Maria Rodale

“If you do just one thing–make one conscious choice–that can change the world, go organic….No other single choice you can make to improve the health of your family and the planet will have greater positive repercussions for our future.”

That’s a bold statement. Is eating organic more important than avoiding meat, stopping coal plants, biking instead of driving or donating to worthy causes?

Yes, declares Maria Rodale, the CEO of the Rodale Inc. publishing empire (Mens Health, Prevention, Runners World) and author of the aptly-named Organic Manifesto: How Organic Food Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World and Keep Us Safe (Rodale Books), from which the quote is drawn.

“There’s so many benefits that come from that one choice,” Maria explains. “You’ve removed a bejillion pounds of dangerous, synthetic, disease-causing environment-destroying chemicals from the soil, the water our bodies. We would all immediately be healthier. Our children would be healthier.”

Farmers and their families and farm workers would be better off, too, she goes on: “And our kids would be smarter. There are actually studies that show that a lot of these chemicals do reduce intelligence.”

I arranged a phone interview with Maria after meeting her last spring during Cooking for Solutions, a great conference and food fest on sustainable agriculture and fishing organized by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’d read her book and wanted to delve deeper into the issues surrounding organics. Tomorrow, I’ll offer a dissenting view from Steve Savage, an agricultural consultant who is dubious about many of Maria’s claims.

Maria, who is 49, is the scion of America’s first family of organics. Her grandfather, J.I. Rodale, started Organic Farming and Gardening magazine, which is now known as Organic Gardening, in 1942. He put his ideas into practice on a 60-acre farm near Emmaus, Pa. She was raised nearby. “I grew, I weeded, I picked, I cooked,” she said. “I was very aware that we were a little different from everyone else, at least once I started going to school.” The family farm became a tourist destination. “For many people, it was like a pilgrimage,” she remembers. Those were the days when organic food could be purchased only in health or natural food stores.

Today, while the acreage farmed organically remains small–less than 1% of U.S. farmland–organics are a big business. U.S. sales of organic food and beverages have grown from $1 billion in 1990 to $26.7 billion in 2010, according to the Organic Trade Association. Organic fruits and vegetables represent more than 10% of all sales of fruits and vegetable, the group says.

Conventional foods are worse for us than we realize, Maria argues. The government responds to problems after the fact and is overly influenced by big agricultural firms, which also shape university research. In her book, she writes:

There is enough evidence to know now that synthetic chemicals are destroying our health and our ability to reproduce and, thus, our ability to survive as a species. Agricultural chemicals have statistically and significantly been implicated in causing all sorts of cancers, behaviorial problems, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism, Parkinson’s disease, reduced intelligence, infertility, miscarriage, diabetes, infant deformities and low birth weight.

No specific studies are cited in the book, so I asked Maria for a couple of references. She sent me a link to Beyond Pesticides,  website, where a blog with headlines like Low Doses of Pesticides Put Honey Bees at Risk. Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York provides a fact-sheet about pesticides here which says, among other things, that

Pesticides have been shown to cause a wide range of adverse effects on human health including acute and chronic injury to the nervous system, lung damage, injury to the reproductive organs, dysfunction of the immune and endocrine systems, birth defects, and cancer; these effects can manifest as acutely toxic effects, delayed effects, or chronic effects.

For its part, the agricultural industry says pesticide residues on food are harmless and regulated by the government.

The picture is darker when it comes to farm workers. A long-term government study of more than 80,000 farmers and their wives from Iowa and North Carolina, called the Agricultural Health Study, offers some warnings. While the farmers studied are generally healthier than the general population, pesticide exposure has been  linked to Parkinson’s disease, prostate cancer, lung disease and some brain disorders. (Details here.) One study found that farmers who “used pesticides longer and more often said they had more neurological symptoms than those who had not used pesticides or had used them less frequently and for fewer years.”

What’s more, anecdotal evidence on the impact of synthetical chemicals on birth defects is downright scary, as Barry Estabrook reported in Tomatoland. [See my July blogpost, Rotten tomatoes.] Tom Philpott of Mother Jones recently reported on methyl iodide, which is sprayed on strawberry fields and has been called “reliably carcinogenic” by the Pesticide Action Network.

