Beyond Green

Can the USDA Really Fight Industry Consolidation?

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:17:00 +0000

The first of the much anticipated agricultural competition workshops are underway right now in Iowa. Hosted jointly by the USDA and the Department of Justice, the workshops aim to explore the question of consolidation in agribusiness. The workshops themselves have already come under scrutiny for initially excluding actual farmers on the panels -- and have come in for continued criticism that the farmers who have been put on are more representatives of corporations than real farmers.

It's hard not to be somewhat cynical about our government's claim that they're shocked, shocked to discover there's anti-competitive behavior in agriculture. On the other hand, for the last twenty or so years, consolidation has been -- in Washington at least -- the crime that dare not speak its name. So the fact that it's the USDA and DOJ running these workshops is nothing short of astonishing.

And while the whole of the industry will get attention, much of the focus so far has been on Monsanto, which thanks to its aggressive practices -- along with support from the USDA -- now controls up to 90% of the seed business in some markets. It's to the point that in many parts of the country non-Monsanto (and thus non genetically engineered seed) are simply unavailable to farmers.

The Justice Department is already investigating the company and it will undoubtedly get a lot of attention during these workshops. But knowing the Obama administration's support for biotechnology generally and reading between the lines in this NY Times article on the issues involved with Monsanto, I'm starting to get concerned.

The way the article characterizes the debate, the goal appears to be to broaden access to Monsanto's intellectual property, i.e. the herbicide-tolerant genetic traits in its seeds, rather than to broaden access to conventional seeds:

Monsanto sells its own branded seed varieties, like Dekalb in corn and Asgrow in soybeans, to farmers. But it has expanded its influence and profits by licensing those traits to hundreds of small seed companies, allowing them to incorporate the traits in the seeds they sell. It has also granted licenses to the other large trait developers, allowing them to create combinations of engineered traits in a process known as stacking.
Monsanto says that its licensing shows it is the opposite of a monopolist, encouraging rather than hampering competition.
But critics say the licenses give Monsanto excessive control. Seed company executives said the licenses were sometimes worded in a way that compelled them to sell Monsanto traits over those of its competitors. Mr. Quarles denied that, saying the contracts contain sales incentives typical of the industry.

The rest of the article focuses on the legal battles between Monsanto and Dupont, another biotech giant, over access to Monsanto's patents. It may very well be that the anti-competitive behavior the government punishes is that which prevents even greater adoption of biotech seeds -- the opposite of what many progressives want out of anti-trust enforcement.

Until we can displace agricultural productivity as the only measure of success of government policy, even this new attention to anti-competitive practices is unlikely to lead to meaningful reform. To me the focus must be on finding ways to increase farmers' share of consumers' spending without threatening significant increases in food prices -- there is, after all, no government that likes to champion policies that increase the cost of food. Nothing puts a damper on electoral prospects like bread riots.

Keep in mind that a mere 7 cents of the consumer's food dollar gets to the farmer, while 73 cents goes to distribution costs. The only way we can get to a win-win -- and not be forced to choose between higher farmer income or higher retail prices -- is to let the middleman, i.e. the processors and yes, the retailers -- take the hit. Sadly, I don't think Walmart, Safeway or Whole Foods are on the agenda at the moment, even though some experts believe the real squeeze on farmers comes from them.

It's when we start having discussions like that and start recognizing that a relentless focus on agricultural production simply is not consistent with helping rural economies that I'll believe we might just be getting somewhere.

Photo credit: Farm Aid

Spring Gleaning

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:09:00 +0000

There's a nice article in USA Today about a new generation of public urban orchards, ripe for the picking:

Fruit-picking opportunities... are becoming more common, as volunteers in cities including Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia and Madison, Wis., mobilize behind a goal of planting fruit trees on public land in city parks and neighborhoods.
"This is part of what's obviously been an explosion in interest in locally grown and organic food," said Janet Parker, a founding member of a group called Madison Fruits and Nuts. "I think we're coming to realize more and more that it doesn't make any sense, at this late date with climate change being what it is, to truck in so much of our food from California, in the cases of apples, sometimes New Zealand."

Free fruit also is available for picking in season on public land in Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Minneapolis and New York, according to neighborhoodfruit.com, a site that helps people track down available fruit.

One of the compelling points in Sharon Astyk's A Nation of Farmers involves her observation that we've been trained to see "free" food as having minimal actual value-- we're better off buying our fruit in the store than gleaning from what's available around us.

But that's why this urban orchard movement is so compelling -- it's another way to bring the reality of food production closer to home for millions of urban residents. Also, note the shout-out the article gives to the Philadelphia Orchard Project, which has started 17 orchards in the Philly area in the last 3 years.

Oh, and for the rest of you wanting to find your nearest gleaning opportunity, there's an app for that.

Photo credit: Muffet

Heirloom Apples to the Rescue!

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:42:00 +0000

Here's another example of the power of diversity over monocultures in agriculture. Writer Gary Nabhan has a great piece at Grist on how heirloom apples may save US apple growers from the risks of climate change:

Recent studies have suggested that orchard keepers face a new challenge to supplying a variety of apples to their customers. Shifts in weather patterns may be reducing the number of winter chill hours that apple and other trees require in order to bear abundant fruit. If trends continue as predicted, most California orchards are expected to receive less than 500 chill hours per winter by the end of the 21st century. Most apple varieties require 1,000 chill hours per winter to yield harvests large enough to keep orchards economically viable, although some require as little as 800 hours and a few can get by on just 500 chill hours.

