Coming Back to Food

[Hello, folks, Natasha here. I'm getting married in about a week and a half, then honeymooning, and Melissa has been kind enough to agree to guest host full-time for the last half of July, easing into things over the course of the following week. It's my pleasure to be leaving you in her capable hands. Welcome, Melissa!]

I am excited to join Natasha here at Change.org to explore sustainable food issues during July.

For me, I've come back to food as an important issue after spending several years living off junk food with farmers markets peppered here and there. I am lucky that within my close circle of friends, I have friends working on several avenues of food-- from having their own organic farm, to adding local foods to their bagel shop, and even working on food policy in New York City.

As a little kid, I was fascinated with plants and food. I remember growing pumpkins in kindergarten, starting lettuce seeds on a sponge for a science project in second grade, and the sheer amazement of seeing a watermelon plant growing out a sink in seventh grade a few months after some seeds ended up in the trap.

As a college student, I was angered to learn that not everyone has access to healthy foods. I did not understand why there were not any real grocery stores covering most of Newark, NJ, or why Philadelphians didn't have grocery stores evenly spaced out across the city. I did not understand why farmers are given subsidies to grow corn while small, local farms have a hard time making it work.

Now, I am figuring out how to incorporate food advocacy into my everyday life. I've started an organic garden at my mom's house. There is almost nothing better than walking around barefoot, pulling weeds, and then eating the veggies I grew! I've also started to read more about food writ large, and I've started to talk with the leaders in the local foods movements, here and elsewhere.
I hope to share with y'all what I am learning. I hope to ask phenomenal questions and get incredible answers.

And, I hope we get offline more, outside more, and enjoy the beauty of a summer squash.

(Photo credit: j.e.n.n.y. on Flickr.)

World According to Monsanto, pt 10, Taking Over

This last episode of the documentary covers the GMO-mediated takeover of South American farmland, replacing small, diverse farms with a desert of genetically engineered soybeans that will be fed mainly to livestock in wealthier nations.

But, but, but ... we need to feed the world, right? Yes. And there are much better ways to do that.

Dr. Doug Gurian-Sherman, an expert in genetic engineering, explains as much in an interview at The Ethicurean.

First, he explains the difference between types of yield. There's intrinsic yield increase, higher food production capacity mediated by the genes and environmental interactions of the plant. Then, there's operational yield increase, where losses from pests and weed competition are cut, therefore boosting net yield.

Gurian-Sherman worked on the Union of Concerned Scientists' report demonstrating only very slight operational yield increases due to the introduction of GMO crops in the US. But they don't have any traits on the market that can increase intrinsic yield. He explains the problem with trying to do that, specifically recent obstacles to realizing the company's claim that they can 'get more out of every raindrop':

... In the report we cover an interesting case. One problem with some drought-tolerant crop varieties is that under normal moisture conditions, the variety doesn’t yield as well as varieties without drought tolerance. The New York Times recently covered a potential breakthrough with a particular gene that reportedly conferred drought tolerance but didn’t show that downside. But then a few months later, another lab working on the gene for different reasons found that it made plants more susceptible to various plant diseases. So the same gene that confers drought tolerance makes plants more susceptible to disease. Farmers may have to use pesticides to control these diseases if this drought tolerance gene is approved. How will this balance out in terms of benefit and risk?

Such unintended effects are not publicized because companies don’t like to talk about failures. The bottom line is that there has been a huge amount of effort to produce a lot of crops over the years with success of only a few traits: Bt and herbicide tolerance. They have not resulted in significant yield gains at all in the U.S. And we also have to put any yield gains in the context of the expense and other factors and compare GE technology to other technologies and production methods. ...

Gurian-Sherman also details more of the things that can go wrong when trying to boost yield through adjusting complex, multi-variable traits. There are often unintended consequences, such as the increased lignin production in the cell walls of Bt corn plants. Lignin isn't harmful, to my knowledge, but it's not edible either to us or the majority of microorganisms, so it would probably take longer to break down.

What would the effects be of having corn residue that's less digestible to the soil microfauna? I don't know, though it could conceivably reduce biodiversity and the available food supply for communities of organisms that make soil healthy. It might considerably alter the makeup of soil ecosystems by favoring different microbes, or not have any effects.

Though it would be nice if we could know for sure. Especially nice if our food was labeled so that we knew if we were participating in the experiment.

Wednesday Brunch: Eat Fast Before It's Gone

Raiding the internet fridge for your intellectual delectation ...

- Worries about a neo-colonial farmland grab continue to grow and will be raised at the G8.

- You probably need to get outside more.

- The Food Safety Working Group is ready, with a lot of new recommendations and a Mike Taylor, to boot.

- How many billion dollar droughts will it take to get the agriculture sector to take global boiling seriously?

- Richard Heinberg talks about the implications of peak oil for agriculture:

Border Patrol Plans To Erode the Rio Grande's Banks

Anyway, that's what the headline of this story should read, though the editors chose the following instead:

Border Agents to Dump Agent Orange-Like Chemical to Kill All Plant Life Among U.S.-Mexico Border

From the article:

(NaturalNews) The Border Patrol has temporarily postponed -- but refused to cancel -- plans to use helicopters to spray herbicide along the banks of the Rio Grande between the cities of Laredo, Texas and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, in order to kill a fast-growing river cane that provides cover for undocumented migrants, smugglers and other border crossers. ...

What happens when you completely defoliate river banks, perhaps with something like a broad-spectrum herbicide, is that the banks themselves start rapidly eroding, which silts up the river, which increases the chance that a freak storm, or one of the Gulf of Mexico's occasional hurricanes, will overrun those banks.

Now granted, we are talking about a river that's so extensively drawn down for irrigation that it doesn't reach the Gulf of Mexico all the time. But sometimes, even on the Texas/Mexico border, it does rain.

