We Be Grubbin'

Time to do some math, shall we? What happens when you take food that is organic, raised in a sustainable way, whole and locally grown, and add food that is produced fair from seed to table -- good for our bodies, communities and environment?

I know, it's a mouthful, and perhaps a tad bit bourgeoisie?

The answer is as simple as a one, two, three, four letter word -- grub -- poised to be the frame by which young progressives can begin to talk about that mouthful from the first paragraph. And it is most certainly not just for the aging affluent hippies of the world.

In "Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen," best-selling author Anna Lappe and chef Bryant Terry dish up the social, political and economic impact of our food choices with a side serving on how we can improve our health and the health of our communities. They do it all with mad flavor, the sensibility of artists, activists and healers -- coming from a green place of American Love.

"This is left of center, progressive at the least, at best radical -- to think that everyone -- not just food corporations and the government -- should be sitting at the table," says Terry. "No one sector should determine our food system."

The food revolution of grub is nothing new. If your mother was a food justice activist who just wanted to feed her kids right -- like Anna Lappe's mom -- who wrote the seminal "Diet for a Small Planet," or if perhaps you hailed from the former members of the Nation of Islam who read Minister Muhammed's "How To Eat To Live" or Dick Gregory's, "Cookin' with Mother Nature," then I know you know what I am talking about.

Or maybe not. Maybe you were a Kool-Aid kid through and through.

Still, there was a revolution of food access and analysis in the '60s and '70s -- an awareness of "food insecurity" fed to 10,000 kids a day nationally by the Black Panther Party's breakfast program. Or, perhaps you were snot-trolling patchouli-scented coops from Park Slope to Berkeley. If you had a mom like mine in the early '80s you were fed raw broccoli (for the crunch!) and tuna with just lemon on it for lunch -- and we loved it -- while living in the Vanderveer Houses (aka the projects) in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

The rise of diabetes, heart failure, and the not-so-cool-to-talk-about Irritable Bowel Syndrome is often linked to the overuse of industrial sugars or the proverbial high fructose corn syrup -- aka "the cake" that the "non-organic" food manufacturers use.

"Grub" is a savvy indictment of our food delivery systems and the choices that we make. Readers learn the alarming consequences -- hunger amidst plenty, the disappearance of the family farm, toxic pesticides and the illusion of "cheap" food, along with the ever-popular skyrocketing of diet-related diseases.

All right, put the Twinkie down, but don't frown. While some of the suggestions to agro-industrial complex were mapped out in Anna Lappe's previous book "Hopes Edge," which she co-wrote with her mom, Frances Moore Lappe, "Grub" starts like any good organizing tool and scares you to death about the state of things, but it ends hopeful for the new century -- there is, indeed, a revolution going on in food and farming that is healthy for all.

"When you choose grub," Terry said, when I caught him lounging in Oakland, "you don't have to give up anything but a mouthful of pesticides."

That's fresh, and good to know. Dick Gregory comments in "Cooking with Mother Nature" that there is an "American habit of putting 'garbage' in their stomach instead of in the disposal."

According to "Grub," organic farmers and advocates have "long argued that organic methods enhance resistance to diseases and insect pests, while synthetic fertilizers and pesticides can actually increase crop susceptibility to pests."