The Myth of Containment
The blog post was written by Watershed Media board member Diana Donlon.
In the mid-1980s when I was studying history in college, “containment” - as in stopping the spread of communism - was a ubiquitous topic. The threat of communism has long-since waned, but the theme of containment has resurfaced albeit in a different, but tragically visceral guise. The ongoing calamity in the Gulf is quite literally a failure of containment. BP gambled with a risky technology. The government was sloppy in its due diligence. And both otherwise powerful entities have proved to be virtually powerless to stop the hell they’ve unleashed. Late last month Bob Herbert of the New York Times likened “the oil gushing furiously from the bowels of earth” to “a warning from Hades.”
There are instructive parallels between the uncontained oil catastrophe and genetically engineered technology. Like the oil companies, the bio-technology companies pushing genetic engineering (GE) are gambling with the fundamental integrity of our ecosystems. Bio-tech gambling, however, is taking place at the molecular level largely out of public view and mostly without our knowledge or consent.
On April 27, 2010 the Supreme Court heard its first ever case addressing genetic engineering -- Monsanto v. Geertson Seed Farms. Monsanto was appealing a Federal court decision that USDA failed to abide by environmental protection laws when it approved “Roundup Ready Alfalfa” for commercial sale. Roundup Ready Alfalfa (RRA) has been genetically altered to be resistant to glyphosate the active ingredient in Monsanto’s flagship Roundup herbicide. The justices’decision on the case was announced on Monday (June 21). In a 7- to-1 decision, with Justice John Paul Stevens dissenting, the Supreme Court ruled that the lower court judge had gone too far in imposing a national ban on RRA. Both sides immediately started claiming victory. But, before we consider the implications of the high court’s decision, let’s back up a moment and ask why we should care about a seemingly obscure legal case in the first place?
Hay is the third largest crop grown in the United States. And, in this country the primary hay crop is alfalfa. Most alfalfa is fed to dairy cows. Dairy cows produce dairy products including milk.
In 2007 the Federal court held that the USDA had failed to abide by environmental protection laws when it approved RRA for commercial sale. Citing its potential to contaminate organic and conventional crops, the court halted any further planting and sale of Monsanto’s RRA. The Federal court granted an injunction banning all plantings of the GE alfalfa until USDA fully complied with environmental laws and rigorously assessed the crops’ impacts. Monsanto already controls corn and soy, the two largest crops, and would like to add alfalfa to its impressive roster. Unsatisfied with Federal court ruling the company took the case to the Supreme Court.
During the oral argument on April 27, Justice Scalia stated that, “This isn’t the contamination of the New York City water supply. It really isn’t.” With all due respect to Justice Scalia, it isn’t, but he was close. It could be the potential, irreversible, genetic contamination of the food supply.
Some question how a Roundup Ready Alfalfa plant could contaminate a conventional or an organic plant. The answer is pollination. Alfalfa is an open-pollinated crop. Bees, wind, and other pollinators can carry pollen at a distance of several miles from the genetically engineered Roundup Ready plants and cross-pollinate the non-Roundup Ready Alfalfa plants. Pollination has the potential to wreak havoc by spreading patented, foreign DNA that is proprietary to Monsanto. And, like BP and its infamous Deepwater Horizon well, the Monsanto Corporation and the government will be utterly powerless to contain the damage it unleashes on the commons.
In Greek mythology Zeus was angry with Man because, with the help of Prometheus, Man had stolen fire from the gods. Zeus planned his revenge on the mortals by giving Pandora a box or a jar. He told her that the box contained ‘special gifts’ but that she must never, under any circumstances, open it. One day Pandora’s curiosity got the best of her and she lifted the lid slightly. Out flew disease, despair, hunger, poverty, war, sickness, death, old age, greed and violence. Frightened by what she saw, Pandora tried desperately to close the vessel but, her efforts were in vain and only hope remained. Like a big, bad oil slick, the evils oozed all over the earth and have plagued us ever since.
