Back to the Start

Simple. Sweet. Back to the start.

Another reason organic and sustainable farming practices need to be the majority

A new study published in PLoS ONE has found that "nitrate elicits developmental and reproductive toxicity at environmentally relevant concentrations due likely to its intracellular conversion to nitric oxide." In plainer terms, toxicologists at North Carolina State University studied water fleas, often known by their Latin name daphnia magna, and found that the little creatures can convert nitrites and nitrates to the significantly more toxic: nitric oxide. The nitric oxide can then cause developmental and reproductive toxicity in the tiny water fleas which, for example, leads to water flea babies born sans swimming appendages. So where are the nitrates coming from? Farms, golf courses, gardens... It's fertilizer runoff. And it turns out it is even more hazardous than previously thought. Ugh.

Read more here.

Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein Recall

If you follow us on twitter, you'll know that we predicted a massive recall due to contamination just a few short days ago. Not only because contaminations are happening more and more often, but because founders, family, and friends of JustSaying have been hit with an awful stomach flu that has yet to be officially pinned on H1N1 or the restaurant a few of us recently dined in. The Washington Post reports:

"The company at the heart of a growing recall of processed foods knew that its plant was contaminated with salmonella but continued to make a flavoring and sell it to foodmakers around the country, according to inspectors at the Food and Drug Administration. Managers at Basic Food Flavors of Las Vegas learned on Jan. 21 that samples taken a week earlier from their Nevada facility tested positive for salmonella, a potentially deadly bacterium, but they kept shipping their product to foodmakers, according to FDA inspection records. The company makes hydrolyzed vegetable protein, or HVP, a flavor enhancer used in a wide variety of processed foods, from potato chips to sweet and sour tofu. The additive, which comes as a powder or a paste, is mixed into foods to give them a meaty or savory flavor -- similar to the use of monosodium glutamate. Basic Food Flavors tested surfaces near food-processing equipment throughout its plant twice in January and once in February, and each time the samples showed salmonella contamination, according to FDA records. The company continued to ship products and to make more HVP without cleaning the plant or the equipment in a way that would have minimized contamination, the records said."

Take a moment to review the latest recalls and list of affected products found here, and read more here and here.

And please remember, we aren't doctors here folks. Just a couple of people trying to promote health and well-being for ourselves and our environment. Sure, I may have snacked on some potato chips while on a long car ride last week, but that doesn't mean I'm just going to sip on Alka Seltzer and skip tomorrow's doctor visit.

MP Answers 10 Reader Questions

Michael Pollan answers reader questions in the February 1, 2010 issue of TIME magazine. If you can't wait, read it on their website here. Here's a good one:

How can consumers ensure a strong food system for future generations? -Brad Christian; MEMPHIS, TENN.

MP: We need to vote with our forks as consumers. We also need to make our agricultural policies support the kind of food system we want--support farmers who are growing organic food or local food, not just big corn and soy farmers.

Drinkability

Just yesterday, I was reading about the evolution of American agriculture and how the booze biz went from an in-farm operation to the town taverns. (Believe it or not, I'm not retelling the story I always tell from MP's Botany of Desire about Johnny Appleseed's alcohol/apple loving ways.)

The real tipping point that took folks to the taverns was rum. An import. That which they couldn't produce at home. So I got to thinking: For those of us who don't grow barley or tend to a vineyard, what's the most eco-friendly alcoholic beverage? Biodynamic wine from Australia? California wines? What about those of us on the East Coast? Should we stick to Sam Adams? Yuengling? Some other locally brewed beer I don't know about?

The truth is, I don't drink so this isn't a topic I've investigated much further. I do, however, read Slate's Green Lantern and it just so happens that Nina Shen Rastogi has addressed this very topic in her recent post. It turns out that there are a lot more factors to picking your poison than I had expected. For instance, the decision between glass and aluminum depends on the quality of your local recycling program. And the synthetic cork you may think is better for the environment isn't exactly endorsed by the WWF.

If you are a libation lover, read the entire Lantern post here. And then consider setting snobbery aside and purchasing wine in a box.

