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Chicken Epidemic Linked to Equine Pathogen

By on April 2, 2013 in In The News

Free-range ChickensFree range chickens are great for the small scale grower or modern day homesteader for their eggs, bug control, funny antics and sometimes meat. One thing to be aware of is some of the dangers that face chickens, such as coyotes, dogs or hawks. Ravens are very fond of the eggs, often waiting until they know that a fresh egg is available and swooping down to carry off a tasty snack.

Another danger has recently re-surfaced on a free range chicken farm in Denmark. A pathogen that is commonly carried by horses has been shown to be the cause of a deadly outbreak of respiratory illness in the chickens. The bacteria Streptococcus equi zooepidemicus, often shortened to “Strep zoo” will colonize the skin and respiratory tracts of horses. It can cause pneumonia, strangles and other diseases, but also can be inactive in the horse, never showing signs or causing illness. These “silent carrier” horses can spread the pathogen within their area and to other animals. This is a prime reason for once or twice a year vet visits for your horses, as the vet will know what diseases are active in the immediate and surrounding areas along with what methods are best used to counteract them.

A large free-range poultry farm in Denmark had 80% of their chickens die over a four month series of outbreaks of respiratory illness. After laboratory testing at the University of Copenhagen traced the disease to the herd of horses living on the same property, researchers found that separating the horses from the chickens is one of the best methods of preventing the spread of the disease.

Outbreaks of Strep zoo in poultry have been very rare in recent decades, mainly due to the decline of the small farm with its varied populations of animals. With the increasing popularity and economic viability of the diversified small farms returning, we must be careful not to repeat the hard lessons learned by our grandparents and great-grandparents. This is just such one lesson; that of keeping the poultry separated from any direct contact with horses. The Strep zoo bacteria is a respiratory illness, so secondary contact should be fine, such as chickens pecking through the horse manure to control flies.

A Major Outbreak of Streptococcus equi subsp. zooepidemicus Infections in Free-Range Chickens Is Linked to Horses

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Junk Food Designed to be Unhealthy And Addictive

By on March 4, 2013 in In The News

Engineering Salt, Sugar and Fat to Create Food Addiction

“Today, one in three adults is considered clinically obese, along with one in five kids, and 24 million Americans are afflicted by type 2 diabetes, often caused by poor diet, with another 79 million people having pre-diabetes. Even gout, a painful form of arthritis once known as “the rich man’s disease” for its associations with gluttony, now afflicts eight million Americans.”
-Michael Moss in The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food

Salty Junk FoodHow did we reach this stage of poor health as a nation? The answer may surprise and anger you. As with most complex issues, the answer is not as simple as many talking heads in the media and nightly news would have us believe. It isn’t just a matter of willpower, or knowledge, or education, or alternatives to the junk food that is, quite literally, killing us. The answer is far deeper, wider reaching and more sinister.

Most processed foods these days are “optimized”, or engineered for better sensory perceptions that drive us to eat more. These sensory perceptions include but are not limited to the physical appearance, packaging, shape, mouth feel, taste and array of flavors, aftertaste, smell and satisfaction of a food. One of the most important factors that are considered is the strength of the urge for a second bite, sip or swallow, or a third.

Everyday people spend hours in tasting rooms where they touch, feel, sip, smell, swirl and taste whatever product is being optimized. Their opinions are fed through a very sophisticated program that not only produces an optimized formulation for the food in question, but also addresses marketing concerns such as colors and packaging. All of this is done to gain more “stomach share”- the amount of processed food that a consumer will eat from a certain company. These are not small concerns in an industry that measures stomach share in the billions of dollars annually.

The Holy Grail for food companies is what is termed the “bliss point”, that spot where consumers like a product the most, but are not satisfied enough with the flavor combination to stop eating it. Foods and drinks cannot be too flavorful, as consumers quickly get bored with them. The brain is quickly overwhelmed with big, intense and distinct flavors and shuts down the “want more” portion, thus stopping eating.

This has become one of the major guiding principles of the processed food industry. The biggest players owe their success to very complex and secret formulas that pique the taste buds but don’t have a distinct, intense flavor that shuts down the desire for more. This is the science of engineering addictive junk food at its most focused and intense.