That’s probably reason enough, for many of us, to choose organic. But what about the costs? Maria makes a couple of good points in that regard. First, she says: “If you can, grow a garden, which is fun and good. It’s great exercise, and kids love it.” If not, shop carefully and cook more: “Eat less processed food. Do more cooking. Every step of processing food add more cost.” In Maria’s Farm Country Kitchen, she offers gardening tips, recipes and political commentary:

Stop wasting American tax dollars supporting, subsidizing, and encouraging the toxic chemical and GMO farming that are promoted by unethical companies who spread lies and poison around the world in order to line their own pockets. We’ve been ripped off and contaminated long enough.

I asked Maria about evidence that organic growers are less productive that conventional farmers. That’s not so, she says, noting that most big farms in the U.S. produce corn and soy for non-food use.

“Most people don’t eat that corn and soy,” she says. “It’s made into high fructose corn syrup. It’s made into feed for factory grown animals. It’s made into biofuels that do not feed people.” She’s right about that–more than a third of the US corn crop goes into the making of ethanol. Something’s wrong, she says, when “a farmer who is growing chemical corn is getting subsidized and a farmer who switches to growing food that people need to eat gets no help whatsoever.”

What do you think? Should we be subsidizing organic farmers? Or not?

Come back tomorrow to learn why Steve Savage believes that organic food, whatever its virtues, can’t meet the world’s growing demand for food.

It would be easy to dismiss Ted Turner as a billionaire with a big mouth, a blowhard or even a buffoon.

Wrong, wrong and wrong.

Ted was on display in all his Ted-ness the other day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Cooking for Solutions conference on food and sustainability. He ranted, he raved, he clowned, he ignored questions from interviewer, Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post. Moderating Ted is about as easy as domesticating a bison. (His herd numbers 50,000.)

But what Turner said made a lot of sense, even as his answers wandered, ADD-like, all over the map.

I’ve covered Ted, on and off, since the late 1980s,when I was a media writer.  He’s always been underestimated. Conventional wisdom in the broadcast industry was that CNN, his pioneering 24-hour news channel, would never work. Much later, after he merged his Turner Broadcasting  Co. with Time Warner (my employer at the time), he was one of the few top execs who opposed the disastrous merger from the start. He has always lived his values, using the platforms he created to support causes dear to him–the environment, nuclear disarmament, the end of the Cold War. Remember the Goodwill Games?

His bombastic demeanor  may be a reason why he hasn’t gotten the credit deserves for his philanthropy. Turner, who is 72, has given away more than $1.3 billion to the Turner Foundation, the United Nations Foundation, the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the Captain Planet Foundation, and the Turner Endangered Species Fund. He also took the Giving Pledge put forward by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

As if that weren’t enough, Turner owns about 2.1 million acres of land in the U.S., making him the nation’s 2nd biggest landowner (behind his fellow cable mogul John Malone). Most of his land is protected from development.

So what’s on his mind these days? Lots. Some highlights:

Food, population and women: “What really concerns me is if we go to 8 or 9 billion. The natural world is collapsing all around us. There are two things we can do that won’t cost a lot of money… Millions of women don’t have access to family planning. If you provide people with  family planning, they won’t have unwanted pregnancies and they won’t have to  have abortions. The second thing we could do and we should have done it a long time ago is half the women in the world don’t have equal rights with men. In the Arab world, people are treated like dogs. They can’t vote in Saudia Arabia. They can’t drive a car. They don’t get an education. Women need to have equal rights with men, and equal education and equal rights to a job, and when women have that, they will choose to have smaller families.”

War: He’s against it. “If we re not bombing someone, we’re not happy. But if people come bomb us, we get mad as hell. Look what happened when they bombed the World Trade Center. We were mad, mad, mad.”

Energy conservation: He’s for it. “I sit in my office in the dark. I only turn my light on when I really need it.”

Energy poverty: Rich countries should get together to help the two billion people in the world who don’t have access to electricity. “Why not give everyone in the world who doesn’t have electricity a solar panel and a light bulb so their kids can do their homework?”

The defeat of climate bill: “It’s going to go down in history as one of the great tragedies that we’ve ever had.”

Politics: “This polarization that’s going on in Congress is not good for this country, and we should demand that it be stopped.”

His bison herd: It started as a hobby, like getting a dog. “We came very close to losing the bison completely and that just broke my heart as a little boy.”