As to the particular herbicide planned for use, imazapyr, both Mexico and the European Union consider it more toxic than does the US EPA. The EU has gone so far as to ban it.

I wonder when we'll hear the Border Patrol planning to do something this stupid along the Canadian border. Oh wait, right, that'll be never.

Can't we just take it as a compliment that people want to come to our country looking for new opportunities? We should be flattered. Especially if they're looking for work, because every country needs good workers and hardly anyone can better prove their chutzpah than someone who's willing to come to a whole other nation where the customs are different and they stick out in a crowd.

No sense to be made of any of it.

Nutritionism and Guilt vs Coffee

This is some weapons-grade nonsense:

... Coffee is a toxin that shuts down the cleansing process of the body and locks other toxins such as fat inside the body. Therefore, it is wise to quit drinking coffee if you are serious about losing weight.

Just a day ago, I was reading about how my beloved (yeah, I'm objective) coffee can help reverse the effects of dementia in old age, some toxin,* and this relates sidewise to understanding why describing fat as a toxin is just plain ignorant.

In fact, fat has a lot of bearing on the proper function of the brain and our bodies, notably in the myelin sheathing that surrounds our nerve cells.

Myelin is made primarily of fats and lipids and its destruction in diseases like multiple sclerosis slows nerve impulse transmission so badly that victims begin to lose all functions mediated by the brain and spinal cord. It's the electrical insulation properties of fat that are responsible for the fact that "nerve impulses in unmyelinated neurones have a maximum speed of around 1 m/s, [while] in myelinated neurones they travel at 100 m/s."

A human body that regarded fat as a toxin would destroy its own nerve casings. Therefore, if coffee really prevented your body from recognizing fat as toxic, the proper response would be to have it all the time.

But does caffeine affect fat retention one way or another? As a stimulant, and stimulants are generally appetite suppressants, you might even expect it to cause weight loss. Katherine Zeratsky, a registered dietitian at the Mayo Clinic, says coffee has no measurable effect on long-term weight, except that excess consumption of high calorie coffee drinks has the same likely effect as consuming lots of other high calorie foods.

So, to recap - Fat isn't a toxin. Coffee doesn't seem to affect weight, but the things you add to it might.

So what's left to say? That there's an endless market for hashing over every little facet of people's diets looking for hidden guilt using unsupported assertions that can contradict basic biological principles. That it's humorously easy to jump the gun and assume that something people like, coffee, is by definition bad for us. Meh.

Take away some of those unfounded assumptions and there isn't anything to that article but the idea that a person needs to be 'cleansed.' Sounds like a bunch of distracting, pseudo-religious claptrap to me. You want to worry about a toxins that improperly accumulate in the body, worry about bisphenol A or pthalates, or any of the other weird chemicals that leach out of our ubiquitous plastic food packaging.

Again, again and again: Guilt culture and nutritionism act as a hindrance to sensible discussions about food and sustainability. They are wasteful diversions from serious questions concerning recent declines in public health, which you would think people would know better than to blame on foods that humans have been ingesting for millenia.

* To be extremely clear: Dementia is multi-causal and I found no mention in publicly available news articles linking coffee's anti-Alzheimer's effects to fat regulation. When causation is first established in health studies, it can take quite a lot of work to determine the mechanism because living systems are complicated and we don't understand them as well as we'd like. It wasn't my idea to connect these concepts together, hence, the debunking.

(Photo credit: Il Quoquo on Flickr.)

Weight

I never know quite how to react when people tell me they're losing weight. Sure, if they're going to bring it up and seem happy about it, I'll congratulate them. Seems only polite.

But I'd feel odd being too enthusiastic about it. It seems like an implied criticism of their previous weight and a reinforcement of society's tendency to pass harsh moral judgment on weight in excess of an ideal that hardly anyone can live up to. Which is rich, considering that this is the same society that glories in supersized junk food and sodas, ever on the hunt for the faster, cheaper bite.

Indeed, as Ellinorianne writes at DailyKos, the food most Americans commonly eat has often been designed to increase our calorie intake on purpose. The book she's talking about is David Kessler's, The End of Overeating:

... The most stunning thing about the book is the food industry's push to make more highly palatable, cheaply made foods to make sure we can eat more calories in less time. I don't even frequent many of the places mentioned in the book and when I do, I tend to stay away from the fried foods, etc. (I have a soft spot for California Pizza Kitchen's Japanese eggplant pizza with the whole wheat crust) and usually eat half of what's put in front of me, it's just so much food.

So not only are we eating larger portion sizes but consuming foods that are easier to eat, less chewing (I'm serious, they do this on purpose) so that every bite is more calorie dense and unfortunately much lower in nutritional density. It's the trade off and it's killing us. And these foods are convenient and cheap for many families. ...

Then she talks about how she doesn't want to lose the weight she's struggling with out of shame or insecurity, but broadly, because she wants to have a healthy relationship with food and her environment. That, I can wholeheartedly congratulate.

Though losing weight for its own sake ... I'm a medium sized person, 5'6", a little squidgier than I was as a teen and about 20 lbs heavier. I usually wear a medium, or ladies' size 6 or 8, depending, though in a store where the sizes run smaller than the department stores I normally shop, a 10.

At 34, I feel that while it would certainly behoove me to exercise more so my deskbound job doesn't land me in a cardiac unit at 50 (which feels alarmingly close, I must say), I'm a perfectly reasonable size for a person to be.

Last year, I ended up on a shopping trip with a 12 year old cheerleader who's slight and small, with a slightly convex stomach. She was worried that everything made her look fat and her stomach look huge. Nonetheless, she could have been wearing a muumuu without anyone thinking she was doing so because she had anything to hide.