Mmmmm.... SweeTango

If you share my fondness for Honeycrisp apples, you'll be thrilled to hear about the newest delicious variety born from the University of Minnesota:

SweeTango will start showing up in some Minnesota farmers markets Labor Day weekend and arrive in selected grocery stores around the Twin Cities, Seattle and Rochester, N.Y., a few days later. If all goes according to plan, the apple should be available nationwide in 2011 or 2012, said Byrne, who's president of the cooperative and vice president of sales and marketing for Pepin Heights Orchards in southeastern Minnesota.

SweeTango and Honeycrisp were developed at the University of Minnesota. The new apple has Honeycrisp's crispness and juice but kicks up the flavor and adds an intriguing note of fall spice. It was made by crossing Honeycrisp with Zestar!, another University of Minnesota variety.

"It inherited Honeycrisp's texture, and that's a rare commodity, and it actually has more flavor than Honeycrisp," said David Bedford, the university apple breeder who helped develop Honeycrisp and SweeTango. (AP)

Learn more here and here.

Might be tough to find a date this weekend

Or rather, this next lunar month. For the first time in a decade, Ramadan begins before the medjool (aka the most sought after date) harvest season in the Coachella or Imperial valleys in Southern California. The LA Times reports:

"...Wholesalers and grocers were rushing to put their orders in for Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that begins Saturday. During Ramadan, Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset, followed by evening meals that commence with at least one date, a practice believed followed by the prophet Muhammad. Preferences for the fleshy fruit run from the drier deglet noor to the sweet Medina to the hard, yellow barhi. But the most sought-after dates -- especially among Middle Easterners -- are the soft, plump medjool..."

So what is a practicing Muslim to do? Enjoy the 2008 harvest. They freeze remarkably well.

"...But the thought of year-old fruit remains unappealing and callers to SeaView insist on fresh produce. Some, unfamiliar with the ripening process, ask if the dates can be picked a few weeks early. "The funny part is when they argue with you, 'Why aren't they ready?' " said Roya Jensen, Dennis' wife, who oversees sales. "Because every year they're ready in September." Growers including the Jensens have been dealing with the supply-and-demand crunch the last few years, with harvested dates rushed from the groves straight to markets. This year, growers have had to rely on last year's crop going into the season..."

Something tells me that many are hoping for fresh dates come Lailatul-Qadr and Eid-al-Fitr. Read more about Southern California's ideal growing conditions and date business in Raja Abdulrahim's recent article. Ramadan beings this Saturday, August 22nd.

"Soil Not Oil"

I've been meaning to link to this interview with Vandana Shiva, India’s leading environmental activist, in the Urbanite's April Green Issue for weeks now but I guess I let those peonies take precedent. The tension between traditional and industrial agriculture is a big and important issue that needs to be addressed globally. From the interview:

Q But if you have to feed more than a billion people, as farmers in India do, isn’t it impractical to hang on to traditional farming methods?

A Here, they want to connect all of India with superhighways, and 90 percent of the roads haven’t been built. They won’t be built because of the financial collapse. So this huge dream of a totally motorized world and tractorized agriculture is already failing in front of our eyes. It failed in Cuba under very tragic circumstances—under [the U.S.-imposed] trade embargo. But they rebuilt their agriculture [based on] principles that ancient cultures practiced. Now I don’t call that being locked into tradition. It’s highly innovative.I see fossil-fuel-free farming as a future of agriculture—not because of nostalgia, not because of romanticism, but because of a very hard-nosed realism. If your fertilizer prices have tripled in the past year, there is no way to carry on depending on chemical fertilizers. If your phosphate requirements in chemical agriculture are going to run out in the next twenty years, you’d better get ecological, organic sources. To depend on an agriculture that requires oil inputs at every step would be developing a system at this point that has no future.

Expect to see Shiva's book, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis on my list of recommendations once I pick it up and finish it.

food news

I really wish I was at the Knight Fellowship Food Science Boot Camp going on at MIT this week because I couldn't imagine a more pertinent time to be discussing the industry of food and agribusiness with folks like Marian Nestle and everyone else up there. Feel free to call and conference me in, guys. (I wish!)

As regularly discussed here on justsaying, the new administration has been incredibly receptive to once-considered revolutionary movement towards sustainability, biodiversity, and stricter safety regulations, and seems to be leaning away from the industrial and often hazardous model that has created a culture too reliant on convenience to bother purchasing peanut butter and jelly separately (also see here).