His Ted’s Montana Grill restaurants: There are now 46 of them, and he urged the crowd to give one a try.  “Bison is much better for you. It has half the cholesterol and fat than beef. And it tastes better.”

He who profits most who serves the best: That’s the Rotary Club message that Turner says has guided him. “I am absolutely sure because I’ve tested it myself that you’re far better off living a well rounded life where you make a contribution to society that just being hoggy and greedy and piling it up like Scrooge McDuck. Remember he had that big pile of money and he went for a swam in it? It’s much better swimming in water than swimming in money. And right now we’re swimming in debt.”

Can we shop our way to sustainability in the supermarket aisle?

Eco labels are cluttered, confusing and unreliable.

Organic food gets a tiny slice of the market.

Most shoppers don’t pay much attention to environmental factors. Perhaps understandably so. They’re busy, or  ignorant. Or they don’t care.

Which makes me believe that we can’t count on consumers to bring about a sustainable food system.

So, like it or not, that it’s going to be up to business to fix the food system.

That’s my takeaway from today’s discussions at the Sustainable Food Institute, part of Cooking for Solutions, a great event on food/ag/sustainability organized by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m here for a couple of days of good talk, good food, good wine, shared by reporters, chefs, people in the food business, scientists, activists and a farmer or two.

In several panel discussions–one on eco-labels, another about the popular but nevertheless limited Seafood Watch program run by the aquarium, and also during my own interview with Louise Nicholls, a sustainability executive from the British food and department store Marks & Spencer–it became clear to me that the dizzying complexity of food and agriculture systems, including as they do health, environmental and economic concerns, will make it very difficult to communicate simply to shoppers what’s “good” and what is not, even assuming scientists can reach consensus on that.

Persuading shoppers to then change their habits is even tougher.

Consider Seafood Watch, known best for the wallet-sized pocket guides that rank popular seafood choices as green (recommended), yellow (good alternatives) and red (avoid). By most measures, Seafood Watch, whose recommendations are science-based and peer reviewed, has been a big hit. The aquarium has given away nearly 40 million guides, and millions more have been accessed on smartphones and the web.

Here’s the thing, though: Only about 500,000 consumers regularly use the guide, the aquarium’s market research has found. What’s more, the guide is limited in its scope–it focuses on healthy oceans, but doesn’t take into account social issues, workers rights or carbon emissions. A fresh Alaskan salmon that travels by air to a New York City restaurant can get the green light.

The good news? Chefs and retailers are paying more attention to Seafood Watch. “We didn’t have the ear of business ten years ago,” said Sheila Bowman, senior outreach manager at Seafood Watch. “Things have changed.” What’s more, they are getting recommendations on 2,000 kinds of fish, not just the 70 in the pocket guide.

Similarly, the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC), which has a consumer-facing label, has been gaining ground with big companies. Just last week, the MSC said, Kroger, Costco, Supervalu and Walmart announced new seafood commitments around MSC standards. Kroger, for example, which has about 2,500 stores in 31 states, has set a 2015 goal of sourcing 100% of its top 20 wild-caught species from “sources that are certified by MSC, in full assessment, or involved in a Fishery Improvement Project with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).” Big retailers, in other words, are increasingly making sustainable choices on behalf of consumers.

Other ecolabels almost inevitably capture only one or two attributes of a food product. This poses dilemmas for even the most conscientious consumers.

Are organic grapes from Chile better than conventional local grapes? Should you favor Fair Trade or Rainforest Alliance-certified coffee? Industry-backed labels like the food industry’s Smart Choice initiative are not just confusing but misleading, as we learned a couple of years ago when Froot Loops and Cocoa Krispies were deemed Smart Choices.

Jon Johnson of the University of Arkansas and The Sustainability Consortium made a great point–that no label can be universal (applicable to many product categories), accurate and simple. You can have two of those three, but not all three–and in particular there are tensions between accurate and simple. For its part, the Sustainability Consortium is engaging, with numerous partners, in science-based life cycle analyses that will be hard to translate into a simple, consumer-facing label.

Again, the good news is that while the Sustainability Consortium was started by Walmart, its partners now include Best Buy, Kroger, Safeway and Marks & Spenser as well. Provide those retailers with actionable data about sustainability, and they can then be persuaded to make smart choices on behalf of consumers. It’s easier to change a few hundred big brands than it is to change a few hundred million consumers.