After a mere 20 minutes of this, I felt hideous. While I remember that, as a child, adults looked different enough that it was hard to wrap my head around the fact that we were all one species, and I know she didn't mean anything by it, it was making me and all the adult women around me squirm. What a monster I must be, what a behemoth, I thought.

All the progressive humanism in the world wasn't enough to keep my self-esteem up during this temporary, entirely oblique onslaught that wasn't even directed at me.

I shook it off, leaving me with only a niggling, residual feeling of stupidity. But I'm still totally baffled by the fact that we've managed to create a world where a very fit 12 year old, a cheerleader who also runs track and probably wouldn't weigh 100 pounds in soaking wet denim, can look in a mirror and see only FAT! That is just so unbelievably frakked up that I don't think I have the words for it. It's an outrage.

It's particularly awful in light of the fact that heavyset women face significant pay discrimination because it's been completely normalized to say nasty things about overweight women and assume their incompetence, their unworthiness to even be seen in public. It's so bad that it was relatively easy to document shopping discrimination against larger women, which is economically foolhardy behavior, considering that it turns away potentially paying customers.

After all, women are supposed to be 'lovely' and to smile and to be pleasing, visually and otherwise. At all times, all ages.

For women, beauty is also explicitly equated with virtue in the popular stories that l and every other little girl grows up with. If you think 'ugly stepsister' is a meaningless turn of phrase, think again. Goodness means beauty and beauty means being thin, but not too thin, and fit, but not muscular, because that's gross. So stay away from the free weights, missy.

In the US, fat is the universal sin of our era. It's one of the main reasons why it's so hard to have a sensible public conversation about food that doesn't end up making everyone feel as terrible about themselves as being compared with a 12 year old athlete.

I don't know how to fix any of that, so I suspect I'm just going to keep feeling extremely awkward when people brag to me about losing weight and I worry that they're doing it so others will know that if they're fallen, they're at least trying to be righteous. And I just, I mean, come on, people, it's a little extra weight. You'd think they'd done something horrible, maybe tanked the world economy like those vile SOBs at Goldman Sachs, but let me tell you, those bastiches don't feel sorry about that at all.

On the scale of sin, we spend too much time worrying about the petty imperfections of ordinary people, while thieves, mass murderers, poisoners, defrauders, greedheads and blackmailers get to run our major societal institutions with near impunity. Why do we let them do that? Adding insult to injury, not only is nothing ever done about it, they don't even get a tenth the disapproval directed at them as a person does for being seen eating a dessert while overweight?

Wtf is wrong with us? I submit that it is not principally the size of our buttocks.

Food Safety Working Group Accepting Comments

So the White House's Food Safety Working Group is on Twitter, and they said they were open for comments. Here's what I wrote them:

First, it's ridiculous that the FDA, with responsibility for 80% of food inspections, has a much smaller inspection personnel budget than the USDA. And I certainly hope that if Michael Taylor is put in charge of the FSWG, that he's gotten over that nonsense about physical plant inspections being unnecessary after all the recent contamination outbreaks. Otherwise, this FSWG effort will rightly be seen as a pointless chicken sacrifice, a ritual effort to give the appearance of doing something while merely hoping to calm the public.

The 'do something, anything' mentality is why we still have take our shoes off at the airport and walk around barefoot in public, a useless and humiliating exercise that distracts from the utter lack of security surrounding air freight and shipping ports. Please don't waste people's time.

Second, I know a lot of money has been spent studying it, but please do what you can to halt this destructive National Animal ID System plan at the premise ID level. It penalizes small farms and doesn't help with identifying the main source of contamination, which is poor packing plant safety practices and excessive line speed during slaughter.

Also, anything that puts the Amish out of business is a PR disaster that the federal government probably doesn't want to deal with.

Third, please establish real accountability in food labeling and the supply chain. Manufacturers should know what they're putting in food and where it comes from or they shouldn't be allowed to sell it. A good start would be requiring the labeling of food that might contain genetically modified organisms, because people should have the right to know what they're eating and corporations should have to tell us, even if they can afford to buy entire congressional committees.

'We don't know' should no longer be an acceptable answer from food manufacturers as to where their products come from or what they're made of.

Thank you for reading.

GMO Grapes

The SO and I were talking just last night about what a complete and utter sh*t fit would probably rip through France if genetically modified grapes were ever introduced. Also, Italy.

Not that it's unreasonable. They have centuries worth of branding to protect. Costa Rica has the same attitude towards coffee, of which there are two varieties; Coffea arabica and Coffea robusta.

C. arabica produces a less bitter, high quality bean, and it needs high elevation. C. robusta can grow in lowland areas, but the quality is considered very poor. Costa Rican law prohibits growing C. robusta anywhere at all, on account of wanting to maintain their reputation and secure the best possible price on glutted international markets for their prized coffee crop.

So anyway, I'm looking through the news today and, wouldn't you know it, someone's gone and made genetically modified grapes. I have a hard time believing that they'll be allowed in countries that are so very proud of their heritage vineyards.

(Photo credit: by david.nikonvscanon on Flickr.)

Persian Eggplant Stew

I got a cookbook from friends, "A Taste of Persia", by Najmieh K. Batmanglij, for my birthday this year. I just tried my first recipe out of it and omfg, it turned out very good, so I thought I'd share it.

I didn't stick entirely to the recipe due to not having the exact ingredients and seeing it made with slight variations previously, as will be explained below. This dish is a good introduction to Persian cooking and in spite of an hour and a half minimum cooking time, fairly simple to make.

The Persian name for it is given as Khoresh-e bademjan, literally, stew of eggplant. It's got a citrusy tomato base, the eggplant ends up very soft and savory, and it's been one of my favorites since the first time I tasted it years ago.

Equipment you will use: Both rangetop and oven. Two medium saucepans, a large skillet and a deep, covered baking dish ... or ... a roomy dutch oven, a skillet and a medium saucepan. Measuring spoons.