At first glance it looks like Monsanto has won, but the decision isn’t so black and white. The Supreme Court did not make a decision on the safety of RRA and left the lower court ban in place. In sum, the ban on planting Roundup Ready Alfalfa still stands. The lid is still on the jar. If we have learned to stop gambling with too-big-to-fail technologies that once unleashed cannot be contained, we will keep it firmly in place.
Diana Donlon is a philanthropic consultant to foundations in the Bay Area. Her area of specialty is the food system.
Republican Senators Take Aim at Small Farmers, Urban Consumers, and Locavores
In late April, a trio of Republican senators––John McCain (AZ), Saxby Chambliss (GA), and Pat Roberts (KS)––wrote an angry letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, debunking a recent USDA program called “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food.” This initiative distributes grant money and loans with the goal of strengthening local food chains and linking consumers with farmers.
The Senators accuse USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan of diverting urgently needed funds from rural communities in favor of: 1) “specialty crops” (the government’s term for fruits, nuts, and vegetables, of which the USDA recommends each of us eat at least five servings a day); and 2) small growers and organic farmers (who the Senators stereotype as hobby producers “whose customers generally consist of affluent patrons at urban farmers markets.”)
They conclude that
“American families and rural farmers are hurting in today’s economy, and it’s unclear to us how propping up the urban locavore markets addresses their needs. Given our nation’s crippling budgetary crisis, we also believe the federal government cannot afford to spend precious rural development funds on feel-good measures which are completely detached from the realities of production agriculture.”
The not so subtle subtext of this letter is that to be a “real” farmer, you must be engaged in “production agriculture.” One can only assume this means corn, cotton, wheat, rice, and soybean production—the five primary commodity crops grown across hundreds of millions of acres in factory fields, propped up by the lion’s share of $15-plus billion in yearly USDA farm bill payments. In their view, the small producers benefitting from the Know Your Farmer program are not just do-gooders raising organic heirlooms for elite urbanites. They’re sucking away subsidies that should be going to the nation’s real farmers. Never mind that there are now more than 5,000 farmers markets across the country; or that an average of 10 million Americans shop at one on any given Saturday during the harvest season; or that farming organically is extremely hard and valuable work.
Here’s the bottom line. The Know Your Farmer program has spent a reported $65 million total so far with plans to invest another up to another $1 billion in loans from the stimulus program. This is peanuts compared with the $60-plus billion in USDA commodity subsidies that production growers presently receive over a five-year period.
Since Senator Chambliss is the ranking minority member of the Agriculture Committee, he and his fellow scribes must be aware that the U.S. is now considering paying Brazilian cotton growers $147.3 million this year because of former production agriculture subsidies that were in violation of World Trade Organization rules. You read that right––Brazilian farmers. The Wall Street Journal recently decried this as madness.
Such divisive political framing sets clear distinctions for how we talk about farmers, food, and our agriculture and nutrition policy. It might also backfire by fueling the fires of public opinion that have been rallying around healthy food production and raging against USDA subsidy programs. It is obvious to an increasing number of citizens and legislators that these programs:
1) divert billions of dollars to commodity agribusinesses whether they have actually suffered losses or not, whether they grow crops or not, with few funding caps, and few social or environmental mandates that would provide a public benefit to taxpayers in return;
2) support industrial crops that are more suited for animal feed, processed foods, and biofuels rather than a healthy, diverse diet;
3) flood the market with cheap, processed ingredients that contribute to a growing crisis of obesity and other diet-related epidemics.
Are these the feel-good measures McCain, Chambliss, and Roberts want us to get excited about?
Instead, they single out a long-overdue and modest attempt to repair links in broken local food chains and educate the public about the importance of knowing your farmer and where your food comes from. Revitalizing local food production can impact the every day lives of citizens––Food Stamp recipients, for example, who can use their Electronic Benefits Transfer cards to buy organic produce at farmers markets; or public school kids that enjoy fruits and vegetables grown by productive farmers in their areas; or small livestock producers that can now process their pasture raised meats with the aid of mobile slaughtering units.