The NY Times published a wonderful article offering an overview about what's been going on in the movement, from Alice Waters, whose name has been floating around in conjunction with the White House kitchen, to Michael Pollan, who is, well, in my opinion, one of the pioneers of this "food revolution," and of course the Obama family.

Here's what I think is so great about all this: Right now eating organic and going green is trendy and as you all know, organic doesn't necessarily mean sustainable or the most eco-friendly AND trends don't always stick around for decades. So what we need are influencers and the Obama family has that power. Let's face it, there is an air of celebrity around our first family and celebrities have a major influence on the "now" generation. If they can keep up this momentum I truly believe the next few years will be paramount in shaping the future of the food industry and capturing the attention and interest of young minds whose future involvement and inertia is critical.

I'm speechless

I can't believe this. A chicken tracker. A way to find out where the chicken you are purchasing/cooking/eating came from and who raised it. Wow. I probably don't even have to say it, but I would love this to become the norm.

Food Films

There is a great article up on Treehugger collecting/contributing reviews of five food-focused films as well as clips from each of them: The World According To Monsanto, King Corn, Our Daily Bread, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, and Food Fight. Each film appeals to me for different reasons and you can bet they are all going on my Netflix list. Well, at least four of them. I'm on the fence about Our Daily Bread. Find the article here.

blue revolution

Mark Bittman for the NY Times, writes about the future of fishing:

The [industrial fish farming industry] spends an estimated $1 billion a year on veterinary products; degrades the land (shrimp farming destroys mangroves, for example, a key protector from typhoons); pollutes local waters (according to a recent report by the Worldwatch Institute, a salmon farm with 200,000 fish releases nutrients and fecal matter roughly equivalent to as many as 60,000 people); and imperils wild populations that come in contact with farmed salmon.

There's good news though. Plenty of scientists are agree that a turnaround is possible. If fisheries are managed well, even declining species can quickly recover. Read all about it here. And check out this awesome (although not really related) picture of my friend Nick with a Strawberry Grouper (catch and release of course):

How did I not know about Ableman??

A friend of mine mentioned Michael Ableman in an email so I promptly googled him and came across something he wrote regarding E. Coli tainted spinach back in 2006. We seem to see through the same eyes. From Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food:

Not long ago lettuce came only in heads and spinach in bunches. For a salad, someone else might do the growing, but you still did the trimming and washing. You had some control -- and responsibility -- over the process. Now salad comes prewashed and bagged. You just pour it on a plate, dress it, put it in your mouth and chew.

This convenience adds risk. You give one more job over to someone somewhere else, trusting that they are concerned as much about product quality and your health as about the bottom line on the quarterly report.

But the business of food is now big business, and it might be making us sick. Witness the spinach tainted with E. coli bacteria that is blamed for more than 180 people infected in 26 states and Ontario, Canada, including one death.

The first mixed salad greens and loose spinach were from small, local growers who hand-cut the young greens and rushed them to market, organ-transplant style. Now we have a multimillion-dollar salad industry that consolidates raw ingredients from many big producers and has little control over growing methods. Washing salad ingredients on this scale requires facilities more like municipal swimming pools or public bathhouses than where our food should come from. And if you remember sixth-grade biology, you know that stuffing fresh, green leaves into sealed plastic bags is a great way to breed bacteria.

The spinach scare has prompted cries for better regulation and inspection. But the drama over one microorganism distracts us from something much bigger: a vast industrial food system built on cheap, empty calories -- from government-subsidized corn, for example -- that feed epidemic levels of obesity and diabetes. Sometimes it seems a system more interested in finding ways to pump more high-fructose corn syrup into kids' breakfast cereals than in providing fresh, whole foods to nourish their growing bodies. Click here to continue reading.

So some new suggested reading (for myself and others):

Fields of Plenty: A Farmer's Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It by Michael Ableman

On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm by Michael Ableman

From the Good Earth: A Celebration of Growing Food Around the World by Michael Ableman

A few Michael Ableman articles that appeared in the LA Times

Imagine that...

