Author: Jill Richardson

[Welcome authors Moby and Miyun Park, and Host Jill Richardson, author of, Recipe for America]

[As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book.  Please take other conversations to a previous thread. – bev]

Gristle: From Factory to Food Safety

The cover of Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety says it all. It shows a picture of a cow, separated into its various cuts – except each cut lists a different issue to consider when choosing to eat meat or not: health, environment, workers, taxpayer cost, animals, children’s health, global hunger, zoonotic diseases, communities, and climate change. The book, edited by Moby with Miyun Park, includes a series of essays, one on each of those topics. And by addressing each of those issues, this book takes the debate about what role food animals should play in our society and how they should be treated to a new level.

The philosophical and ethical question of whether or not animals should be killed for food is both complex and personal. But the evils of factory farming are much more cut and dry. To that point, this book brought together a group ranging from a vegan shoe store owner to pig farmers, all in agreement that factory farming and industrial animal production is not the way to go. The inclusion of an essay by pig farmers (Paul and Phyllis Willis of Niman Ranch), in fact, shows that this book is not intended to preach at the choir of people who already eschew meat. It’s aimed at a far wider audience, hoping that one (or more) of the various angles will strike a chord with each reader and make them think twice about the meat they eat (or don’t eat).

The question of how most meat reaches our plates is one that is intentionally hidden from us. Thus, most people will be surprised by at least one of the chapters in the book. One of the biggest eye openers for me when I first learned of it was the impact factory farms have on the surrounding community, a topic that Gristle covers very well. On a trip to Iowa this past year, I learned that Iowans occasionally suffer from a weather condition they call “shitsmog.” It is what it sounds like, and the shit comes from factory farmed hogs. I visited a factory hog farm on a “good” day, when it was nearly freezing outside and the odor was kept to a nauseating minimum. I met Iowan after Iowan who had been forced to turn activist against the factory hog farms, exactly because of the impact it had on their communities. When a factory hog farm moves in next door, the best case scenario is a bad stench and the worst involves your property value tanking so low you can’t afford to move away from the smell, not to mention the health problems you may suffer as a result of the massive amounts of hog waste.

Another issue the book raises – one that has been thankfully covered in the news in recent years (Google “Agriprocessors”) – are the human rights violations common in the meat industry. Again, the stories in the book are echoed by my own experiences. A man I spoke to who worked in a Tyson hog plant told me that nearly everyone in the plant suffered from tendinitis, but received nearly no treatment for it. In his case, he told his boss he suffered from stress incontinence (a condition that means, as he put it, “when ya gotta go, YA GOTTA GO!”) but his supervisors STILL refused to let him go to the bathroom when he asked. So he wet his pants. Then his supervisors started sniffing around him for evidence that he was drunk or on drugs, which he was not. This happened twice. After the second time, they decided he could actually have bathroom breaks when he requested them. Imagine a job where you aren’t even allowed to go to the bathroom! (And that’s not to mention the instances of worker deaths or mutilations caused on the job.)

Those essays, as well as the one on industrial animal production’s link to global warming, were the ones that most resonated with me. My hunch is that each reader of Gristle will come away with a different, very personal experience. Some chapters will speak to you; others may not. However, it’s well worth reading, and I urge you to approach it with an open mind, and perhaps a little bit like a buffet: look for the subjects that most interest you, and make sure you read them. If you give each essay in the book a chance, you’ll come away with something new you’ve learned and perhaps a new perspective on your dinner.

[Gristle – website / resources]

The school lunch bill is about as appetizing as, well, school lunch. (photo: john.murden via Flickr)

Why do Democrats put their least loyal Senator in charge of one of their highest profile issues? Michelle Obama started her government-wide “Let’s Move” program to improve children’s health and nutrition, but Blanche Lincoln’s the author of the Senate child nutrition bill that just passed out of the Senate Agriculture Committee yesterday. And Blanche Lincoln is no Michelle Obama. She’s not even as progressive as Barack Obama, who called for $10 billion in new money over 10 years for child nutrition, a number Lincoln reduced by more than half.

To put that in easier to understand terms, Obama’s proposal would have given up to $.18 in addition funds to each child’s school lunch. Lincoln’s bill gives each lunch $.06. Compare that to the School Nutrition Association’s request to raise the current $2.68 “reimbursement rate” (the amount the federal government reimburses schools for each free lunch served to a low income child) by $.35 just to keep the quality of the lunches the same and make up for schools’ current budgetary shortfall. School lunch reformer Ann Cooper calls for an extra $1 per lunch to actually make lunches healthy. So any amount under $.35 is no reform at all, and Lincoln gave us $.06.