Why don’t the Senators want us to know our farmers or care about where our food comes from? Maybe it’s because they are clinging to the decades-old “Get Big or Get Out” story line that defines how the majority of the country’s food is presently produced. This is the tragic story of 50 years of USDA policies that swept millions of family farmers from the American landscape and gave agribusiness the unimaginable powers they wield today over our entire food system.
Knowing your farmer and knowing your food will become the primary story of the next fifty years of food production. It is the story of saving local agriculture and local farmers before they disappear altogether. In saving regional food production, we become healthier, more engaged, more secure citizens. With quite a bit of leadership, and a comparatively miniscule budget, Vilsack and Merrigan are actually trying to restore relationships and rewrite the stories of decentralized modern farming.
If Senators McCain, Chambliss, and Roberts cared about the health and vitality of rural communities they might be better served to embrace the inevitable rediversification of the food supply. It certainly deserves its fair share—and then some.
Feed Your Children Well
The Child Nutrition Act is up for reauthorization by September 30. This is a federal government policy that sets the rules and standards and uses tax dollars to—among other things—provide a daily reimbursement for school lunches. Right now this amounts to $2.57 for a free lunch, including labor and ingredients. It is nowhere close to what most school districts need to put healthy foods on our cafeteria tables and reward all the people who make that possible. Congress will soon consider adding one dollar per meal to the reimbursement, and this still might not be enough.
Often when we think of huge “omnibus” government legislations like the Transportation Bill, the Energy Bill, or the Farm Bill—huge public spending programs with real life consequences—they seem so complex and tedious it is hard to understand how they affect us personally. It’s easy to get lost in the billions and trillions, in the alphabet soup and acronyms, in highway projects and corn monocultures in the Midwest. One of the beauties of the National School Lunch Program is that we can see the impacts on a personal level. We can look around in our communities and see our kids who depend on these programs. The Child Nutrition Act touches home in every community around the country.
This year the US arm of the international movement known as Slow Food is circulating a petition asking for some very reasonable changes to the Child Nutrition Act:
• $1 increase in the reimbursement per meal;
• grants for Farm-to-School and school garden projects to educate every single child in the country on where food comes from, and get the culture back in agriculture;
• financial incentives for schools to purchase as many fruits and vegetables as possible from local farmers to keep that money in the community, and to shorten the distance our food has to travel before it reaches our children’s cafeteria tables.
All this makes sense and deserves our support if only for one single reason. Children need proper nutrition to be good students. They can’t make it through an afternoon of focused attention without healthy food. This is actually a national security concern. We can’t afford to be a nation of under-achievers, at least not if we can help it.
Fortunately, there is a great shift in consciousness occurring around food and public health right now. Locally grown healthy food is being seen as a catalyst and dynamic organizing principle to revitalize local economies, to compensate for a future with less oil, to deal with a planet that is heating up, to address an obesity crisis that is verging on disaster.
The concept of feeding all of our children well, of teaching them about the beauty and complexity of food production through school gardens and local Farm-to-School programs which actually feed them, should be a community as well as a national priority. But in order for these things to happen, Congress needs to authorize more funding for the program. We should see this long overdue increase to the Child Nutrition Act as a down payment on a new generation that will have a lifetime of good eating habits engrained in them. The idea of healthy foods as preventive health care—perhaps even as medicine—is a concept that can and should change the world.
Find Slow Food's petition here.
Find info on HR 1324, a bill introduced by Lynn Woolsey relating to Child Nutrition Act.
Dan Imhoff is the director of Watershed Media, publisher of the newly released book, "Smart By Nature," a collaborative project with theCenter for Ecoliteracy.