In its "high emissions scenario" for climate change, the Union of Concerned Scientists has predicted that orchards in southeastern Pennsylvania will receive 1,000 or more chill hours in just 50 to 60 percent of winters. Because Pennsylvania is the fourth-largest remaining producer of apples in this country, and because much of its $60 million annual crop comes from the southeastern region, these predictions have generated considerable anxiety among orchard keepers. But no one knows how many of the varieties currently being grown there can actually tolerate fewer than 1,000 chill hours -- the meteorological projections have not yet been tangibly related to the specific responses of particular varieties. And of course, no one knows for sure how much of the perceived weather shifts are due to global warming or to more localized urban heat-island effects of changing land uses.

As Gary mentions, this is of particular concern in Pennsylvania. But farmers like Nick Botner in Oregon are doing their part to fill in some of the blanks on which varieties will thrive in the new conditions. Botner may be in his eighties, but he's not slowing down -- he's testing 3,000 heirloom varieties to see which will grow best in our changing climate. Will apples disappear from store shelves? Not if we remember that there are plenty of apples in the ~~sea~~ tree.

Photo credit: Amanda "Bake it Pretty"

Philly Proposes a Big Soda Tax

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:35:00 +0000

Music to my ears (via the Inquirer):

Mayor Nutter wants to treat the city's weight and wallet problems in his 2010-11 budget with the same remedy: the nation's highest tax on all sweetened beverages including soda, energy drinks, ice tea, even chocolate milk.

Nutter's plan would put Philadelphia at the front of the movement to tax sweet drinks, an effort that the beverage industry already opposes and that could encounter resistance in City Council.

The tax rate would be 2 cents per ounce, 40 cents on a 20-ounce bottle of soda. The levy would cover fountain-drink syrups and powders, based on the number of liquid ounces they produce. Diet drinks without added sugar and baby formula would be excluded.

City officials said they could raise $77 million a year. Health Commissioner Donald F. Schwarz estimated that a typical city resident drinks a half-liter of sweet beverages a day.

Not mentioned above, but confirmed is that the tax would also apply to flavored, sweetened milk. At 2 cents an ounce, it's about double the most commonly discussed tax and would add $1.34 to the price of a two-liter bottle of soda. If enacted, there's no question it will affect consumption.

Look, nobody likes taxes, but Philly already consumes above average amounts of soda and has high rates of obesity. Plus, for any arguments about regressivity of a soda tax (since it would theoretically hit low-income folks harder), it's important to remember that this is all about preserving services that help those low-income folks the most. I don't agree that a reduction in soda consumption because of price is on par with that same person losing access to vital city services -- we need to have some sense of perspective.

It will be very interesting to see if this tax can make it into law. Meanwhile, Democrats everywhere could learn something from Mayor Michael Nutter. Even if the City Council halves his tax to a penny per ounce, it's still going to be effective. Somehow, Dems seem to think that negotiating with oneself is the best strategy. Nuttter seems to be coming in high to make sure he gets something meaningful out of it. Anyway, stay tuned. The fight over this will no doubt be something to see.

Photo credit: poolie

GMOs as Big Ag's Version of "Financial Innovation"

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:36:00 +0000

(Photoillustration by Grist)Financial blogger Felix Salmon has an essay in Foreign Policy called "How Locavores Can Save the World" -- expanded, by the way, from a wonderful blog post he wrote after attending a panel discussion on world hunger at the Davos World Economic Forum in the company of Blue Hill Farm's Dan Barber. Salmon usually focuses on issues involving economic crises, monetary policy, complex derivatives, macro-economics and governmental oversight of the financial markets, but here he's talking monocultures, sustainable agriculture, and transgenic seeds. Tom Philpott has in the past opined on the similarities between financial and food crises, so I suppose this turn of events is not too surprising.

But the bit I found most striking was how Salmon characterized Big Ag's claim that genetically modified organisms are an "answer" to the problem of world hunger:

[It] is the agricultural equivalent of creating triple-A-rated mortgage bonds, fabricated precisely to prevent the problem of credit risk. It doesn't make the problem go away: It just makes the problem rarer and much more dangerous when it does occur because no one is -- or even can be -- prepared for such a high-impact, low-probability event.

Well, hey. That's a new one. GMOs as CDOs...

READ THE REST OF THIS POST ON GRIST.ORG

Junk Food Taxes May Be Better than Healthy Food Subsidies

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 02:55:00 +0000

An interesting new study was just published in Psychological Science, about a lab experiment at SUNY Buffalo that suggests junk-food taxes increase the overall nutritional quality of a shopping trip, while subsidies on healthy foods actually decrease the nutritionally quality (via Science Daily).

[Study author and clinical psychologist Dr. Leonard] Epstein and colleagues simulated a grocery store, "stocked" with images of everything from bananas and whole wheat bread to Dr. Pepper and nachos. A group of volunteers -- all mothers -- were given laboratory "money" to shop for a week's groceries for the family. Each food item was priced the same as groceries at a real grocery nearby, and each food came with basic nutritional information.

The mother-volunteers went shopping several times in the simulated grocery. First they shopped with the regular prices, but afterward the researchers imposed either taxes or subsidies on the foods. That is, they either raised the prices of unhealthy foods by 12.5 percent, and then by 25 percent; or they discounted the price of healthy foods comparably. Then they watched what the mothers purchased.

The study authors separated food into two categories, "high calorie for nutrient" food and "low calorie for nutrient" food -- i.e. junk food and healthy food. They did this so that they could specifically measure the effect pricing changes had on the nutritional content of a participant's shopping basket. As you might expect, taxing junk food reduced junk food purchases, and subsidizing healthy food increased healthy food purchases. But the story does not end there. The researchers discovered that taxing the bad stuff was far more effective from a nutritional standpoint than subsidizing the good stuff -- and not just because prices affected sales.

The junk food taxes caused a real shift in nutritional quality because the money saved on junk food was spent on healthy food, which has more nutrients per calories. However, when the researchers subsidized healthy food in their test, many participants spent the savings on -- wait for it -- junk food. A subsidy for health foods actually increased the amount of fat, protein, and carbohydrates from that simulated shopping trip by about 10 percent each.

