UPDATE: This position has been filled. Thank you.
Location: San Francisco Bay Area preferred, pacific-time zone required, telecommute
Status: Part-time, contract, 15-20 hours/week, flexible
Compensation: $20-30 per hour, depending on experience
Post date: April 4, 2013, position open until filled
Our founding fathers, white-maleness aside, did get a few things right. One of them was the concept of “separation of powers,” to ensure a system of checks and balances among the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial. But a dangerous provision snuck into the budget bill passed last week in Congress upends that system. Continue reading →
Hope to see you at one of these venues. To have me speak in your area, contact me here.
New York City
March 20: CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College
• Force Fed: How Food Industry Disinformation Undermines Public Health
For details, see PDF flyer.
Boston
March 21-23
Consuming Kids Summit: Reclaiming Childhood from Corporate Marketers
• Is This Even Legal? Demystifying the Laws on Marketing to Children (panel)
• Slowing Down the Clown: Policy Tools to Protect Children from Fast Food in Your Area (workshop)
Southern California
April 9: Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, Occidental College, Los Angeles
• Force Fed: Deconstructing Food Industry Lies
Class begins at 1:30pm; Room: Lower Herrick.
June 18-20: 7th Biennial Childhood Obesity Conference, Long Beach
• Marketing healthy foods to children: Do the ends justify the means? (panel discussion)
It’s fair to say that the vegetarian world gave me my start. In 1996, I began volunteering with various groups to promote plant-based eating. I soon discovered Marion Nestle’s work on the politics of the meat and dairy industries and I was hooked. In the early years of doing this work I made numerous friends in the San Francisco area who I still remain close to today. Something about a shared bond over food choices and values that makes for lasting friendships. So it’s with a heavy heart that I write this unusual post, to expose an injustice being done to one of those dear friends: Colleen Holland.
Sign at Mom’s Organic Market
As the frequent bearer of bad news about the food industry, I am thrilled to share a positive story. Last month, MOM’s Organic Market, a small retail chain based in the Baltimore area, announced it would stop carrying products featuring children’s cartoon characters:
Products ranging from Dora the Explorer frozen soybeans to Elmo juice boxes will be discontinued and replaced with organic alternatives in cartoon-free packaging.
Company CEO Scott Nash blogged last August about how his young daughter begged for a cereal she never tasted because of “Clifford the Big Red Dog” on the box, putting the store’s policy into motion. The company sent me this list of discontinued items, which includes numerous Earth’s Best products, along with a few other natural food companies.
2/28 Postscript: In happy news, Tara Marino reports that after an exchange with Lauren Fox (social media manager for AND), she will be reinstated. Fox claimed that Marino’s comments were not the reason for her removal but rather AND was deleting all non-members of the Academy. Marino provided her member number, which cleared things up. However, still no word back from the California affiliate.
I received the following email from registered dietitian Tara Marino who says she was recently “deleted” from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics LinkedIn group after expressing support for my report on the organization’s questionable corporate sponsors. (See previous post on a similar silencing attempt.)
In my ongoing effort to bring more attention to the plight of food workers, following is a guest post by Sally Smyth, a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, where she is researching retail jobs with the Food Labor Research Center, which is directed by Saru Jayaraman, author of Behind the Kitchen Door.
This week I’ve been writing about the National Restaurant Association (the other NRA) and why we should care about food workers, in part to bring attention to the new book Behind the Kitchen Door by labor advocate Saru Jayaraman. Today I want to offer practical resources for how to help improve the lives of the 20 million food workers who help us put food on our own tables every day.
This week, with the release of Saru Jayaraman’s new book, Behind the Kitchen Door, I’ve been writing about the powerful influence of the National Restaurant Association, for example, in lobbying against paid sick days for workers. Sadly, most of my colleagues in public health and the good food movement don’t pay enough attention to the many injustices workers face every day. So here is my attempt to help correct that situation.
This week, food labor advocate Saru Jayaraman is releasing her new book, Behind the Kitchen Door, which relates heartbreaking stories of just some of the 10 million restaurant workers in the U.S. In a chapter called, Serving While Sick, she tells the disturbing tale of a fast-food worker who had no choice but to come to work with a bad cold since she couldn’t afford to go unpaid. When this worker tried to explain to her manager how perhaps handling food while coughing and sneezing was not such a good idea, she was laughed at. She later wondered how many customers she got sick that day because she couldn’t leave the counter every time she needed to wipe her nose.
