Sam Kass was the director of Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move’
campaign and the Senior Policy Advisor for her Healthy Food Initiatives. He assisted Michelle Obama in creating
the first major vegetable garden at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s
Victory Garden. Kass is now
preparing to be a senior food analyst on the NBC news team.
Kass’s plans for working at the UN Conference on climate
change in December may surprise many of the delegates from 190 countries, whose
goal is to achieve a binding and universal agreement on climate. Kass is planning meals for the
delegates – meals that will send a message on the crucial role that food and
agriculture will play in either reducing or worsening climate change. Methane is produced by livestock and
food waste; nitrous oxide escapes from manure and fertilizer; carbon dioxide is
left unabsorbed when rainforests are cut down to make way for cattle and
soybeans. “If it were a
nation, rotting food would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gas
(after the US and China) and takes 28% of the planet’s agricultural land to
produce” says Kass. He plans to
serve a meal on two different plates – one made with typical, resource
depleting, greenhouse gas emitting ingredients (such as corn-fed beef) and one
made with truly sustainable ingredients.
Kass is hoping to compel leaders to place the food system on the list of
sectors requiring action, along with energy and transportation
Kass recently co-hosted a sustainably focused meal with a
Peruvian chef and with Sean Penn
at the World Bank, International Monetary Fund meetings in Lima, and spoke to
the power of food to inspire sustainable policy. For his work at the Paris conference,
Kass will be working with allies such as the Center for Food Safety (CFS), who
will be there to highlight the importance of carbon capture through
agroecological practices.
CFS maintains that this kind of carbon capture can be started
immediately, carries no risk and will increase crop yield, minimize erosion,
and help the water carrying capacity of soil. (Agroecology is the study of the interactions between
plants, animals, humans and the environment within agricultural systems. It
includes organic farming, traditional framing methods, crop rotation and
polyculture rather than monoculture.)
President Hollande of France and
the French Minister of Agriculture have expressed an interest in putting soil
carbon sequestration among the actions to be recommended at the UN
conference. Kass hopes to inspire
high-profile chefs throughout the world to keep in mind the issues of food,
agriculture and climate.
What we can do about these issues?
I suggest reading and ultimately subscribing to Civil Eats, an online news
source from which most of this column is taken. It is fascinating reading on
many subjects related to food policy, highlighting good practices as well as
bad ones. Compost, feed your
leftovers to a neighbor’s chickens (or your own), and eat lower on the food
chain. Enjoy our organic farmers’ wonderful
produce. They are agroecologists!
Sadja Greenwood, MD, MPH
past
columns on this blog
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