For example, Frito-Lay employs about 500 chemists, psychologists and technicians to conduct research that cost up to $30 million a year that focuses on questions of crunch, mouth feel and aroma for each of their product lines. One of their tools simulates a chewing mouth to test and perfect their chips, like the perfect “break point”; people crave chips that crunch at about four pounds of pressure per square inch. You just can’t make stuff like this up!

With market shares reaching multiple billions of dollars, highly aggressive marketing tactics such as Coca-Cola make twisted sense. Their goal was simple; outsell every other beverage that people drink, including milk and water! From this goal they developed one question for the marketing division – “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?” This explains the door-to-door sales of Coke to Brazilians living in slums and frontier shanty-towns.

With all of this high technology, psychological and physiological research running into hundreds of millions of dollars, strategic placements and extremely focused marketing campaigns all supporting highly addictive processed foods, what chance do we as everyday people have?

Somewhat surprisingly, we actually have a pretty good chance. Alternative research has shown that people can “recover” from their junk food addictions simply by abstaining from them for a period of time. Eating normal meals, eliminating or restricting snacking on junk food, or replacing that food with real, healthy food recalibrates our taste buds. Skipping meals is one of the leading causes of increased junk food intake, not by desire but simply because of convenience. Snacking on fresh vegetables such as carrots, apple slices, celery or such that provides the crunch that we have come to desire helps ease us out of the salt/sugar/fat cravings and into appreciation of new tastes and flavors that have been lost as we overload our taste buds with junk processed foods. The brain has a chance to realize that the food being eaten has nutritional content and can once again establish a reasonable signal of when the stomach is “full”. It is no longer tricked into over-eating multiple times a day.

Once a recovery period of a couple of weeks to a month had been established, most people found the tastes of the same junk food they previously had highly enjoyed were too salty, fatty or sweet and lacked the real flavors that they had re-discovered and come to appreciate. They also had pleasant side effects of increased concentration, higher energy that lasted throughout the day, decreased weight, blood pressure and headaches, among many others.

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food – NYTimes.com

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All Seeds Are Not Equal

By on March 3, 2013 in In The News

Your Garden is Chemical-Free, Are Your Seeds?

Handful of seedsThere is a groundswell among home gardeners looking to grow their gardens in a less chemically intensive and more biologically responsible way. They spend hours reading and researching the best ways to build the health and fertility of their soils, improve the microbial communities in the soil and attract earthworms and beneficial insects and pollinators. The appearance of more earthworms, a new species of butterfly or pollinating moth is cause for celebration.

Seeds are a high priority for these gardeners. The purity, quality and provenance are paramount. After all the work and care that goes into the soil and preparation, they rightly want the best and highest quality seeds possible.

Surprisingly, this is exactly where the home gardener and small scale grower may be getting shorted on quality. Growing for seed as opposed to growing for food has its own unique challenges. For a plant to set seed it must reach full maturity, set flowers and produce seed. This takes much longer than a plant grown for food which is usually harvested at a much younger stage, succulent and tender. Producing seed exposes the plant to a whole host of insects and diseases that younger plants may not experience, due to the phytochemical changes that take place as the plant matures sexually in order to reproduce.

Margaret Roach wrote a great opinion piece in a recent New York Times Sunday Review:

“In my own vegetable beds I use no chemical heroics, and yet I had been using some conventionally produced seed that is often coddled and adapted to a life of “high inputs” that it won’t get from me or from an increasing number of other chemical-averse home gardeners.

That packet of seed may not grow as well in my garden as one that wasn’t grown with chemicals, and it also probably contributed to upstream pollution.”

Agricultural regulatory agencies allow an expanded use of petro-chemical pesticides, fungicides and fertilizers if a grower specifically grows for seed production and not food production. Many large-scale seed growers take advantage of this loophole, with the unintended consequence of creating a population of seeds that have become dependent on high-input, chemically intensive agriculture that many home gardeners are moving away from.

This has been ongoing for several decades now and is just being discovered as more and more gardeners and small scale agriculturalists are growing with less chemically intensive methods and are looking for sources of seed that are in line with their vision.

The end result of using seed grown under these conditions is that they usually don’t perform as well. They don’t germinate as strongly, are slower to put on growth, develop fewer flowers and are much more pest, disease and weather susceptible. In short, they simply aren’t as strong and resilient as those seeds grown in more biologically active soil with little to no chemical inputs.