READ THE REST OF THIS POST ON GRIST.ORG

Who Needs Clean Water Anyway?

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 21:28:00 +0000

Another entry in the New York Times fantastic "Toxic Waters" series came out Sunday. This latest one is about the slow but tragically effective weakening of the Clean Water Act:

Thousands of the nation's largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act's reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.

As a result, some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.
Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.
The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation's largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.
"We are, in essence, shutting down our Clean Water programs in some states," said Douglas F. Mundrick, an E.P.A. lawyer in Atlanta. "This is a huge step backward. When companies figure out the cops can’t operate, they start remembering how much cheaper it is to just dump stuff in a nearby creek."
"This is a huge deal," James M. Tierney, the New York State assistant commissioner for water resources, said of the new constraints. "There are whole watersheds that feed into New York's drinking water supply that are, as of now, unprotected."

All this despite the dangerous rise in pollutants in our drinking water. Meanwhile, Congress has been trying to engineer a fix in the form of the Clean Water Restoration Act, specifically by removing the word "navigable" from a description of waterways subject to regulation under the CWA. But guess who is among the lobbying groups leading the charge against reform? Our good friends in industrial agriculture, the American Farm Bureau. They are lobbying directly and through corporate front groups like the perniciously named Waters Advocacy Coalition. And here's what an AFB spokesman had to say to the New York Times:

"If you erase the word 'navigable' from the law, it erases any limitation on the federal government's reach," said Mr. Parrish of the American Farm Bureau Federation. "It could be a gutter, a roadside ditch or a rain puddle. But under the new law, the government gets control over it."

The article also suggests that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson could issue a ruling that would clear up some of the confusion regarding the EPA's jurisdiction. She has so far refused, preferring to wait for Congress to act. But with the GOP doing an awesome impersonation of a brick wall, it's hard to see the legislation moving forward any time soon. Perhaps Ms. Jackson might reconsider. It's only our water, after all.

In Philly? Come Chat with an Urban Farmer

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 20:47:00 +0000

Snow got you down? Would you rather be talking about spring planting? Well, if you happen to be in Philly this weekend, you're in luck. Urban farmer extraordinaire Dave Zelov, fearless leader of the Weavers Way agricultural empire, will be at the Allen's Lane High Point Cafe at the R8 Allen's Lane train station in NW Philly giving a presentation and answering veggie gardening questions this Sunday, February 28 at 2pm.

I can vouch for the fact that Dave is an amazing resource and a super nice guy. And yes, even in the middle of the snowiest winter in Philly history -- a winter which shows no sign of abating -- he's already harvesting chard, kale, bok choy, tatsoi, lettuce, arugula, pea shoots, and baby greens out of his hoop houses. But he's taking a break to help us all get a mental head start on the growing season.

Anyway, if you're around and want to think and talk about something green, swing on by this Sunday. Tell him Tom sent you.

Robots Should Stay out of the Kitchen

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:58:00 +0000

This is wrong on so many levels. The NYT reports on the latest doings in the robotics lab:

With Dr. Rybski looking on like a proud parent, a bearded graduate student clacked away at a laptop on a roving service cart, and the robot rolled forward to fulfill its primary function: the delivery of one foil-wrapped Nature Valley trail-mix flavor granola bar.

"Hello, I'm the Snackbot," it said in a voice not unlike that of HAL 9000, from "2001: A Space Odyssey," as its rectangular LED "mouth" pulsated to form the words. "I've come to deliver snacks to Ian. Is Ian here?"

Now, Snackbot exists to help gather data on human/robot interactions. Although a careful review of the relevant data contained within such works as Battlestar Galactica, Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey or even the lackluster I, Robot will give a discerning viewer all the information he or she needs to understand the dangers robots pose to humankind.

But it gets worse:

The Snackbot is but one soldier in a veritable army of new robots designed to serve and cook food and, in the process, act as good-will ambassadors, and salesmen, for a more automated future.

The article then proceeds to describe some of these "soldiers" culminating in the shocking robot-human hybrid that is the innocuously named Motoman SDA-10:

First they make our sushi. Then they enslave us.

The scientists involved with these efforts readily admit that the whole idea is meant to counteract the important lessons we've learned from Terminator and BSG and acclimate us to the idea of a future populated with robot servers. We all know how that story ends, don't we?

My suggestion: boil your own pot of water and leave the robots out of the equation entirely.

Photo credit: Koji Sasahara/Associated Press

Is there too much 'Let's Hope' in 'Let's Move'?

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 18:45:00 +0000

The industry talks a good game, but keeps churning out the same old junk. It's no mystery that Michelle Obama's Let's Move anti-obesity campaign is built on industry cooperation. It's also true that many experts are skeptical of the wisdom behind it; nutritionist Marion Nestle has been particularly critical both of the government's food industry "health" partnerships as well as of the administration's unwillingness to fight the industry's relentless media advertising.

I tend to agree. While the Let's Move initiative is full of worthy proposals, especially in the area of addressing food deserts and promoting farm-to-city initiatives, the idea of leaving restrictions on junk food television advertising -- not to mention junk food taxes -- out of the equation seems to base the pitch just a bit too much as an appeal to our better angels. It's hard to see public service announcements and educational campaigns counteracting those hundreds of millions of dollars work of junk food ads Americans of all ages submit to every time they turn on their televisions.

And it certainly doesn't help when star athletes, some of whom will no doubt participate in Let's Move, continue to flack for junk food (from Petyon and Eli Manning and Oreos to Derek Jeter and Gatorade). Meanwhile, anyone who's been watching the Olympics knows that NBC's coverage of this ultimate athletic event has been awash in ads for soda and other junk food. Even the Olympians themselves are in on the act -- Alternet noted that snowboarder Brad Martin is featured prominently in a McDonald's ad shown repeatedly during the Olympics.

