today the way our research works is that everyone hoards and hides their information because it’s worth something. It’s got value. The Precision Medicine Initiative says we’re spinning our wheels by hoarding our data — let’s bring our data together and compare it, and together we can make a bigger difference. I’m hopeful that it’s going to change some of the dialogue in the future. I also hope we start looking at the individual. Just this past week, a study came out in which they’re finally looking at somebody’s genes to truly decide what the best conventional drug treatment is.
ACRES U.S.A. This is a new idea?
WINTERS. I’ve been doing that for a decade, but it hasn’t been covered by insurance. People have to pay for these genetic tests out-of-pocket to determine the best treatment for them. But with this new study coming out, this may be part of your normal regimen — you get diagnosed with cancer and you get a precision, personalized medical approach. That is really a groundbreaking moment in 75 years of oncology care. Also, people are paying more attention to why we have more cancer, and that segues into talking about the industry that’s behind the gene research. There is a lot of industry behind the treatments. If you then say, “Gosh, that chemical we put on the food is toxic” — admit that once and entire multimillion if not multibillion-dollar industries could go down the tubes. No one in that industry wants to have people label known carcinogens. It would not be good for business. These are the kinds of things that we talk about in the book — who these industries are and where you need to look to educate yourself. You cannot depend on your government or Big Ag or big industry or even big medicine to do that for you. They’re all in bed together.
ACRES U.S.A. Do you think there is a lot of walking on eggshells around the idea that we would like to solve this problem, but not really?
WINTERS. Oh, totally. I think that’s actually a perfect statement. When you have something that’s encroaching on a trillion-dollar moneymaker, my goodness. We are not very compelled to change. There are people being paid to come and troll sites like mine, saying everything I’m doing is hooey, totally refutable and not standard. Then they jump on the fact that I’m not a conventionally trained medical doctor, even though I’m a naturopathic doctor. I went through the same board exams and studied to learn all of this personally and professionally. I work with conventional colleagues around the world and can communicate on their terms. There are people who are committed to blocking this information from being available and being transparent.
Understanding the World of Cancer Research
ACRES U.S.A. Let’s talk about your research activity.
WINTERS. I help consult on Institutional Review Boards on research projects at major medical universities and academic institutions on a regular basis. An IRB is an independent ethics committee that reviews your permission to do a research project through the FDA, for example, which vets the research. They give you a stamp of approval that you can run with this project — “It’s ethical. It makes sense. You’re asking a good question. Yes, let’s do the research.” I work within that arena, and I know what they’re saying yea and nay to, and they’re happy to say yes to the types of things that I want to study, but they’re not willing to fund it. That’s the other piece. A lot of the things that we need to be talking about, no one wants to fund. Thankfully, in this era we have a lot of philanthropic, entrepreneurial dollars and personal money being filtered into the world of research that may actually make a difference and get us somewhere. In the past we really depended on the industry, on the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute. We’ve looked at all of these other resources to do our research for us, but no one felt compelled to do some of it, because you can’t make money off food. You can’t make money off certain nutrients or supplements or herbs, and you can’t make money off lower dosing of some of the more toxic therapies. So it’s an interesting dance that we’re in.
ACRES U.S.A. You also have a personal connection to the world of mainstream cancer research, if I’m not mistaken.
WINTERS. Yes, my husband worked in cancer research. He was a cancer drug designer in grad school. He’s a biochemist by training, and he worked for Merck Pharmaceutical. He runs a medical marijuana-testing lab in the state of Colorado to make sure that people are actually doing what they say they’re doing, and also make sure it’s not fraught with chemicals and pesticides. We are very passionate about quality, quantity, research and the scientific method around all of these things, but we also recognize the many roadblocks that are put up to get real research done and to get information disseminated to the masses.
ACRES U.S.A. With your husband as a window into the world of high-dollar biochemistry, biomedical research, then you are highly informed about the world that you’re more or less opposing, if that is the right word.
WINTERS. Exactly. Or trying to create transparency, communication and some real change. I don’t think that it has to be us or them. I think there are different conversations. But they would see me as the opposition, right? That’s pretty clear.
ACRES U.S.A. Are they paranoid?
WINTERS. Judging by the way I’ve been addressed — yes, exactly. What is that old Schopenhauer quote about truth? First they laugh at you, then they vehemently oppose you, and then they accept it as fact. I have lived and practiced long enough, through 25 years of my own cancer diagnosis, as well as helping thousands of others, to have watched that process unfold multiple times. I used to be laughed at, like, “Oh, she’s just a kooky naturopath.” Now that I’m out there on a bigger stage around the world and even advising on conventional research and therapies, they’re starting to get really mean.
ACRES U.S.A. Recent experience tells us that armies of clever and nasty trolls can be hired.
WINTERS. Definitely. I don’t even respond. Luckily, I don’t have to. Most people who know me, who have worked with me, know that what I do is about education and empowerment. My mission is exactly the one you have at Acres, except mine says, “I bring you everything you need to know to grow a bountiful, nourished body and preventative terrain that doesn’t leave a welcome mat for disease and chronic illness.” We’re on the same exact path, trying to bring informed consent and understanding to the world. That’s what it’s about. I’m passionate. Doctor means teacher. It’s docēre in Latin, and I feel like that’s been my purpose, to help people understand that we are so far from what Mother Nature intended.
ACRES U.S.A. Something you said earlier really caught my attention. What is your theory on why we’re seeing this upsurge in secondary cancers?
WINTERS. It’s not even a theory. In fact, even the research says this 300 percent increase since the 1970s of brand-new, secondary cancers in people who’ve had a previous cancer is caused directly by the treatment they received. Radiation is a known carcinogen. Methotrexate, which we often give out like candy to rheumatoid arthritis patients, is a known carcinogen. It causes B-cell lymphoma. We know that people who’ve undergone lots of radiation or chemotherapy are likely to have leukemia or lymphoma. We know that children who’ve undergone childhood cancer treatment are almost guaranteed a cancer in their adulthood. It’s like a 90 percent rate of adult cancers in children who have undergone treatment. These are horrifying to me, and no one is asking questions. So treatment itself is the poison. If we come at it from a metabolic, mitochondrial approach, it’s not that we don’t do those treatments. It’s to say, “Clean up and enhance your mitochondrial function so you don’t end up being that statistic.” That’s where I’m coming from. That’s where this book is coming from. That’s where the metabolic approach to cancer research is coming from. Tidy up your mitochondria. Lower your risk of cancer and chronic illness.
ACRES U.S.A. How do you feel when you see somebody in the news such as Angelina Jolie having her breasts and her uterus removed because of her high genetic propensity for cancer?
WINTERS. The BRCA gene mutation that motivated Angelia Jolie to choose preemptive surgeries is simply a problem with how our mitochondria are functioning and how we methylate, which is just the way we process chemicals in our foods and things we’re exposed to — including emotional exposure, not only in our environment. What’s really sad is that she set us back about 10 years. We were moving forward in our understanding of this more as a metabolic, dietary, lifestyle, preventative approach. Angelina Jolie comes out, removes her breasts, and the world takes notice. Suddenly we see a huge upsurge in BRCA testing. We see a huge upsurge on surgeries. We see a huge upsurge in a lot of industries that fell from the tree of that announcement. In private practice, I’ve seen seven women who preemptively removed breasts and/or ovaries and ended up dying of stage IV metastatic disease. This is what is so crazy. The location is not the issue. The terrain is the issue. Simply removing an area that might have a likelihood of having cancer is like saying, “Well, great, I might have brain cancer someday, so I’d better remove my brain.” It’s insane, that approach.
ACRES U.S.A. It would present a severe difficulty.
WINTERS. Exactly. I have this gene in myself. I have hundreds of patients with this gene. I educate them. I empower them and help them understand what makes that gene express cancer, and they turn their diet and lifestyle around to make sure that they’re not expressing it. Some of them may do the surgery. Some of them may even do prophylactic treatments, but they also know they have to take this more global, terrain-centric approach. We’ve had a BRCA uptick, approximately 47 percent since World War II. That should tell us we’ve done something to our systems to make BRCA gene more prevalent today, and it’s because of the things we’ve put into our bodies. People think, “Hey, my DNA is broken; therefore, I’m going to get cancer.” We’re trying to explain, “No, no, no, no. That’s not it. Your mitochondria are going to keep that DNA healthy or unhealthy, depending on what you feed that mitochondria.”
ACRES U.S.A. There is something heartbreaking about these irreversible preemptive surgeries.
WINTERS. I had an experience recently with a young woman who had a prophylactic surgery, removing her breasts because of the family dynamic of this gene, and she said, “Well, great. I get a new pair of boobs. I get to keep smoking.” As she was telling me this, she was wearing her cell phone in her bra. I about cried, because invariably she will have this cancer raging through her body in few years. She’s just been given this false sense of security by simply removing a body part, and it has not changed her mitochondria one iota. She’s still exposing herself to well-known risk factors that cause mitochondrial damage that will lead to that BRCA mutation expressing.
Sugar Is a Culprit of Mitochondrial Damage
ACRES U.S.A. Which risk factor concerns you the most?
WINTERS. The other thing that drives this is sugar — sugar, sugar, sugar. We’ve gone from 5 pounds of sugar per person per year at the end of the 1800s and early 1900s, to 175 pounds of sugar per person, per year, in a recent statistic that came out in 2014. That is a metabolic catastrophe. Our body does not even know what to do with that information, and the mitochondria are overwhelmed. We are overfed and undernourished and we are oxidizing the heck out of ourselves with all of the growth factors and all of the inflammatory markers that sugar stimulates. That’s what leads into this. How do we pull back the reins on metabolic approach to cancer? Sugar is one of the center posts of this discussion.
We’ve gone from 5 pounds of sugar per person per year at the end of the 1800s and early 1900s to 175 pounds of sugar per person today.
ACRES U.S.A. What has changed in the last 10 or 15 years to sharpen our understanding of what sugar is doing to mitochondria?
WINTERS. You probably heard that there were some researchers — one of them at Harvard — in the 1960s who basically got paid off by the sugar industry. That was what changed. We decided that fat was bad and sugar was fine. Then, of course, we got completely away from what our grandparents, our great-grandparents and upstream several generations before them had been eating. We said, “Boy, fat is bad. Eggs are bad. We need to go to a whole-grain diet,” thank you to agricultural subsidies, not to your health, which then also fed into the sugar industry. They’re all very much in bed together. Basically, Big Ag, like Big Sugar, took on a huge role in our post-industrial revolution after World War II. They put the spotlight on fat being bad and grains and sugar being good. Now, grains turn into sugar, mind you. I lump them into one conversation. What happened then is that we went barking up the wrong tree for a very long time. Over the last 10 years we’ve made no change in cardiovascular disease despite all the drugs we’re throwing at people, especially statins. The low-fat diet has not gotten us anywhere on cardiovascular health. By 2020, cancer is likely to be the number one cause of death in this country. It’s now the number one cause of death in 12 European Union nations, where heart disease always had been before.
ACRES U.S.A. But at least the danger of sugar is getting more attention?
WINTERS. We can now really see that cardiovascular disease and cancer are very much fed by sugar and carbohydrates and starch and grains. We are finally doing the research. We have people like Gary Taubes, who wrote Good Calories, Bad Calories and The Case Against Sugar. We have the famous doctor Robert Lustig and his book called Fat Chance. Specifically, we’ve had a lot of studies, but we’ve buried every one of them.