Extras: Rice - this dish is meant to be served over rice, so depending on the type you'd like to have, start making a pan of rice right around the time everything else goes in the oven. Dried lime - if there's an international grocery near you, you might be able to find a bag of dried limes, (the ones I found came from Mexico, so you don't necessarily need to have a Middle Eastern grocery nearby) as a substitute for either lime juice or the unripe grapes, which last I've never found anywhere. Saffron - this spice is a near constant in Persian cooking, and usually pricey, but you can often find a good deal on it at an international grocery store. Garlic - as I've mentioned before, you can get huge jars of crushed garlic at an international grocery for a good price, saves a lot of hassle and can last a while even if you use as much garlic as we do. Turmeric - this spice seems to be widely available and is a bright orange-yellow color, it's a common ingredient in curries and is one of the very few traditional remedies proven to have positive health effects.

Meat: While the recipe calls for meat, that's easily optional. This dish is very much about the vegetable flavors and textures and would be plenty delicious without it.

Ingredients: In plain font below are the ingredients listed in the book. Substitutions or additions I used are in italics.

• 5 tablespoons (tbsp) vegetable oil, butter or ghee
• 3 small onions, peeled and thinly sliced
• 2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed - or - 2 teaspoons (tsp) crushed garlic
• 1 pound skinless, boneless chicken or meat (lamb, veal, beef), cut into thin strips
• 1 tsp salt - or - I found a 1/2 tsp sufficient
• 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper - or - 1/2 tsp of mombasa hot pepper, a specialty of the herb sellers at the local farmers market, though next time I might halve this amount
• 1/2 tsp ground saffron threads, dissolved in 4 tbsp of hot water - or - about a 1/2 tsp of unground, very loosely packed saffron threads dropped in a dish with 4 tbsp of hot water and stirred, which seemed to work just fine and used a far more reasonable amount
• 1/2 tsp ground turmeric
• 3 cups fresh or canned pureed tomatoes (about 6 tomatoes) - or - I had 4 tomatoes and a 15 oz. can of plain tomato sauce, to which I added about half the can again of plain water to make sure there was enough liquid
• 1 cup of unripe grapes or 4 tbsp of lime juice - or - one dried lime, rinsed off and added whole with the tomatoes, and simply left to float on top of the stew while cooking and baking. Do not eat.
• 3 medium eggplants (about 2 pounds), peeled and sliced - or - I had 6 mini eggplants, 2 zucchini squash, and a large russet potato

• 2 egg whites, lightly beaten - or - the instructions say these can be brushed over the vegetables to cut down on oil in the sauteeing process, but I didn't bother with this

The first step is to stir-fry the onions in some oil in one of the saucepans (preferably one that has a well-fitting cover) for about 5 minutes, by which point they should start looking a little see-through. I started this part off in the dutch oven that I later just put in the oven to bake. Here, you add the garlic and meat, then continue to stir-fry for another 15 minutes. Add all the remaining spices, including the saffron and the hot water it's been soaking in.

At every stage where you're cooking uncovered on the range top, stir the food regularly to keep it from sticking to the bottom of the pans. If something sticks, it'll burn.

Add the chopped tomatoes, and/or pureed tomatoes, and the lime. Here's also where I added the extra water and made sure that everything was well-stirred before the next step, turning the heat down to low and simmering covered for 15 minutes.

Depending on how long your oven takes to get going, you might want to start pre-heating it to 350 degrees Fahrenheit right about now. This is also when you want to start thinking about cooking your rice so it's done about when the stew is finished.

While that's going on, add the rest of the oil to the skillet and fry up the eggplant and other vegetables for about 10 minutes or until they're starting to turn golden-brown. While we had a potato and zucchini, which I've had in this stew before, carrots are also very good if you don't have enough eggplant or would just prefer a wider mix of vegetables.

When the covered simmering is done, add the meat and sauce to a deep, covered baking dish. Lay the sauteed eggplant and vegetables over the top. Cover and put in the oven to bake for 30 minutes. Then remove the cover, and bake for another 15 minutes uncovered.

Serve. Eat.

The recipe included something about a garnish, but if you want to know about that bit, I recommend the book. It seems to have all my favorites in it and I found the instructions very easy to follow.

In general, Persian cooking is more savory and less spicy hot than Indian food, but is similar in the theme of mostly vegetable stews over rice and vegetable or fruit accented rice dishes. There are also the kebabs, and the delightful habit of spicing things with powdered sumac as reflexively as westerners use salt or pepper at the table. It's a healthful and delicious cuisine that should please even the most conventional American palate.

Mike Taylor for Food Safety Coordinator

Obama's considering appointing a former Monsanto vice president, Mike Taylor, to head the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.

As Jill Richardson writes at LaVidaLocavore at the link above, Taylor thinks the FDA wastes too much time on food safety inspections at meat packing plants. Further, he believes that one of their main problems is that they have to slow down their line speed too much.

Everyone who's read anything about the horrendous working conditions at US meatpacking plants knows that incomplete kills before slaughter and worker injuries increase dramatically when line speeds increase.

As also noted at the Ethicurean, Taylor is the reason milk from rBGH/rBST cows doesn't have to be labeled. Bovine growth hormone is perfectly safe, after all. Except for cows, or humans who drink its breakdown products in milk.

So yes, Mike Taylor is the person we have to thank for putting pus from mastitis-infected cows into the milk supply, and exposing milk-drinking Americans by the millions to greater cancer risks.

This guy is heading up a food safety working group.

I'm just swimming in the changeiness.

World According to Monsanto, pt 9, Contamination

A traditional Mexican corn farmer speaks in this portion of the "World According to Monsanto" documentary about the transgenic corn conquest of the ancient home of corn and the center of its greatest biodiversity: "... If they succeed, we'll be dependent on multinationals. We'll be forced to buy the fertilizer and insecticides they sell, because without them, their corn won't grow. Whereas the local corn grows very well without fertilizer or herbicide. Look at it, it's very beautiful. ..."