READ THE REST OF THIS POST ON GRIST.ORG

The Cleveland Model

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:28:00 +0000

Let's go back to the co-op theme, shall we? Tom Philpott of Grist wrote some time ago about the need for a "less efficient and more robust food system." He sketched a vision, based on his experience with his own farm, of small interrelated businesses benefiting communities via the local multiplier effect and generating jobs, good wages and affordable, healthy food far beyond what globalized multinational corporations have been able to manage for most American regions. It's a vision that without doubt shouldn't be restricted to the food system. Philpott closed the piece with a question: "How do we get there?"

Well, Cleveland, Ohio -- of all places -- has attempted an answer which caused Philpott to review the Nation's coverage of this "new" phenomenon of large scale cooperatives:

In a must-read article in the March 1 issue of The Nation, Gar Alperovitz, Ted Howard, and Thad Williamson lay out what they call the "Cleveland Model," a reference to that city's emerging complex of worker-owned businesses under the Evergreen Cooperatives umbrella.

The key enterprise in the Cleveland initiative is the Evergreen Cooperative laundry, "a worker-owned, industrial-size, thoroughly 'green' operation" that "opened its doors late last fall in Glenville, a neighborhood with a median income hovering around $18,000," The Nation reports. Overall in Cleveland, the poverty rate stands at about 30 percent; the population has halved since 1950. The hollowed-out city, like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and other rust-belt metropolises, stands as a stark rebuke to 30-plus years of de-industrialization and corporate-dominated globalization.

While these are "not your traditional small-scale co-ops," the authors report, they are also not faceless entities that turn workers into cogs in a vast machine. The authors write:

The Evergreen model draws heavily on the experience of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in the Basque Country of Spain, the world's most successful large-scale cooperative effort (now employing 100,000 workers in an integrated network of more than 120 high-tech, industrial, service, construction, financial and other largely cooperatively owned businesses).

...To fund the Evergreen initiatives, the project's founders have been resourceful: they've cobbled together funds from a combination of local foundations, banks, and city government, The Nation reports. And get this:

An important aspect of the plan is that each of the Evergreen co-operatives is obligated to pay 10 percent of its pre-tax profits back into the fund to help seed the development of new jobs through additional co-ops. Thus, each business has a commitment to its workers (through living-wage jobs, affordable health benefits and asset accumulation) and to the general community (by creating businesses that can provide stability to neighborhoods).

Besides the laundry, Evergreen also runs Ohio Solar Cooperative, which installs PV solar panels on commercial and government buildings and provides weatherization to homes. The group will soon roll out Green City Growers Cooperative, "a 100% worker-owned, hydroponic, food production greenhouse."

That's change we can believe in. Sadly, I question how much commitment there will be from the administration for this kind of thing. From the federal government's perch in DC it's easy to mistake what Cleveland is doing as "too small" to address the jobs crisis that we face. But that is nothing more than a failure of imagination. Still, the leadership on this will likely come from cities. Even so, we should all be thinking about how we might be able to get something like the Cleveland model to take root in our own communities.

A Better Plastic?

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:01:00 +0000

If you've been watching the Olympics, you might have seen an ad for Sun Chips that features its "compostable bag." The plastic in the bag is derived from GMO corn and made by Cargill. The ad neglects to mention those inconvenient truths, though it does claim that its bag will break down in home compost "under ideal conditions."

Even worse, with the possible exception of the Sun Chips bag, corn plastic generally will not break down in home compost, even under ideal conditions -- it's only compostable in "industrial-scale" composting systems. So for those of you who live in San Francisco, which actually has municipal composting, that's all well and good, I guess. But for the rest of us, this stuff is still plain, old [genetically engineered] garbage.

But now researchers in the UK may have just fixed all that:

Scientists at Imperial College London are working on bioplastic packaging - made from trees and grass - that can break down in home composting bins.

The polymer developed by the scientists is made from sugars that come from the breakdown of fast-growing trees and grasses, or agricultural and food waste.

The scientists from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council purposely focused on non-food crops - many common bioplastics come from corn or sugar cane waste - and using low-energy and low-water processes.

Very cool. Keep an eye on this stuff. It could really be the packaging of the future.

Co-ops: for Farmers What's Old is New

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 19:57:00 +0000

I love my food co-op. It's not a secret. Heck, I blog for it. And what works for consumers works for farmers like Sam Simon of upstate New York, too (via the NYT):

He began his dairy operation in 1999, more as a labor of love than a business venture. But he soon realized that the economics were unsustainable: Farmers couldn't survive being paid roughly the same price for milk that they were in the 1970s. "This is nuts," he thought.
So he looked for an alternative in which a farm could produce premium milk, process it and sell it on its own label. The farms he looked at that had tried it weren’t succeeding, so he came up with the idea of a nonprofit co-op selling premium-quality milk, without artificial hormones, traveling 80 or so miles instead of 1,200, to customers in the Northeast. The hope was that people would pay more for locally produced, higher-quality milk, and that the extra cost would be passed on directly to the farmers.
He signed up eight family farms in Dutchess and Columbia Counties that produce 1.6 million pounds of milk a month, 200,000 of it sold through Hudson Valley Fresh. So far it's working. The farmers get paid a price, now $21 per hundredweight of milk, based on their cost of production, not on the fixed commodity price, now about $16, up from as low as $11 last year. That can be the difference between breaking even and not. Hudson Valley Fresh sells a third of it in New York City, in places like Whole Foods, and the rest in the Hudson Valley and Connecticut and on Long Island.

Milk is a troubled commodity, of course, but much of that trouble comes from the fact that, thanks to Ronald Reagan, its price is set on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where large speculators can (and have) manipulated the price. Even though fluid milk is a perishable commodity, for some reason commodity traders get to determine the wholesale cost, which now has no relation to the actual cost of production. That's capitalism for you!

