Last weekend, I spoke about my dad’s book, Fixing the Food System: Changing How We Produce and Consume Food.
I discussed what the book meant to my dad in the context of his career as a food policy journalist. My stepmom spoke about poverty, hunger and nutrition advocacy in the past; and a friend of my dad’s spoke about the path to solutions today.
Here is a transcript of my talk, as well as Bette Hileman’s and Vernon Gras’s.
In his book, my dad examines the potential for a reformed national food policy that calculates the true cost of food, provides universal access to healthful food, adopts farm policies supporting public health and environmental objectives, improves food safety, pays fair wages to food employees, treats food animals with compassion, and reduces the food system’s carbon footprint. He explores solutions to these issues, drawing upon lessons learned from the early food advocates of the 1960s and 1970s.
Here are some facts from the book that you may not be aware of:
The average American now consumes 30 lbs more sugar per year than he/she did in 1970.
U.S. factory-farmed livestock produced 369 tons of manure in 2012, roughly 13 times the sewage produced by the entire U.S. population.
Here is the tribute to my dad that Marion Nestle wrote on her blog.