Roots of Change, the San Francisco think tank and funder with the vision to remake California’s food system, has released a marvelous short video that compresses most of the problems I write about – and some of the solutions – into a short, three-minute video. Find it here.  The sound track is percussive, so you may want to turn down the volume while you watch it!

Mina Arasteh, a Lafayette high school student, saw the video and concluded, “What we are putting into our bodies and everything that happens to our food before it winds up on our dinner plates is directly correlated to how we treat the land, the workers, and ourselves. Thankfully, every cloud has a silver lining, and the video does a great job of depicting it.”

We in the Bay Area have a wealth of activists, organizations, chefs, and all-around food geniuses who are working to save us from the excesses of industrial food. You can participate as much or as little as you like. Not a foodie yourself? Small steps count a lot in boosting the economy of healthy food and agriculture. You could spend $10 a week or organic produce in your regular grocery store, grow tomatoes in one pot on your patio, and patronize vegetarian restaurants. Got some time? Shop at farmers’ markets and talk to the vendors, compost your scraps, and attend healthy food events. Becoming an enthusiastic food revolution supporter? Join an urban farming group, go vegetarian, and check out the many careers available in the new food world.

Ok, we’ve all seen the carbon footprint calculators that measure the damage our lifestyles do to the planet. Here’s a more cheerful calculator, one that lets you count how much you’ve helped if you choose organic dairy products. Check it out!

According to the website, “The numbers are derived from a calculation of USDA conventional agriculture data compared with twenty years of parallel data from Organic Valley member-farms…..Organic Valley farmers and consumers collectively kept 89.5 million pounds of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer and 1.25 million pounds of synthetic pesticides and herbicides from America’s soil and water from 1988 to 2008.  To reduce that down to a personal level, a shopper who purchased two blocks of Organic Valley cheese, two containers of cream and a gallon of milk, for example, would prevent an entire pound of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer from being applied to soil and leaching into our drinking water.”