Meanwhile, the Philly area also has a great example of another kind of successful farmer co-op in Lancaster Farm Fresh, which joins fifty farmers into an entity that can efficiently distribute tons of produce into urban markets from New York City to Washington, DC.

And small scale co-ops may even provide the way forward for ethanol as well -- not as a means to produce fuel for cars on a massive scale, but as an alternative to diesel fuel for farm equipment.

Co-ops have a long history in agriculture but have struggled since corporate consolidation became the watchword in Washington DC and state capitals nationwide. To this day, the USDA remains far more interested in low retail prices of commodities, irrespective of the impact it has on farmers themselves or rural communities. But with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, there seems to be a bit more momentum coming from the USDA for helping farmers establish co-ops. Hoping corporations behave benevolently is not a plan. Giving farmers the ability to act as a countervailing force to corporate control of agricultural markets? Now that's a plan.

Did the President Just Create a National Food Policy Council?

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 21:52:00 +0000

Michelle Obama kicked off her campaign against childhood obesity today. Among the provisions are a revamping of the school lunch program, a small boost in funding for farmers markets, a major initiative to "end" food deserts by 2017, a focus on maintaining children's exercise levels, a set of broad public-private partnerships, along with reforms to front-of-package nutrition labeling and the food pyramid (see the WaPo's Jane Black for a good summary).

But the most intriguing element may have been the creation of The Presidential Task Force on Childhood Obesity. According to the White House blog:

The new task force is charged with developing an interagency action plan to solve the problem of obesity among our Nation's children as part of the First Lady’s Let's Move campaign. The campaign will take a comprehensive approach to engage both public and private sectors to help children become more active and eat healthier within a generation, so that children born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight.
Members of the task force include: the Secretary of the Interior; the Secretary of Agriculture; Secretary of Health and Human Services; Secretary of Education; Director of the Office of Management and Budget; Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the First Lady; Assistant to the President for Economic Policy; and heads of other executive departments, agencies, or offices as the Chair may
designate.

By their nature, food policy councils are designed to circumvent the parochial interests and often "captured" status of regulatory agencies. By making people who don't normally talk sit together and consider the broader impact of their policies, food policy councils have the potential to keep special interests from dominating policy debates.

Most state-level food policy councils, such as New York's or Iowa's (created by then Gov. Tom Vilsack), include nutrition and access to health food as their core mission. And many find themselves moving towards involvement in local food and expansion of farmers markets and the like as a result of the inevitable conclusion that food production and food access are inexorably linked.

READ THE REST OF THIS POST AT GRIST.ORG

Will Philly Get a Soda Tax?

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:05:00 +0000

I sure hope so (via KYW 1060):

...The Nutter Administration is considering a tax on soda to help close the city's massive deficit. But the mayor himself claims that the real goal of such a tax would be to improve your health.

"What we're focused on primarily is obesity."

Mayor Nutter insists that his consideration of levying a tax on all sodas and sweetened drinks has a noble goal that goes beyond solving an economic crisis. He wants to encourage people to avoid sodas:

"It's something that we're taking a look at it, because we care very deeply about the issue of obesity, not only for children, type-2 diabetes, but also adults as well."

It's still unclear if Nutter will include a soda tax in the budget that he presents to city council in one month. Also unclear -- the rate of the tax, and who would pay directly -- distributors, retailers or consumers.

The Philly Daily News suggests a penny-an-ounce tax on soda and other sugary drinks might be a possibility -- though we won't find out until March 4 when the Mayor unveils his budget. In the unlikely event a Philly city soda tax could survive the vicious and inevitable blowback from the beverage industry, it would -- according to Yale's Rudd Center dead useful soda tax calculator -- generate up to $68 million dollars for the cash-strapped city. I say, go for it, Mike!

flickr user: b0r0da

Register Receipts Are [Really] Hazardous to Your Health

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:49:00 +0000

Because coating everyday objects in endocrine disrupting chemicals is just plain fun! From HuffPo:

Amazingly, the greatest threat of BPA exposure may be something we handle nearly every day: receipts. According to the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry's John Warner in a Science News article last year, "The average cash register receipt that's out there and uses the BPA technology will have 60 to 100 milligrams of free BPA." Milligrams? By comparison, the amount deemed worrisome enough by reusable water bottle manufacturer Nalgene to eliminate the chemical from its polycarbonate bottles was measured in nanograms (that's one-millionth of a milligram).
What's especially scary about the receipt scenario is that there's no way to control all the possibilities for exposure -- picture waiters delivering plates of food after handling customers' checks, or shaking hands with someone who just put a receipt in his wallet. What you can control: Decline a receipt if you don't need one (save more trees, too), and wash your hands frequently (good hygiene during flu season, anyway).

Sadly, as far as I know, none of the pending BPA bans on the state or federal level address the use of bisphenol-A in register receipts. And yet that may be how many of us get our largest dose of that nasty chemical (here's more background on BPA). Too bad the FDA thinks its hands are tied when it comes to regulating it.

The Professor in Chief

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:46:00 +0000

The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg analyzes President Obama's bravura performance during his Q&A with the GOP:

The "Question Time" format -- Republican legislators vs. Democratic President -- turns out to suit Obama perfectly. He listens carefully to the question/statement. He prefaces his answer with a brief courtesy of some sort. Then he analyzes the question, calmly picking it apart and vaporizing its premises. Then he explains (a) why his policy is preferable and (b) how it has already incorporated Republican ideas to the degree that they make sense.

