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The good folk at Canada’s Globe & Mail asked me to write a piece called “What I Did This Summer.” Never having written one before, I thought I’d channel my inner 12 year old.

Cuzco, Peru: This summer I started to write a book and film a documentary with my hero. His name is Steve James. He filmed ‘Hoop Dreams’ which was about basketball and hope and disappointment and race and inequality and America. Our film is called “Generation Food”. It is about how we will eat in the future.

So I went to Japan. People used to live long lives in Okinawa because of the traditional diet. Lots of people lived until 100. Now grandparents are burying their children. They don’t eat as they used to. When the Americans came with their military base, they brought fast food for the GIs. Everybody eats it now. I visited farmers who plant crops on US bases. They did it so often that the Americans gave up and just let them do it. I ate goat sashimi because it would have been rude not to.

Then I went to Cuba. I saw where Hemmingway pickled his liver. I learned why the US bans Cuban rum. If they let it in everyone would drink it. The food isn’t very good. The Cubans blame the Spanish for making them want to eat beans and rice and pork. This is a shame. Cubans have some of the tastiest fruits and vegetables on the planet. I talked to Cuban cooperative farmers. Some of them talked about money in ways that would make a Wall Street...

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For most people in the U.S., our knowledge of the food system comes from supermarkets and corporate advertising campaigns. The dominant narrative of our food system—that it is healthy and efficient—is inaccurate, incomplete and deceptive. Even the most popular “alternative” stories—that of idyllic farms supplying produce to local co-ops or organic cafés—provide an incomplete vision of what is needed and what is possible.

The full impact of the food system on the people who live and work throughout the food chain—particularly people of color, from the fields, to the processing plants, to the supermarkets, to the plate—is hidden. The lack of these stories being heard, and therefore considered in policy and planning processes, reinforces health inequities and the current legacy of historical injustices.

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Originally published in Hyphen Magazine.

“No rice, please.” I keep hearing this disturbing sentence from Asian American friends. Many are fighting the battle of the bulge and some are convinced that rice is the enemy. Or maybe it’s gluten. Wait, was it sugar, or eating late at night? Despite an endless stream of nutrition information, we seem more confused than ever about what to eat to stay fit and feel good. As for myself, a rice-less future is not one I want to participate in! To add to the problem, the food and pharmaceutical industries often pay nutritionists as spokespeople, so sorting out truth from ads can be near impossible. The result: voodoo attempts at weight loss. 

For help, I reached out to Professor Marion Nestle, a UC Berkeley grad and one of America’s leading experts on health, nutrition and weight loss. She is the author of the popular blog Food Politics and a professor at New York University. Her newest book is Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, and I hoped reading it would help me understand whether one of my favorite foods, rice, was leading to my...

Originally published in GOOD.

In the Caribbean, a sea of tea green and gentian blue, of overlapping cultures, diverse tastes, a thousand histories and conflicting visions for the future, there’s one view that unites everyone: Cuba has the Worst. Food. Ever.

You might blame bad food on the blockade, yet there are thriving markets filled with fresh fruits and vegetables. In Havana, around 60 percent of the delicious tropical produce comes fresh from the city and its surrounds. Even if most Cubans eat it only a handful of times a month, the backbone of Cuban food needs to have bones in it. Anything that isn’t meat is just treading water, and often tastes that way too.

Some people suggest that today’s Cuban love affair with meat stems from the 'Special Period,' after the end of communism, when Cuba’s trading links sank with the Iron Curtain, and the average Cuban lost 20 lbs because food—especially meat—was so hard to come by. Yet while this explains meat's popularity, it doesn’t explain why it's often so poorly cooked.

Some of the more embarrassed Cubans I spoke to blamed the Spanish, for bringing their meat and beans and rice culture to the Caribbean. But Spanish food is often quite good, while Cuban cuisine rarely manages to rise above the culinary low water mark of 1970s English...