The NY Times reports More Tainted Eggs From China Found

High levels of the industrial chemical, Melanine, which was recently involved with the milk scandal that caused four infant deaths and ailments like kidney stones, has been found in the eggs. The government blamed the dairy scandal on scam artists who were intentionally adding melamine to milk as cheap filler in order to save money because it is known to give feed and food an artificially high protein reading.

However United Nations Food and Agriculture official, Zhang Zhongjun, said that he was told the source of the contamination is still unclear and could be from melamine-tainted animal feed. Zhang told the NY Times reporter, "It’s not clear where the problem is from. It’s not clear whether the melamine was added by humans or by pollution.”

A human or pollution problem in China's agriculture industry?!? You're kidding...

Must Read Michael Pollan

Can't even begin to express how grateful I am for Michael Pollan and essays/articles like this one that appeared in last week's NY Times magazine. Pollan's letter to the President-Elect focuses on the major issue underlying health care, energy Independence and climate change: the food issue.

Any attempts I would make to paraphrase Pollan's article won't do his points justice - so I urge you to read the article. I can attempt to summarize by saying: Pollan examines the past, present and possible future food system as well as the political relationship between food and just about every other sector of our world in such as way as to remind us that food is the core of our existence and well-being. It is essentially a condensed version of his latest book but with a stronger and bigger message regarding what to do next. In Defense of Food educated and empowered the individual. This piece picks up where the book left off and addresses the system from the top down by way of some brilliant, if a *tad ambitious, proposals:


I. Resolarizing the American Farm

II. Reregionalizing the Food System

III. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

A few excerpts from the article:

"...Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on — but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them..."

"We need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine."

"First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change."

"Today most federal messages about food, from nutrition labeling to the food pyramid, are negotiated with the food industry. The surgeon general should take over from the Department of Agriculture the job of communicating with Americans about their diet. That way we might begin to construct a less equivocal and more effective public-health message about nutrition. Indeed, there is no reason that public-health campaigns about the dangers of obesity and Type 2 diabetes shouldn’t be as tough and as effective as public-health campaigns about the dangers of smoking. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes. The public needs to know and see precisely what that sentence means: blindness; amputation; early death. All of which can be avoided by a change in diet and lifestyle. A public-health crisis of this magnitude calls for a blunt public-health message, even at the expense of offending the food industry. Judging by the success of recent antismoking campaigns, the savings to the health care system could be substantial."

*tad ambitious = Pollan's suggestion to "tear out five prime south-facing acres of the White House lawn and plant in their place an organic fruit and vegetable garden."

set your DVR

Hope I am not too late to suggest that everyone DVR Oprah today. I got a text early this morning from a reader letting me know that the focus of the show is: Where does your food come from? Not sure if they will only be looking into the meat matter or whether the show will cover the full range of environmental issues but either way I definitely suggest setting the DVR.

Check your local listings:

Lisa Ling Reports: How We Treat the Animals We Eat
Have you ever wondered what "cage-free" or "range-free" really means? Lisa Ling gets a rare look inside some of America's farms. Where does our food come from? (OAD 10/14/2008) (PG)

(thnx Alissa)

Thin line between commercial and agricultural

An article in The Post today has really got my wheels turning. In Baltimore County, Md., dairy farmer Bobby Prigel, like so many other small farmers, is struggling to keep his farm in operation. Instead of shipping his milk out of state he'd like to build an organic creamery and sell his products locally - but neighbors and preservationists aren't happy about it. They don't want the rural landscape spoiled and argue that making butter, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream isn't farming, it's manufacturing. Perhaps, but I say it's innovative, not to mention a positive step towards farmers taking back a big portion of the profits that "processors" are making.

The concerns of the preservationists - from water use and paving to the possibility of the small production facility turning into a factory - are understandable but I'm sort of leaning towards the big picture. The Pollan-esque picture. A place where Sparks, Md., farmer David Smith wouldn't be locked in a two-year battle with neighbors over his proposal to open up a retail shop in order to sell his pasture-raised meat. A place where pasture-raised meat is the norm... and where happy cows get to watch their milk turn into delicious ice cream... sigh...

Keep building the market and processing facility, Prigel.

Okay... that's enough from me. The article is a must-read: The Churning Point.