ACRES U.S.A. Can you give an example?
WINTERS. For instance, we’ve known for a very long time that diabetics have a higher rate of cancer. We’ve known that in the research well since the ’60s. We’ve known since we started using PET scans that when we give them a bolus of radioactive glucose, we see where it goes, and guess what? It goes to the cancer sites. It goes to the cancer cells, because there are more than 300 times the receptor sites for insulin and for sugar on the cancer cell than there are in our healthy cells. We’ve known that for a while, and your doctors use the technology that says sugar is a problem, and everyone still has their head in the sand. It’s ridiculous. We’ve known that the higher your hemoglobin A1c, the more you oxidize, the more damage to your blood vessels, and the more damage to your nerves. We’ve known this causes mitochondrial damage for a very long time. And yet we bury the data. It’s insane to me.
ACRES U.S.A. It wouldn’t be very difficult to write a science fiction story where somebody 100 years from now says, “You know, these people were real nutjobs. They made themselves incredibly sick to drive one-sixth of their economy.”
WINTERS. Exactly. We have all become metabolically inflexible. The disease that’s taking the Western world by storm today is Alzheimer’s. The research is mounting that Alzheimer’s is diabetes of the brain. Cancer is expensive, but Alzheimer’s is way more expensive. It takes a lot more to care for somebody with Alzheimer’s than it does for somebody with cancer. So it may be the Alzheimer’s group that gets us to start talking about sugar.
ACRES U.S.A. It will turn the gasoline into crude napalm.
WINTERS. Yes. That’s what we’re doing. We are napalming the heck out of ourselves. Imagine going from a 5-pound bag to 175 pounds of that dumped into your personal gas tank, on average, every year.
ACRES U.S.A. When you say, “the terrain is the issue,” are you referring to the mitochondria in every cell?
WINTERS. In Western science we would call that the extracellular matrix. It’s the goo that our cells frolic about in. It’s everything from the cell and the cytoplasm, which is the goo inside the cells, to the extracellular matrix, which the cell floats about in, to the lymphatics, the blood, the plasma that circulates through our bodies, to the tissues and organs and structure that holds our container together. So when I say terrain, I’m talking all the way down to the infinitesimal nuclei of mitochondria and even to the electrons of that mitochondria, all the way up to the external shell of our skin, our bone, our muscles. Terrain is the entirety, as well as how we interact with the people and the world around us. When I think about terrain, I think about our microbiome. I think about our hormones. I think about our blood sugar balance. I think about our immune system, our night and day circadian rhythm cycles, our stress response. It’s all-inclusive.
The “Evolutionary Gift of Ketosis” and the Ketogenic Diet
ACRES U.S.A. So the terrain of many people is in bad shape. The evidence in the medical media, along with what is happening all around us, seems persuasive.
WINTERS. Even when I was eating my vegetarian diet and exercising like a madwoman, I had some of the worst blood sugar ever, because I was living on grains and legumes and fruit and not a lot of vegetables and not enough protein and animal fat, and good, non-animal fats as well. I was on the low-fat, vegetarian diet kick, and even vegan for a while, and my sugars were out of control, as was my cancer. Basically, ketones are these little chemical messengers in our body. It’s an alternative fuel source. Just like we can convert our oil to gasoline or diesel, we can also do that in our own body. We can convert our glucose-burning mitochondria into ketone-burning mitochondria. We call that becoming fat-adapted and becoming metabolically flexible. Historically, even just a century ago, we weren’t able to access food 24/7/365. So we would naturally use this evolutionary gift of ketosis that gives us clarity, gives us fortitude, and gives us the ability to run smoothly so we can keep seeking our food. It was a built-in mechanism that came with the model that we were given. We then got further and further away from natural ketosis, and we became incredibly overfed and undernourished in the last 75 years. Now when we feed the body sugar, it gets converted into ATP — energy. But interestingly enough, we make more ATP when we burn fat over sugar. It’s actually a more efficient and more effective fuel source. It offers a lot more protection for the mitochondria than burning carbohydrates.
ACRES U.S.A. What are some of the positive effects?
WINTERS. When we look at the “Terrain 10” issues that I focus on in my book, we know that ketosis impacts positively each and every one of those, so it lowers inflammation. It lowers blood circulation vessels to the tumor. It stimulates and immunomodulates the immune system. It balances out hormone dysregulation. It changes the microbiome. Those are just examples. It heals our mitochondria. It encourages new stem cell growth, new, healthy stem cells, and induces actual cancer cell death as well. It has all of these assets in a really profound way. We don’t have a pharmaceutical or a chemotherapeutic agent that does. We might have something that hits one or two of those targets, but certainly not all 10. Ketosis has the ability to hit all 10. It’s not meant to be a standalone treatment. It’s meant to enhance other therapies. For instance, radiation will not work if somebody has high sugar levels. That’s well documented in science, well documented in the literature, and yet it is never described and discussed with the patient. If you have elevated blood sugars and you’re having radiation, the likelihood of that radiation working well for you is very slim, the side effects are even higher, and your potential for that radiation to cause a future cancer is even higher. If we actually have people in ketosis while they get their radiation, they’re going to get a better response to the radiation while protecting their healthy cells at the same time. It’s a win-win across the board.
ACRES U.S.A. What is a ketogenic diet? In your book, you mention that vegetarians or vegans will eat too many carbohydrates, and that reminds me of the confusion that surrounds complex versus simple carbohydrates, which in turn recalls the confusion around healthy versus unhealthy fats.
WINTERS. Exactly. The ketogenic diet has been utilized as a direct therapy for epilepsy since the 1920s. It started at Johns Hopkins. It was revived later by a man whose son had epilepsy. After the epilepsy drug Depakote came on the market in the ’40s it lost favor. Doctors found it easier to give out a pill than to teach a patient how to do this diet. But a parent whose son wasn’t responding to the pill found the literature and put his child on the ketogenic diet, which stopped the grand mal seizures. He later started a corporation called CharlieFoundation.org, and they have taught thousands, if not tens of thousands, of parents how to implement a ketogenic diet for their kids with neurological disorders. Then folks like Thomas Seyfried brought this more into the limelight a few years ago. Now we’re even seeing that it’s working on the autism spectrum and on Alzheimer’s.
ACRES U.S.A. How does it compare to popular diets of the past?
WINTERS. Basically this diet gets away from sugar. It’s 70-90 percent fat, depending on the level that people need to go into. Some people need to be in deeper ketosis than others to get the therapeutic effect. We often think back to the Atkins Diet, which was high-protein. A true ketogenic diet is not a high-protein diet. In fact it’s the opposite, low- to moderate-protein at most. You have to determine that person to person, because protein can switch over and turn into gluconeogenesis, making more sugar. If we get too much protein, which we tend to do in this country, that also converts to sugar in a low-carb environment. The protein amount for these folks is 20-25 percent and the carbohydrates are anywhere from 0-10 percent, depending on what’s needed for that person’s therapeutic response.
ACRES U.S.A. Are you talking about complex or simple carbohydrates?
WINTERS. It all turns into the same thing. On the outside of the body, it might be simple or complex, but on the inside there’s no discrimination. Sugar is sugar is sugar, whether it comes from a bean, a banana, a potato, a bowl of rice; it’s all the same.
ACRES U.S.A. I always thought eating asparagus was a lot better for me than eating white rice.
WINTERS. It sure is. That’s why we want our patients to eat vegetables as their carbohydrates versus grains or legumes, because you get all of the other co-factors, all of the nutrients that are anti-cancer, that clean up the mitochondria, that stabilize our epigenetic expression. You’re going to only get that from green, leafy vegetables, cruciferous vegetables. You’re not getting anti-cancer benefit from your grains and starches — not to the level that you get from a real vegetable. We really try to break down the mythology. We help people understand how to test for this to make sure they are, in fact, in ketosis. If someone’s not in ketosis and they think they are, they can feel pretty crummy. And once you hit ketosis, it’s like you hit this sweet zone. Your brain works better. Your body works better. You become what’s called metabolically flexible.
ACRES U.S.A. What are some things we associate with health that are misleading? You favor fasting, but it sounds like you’re not really a fan of the master cleanse trend.
WINTERS. The master cleanse base is maple syrup. If you pulled that out, you’d probably do great. We actually have patients do water with lemon juice, sea salt, baking soda and cayenne, and that works beautifully as a way to get your electrolytes. People use maple syrup to bring in the electrolytes. Well, guess what? We just bring ’em in with baking soda and sea salt. There are great ways to upgrade, if you will, some of these old fad cleanses and whatnot to make them more metabolically effective. At a time when we weren’t gorging on sugar, a little bit of maple syrup would’ve been great. But today it’s like adding fuel to the fire.
ACRES U.S.A. What are the pillars of a typical ketogenic diet?
WINTERS. When I say “animal protein,” from eggs to dairy to butter to flesh, poultry and fish, I have to qualify this. We are extremely fanatical about quality. If it has been industrially farmed, do not eat it. It is not worth it. It is loaded with cancer-causing agents. That’s where you see the studies saying meat causes cancer. It’s been done with that type of meat or dairy or what-have-you.
ACRES U.S.A. How would you describe an animal that’s raised in one of those facilities?
WINTERS. My colleague, Jess Higgins Kelley, who co-wrote this book with me, calls them four-legged Superfund sites. And that is exactly what they are. I know my farmers and ranchers around here in Durango. We just were at the farmers’ market this morning getting raw cheese and eggs and bones for this week’s bone broth. I know exactly how those cows and sheep and eggs are raised. If you don’t know where that meat’s coming from, it’s probably not worth the risk of ingesting it. We try to get folks to focus on vegetable as their base camp, shooting for three cups of leafy greens, three cups of colorful vegetables and three cups of cruciferous vegetables a day. All of those are in the lower-glycemic family.
ACRES U.S.A. What about squash and fruits?
WINTERS. Your lowest-glycemic squash is zucchini, spaghetti squash and pumpkin, so those can be woven into this. Tomato is actually a fruit, so that would be considered one of your fruits, as are avocado and olives. And once you become more metabolically stable, you can bring in some fruit and then eating really good, organic, low-glycemic berries and maybe organic — small Granny Smith apples. We’ve bred food to be more sugary, so most of the apples on the market are just little sugar balls. You want to go with the small, tart apples over the giant, sugar-ball apples. Corn, as much as everyone would like to think it’s a vegetable, is not. It’s a grain. Today it’s pretty much impossible to find corn that is not drenched in glyphosate and GMOs, and it’s also super high in sugar, which turns into insulin growth factor which is a known growth factor for cancer cells, so we just say no way on that. Potatoes are little starch balls as well.
ACRES U.S.A. Please don’t take away potatoes. I’m from the Midwest.
WINTERS. If you can get your hands on some organic, non-GMO, purple potatoes, or you can get your hands on non-solanaceae family sweet potatoes or yams in extreme moderation, then those can be great additions for the color added to your diet, the phytonutrients. On top of that, we have fat. After the vegetable base camp, we go with fat, and that’s olives, olive oil, coconut, coconut oil, avocado, avocado oil, macadamia nuts, hazelnuts — highest in omega-3s. We definitely bring in butter, ghee — again, grass-fed, finished, pastured. We want it rich with CLA (conjugated linoleic acids) and vitamin D. Then, if people tolerate dairy well — if they don’t have an allergy, their insulin growth factor isn’t too bad, and they know the quality of their dairy — whole cream. Whole sour cream has incredibly fat-dense nutrients to bring on board. Then meat or poultry or seafood becomes a condiment sprinkled on top of that. Again, quality is key. Then there is literally the cherry on top. We might use stevia or monk fruit as a sweetener that we might put into our beverages or bake with. Once you’re more glycemically stabilized, you can add some berries and low-glycemic fruit into the mix.
