Rootstock Radio

"Hungry kids can't think and malnourished kids can't learn - that's just the reality," says Chef Ann Cooper (aka the Renegade Lunch Lady). Today Ann shares how she's working to transform school lunches for all and setting new - higher - standards.

"Probably more than half of the fish we eat right now are farmed, whether it's oysters or shrimp, tilapia or catfish," says Sheila Bowman of Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Program. It's no longer a matter of simply comparing the taste of fresh vs. farmed fish - where those fish come from is equally, or even more, important.

"While pesticides have been marketed as a necessity to growing food and supposedly feeding the world, what they have actually done is unravel our communities' capacity to provide healthy, nourishing food." Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, senior scientist at the Pesticide Action Network shares the alarming picture of pesticides in our food system - and what we can do to help.

We've all heard bees are dying, but how bad is it really? "We ignore the plight of pollinators at our own folly," says Eric Lee-Mader of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation. "All of us can be stewards of pollinator habitat." Eric shares the alarming picture, but he also shares some real actions that we all can take to help turn the tide.

We continue our discussion of the serious pesticides problem that our country is facing in part 2 of our 2-part conversation with Jay Feldman of Beyond Pesticides. "As an environmental and public health issue, pesticides are in our lives every day," says Jay. "Why are we using these materials that are associated with diseases if we don't need them, if there are alternative practices that can be used?"

â￿￿As an environmental and public health issue, pesticides are in our lives every day," says Jay Feldman of Beyond Pesticides. "Why are we using these materials that are associated with diseases if we don't need them, if there are alternative practices that can be used?" This is part 1 of a 2-part episode on the serious pesticide problem our country is facing today.

We're back with Michele Merkel of Food & Water Watch to learn how we can engage our elected officials between elections to make food and water issues a priority.

CAFOs, Fracking & GMOs, Oh My!

Erika Allen, daughter of Growing Power's founder Will Allen, sees creativity as a necessary component of her work in urban agriculture and youth education. This inventive bent might be precisely why Growing Power is having such a huge impact in the Chicago area.

Detroit food activist Malik Yakini views the good food revolution as one piece of the larger movement for freedom, justice and equality in agriculture, and beyond. He focuses his activism on food because "everyone eats, and everyone wants access to good food," and so his work tends to cut through divisions of race, religion, gender, and more. Malik and his team at the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network see food as a "great equalizer."

The realization that many former fixtures of American life are vanishing led Robert Wolf to examine the concept of rural renewal in his latest book. Formerly a Chicago Tribune columnist, Robert currently serves as the director of Free River Press. He has written several books and is the producer of American Mosaic, a weekly half-hour radio program featuring stories written and read by men and women from all walks of life and all regions of the country.

We talk with dietician and award-winning nutrition expert Ashley Koff about how the environment and our health are all connected. Find out which vegetable Ashley can't live without and why organic agriculture matters so much from her perspective as a dietitian.

Much of the work Allen is doing with holistic land management started with the desertification of land. Desertification is land degradation in a form so extreme that it creates desert. He noticed that the areas where the land was healthiest was where there was livestock grazing, contrary to the belief that heavily grazing livestock with cause the land degradation. The soil plant an animal life had to co-evolve, so it wasn't the animals ruining the land but poor land management. Allen, along with farmers and rancher in the area, began to experiment with grazing animals and came up with a plan for holistic land management. Since it was devised, his plan has helped farmers all over the world, and, as long as people follow the process exactly, he can almost guarantee the results they will see.

Mindful Cooking with Cynthia Lair

Keefe says perennial agriculture is part of the answer to sustainable farming. Perennial agriculture does not require yearly plowing where much of the carbon in the soil is lost. Pasture farming is one of the most tried and true methods of raising food with perennial plants. Cattle are able to turn grass, which humans can't eat, into nutrient rich food for humans.

Rootstock Radio: Maria Rodale on Living Well

Chris can be described as a different kind of dietitian. Instead of only focusing on a healthy diet, she also focuses on the environmental impact of the food we consume. Chris says, "Biodiversity is connected to both environmental and human health." She believes it is important to preserve and pass along the concepts of biodiversity and environmental health for generations to come.

One of the major programs which Lane is working on is the Northern Organic Vegetable Improvement Collaborative (NOVIC). NOVIC is a collaborative effort among researchers and educators from top universities who work together to grow all of the material and breeding lines for various vegetables to see how they perform in different environments. The breeders are looking for traits which specifically organic farmers need, since seeds bred for conventional farmers don't always hold up under organic conditions.

The cost of living in an area which grows potatoes in vast quantities isn't just about money. Amy says that the people who live in the area of the RDO fields are being sprayed with pesticides by helicopter every week. Some people in the area are getting ill, the water is being contaminated throughout the United States, livestock is being affected and other crops (including organic crops) are also being hit with at least 35 different pesticides which are found on potatoes. Additionally, the growing of these potatoes requires over 13 billion gallons of water per year.

Most recently, Frances participated in Democracy Spring, a movement committed to taking money out of politics and putting more people in politics, enforcing voter rights, and the Supreme Court understanding that the right to speak must be driven by a meaningful right to be heard. "Hunger," she says, "is not caused by a scarcity of food but a scarcity of democracy." No one is hungry by choice, "hunger is the symptom of powerlessness," and powerlessness is the opposite of democracy.