Food for thought at organic farming conference
La Crosse Tribune
By Joe Orso
Children and food — both are major driving forces behind the work done by dietician and writer Melinda Hemmelgarn.
In a keynote speech Friday morning at the 19th annual Organic Farming Conference, Hemmelgarn sharply criticized many in the corporate food industry for manipulating the marketplace, and said she’d like all children — and adults — to ask: Where does my food come from? Who produced it? Under what conditions? What’s in it or not in it?
“What’s sad is that when children see fruit on a label, they think fruit is contained in a product,” Hemmelgarn said, with images of Twizzlers, Froot Loops and other food on a screen behind her at the La Crosse Center.
Her presentation, “The Illusion of Choice: Finding Good Food, Food Truth and Justice for All,” was part of the largest organic farming conference in the nation, organized by Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service.
More than 2,000 are attending the conference, which ends today.
Before Hemmelgarn’s presentation, Rosie Zimmer, husband Gary and son Nicholas received the MOSES 2008 Organic Farmer of the Year award.
The family runs Otter Creek Organic Dairy in Avoca, Wis.
“This Oscar belongs to all of us,” Rosie said to a packed hall.
Hemmelgarn described the food system with broad strokes, quoting everyone from Hippocrates — “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” — to a Burger King billboard reading “Now You Can Pay Rent and Eat.”
“This is truly offensive,” she said of the advertisement, and later quoted John Alm, who as Coca-Cola’s president and CEO said in 2003, “The school system is where you build brand loyalty.”
Hemmelgarn writes the Food Sleuth column for The Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Mo., and said children need to become healthy skeptics about advertising and other media.
In one exercise, she displayed an image from stayfreemagazine.org with the alphabet made from letters of brand logos — like the “P” from Pez – and asked the audience to identify each.
But while she critiqued the food system, she also promoted food that is healthy, green, fair and affordable, and said people need to get back to thinking of themselves as a collective society rather than as individuals.
“We should all be growing some of our food, we should be cooking most of it and we should know all of it,” she said. “I tell my husband that growing food together is second only to having children together.”
Joe Orso can be reached at (608) 791-8429 or [email protected].