What is TH2 Dominance, and How Does a Ketogenic Diet Address It?
ACRES U.S.A. Everybody knows somebody or is somebody with autoimmune problems. What is TH2 dominance, and how does your ketogenic diet address it?
WINTERS. Think of a teeter-totter on a playground. On one side you have TH1, on the other side TH2, and in the center you have something called T helper cell 3 or T3. Cancer is predominantly a TH2-dominant process. Autoimmunity is predominantly a TH1 process. Some of us, like me, for instance, could be both TH1 and TH2 dominant. I had the pair going at the same time, both autoimmunity and cancer. Some people can be completely TH1 and 2 depleted, so there’s no immune system left at all, and that’s Dangerville. What happens with a ketogenic diet is, it goes right into the center, right at that TH3, and balances the teeter-totter. If you’re having an autoimmune flare, it will bring it back to balance. If you’re having a cancer flare, it will bring it back into balance. And if you’re flaring on both or extremely depleted in both, it will bring it back into balance. We’re doing a lot of immune therapies in cancer right now, and the ketogenic diet is considered nature’s checkpoint inhibitor. That basically means that it balances the immune system. It’s quite powerful.
ACRES U.S.A. What kind of cancer did you have?
WINTERS. I had cervical cancer in my teens. They just did the old cryotherapy to burn it off with cold. There was a whole slew of reasons why my terrain was broken, and I have spent 25 years cleaning it up. At age 19, I ended up with Stage 4 terminal ovarian cancer. They’d missed it because of my age. We just didn’t know. And at that point, it was so far gone that they didn’t even recommend treatment. They recommended hospice. They said, “Well, we can do palliative treatment, but it’s likely going to make things worse,” because I was very, very sick. Probably the biggest gift they ever gave me was to say, “There’s nothing we can do,” because it stimulated something within me to say, “Well, then I’ll figure out what I can do.” And that’s what set me off on a 25-year journey and saved my life as well as thousands of other people who were also sent out to pasture, if you will. That’s why it’s been my joy, my purpose and my absolute passion to learn everything I can about the terrain, about cancer, about the metabolic approach and mitochrondrial reboot.
Nasha Winters will be presenting at the 2017 Acres U.S.A. Eco-Ag Conference and Trade Show in Columbus, Ohio. Her book, The Metabolic Approach to Cancer: Integrating Deep Nutrition, the Ketogenic Diet and Non-Toxic Bio-Individualized Therapies, is available from Acres U.S.A. Visit our bookstore or call 800-355-5313.
New Regenerative Organic Certification Champions Healthy Soil And Healthy Farmers
New Regenerative Organic Certification Champions Healthy Soil And Healthy Farmers
The Rodale Institute’s new label goes beyond USDA organic.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF RODALE INSTITUTE
There’s a new organic label in town, and it’s definitely one you’ll want to pay attention to.
The Regenerative Organic Certified Label (seen above) builds on the standards set by the USDA organic label by putting a strong emphasis on soil quality and, most notably, setting social fairness benchmarks that focus on the health and safety of farm workers.
As we’ve reported previously, many of us believe the USDA label regulates more than it actually does. For example, the USDA rules focus on mitigating environmental damage through the use of synthetic pesticides, sewage sludge, and genetic engineering. All of that is a good start, but many feel it doesn’t go far enough when it comes to ensuring healthy soil, biodiversity, and high animal welfare standards.
The Rodale Institute, which is spearheading the Regenerative Organic Certification label along with a coalition of farmers, scientists, nonprofits, and sustainably-minded companies, aims to plug the gaps in the USDA standards and address some of these long-held consumer concerns. The Regenerative Organic Certification consists of three pillars: soil health, social fairness, and animal welfare.
The first pillar, soil health, is one of the founding principles of the Rodale Institute and has been the basis for much of their research over the past 70 years. They believe that organic agriculture should do more than just strive to mitigate damage to soil; instead, it should—and can—improve soil quality over time by adding nutrients and building up organic matter. In fact, research conducted by the Institute in 2014 estimated that if all current farmland and pasture shifted to regenerative organic practices, 100% of annual carbon dioxide emissions could be sequestered in the soil. The Regenerative Organic Certification moves towards making this a reality by promoting the use of cover crops, no or low tillage, and rotational grazing. (This small farm used regenerative practices to save farmland damaged by conventional practices, including pesticides and over tilling.)
The social fairness pillar of the new label is entirely missing from the USDA organic standards. It draws on international Fair Trade standards that protect growers in developing countries who are often exploited with harsh working conditions and meager compensation by big corporations. The Fair For Life label, which also serves as inspiration, extends Fair Trade standards to all countries, though it is not as widely recognized. However, the Regenerative Organic Certification is unique in considering human welfare a part of organic agriculture, making it as important as soil and animal welfare. Notably, the certification requires that living wages be paid to all farm workers and sets fair pricing standards.
In terms of animal welfare, the Regenerative Organic Certification looks for grass-fed and pasture raised animals, which goes further than the USDA organic rules, which only say animals must have access to the outdoors and that rudiments, like cows and sheep, must have access to pasture land during the grazing season, a minimum of 120 days a year. The new label would also prohibit concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are massive industrialized feedlots that cram upwards of 1000 cattle into crowded, concrete quarters. In addition, it would adhere to the five freedoms of animal welfare, and seek to minimize transport distances for animals that can lead to excess suffering.
The label, which is being administered by NSF International, is currently undergoing a public review period that lasts until October 12, 2017. You are encouraged read the certification details here and send feedback.
(Whether you're starting your first garden or switching to organic, Rodale’s Basic Organic Gardening has all the answers and advice you need—get your copy today!)
New Jersey: Governor Murphy's Team Wants to Put The Garden Back in Garden State
MURPHY’S TEAM WANTS TO PUT THE GARDEN BACK IN GARDEN STATE
CARLY SITRIN | JANUARY 30, 2018
Governor’s advisory committee wants more state support for agri-tourism, a revived Jersey Fresh program, and to get more people involved in farming
Agriculture has always been a keystone of the state’s economy; if no longer dominant in dollars, it certainly still plays a significant role in the Garden State’s image. The Department of Agriculture’s transition report underscores that fact, with its advisory committee hoping to enhance New Jersey’s public image by supporting agritourism efforts and bringing back the sidelined and underfunded Jersey Fresh program.
The new Murphy administration appointed a transition committee for each of the state’s cabinet-level departments, seeking advice and information on what the departments’ stakeholders — experts, analysts, business leaders, officials of non-profits, etc. — view as priorities for the administration. The report on agriculture was among a number that were released publicly last week: These are just advisory reports — Murphy has no obligation to follow their advice.
Make New Jersey Fresh Again
One of the recurring themes throughout the report is the need for strong state branding — starting with the Jersey Fresh program.
The report takes former governors to task for drastic funding cuts over the last decade that have reduced the marketing program's budget from a peak of $1 million down to $50,000, an amount they say barely covers the cost of the inspection and grading efforts.
The advisory committee calls for Murphy not only to revive the program, but also to permit farmers to sell home-baked goods, farm beer and cider, and industrial hemp. As it stands, New Jersey is the only state where selling home-baked goods is prevented by law.
Another rebranding effort would focus on the 2.25 million acres of wineries in the southern counties of Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, Gloucester, Ocean, Monmouth and Salem which the report targets as a growing tourist space.
The report calls for the creation of road signs and other promotional materials dubbing that region the "Coastal Plains Wine Corridor” which they believe could become the "Napa Valley of the East." The advisory committee recommends putting the Economic Development Authority and Rutgers Agricultural Experiment Station program (NJAES) in charge of this effort, giving interested wineries access to EDA loans for winery expansion, vineyard establishment, and necessary equipment.
More Farmers
The report also emphasizes the need to get young people interested in farming again. According to the report, New Jersey farms are facing a decline, with the average age of a New Jersey farmer at 60. What's more, because the state resources set aside to preserve farmland come with the exception that the land should remain in farming, that creates a need for a new generation of farmers.
To combat this issue, the advisory committee recommends pouring more resources and budgetary support into the research efforts at the NJAES, which is the main source of technical support for farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural professionals in the state. The report also seeks to get young people involved though Future Farmers of America (FFA), 4H, and vocational tech programs.
The report also recommends making changes to encourage urban, niche, and beginner farmers by extending tax benefits to farms under five acres and removing barriers to urban farming such as the department of health regulation that prohibits small farms from accepting food stamp benefits like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and WIC.
The issue of food deserts in some New Jersey cities is also targeted in the report, which advises directing the department of agriculture to work with education programs and establish EDA loan programs to get beginner farmers the equipment and information they need to start urban farms.
Food Security
According to the report, the number one priority for the Murphy team should be immediately restoring the “heat and eat" benefits that would make it easier for those participating in the SNAP program, which is overseen by the federal Department of Agriculture, to also receive help paying heating bills. While in office, Gov. Chris Christie repeatedly vetoed budget language that would have restored the program and according to recent Benefits Data Trust research, some 160,000 Garden State residents have seen their SNAP benefits dip by about $90 a month due to Christie's actions.
It also recommends streamlining food insecurity programs like SNAP, WIC, school breakfast and lunch, adult-care food programs and food assistance for disaster relief into two departments (Agriculture, and either Human Services or Health) and making them easier to apply to.
Deer and Insects
The report also touches on some issues that are more difficult to categorize like deer-hunting permit changes and funding for an insect laboratory.
Deer in the state are largely overpopulated and have been negatively impacting farmers by contributing to annual crop losses of up to 40 percent, according to the report. In response, the committee recommends a “strategic deer management plan” that would “develop target population numbers for a sustainable herd” — all of which really means more deer hunting. Some of the proposed regulations include allowing bow hunting during summer months and creating an all-season, all-zone, “Earn-A-Buck” program similar to ones in states like Indiana and Virginia where more does and antlerless deer can be taken per buck until the population “has reached a scientifically acceptable level.” This would be a change from the current law which restricts doe counts in some zones and in some seasons unless a hunter is in possession of an unlimited doe tag.
The committee also supports repairing and funding the Phillip Alampi Beneficial Insect Rearing Laboratory, a facility constructed in the mid 1980's for research related to raising and releasing insects like weevils and beetles to control invasive species in New Jersey.
These 11 Easiest Vegetables to Grow Makes Gardening 10x Better
These 11 Easiest Vegetables to Grow Makes Gardening 10x Better
Posted on 2018-01-24 by Chris
What if I told you there are numerous easiest vegetables to grow that can make gardening 10X better and fun?
What’s more?
They require no special care or technical expertise.
You’d think there must be some hidden catch, right?
But there’s not. It’s absolutely true.
Today in this post, I’m going to walk you through 11 easiest vegetables to grow.
So, what makes some vegetables easier to grow than others? I’ve looked at four factors as follows;
1. The growing season – If a given vegetable has a short growing season, the growing becomes much easier.
2. Moisture requirement – as minimum as possible. Watering is a very difficult gardening task. Therefore, the little of it required the better.