Now that NAFTA has made import controls on artificially cheap US corn difficult, and as much US corn contains transgenic traits, it's been impossible to keep contamination of this wind-pollinated plant at bay. Even in fields where farmers have been saving their own seed and sharing only with neighbors who do the same for centuries.

The clip goes on to diagram the smear campaign started on the site AgBioWorld against Ignacio Chapela, the researcher who first documented transgenic contamination of Mexican corn, by Andura Smetacek of Monsanto and Mary Murphy of Monsanto's public relations firm, The Bivings Group.

That "activists" would be interested in the research was enough reason to oppose it, to hell with the inconvenient science, it couldn't possibly be relevant. Activists, as you know, are a rather shady lot motivated only by ... well, whatever it is that drives them. If people don't live and die solely out of concern for their next paycheck, they have no place in serious discussions. If 'activists' believe something, it couldn't possibly be true.

The position taken by Monsanto and other biotech firms is that that their products are at base completely harmless, as well offering substantial environmental benefits, and being entirely under control.

Very little research has been conducted attempting to falsify this premise, and when cracks have appeared in those sweeping assumptions, enormous pressure is wielded, often successfully, to silence critics.

Ignacio Chapela was finally vindicated regarding the contamination of Mexican corn, and did finally get the tenure Monsanto agents tried to deny him. Will the rest of us be as successful in our attempts to win the right to know what we're eating from the USDA, which at times seems to operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary of industrial agribusiness?

(Photo credit: James Tan Chin Choy on Flickr.)

Ending Childhood Hunger by 2015

Guest editorial by Jim Weill, FRAC president

It’s always shocking to hear how many Americans can’t afford enough healthy food to get through the month – 36.2 million people live in such households at last count – but it’s especially troubling when you consider how many of the hungry are children. More than 12 million children – nearly 17 percent of all children in the country – live in homes that are struggling with hunger, hindering them from growing, learning and succeeding in school.

During the presidential campaign, President Obama pledged to end childhood hunger in America by 2015. It’s an ambitious pledge and one that he’s clearly standing behind. According to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the president instructed him that “what I want you to do first, the most important thing in this job, is to make sure America’s kids are well fed.”

As a nation we have only six years to reach this goal of ending childhood hunger and it will not be easy. But the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) has described the essential strategies needed to make the 2015 pledge a reality. They are the measures required if we’re serious about ending the scandal of childhood hunger in the U.S. and bolstering the health and futures of our children.

FRAC’s seven step plan:

First, we must restore economic growth and create jobs with better wages for lower-income workers. A broad recovery that creates good jobs with benefits will help many more families fully meet their children’s needs.

Second, we must lift the incomes of low earning workers by increasing the minimum wage and strengthening refundable tax credits and other supports that help make work pay.

Third, we must strengthen the Food Stamp Program (recently renamed SNAP) by making monthly benefits adequate for a healthy diet, expanding eligibility and making other overdue, targeted improvements.

Fourth, we must strengthen Child Nutrition Programs to ensure that many more children receive the benefits of a good school breakfast and lunch as well as healthy nutrition in out-of-school settings, such as child care centers and afterschool and summer programs. These programs are due to be rewritten in Congress this year and we can improve them to make a real difference in the lives of children.

Fifth, the entire federal government must be engaged in ending childhood hunger. This goal should be a government-wide priority and meeting it will require focus not just from the Department of Agriculture but from such agencies as the Departments of Health and Human Services, Education, and Justice, the Corporation for National and Community Service, and key White House offices.

Sixth, we must make sure all families have convenient access to reasonably priced, healthy food. Let’s find new ways to grow access to healthy food in what now are “food deserts,” with a new national focus on having good grocery stores accessible in all low-income communities.

Seventh, we must work with states, localities and nonprofits to expand and improve participation in federal nutrition programs. Low-income families will only benefit when they know how to get the help that’s out there, and when unnecessary red tape is eliminated.

Much of the work will fall to Congress and the president. But to end childhood hunger by 2015, it’s incumbent on all of us – national, state and local public officials, anti-hunger advocates, child advocates, faith-based institutions, business, labor, and service providers – to stand behind the goal. FRAC’s strategies are meant to provide a starting point from which to grow, foster dialogue and build momentum. We hope you’ll join us on this critical journey toward 2015.

Jim Weill is the president of the Food Research and Action Center, the leading national nonprofit organization working to improve public policies and public-private partnerships to eradicate hunger and undernutrition in the United States. FRAC’s full seven-point set of strategies can be found here, at EndingChildHunger2015.org.

(Photo credit: spence_sir on Flickr.)

Editor's note and update: A minor correction was made to the household count given in the first paragraph. We regret the initial error.

The Fertilizer Divide

While plant breeding has done its part, and irrigation a lion's share, in bringing global crop productivity up over this last century, synthetic and mineral fertilizers sealed the deal.

Plants need more than nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium (N-P-K), but an abundance of those three key, limiting nutrients will get them growing well, usually even if there are micronutrient deficiencies. So the prominent N-P-K listings on fertilizer bags are generally most crucial, and arguably the most critical of these is nitrogen.

While the Green Revolution is attributed in large part to hybrid crop varieties, these do poorly when not supplied with the abundant irrigation and nutrient resources provided through the industrial agriculture system. As much as the biotech industry claims to be overcoming these input requirements, they have yet to do so, and hope is not a plan.

Industrial agriculture uses fertilizer synthesized from natural gas, which is running into price and availability constraints similar to that found with other fossil fuels. Further, using nitrogen fertilizer in excess of what can be absorbed by plants and organisms residing in the soil are a significant source of water pollution and the formation of nitrous oxides, which are powerful greenhouse gases.

