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A 50-Year Farm Bill

Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry have contributed a short but eloquent op-ed to Sunday's New York Times about the dangers of industrial agriculture and our need for what they call "a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles":

Clearly, our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable. We must restore ecological health to our agricultural landscapes, as well as economic and cultural stability to our rural communities... We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.

After the passing of a mediocre 2008 Farm Bill and President-elect Obama's appointment of Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture – which upset (or at least disappointed) many folks advocating for large-scale sustainable agricultural practices in the States – it's as important as ever that these voices are being heard. Here's hoping some more change is on the horizon.

New York Times: A 50-Year Farm Bill

Mark Bittman's Picnic Picks

And speaking of picnics, today's Times has an amazingly comprehensive list of simple picnic foods from the Minimalist himself, Mark Bittman. Just in time for the long weekend!

New York Times: 101 20-Minute Dishes for Inspired Picnics (may require login)

Briefly, Dan Barber's Op-Ed in the Sunday NYT

Having gone home for Mother's Day to the land of the Boston Globe, I missed Dan Barber's insightful op-ed piece in Sunday's New York Times. Check it out here.

Thinking Little For Big Change

This week's New York Times Sunday Magazine, its Green Issue, features an essay by Michael Pollan that speaks powerfully about the climate crisis and the seeming disparity between its scale and what we are told we can do as individuals to help mitigate it. Change our lightbulbs? What good does that do to eliminate the hypoxia zone at the mouth of the Mississippi or slow the rate of melting at our Poles?

I am terrified. I know this is not a unique sentiment to throw out there - many of us are - but one thing that essays like Pollan's and the work of individuals and organizations both in New York City and beyond have helped me realize is that, in a twisted sense, we are lucky. We are at a point in time where our agency as individuals can effect massive change in a way I certainly haven't felt in my lifetime.

Sure, it's easy to feel defeated at times. We try to do good by recycling our junk mail, but what about the diesel-fueled truck that comes to haul away that puny pile of envelopes (or, in the burbs, the fuel you use to drive your recyclables to the dump)? We turn the light off in the kitchen when we're not in there cooking, but who do we talk to about turning off the lights at the top of the Empire State Building? Well, if we pose our questions like that, it certainly does become easy to think our actions are futile.

What we really need to do is, as Wendell Berry so brilliantly put it, Think Little. Don't measure your actions as an individual against the cumulative actions of a corporation, municipality, or society; measure your actions today against your own actions from yesterday, last year, or five years ago. Think about it.

Five years ago:

• I did not have recycling bins in my apartment.
• I had never been to a Greenmarket
• I brought all of my groceries home in double-bagged plastic
• I bought and drank from a different paper coffee cup every morning

Now add those things up. A year of using my beloved OXO coffee mug has probably saved about 250 paper cups from entering the waste stream. If I was coming home with twelve plastic bags from each grocery and bodega trip, I've likewise probably kept from using about 300 bags a year. This is not insignificant. And certainly if you combine my 250 cups with those of my coworkers, my friends, and my family - a tiny microcosm of this hugely populated world - our thousands of paper cups are nothing to sneeze at.

As the pull quote from Pollan's essay highlights, "For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do." So, while I have this platform from which to speak, I ask you (yes you!) to consider the moves you can make today that you did not make yesterday. No matter how small, no matter what you did yesterday that was better than the day before. Be selfish in the best way possible and concern yourself only with yourself, as an agent of change. We may be terrified, but we are not helpless.

For my part, I am taking a day out of the office tomorrow to dig in Eric's back yard, spreading compost and planting summer vegetables. Feels little, right? Maybe a little luxurious? Well sure, but it feels good, too. And that's nothing to underestimate.

New York Times: Why Bother?

Federal Conservation Program Suffers Under High Commodity Prices

A little more on the effects of rising food prices: David Streitfield has a piece in today's New York Times about farmers who are taking their idle land out of the government's Conservation Reserve Program in order to cultivate and cash in on the current high prices of commodity crops. There's a glimmer of hope in his (very) brief mention that the USDA seems to be leaning toward bolstering the program rather than trimming it, but it's not much to offset what a contentious issue it's become among the lobbies that have a vested interest in the land.

New York Times: As Prices Rise, Farmers Spurn Conservation

What Do Rising Food Prices Really Cost?