As Jon put it: “It’s not going to be the consumers who drive market change. They’re going to rely on retailers and others, government agencies and NGOs, who are going to force change.”

To an impressive degree, this is what Marks & Spencer is doing with its sustainability program, Plan A. Why Plan A? Because there’s no Plan B. The retail chain is being pushed by consumers but it’s pulling them as well–for example, the stores stopping giving away plastic bags, instead charging 5p per bag, and dropped its plastic bad use by 83%. M & S used to give away more than 460 million carrier bags a year. In M&S’s cafes, consumers need not worry about the coffee–every blend is Fair Trade, organic and Rainforest Alliance Certified.

Still, in the end, the consumer is king. M&S sources as much food as possible — including all of its fresh beef, pork, chicken, turkey, duck, goose, farmed salmon and trout, shell eggs and milk — from the UK and the Republic of Ireland. The store has even worked with farmers to extend the UK growing season for asparagus.

Still, there are limits to what a company can do. Paula Crossfield of Civil Eats asked Louise Nicholls about reports that asparagus farming in Peru is causing severe water problems there. (See How Peru’s wells are being sucked dry by British love of asparagus.) That sure doesn’t sound sustainable.

So why not stop selling asparagus in the winter? That, evidently, is a step too far, even for M&S. Business is business. And so the dance continues,

Drew and Myra Goodman never planned to become farmers. Two kids from New York City,  they graduated from the same high school and made their way to northern California, where Drew went to UC-Santa Cruz, Myra to Berkeley. (She majored in “The Political Economy of Industrial Societies.”  Ah, Berkeley. ) Grad school was next on her agenda—Myra anticipated a career in international relations—but she and Drew decided to take a year off to live in a 600-square-foot home in rural Carmel Valley. “A romantic adventure,” she called it.

But, as John Lennon once wrote, “life is what gets in the way when you are making other plans.” Drew and Myra grew raspberries on a two-and-half acre plot, selling them first at a roadside stand, then to restaurants in nearby Carmel. They didn’t know much about farming, but because they didn’t like the smell of the chemical fertilizers and pesticides, they tried organic farming, guided by Rodale’s Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. They grew salad greens, too, and while they made only $9,800 in their first year, 1984, they decided that grad school could wait. And then wait some more.

A quarter century later, their Earthbound Farm is America’s largest grower of organic produce. Drew and Myra were the first to sell the pre-washed bagged salads that are now on supermarket shelves everywhere, and they dominate that market. Today, Earthbound processes and markets more than 100 varieties of salads, vegetables and fruit, gathered from about 150 farmers who tend 35,000 organically-farmed acres from British Columbia to Mexico. Earthbound Farm products are available in 75% of supermarkets across the country, and the firm makes store brands for chains like Costco, Safeway and Trader Joe’s. Annual revenues top $400 million.

Talk about organic growth!

“We’ve been sprinting nonstop,” says Drew, just to keep up. Things eased up a bit lately after he  chose to step down as CEO of Earthbound to become head of strategy. Myra oversees marketing and writes cookbooks, including Food to Live By” The Earthbound Farm Organic Cooking, which tells their story. (I can personally vouch for her recipe for Whole Wheat Penne with Edamame, Portobellos, and Slow-Roasted Tomatoes, which my wife cooked this evening. I’ve posted the recipe below.)

Reporters, enjoying the spread at Earthbound

I met Myra and Drew last week during Cooking for Solutions, a conference and foodfest sponsored by the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Myra was on a panel that I moderated about business and sustainability, and the next day they hosted about 100 reporters and chefs for a delicious organic lunch under sunny skies at Earthbound’s farm stand, near their original farm. I enjoyed their company so much that I didn’t take many notes, which is why there are so few quotes in this blogpost.

We talked some about the reasons why the organic industry, which has grown steadily for years, still remains small. Less than 1 percent of farmland is farmed organically. Price, is, of course, the big issue—people can’t or don’t want to pay more for organic food. Interestingly, Earthbound Farms’ business took off not just because customers cared about organic but because they liked the convenience of pre-washed, bagged salads.