Now, a new study has quantified the global fertilizer use divide, with the not-too-surprising findings that industrialized countries use too much and African agriculture may be in need of a lot more. From the press release:

... A co-author, F.S. Zhang of China Agriculture University, and colleagues recently conducted a study in two intensive agricultural regions of northern China in which fertilizer use is excessive. Their results showed that farmers there use about 525 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre (588 kilograms per hectare) annually — releasing about 200 pounds of excess nitrogen per acre (227 kilograms per hectare) into the environment. Mr. Zhang and his co-workers also demonstrated that use of nitrogen fertilizer could be halved without loss of yield or grain quality, reducing nitrogen losses by more than 50 percent in the process.

At the other extreme are the poorer countries of sub-Saharan Africa, like Kenya and Malawi. In a 2004 study in western Kenya, a co-author, Pedro Sanchez, and colleagues found that farmers used only about 6 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre (7 kilograms per hectare) — little more than 1 percent of the total used by Chinese farmers. And unlike China’s soil, cultivated soil in Kenya suffered an annual net loss of 46 pounds of nitrogen per acre (52 kilograms per hectare) removed from the field by harvests.

“Africa is a totally different situation than China,” said Mr. Sanchez, director of tropical agriculture at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “Unlike most regions of the world, crop yields have not increased substantially in sub-Saharan Africa. Nitrogen inputs are inadequate to maintain soil fertility and to feed people. So it’s not a matter of nutrient pollution but nutrient depletion.”

[Study authors note that farmers in the European Union and United States have both seen dramatic improvements in fertilizer use efficiency in recent decades.]

... Since 1995, the imbalance of nutrients–particularly phosphorus–has decreased in the Midwestern United States, in part because better farming techniques have increased yields. Statistics show that from 2003 to 2005, annual corn yields in parts of the Midwestern United States and north China were almost the same, even though Chinese farmers used six times more nitrogen fertilizer than their American counterparts and generated nearly 23 times the amount of excess nitrogen.

“U.S. farmers are managing fertilizer more efficiently now,” said the co-author Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford’s Program on Food Security and the Environment. However, environmental problems have not disappeared. “The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico persists due to continued fertilizer runoff and animal waste from increased livestock production,” said Ms. Naylor, a professor of environmental Earth system science and senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute and Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. ...

There is concern within the environmental and policy communities that calling for increased fertilizer use and subsidies in Africa, as the authors do, could either replicate the hazards of US agricultural pollution or end up further reinforcing class inequality in areas where subsidies often benefit the already well-off the most.

Considering how little fertilizer is used in Africa, a modest increase there would probably be more than offset by the substantial decreases that Chinese agriculturalists could make, if they were inclined to be more efficient in their use of inputs. Though, as you might expect, I'd be much more in favor of encouraging polyculture farming practices that were mixed with animal husbandry and the use of animal waste as fertilizer.

The main problem in US agriculture is that the animals have been so separated from crop growing areas, given so many drugs and strange foods, and their waste so concentrated, that their manure is toxic. Particularly with cattle, who've also been fed such an unnatural diet that they're host to far more bacteria, such as E. coli O157:H7, that are dangerous to humans, that their manure is a biohazard in ways that grass fed cattle's waste is not.

A program to subsidize low income African farmsteads in securing small flocks of goats, sheep or chickens, depending on their access to land, might be a better, more self-replicating way to get them the needed soil nutrients. With chickens and animals like goats and sheep that can be milked, this also provides a farm family with extra protein during the animals' lifetimes. It's a solution that would require a little more creativity and human resources, but would probably have more stable long-term costs than a solution dependent on the global market for fossil fuels.

Because while it would be silly to deny that they need help, all types of help are not created equally.

(Photo credit: Lukas on Flickr, from a One Acre Fund project in Kenya, where a woman demonstrates adding small doses of fertilizer directly to the planting hole.)

Beetles and Monoculture

Julian Siddle of the BBC doesn't seem aware that a pine beetle infestation has already spread to the United States, devastating forests all the way into southern California, but nonetheless provided some interesting reporting on how Canada is addressing the pine beetle decimation of their forests and the environmental circumstances shaping their thinking on the matter:

... Cold winters usually kill off the beetle larvae, but the region has been warmer than usual in recent years.

... Without interference from man, mature lodge pole pine would be regularly destroyed by forest fires. But, [Staffan Lindgren, professor of entomology at the University of Northern British Columbia,] explained, the species has evolved to use fire to aid regeneration.

... The damage caused by the beetle, combined with the downturn in the demand for wood due to the global recession, has brought about a rethink on forest policy in British Columbia.

Mixed forests, rather than monocultures, are now seen as healthier both for the trees and other plant and animal life - even though a lack of uniformity makes them more difficult to harvest. ...

First, warming temperatures have helped pests proliferate. Not only would a sufficiently cold winter kill more beetles off, but as we've covered before, insect life cycles are governed by what are called degree days. That is, they need a certain minimum heat input within their tolerable range before they can progress to the next stage of their life or reproduce. It's a fascinating biological clock mechanism that allows them to be very responsive to limiting environmental constraints.

Second, the natural cycle of ecosystem renewal and regeneration has been disrupted without adequate replacement. Having spread ourselves out so widely, and having such rigorous fire supression knowledge, we left the trees without a means to clear out the competition and literal dead wood so that new, healthy seedlings could periodically get a decent chance to establish themselves.

Third, human ecosystem management techniques have decreased biodiversity. If even one pest organism can take advantage of a fatal flaw in the dominant species, the monoculture ecosystem can collapse.

Making ecosystems work properly is hard. We don't always understand all the necessary inputs and interactions.

