Public Policy Teach-Ins

MOFGA's Public Policy Committee Presents Two Important Teach-ins At This Year's Fair

Reversing the Obesity Epidemic: Partnering for a Healthier Future
Saturday, September 26, from 9:30 to 11:00 a.m. in the Youth Enterprise Zone Tent

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Featured Policy Speaker Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., whose presentation will be Contamination Without Consent: Cancer and the Environment, Reforming Chemical Policy.
Saturday, September 26, from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. in the Spotlight Stage Tent.

Reversing the Obesity Epidemic: Partnering for a Healthier Future.

According to the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention/Department of Health and Human Services, nearly three out of every five Mainers are obese or overweight. Obesity rates in Maine have risen 100 percent in only 17 years. Between one and five people die every day in Maine from causes related to being obese or overweight.

Join us in the Youth Enterprise Zone Tent for an important presentation about what’s making America, and Maine in particular, fat. Panelists will include Dr. Tim Goltz, a family physician who has practiced in Damariscotta since 1998; Karen Kleinkopf, a first grade teacher and co-founder of FARMS (Focus on Agriculture in Rural Maine Schools); and Heather Albert-Knopp, MOFGA board member and administrator of College of the Atlantic’s Sustainable Food Systems Program.

Goltz will lead the discussion, sharing knowledge he has gathered about obesity through his clinical practice and interest in public health issues. Since 2005, Goltz has served on the MaineHealth Healthy Weight Workgroup. He also chairs the MaineHealth Preventive Health Workgroup. Goltz will review the current status of obesity in Maine and the United States, causes of the obesity epidemic, and possible solutions. He is especially interested in fostering a dialog between MOFGA members and the medical community, as he believes that promoting local eating is one of the key interventions to improve community health.

Then Kleinkopf will discuss the role of FARMS (Focus on Agriculture in Rural Maine Schools), which she co-founded, in promoting increased use of locally grown organic foods in public schools, and strategies for working with food service directors, parents, administrators, teachers and students. Kleinkopf holds a bachelor’s in sociology from Clark University and a master’s in creative arts in learning and elementary education from Lesley University. She has taught first grade for 10 years in the public school system and is the mother of three young daughters. Kleinkopf also founded Miles of Friends, an intergenerational program between elders and second graders in Lincoln County.

Albert-Knopp will then discuss the importance of getting fresh, local, organic foods to all Maine people, regardless of income or education. Albert-Knopp helped launch and coordinate “farm to school” efforts in eastern Maine through the Healthy Acadia Coalition, bringing more local foods into school cafeterias and classes. She will discuss challenges in accessing local, organic food by participants in the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition program, which serves thousands of low-income Maine families.

MOFGA has invited administrators from the Departments of Health and Human Services; Agriculture; and Education to attend the presentation and participate in the subsequent question and answer session.

Heather Spalding, MOFGA’s associate director, will moderate the discussion.

Featured Policy Speaker Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D.

Contamination Without Consent
Cancer and the Environment
Reforming Chemical Policy

Also Saturday, September 26th, we will welcome back Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D., as our featured speaker for this forum. Ecologist, author, and cancer survivor, Ms. Steingraber is an internationally recognized expert on the environmental links to cancer and human health.

Steingraber’s highly acclaimed book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment presents cancer as a human rights issue. It was the first to bring together data on toxic releases with newly released data from U.S. cancer registries. Living Downstream won praise from international media, including The Washington Post, the Nation, The Chicago Tribune, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, The Lancet, and The London Times. Steingraber was named a Ms. Magazine Woman of the Year, and later received the Jenifer Altman Foundation’s first annual Altman Award for “the inspiring and poetic use of science to elucidate the causes of cancer,” and from the American Medical Writers Association, the Will Solimene Award for “excellence in medical communication.” The Sierra Club heralded Steingraber as “the new Rachel Carson,” and Carson’s own alma mater, Chatham College, selected Steingraber to receive its biennial Rachel Carson Leadership Award.

Continuing the investigation begun in Living Downstream, Steingraber’s more recent work, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood, explores the intimate ecology of motherhood. Both a memoir of her own pregnancy and an investigation of fetal toxicology, Having Faith reveals the alarming extent to which environmental hazards now threaten each crucial stage of infant development. In the eyes of an ecologist, the mother’s body is the first environment for human life. The Library Journal selected Having Faith as a best book of 2001, and it was featured on “Kids and Chemicals,” a PBS documentary by Bill Moyers. Sandra also has contributed to What We Do Now, an anthology of individual manifestos outlining a series of passionate new ideas for living.

Steingraber also has authored an alarming report entitled, The Falling Age of Puberty in U.S. Girls: What We Know, What We Need to Know, which shows that girls get their first periods today, on average, a few months earlier than did girls 40 years ago, and they get their breasts one to two years earlier. Over the course of a few decades, the childhoods of U.S. girls have been significantly shortened. Contributing facts include exposure to industrial chemicals in the environment. What does this mean for girls today and their health in the future?

An enthusiastic and sought-after public speaker, Steingraber has keynoted conferences on human health and the environment throughout the United States and Canada and has been invited to lecture at many universities, medical schools, and teaching hospitals--including Harvard, Yale, Cornell, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. She is recognized for her ability to serve as a two-way translator between scientists and activists. In 1999, as part of international treaty negotiations, she briefed U.N. delegates in Geneva, Switzerland on dioxin contamination of breast milk. Interviews with Steingraber have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, USA Today, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, on National Public Radio, “The Today Show”, and “Now” with Bill Moyers.

Sandra Steingraber in Maine

This presentation is made possible through a generous grant from an anonymous funder who helps Dr. Steingraber speak at events hosted by non-profit organizations. MOFGA is coordinating Dr. Steingraber’s visit with the Natural Resources Council of Maine (NRCM). During her visit to Maine, she will speak at the Camden Opera House on Friday evening, September 25th, at 7:00. For information about that presentation, contact NRCM at www.nrcm.org or 800-287-2345.

Steingraber is currently a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Ithaca College. She received her doctorate in biology from the University of Michigan and master’s degree in English from Illinois State University. She is the author of Post-Diagnosis, a volume of poetry, and co-author of a book on ecology and human rights in Africa, The Spoils of Famine. She has taught biology at Columbia College, Chicago, held visiting fellowships at the University of Illinois, Radcliffe/Harvard, and Northeastern University, and served on President Clinton’s National Action Plan on Breast Cancer.

MOFGA’s Public Policy Teach-in featuring Dr. Steingraber will take place on Saturday from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. in the Spotlight Stage Tent.