While modern chemical agriculture initially looks very promising with better growth and increased yields, it is always discovered that plants grown with amply available macro-nutrients afforded by the chemical fertilizers become lazy and lose the ability to work for their nutrition, growing ever more dependent on the applied fertilizers for food and pesticides to control the insect populations.

The solution to these issues is to find seed sources that concentrate on growing their seed in a natural and low-input manner. These are often smaller, family-owned companies that are happy to answer questions on how their seeds are grown. They know the story of the seed they offer and willingly share it. Patronizing these companies only helps to strengthen the entire system by rewarding those that are congruent with the natural order of agriculture.

Look Carefully At Those Seeds – NYTimes.com

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Can the FDA be Trusted with Our Food Safety?

By on December 27, 2012 in In The News

By all accounts, the FDA is a miserable failure for food safety.

System Failure

Many of us remember the national food safety nightmare – a listeria outbreak in cantaloupes from around Rocky Ford, CO – in the summer of 2011. All in all, there were 147 illnesses and 33 deaths, making this incident the most deadly outbreak of food-borne illness in our country since 1924. The farms owners declared bankruptcy later that fall. All of this occurred because of jerry-rigged potato cleaning equipment had been adapted to wash melons in conditions that heavily favored bacterial growth. There were no anti-microbial solutions – such as chlorine – used to kill the bacteria, only water.

As bad as this sounds, it is only the tip of the iceberg. The real tragedy, or crime, depending on how you view it is that not once in its 20-year history had the farm been inspected by the the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), tasked with the oversight of the safety of our food supply. A third-party inspection company was used by the farm, and accepted by the FDA as certifying the safety of the equipment and processes used in its handling systems. In fact, the company had one of its auditors at the farm at the time the first people were being sickened, and gave the processing facility a “superior” rating of 96 percent after a four hour visit.

This, sadly, is not an isolated major food safety incident. There are about 48 million cases of food poisoning each year, according to the Center for Disease Control. These result in more than 3,000 deaths. Affected foods include fresh vegetables and fruits, eggs, meat and cheeses – just about everything we eat! The rate of outbreaks and food recalls has been steadily rising since 2007. In a nutshell, our national food safety record sucks.

Why have these outbreaks increased in numbers and severity? What can be done about it? Let’s address the first question, then we will look at the second one. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that the FDA is riddled with shortcomings, both in the administration and regulation areas. The process it uses for product recalls is ineffective and confusing, it has waffled with the blatent overuse of antibiotics in animal feeding operations, and lacks the manpower to perform the scientific studies required to do its basic job of food and drug safety. When enforcement is attempted it only occurs about half the time and is half-hearted, with fines rarely imposed. It also accepts third-party inspections, which often have serious conflict-of-interest issues alongside questions of the quality of inspections, as shown by the cantaloupe fiasco. Another example is the Iowa based salmonella based recall of over 550 million eggs that led to the first (and only) inspection performed by the FDA, followed by a warning letter threatening “regulatory action”. A month later the company was allowed to resume selling eggs, with no corrective action being confirmed or other inspections performed. Yet another example was the salmonella outbreak in peanut butter in 2007. A plant was missed after an “intensive round of inspections” that was the cause of a second, more deadly salmonella outbreak. When that plant was finally inspected, it was found to have mold on the walls and slime covering the processing equipment.

One of the main reasons for the increased number of outbreaks is the amount of control the food industry has over the FDA. When an industry has enough political power, it uses that power to determine what the FDA will do in response to an issue. Unfortunately, that response is all too often to “do nothing” unless there are enough deaths to attract enough public attention to the issue. In addition to political pull, there is a “revolving door” policy where top industry people go to work at the FDA, sometimes while still drawing a paycheck from their “former” employers. Conflict of interest, anyone? One of the prime examples of this is Michael Taylor, a Monsanto attorney who prepared research on the constitutionality of states determining labeling laws for Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone rBGH. Then, once he had become the FDA’s deputy commissioner for policy, he wrote the guidelines for rBGH labeling policy for the FDA. Not surprisingly, they were in agreement with the research memo he worked on while at Monsanto. This is not an isolated case, either. There are many former and current employees of Federal regulatory agencies who are or were industry executives and vice versa.