This innovation, too, was unplanned. As Myra tells the story in Food to Live By, she and Drew were working very long hours and found they were too tired to cook each night. So they made a habit on Sundays of harvesting, washing and drying a week’s worth of baby greens, and making fresh vinaigrette dressing from lemons that grew on the property. The salads stayed fresh, to their surprise. Soon after, faced with a surplus of baby greens, they took bagged salads to local health food stores and they sold very well. Myra’s father, Mendek Rubin, designed the first production line — in their living room! She writes:

We would fill a huge mesh basket with greens, dunk and swirl them in the first sink, haul out the basket with (a) rope and pulley system, then repeat the washing process in the second and third sinks. For our drying system, we used restaurant salad spinners, and absorbed any leftover moisture by shaking the salad in giant terry cloth sacks made from bath towels.

Amazing. Today, Earthbound Farms produces more than 30 million salad servings a week.

“I’m proud,” Myra told me, “because I do think we are making a difference.” Their kind of farming is good for the environment, good for farmworkers, good for people who live in neighborhoods near the farms and, she says, good for human health, although the argument that eating organic food is better for you remains unproven.

So why aren’t more farmers growing organic food? Basically because they have to charge more for it that consumers will pay. One reason Earthbound’s mixed greens have done so well—organic mixed greens account have more than 40% market share in the category—is that they are priced only slightly higher than conventional produce. Why? Because baby greens stay in the ground for as little as 21 days, which means they don’t require much, if any, weeding, organic fertilizer or pest-control methods as do vegetables like carrots, celery, broccoli or cauliflower that stay in the ground much longer. Even more costly is organic milk because cows need to be fed so much organic grain to make it. This kind of thing never occurs to those of us who a more likely to fly over farmland than to walk on it.

Organic foods cost more also cost more to grow because some farmland is typically set aside to grow flowers to attract beneficial insects like ladybugs that will eat unwanted pests. So per-acre yields are lower. Plus, organic farming is more management intensive and labor intensive.

This is why, in general, so-called Big Organic is to be welcomed and not feared: Organic food would be even more expensive were it not for the economies of scale that benefit Earthbound. And to see organic farming spread further, costs need to come down.

–

Here’s the Whole Wheat Penne recipe, the first ever on this blog. Healthy and delicious!

Whole Wheat Penne with Edamame, Portobellos, and Slow-Roasted Tomatoes
(Serves 4)

Edamame is in the spotlight here. These soybeans look like little green gemstones hidden among the strips of intensely flavored tomatoes and hearty portobellos. Edamame also make an appearance in the pesto-like puree that coats the pasta. Admittedly, this dish has a lot of components, but all the elements add up to layers of incredible flavor.

About 1 cup shelled, fresh or frozen (unthawed) edamame (soy beans, from 1 pound unshelled)
2 cups (8 ounces) dried whole wheat penne
1/4 cup olive oil
2 large portobello mushroom caps (about 8 ounces total), sliced 1/4-inch thick
1 clove garlic, peeled and crushed
2 tablespoons dry white wine or water
2/3 cup sliced Slow-Roasted Tomatoes (page 383), or 2/3 cup sliced sun-dried tomatoes (see sidebar, page 242)
1/2 cup minced fresh basil
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves
Pinch of dried red pepper flakes
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
3/4 cup Edamame Pesto (recipe follows)
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
Basil sprigs (optional), for garnish

1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the edamame and cook until tender, 4 to 5 minutes. Drain the edamame in a strainer, transfer them to a bowl, and set aside.
2. Let the water return to a boil, add the penne, and cook according to the package directions.
3. Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat and add the mushrooms. Cook, stirring occasionally, until they begin to soften, about 2 minutes. Add the garlic and wine and stir to combine. Cover the skillet, reduce the heat to medium low, and cook until the mushrooms are tender, about 5 minutes.
4. Add the edamame and the tomatoes, basil, thyme, and pepper flakes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Cook until the tomatoes are warmed through, about 3 minutes.
5. Drain the penne in a colander, setting aside 1 cup of the pasta cooking water. Return the penne to the pot. Add 1/2 cup of the Edamame ?Pesto? and stir to combine. If the pasta is too dry, add 1/3 cup or more of the reserved pasta cooking water.
6. Add the mushroom mixture to the pot with the pasta and stir to combine. Taste for seasoning, adding more Edamame ?Pesto,? salt, pepper, or pasta cooking water, if needed.
7. Transfer the pasta to a serving platter or pasta bowls, and sprinkle the Parmesan cheese on top. Serve immediately, garnished with basil, if desired.