3. Temperature – as flexible as possible.
4. Space – utilizes space efficiently.
Based on these four parameters, I’ve been able to come up with this list that can be used by both newbies as well as experienced gardeners.
Let’s jump in…
11 Easiest Vegetables to Grow
Potato
Potatoes are generally grown from seed potatoes – these are tubers specifically grown to be disease free and provide consistent and healthy plants. To be disease free, you should select the areas where seed potatoes are grown are with care.
Luckily, potatoes are so easy to grow, that gardeners end up with “accidental” potatoes every year!
Their growth is divided into five phases:
During the first phase, sprouts emerge from the seed potatoes and root growth begins.
During the second, photosynthesis begins as the plant develops leaves and branches.
In the third phase stolons develop from lower leaf axils on the stem and grow downwards into the ground and on these stolons new tubers develop as swellings of the stolon.
This phase is often (but not always) associated with flowering. Tuber formation halts when soil temperatures reach 27 °C; hence potatoes are considered a cool-season crop.
Tuber bulking occurs during the fourth phase, when the plant begins investing the majority of its resources in its newly formed tubers.
At this stage, several factors are critical to yield: optimal soil moisture and temperature, soil nutrient availability and balance, and resistance to pest attacks.
The final phase is maturation:
The plant canopy dies back, the tuber skins harden, and their sugars convert to starches – and then your potatoes are ready!
Read: 13 Easy to Grow Vertical Garden Plants
Lettuce
Generally grown as a hardy annual, lettuce is easily cultivated, although it requires relatively low temperatures to prevent it from flowering quickly.
Lettuce is one of the easiest vegetables to grow. It grows quick, is relatively convenient to harvest because you just have to simply snip the tops off the plants or select leaves as needed
It also takes up very little area. They are able to grow even in containers, possibly accompanied by flowers or tucked under taller plants.
Lettuces meant for the cutting of individual leaves are generally planted straight into the garden in thick rows.
Heading varieties of lettuces are commonly started in flats, then transplanted to individual spots, usually 20 to 36 cm (7.9 to 14.2 in) apart, in the garden after developing several leaves.
Lettuce spaced further apart receives more sunlight, which improves color and nutrient quantities in the leaves.
Lettuce grows best in full sun in loose, nitrogen-rich soils with a pH of between 6.0 and 6.8.
Heat generally prompts lettuce to bolt, with most varieties growing poorly above 24 °C; cool temperatures prompt better performance, with 16 to 18 °C being preferred and as low as 7 °C being tolerated.
Zucchini
Zucchini is very easy to cultivate in temperate climates. As such, it has a reputation among home gardeners for overwhelming production.
The part harvested as "zucchini" is the immature fruit, though the flowers, mature fruit, and leaves are eaten as well.
One good way to control overabundance is to harvest the flowers, which are an expensive delicacy in markets because of the difficulty in storing and transporting them.
The male flower is borne on the end of a stalk and is longer-lived.
While easy to grow, zucchini, like all squash, requires plentiful bees for pollination.
In areas of pollinator decline or high pesticide use, such as mosquito-spray districts, gardeners often experience fruit abortion, where the fruit begins to grow, then dries or rots.
This is due to an insufficient number of pollen grains delivered to the female flower. It can be corrected by hand pollination or by increasing the bee population.
Bok Choy
Bok choy (Brassica rapa) is also called Chinese cabbage.
This Chinese vegetable is a cool weather vegetable that grows best in spring and fall.
Growing bok choy is done from seed. Planting bok choy can be done by directly seeding the garden soil or by starting plants indoors until the weather is right for transplanting later.
Either way, when planting bok choy, germination occurs within seven to ten days.
Bok choy used to be limited to meals in Chinese restaurants, but these days you are just as likely to find it growing in backyard gardens.
It's a quick growing vegetable and there are a surprising number of varieties to try.
Takes relatively shorter time to mature. Depending on the variety and the weather, bok choy should be ready to harvest in 45 - 60 days.
eet
All beets grow best in fertile soil with a pH between 6.2 and 7.0. Water the prepared bed, and plant beet seeds half an inch deep and 2 inches apart, in rows spaced 12 inches apart.
Beet seeds germinate in five to 10 days if kept constantly moist. Repeated watering can cause some soils to crust on the surface, which can inhibit the emergence of seedlings.
Cover seeded rows with boards or burlap for a few days after planting to reduce surface crusting. This technique is also useful when planting beets for fall harvest in warm summer soil.
Just be sure to remove the covers as soon as the seedlings break the surface.
Scallion
Scallions grow so fast.
Actually, you can re-root scallions from the grocery store.
You may even have luck regrowing the ones you've used for cooking if you leave a couple of inches of stem attached to the roots.
You don't even have to plant them in the garden. Scallions will happily grow in a glass of water. When something is this ridiculously easy to grow, you might as well take every opportunity.
Read: Small Space Gardening: 14 Mind Blowing Ideas (#7 is my favorite)
Onion
Onions are best cultivated in fertile soils that are well-drained.
Sandy loams are good as they are low in sulphur, while clayey soils usually have a high sulphur content and produce pungent bulbs. Onions require a high level of nutrients in the soil.
Phosphorus is often present in sufficient quantities, but may be applied before planting because of its low level of availability in cold soils.
Nitrogen and potash can be applied at regular intervals during the growing season, the last application of nitrogen being at least four weeks before harvesting.
Bulbing onions are day-length sensitive; their bulbs begin growing only after the number of daylight hours has surpassed some minimal quantity.
Most traditional European onions are referred to as "long-day" onions, producing bulbs only after 14 hours or more of daylight occurs.
Southern European and North African varieties are often known as "intermediate-day" types, requiring only 12–13 hours of daylight to stimulate bulb formation.
Finally, "short-day" onions, which have been developed in more recent times, are planted in mild-winter areas in the autumn and form bulbs in the early spring, and require only 11–12 hours of daylight to stimulate bulb formation.
Onions are a cool-weather crop and can be grown in USDA zones 3 to 9. Hot temperatures or other stressful conditions cause them to "bolt", meaning that a flower stem begins to grow.
Ginger
The easiest way to get started growing ginger root is to get a few fresh rhizomes of someone who does grow ginger, at the time when the plant re-shoots anyway (early spring).
Otherwise just buy some at the shops at that time.
Make sure you select fresh, plump rhizomes.
Look for pieces with well developed "eyes" or growth buds. (The buds look like little horns at the end of a piece or "finger")
Some people recommend to soak the rhizomes in water over night. That's not a bad idea, since shop bought ginger might have been treated with a growth retardant.
Pea
Choose an open, weed-free site in full sun. Grow peas in a moist, fertile, well-drained soil.
Try to dig plenty of well-rotted compost into the soil several weeks before sowing to improve soil fertility and help retain moisture.
It's best to avoid sowing peas on cold, wet soils as they tend to rot away. If space is at a premium then try growing peas in containers or patio bags.
Provide supports - Peas produce tendrils to help them climb upwards.
Erect wire netting, or push upright twiggy sticks into the ground along the length of each trench to provide your peas with supports to cling to.
Water regularly- Once pea plants start to flower it's best to water thoroughly once a week to encourage good pod development.
You can reduce water loss by applying a thick mulch of well-rotted manure or compost to lock moisture into the soil.
Radish
Radishes are a fast-growing, annual, cool-season crop. The seed germinates in three to four days in moist conditions with soil temperatures between 18 and 29 °C.
Best quality roots are obtained under moderate day lengths with air temperatures in the range 10 to 18 °C.
Under average conditions, the crop matures in 3–4 weeks, but in colder weather, 6–7 weeks may be required.
Radishes grow best in full sun in light, sandy loams, with a soil pH 6.5 to 7.0, but for late-season crops, a clayey-loam is ideal. Soils that bake dry and form a crust in dry weather are unsuitable and can impair germination.
Harvesting periods can be extended by making repeat plantings, spaced a week or two apart. In warmer climates, radishes are normally planted in the autumn.
The depth at which seeds are planted affects the size of the root, from 1 cm (0.4 in) deep recommended for small radishes to 4 cm (1.6 in) for large radishes.
During the growing period, the crop needs to be thinned and weeds controlled, and irrigation may be required.
Swiss chard
Swiss chard (Beta vulgaris) is an easy-to-grow, heat-resistant heirloom that does not bolt; it has a mild flavor.
Growing Swiss chard works best in rich, moist soil with a soil pH between 6.0 and 6.8. Plant about 12 to 18 inches apart in fertile soil, watering directly after planting.
Work nitrogen-rich amendments such as blood meal, cottonseed meal, feather meal, or composted manure into the ground before planting.
Other options include applying a timed-release vegetable food, such as 14-14-14, according to label directions, when planting and every couple of weeks during the growing season.
Like all vegetables, Swiss chard does best with a nice, even supply of water. Water regularly, applying 1 to 1.5 inches of water per week if it doesn’t rain.
You can measure the amount of water with a rain gauge in the garden.
Apply organic mulch such as compost, finely ground leaves, wheat straw, or finely ground bark to keep the soil cool and moist and to keep down weeds.
Mulching will also help keep the plant leaves clean, reducing the risk of disease.
Read: The Complete Guide to Organic Gardening with Zero Skills
Kale
Kale is a leafy vegetable in the Brassica or Cole crop family.
It is usually grouped into the "Cooking Greens" category with collards, mustard and Swiss chard, but it is actually more of a non-heading cabbage, although much easier to grow than cabbage.
The leaves grow from a central stem that elongates as it grows. Kale is a powerhouse of nutrients and can be used as young, tender leaves or fully grown.
Kale can be grown as a cut and come again vegetable, so a few plants may be all you need.
The plants can be quite ornamental, with leaves that can be curly or tagged, purple or shades of green. It is considered a cool season vegetables and can handle some frost, when mature.
Carrot
Carrots are grown from seed and can take up to four months (120 days) to mature, but most cultivars mature within 70 to 80 days under the right conditions.
They grow best in full sun but tolerate some shade.
The optimum temperature is 16 to 21 °C. The ideal soil is deep, loose and well-drained, sandy or loamy, with a pH of 6.3 to 6.8.
Fertilizer should be applied according to soil type because the crop requires low levels of nitrogen, moderate phosphate and high potash.
Rich or rocky soils should be avoided, as these will cause the roots to become hairy and/or misshapen. Irrigation is applied when needed to keep the soil moist.
After sprouting, the crop is eventually thinned to a spacing of 8 to 10 cm (3 to 4 in) and weeded to prevent competition beneath the soil.
Conclusion
You’ve just read about some of the easiest vegetables to grow.1
Now all you have to do is choose one, give it a try and before you know it, you’ll become an expert in even growing the complex ones.
Just take the first step.
National Nonprofit Aims To Put Gardens In 100 Detroit Schools
BIg Green
Kimbal Musk, co-founder and CEO, Big Green, stands in a learning garden in Indianapolis.
National Nonprofit Aims To Put Gardens In 100 Detroit Schools
Big Green, run by brother of Elon Musk, promotes science education, healthy eating
January 17, 2018, By SHERRI WELCH
- Big Green to bring 100 learning garden classrooms to metro Detroit as part of $5 million commitment
- Kimbal Musk, who with brother Elon sold company that later became PayPal, is champion behind the gardens
- $2 million raised so far for project
A national nonprofit run by the brother of serial entrepreneur Elon Musk aims to bring food education and outdoor "learning garden" classrooms to more than 100 metro Detroit schools as part of a $5 million plan to connect the city's youth to real food.