Food Safety Bill Ignores CAFOs; Spurns Small Farmers
[Posted by Emmett Hopkins, Watershed Media research assistant and Foggy River Farm farmer.]
In a rush to pass some sort—any sort—of food safety bill, Congress has penned a piece of legislation that might actually harm the very farmers that hold the answers to our food safety challenges.
Before leaving on its August recess, Congress passed House Resolution 2749 (HR 2749). This bill gives the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sweeping powers to regulate American food producers, but in doing so, it does little to distinguish between huge multinational corporations and small family farms producing food to sell in their local communities. According to Opencongress.org, HR 2749 grants the FDA “the authority to regulate how crops are raised and harvested, to quarantine a geographic area, to make warrantless searches of business records, and to establish a national food tracing system.” To fund this effort, the bill proposes raising a $500 registration fee on any facility “holding, processing, or manufacturing” food.
As we wait for the Senate to return from recess and take up this bill, it is worth considering its effects on small-scale farmers and local food producers. Across America, communities are working to create strong, viable regional food systems. From Alabama to Washington, locals are supporting small sustainable farms, establishing farmers markets, creating local food co-ops. They do this not just because they appreciate the sweet perfection of just-picked tomatoes and melons—but also because they know that by strengthening local farms and food processors they are more likely to have a reliable supply of safe, healthy foods for their children and their grandchildren. Who needs a bureaucratic food registry system when you can drive across town and visit the farmers who grew your lettuce, made your cheese, or canned your pickles?
In its current form HR 2749 could have a disabling effect on many small scale farmers. The $500 registration fee required to be paid by any farm that processes food is unreasonable to ask of small farms. During acommittee hearing, one of the bill’s sponsors Henry Waxman (D-California) pointed to large corporate food producers in his defense of the fee structure: “In the recent peanut (salmonella) outbreak, Kellogg’s alone lost $70 million. Faced with such a dire situation, I think it is reasonable to ask the food industry to chip in.” This is all well and good, but the problem arises when Waxman and his colleagues fail to differentiate between Kellog’s—which reported $12.8 billion sales in 2008—and little Grandma’s Jams and Jellies that made, let’s say, $12,800 in 2008.
Several farm organizations and US Representatives have expressed their concern about the fee structure:
Representative Sam Farr (D-California), during a committee hearing, said this:
"I have deep concerns ... about the fee structure in the measure, which would charge a farm family making jams or syrup or cheese the same fee as a processing plant owned by a multinational corporation employing hundreds or thousands or workers. This strikes me as not only unfair but contrary to federal farm policy that has encouraged small and mid-sized family farms to get into small scale value-added enterprises to survive economically. I am seeking an assurance ... that a more progressive fee structure will be found that does not inhibit our farm families from taking advantage of new markets."
A letter presented to Henry Waxman by seven concerned members of Congress stated:
The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and the National Organic Coalition, in a letter to bill sponsor Representative Dingell (D-Michigan), wrote this:
"While H.R. 2749 bill exempts facilities that sell over 50.1% of their processed products directly to the consumer, it still imposes a fee on those who primarily sell wholesale. We represent a large number of farmers who sell their value-added products to the wholesale market as well as a large number who sell direct to consumer, and in fact, most farmers increasingly do some of each. […] H.R. 2749 requires facilities of all size, regardless of whether their annual revenue stream is $1,000 or $1 million or $100 million, to pay the same fee. […] This is a fundamental issue of equity. The tax in the bill as written and approved by the House violates the basic principle of ability to pay which is the bedrock of our system."
While the proposed law includes certain exemptions for farmers that primarily sell directly to consumers, restaurants, and grocery stores, farms that sell primarily to other local venues such as caterers and school or hospital cafeterias would not qualify. The NSAC and NOCworry that “there is increased demand for locally-produced agricultural products in school cafeterias, but as it stands, the language in HR 2749 would not exempt farmers selling direct to institutional settings which could dampen farmer interest in these important new markets that stand to provide healthy, fresh food to our nation’s children.”