Though we do know of a few surefire ways to break an ecosystem, some of which we might be directly or indirectly responsible for. Global warming and the monoculture are our fault, and these stressors give an opportunistic organism like the pine beetle the chance to take over and do its worst.

In this case, it's why the western portion of North America is increasingly covered in large stands of dead kindling. In the case of our artificial agricultural ecosystems, it's why when a pest develops resistance to whatever method we're using to combat it, it can devastate food production across a wide region.

Hard to create, easier to destroy. It's going to be true of any complex system, and certainly the living systems we depend on for life support. Though we can learn to interact positively with our environment, we tamper at our peril.

(Photo credit: tomsaint11 on Flickr.)

Robyn O'Brien: The Unhealthy Truth

I can't call in queer to work today, they don't excuse you for that kind of thing around here, but hopefully I can plead wedding madness in re my brevity of posting. I'm sure at least Robert Wager misses me ;)

Anyway, go read Civil Eats, where Naomi Starkman has interviewed Robyn O'Brien, author of "The Unhealthy Truth," and explainer of why we a) don't need biotech to feed the world and b) would really like to know what we're eating.

You could also check out Jill Richardson's sampler platter of food news. You know you'll like it.

The Banana Republic of Honduras

From the Encarta entry on Honduras, a brief backstory on how Honduras came to be the original "Banana Republic":

At the start of the 20th century, Honduras was the poorest of the Central American nations. In the early 1900s U.S. fruit companies began growing bananas along the Caribbean coast of Honduras. They competed ruthlessly for grants of land from the government under favorable terms and often promised political support in return. The banana companies soon became the dominant force in the country’s political and economic life.

By 1910 U.S. firms controlled 80 percent of all banana lands, and bananas had become the mainstay of the economy. Honduras became known as a “banana republic.” When revolutions broke out in 1911 and 1913, the United States intervened on the side of the ruling elite to restore order and protect U.S. property. ...

By US firms, they mean United Fruit (Chiquita) and Standard Fruit (Dole), who abused their workers, backed military dictatorships, and seemed at all times to be fully supported in their ruthless land and power grabs.

As the previous century continued, the US continued training Central American military and paramilitary forces at the School of the Americas*, and, in what I'm sure is entirely a coincidence, these individuals replicated the brutal repression of democracy in service of corporate profits throughout the region and the world. Its graduates, trained in "torture, extortion, blackmail and the targeting of civilian populations," have been implicated in numerous coups, murders, kidnappings, rapes and incidents of torture directed at social workers, union organizers, labor activists, and even nuns or priests advocating for social justice reforms.

Via RandomNonviolence, it's worth noting that graduates of the School of the Americas are responsible for the weekend coup in Honduras.

While you may want to go to Chavez Code (via Xcroc) for breaking news, I think it's worth remembering that in Honduras' bloody, recent history, a direct line can be drawn from banana monoculture, extreme economic inequality and overweening corporate power to torture and political repression. And perhaps more to the point, these tragedies spring from an unstated belief in the right of businesses to profit at the expense of all else, to privatize productivity gains and impose costs and losses on the public.

There's nothing unique about Honduras that couldn't be replicated elsewhere.

* The School of the Americas went through a PR exercise in which its name was changed to “The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation” (WHINSEC).

(Photo credit: Arpana Sanjay on Flickr.)

Total(ish) Recall

ObamaFoodorama discusses the ineffectual food safety measure known as a voluntary recall. LaVidaLocavore has more on the food inspection details

The FDA can't even make food processing plants show them their customer complaint records, their pest control records, or their contamination control plans. Let's contrast that toothlessnes towards large corporations with the micromanagement the federal government is trying to impose on individual ranchers in the form of the National Animal ID System.

... Mr. [Jay Platt, the third-generation proprietor of Platt Ranch,] called the extra $2 cost of the electronic tags an onerous burden for a teetering industry and said he often moved horses and some of his 1,000 head of cattle among three ranches here and in Arizona. Small groups of cattle are often rounded up in distant spots and herded into a truck by a single person, who could not simultaneously wield the hand-held scanner needed to record individual animal identities, Mr. Platt said. And there is no Internet connection on the ranch for filing to a regional database.

... “My main beef is that these proposed rules were developed by people sitting in their offices with no real knowledge of animal husbandry and small farms,” said Genell Pridgen, an owner of Rainbow Meadow Farms in Snow Hill, N.C., which rotates sheep, cattle, pigs, turkeys and chickens among three properties and sells directly to consumers and co-ops.

“I feel these regulations are draconian,” Ms. Pridgen said, “and that lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture.” ...

Why would the FDA have virtually no power to compel the food production and distribution industries to prevent people from dying of E. coli contamination, all while it's on the verge of having draconian authority over every aspect of animal movement on small farms and ranches?

Consider it a map of public power - Nestlé has it, Platt and Pridgen don't. It's obvious whose side the government is on.

World According to Monsanto, pt 8, Control

This installment starts off talking to a pair of Indian cotton farmers explaining that not only does Monsanto's Bt cotton still need to be sprayed, they can no longer find non-Bt cotton to buy. The narrator sums up:

"Today in India, Monsanto controls nearly all of the cotton seed market, forcing the locals to buy its seeds at prices four times higher than conventional varieties. Small farmers must turn to money lenders, who charge high interest rates. If the harvest is poor, it means bankruptcy."

The entire microcredit movement, started by Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus, tried to fix the exploitive finance infrastructure available to the poor, who tend not to have collateral or cash reserves that traditional banks are interested in. Yet even microcredit has run into trouble, as noted at Yunus' website:

BALI, July 28 - In an effort to head off a potential crisis in the fast-expanding microfinance industry, its leaders are adopting global truth-in-lending standards and creating a system for comparing loan terms offered by competing lenders. To manage the effort, a new self-monitoring organization, MicroFinance Transparency, is being set up as the industry's policeman. The goal is to prevent companies from taking advantage of poor people with high interest rates and misleading credit offers.