Now to address the question of what can be done? Surprisingly, there are several possible movements afoot that might have a positive impact on the state of food safety. The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011, a very controversial plan that was opposed by many smaller producers and supported by larger ones, may have some keys to this puzzle. It has been delayed with budget issues and has not gone into effect, but grants the FDA the power to prevent repeat offender from continuing to sell their product by revoking their registration. Another proposal by a Connecticut congresswoman would sever the ties of the food industry to inspection agencies. Third-party inspections can be effective if the inspector is not bing paid directly by the company they are inspecting. Some inspection companies have board members who are executives in client companies they monitor. Again, what conflict of interest?

These are all well and good, but can the average person trust them to be effective? Will they measurably improve the quality of the safety of our food? That remains to be seen. In the meantime you can do what has been proven to be extremely effective so many times before. If you are concerned with the safety of your food, do something about it. Take a personal interest and responsibility for what you eat. This means doing some reading and research, asking questions and listening to the answers. You will establish your own “approved list” of food suppliers that you trust and those to stay away from. This will take some work, but probably much less than you think and for a shorter time period than you would initially expect. Once you establish a safe list, you won’t have to research each and every food item you buy, just the new ones that you aren’t familiar with.

Not surprisingly, you will quickly find that the majority of food producers you come to trust are the ones you can get to know. They will be local or regional, with small to medium sized operations. They will answer your questions and your phone calls, not minding that you need some answers. They will offer farm or facility tours, which you should accept. There are already several organizations that help with finding just these sort of companies. We’ve written about several of these, one is FarmPlate, another is Horsepower and yet another is Local Harvest. All of these are online tools to help you do what I just described, find quality and trustworthy sources of good, clean and fair food.

By taking responsibility for your food, you ensure that what you eat is to your standards. You also take that decision process out of the hands and control of a corporation and put it firmly in your grasp. You might be surprised at how the quality and safety of your food improves with much less cost than you expected.

The FDA Is Out to Lunch

Third Party Inspections of Food Firms Fail

The Amazing Revolving Door – Monsanto, FDA & EPA

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US Government Backs Down From Big Ag

By on December 1, 2012 in In The News

Money RulesFor more than half of 2010 members of the Department of Justice and Department of Agriculture held investigative hearings around the country on the impacts that Big Ag – industrialized, commercial agriculture – had on the producers that supplied them or used their products. For many of the farmers working under contract to national companies, this was potentially great news. This was a unique opportunity to talk directly with some of the highest-ranking officials in agriculture and justice to tell their story and get some help. The message from Washington seemed to be pretty clear – they were interested to hear how the independent farmers of America were being used and pushed around by Big Ag, and they were not going to allow these practices to continue.

During their tour of more than seven months of 2010, the officials heard from many farmers, ranchers and other producers around the country. They learned of the power and technology concentrations in the seed, pork, cattle, dairy and poultry industries. They looked at the discrepancy between the price consumers pay for food and the price farmers receive for producing it.

Very similar stories were told over and over again from many separate parts of the country of abusive practices across the board in all of the different industries. No matter the industry or what part of the country the meetings were held in, it seemed that the story rarely changed. Contracts, terms and conditions that would make rural Southern sharecropping look pretty reasonable by comparison were the norm. Preferential treatment, grudge punishment for questioning the system and constantly rising costs and tightening requirements are all part and parcel of doing business with Big Ag these days. That doesn’t even begin to take into account the threats of lawsuits or financial punishment that accompanies much of these systems of contracts. In the seed industry, for example, it is common for farmers to have to sign a binding agreement in order to purchase corn, cotton or soy to plant in their fields. They must agree to use only the specified fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and seeds. They cannot save any of their seeds. Pamphlets are routinely mailed to all of the farmers in a region offering “gifts” as rewards for reporting their neighbors for “breaking contract”. Neighbors are suspicious of each other, even those who have farmed next to each other for several generations.

So, what resulted from all of that travel, all those meetings, all that planning that we, the taxpayers, paid for? Going on two years down the road – not much. The USDA developed legislation that revised and updated the regulation of livestock industries that would prevent the destructive practices that are now common. The Department of Justice initiated an anti-trust investigation into Monsanto and DuPont about their “possible anti-competitive practices in the seed industry.” Monsanto was targeted for its business practices surrounding its Roundup Ready soybean. Information on the DuPont investigation was not released.