Let’s stop and think for a minute about where the most prevalent food safety problems come from. Salmonella and E. coli are the bacteria that seem to most often cause outbreaks in the US—and both originate exclusively from animals. E. coli lives in the gut of ruminants; The main culprit for spreading this disease is cattle. The corn-fed cattle in industrial feedlots carry by far the most E. coli bacteria. (A 2009 studyby the USDA found that “When cattle were abruptly switched from a high grain diet to an all hay diet, total E. coli populations declined 1,000-fold within 5 days.”)
Miraculously, however, it seems that all of the large-scale industrial animal operations would be exempt from the regulations proposed under this bill (see "USDA Exemptions" section of bill ongovtrack.us)....when in fact it is these industries where most of our food-borne illnesses begin. It is the massive industrial farms that need targeting—not a misguided effort to control the demonized "leafy greens." Let's focus our attention where it is truly productive: the mega meat feedlots and slaughterhouses. Instead of HR 2749, Congress would be better suited to pass something closer to Kevin's law—a.k.a. the "Meat and Poultry Pathogen Reduction and Enforcement Act." This bill was introduced by Anna Eshoo (D-California) along with 36 Republican and Democratic co-sponsors in 2005, but never became law. It would have focused the fight for food safety squarely on the large meat producers, where it belongs.
The idea of promoting food safety is a noble one: To protect consumers from food-borne illness that could suddenly and silently harm them or their families. The solution proposed by HR 2749, however, fails to focus narrowly on the most likely sources of illness: meats and other foods processed in massive facilities, and food imported from abroad. Instead, it risks slowing down the regional food movements that actually promise solutions to our food safety problems. Rather than holding back small-scale farmers, we need to be urging them forward. They represent the future of American food: a network of regional food systems where food is traceable and farmers are accountable because they are right down the road.
*Visit the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) website for links to various Congressional hearings, statements by farm organizations, and information about other shortcomings of HR 2749.
*Visit Wild Farm Alliance’s compilation of articles related to the food safety bill and other related topics issues.
*Read Carolyn Lochhead’s San Francisco Chronicle article on resistance to the bill.
Calls for CAFO Reform are Heating Up
The outbreak of H1N1 influenza—recently classified as an international pandemic by the World Health Organization—has put a human face on the health risks posed by Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). As people become more informed of the potentials for disease transfer, the possible squandering of antibiotic medicines, and tragedies of environmental degradation, dissatisfaction with large-scale industrial animal factories is intensifying. The H1N1 outbreak is just one of many signs that this type of industrial agriculture cannot be permitted to continue as currently practiced much longer. Reform is a matter of when, not if.
In November, California voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to prohibit confinement cages that do not give egg-laying hens, pregnant pigs, or calves raised for veal adequate room to stand up and fully extend their limbs. While Prop 2, (the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act), represents a major step forward in implementing better practices and more humane treatment for animals, its larger effect may be far beyond the California state line.
The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), a major proponent of Prop 2, is modeling similar initiatives in states such as Michigan and Ohio, which have large embedded CAFO industries as well as ballot initiative systems. In an attempt to block reforms in Ohio, the agribusiness lobby is proposing a pre-emptive legislation that would create industry-determined statewide standards and oversight for farm-raised animals. The Ohio Farm Bureau is attempting to fast track this idea to voters this fall, with the hope of rendering any tighter controls condoned by the HSUS redundant and unnecessary. (One of the best places to find regular updates on both sides of this issue is www.farmpolicy.com)
These reform movements are not relegated to the animal welfare movement, however, nor to the increasingly critical United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which has a web page specifically dedicated to issues surrounding industrial animal production (http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/home/en/index.htm).