He occupies the position of authority: he's President; he has the podium; the format makes it awkward for his questioners to interrupt or hector him. He sets the rhythm, and the rhythm suits him. There's a leisurely arc to his answers. In the campaign debates, the stingy time limits -- "one-minute answer!" "lightning round!" "Bzzzz!" -- and the preening "moderators" cramped his style. Sometimes he'd barely get started. In Baltimore, he didn’t have to rush. Each answer became an essay with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It helped that his questioners were politically hostile public officials pretending to be policy wonks, because that freed him to unleash his own, greatly superior wonkery without sounding overly technical or condescending.

My fear is that all that will resonate from Obama's appearance will be its tone and scorekeeping -- meta-analysis will prevail over policy analysis. The actual content of his proposals and his explanations for why the GOP's alternatives are useless will get lost in the noise. As Paul Krugman pointed out today, the GOP has no ideas and to date that appears to be a winning electoral strategy.

My hope is that this event will encourage the GOP to flog their ideas more vocally. If today's "alternative" GOP budget document is any indication -- with its massive cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security -- the GOP is probably better off sticking to their familiar, well-worn one word answer.

Frack, Baby, Frack

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:50:00 +0000

With all the excitement over fracking -- the process of freeing huge amount of natural gas trapped within rock formations such as the Marcellus Shale by injecting water and chemicals at high pressure -- in Pennsylvania and New York, it's tempting to forget that the environmental cost to getting the gas out of the ground may turn out to be severe. In NY, the concern is radioactive contamination of New York City's upstate water supply. In Pennsylvania, the problem is more mundane -- constant industrial accidents (via Pro Publica):

Earlier this month, Pennsylvania's environmental officials fined Pennsylvania-based Atlas Resources after a series of violations at 13 wells, including spills of fracturing fluids and other contaminants onto the ground around the sites. And just last week the agency fined M.R. Dirt, a company that removes waste from drilling sites, $6,000 for spilling more than seven tons of drilling dirt along a public road.
The reports come on the heels of a string of other incidents that have killed fish in one of the state's most prized recreational lakes and released toxic chemicals into the environment.
The Atlas spills are significant because they are among the latest and because they happened repeatedly during the routine transfer of fluids. Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection fined [1] Atlas Resources $85,000 for the offenses, which took place between May and December of 2009. Many of the spills were discovered by DEP inspectors.
..."If you look at this series of violations -- it's not only that there are multiple violations," said DEP spokeswoman Helen Humphreys, pointing to the fact that the same three violations were turning up at each site. "This is a pattern, and it's a problem."

Newsweek has a nice piece on the dangers of fracking fluids -- the stuff they inject into rock to bust the natural gas out -- and the fact that, despite their highly toxic, often corrosive, nature, such fluids were exempted from clean water regulations by Congress back in 2005. The NYT also covered a series of drilling-related spills in Pennsylvania a month ago.

But no matter the technique, Pennsylvanians should know by now that extractive industries have a tendency to poison the environments they exploit. The state has been actively cheerleading the industry (although given the potential windfall also strangely resistant to taxing it -- Gov. Rendell seems to prefer putting the tax burden on casino gamblers). But there ain't no such thing as a free lunch, especially where hydrocholoric acid, benzene and diesel fuel (favorite ingredients for frackers everywhere) are concerned. Like the saying goes, frack around too much and there's sure to be trouble in the end.

Philly Grocery Exec A Guest at State of the Union

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:48:00 +0000

This is definitely cool (via the Inqy):

Tonight, when President Obama gives his State of the Union address, he's expected to acknowledge a fourth-generation New Jersey grocer who builds supermarkets in poor neighborhoods, including four in Philadelphia.

Jeff Brown, 46, who runs Brown's Super Stores Inc. of Westville, Gloucester County, acknowledged yesterday that he would be a guest of honor seated in Michelle Obama's box in the House of Representatives during the speech.

"It's cool," Brown said. "So cool."

Obama is expected to mention the idea of building more supermarkets in impoverished areas, commonly called supermarket deserts because of the dearth of stores large enough to sell fresh food.

It's great news that addressing food access for low-income folks truly is a priority in the White House. Brown operates several Shop-Rite's in struggling Philly neighborhoods and deserves credit for his efforts. The only thing I'll ding him for is his vocal and influential opposition to Philly's failed plastic bag ban of last summer. Still, net net, he's one of the good guys so good for him for getting his work (and Philly) some much-needed attention.

And the Winner of the USDA's Food Safety Sweepstakes Is...

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:29:00 +0000

Dr. Elizabeth Hagen! No, you're not expected to know who she is. Suffice it to say that, as anticipated, USDA Chief Tom Vilsack turned to an under-the-radar choice for Under Secretary of Food Safety. Hagen, currently the USDA's Chief Medical Officer, will, if confirmed, take charge of the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), which is responsible for the safety of meat and poultry products.

The interesting aspect of this pick is that she is an infectious disease doc and public health specialist who has been working at USDA for several years -- and thus should have a good grounding in food safety methods. It also means both the Under Secretary of Food Safety as well as the administrator of FSIS itself, Dr. Jerold Mande, will be medical doctors. One can hope we will on longer hear things like "I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health," coming from top FSIS administrators.

Hagen joined the USDA during the Bush administration so she's neither a fresh face nor someone who is untainted by the food safety failings of the last few years. But neither does she appear to be an industry flunky. While I would have preferred an outsider who might come in and shake up the ossified USDA food safety culture, that was clearly too much to ask. It's also true that no one outside of USDA seems to have had many dealings with Hagen, but hope abounds (via Food Safety News):

Carol Tucker-Foreman, a distinguished fellow at The Food Policy Institute at Consumer Federation of America, responded to the announcement with guarded optimism.

"Consumer advocates who work closely with the FSIS on policy issues have had limited direct experience with Dr. Hagen. We have been told, however, that she has been a strong advocate for improved food safety policies and has urged the agency to be more aggressive in asking companies to initiate recalls."