Tom Philpott over at Grist has written an insightful piece (Victual Reality: Skewed View from the Berkeley Hills) in response to Kim Severson's article in last Wednesday's New York Times, Some Good News on Food Prices.

I agree with Philpott about the idealism that underlies Waters' and Pollan's belief that rising food prices will necessarily be good for local and sustainable agriculture, especially given the position from which both of them view the food landscape in the United States. Both are based in the Bay Area, a part of the country that is famous for its social conscience, which translates into (among other things) a well-established culture of support for local agriculture. But really: both of them have to have seen enough evidence, whether right there in California or as they've traveled, to know how far we still have to go to inspire the concern among the masses required of reaching a tipping point on sustainable agriculture.

I won't purport to understand the whole picture myself, but living in New York City, it's hard not to see what's right here: affluent neighborhoods filled with natural food stores, co-ops, and restaurants touting their seasonal and local menus edging right up against poorer neighborhoods whose grocery stores offer little variety of damaged or otherwise unappealing produce, where options for dining out rarely stray from fast food, and poverty supplants whatever concern there is for responsible agriculture or organic food. That is to say, cheap food is better than no food.

Don't get me wrong... Greenmarkets are popping up in underserved neighborhoods all over the five boroughs - a decent number of which now accept EBT - and programs designed to teach kids about farming and health seem to be on the increase. But it's incredibly presumptuous to say that rising food prices will naturally lead poorer people to switch to local foods. They could, but knowledge of and access to that alternative must exist first. That includes finding ways to dispel local eating as a privilege of an elite few, connecting city-dwellers with farms and giving them a stake in what happens to them, and instilling a sense of agency over food choices in consumers across the board.

Until there is a sea change in both education and policy - not just food prices - the reality is probably closer to Philpott's: those who can't afford more expensive food (or simply believe in bargain-hunting) will continue to seek out the cheapest choices they are aware of. And given that the stalled 2008 Farm Bill doesn't promise much by way of radical change, this seems to mean that food made from heavily subsidized commodity crops, i.e. fast food and its synonyms on grocery store shelves, will continue to be cheaper.

I'd love to be proven wrong, though. And that's not something I say too often.

Gristmill: More on last week's Victual Reality column

Massive Beef Recall Stemming from Hallmark Slaughterhouse Video

Westland/Hallmark Meat Packing Company, otherwise known as the proprietors of the slaughterhouse whose disgusting abuse of cows was captured on video by a Humane Society worker, have issued a recall for 143 million pounds of beef. It's biggest recall of beef in history and includes meat that entered the marketplace as far back as two years ago. That last bit indicates that this recall is as much a PR gesture as it is out of genuine concern for the public health, since most of that beef has already been consumed and Westland/Hallmark insists the rest of it actually poses little threat to the health of those who eat it.

The New York Times ran an editorial about the recall today, emphasizing that it points to a much greater problem with our food inspection program. (Here I felt a little wave of validation for my mini-rant about the same issue in comment #61 about cloned meat.) And how:

The [Humane Society video] surfaced after a year of increasing concerns about the safety of the meat supply amid a sharp increase in the number of recalls tied to a particularly deadly form of the E. coli pathogen. There were 21 recalls of beef related to the potentially deadly strain of E. coli last year, compared with eight in 2006 and five in 2005.

At the moment, the Westland/Hallmark web site consists solely of a sort of splash page, with a letter dated February 3, 2008 to the public from its president. I realize it's beside the point, but oh my gosh! Did no one proofread this business? Anyway, he concludes his letter with these words:

I proudly assure our customers that we comply with all USDA requirements, including the requirement that only ambulatory livestock may enter the harvest facility to be processed for human food. I am confident that we have met this high regulatory standard.

Curious.

The Ethicurean: 143 million pounds of beef recalled — but not to worry 
New York Times: The Biggest Beef Recall Ever (editorial)

Dangerous Mercury Levels In NYC Tuna

Today's New York Times ran a disturbing piece by Marion Burros on mercury-tainted tuna found in sushi restaurants around New York City. I'm very sad that my personal favorite for sushi indulgence, Blue Ribbon, was at the top of the list. Any chance the one in Park Slope doesn't use the same fish as the one in Manhattan?