The initiative was announced on July 28 at a microcredit conference in Bali by Chuck Waterfield, a professor at Columbia University who spearheaded the initiative, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who launched the microcredit revolution in Bangladesh 30 years ago with his Grameen Bank. "Microfinance emerged as a struggle against loan sharks, so we don't want to see new loan sharks created in the name of microcredit," Yunus tells BusinessWeek.

If the industry doesn't curtail abuses and confusion, it faces the prospect of government crackdowns and donor funds drying up. Since Yunus pioneered the idea of lending small amounts of money to poor people without demanding collateral, the phenomenon has spread worldwide. These days, thousands of organizations are making loans to tens of millions of borrowers—usually to help them set up or expand small businesses. ...

As the video segment goes on to note, the introduction of patented seeds sent farmer suicide numbers way up. In an interview with Navdanya founder, Vandana Shiva, she points out that the biotech firms are looking to introduce patented genes into all the seeds they sell, getting everyone used to the idea that companies can have total control over the food supply.

Shiva says, I believe rightly, that control over the food supply is more powerful than guns.

The global poor, who also grow quite a bit of its food, are squeezed by both finance systems that abandon them to loan sharks and corporations who want to be able to charge every year for what farmers used to be able (at least sometimes, if they wanted or needed) to provide for themselves.

I don't even have to stretch my imagination to posit some dire result. The suicide rate among Indian farmers has already increased dramatically.

In response, Monsanto has a very cheery and inclusive mission statement. But you know what they say about good intentions.

How Convenient

As Greg Plotkin commented in the post about the USDA food desert report, "Price is important, as is access and nutrition education, but sometimes I think we underestimate the power of convenience as well."

Can't argue. In fact, that reminds me of a great blog post I read at Pandagon a couple years ago.

An archive crash seems to have taken out the memorable, original post, but I found another fan, Harold Henderson, who partially preserved (woohoo!) this Chris Clarke essay on how responsibility for maintaining environmental and social virtue falls mainly on women. (I'm including almost the entire post below, but as non-quoted commentary amounts to about two sentences and there isn't context otherwise ...):

Clarke: "In a paper published a couple weeks ago, Dr. Sherilyn McGregor of Keele University in Staffordshire points out that when environmentally sound living requires extra work, that work is usually 'women’s work.' ... What decisions are environmentalist citizens asked to make? Choosing the green laundry detergent and toilet paper and buying organic groceries. Carrying cloth bags to the supermarket. Using non-toxic cleansers. Adding corporate citizenship to one’s list of brand loyalty factors and schlepping the Seafood Buying Guide around. Sorting trash into the proper containers for recyclables, compost, and landfilling.

"Of course, we men carry all those containers to the curb, which perfectly balances the division of labor. But then you add Environmentalism 2.0 to the mix, and you have the Slow Food (read: hours spent in the kitchen) and Local Food (read: hours spent shopping) movements, and with that kind of scheduling pressure a woman likely wouldn’t even have enough time left in the day to type up her husband’s poetry."

Henderson: That's not random snark -- Clarke is specifically referring to poet Wendell Berry's anti-computer tirade of a few years back, in which he explained that his wife types his stuff on an old Royal typewriter. It's all very well, as Keele writes in her paper, to idealize participatory citizenship as in Athens of old. But "as feminists have noted, these Athenian citizens were freed for politics by the labour of foreigners, slaves, and women who were not granted the status of citizen. Citizenship, understood as being about active participation in the public sphere, is by definition a practice that depends on 'free time'; it is thus not designed for people with multiple roles and heavy loads of responsibility for productive and reproductive work." ...

As Henderson points out elsewhere, all the unpaid work people (usually women) do isn't even recognized by society as work that takes real time or effort. The work of taking care of other human beings, especially, gets no respect at all.

On top of that work, most families with children can't afford to live on one income. (Even though Mom often still does the majority of childcare.) Maybe part of the calculation goes like, 'well, either we spend an hour and a half cooking, more time cleaning up, etc., or we order take out and help the kids with their homework.'

Families can no longer count on having the unpaid, professionally disdained, ineligible for Social Security, morning-to-night labor of a grown adult to pick up the slack.

So yes, people are tired and stressed and don't have much time and ... oh, f* it, we're getting pizza tonight.

The USDA report also mentioned that the amount of time people spent getting to the grocery store in food desert areas was higher than the national average. Even if you have a car, that takes a bite. Do you go right after work, in rush hour traffic when everyone else is going and the checkout lines will all be five people deep? Do you go later at night, after dinner, when a person should be able to have a little time to relax? Do you go only on the weekend, knowing that most of the fresh produce needs to be eaten in a couple days and will run out by mid-week at latest?

Yeah, you make time and go to the grocery store, but the longer it takes, the less frequently you're going to want to bother. There's no point making some sort of moral argument about it, that's just the way it's going to work.

So, once again and not for the last time, the food system doesn't just have one problem, and not all of those problems are directly related to food.

(Photo credit: Phillie Casablanca on Flickr.)

California's Drought Continues

Bad news for the Central Valley:

... Farmer Bob Dietrich said he has planted 300 of his 1,100 acres because his single well isn't enough to water his entire farm. Shawn Coburn apologized for arriving late, saying the $750,000 well he drilled earlier this year "is sucking air" as aquifers shrink under increased pumping. ...

This has been your 'sustainability moment' for today, wherein it behooves one to wonder if we can possibly continue doing what we've been doing and not suffer a major crash.

We're going to have to stop using fossil fuel and fossil water one way or another this century. We can either plan ahead for it and find other alternatives, or we can be cut off abruptly, dramatically, with little in the way of time or resources to prepare.

It's up to us. For now.

Update: Link added.