The gardens created by Boulder, Colo.-based Big Green are intended to support science lessons taught through the growing of food. The idea is to help kids increase their preference for nutritious foods, develop healthier responses to stress and improve their academic performance, said co-founder and CEO Kimbal Musk, who with his brother Elon developed and sold for $300 million the company that is now PayPal Holdings Inc.
Kimbal Musk went on to open Kitchen restaurant in Boulder, a farm-to-table restaurant, in 2004, and for the next dozen years helped local farmers scale their businesses to meet the growing demand of his restaurant group, The Kitchen Cafe LLC.
He also founded the Kitchen Community — now known as Big Green — after seeing how school gardens can help kids.
Since 2011, it has created learning garden classrooms, with raised beds planted with fruits and vegetables and student seating areas, in Denver, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Chicago, serving about 250,000 students.
The metro Detroit project, which happened with encouragement from the Pathways Foundation, Musk said, has raised $2 million to date from Pathways; Grand Rapids-based Gordon Food Service; Carol Ilitch, a mediator at Oakland Mediation and the daughter of Little Caesars founders Mike and Marian Ilitch; and others.
The effort will target Detroit, elsewhere in Wayne County and nearby low-income, underserved schools, Kimbal Musk said.
"We have stopped educating our kids about real food for a couple of decades now, and the results have been disastrous, rampant diabetes ... and in some neighborhoods, over 40 percent of kindergarteners go into kindergarten obese," he said.
"It's not something they did to themselves. It's what we did to them, and we now need to fix it."
Big Green has named Ken Elkins, who served as COO of Winning Futures since 2013, as regional director for Detroit. He will be charged with hiring three teachers who will serve as garden educators and assist teachers with lesson planning, and three local landscapers to build and maintain the gardens.
Elkins also will be charged with raising the remaining $2.5 million to $3 million for the project.
The $5 million will fund the construction and planting of the first 100 learning gardens. The Detroit branch will then need to raise about $1 million a year afterward to maintain the teacher training and gardens, Musk said.
Big Green will work initially with the Grand Valley State University charter school network, given the interest it has shown in the learning gardens, Musk said.
The university charters 41 schools throughout metro Detroit, according to its website.
"We expect at some point to work with Detroit Public Schools Community District, as well," Musk said.
The nonprofit plans to build its first learning garden in April and to have 100 in place within 2 1/2 years, Musk said. "Will be moving very fast."
Big Green looks to build on the urban agriculture, community garden and school garden projects sprouting around Detroit.
School gardens have shown to be a powerful tool to improve test scores, Musk said.
"If you teach the exact same science lesson in fifth grade in the classroom and then move it out to the garden, you'll get a 15-point increase in test scores for those who had the outdoor lesson. It's so much more powerful than learning in the classroom."
As for the produce that's grown, many schools choose to do a farmers market, selling it to parents. Others incorporate it into the cafeteria menu so students can eat the food they've grown, he said.
Given that the gardens go in schools in low-income communities, "we also encourage people to eat food right out of the garden," Musk said.
6 Places Where Soil-Less Farming is Revolutionizing How We Grow Food
If it seems like “water, to which farmers have added the necessary nutrients for plant growth.hydroponic systems” are everywhere, that’s because they are. Hydroponic farming is one efficient way to grow fruits and vegetables in small spaces without the use of soil. Instead of dirt, plants grow down into
6 Places Where Soil-Less Farming is Revolutionizing How We Grow Food
by Greg Beach
If it seems like “hydroponic systems” are everywhere, that’s because they are. Hydroponic farming is one efficient way to grow fruits and vegetables in small spaces without the use of soil. Instead of dirt, plants grow down into water, to which farmers have added the necessary nutrients for plant growth. These are then absorbed, along with water, through a plant’s roots. Light is provided either by the sun or specially designed grow lights, with many sustainable systems powered by renewable energy sources. Aquaponic farming incorporates fish into the soil-less system, using the closed-loop nutrient cycle from fish digestion to their advantage. Some systems even feed nutrients to plants through the air! From water-less deserts to the sun-less underground, soil-less farming is offering new possibilities to feed an increasingly urban, growing global population in a more Earth-friendly way.
1. Stores
With consumers increasingly conscious of their environmental impact, many stores have realized that going green is good for business. Big-box store Target began a series of trials in spring 2017 in which vertical, hydroponic gardens were installed in various Target locations to provide customers with the freshest possible produce. In collaboration with MIT Media Lab and Ideo, Target designed a system that is capable of growing leafy greens and herbs with minimal water usage. The company hopes to someday branch out into other crops, such as potatoes, zucchini and beets. MIT may even offer Target use of rare heirloom tomato seeds for its project. Meanwhile, IKEA has teamed up with Denmark-based SPACE10 to design high-tech hydroponics systems in-stores and in homes.
2. Deserts
In preparation for a future dominated by climate change, in which oil becomes a lesser part of the world’s energy diet, Saudi Arabia has taken several major steps to build a more sustainable system in its challenging desert region. One such move is the rethinking of many traditional farming practices, especially focused on reducing water usage. A farm in the town of Jeddah uses neither water nor soil, rooting plants in mid-air while providing their nutrients through a mist. Designed by AeroFarms, the system is the first aeroponic farm in the Middle East and hopes to someday acquire all its water needs through capturing humidity in the air.
Related: The future of food: how dry farming could save the world
If a desert farm chooses to go hydroponic, there are ways to grow without draining freshwater supplies. In arid South Australia, SunDrops Farms grows 15% of the country’s tomato crop through a solar-powered hydroponic system. To eliminate the use of precious freshwater, SunDrops sources its water from the nearby saltwater gulf, which is then desalinated through the reflected heat of the sun.
In a very different kind of desert, soil-less farming helps growers from the Arctic to Antarctica make the most of a short growing season.
3. Cities
As the global population becomes more urban, cities are investing in more local food production systems that offer economic development opportunities and reduce a city’s carbon footprint. In a warehouse on the Near East Side of Indianapolis, Farm 360 are growing vegetables on a hydroponic system that is exclusively powered by renewable energy and uses 90 percent less water than traditional farming methods. The harvest is sold in local grocery stores while the farm supports dozens of living-wage jobs to residents of the neighborhood.
In even the most isolated urban areas, soil-less farming finds a home. With its ability to receive vital supplies and support a functioning economy severely restricted by the Israeli blockade, Gaza has stepped out onto the rooftops to grow its own food. Beginning in 2010, a United Nations-funded urban agriculture program equipped over 200 female-headed households with fish tanks, equipment, and supplies to build and maintain an aquaponics growing system. This initial spark has encouraged others to create their own and to teach others of this valuable skill.
4. The Underground
Farming without soil can often take place beneath the soil. In Paris, Cycloponics runs La Caverne, a unique urban farm that grows mushrooms and vegetables in an underground, formerly abandoned parking garage. The farm’s hydroponics system uses special grow lights to ensure the vegetables have what they need to survive. The mushrooms grow in a special medium and, through their respiration, provide valuable CO2 for the plants to thrive. La Caverne may have found inspiration from Growing Underground, London’s first underground farm. On 2.5 acres of unused World War II-era tunnels, Growing Underground produces pea shoots, several varieties of radish, mustard, cilantro, Red Amaranth, celery, parsley, and arugula.
Related: 7 agricultural innovations that could save the world
Honorable mention: shipping container farms. Although these may be mobilized on the surface, they may as well be underground due to the closed roof of most shipping containers. The solar-powered hydroponicsLA-based Local Roots can grow the same amount of vegetables, at cost parity, with 99 percent less water than traditional farming.
5. On the Water
Some soil-less growing operations take it a step further, leaving the ground behind entirely and opting for a farm floating on water. Barcelona-based design group Forward Thinking Architecture has proposed a progressive solution to the decreasing availability of arable land by creating floating, solar-powered farms. Using modules that measure 200 meters by 350 meters, Forward Thinking’s design allows for expansion and custom configuration of farms. Each module has three levels: a desalinization and aquaculture level at the bottom, then a hydroponic farming level, topped off by a level of solar panels and rainwater collection. The company estimates that each module would produce 8,152 tons of vegetables a year and 1,703 tons of fish annually.
Related: NexLoop unveils water management system inspired by spiders, fungi, bees and plants
Greenwave takes an alternative approach to soil-less, floating farming by combining the cultivation of shellfish and seaweed, both profitable crops that also help to clean the aquatic environment and absorb greenhouse gases. The farm requires little external input, pulls carbon dioxide from the air and water, and consumes excess nitrogen that could otherwise result in algal blooms and dead zones.
6. Your Home
Yes, you too could get in on the soil-less action. Whether you prefer to DIY or you’d rather something more straightforward, there are options for every style.
Lead image via Depositphotos, others via MIT OpenAg, Sundrop Farms, Esther Boston, Cycloponics, GreenWave, and Urban Leaf
Junk Food Could Be Taxed Like Cigarettes Or Alcohol, Researchers Find
Researchers found that a tax on junk food is both legally and administratively feasible at the federal level in the United States. Proponents of such a tax claim it will help curb obesity in the country which is now peaking at alarming levels, essentially becoming a public health hazard.
Junk Food Could Be Taxed Like Cigarettes Or Alcohol, Researchers Find
JANUARY 24TH, 2018 | BY TIBI PUIU
Researchers found that a tax on junk food is both legally and administratively feasible at the federal level in the United States. Proponents of such a tax claim it will help curb obesity in the country which is now peaking at alarming levels, essentially becoming a public health hazard.
“Economic and social environments can influence food choice in beneficial and harmful directions. Our finding that a federal manufacturer excise junk food tax — defined through product category or combined category-nutrient approaches — appears to be legally and administratively feasible and has strong implications for nutrition policy,” said Jennifer L. Pomeranz, who is an assistant professor of public health policy and management at NYU College of Global Public Health.
According to the CDC, 36.5 percent of American adults and roughly 20 percent of children ages 6 to 19 are obese. What’s more, over 70 percent of all men and 60 percent of all women from the US are overweight. This makes a huge fraction of the country’s population at risk of developing cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, osteoarthritis, and chronic kidney disease. And to be fair, this is no longer an American problem. A third of the world’s population — over two billion people — is now either overweight or obese.
Given the public health risks, many experts believe we ought to enact policies that improve American diets. One course of action would be to regulate the price of food and beverage to incite consumers to make healthier choices, either through taxing unhealthy foods or offering subsidies for healthier foods.
A legally feasible tax
Researchers at New York University and the Friedman School at Tufts University investigated the feasibility of implementing a national soda or junk food tax. A federal-level tax, rather than state-by-state, is preferred because the effects are broader and you avoid seeing things like consumers traveling from state to state to fill groceries and dine at restaurants where they can escape the tax. On the other hand, the United States is not heterogeneous in its citizens’ attitude towards junk food or healthy eating, which will make a nation-wide tax challenging to implement.
The team examined the present scientific literature to identify which products should be targeted for junk food taxes but also looked elsewhere where similar legislation was passed. There are eight countries in the world who have implemented some kind of food and beverage taxation specifically aimed at curbing obesity.