Better recalls are certainly a start (if for no other reason than to give bloggers a break). Yet it strikes me that nothing in the pick undermines the argument that the FDA's newly minted deputy commissioner for foods Michael Taylor is the true "national" head of food safety right now. That's neither a good nor a bad thing, just political reality. And with the top jobs now filled, there's no further excuse for inaction.

At some point soon, in the course of fixing our broken system, Hagen and Taylor will have to take a stand: Is the future of meat safety in this country one of decontamination and post-hoc treatments for routinely infected products (aka "Zap the Crap")? Or will the USDA attack the root causes of pathogens in our meat -- an unrelenting focus on low quality, high quantity production methods. Dr. Hagen, please surprise us.

This post originally appeared on Grist.org

Someone Tell Schools: Sugar is Not a Food

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:30:00 +0000

Reporter Ed Bruske spent a week working in a Washington, D.C. public school lunchroom. His series of articles (1, 2, 3) that resulted are fantastic reading for anyone following the ongoing debate regarding school lunches and the challenges for enacting real reform. Today's entry looked at how sugar is used in school food.

Bruske lists the multiple ways schools find to sugar up our kids -- Pop-Tarts, sugar cereal, canned fruit in syrup, flavored milk, cookies and other desserts and even juice. Yes, juice is part of the problem, too. By weight, it has just as much sugar as Coke. Bruske observes that a 4 oz cup of apple juice has the equivalent of 3 tsp of sugar. As for flavored milk, an 8 oz carton of the brand served in the DC school contains 6 tsp of sugar. It's the same percentage of sugar as juice but at twice the service size, it's almost the same amount of sugar as a can of Coke -- and handed out to many of our kids for free. Got diabetes?

I recommend an experiment. Take a cup measure and put in 4 oz (1/2 cup) of water. Then add 3 tsp of sugar. If you’re feeling saucy, double the amount of both. Now drink. That’s what we serve to our kids at school? Yuck.

READ THE REST OF THIS POST ON GRIST.ORG

You say "unagi," I say... Sablefish!

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 20:54:00 +0000

Casson Trenor, author and sustainable seafood expert, decried on Twitter today the fate of the Thames River eel, whose population has crashed 98% in the last five years. This comes on the heels of a 90% decline in the eel population in European waters over the last 30 years. Seafood Watch also encourages consumers to avoid freshwater eel, despite the fact that it is a "farmed" species, because the eels are captured from the wild and raised in pens. Breeding stocks in the wild thus remain pressured and declining.

So, I asked Trenor (via Twitter), what is an unagi lover to do?

He said, try sablefish! He also observed in another tweet that:

We don't generally eat unagi for the taste of the eel itself, we eat it for the sauce, rice, and texture -- can replicate these

He even helpfully provided a recipe from Seafood Watch, which I reproduce below.

"Faux-nagi"

Ingredients
(Serves 8)
Sablefish season: May–October

1 1/2 pounds sablefish* fillet
1 large sheet konbu (kelp)
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons mirin
1 1/2 tablespoons sake
1 handful katsuobushi (skipjack flakes)
Potato starch
Sea salt
Sesame seeds
Extra sake
Extra water
Steamed rice
Directions
Dust both sides of the sablefish fillets with sea salt. Cover the fillets in plastic wrap and transfer to the refrigerator. Let sit for 15–20 minutes.

Wash salt off the fillets with very cold water. Blot dry with a paper towel.

Tear the konbu into pieces the size of your fillets. Wet a new paper towel with sake and use it to moisten the konbu. Sandwich the sablefish between pieces of sake-moistened konbu. Cover the fillet in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30–40 minutes. Remove the konbu and return the fillet to the refrigerator.

Mix the soy sauce, sugar, mirin, and katsuobushi with 1 1/2 tablespoons of sake, and 1 1/2 tablespoons of water, in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer for about 10 minutes. Drain and remove the katsuobushi then set the sauce aside.

In a small bowl, combine 8 tablespoons of cold water with 2 tablespoons of potato starch to create a thickener (add the water to the potato starch gradually, whisking constantly to avoid clumping). Return the soy/mirin sauce to a boil then lower heat to a simmer. If desired, add the potato starch thickener to the sauce, gradually, until the desired consistency is reached. (Some people may choose to add very little or no thickener—you definitely won't want to use it all, but it's easier to mix a large batch.) Remove from heat and let cool.

To serve:
Slice sablefish into portions approximately 1 inch wide by 2 inches long. Lightly char one side of the fish with a small butane torch or sear it very briefly in a hot saucepan. Top fish with a drizzle of the sauce and a sprinkle of sesame seeds. Serve slices of faux-nagi over bowls of hot steamed rice. You can also serve this nigiri style as they do at Tataki.

*Seafood Watch® recommends wild-caught sablefish from Alaska and British Columbia.

And don't forget to ask for sablefish at your favorite sushi place. They may not have it, but maybe they'll get the message and buy some... Thanks, Casson!

Flickr photo: avlxyz

Is the FDA FUBAR*?

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:39:00 +0000

Journalist Merrill Goozner highlights some commentary from an FDA Insider who claims that the FDA is "more pro-industry than any time in 35 Years":

So says Jim Dickinson, editor of FDAWebview, an industry newsletter that closely follows enforcement issues at the agency. After reviewing the deregulatory shifts at the Food and Drug Administration since the Carter administration, he writes:

It has taken almost a generation, but by now, the pro-industry infiltration of FDA's culture is firmly entrenched. Not only is collaboration in product reviews officially encouraged, but good relationships across the regulatory fence hold the prospect of a possible future career in a well-paid industry job - a connection that is less likely to be publicly noticed in news media that now have to line up for information that has been filtered through agency press offices. The arm's-length relationship that formerly ruled every contact between agency and industry has become a fading memory.