Maryland’s attorney general, Douglas Gansler, is pushing for a ban on arsenic, a conventional growth promoter (and suspected human carcinogen) relied upon by the U.S. poultry industry, which is heavily concentrated in the Delmarva Peninsula. Under current law, chickens can be fed small amounts of arsenic along with their feed, purportedly to speed growth and fight parasites. Gansler recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post calling for a ban of arsenicals such as roxarsone in chicken feed, as they may be passed on to humans who eat poultry or drink water contaminated by run-off from the industry’s prolific manure. (The poultry industry reportedly generates 1.2 billion pounds of manure each year in Maryland alone.) The Maryland attorney general is currently working with 30 other states through the National Association of Attorneys General to convince the Food and Drug Administration to ban this practice.
The Obama administration is supporting a bill (“The Preservation of Antibiotics For Medical Treatment Act of 2009”) that would ban “many routine uses of antibiotics in farm animals in hopes of reducing the spread of dangerous bacteria in humans.” Antibiotic medicines have been heralded as one of the scientific miracles of the 20th century, but their excessive use in industrial animal agriculture has raised grave concerns about the creation and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria. (According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the CAFO industry uses 70 percent of all antibiotics in the United States.) The New York Times reports that the American Medical Association is one of the key supporters of the legislation. Industry groups such as the National Pork Producers Council are lobbying hard against it. The measure could have industry-wide implications with regard to the incomprehensible concentrations of animals currently being raised in single locations. If non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics were banned, and any use of antibiotics can only be done with supervision from a veterinarian, CAFOs may be forced to radically scale down the size of their operations in order to control disease and maintain healthy animals.
We should probably get used to hearing a lot more about the unintended consequences of our industrialized food system. Slowly but surely, people in all circles and at all levels of government are demanding that food production be put back on a healthy track. This is a very encouraging sign—our present and future are both at stake.
To read more about these issues, check out the following reports:
Pew Commission, Putting Meat on the Table;
Union of Concerned Scientists, CAFOs Uncovered;
UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Livestock’s Long Shadow.
Californians Ban Animal Factory Farm Techniques
In this week’s 2008 election, California unanimously voted to dismantle some of the animal factory farming industry’s most restrictive confinement practices. Restrictive being the operative word. The law that goes into effect in 2015 will phase out: 1) gestation crates that virtually immobilize sows throughout their pregnancies; 2) veal crates where male dairy cows are anemically confined; and 3) “battery cages” that afford a laying hen no more living space than a standard piece of copy paper and six to seven companions.
Of these three confinement systems, California’s egg industry will be the most severely affected. The Los Angeles Times estimates the size of the state’s flock of egg-laying hens at 20 million. Hog and veal operations are limited throughout the state, the nation’s largest agricultural producer. Throughout the campaign, conventional egg producers threatened to move their operations across state lines or even south of the border if Proposition 2 passed, sounding alarms that California’s egg supply could face food safety threats. With the passage of the law, egg producers who do choose to stay in business will have to shift their operations to free-range systems, a small but swiftly growing segment of the national market.
Proposition 2 was championed by the Humane Society of the United States, Farm Sanctuary, and the California Veterinary Medical Association, among many others. The opposition included egg and hog producers farmers both in and outside the state, as well as the American College of Poultry Veterinarians, who claimed the law would be economically disastrous for California egg producers and raise prices for consumers.
California has long considered a bellwether for political, economic, and cultural trends across the nation and the world. And for this reason the campaign was hard fought, with both sides raising $8.5 million for their effort, according to the Los Angeles Times. Both sides also see this as a sign of a national snowball against animal factory farms—perhaps not just on confinement systems, but on environmental and labor violations, greenhouse gas emissions, as well as grain subsidies that all together, have created a nightmarish and unsustainable meat, dairy, and egg production supply. (Also the subject of an upcoming Watershed Media book, The Animal Factory.)