Kerala, a state on India’s tropical Malabar Coast, imposed a 14.5 percent tax on the consumption of fast food. In 2014, France introduced a tax on sugary drinks that made a noticeable dent in the sales. And in the United States, some municipalities have taken matters into their hands. The city of Berkeley, for instance, introduced a one penny-per-ounce tax on all sugar-sweetened beverages sold in the city. Five months after its implementation, lower-income residents had reduced their consumption of these items by 21 percent compared to pre-tax levels.
Researchers identified four ways of classifying foods:
- by product category (such as soda or candy),
- broad nutrient criteria,
- specific nutrients or calories,
- or a combination.
The most frequently targeted categories were sugar-sweetened beverages, candy, processed meat products, and sweet and salty snacks, and the most frequently targeted foods were sugar, calories, and salt.
Next, the researchers looked at the various federal taxing mechanisms that would be the most administratively feasible. For instance, there are two main types of tax: sales or excise. Excise taxes are charged on the manufacture, distribution, or sale of commodities, and it’s up to the taxed entity to determine the extent to which it will pass on the tax to consumers. Sales taxes are paid directly by consumers and collected by sellers.
Other countries where there’s a junk food tax overwhelmingly use an excise tax mechanism, similar to the kind you see for alcohol and tobacco.
“One advantage of a manufacturer excise tax is that food companies may be incentivized to reformulate their products if nutrition criteria are incorporated into the tax,” Pomeranz said.
Ultimately, from a legal and administrative perspective, the team concluded that a federal junk food tax is feasible. Existing bills and laws support defining junk food through product-specific categories, and add a graduated taxation strategy where the tax increases as the nutritional quality of the food decreases. From an administrative perspective, current taxing mechanisms support the viability of a junk food excise tax paid by manufacturers, the researchers reported in the American Journal of Public Health. So, the ball is now in the court of policymakers who have the, admittedly, challenging and unpopular job of taxing junk food and soda.
Photo Credit: Pixabay
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Hotels Design Functioning Gardens to Cater to New Trends
As guests demand fresher food that has been sourced locally (not to mention organically), hotels across the country are creating gardens and small farms to grow herbs and vegetables, and to even keep bees for honey. Best of all, even urban hotels are putting their rooftops to use and growing some basics for the kitchens below.
Hotels Design Functioning Gardens to Cater to New Trends
by Jena Tesse Fox | Jan 22, 2018
As guests demand fresher food that has been sourced locally (not to mention organically), hotels across the country are creating gardens and small farms to grow herbs and vegetables, and to even keep bees for honey. Best of all, even urban hotels are putting their rooftops to use and growing some basics for the kitchens below.
Creating these gardens and farms and making them—literally—fruitful can be more challenging than simply planting some seeds, as chefs and food-and-beverage teams often learn through experience.
Water, water everywhere...
At the Westin New York Grand Central, chef Brian Wieler created a garden for vegetables and herbs on the high-rise’s rooftop, but didn’t think about irrigating the soil. “The first year, it was me with a garden hose,” he said. “I'd have to spend about an hour-and-a-half up there every day to water the garden.” After that first year, the hotel installed an irrigation system with timers to make sure all of the plants get the right amount of water at the right time of day.
When executive chef Daven Wardynski created a garden with 15 raised beds on the fifth floor sundeck at the Omni Chicago Hotel, he also didn’t have an irrigation system during the project’s first year. “The tomatoes didn't perform very well because of that,” he said. When he transferred to the Omni Amelia Island resort in Florida, he had an opportunity to create a full farm as part of the resort’s Sprouting Project—and remembered to create an irrigation system first. He decided to create two aquaponic lines rather than a hydroponic line because aquaponic systems include live fish that supply natural nutrients to the plants.
At Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., executive chef Bernard Ibarra thought that he would have sufficient irrigation when he started building the resort’s Catalina View Gardens, but didn’t realize how quickly it could get out of control. During the garden’s first season, Ibarra would open the pipeline from a water tank up the hill to irrigate the soil for an hour—but would then get tied up in the kitchen and not be able to close the pipeline for six hours or so. “The place looked like a lake,” he said. “A better irrigation system was put in place and now we still open it manually, but because of the numerous pipes and the hose alongside the the growing rows, it's a lot easier to control.”
Evolving a Garden
When Wieler began planning the rooftop garden at the Westin, he tapped one of the hotel’s in-house carpenters from the engineering department to build the vegetable beds from white cedar wood. “It’s resistant to rot and several species of insects and things that can burrow in the wood and help to destroy them more quickly,” he explained. “I didn't want to put in any pressure-treated wood or the treated wood that people use outside. It's got arsenic and other chemicals and you really don't want to associate it with food. The pressure-treated wood that they sell in the lumberyards, wood that's got some sort of a green hue or tinge to it, that is actually soaked in chemicals to prevent pests and rot and things like that. So it's not something that you really want to utilize for your garden.”
Masons then put the beds up on risers made of paving bricks to help protect the integrity of the roof base, which itself is lined with small rocks (a “rock ballast roof”) to help with drainage and to handle the weight of the vegetable beds.
When Ibarra wanted to create the Catalina View Gardens at Terranea, he consulted owner Jim York to learn about designing an effective space. To prevent gophers from attacking the vegetables, Ibarra and his team installed chicken wire 1 foot under the ground and also as fencing surrounding the gardens. “For the most part, for the past four years, it’s been gopher-free,” he said.
The Omni Amelia Island, meanwhile, had an old greenhouse that Wardynski was able to repurpose for the Sprouting Project. “We had to replace the tarp and lay cement on the inside so it wasn't an earth floor,” he said. “There was not necessarily any engineer that was brought in to design the space; it was me with a post hole digger putting in an enclosure for our chickens or a post that we could level off so we can set beehives off the ground. It's just a continual process of evolving.”
Wardynski—who grew up on a farm in Michigan—also faced challenges in creating his Florida garden. “In Michigan, we grow lettuces in spring and summer,” he said. “When you try to grow lettuces here in the summer, it's an epic fail because it's too hot. Everything wants to go to seed and then die.”
Make a Garden Grow
Much like designing a lobby or restaurant, the hotel teams have been able to see what works and what doesn’t as they develop their gardens and farms, and adjust them as needed. “The sun and the wind have a big say in the way the vegetables grow,” Ibarra said. “It's an ongoing lesson because the weather changes at times and the sun doesn't always shine at the same times.”
Since the rooftop garden opened at the Westin, it has grown from four vegetable beds and four whiskey barrels (for herbs) to 12 beds and nine barrels. And over the years, Wieler learned how to take advantage of the rooftop locations, using shade from the surrounding buildings to protect more sensitive plants (like lettuce) that can be scorched in the summer heat. He also learned what crops are suitable for a rooftop and which are not: While zucchini and squash may be popular in the kitchens, the huge leaves make them impractical for a limited footprint. The Sprouting Project at the Omni Amelia Island also developed an apiary that started with two colonies of bees and eventually grew into 16 colonies, as well as a “barrel room” with 36 20-liter barrels that are filled with everything from cocktails to hot sauces made on-site to vinegar made from leftover wine.
And Wardynski isn’t done designing his farm. “This year, my hope is to move one of the fence rows back and lay in an area that can actually have beans and vine items,” he said, noting that squashes, corn and beans can “flourish” off each other as they grow.
FFAR Awards $2.7 Million to Create Fellowship Program to Foster the Next Generation of Food and Agriculture Scientists
FFAR Awards $2.7 Million to Create Fellowship Program to Foster the Next Generation of Food and Agriculture Scientists
FFAR Will Collaborate With Industry Leaders and Universities to Provide Interdisciplinary Training for Graduate Students
WASHINGTON, January 17, 2017- The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR), a nonprofit established through bipartisan congressional support in the 2014 Farm Bill, today announced a $2.7 million grant to launch the FFAR Fellowship Program. A team at North Carolina State University led by John Dole, Ph.D., will manage the program. The grant will be matched by a consortium of industry leaders dedicated to preparing the agricultural workforce to optimize impact on the future of the industry.
The goal of the program is to combine cutting-edge food and agriculture science research with professional development training to better prepare graduate students for the workforce. The program will address the "STEM Paradox," or the observation that science, technology, engineering, and math students have strong scientific skills but sometimes lack other professional skills that make them successful in the workplace. Unlike other programs, the FFAR Fellowship focuses exclusively on food and agriculture sciences.
"At the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, we understand that the future of agriculture lies in training the next generation of scientists," said FFAR Executive Director Sally Rockey, Ph.D. "Students must be prepared to not only make the scientific breakthroughs that will sustain us but also have the professional skills to succeed in their careers across the agricultural sector."
The FFAR Fellowship Program will fund 48 graduate students over three years using an interdisciplinary approach to career readiness. Students will pursue research projects in an area of food or agriculture research related to FFAR's Challenge Areas and strategic initiatives, such as soil health, plant phenomics, precision agriculture, breeding technology, digital agriculture, and sustainable livestock production. In addition to academic advisors, students will be matched with industry mentors who will provide additional career guidance.
The flagship component of the FFAR Fellowship Program is the annual professional development workshop. Fellows will convene with industry peers to participate in training for professional and interpersonal skills, such as team building, project and time management, and science communication. These trainings will be complemented by a personalized development plan to help students obtain the professional skills they need to excel in the workforce.
"Industry and academia will be working together in this program to provide an unparalleled educational opportunity for graduate students studying in food and agriculture," said John Dole, Ph.D., North Carolina State University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences associate dean and director of academic programs. "The FFAR Fellows will be conducting innovative research, while learning what it takes to succeed from leading industry scientists."
Interested students should visit www.ffarfellows.org for details on eligibility, application requirements, and fellowship expectations.
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About the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research
The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization, builds unique partnerships to support innovative and actionable science addressing today's food and agriculture challenges. Leveraging public and private resources, FFAR will increase the scientific and technological research, innovation, and partnerships critical to enhancing sustainable production of nutritious food for a growing global population. Established by the 2014 Farm Bill, FFAR is governed by a Board of Directors with ex officio representation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and National Science Foundation.
Learn more: www.foundationfar.org | Newsletter Sign-Up
Connect: @FoundationFAR | @RockTalking
Lettuce, Hydroponics, and E. Coli, Oh my!
Lettuce, Hydroponics, and E. Coli, Oh my!
January 21, 2018
By: Heaven Bassett
For those worried about their salads during the current nationwide (and international) outbreak ofE. coli O157 linked to romaine lettuce and “leafy greens,” there may be a future hope for your worries. As the CDC and FDA continue their traceback investigations, many have been left wondering what could have been done to prevent this outbreak.
Have you ever wondered if there was a way that we could reduce the risk of bacteria contaminating our greens? Wouldn’t it be nice to know that the risks for E. coli, Listeria, Salmonella, and maybe even parasites were a rare concern? Maybe, just maybe, could there be a better way for us to grow our leafy greens so that they become even healthier for us than they already are? Guess what! The technology (or rather growing practice) exists. It is called hydroponics.
Huh? Hydro-what?
Hydroponics. Let’s take a trip down the yellow brick road and take a closer look at the wonderful world of hydroponics.
Don’t let the name intimidate you. Hydroponics simply translates to “water-working.” To grow those uber-healthy greens for your organic loving lifestyle, water-working is the clever wizard behind the curtain. With E. coli outbreaks at play, contaminated water sources are on the mind. Though E. coliis regularly attributed to meats, a major contender to pathogen problems are soil and water.