He says the shift in culture accelerated after the 1992 passage of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which made the agency dependent on industry funding. He concludes there's nothing that Margaret Hamburg, the new commissioner, and Joshua Sharfstein, her deputy, can do about it. Quoting a former chief of enforcement, he writes:

User fees at FDA are the primary villain, because they "allowed the industry to dictate the changes at the FDA in programs, procedures and practices. It will be impossible for the Obama administration to reverse the trend because as long as the user fees are in place the industry has the upper hand."

Radical stuff from an unexpected source.

It's hard to talk about the creeping takeover of the federal government by corporate interests without sounds like a conspiracy-minded crackpot. And yet, when presented with evidence like this, what other conclusion can you draw? There's no question that the "collaboration" Dickinson refers to continues to this day -- and not just for drugs. It's an established fact that the FDA relied heavily on chemical industry lobbyists to draw up the (hopefully) now infamous 2008 FDA bisphenol-A report that declared the plastics ingredient totally safe, despite all evidence to the contrary. And with concerns over the budget deficit now front and center any attempt to eliminate what is a legitimate funding source (by that I mean those drug company fees) will likely fail. In a word: Ugh.

*Y'all know what FUBAR means, right?

With Obesity It's Not Just the Calories. It's the Chemicals

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:27:00 +0000

Michelle Obama's anti-childhood obesity agenda would have kids a little less round 'round the middle.White House Flickr streamWhile we await Michelle Obama's speech this Wednesday to the United States Conference of Mayors that will likely launch her new campaign against childhood obesity, I thought I'd offer a little perspective as well as a few bits of research that shed light on the enormity and complexity of the obesity epidemic.

First off, let's be clear: The First Lady will, of course, do everything she can to avoid picking a fight with Big Food -- I wouldn't be surprised to see corporate partnerships coming out of her efforts. Indeed, her team's first foray into the food policy arena, which included rumors of a White House embrace of former FDA Commissioner David Kessler's "junk food addiction" model for obesity, the president himself raising the possibility of a soda tax and the somewhat defensive posture of her policy team in an interview with NPR, were overshadowed by industry objections.

Even the most common-sense advice from her (drink water not soda, eat less processed food) prompted howls of outrage from food companies. We'll know for sure next week, but school food will probably be the focus of all her efforts. After all, school food is already the government's responsibility and even in the "reform-proof" Senate there is a fair amount of momentum for reducing access to junk food in the lunchroom and improving the quality of school food.

Unfortunately, the school environment is not the only one at issue for kids...

READ THE REST OF THIS POST AT GRIST.ORG

Food Failings Hit Congress Hard

noreply@blogger.com (tlaskawy) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:30:00 +0000

A story in Politico describes the soul-searching on Capitol Hill prompted by the sad, sudden death of Rep. John Boehner's 46-year-old chief of staff Paula Nowakowski:

"For a lot of us, this was a mortality check," said Justin Harding, 34, who's often on call seven days a week as chief of staff for Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and frequently gets home from work after his kids have gone to sleep. "It's causing us all to reflect and sort of check our own circumstances."

Hill staffers say Nowakowski's lifestyle mirrored much of their own. She smoked, she didn’t always eat well, and she often worked seven days a week.

A toxic combination, to be sure. Stressful jobs that require long hours are certainly unhealthy. But it's only recently that you could add diabetes to the list of job-related illnesses:

After working on George W. Bush's 2000 campaign in Michigan and enduring a lifestyle of horrible food and little sleep, Roe developed Type 1 diabetes [ed note: the reporter meant Type 2 since Type 1 doesn't "develop" in adults]. He knew he was getting ill, but he ignored the signs until he collapsed right after Bush's Inauguration and nearly died. He was hospitalized for a week and barely avoided a diabetic coma.

Other Hill staffers have also developed diabetes and high blood pressure.

And there's more:

One longtime Democratic committee staffer and former staff director, who asked not to be identified, got his wake-up moment when he crashed his car driving back to the Capitol after working until 5 a.m. the night before.

"I must've fallen asleep at the wheel," the staffer said. "I banged the car into a curb and blew both tires."

Soon afterward, he discovered he had developed high blood pressure and was battling diabetes. He later bowed out of his position, taking a lower-key spot on the committee.

Meanwhile, Rep. Joe Barton blamed his heart problems on "eating too many chicken-fried steaks."

"In the long run, I'd say this lifestyle could certainly be detrimental to your health," said Rep. Kathleen Dahlkemper (D-Pa.), a freshman who previously worked as a dietitian and spoke with POLITICO by phone from the Blue Dog retreat on Tuesday. "I'm sitting here watching them bring out trays of snacks: cheeses and sweets. We just ate lunch, which was huge. And before that, we had a very big breakfast. I can't get over how much food they put in front of us."

...Those who worked around the clock on last year's stimulus package and, now, on the health care bill admit to getting the majority of their meals from the Capitol vending machines.

While Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved to upgrade the food choices in the House cafeterias, the value meal in Longworth still includes a fountain drink and choices like chicken wings, burritos and popcorn chicken salad.

The focus in the obesity epidemic is often on low-income communities and their food deserts and swamps. But for many farther up the income chain, the work environment is just as toxic. It's not just Congressional workers who indulge in vending machine lunches, pastry and candy-strewn conference room spreads and bottomless cups of soda.

I can only hope that Capitol Hill denizens realize why addressing obesity and the associated problems in the food system requires going far beyond demands of personal responsibility and virtue. They would, I imagine, agree that they eat what's available. And if it's junk that's available, that's what they eat -- they don't have a choice. And as a result that junk makes them sick.

It's an interesting experiment going on up there -- how much more do they themselves have to suffer before they take steps to clean up their own food environment? And if they do act to protect themselves (or even if they don't), one hopes they now see the value of fixing public school cafeterias if not the rest of American workplaces.