Still a Fast-Food Nation

Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation and incredible inspiration to folks in and interested in the movement towards a functional food system, published the afterward to his book on the Daily Beast yesterday.

In the afterward/article, Schlosser shares some saddening news about prevailing fast-food advertising and sales and still-rising obesity rates. While pleased that his book remains in print ten years later, he points out that the atrocities within its pages are unfortunately not yet out-of-date as he'd hoped they would be. Thankfully, Schlosser is inspired and optimistic about the powerful food revolutionaries working hard to change the food industry into something that wouldn't sadden Upton Sinclair. Read the full article here.

Big News for Food Safety

Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser weighed in on the FDA Food Safety Modernization Bill, calling it the "best opportunity in a generation to improve the safety of the American food supply," in a New York Times Op-Ed published yesterday. "This legislation is by no means perfect. But it promises to achieve several important food safety objectives, greatly benefiting consumers without harming small farmers or local food producers."

The Senate is scheduled to vote on the bill tonight. Here are some basic objectives of the bill:

• The bill would, for the first time, give the F.D.A. (who oversee 80% of American food) the authority to test widely for dangerous pathogens and to recall contaminated food.
• The FDA would gain resources and authority to prevent food safety problems, rather than respond to them after people have become ill.
• The bill would also require large-scale, high-risk food-production plants get more frequent inspections.
• For the first time, imported foods would be subject to the same standards as those made in the United States.
• Small farms are exempt from the bill and may continue to be regulated under state and local laws. 
• Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma is annoying.

The CAFO Reader

I know it's 4th of July weekend and everyone wants to have their barbecue and ignore its environmental cost too, but we've found a new book for the summer reading list and it's all about CAFOs. The who's who of the sustainable food movement got together and penned a fearless collection of essays on factory farming for The Cafo Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Animal Factories. Favorite of ours, Anna Lappé, contributed a chapter on the link between livestock and the climate crisis. Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser contributed as well.

The University of California Press summarizes:

These essays analyze and vividly depict the devastating impacts and current conditions in and around factory farms. The collection also provides a compelling vision of  “putting the CAFO out to pasture,” in which food systems become more healthy, humane, and sustainable. The CAFO Reader will quickly become an invaluable educational resource in the battle to reform the tragic state of industrial livestock production. It will also inform and influence the growing public movement of activists, farmers, policy makers, and consumers who are aiming to make our food healthier for ourselves and the planet.

Word on the street is that a larger photographic volume fit for a coffee table will be out this fall.

"The Food Movement, Rising"

A new essay from Michael Pollan in The New York Review of Books takes a look at the food revolution taking place - whether it's completely recognized yet or not - here in America. Pollan discusses everything from Michelle Obama's efforts to food safety and industry and how books published in the past decade (by other faves like J.S. Foer, Eric Schlosser, Marion Nestle, Joel Salatin, etc) along with growing support from national environmental and health organizations most definitely suggests a culture ripe and ready to get "beyond the barcode." 

If you take the time to go beyond JustSaying's summary and read the whole article just one time, let this be it. Find The Food Movement, Rising here.

Set your DVRs or TiVos!!

Wednesday April 21, 2010. 9:00PM - 10:30PM ET.

On the eve before Earth Day, PBS will be airing Food Inc. The film by Robert Kenner, Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan lifts the veil on the U.S. food industry, reveals surprising facts about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we may go from here. If this fiml doesn't make you do a double take about your dietary decisions, I don't know what will.

Joel Salatin interviewed by The Guardian

Since being highlighted in Eric Schlosser's film Food, Inc, local food movement hero Joel Salatin is bringing much needed attention to horrors and human arrogance of industrial farming and then to the chemical-free farming methods Michael Pollan praised him for in The Omnivore's Dilemma.

The Guardian recently interviewed Salatin and oublished an incredible article. Find it here. Here are some highlights:

From The Guardian's Gaby Wood:

"...in the 1970s, the top five beef packers controlled 25% of the market; now the top four control more than 80% – meaning that if ever meat is tainted by bacteria or chemicals it has the potential to reach vast numbers of people; in 1972, 50,000 food safety inspections were conducted by the US Food and Drug Administration, and three decades later that number had gone down to 9,164; 70% of all processed foods have some genetically modified ingredient; in 2007, E coli from food affected 73,000 Americans – something the film correlates directly with the increase in consumption of processed foods and the scale and cleanliness of the country's huge industrial slaughterhouses."

And from Salatin:

[Quotes Joel Arthur Barker on paradigms] "...every paradigm, he says, exceeds its point of efficiency. Agriculture is always the last sector to join the new economy, because farmers are very conservative. So only now has the industrial paradigm in agriculture come to the end of its workability, Salatin explains. "What happens is all these things we're seeing – campylobacter, E coli, mad cow, listeria, salmonella, that weren't even in the lexicon 30 years ago – that is the industrial paradigm exceeding its efficiency. So these Latin squiggly words that we're learning to say – bovine spongiform encephalopathy – are nature's language screaming to us: ENOUGH! And the question then is: what will it take for us to listen? And my contention is that Wall Street is still wearing conquistador mentality and uniforms, and nobody is listening to the pleadings of nature saying: 'Enough.'"

And Salatin's five reasons why we should eat his meat:

1.) "...it's safer from a bio-security standpoint. If you eat our stuff, it's gonna be only sold real close right here. There's a short chain between field and fork, and the shorter that chain is – the fresher, the more transparent that system is – the less chance there is of anything from bio-terrorism to pathogenicity to spoilage. You wanna get diarrhoea? Eat industrial food." 2.) "Number two is what I would call your own personal immune system." The more antibiotics are given to the animals we eat, he explains, the less responsive we become to antibiotics when we need them for medical reasons. "You've been drugging yourself at dinner every day." 3.) "Thirdly, he goes on, they've had their meats checked, and they are unequalled in their nutritional density and power, however you want to measure it – "Omega 3, omega 6 ratios, riboflavin, polyunsaturated fats, vitamin A…" 4.) "It tastes better." 5.) "It's better for the environment. It's a very landscape-therapeutic production model."

(Thnx MP)