This is where hydroponics may be of service. The dirt-free process of gardening can range from simple to elaborate, pending the experience and motivation of the cultivator. While some of us have used the technique with a few seedlings and a glass bowl of water as a lesson on biology, others have taken the process to intricate heights. Hydroponics is a fast-growing, safe-strategy, that offers more control than soil-based agriculture. As an eco-friendly and pathogen preventive measure, hydroponics presents the possibility of clean plant growth and year-round production.
Without hydroponics, natural and man-made variables are at play. Soil can be contaminated by a multitude of exposures. Think animal feces blended with water irrigation, coupled with aggressive pesticides, and you may just end up with an unhealthy stock of produce. That’s right, the recent E. coli outbreak has us waving a sad goodbye to that gorgeous flourish of leafy greens we just picked up from the supermarket; though, according to a recent NBC report, the exact source may not be our beloved romaine lettuce. Yet, we know the drill: When in doubt, throw it out.
Hydroponics could very well be the save all to a host of pathogen-problems. Soil is not the criminal; however, it houses the offending micro-organisms, and provides a perfect shelter for bacterium growth. Removing soil from the equation and carefully monitoring what produce roots are exposed to could diminish food-borne illnesses on a massive scale. Goodbye contaminated soil, hello nutrient rich organic grub.
Think of it this way, by focusing our attentions on the roots of the plant rather than the variable dirt conditions, we can give the produce what it needs to thrive, while protecting it from dangerous contaminants. For those who are eco-friendly, hydroponics provides more than one green benefit. Hydroponic systems use 20% less water than standard soil gardening due to targeted water use and cycling. Along with that positive, the sterile environment of hydroponics systems means pesticides are unneeded.
Drawbacks?
So, what’s the problem with hydroponics? Just as with all things, the answer takes a familiar shape:potential for human error.
It takes constant management and technical experience to efficiently manage hydroponics. Without the nutrients soil provides, produce can grow with a severe deficit. This can not only create subpar taste, but also culminate foods that are unhealthy, or dangerous, for consumption. The careful monitoring of nutrient distribution is vital in hydroponic practice.
A few things to chew on (food pun intended), is that in many circumstances soil acts as a safeguard. Hydroponic systems are not without their own disease drawbacks. Without soil, if water-based micro-organisms find their way into the stock, the entire crop is contaminated, rather than a portion of the harvest. This means regular testing is required, thus adding to the already high cost of these systems.
Speaking of pricing ventures, hydroponics are at the mercy of the power source. If a hydroponics system fails, the plants will die at a rapid pace. Hydroponic systems require more than one power fail-safe, causing the price tag to jump away from the average household.
So, is it worth it? Absolutely. According to the CDC, 265,000 STEC infections occur yearly in the good old U.S.A, 36% percent of these are from E. coli O157:H7. The full use of hydroponics could prevent those infections that have been spawned so frequently from sprouts, spinach, and other leafy vegetables. Also, with dedication, education, and thorough instruction, seasonal produce can be a thing of the past.
Garlic roasted Brussel sprouts hydroponically grown any time of the year? Don’t mind if I do.
References:
https://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/agriculture/soils/improvement/plant-nutrients
What The Future Of Food Means To Dan Barber And Kimbal Musk
Dan Barber, left, and Kimbal Musk are both developing earth-friendly ways to reinvent agriculture. [Photos:Jessie English; Set Designer: Wunderkind; Grooming: Kay Louro]
What The Future Of Food Means To Dan Barber And Kimbal Musk
Two culinary-world luminaries—Blue Hill chef Dan Barber and Kitchen Community cofounder Kimbal Musk—debate the best way to approach sustainable eating.
January 11, 2018
BY DANA COWIN
Chef Dan Barber, co-owner of the Michelin-starred restaurants Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, helped pioneer the farm-to-table movement and continues to advocate for sustainable food and agricultural policies. Tech veteran Kimbal Musk runs the Kitchen, a restaurant group, venture fund, and philanthropic organization that develops teaching gardens within municipal school systems. They talk to food editor and entrepreneur Dana Cowin about their differing views for improving agriculture—and our health.
Fast Company: Let’s start by discussing the problem of industrial food. What are the challenges, and what do you think are the solutions?
Kimbal Musk: More than 50 years ago, we created this marketing term: “We have to feed the world.” We ended up taking our farmland and using it for high-calorie, low-nutrition food. We had a massive oversupply. It fed high-calorie food especially into our poor. And so we have rampant obesity and diabetes across this country. Twenty-five million acres of land today is used to grow corn ethanol, twice the size of the Central Valley in California. It takes 1 gallon of oil to make 1 gallon of corn ethanol. So it’s neutral at best for the environment, but a total waste of land if you want real food to be grown.
Dan Barber: Have you ever tried corn ethanol? It doesn’t taste very good. My problem, though, is less with the agribusiness conglomerates that run the show Kimbal just described. It’s the culture that feeds into that. It’s easy to blame the corporate entity, the Wizard of Oz controlling everything. Seven weeks ago, I was in Fargo, North Dakota, with a farmer who grows rotations of corn and soy, with some wheat, on 24,000 acres. He said to me, “If you want me to grow a diversity of crops, then tell me who’s going to pick it up from my farm. Which storage facility within 3,000 miles will take buckwheat, rye, or barley—all these crops that we talk about? Which distributors will take it from there? Which marketplace can buy it? Give me an answer to those questions, and I’ll plant whatever you want.” It was quite simple for me: Changing the culture [will require] a new paradigm for agriculture.
FC: What does that new paradigm look like?
KM: I’m a big believer in the young farmer—both soil-based and indoor—but where I’ve seen most growth is in indoor. We came across technology where we can take a [shipping] container and turn it into an indoor farm. It’s the equivalent of about 2 acres [of farmland], but you can locate it in Downtown Brooklyn. We received 1,100 applications to run these farms. We’ve seen a lot of extraordinary enthusiasm if you can bring the farm to the farmer.
DB: The future of produce from a container doesn’t make me hungry. I see benefits [in] recapitalizing our geographic and environmental strength.
KM: The technology for indoor farming is changing so fast. It’s all based on lighting and ergonomics. A year ago, we started working with [urban farming incubator] Square Roots to do about 50 pounds of baby kale in a container a week. Today, if we upgrade to new technology, we can do 300 pounds of kale in the same space.
Using light recipes—one of our farmers re-created the summer of Italy in 2009, which was a famous season for basil. When did it rain? What’s the humidity? He’s been successful in creating a delicious basil that has sold well in New York City. I personally still prefer [basil grown in] soil in a perfect season, but indoors, you can create the perfect season even on a [rainy] day like today.
DB: But I don’t want to create the perfect season. What’s a perfect season? An imperfect season for a tomato is the perfect season for kale. That’s the beauty of an ecological system. You’re growing kale in a half-acre container. We can do the same thing, but we could also grow a cover crop, and we can grow those tomatoes. We could grow a series of grains to make bread and porridge and probably run some cattle over to graze, and have a whole cuisine on that half acre, versus just producing the kale.
KM: You’re preaching to the choir.
DB: You just don’t want to invest in it.
KM: No, it’s not that. I’m leasing 208 acres in downtown Memphis that used to be a chemical cotton farm tended by prisoners. I’m converting it into an organic, soil-based demonstration farm. That community really needs it. There’s tons of farmland around Memphis: 200,000 acres are available if the market is there. But you have to create the market, and we’re trying to do both. In New York City, you’ve got plenty of markets, but the land around it is too expensive.
DB: The problem I have is that [indoor farming] ends up diffusing resources. The origin of organic is “organism,” the whole gestalt. It’s not taking the kale and putting it in a silo in a container: That’s the opposite of organic in the truest sense of why it was developed. What scares me is that you’re so good at explaining what you do, those precious resources flow to you. There is plenty of good soil out there. We just need to direct our attention to reinvigorating that culture of agriculture, which is so important for the future of good food.
Musk, left, sees potential in indoor farming. Barber advocates for “recapitalizing our geographic and environmental strength.” [Photo: Melissa Golden]
FC: What do you think about the cuisine that’s being developed from this kind of technology and control?
DB: It’s not just cuisine but culture. The bumper crop that you get from a good year and the mediocre crop that you get from bad weather is where you get cuisine. Beer was created out of barley that was not good enough to make porridge or bread. You see examples of that through every culture, every cuisine. In your scenario, those imperfections don’t arise.
KM: They do in our restaurants, but what we have learned is that people still want a salad in January. We get [greens] shipped in from California or even Australia, which is so crazy. If an indoor farmer can grow arugula in January, we would rather support this person than bring it in from a few thousand miles away.
DB: But wouldn’t you rather convince people not to eat salad in January? I mean that seriously. The culture has shifted. A preponderance of people do not want the tomato or raspberry you can get in January. Wouldn’t you like to help make that happen with salad greens?
KM: At our more upscale restaurant, the Kitchen, we hope to hold a candle to Blue Hill [in seasonality]. At our Next Door restaurants, which are designed to be more affordable, you have to baby-step [those customers] into real food. They’re used to eating cheeseburgers all the time, and we want people to eat more healthily and more sustainably. That does mean a salad in January. I would love to pretend that isn’t the case, but it is.
DB: If I’m an investor, I hear what you’re saying. The idea of growing all of our salad needs across the street in a tower is intoxicating. But if I project forward a decade, I’d rather change that culture. The food culture in America is quite pliable. You wouldn’t be bringing up kale five years ago. Greek yogurt. Sushi. We take on new stuff with dizzying speed.
KM: The money is going to indoor because, from an investor’s perspective, someone who wants to live on a 20-acre farm can make a nice life, but there’s no business there.
FC: Kimbal, you’re an amazing fundraiser. How would you solve Dan’s problem?
KM: I go to the Iowa farm conference every year to meet with these farmers, and 56% of land there is owned by people 65 years or older. When these lovely folks pass on, someone’s going to buy their land. This is trillions of dollars worth of land being used for corn ethanol, a terrible unprofitable use. Their kids don’t want it. Their grandkids don’t even want it; [they’re] in their forties. You’re talking about the great-grandkids who might take it over. It’ll be the most extraordinary transfer of land to the youngest generation. I go there every year and spend two days listening to them complain. If you’re 25 years old and you get 100 acres of land in Iowa, you’ll make $21,000 a year if you are lucky. You should come with me to the conferences, because when the right time comes, we’re going to find out what to do with this land. And you’re talking about millions of acres.
DB: But we already know what the right thing to do is. “Give us the market and we’ll grow whatever you want.” I have heard that from the most conservative old [farmers] and the young folks. It rests on our shoulders to create that change.
This story was adapted from the Fast Company Innovation Festival.
A version of this article appeared in the February 2018 issue of Fast Company magazine.
WISErg Brings Funding Total to $57m for Food Waste Tech with Series C
WISErg Brings Funding Total to $57m for Food Waste Tech with Series C
JANUARY 18, 2018 EMMA COSGROVE
Food waste-to-fertilizer technology startup WISErg has raised a $19.2 million Series C round, bringing the company’s total fundraising to $56.6 million.
The round was led by family office Laird Norton Company, with Seattle-based Second Avenue Partners and other existing investors also participating.
Founded in 2009 by ex-Microsoft employees Larry LeSueur and Jose Lugo (LaSueur has since left the company), WISErg provides grocery stores with a way to recycle expired produce and leftover prepared foods with their self-contained digester, the Harvester.
