- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
- 0
-
Sparkle (0)
Welcome to the BlogHerFood 10 Liveblog of the panel "Values: A Good Food Fight: Food safety, food policy, food equality." Here is the description: Become a powerful agent of change. You can go to battle for the food issues that are most important to you: school lunch reform, food safety, critical food policy, and more. In this session, Jennifer Maiser from the Eat Local Challenge moderates a conversation with Kristin Hyde from Good Food Strategies and Naomi Starkman from CivilEats that will arm you with helpful tools from their personal arsenals to help you find timely, accurate information and ways to make a difference…whether in your own kitchen or while communicating with policymakers. Your liveblogger is Bon Vivant.
Can't make it to BlogHer Food? Get the virtual conference pass and don't miss a thing!
Panelists:
Jennifer Maiser (JM) (Twitter: @lifebeginsat30)
Kristin Hyde (KH) (Twitter: @goodfoodkristin)
Naomi Starkman (NS) (Twitter: @naomistarkman)
Introductions
JM: Main goal of today's panel is to make sure that everybody has the tools they need for talking about food policy, whether for your own blog or a news outlet you write for. We (the panelists) would also like to get feedback on what tools and resources you need for your writings on food policy/safety.
NS: Really excited to have this conversation, to talk about what you're interested in, what do you want to cover. Would like to know how much do you talk about food policy, if you want to talk about it all; how many here write regularly about food policy? How many want to write more about food policy? Sees food policy as falling into two main categories of interest: food choices (organic vs non-organic, industrial vs local) and urban agriculture.
Talked about Good Food Fight.com, a resource that fellow panelist Kristin Hyde recently launched. Features tools and resources that they (the panelists) have found to be really helpful in the conversation around food policy. They're seeing more major media organizations taking an interest in food now (eg, Huffington Post, The Atlantic Food Channel, Grist, ChooseWise, Ethicurean, etc).
Other tools on Good Food Fight: a list of food policy tweeters and examples of blogs addressing food policy issues that educate and engage their audiences. Bloggers don't need to be experts on every topic, you can always direct your readers to other resources/sites that delve deeper into policy/research/data on the topic you're writing about.
KH: Assuming that everyone's here because we believe that food has impacts beyond our meal: environment, health, economy, etc. Background: worked with public policy advocacy on Capitol Hill, coming from working on environmental issues with the Sierra Club and other non-profits, the 'lightbulb' went off 10 years ago while working on the wild salmon debate that when you fixed problems about food, you fix bigger problems in society as well. Started working on advocacy in 1990; the media landscape was very different then. Today, it's less organized, there are more voices opinionating on issues and the consumer voice has more power now.
For the panel session, wants to know how bloggers/writers incorporate ideas about food policy into your writing? What do you need to do that more? People can affect policy with what you write - how do you like to get resources: emails, websites, Twitter, meet-ups?
Discussion
JM: Really exciting that consumers don't have to rely solely on the mainstream media any more. There are so many other ways to get messages out. There are some topics that the mainstream media doesn't pick-up on, but blogs do, giving more avenues for discussions about food policy to happen.
NS: Civil Eats tries to stay ahead of the news. Citizen journalism is very important and powerful - bloggers can generate awareness just by addressing a topic. For example, the current discussion around genetically-modified salmon: there's lots of interest in this, as a blogger, how do you tell the story, and where would you go to get resources? To engage their readers for example, The Washington Post asked its readers if they would eat this type of salmon. Sees blogs as a platform for dialogue, it's not a monologue.
Andrew Welder (Eating Rules): Feels like he's often preaching to the choir with his blog. His key areas of focus: (a) wants to increase readership (b) generate awareness. How do we change minds, expand readership while growing awareness? Right now, he's starting to see comments from people that he doesn't know. Currently running a blog challenge (no processed food