The USDA legislation was met with heavy criticism and attack from the House of Representatives, the House Agriculture Committee, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Chicken Council, all of which was to be expected as they are funded by special interest groups of the very industries that would be affected by the revised laws. The final straw to the whole process was a rider in the June 2011 House Appropriations Committee funding bill that was was designed to strip the USDA of the funds it needed to finalize and implement the strongest of the proposed rules. By late 2011 the Dept. of Justice, Dept. of Agriculture, the USDA and the administration was in full retreat from the corporate livestock, seed, dairy and poultry lobbies.

The rider passed in November 2011, effectively killing the revisions. Very recently, the Dept. of Justice closed the antitrust investigation into the U.S. seed industry, absolving Monsanto and DuPont of any wrong-doing. The damage done to the very people that the hearings were trying to protect – the producers – is unknown at this point. From the Washington Monthly –

“By documenting the big processing companies’ exploitation of independent farmers, then failing to stop that exploitation and retreating in almost complete silence before entirely predictable resistance from the industry, the administration, for all intents, ended up implicitly condoning these injustices. The message to the processing companies is, after all, absolutely clear: you are free to continue to act as you will.”

Where do we go from here? Several things have been shown to us from these events and actions. One: industry controls government in this country, regardless of what anyone says to the contrary. Sure, there may be examples; they only serve to point out the minute exceptions, not the mainstream. Two: getting away from industry and corporate control of food is in all of our best interests. How do we do that? By continuing to support and actively participate in local, sustainable methods of growing and producing our food. Buy from the farmer’s market, join a CSA from a local grower, get to know who grows your food and how it is produced. Yes, this takes work. The alternative is the recent headline – “To Find Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria, Look to Commercial Pork.” Is that the food system we want and support?

Obama’s Game of Chicken

U.S. Closes Antitrust Investigation Into Seed Industry, Monsanto

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Horsepower – Direct to Consumer Online Marketplace

By on October 24, 2012 in In The News, Local Food, Making A Difference

Horsepower

Horsepower

We recently met the wonderful folks that started Horsepower at The Heirloom Exposition in Santa Rosa, CA mid September. The founders are both active farmers that attended Cal Poly. The development team is also from Cal Poly, and David is a great person. Not a farmer, but highly interested in the local food economy and finding ways to use technology to help bolster local agriculture.

Horsepower is an online marketplace that helps consumers find producers and a lot more. In addition to the standard “Where can I buy …” type of connections from consumers looking for locally produced foods, Horsepower goes beyond this to its’ real strength, of providing producers a portal to promote and sell their produce to the market of their choosing, from consumers to distributors to restaurants to processors. This is a perfect place for the diversified farms who are growing, raising and producing much more than just a couple of commodities. As their website says, “Horsepower users are made up of a community of sellers and buyers wanting to connect directly with each other. They are farmers and ranchers, farm suppliers, consumers, restaurants, FFA and 4H projects.”

There are a number of other web based producer to consumer applications that do a good job. What makes Horsepower different is that it was started by farmers and has grown from the perspective of a producer and how to communicate what is grown or raised to their customers. The depth and breadth of the menu can be a little overwhelming as a consumer, with listings such as Commodities, Animals, Farm Supply, Fresh Produce, Nursery, Dairy, Meat, General Store and even Real Estate. Each category is broken down into more defined areas to make it easier to search for what you are looking for. While most other farm-to-consumer website feature exclusively food and food related items, Horsepower will help you find equipment, buy or rent land, get a load of compost or see who has the closest supply of home-made apple butter. As a consumer, it is a bit like getting to see what the old fashioned feed or general store would have been like, as this is exactly how many of them worked within a farming community.

Horsepower was started by Diane and Ralph Friend after they had gotten frustrated by brokers earning more income than they did as producers, as well as seeing their customers paying much higher prices than they themselves would have charged. The concept was solid, but technology and social networks needed to grow to the point of being able to support the direct to consumer, social based web presence that it has become. That has taken some time for technology to catch up, but it has now. They are in the start-up or initial roll-out phase of getting everything working, with some great initial response and results. Both producers and consumers have shown a high level of interest, as the program provides transparency and empowerment for the farmer, giving them more control over who they’re selling to and how they’re selling. This translates to a win for the consumer as well, due to the fair, honest prices for the farmer usually reflect a savings to the consumer in the direct-marketing model. The consumer gets to know and understand the producer while directly supporting that producer and receiving a premium product at a better than average market price in the bargain. How’s that for a win-win solution?

