Caroline Wimberly traveled to Durban, South Africa in late August 2015 to attend three conferences on behalf of Brighter Green. Afterwards, she traveled extensively around the country. This blog is the first in a four-part series on her experiences and observations during the trip.

As Brighter Green has documented previously (here and here, to start), Western-style fast food chains have expanded quickly in the developing world. Judy Bankman wrote about the effects of these chains on public health and food security in South Africa. I saw my fair share of Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) outposts during my travels. In fact, I encountered more KFCs in South Africa than any other quick service food chain (including McDonalds). Cheap, “finger-licking” chicken products are highly popular, and due to the quick development of industrial poultry facilities around the country, are widely available.

In 2012, South Africa had more than 600 KFC outlets, with about 8-10% of the commercial chickens produced domestically being sold through KFC, according to a KFC executive. As of October 2015, there are over 800 restaurants, according to KFC South Africa’s website (about a 33% increase from 2012). Below is a map from their website showing the distribution of these locations: Read More

Here are the comments Brighter Green submitted to the U.S. Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Health and Human Services (HHS) in May 2015 in support of including sustainability criteria in the revised “Dietary Guidelines for Americans.” The Guidelines help determine U.S. national nutrition policies and food procurement (purchasing) programs. This year, for the first time, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC), the independent scientific body that advises the USDA and HHS, recommended adoption of sustainability considerations in the 2015 edition of the Guidelines. 

You can read all of the more than 24,000 comments submitted to USDA and HHS—a record—here: In addition to the comments, more then 200,000 people signed petitions supporting inclusion of sustainability in the Guidelines. Please see My Plate, My Planet: for more on the sustainability language and what’s at stake as the Guidelines are revised. Read More

This blog entry was originally written by What’s For Dinner? director Jian Yi on a train ride to Beijing on World Vegetarian Day (October 1) 2014.

What’s For Dinner? and Vegucated have had six successful screenings in Guangzhou. Much gratitude is due to the efforts of our friends at GAFA, Young City, Yi’he Vegetarian Restaurant, the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, the South China Normal University, the South China University of Technology, and the Guangdong Food and Drug Vocational School.

My arrival in Beijing today coincided with this year’s World Vegetarian Day. Restaurants and snack bars populate the modern, spacious waiting hall of the Guangzhou South train station. And yet not one offers a hot vegetarian breakfast. Every neatly packaged bun sold in the convenience stores contains meat, and the situation is no different at the fast food restaurants. Perhaps you will say that McDonald’s does not traditionally offer vegetarian food? But McDonald’s traditionally does not offer fried Chinese bread sticks either; a fact which does not seem to stop them from being sold at Guangzhou South station.

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No matter where we are, there is one thing in common for the end of year holidays, whether you’re celebrating Christmas or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or another festival: food. Special dishes. Holiday meals. Gathering around a table. It’s time to be merry and stay happy, to try and forget about sorrow and anger, and often, to give up asking too many questions—questions that may lead to the truth, and the truth can be inconvenient.

On November 28 and 29, 2014, Brighter Green’s Mia MacDonald and Wanqing Zhou joined environmental and rights advocates at the International Strategy Meeting on Impacts of Unsustainable Livestock and Feed Production and Threats to Community Conservation in Paraguay. The meeting and field trips were organized by the Global Forest Coalition, an international non-profit network of organizations based in Paraguay and the Netherlands.
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This article originally appeared in The Huffington Post on September 23, 2014.

Co-authored by Wanjira Mathai, director of the wPOWER Project at the Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace & Environmental Studies at the University of Nairobi and Chair, Green Belt Movement

Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist and 2004 Nobel Peace Laureate, was fond of recounting a children’s story she’d been told on a visit to Japan. A huge fire breaks out in the forest, runs the tale. The animals are transfixed and overwhelmed by the conflagration. All of them but a hummingbird, who resolves to do something. She flies to the nearest stream, dips her beak into it, and drops a bead of water onto the flames. The elephant, the lion, the giraffe, and the other animals laugh at her, as she flies back and forth over and over again. “You’re just a tiny hummingbird,” they jeer. “What difference do you think you can make?” The hummingbird replies: “I’m doing the best I can.”

For many who heard Wangari tell the story, the message of maximizing our abilities and passions for the greater good rather than descending into cynicism or despair was galvanizing. Wangari embraced this interpretation wholeheartedly. Yet it’s clear that a more challenging, even provocative message lies within it. That message has more relevance than ever as hundreds of thousands of people, us among them, marched Sunday in the streets of New York demanding their leaders take urgent action to address climate change, and as heads of government, industry, and civil society gather at the United Nations for an unprecedented global-warming summit.

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