Edamame Pesto
Edamame are fresh soybeans, pale green and oval, about the size of a fingernail.
Look for them in the grocer’s freezer section, although sometimes you can find them fresh. They are very nutritious, and when pureed like a pesto, with garlic, lemon, parsley, and pine nuts, their usually mild taste comes alive. Serve this unusual  pesto on pasta, or spread it on thin baguette slices or crackers for a quick appetizer. It’s great spread on sandwiches instead of mayonnaise, too.
Makes about 3/4 cup

3/4 cup shelled, fresh or frozen (unthawed) edamame (soybeans, from 3/4 pound unshelled)
1 clove garlic
3 tablespoons pine nuts
1/2 cup (packed) flat-leaf parsley leaves
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon salt

1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat. Add the edamame and cook until tender, 4 to 5 minutes. Drain the edamame in a strainer and set aside to cool completely.
2. Place the edamame in a food processor or blender and add the garlic, pine nuts, and parsley. Process until coarsely pureed, stopping to scrape down the side of the bowl once or twice.
3. Add the olive oil, lemon juice, and salt and process to combine, about 30 seconds. The ?pesto? will not be completely smooth. The pesto can be refrigerated, covered, for up to 5 days, or frozen for up to 3 months.

Have you noticed? A food revolution has begun—with the goal of making our food and agriculture systems better for us, better for the environment, maybe even better for workers and democracy.

So, at least, says Marion Nestle, the author, activist, NYU professor and corporate critic, who gave a rousing closing speech at Cooking for Solutions, a mind-stretching, belly-expanding conference and foodfest organized by the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The revolution will be inspired, in part, from the top—symbolized by the White House organic garden, First Lady Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign and some encouraging legislation, including a requirement in the health-care law that fast food restaurants put calorie labeling on menus.

“I can’t remember every having a First Family that was interested in the issues that I’m interested in,” said Nestle, a veteran of the food wars and author of six books, including a new volume about pet food.

More important, the energy for a food revolution is being generated by diverse, decentralized grass roots (pun intended). Signs include the robust growth of organic food, albeit from a small base; the slow food movement; the rapidly increasing number of farmers markets across America; strong interest in local agriculture; Jamie Oliver’s broadcast TV prime time anti-obesity crusade; other celebrity chefs who tout “green” practices; the battle to reform school lunch programs; the campaign against bottled water; the animal welfare movement; and the obsession with food issues in so much of the media, ranging from Michael Pollan’s bestsellers to indie movies like Food Inc. to the  legions of food bloggers, many of whom came to Monterey.

When you look at it that way, there’s a lot going on.

Says Nestle: “The food revolution is about is democracy by the people, of the people for the people. It’s very bottom up.”

I think she’s onto something. The obesity crisis, in particular, implicates our industrial food system and its overproduction of cheap calories as a cause of big, expensive and worrisome social problem, with terrible human costs. No longer is food a concern only to the white wine and argula crowd; it’s everybody’s problem.

Since this blog is focused on business, I asked Nestle after her talk how she would advise a big food company like Kraft, PepsiCo or Coca Cola to get on the right side of the debate.

“They have to be willing to take less profits,” she replied, without a pause. “That’s the answer.”

Of course, she’s smart enough to know it isn’t. But her view is that shareholder capitalism, with its demand for steady growth in revenues and profits, is one cause of the obesity crisis. She traces the problem back to the 1980s when farm subsidies and productivity gains led to huge harvests of corn and soy, more than Americans wanted or needed. At the same time, short-termism reigned on Wall Street.

“There’s still a great surplus of food in this country, and food companies have to sell it,” she said. “Obesity is the Achilles heel of the food industry. It’s something they have to deal with every day. If you want to do something about obesity, you have to either eat less or move more. And eating less is very bad for business.”

Do companies really want to make us fat? Certainly not deliberately, but it is in their interest to make portion sizes bigger and bigger. It’s in their interests to sell food not just in grocery stores and restaurants but in gas stations, liquor stores and drug stores, too.