What we are witnessing here is the emergence of ethics and food production issues not just in a state referendum but in what could soon be a national policy dialog. There is little time to celebrate, however. While Californians passed this step toward humane farming, the Bush Administration eased restrictions on feedlots and Confinement Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). Under just issued EPA requirements, large livestock facilities (whose waste flows often exceed those of small cities) can avoid obtaining pollution permits as long as they claim they will not harmfully discharge into nearby waterways.
Sure, we believe you're not dumping your shit in the creeks, streams, and waterways!
The new voluntary compliance law is unimaginable in its neglect of the public trust. It is part of the final act of an administration which will no doubt be remembered for its cronyism, corruption, contempt of government, and transfer of the public treasury and well being to the private sector.
And while Californians voted in favor of the first African American president, for more humane treatment for animals, and in support of a high-speed passenger rail system, we also voted for a restriction of marriage between a man and a woman.
Obviously, there are still more miles to travel and mountains to climb and not a moment to lose. As my classics professor said to me upon my completion of undergraduate work, “Go forth and be frustrated.” But don’t forget the hope for a better world delivered in the 2008 election.
For a sense of the potential ripple effect of California's Humane Farming Act, check out this article in the Des Moines Register
Eating Like An Activist
How did food suddenly surface—along with nuclear fallout and climate change—as one of the critical issues of our time? I guess when we all woke up and realized that we eat at least a few meals a day. And all of those individual food choices actually carry real world economic, social, and ecological consequences.
After all, we only get to vote once a year or even every few years for the handful of people who ultimately call the shots in politics, and by extension, the corporatocracy. Only so many of us are cut out to be congressmen, agribusiness CEOs, or fast food barons. But if we really thought long and hard about the state of our country and the challenges ahead of us—about our squandered resources and mismanaged opportunities for leadership—most of us would be out on the street engaging in nonviolent protest twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
Which brings us back to food. It’s something tangible we can do something about. It’s something delicious that we can get passionate about. Eating is an act that grounds us to the present, to the future, to the land, to each other.
And it’s true, over the past fifty years the global food system has assumed Weapons of Mass Destruction-like propensities all its own. Fields are pumped with explosives-grade fertilizers. Wild areas have been devastated by the voracious planting of corn and soybean and wheat and rice and cotton and sugar cane monocultures. Mega-dairies and mega-feedlots unable to contain their toxic manure have driven people out of rural areas because they can’t breathe, can’t drink the water, can’t tolerate the countryside, can’t eat the fish, and can’t coexist with the flies. There are over 150 Dead Zones in waterways around the world. These are bays and gulfs and aquatic environs where agricultural nutrient contamination causes algae blooms that suck the life sustaining capacity out of the water. Fisheries collapse. Nothing survives. It’s eerily like nuclear fallout.
The maraschino cherry on top of all this is the obesity crisis. That economic disaster is just waiting to bankrupt state treasuries across the nation in the form of lost work days, drug prescriptions, doctors appointments, heart by-pass surgery and diabetes treatments, joint replacements, and hundreds of billions of dollars in other insured and uninsured annual medical bills.
But maybe there is a way out. “Eating,” wrote the Kentucky philosopher Wendell Berry, “is an agricultural act.” By that he meant that our food comes from the land, and that land is ultimately affected by the everyday choices and purchases of eaters. Berry might also have said that eating is an existential act. By this, I mean existential not in the I eat therefore I am sense, but in a more philosophical, why are we here? what makes us human? big picture kind of sense. Surely we eat to live. But how we accomplish this most basic and gracious and potentially spiritual act also says a lot about us as people—defines us actually—as a culture, as a species. Perhaps we don’t have to eat our way down to the last wild Chinook salmon, or reduce the Earth’s magnificent biological diversity to just a handful of species that satisfy our encroaching global culinary autism.
Something has to change. We simply can’t keep eating this way. We need to act, to start eating like activists: at the dinner table, at farmers’ markets, at our pre-schools and soccer games. How can our food choices influence the world we would like to live in, a world we would feel okay about passing on to our children and grandchildren? Here are a few rough compass points.