Family Farmers Breathe New Life into Direct-to-Consumer Online Agricultural Marketplace

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Local Food Movement Feeds Commercial Customers

By on October 19, 2012 in In The News, Local Food

The Local Food Movement Gets A New Prescription

Local Food Economy

Local Food Economy

The local food economy is entering a completely new chapter with such seemingly unlikely partners as St. Joseph Mercy Hospital of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Leading edge, innovative hospitals such as St. Joseph’s are working to incorporate more local, sustainably grown produce into their menus and food systems. Things quickly become complicated due to the sheer amount of food that is prepared and the time needed for prepping. For instance the soup du jour for 600 people is 65 gallons. The ingredients needed in one just day’s vegetable soup would require hours of prepping and chopping, but is supplied by the current food distribution system already pre-washed, sliced, diced or cubed and ready for the cooking process. As an example, the green beans sourced from a local grower – 200 pounds of them – required 8 hours of washing, snipping, stringing and slicing to prep for that day’s evening meal. Even though the food was sustainable, the processing wasn’t as the kitchen isn’t equipped to handle that amount of prep work on a continuous, daily basis.

There is a tremendous enthusiasm and pressure from consumers of all sizes for more local food. These consumers aren’t just the mom and dad at the farmer’s market on Saturday, but are increasingly including the large scale commercial consumers such as hospitals, universities and large businesses that are looking to satisfy their customers and employees desire for better tasting, more healthy, local food. This is a good, or possibly great thing, if it can be handled to benefit everyone in the equation. One of the biggest challenges for local food economies is that the commercial consumers have been set up to take advantage of the industrial food distributors efficiency and convenience. They are the keystones as to why and how large distributors reign supreme in this market. Everything shows up prepped and ready to use – something that isn’t even thought of in the local food model. Granted, there can be some improvements in the commercial consumers kitchens, as most of them do not have any facilities set up for any prepping whatsoever. This can be remedied, but takes dollars, forethought, planning, construction and time to accomplish.

Farmer’s markets are an important piece of building the local food system, but they are still such a small part of the entire US food production – less than 1 percent for the just over 7,000 markets across the country- that significant growth and positive impacts for the legion of local growers can be realized by connecting small and mid-sized local farms with these institutional, commercial consumers in their local communities. Even very small changes in the purchasing patterns of these consumers can have major changes in the local food system, as an average sized hospital’s food budget can easily top $4 million annually. Just 1% of that is $40,000 that would stay in the local food system, making a huge positive impact. A more realistic figure of 2 – 3% purchasing change means $80,000 – $120,000 going into the local grower’s systems. What benefits and opportunities can you see $80,000 having on your local farmer’s market and local food network?

There are a couple of workable solutions to the questions of efficient local food distribution to make life easier for these larger customers. One is a regional food distribution hub, which some models have proven successful and others have failed in different regions of the country. Another is a co-operative system that partners with a smaller, regional food distribution system that is already in place, effectively adding a “local, sustainable food” section to it’s inventory of supplies and services. There are still others that bear examining and evaluating to see if they would work for a particular need or application.

There are a growing number of institutions just like St. Joseph’s who are responding to their customer’s desires and needs by putting their not inconsiderable moral, ethical and financial weight behind new local food initiatives. The market is there, it just needs some evaluating, adjustments and planning to make it happen, with hugely beneficial results for both the growers who can create the relationships and supply the needs as well as the institutional consumers that can broadcast the triumphs of inter-weaving local, healthy, sustainable food into their menus.

A New Prescription For the Local Food Movement

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Food Justice and Security Starts at Home

By on October 4, 2012 in In The News, Local Food

Food Justice Starts at Home

Food Justice Starts at Home

Food is at the forefront of many people’s minds today, with daily news channels reporting on foods to avoid for health reasons, food safety recalls almost daily, foods that a new study has shown will fight this or that disease, the growth of farmer’s markets and endless debates on local, sustainable food. Some articles and organizations trumpet the dire need to “feed the world”, while others are talking about feeding ourselves. There is ample evidence that food waste is a serious problem and that distribution systems are the culprit. Food has become noticeably more expensive over the past couple of years, with higher prices expected due to this year’s hard drought across much of the Midwestern US.

