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Originally published in the Washington Post.

Jeremy Brosowsky never pictured himself in the garbage business. A serial entrepreneur, he is 39, with an Ivy League degree and a stint at Goldman Sachs on his résumé. But when he turned his attention to sustainable agriculture, he realized that what Washington needed most wasn’t another urban farm. It was compost — rich, organic matter to enrich city soils — for the city farms already out there.

Trash, even “good” trash like compost, is not usually appetizing enough to make it into the pages of the Food section. But this column’s mission is to highlight businesses that fill the gaps in the sustainable food chain. Composting is one of them: Americans generate 250 million tons of garbage every year. Nearly a third of what is sent to the landfill could be composted but instead sits in an airless hole where it decomposes and releases methane, a dangerous greenhouse gas.

 “I don’t think of it as the garbage business,” Brosowsky said. “I’m in the magic business. As I tell my kids, ‘I turn garbage into food.’ ”

Brosowsky remembers the date when he had his eureka moment about composting. On March 21, 2010, he was in Milwaukee atGrowing Power, one of the country’s most successful urban farms, where he...

Originally published on Civil Eats

Following the election, millions across the nation are breathing a huge sigh of relief (or maybe crying, depending on where you fall politically). And while my friends and I celebrated over wine, cheese, and grapes, I wondered what Obama’s victory foods were. Everyone has a favorite restaurant to celebrate at in his or her hometown. Mine is Trang, a Vietnamese restaurant with an incredible vegan mock-pork in a mild yellow curry that I still crave.

One birthday of mine, I recall sneaking a view of the staff as they cooked our lunch. An older woman stood out in particular–short, with long, grey-streaked hair pulled back into a bun, standing over a large commercial-sized pot. The woman made me think of my own abuelita(grandmother), and I romanticized the notion of Vietnamese grandmothers making savory Pho with care.

But what if that woman who made my lunch that day was the grandmother of another family, not the family she worked for?  And what if the restaurant I loved so much left this woman, or others on their staff unpaid?  Would she have been able to complain to someone, found a way to get what she was owed?  Or would she have gone without...

Imagine walking through the lunch line at school, your tummy rumbling as you watch your tray being filled with steaming enchiladas, beans and salad. You can’t wait to start eating, but as you reach the end of the line, someone reaches out and drops a healthy dose of sugar coated dried fig pieces all over your tray. “We’ve got to use the figs,” said a food service director at a training on new federal school food guidelines I recently attended, “sprinkle them on everything you can think of.”

Though I don’t imagine anyone would intentionally put figs on enchiladas, the food service director’s comment made me curious. When I asked him about it, he disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a bag of something resembling chocolate chips. “Here, you can have this,” he said, “one less bag of figs we have to worry about.”

The figs had been purchased and distributed to the school district through the USDA’s Foods program, which supplies agricultural commodities and surpluses to schools across the nation. Schools choosing to take part in the National School Lunch Program, established in 1946 to provide nutritionally balanced, low-cost or free lunches to children unable to afford the full cost of a school meal, are eligible for cash subsidies and foods from the USDA Foods program for each qualifying meal...

First, I have a confession and a declaration of interest. I worked at an international development bank, and regret it. As a consequence, for better and worse, I am occasionally confronted with the question, “there’s plenty bad about the World Bank, but what should it do to make the world better?” The answer: the World Bank should stop what it’s doing. As the source of development knowledge, and as a principal creditor, the Bank holds a knife to the throats of its debtors – take our money and our advice, or else. Cancelling the loans, closing the Bank’s doors and paying reparations would be a great step forward.

This isn’t an answer that makes people happy. Yet if you saw a man booting someone in the teeth and they asked you what they might do to improve the condition of the person at his feet, you’d likely suggest that before embarking on a positive program, he might consider stopping with the kicking.

So here’s the twist. The groups most often doing the kicking when it comes to the US food system are corporations – the banks, the developers, the marketers, the processors. The unjust increases in diet-related ill-health, no matter how hard they try to shift blame to poor exercise habits, can be traced in no small part to ...