“When did it become OK to eat in bookstores?” Nestle asked.

Like cheap credit drove the mortgage crisis, cheap food drove the obesity crisis.

While we’ve all seen outrageous examples of how food is marketed, Nestle can still come up with examples that are shocking. Kellogg’s, she says, spent $66 million one year selling Frosted Flakes. PepsiCo and Coke distribute  soda in small villages miles from the nearest city (and dentist) in Latin America, rotting kids’ teeth. South of the border, Cocoa Puffs become “Choco Zucaritas.” Peanut butter, mayonnaise and cookies are promoted as healthful because they contain Omega-3 fish oils.

My favorite example is Enfagrow PREMIUM Chocolate, a chocolate flavored infant formula for toddlers 12-36 months. Mead Johnson, the manufacturer, says on its website that Enfamil, introduced in 1959, “has undergone several significant formulations – each one designed to bring it nutritionally closer to breast milk.” How adding chocolate brings it closer to breast milk is unclear.

The company has the nerve to promote this as a health food:

As your child grows from an infant to a toddler, he’s probably becoming pickier about what he eats. Now more than ever, ensuring that he gets complete nutrition can be a challenge.

That’s why we created new Enfagrow PREMIUM Chocolate with Triple Health Guard™. With over 25 nutrients, Omega-3 DHA, prebiotics, and a great tasting chocolate flavor he’ll love, you can help be sure he’s getting the nutrition he still needs even after he outgrows infant formula.

No wonder Nestle is a cynic about big business.

If, indeed, there is a food revolution, it’s will have to make itself felt in Washington. Right now, U.S. food policy is designed to subsidize cheap calories from corn–with direct farm payments, by promoting ethanol, by erecting trade barriers against sugar cane. This is why burgers and soda, both derived from corn are cheap. Fruits and vegetables don’t get as much of a helping hand from Uncle Sam.

“If you go into McDonald’s with $5, you can buy five burgers or one salad,” Nestle noted.

“What you really want are fruits and vegetables to be cheaper—what the Department of Agriculture refers to as ‘specialty foods,’ ” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

I’m leaving Monterey more hopeful about the possibility of change in the food system. Lots of people — organic farmers, chefs, activists, the people here at the Aqaurium whose Seafood Watch iPhone app has been downloaded by 200,000 people — are working to make it happen. I’ll tell you about more of them in the days ahead.

“We have very, very expensive food in this country.”

“It’s just that the prices are cheap.”

So said Paul Hawken, the environmentalist, entrepreneur and author, in a speech that began Cooking for Solutions, a conference on food and the environment, accompanied by lots of marvelous eating and drinking, this week at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, CA.

The American industrial food system, he said, is bad for the planet, bad for farmworkers and bad for consumers.  “How did we make destroying our land, our children and our health a big business?” Hawken asked.

This was not an upbeat way to start the two-day event, but it’s hard to argue with his analysis. Big Ag produces lots of food–particularly grain and meat–at very cheap prices. According to USDA (cited by Bryan Walsh in this terrific article in TIME), Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. Farm price supports, cheap fossil fuels and vast amounts of water all drive down the price of food.

And the true social and environmental costs? Let’s tally them. They include millions of tons of fertilizer that runs into rivers and the Gulf of Mexico, created an oxygen-starved dead zone that kills of sea life. Hog and chicken waste that contaminate waterways and the Chesapeake Bay. Overuse of antibiotics on animals that helps create antibiotic-resistant bacteria. If you care about animals, there’s the horror of confined animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. We’ve got food safety risks. Tons of global warming pollution. And, oh yeah, an epidemic of obesity, which, again according to TIME, adds $147 billion (that’s billion with a B) a year to our medical bills.

Ugh. And so, for the rest of day, scientists, activists, academics and a sprinkling of farmers and food company executives such as Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farm and Margaret Wittenberg of Whole Foods Market talked about how to make our food system more sustainable.

Here are a just a few highlights:

Fish farms that mimic nature: I was surprised to learn that for the first time this year, more fish consumed in the world this year will be farmed than caught in the wild.  The vast majority of salmon and shrimp consumed in the U.S., for example, is farmed, most of it in Asia. To meet predicted demand for seafood by 2020, aquaculture will have to double production. Yet fish farming has a terrible environmental reputation–excess feed and copious waste cause water pollution, farmed fish escape into the wild and spread disease, the fish meal needed to feed them depletes marine systems.

