Rodale Institute and Organic Center team up to fight global warming

Combining research and resources, dynamic duo of biologically based agriculture looks to solve pressing issues of our day.

By Dan Sullivan

Rodale Institute CEO Tim LaSalle (far right) looks on as Host Committee members Emme (far left) and Sara Snow (center) woo the crowd.

Retooling our food-and-farming system for the benefit of people and the planet was the topic du jour Tuesday, Nov. 11, as the Rodale Institute and The Organic Center kicked off a joint campaign to tackle some of the dominant environmental and health challenges of our day.

Under the banner “Ripe for Revolution,” the two organizations brought an impressive cast of organic luminaries to the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City for an evening of show-and-tell to explain how changing the way we grow, buy and eat our food can fight global warming, end hunger, clean up the environment and improve human health. Both partnering organizations do research, education and outreach focused on the science of food and farming.

“We’re losing 1 percent of our topsoil every year on this planet,” Rodale Institute CEO Tim LaSalle told a room full of reporters at a press conference preceding the fundraising event that drew a capacity crowd of about 400. “This is the opposite of the definition of sustainable. That’s what feeds us.” Dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico have increased 750 to 800 miles this summer alone because of floods in Iowa, LaSalle said, referring to nutrient runoff from fragile soils on conventional farms.

LaSalle explained how more than 60 years of research at the nonprofit Rodale Institute has culminated to identify organic farming as the single most significant and immediate step we can take to curtail the potentially devastating effects of global warming. This is because properly managed organic farms have the capacity to sequester vast amounts of carbon, he said, adding that if we converted all farms worldwide to organic production we could sequester 40 percent of the carbon now being released into the atmosphere.

The Organic Center's Steve Hoffman (left) and Rodale Institute's Tim LaSalle (right).

“When we really return to biological and natural systems—that is, organic—we really just start to bring environmental health and human health back at the same time,” LaSalle said.

Organic Center Managing Director Steven Hoffman highlighted the Boulder, Colorado-based organization’s efforts to prove the superior nutritional value of organic food when compared with conventional. This, he said, includes a significantly higher percentage of micro- and macro-nutrients, more antioxidants and fewer nitrates and pesticides.

“It’s not just an apple a day that keeps the doctor away,” Hoffman told the gathering crowd, “it’s the organic apple.”

Both Hoffman and LaSalle called for a paradigm shift away from a business-as-usual agriculture that employs biotechnology and chemicals—and that has a patented and controlling stranglehold on the food system from “seed to fork” worldwide—and toward a biologically based approach that is free for the learning and that restores rather than degenerates human health and the environment.

“Some people talk about high price of organic,” Hoffman said. “I want to counter that by talking about the value of organic. It really is a worthy investment.”

Hoffman cited research that showed the average child on a conventional diet is walking around at any given time with five types of pesticide residues in his or her body. When children are switched to an organic diet, he said, those pesticide levels drop to negligible amounts within five days. “So organic really is the solution to minimizing exposure to pesticides.”

“I think people are confused” by the myriad labels such as “grass-fed,” “local,” “sustainable” and other claims that bombard people at the supermarket said Maria Rodale, chair of the publishing company started by her grandfather J.I. Rodale more than 65 years ago. “They don’t know what to eat or what to buy.

“But I have seen the research collected out there…and I’m not confused. To me it’s clear. Organic is the number one way to stop global warming, it’s the number one way to protect our health, and it’s the number one way to protect our children.”

Rodale, who reminded the audience she’d been an integral part of the organic movement “since birth,” called upon the media to be vigilant in its supporting the federal organic standards “because people in America need to be able to trust something.”

“One thing I’d really like to see coming out of this evening is the message that organic really has the potential to save the world, and really the human species because the world will be fine without us.”

Other speakers of the evening included supermodel and healthy living spokeswoman Emme, renowned pediatrician Dr. Alan Greene, healthy living television personality Sara Snow, Nature’s Path Foods founder and CEO Arran Stephens and Men’s Health magazine Editor-in-Chief David Zinczenko.

Also on hand presenting an exciting organic menu for the evening were celebrity chefs Michel Nischen and Christina Pirello. Pirello is the host of the television show “Christina Cooks Naturally,” America’s only whole foods cooking show. Nischen, grandson to a displaced farmer, came into his profession with a deep respect for those who work the land sustainably, and with a profound understanding of the connection between how we treat animals and the earth and the quality of the food they provide for us.

Both chefs agreed that in a country where less than 1 percent of the farmland is farmed without the use of synthetic chemicals, there is room at the table for all scales, and all types, of organic production. Nischen said a positive trend is that unlike farmer’s in the era of his grandfather—whose beloved family farm in Georgia fall prey to the “get big or get out” agro-economic realities of the ’70s—today’s farmers with smaller holdings have much greater opportunities to survive and even thrive due, in no small part, to the growing “good food” movement, and to a growing awareness that eating is a profound revolutionary act.

Spicy tofu with pineapple and bok choy over forbidden rice.

Following the third-floor press conference, guests were ushered down to the art museum’s main floor to peruse a variety of multimedia exhibits—including big-screen televisions looping interviews of experts explaining the connections between organic agriculture and environmental and human health—and to savor scrumptious comfort food provided by Nischen (meatloaf and mashies), something a bit more exotic by Pirello (spicy tofu with pineapple and bok choy over forbidden rice) and a parade of hors d oeuvres and refreshments. Then it was back upstairs for chocolate and coffee pairings, and an auction of donated items with proceeds to benefit the two organizations.

“It seems like we’re at a real flash point with this whole food-awareness thing,” said LaRae Cunningham, Ph.D., a board member of Just Food, a nonprofit dedicated to creating a just and sustainable food system in and around New York City. “People are starting to wake up the fact that the intersection of many of these issues that they are able to get behind—whether it’s the economy or the environment or sustainability or global warming or social justice or heath—is food.”

Sponsors of the Ripe for Revolution New York event included O Organics, Rodale Inc., Nature's Path Organic, Organic Works Marketing, Neighbor, Gold Digital, In House Creative Studios, Organic Valley Family of Farmers, Shumei Natural Agriculture and Healing Quest.