Wage your own personal battle against single-use disposable food and beverage containers. By this I mean plastic and paper packaging that will be used once, but is then destined to spend eternity afloat at sea, squashed in a landfill, or wasting away loathingly on the landscape. You can do this by shopping with your own reusable bags, staying in restaurants and cafes rather than taking out, buying food in bulk rather than single servings, making alternatives to bottled water and other disposable beverage containers.
Develop familiarity with the people who grow your food. Organic produce eaten out of season and shipped around the globe doesn’t count as activist eating. Buying food locally or regionally from farmers you know and whose farm practices you are familiar with is a good basis for a food ethic. Eco labels such as organically certified, shade grown, and biodynamic can help you identify good practices on items produced faraway—coffee, wine, grains might come to mind. But ultimately, familiarity with producers is the highest form of certification.
Help to dismantle the Industrial Animal Factory Complex. Mega-dairies and mega-feedlots that house tens of thousands of cows, chickens, and hogs in a single complex have become barbaric, unhealthy, and unecological modes of food production. Learn what you can about what goes on inside these massive operations, then do what you can to alter your diet accordingly. Maybe you’ll start with the industrial breakfast by reconsidering eggs produced by hens in crammed battery cages or bacon from hogs reared on cement-floored confinement sheds. These industrial production methods essentially thwart the animal’s every natural instinct. A healthy breakfast can lead to a whole day of sound choices around animal products.
Vote with your fork. Get political. Learn about the importance of the Farm Bill that is reauthorized by Congress every five to seven years. Meet your representatives and ask them if they have a “Post Cheap Oil Plan” to maximize a renewable farming system based on organic methods, and regional food production and distribution where you live.
Connect your eating and cooking habits with climate change. A recent University of Chicago study showed that eating a more vegetarian diet may be more influential in reducing an individual’s carbon footprint, even more than the car you drive. One main reason? The tens of billions of livestock living in confined animal factories produce nearly 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. This issue is not, however, entirely black and white. Livestock raised locally on a grass-fed diet may compare favorably, and organic produce shipped half way around the world, could arrive with a large CO2 price tag.
Wash your own heads of lettuce and other leafy greens. In the United States, more than half of all pre-washed, pre-cut leafy greens are grown in the nation’s Salad Bowl, the Salinas Valley. Unsafe production conditions there have resulted in isolated incidences of Salmonella, E.coli 0157 , and other pathogens entering the food system primarily through convenience-oriented pre-washed and bagged leafy greens. Industry has responded by waging a war on habitat and wild animals in that area, even though the most probable origin of the lethal E. coli 0157 was cows being fed a corn-intensive diet in the area.
Don’t be afraid to be radical. Newsweek recently highlighted a new group who call themselves the Freegans because they eat only free (surplus) vegan food. That’s pretty hardcore. But, hey, we can all start somewhere. Try growing some of your own food. Tear out some of your lawn and build a garden that becomes your hobby and your workout gym. Become a food artisan. Make your own bread and wine and vinegar and canned tomato sauce. Raise some laying hens in the backyard. There are a lot less worthy things to do with your time.
Make a place in your life for native bees. Three out of every four bites of the food we eat require some sort of pollinator to arrive at our tables. Most of this work is presently done by domesticated honeybees, but those bee colonies are on the verge of a precipitous collapse in agricultural areas all over the world. Native bees that have co-evolved with native plants (and their own sources of pollen and nectar) are our best insurance policy against a potential catastrophe and are best preserved with areas of healthy wild habitat.
When it comes to food, perhaps a word like revolution doesn’t have to seem ominous or pretentious or threatening. There is certainly plenty to be angry about—especially if you live anywhere near a 20,000 cow dairy or mega-feedlot, or follow U.S. Farm Bill politics. But there is also plenty to get excited about. The local food revolution starts at home. It can start right away and offer whole new ways of seeing the world and our rightful place at the table.