In an essay published by Jacobin, Raj Patel and Jim Goodman wrote, “The food system is breaking the planet. Nearly a quarter of anthropogenic greenhouse gases are driven by how we eat, and it’s impossible to tackle climate change without transforming agriculture. So the Green New Deal is wise to call for “a more sustainable food system that ensures universal access to healthy food”…Under a Green New Deal that helped Americans eat better, more cash might flow back to the land. And if the federal government were paying more for better food, and understood that well-managed soil can sequester carbon, sustainable farming might be a way to end America’s rural poverty.”
So why is it that members of the American Farm Bureau, the National Farmers Union, and the majority of the United States Senate have criticized or opposed the proposal?
In a panel led by veteran journalist Samuel Fromartz, join author Raj Patel, farm activist Jim Goodman, and agricultural scholar Garrett Graddy-Lovelace for a conversation about why the policy proposed in the Green New Deal is essential for the future of food.
SAMUEL FROMARTZ
Samuel Fromartz is a veteran journalist who focuses on the intersection of food, farming and the environment. He is a co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of FERN, the Food & Environment Reporting Network. In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker's Odyssey (Viking 2014) is his second book, recounting a personal obsession with craft baking. It was shortlisted for the Art of Eating book prize for 2015 and won the award for Literary Food Writing from the IACP.
He began his career at Reuters news agency in the mid-1980s, working as a correspondent in Washington and as deputy editor for the Reuters Business Report in New York. Since leaving the news agency, his articles have appeared in Inc., Fortune, Business Week, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation, among other publications. He is the author of Organic Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew (Harcourt, 2006) about the evolution of the organic foods industry. Beginning in the late 1990s, he took up home bread baking, eventually working with artisans in the US and Europe.
In 2011, he helped launch FERN, which has grown quickly to become a journalistic presence in the world of food and agriculture reporting. Under his helm, FERN has won many journalism awards, including three James Beard awards.
He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter, where he bakes all his family's bread. He can be found on twitter and Instagram @fromartz.
GARRETT GRADDY-LOVELACE
Born and raised in a farming family and agricultural community in Kentucky, Garrett Graddy-Lovelace now researches and teaches agricultural policy and agrarian politics at American University School of International Service in Washington DC (Piscataway lands). Drawing on community-based scholarship, she currently studies agrobiodiversity conservation, seeds and data, the Farm Bill's history of 'parity,' US-Cuba ag relations, and the relationship of commodity crop surplus to empire. She co-founded the Agroecology Research-Action Collective, and has a PhD in Geography (University of Kentucky) and a Masters in Theological Studies (Harvard Divinity School).
JIM GOODMAN
Jim Goodman and his wife Rebecca ran a 45-cow organic dairy and direct market beef farm in Southwest Wisconsin for 40 years. His farming roots trace back to his great-grandparents immigration from Ireland during the famine and the farm's original purchase in 1848. A farm activist, Jim credits past and present failures of farm and social policy as his motivation to advocate for a farmer-controlled consumer-oriented food system. Currently, he serves as a board member of Midwest Environmental Advocates, the Family Farm Defenders and board president of the National Family Farm Coalition.
Jim is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Platteville with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Animal Science. He also holds a Masters Degree in Reproductive Physiology from South Dakota State University.
RAJ PATEL
Raj Patel is an award-winning author, film-maker and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin and a Senior Research Associate at the Unit for the Humanities at the university currently known as Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa.
He has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. Raj co-taught the 2014 Edible Education class at UC Berkeley with Michael Pollan. In 2016, he was recognized with a James Beard Foundation Leadership Award. He has testified about the causes of the global food crisis to the US House Financial Services Committee and is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.
His first book was Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. His second, The Value of Nothing, was a New York Times and international best-seller. His latest, co-written with Jason W. Moore, is A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.