Thierry Chopin, with kelps

Dr. Thierry B.R. Chopin, a professor of marine biology at the University of New Brunswick, has a simple idea with a technical name that can make fish farming more environmentally friendly. He raises several species of sea life–say, Atlantic salmon, mussels and different seaweeds–together in the same water, they complement one another ecologically and they create multiple revenue streams for the fish farmer. The idea is to duplicate some of the ocean’s biodiversity. Waste from one acquatic species becomes food for another, and the seaweed cleanse the water of surplus nitrogen.(The name for this is Integrated Multi-Trophic Aquaculture, or IMTA. Branding is not Thierry’s specialty.)

“It’s diversification. Don’t put all your salmon eggs in the same basket,” Thierry said. “It’s true in agriculture. It’s also true in acquaculture.” A company called Cooke Aquaculture is now practicing this approach at a half dozen fish farms in the Bay of Fundy, and it wants to expand to another 8-10 sites.

LEED for Food? When tenants need new space, they can seek out LEED-certified buildings. When consumers buy wood or paper, they can look for products certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. Refrigerators, TVs, washer-dryers have Energy Star labels.

But when buying food—at least the vast majority of food–there’s no way for consumers, supermarkets, chefs or even big food companies to know which farmers, ranchers or meat producers are better stewards of the environment than others.

More surprising—your local supermarket or restaurant often does not even know where its food was grown.

These two problems—a lack of standards for agriculture, and an opaque, as opposed to transparent, supply chain—stand in the way of making agriculture more sustainable. With the exception of those who go organic, farmers who are good stewards of the planet aren’t rewarded for their efforts.

I moderated a panel where Wittenberg of Whole Foods and Maisie Greenawalt of Bon Appetit Management Co.,  a forward-looking food service company, talked about ways to bring more transparency to their supply chain and standards to the food they sell or serve. Wittenberg, for example, said that Whole Foods has developed its own animal welfare standards and environmental standards for aquaculture, and that it can enforce them by building direct relationships with ranchers and seafood suppliers. Greenawalt, meanwhile, talked about how Bon Appetit became the first food service company to sign an agreement with the Coalition of of Immokalee Workers (CIW), a organization fighting for more humane farm labor standards in Florida; this required the company to build direct relationships with growers who agreed to live up to the deal.

Several organizations–the Keystone Center, the Leonardo Academy, and the Food Alliance — are, in one way or another, trying to define standards for sustainable food, which could eventually lead to labels and third-party certification. But all face obstacles, not the least of which is how tough the standard should be.

Talking about the effort by the Leonardo Academy, Jonathan Kaplan of the Natural Resources Defense Council said: “I’m very skeptical that the committee will be able to agree on a standard, given who’s at the table.” He went on to say:  “If you set a high bar, you are by definition leaving out most of the industry,” including  farmers who most need to improve. On the other hand: “If you set a low bar, you are just greenwashing.”

Stonyfield’s win-win-win-win business model: Gary Hirshberg ended the day by sounding a very optimistic note. He recalled the early days of his company, which began with a handful of diary cows: “We had a wonderful business. We just had no supply and no demand…You couldn’t use the word organic and the word industry in the same sentence.”

Today, even though less than 1% of farmland in the U.S. meets organic standards, organic food is a $23 billion business and the fastest-growing segment of the food industry. All the major supermarkets have their organic store brands.

Stonyfield Farm has built brand loyalty by doing the right thing, he argued–working closely with farmers and paying them fair prices for milk, donating 10% of profits to environmental groups, being as transparent as possible about its practices.

Hirshberg said: “The farmers are making money. The animals are healthier. Consumers are getting something a lot better. Our employees are well taken care of. And our shareholders have done incredibly well.”

What will drive organic agriculture to scale, he said, is the realization that it can be more profitable than conventional agriculture. “Everything we’ve done is completely scalable,” he said. “Everything I’ve just described to you can be done, whether you’re Unilever, Kraft or Stonyfield.”

More to come in a few days, including a visit to Earthbound Farm, the nation’s largest grower of organic produce and the unlikely story of the New York couple who started it.