*chirp chirp*

Awareness of the ethical, environmental, and health concerns surrounding fish seems to be on a steady increase these days, as Michael Ruhlman notes in his latest. Maybe the fact that the underwater world is basically invisible to most of us has kept attention largely off overfishing, by-catch, water pollution, and other issues surrounding the consumption of fish (not to mention that fishing itself by definition takes place far from the public eye), but no more... Even the Food Network has acknowledged it in some small way; when I flipped it on earlier and found a seafood cook-off, I was informed that one of the judges was William Hogarth from the NOAA Fisheries Service.

If you're worried about the fish you're eating, tuna or otherwise, there are a number of handy guides for choosing fish put out by organizations throughout the US. In addition to the NOAA Fisheries Service guide, FishWatch, I've listed a few here.

New York Times: High Mercury Levels Are Found In Tuna Sushi

Updates 1/24:
Turns out, some folks don't care all that much: Warnings Don't Deter Lovers of Sushi.
Also, in today's Diner's Journal blog at the Times, Marian Burros discusses the more wide-spread presence of mercury in fish, as confirmed by a new report from Oceana.

USDA Weighs In On Cloned Meat

I was momentarily hopeful to see the headline in Wednesday's Washington Post, "USDA Recommends That Food From Clones Stay Off the Market." Then I started reading, and it turns out that recommendation is only temporary:

Bruce I. Knight, the USDA's undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs, requested an ongoing "voluntary moratorium" to buy time for "an acceptance process" that Knight said consumers in the United States and abroad will need, "given the emotional nature of this issue."

Thanks, USDA. That's awful sweet.

More disturbing, though, is the fact that meat from the offspring of cloned animals has apparently been on the market for quite some time, despite a request from the FDA not to enter these animals into the food chain. No particular surprise that it wasn't made public, I suppose, since many proponents of cloned meat don't even want to label the stuff that will legitimately enter the marketplace.

I remain highly skeptical that meat and milk from cloned animals pose no more a health threat than those from non-cloned animals, but that issue aside, it disturbs me to no end when consumers are not given the choice to know what they are buying and eating. Sure, farms that don't raise cloned animals could theoretically go the route of producers of non-GMO foods and label their meat and dairy "non-cloned," but why on earth should that burden befall the people that are not doing it?

Well on that note, it's the end of the work day. I think I will not stay at my office any longer.

Déjà Moo

Good morning, world.

And what a wonderful day it is, because today! Today it's officially safe to eat meat from cloned animals in the United States.

The European Union's Food Safety Agency made its announcement to this effect this past Friday, with the Food and Drug Administration expected to follow suit shortly thereafter. Well, the Washington Post has obtained a copy of the FDA's report, which has not yet been officially released, and it indeed draws the conclusion that meat from cloned pigs, cows, and goats is no less safe to eat than meat from their non-cloned counterparts. That is all they are at liberty to conclude, however:

"Moral, religious and ethical concerns . . . have been raised," the agency notes in a document accompanying the report. But the risk assessment is "strictly a science-based evaluation," it reports, because the agency is not authorized by law to consider those issues.

Like Bonnie over at the Ethicurean, I'm kind of horrified that these conclusions were drawn after mere months of study. The FDA research is based on an inconsistent pool of animals, and because it is so difficult to determine what will actually predict the safety of food from cloned animals, the FDA is just going with what's (only kind of) worked so far:

...agency scientists decided to use the same simple but effective standard used by farmers since the dawn of agriculture: If a farm animal appears in all respects to be healthy, then presume that food from that animal is safe to eat.

Somehow, I'm not reassured... E. coli, anyone? Added bonus: as of now, when that cloned meat starts hitting the grocery shelves, it will not be required to be labeled as such, à la the current guidelines for genetically modified foods.

Though the few articles I've looked at this morning haven't really touched on this, the only point I can see in cloning animals for food is to give cloning companies business and boost meat production in the States, like we need it. Is that so crazy, or am I missing something? Well, count me among the folks who would rather eat meat from a known farm upstate once every couple of days than have cloned meat from who knows where for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

New York Times: Cloned Animals Safe to Eat, FDA Concludes
Washington Post: FDA Says Clones Are Safe For Food
Washington Post: Animal Cloning: A Risk Assessment (excerpts from the FDA report)
The Ethicurean: FDA approves food from cloned animals