What’s a person to do today about sourcing and eating real, good and healthy food? One excellent example is that of Hnin W. Hnin, or more specifically, her mom. That’s right, her mom – a local, sustainable, cultural food hero to her family and an example of what is possible for everyone. Hnin’s family immigrated to New York over 25 years ago, but her mom has faithfully kept their cultural food traditions alive by cooking daily. She shops at the local farmer’s markets when she can, and the supermarket or discount stores when she can’t. She doesn’t cook every day to be hip, trendy or because some article in some magazine said it was the thing to do. She does it because that’s how she has been able to keep her family fed all these years on a shoestring budget. They have cooked their traditional, cultural foods that have helped them keep their identities intact in a world that wants to assimilate and homogenize everyone and everything. We could learn some serious lessons from them. Americans have the blessings and simultaneous curse of having a melting pot culture. Many of us have no strong cultural identity to ground us today, and so are swayed by corporate advertising that promises us a better life or to make us feel better about ourselves if we eat this or drink that. We are lead to believe that healthy food is more expensive, when the exact opposite is more often the case.

Eating real, good and healthy food everyday is not just the realm of the wealthy or famous, as is sometimes thought when we see the prices of organic produce in a Whole Foods market. It is possible to eat well and not spend a fortune doing so. That is where food justice and local and sustainable agriculture comes in. Everyone is more engaged with a local agricultural community, from the producers to the consumers. There is much more transparency, so everyone has a higher stake in the process, with resulting higher overall quality. The Slow Food organization mission statement is for food that is “good, clean and fair”. There are no modifiers in that statement, so it applies to everyone, everywhere. By bringing together a focus on good food – healthy, tasty, chemical free with clean food such as organic, local and sustainable along with fair food that brings sovereignty, food access and fair wage and labor into the mix there is a community of diversity that has not been seen yet on the world stage that is food. There is some real potential here, a nationwide community that is as diverse as it is engaged, committed and passionate about “good, clean and fair” food for everyone. It is surprising to some to see the growth in decentralized, independent food communities and pathways that have appeared across the nation. It is of no surprise to others who have worked to make it happen, a little at a time.

Sustainable food is how we will eventually feed ourselves on this planet, either by choice or by force. The current system is patently unsustainable and will continue to create more damages than benefits as it grows and continues, until it collapses. By definition, we will arrive at a sustainable food system or we won’t arrive at all. Exactly how this sustainable system functions is very much a work and dialogue in progress, with everyone having a say in it. Good, clean and fair are excellent starting points to found this new paradigm, and continue the work of building a network of diverse local food communities that nourish all of us.

Mom knows best: How food justice starts at home

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A Banker Bets on Sustainable Agriculture

By on September 5, 2012 in In The News

“It now appears that we are about five years into a chronic global food crisis that is unlikely to fade for many decades…”

Betting on Sustainable Agriculture

Betting on Sustainable Agriculture

These words were written by none other than an investment strategist who looks at what is or will be profitable in the future and he is betting that sustainable agriculture is one of them. Jeremy Grantham has also talked about the finite resources that are becoming apparent to all but those in government, industry and economists. He believes that our most pressing issue we are facing today is not energy or one of many other crises that we are facing, but food. Food, the third most important ingredient for life is, or soon will become center stage of the world’s attention.

Why the focus on food? Won’t GMOs and industrial agriculture feed us all? The fact of the matter is that system is completely unsustainable. It requires massive amounts of petrochemicals and petroleum just to keep it moving, much less expanding. As the cost of those petrochemicals and fuel continue to rise it will simply become much too expensive to grow food in that system, despite any and all subsidies, price protections or trade restrictions. Right now the foundation of the food system is in crises. The farmers are being squeezed while the corporate food manufacturers are still profitable. It is very easy to see the declining grain production (even before the drought of the past 2 years), across the board increases in resource costs and plummeting crop yields from petrochemical fertilizers. The future of industrial scale farming isn’t looking too rosy right now. What happens when the farmers can’t afford to farm? When they can’t afford the costs to run the tractors, buy the seeds, fertilizers, insecticides and pesticides that are required to grow the industrial crops? Who will do the growing then?