Almost any food is fair game for the Harvester, including meat, fish, and produce. The machine extracts any nutrients remaining in the food and stabilizes the solution so that it can be transferred to a WISErg location in the region. Essentially, the machine prevents the food from putrefying and reduces odors, pests, and greenhouse gas emission that commonly result from the decomposition process.
At the Washington facility, the waste material is transformed into liquid fertilizer that is 100% water soluble and approved for use in organic crop production. According to WISErg, its patented technology generates nitrogen that is more readily available compared to other organic fertilizers. There are no application restrictions and the liquid can be applied using a wide variety of fertilizer equipment including drip tape, sprayers, and overhead irrigation.
The potency of WISErg’s product are due in part to the cold process used to create the fertlizer that still removes all pathogens from the waste.
“There are various hurdles in our process that the pathogens can’t jump over,” explained CEO Brian Valentine.
WISErg will use the new funds to build a second facility in California in order to serve growers in California, Arizona, and Mexico with an eye on Central and South Americas. According to Valentine, the company sold 1.5 million gallons of fertilizer marking a 300% increase on 2016, which he expects to continue.
In California, the company will try a new model where food waste is hauled from grocery stores to a central facility. About half of the new funds will go toward building and staffing up the new facility, while the other half will be put to use developing new fertilizer products. A facility producing four to nine million gallons of fertilizer annually costs under $6 million to build.
WISErg’s Seattle operation includes 14 harvesters onsite at grocery stores, which produces four million gallons of fertilizer per year. The California facility once completed will produce nine million gallons per year says Valentine.
Valentine told AgFunderNews that though food waste rescue and digestion startups are becoming slightly more common, withKDC Ag and Industrial/Organic getting going on the east coast and California Safe Soil also in California, he doesn’t see other food waste rescue businesses as competitors. “There is so much food waste that is an untapped resource at this time. The more people that can figure out how to process it and utilize it instead of dumping it or burning it, the better.”
Valentine says his real competition is with other fertilizers. WISErg’s product offering to date has been certified organic nitrogen fertilizers for fruit and vegetable farms, but the company is developing conventional products as well as fertilizers aimed at row crops like soybeans for launch in 2018.
Though WISErg’s fertilizer has a two-year shelf life and travels well, the company’s largest operating cost is shipping, hence the move closer to California’s vegetable growers. Locating near growers and timing production with the growing season means that WISErg can minimize both storage and shipping costs. And Valentine plans to follow the growers.
Why I Want to Bring #RealFood to 100,000 Schools Across America
American children are being fed processed, nutrient-poor food that leaves them starving and obese at the same time. Our food system is destroying their growing bodies and minds.
My mission is real food for everyone. Co-founder of The Kitchen #realfood restaurants, Big Green teaching kids about food & Square Roots mentoring young farmers
Jan 17, 2018
Why I Want to Bring #RealFood to 100,000 Schools Across America
Announcing Big Green, Learning Gardens in 100 Detroit schools; Eyeing four more American cities.
Big Green :: Real Food Grows Here
American children are being fed processed, nutrient-poor food that leaves them starving and obese at the same time. Our food system is destroying their growing bodies and minds. With an estimated $63.5 trillion in total private wealth, America is more wealthy than any other country in the world. Yet our children are bearing the burden of a broken, even lethal food system.
Today, diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States and costs the country around $245 billion in medical expenses and lost productivity each year. We are not setting our kids up for a healthy future when we fail to teach them how to nourish their bodies and their minds. Inadequate access to healthy foods, in particular veggies and fruits, can lead to preventable chronic diseases that affect children into adolescence and beyond. I am talking about kids feeling healthy and going to school, graduating from school, getting a job and starting a family. Habits form early and so should a good diet. It all starts with real food.
One of our first — and most beautiful! — Learning Garden classrooms in Los Angeles.
About seven years ago, Hugo Matheson — my co-founder at The Kitchen — and I became involved with a few school garden initiatives in our own community in Boulder, Colo. I was astonished to see how excited the kids were to plant, harvest, and EAT vegetables that they had grown. I learned first-hand that school gardens are associated with the most positive changes in students’ fruit and vegetable intake. I couldn’t just stand by as obesity ravished our nation. I wanted to see the same enthusiasm that the kids in my community had for real food, in hundreds of other communities across our great nation. For context, up until this point, building two school gardens per year was considered a strong achievement. What if there were beautiful Learning Gardens in every school in America that would show our kids the path to a thriving future filled with real food?
In 2011, I wanted answers. So Hugo and I co-founded non-profit organization to join the movement to help get kids excited about real food. Supported by my community restaurant, The Kitchen, we started building Learning Gardens in schools around our community and surrounding cities. We were a small but fierce team and called ourselves The Kitchen Community (TKC). We had success in Denver with the support of Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. We went to California to build gardens in LAUSD, Compton, and Hawthorne School Districts. We went to Chicago with the incredible support from the City of Chicago and Mayor Rahm Emanuel and built 100 Learning Gardens in one calendar year! Next up was Memphis with 100 Learning Gardens and Pittsburgh with 50 Learning Gardens in only two years. In 2016 we went to Indianapolis where we now have 30 Learning Gardens and are on our way to 100. 👊 It’s been a whirlwind of excitement around real food and yes, my questions were answered. Real food education makes a powerful difference.
Peas in a purple pod grown in a Learning Garden in Denver, Colo.
I am even more convinced of the difference after seeing and hearing all of the inspiring stories from the communities we have joined. One of my favorite stories is of a high school senior who became involved in the Learning Garden we built at her high school on the south side of Chicago. In January of 2017, her doctor diagnosed her as a pre-diabetic. A chilling and scary diagnosis for such a young girl. In just six months after getting her hands dirty planting real food in her school’s Learning Garden and going through our food literacy program, she started eating healthy; and in November last year, she reversed the course of a life-threatening illness. With the help of a Learning Garden, she is no longer pre-diabetic.
Our success in six American cities is why today, I’m incredibly humbled to announce that my organization is stepping out as a national nonprofit called Big Green. I’m joined by some of the most incredible entrepreneurs in the nation. Our national board members Antonio Gracias, Barry Didato, Don Degnan, Cindy Mercer, RJ Melman, and Michael Tang bring deep entrepreneurial and business expertise. We’ve also been working with the nation’s top educators, like Big Green board member and Memphis Superintendent Dorsey Hopson, to craft programming and curriculum that equitably and effectively teaches kids about food, entrepreneurship, and science through hands-on and project-based learning.
Our BIG vision to change food in America to impact ALL kids, and particularly the most underserved with healthy, vibrant futures, is becoming a reality. In addition to announcing our national non-profit Big Green, I’m also eager to announce that we will join the Detroit community — our seventh city — to build Learning Gardens in 100 schools across the Motor City. 7 cities means 700 Learning Gardens.
Over the past year, we have explored Detroit and learned how resilient the city is — filled with passionate and dedicated people who care about the future of their kids and schools. Our expansion to Detroit is only possible because of the generous corporate, foundation, and individual donors who collectively gave $2 million at the start of this New Year. It’s nearly half of the $5 million capital campaign necessary to build beautiful, outdoor Learning Garden classrooms in 100 schools in Detroit. Our local partners helping make this dream possible include: Gordon Food Service, Pathways Foundation, philanthropist Carole Ilitch, and others. Teachers and principals across Detroit can start applying now for a Learning Garden at their school. Shovels hit Detroit soil in April to build our first Learning Gardens.
With every new city, we join means new jobs locally. In Detroit, we’ve hired Ken Elkins, a Michigan native, and long-time metro Detroit resident, as our Detroit Regional Director. He is now hiring a local team of Garden Educators, Project Managers, and other positions.
We are also eyeing Colorado Springs, Colo., Louisville, Ky., Long Beach, Calif., and San Antonio, Texas, for expansion to build 100 Learning Gardens in each of those cities.
There are 100,000 schools across America. I am focusing first on impacting high-need and underserved students — because sadly, these communities bear the brunt of obesity-related diseases. Eventually, we will reach every kid in all 100,000 schools in America because every child deserves to thrive in healthy environments that connect them to real food.
This ambitious goal will require a significant investment of resources, funding, and human capital. We must scale in order to fundamentally and radically alter the school food environment and ensure that all kids nationwide enjoy healthier futures through real food. While we’ve engaged some of the top US companies like Wells Fargo, Gordon Food Service, Chipotle, The Kitchen, Walmart, we need more American companies to join our efforts.
Reaching 100,000 schools in our lifetime is not something I can do by myself. This is a BIG effort for everyone in America. We must all try to make a Big Green effort to be part of the real food solution. I’m now asking you — CEOs, Governors, Superintendents, partners, parents, and teachers — to support real food education. It’s time to step-up to make #realfood in America a possibility before industrial food takes another child’s life.
Every student in all 100,000 schools in America deserves the opportunity to play, learn, and grow in a healthy community. Go to biggreen.org/hello and sign our pledge to get real about real food. This will also ensure you are up to date on our latest news at Big Green because I promise … BIG things are coming.
Saudi Arabia’s Neom Will Become The World’s First Truly Smart City
Saudi Arabia’s Neom Will Become The World’s First Truly Smart City
JANUARY 17, 2018 BY MIKE WHEATLEY
Saudi Arabia is proposing to build what it claims will be the world’s first truly “smart city”. Called Neom, the developers envisage a 10,230 square mile city and economic zone located in Saudi Arabia’s Tabuk region, which is located along the north-west coast of the country, facing Egypt across the Red Sea.
The description of Neom is a Utopian one, with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman saying at the Future Investment Initiative Conference in Riyadh last October that the city will “function independently from existing government framework” with its own taxes, a judicial system, and labor laws.
Development of the city will be led by former Alcoa chairman and CEO and Siemens AG former president and CEO Klaus Kleinfeld. The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia and international investors are committing a staggering $500 billion to fund its development, with a projected completion date of 2025.
The city will follow an earth-friendly, post-oil atmosphere, with robots performing functions such as security, logistics, home delivery, and caregiving; Neom will be generated solely by wind and solar power.
The name Neom comes from the first three letters from the Greek prefix “neo,” meaning “new.” The fourth letter is from the abbreviation of “Mostaqbal,” an Arabic word meaning “future.” The city will be located in the northwest corner of the Kingdom, and includes land within the Egyptian and Jordanian borders.
Its website proclaims it to be the “world’s most ambitious project.”
Here’s a deeper dive into what to expect:
- Energy and Water. Vast fields of solar panels partnered with wind turbines, which will light up large stretches of energy grids, storing power for this and future generations. Buildings will remain clean and the air will remain fresh and clear.
- Mobility. All-green transport systems, including a bridge that will link Asia with Africa. This will help Neom become known as a global hub of connectivity.
- Biotech. Neom is destined to become a nexus for healthcare research and innovation, including next-gen gene therapy, genomics, stem cell research, nanobiology, and bioengineering.
- Food. Neom will lead the way with arid and seawater farming, and solar-powered greenhouses. Also planned are vertical urban farms and locally grown produce.
- Advanced manufacturing. The systems making Neom move will include personalized, fully automated point-to-point transfers, passenger drones, self-learning traffic systems, and other innovations in research and development, supply, transport and infrastructure.
Mike Wheatley is the senior editor at Realty Biz News. Got a real estate related news article you wish to share, contact Mike at mike@realtybiznews.com.