From his quarterly letter –

• Grain productivity has fallen decade by decade since 1970 from 3.5% to 1.5%. Quite probably, the most efficient grain producers are approaching a “glass ceiling” where further increases in productivity per acre approach zero at the grain species’ limit (just as race horses do not run materially faster now than in the 1920s). Remarkably, investment in agricultural research has steadily fallen globally, as a percent of GDP.
• Water problems will increase to a point where gains from increased irrigation will be offset by the loss of underground water and the salination of the soil.
• Persistent bad farming practices perpetuate land degradation, which will continue to undermine our long-term sustainable productive capacity.
• Incremental returns from increasing fertilizer use will steadily decline on the margin for fertilizer use has increased five-fold in the last 50 years and the easy pickings are behind us.
• There will be increased weather instability, notably floods and droughts, but also steadily increasing heat. The last three years of global weather were so bad that to draw three such years randomly would have been a remote possibility. The climate is changing.
• The costs of fertilizer and fuel will rise rapidly.

Grantham believes that we will transition to a more or less to a sustainable, organic and largely regional food system in the foreseeable future. This, coincidentally, is almost the exact same argument that organic and sustainable farming folks have been talking about for several years now, although for somewhat different reasons. His thoughts are that we have a choice – we can voluntarily create and adapt the above mentioned sustainable food production model, or we will be forced to do so. Not by any government or corporation, but by scarcity. When industrial, chemical agriculture finally proves that it really can’t feed the world, what then? Organic, sustainable agriculture may be the only player left at the table.

He has bet on organic and sustainable agriculture by establishing foundations that finance research into better organic agriculture methods. Once the best practices and highest productivity methods are known, he wants to directly finance those organic farms. This will take some time, as there is no current infrastructure, training or experience on this scale to draw from and must be created. Current models need to be scaled up and tested to be able to dovetail into an overall system that not only helps to maintain itself, but grows itself as organically as the food it produces.

A Banker Bets on Organic Farming

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Real Food Reaches Critical Mass

By on August 23, 2012 in In The News, Making A Difference

The logic of the plantation is the logic of today’s industrial food system.

Real Food Challenge

Real Food Challenge

Is the logic of the chattel slave plantation the foundation of today’s industrial food system? There are some compelling parallels here. The logic of prioritizing profits over human, animal and environmental well-being for one. The complete disregard for the quality or health of the food produced is another. It is becoming increasingly clear that the industrial food system just simply doesn’t work for those that are involved with it, the notable exception being the shareholders. The workers in the system have no health or financial security, the teenagers and young people have serious health issues – diabetes the lead concern- and the farmers and food producers are getting pushed off the land as superfarms continue their consolidations. So where does real food enter the picture?

The industrial model may work for some things, but… it doesn’t work for food.

There is another logic, however. The logic of the Real Food Challenge, founded on respect and balance. Profits that are shared fairly with the workers and producers bringing the food to our tables. This project is one aspect of a much larger movement seeking a just and sustainable food economy. College students are driving real, healthy, measurable change in campus cafeterias. They work with administration in the existing budgets and spending programs to shift the dollars spent into a more sustainable, responsible and local direction. This becomes an investment in a real food economy. After all, students are paying customers of their respective schools, so they should have a say in the foods that they are served.

In three years, the Real Food Challenge has built a network of over 5,000 students at more than 350 schools across the country. They have won more than $45 million in real food purchasing commitments, including the entire University of California system. They predict that in the next 10 years, that number can exceed $1 billion. That’s starting to get into some real money!

One of the biggest successes isn’t just the dollars that have been re-directed, but the small scale, local producers that are able to stay in business and even thrive with the Real Food Challenge. Students are advocating for local producers, then using their examples and farms as studies in classes that help to close the circle. Instead of a negative action of avoiding or boycotting an industrial food producer, this project takes a positive action by redirecting existing dollars in a positive direction while improving several parts of the cycle at the same time. School food is improved, students and faculty health improves, energy and money is saved on shipping and storage costs and the producers are able to make a liveable wage while seeing where the results of their hard work goes.

This is a prime example of thinking outside of the box while engaging the existing system, to the benefit of many of the participants in the food system. We see more and more of these ground-breaking examples happening, a very promising light being shined in an otherwise uncertain time.

A Critical Mass for Real Food by Anim Steel

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