If that’s not disappointing enough, consider where Lincoln “found” the extra money for child nutrition: conservation programs. Under the Democrats’ “paygo” (pay as you go) budget practice, Lincoln has to find a way to pay for every new dollar spent, either by cutting funds in other programs or by raising taxes. Some have called for cutting agricultural subsidies to the largest farmers, but Lincoln instead took $2.8 billion from the Environmental Quality Incentives Progam (EQIP), an agriculture conservation program, to fund school lunch.

Some credit should go to Lincoln for the handful of good things she included in the bill. When a high percent of children are eligible for free school meals, it’s cheaper to provide free meals to every child in the school than fuss with eligibility paperwork for so many kids. Therefore, the Lincoln bill allows for “universal meal service” (i.e. all kids eat for free automatically) in high poverty areas. Lincoln’s bill also directly certifies any child in a household receiving food stamps for free school meals. The qualifications for the two programs are the same, so it makes little sense to make a family fill out the paperwork twice. Both of these measures will help extend free meals to more hungry children.

It’s true that bad food is better than no food at all, but why are we forced to choose the lesser of two evils? Current school lunches are, on average, lousy. Of course some schools stand out by providing excellent, healthy lunches to students, but most do not. In fact, only 6-7 percent of schools meet the USDA’s current lax nutrition standards. The USDA will soon upgrade its nutrition standards based on recommendations fro the Institute of Medicine, but how can they expect schools to meet the new, stricter standards when they can’t even meet the current ones? And a recent University of Michigan study found that children who eat school lunch are more likely to be overweight or obese than children who brought lunch from home.

Unfortunately, the only real way to improve the quality of school lunch is money. Schools need money for better food but they also need money for labor, training, and equipment. And the equipment needed is sometimes as simple as knives and cutting boards, essential tools for preparing fresh fruits and vegetables that all too many schools lack. And it’s money that this bill does not provide.

In the case of school lunch in particular, where the most vulnerable members of our society – low income children who cannot afford to bring a healthy lunch from home – are affected, the government’s failure to provide healthy food is utterly unconscionable. It’s also stupid, since an estimated 1 out of every 3 children born in 2000 will suffer from Type II Diabetes during their lifetime, and diabetes is one of the most expensive health problems to treat. Every penny we don’t pay now for school lunches is money we will spend later on Medicaid and Medicare for children who grow up to suffer from diabetes. But, as a House staffer put it to me when I raised that point, “the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] doesn’t score that way.” When the government tabulates whether or not a program is saving money, future expenditures on predictable, preventable health conditions aren’t added in.

The notion that we lack the money to pay for better school lunch is a false one. We have two large, untapped sources of funding. First, outdated defense programs. Barney Frank recently said:

You know, as I’ve noted the other day, we still have three ways to drop thermal nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union: intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines and the strategic (INAUDIBLE). Given the fact that there is no more Soviet Union, I’m going to be radical and say to the Pentagon, why don’t you pick two of the three and save us billions of dollars?

The other source is corporate taxes. I’m not even suggesting raising taxes. I’m merely suggesting that corporations pay taxes AT ALL. Currently, two thirds of corporations do not. These represent two enormous untapped sources of money that the federal government should absolutely use to benefit the American people. Yet, instead, corporate lobbyists are prioritized over the American people. Let’s hope the full Senate is more forward thinking than the Senate Ag Committee and cross our fingers that the bill gets better when it is debated on the Senate floor.

This diary was initially posted on Huffington Post.

photo: Shelley & Dave via Flickr

Now that Obama’s out making awesome speeches, I’d like to comment on his recent food policy record. From the speeches, he sounds like the Obama that I hoped for when I cast my vote in 2008. From his policy, not so much. And it’s not all Congress’s fault. To recap:

• Food Safety: His administration supposedly supports improvements in food safety but he’s only just recently named someone to head up food safety at the USDA (which oversees meat and poultry safety). It took him a year to do it but he didn’t pick someone with ties to industry (like many of the prospective nominees whose names were floated over the course of the year). A food safety bill has not yet passed Congress but it may pass the Senate soon. Historically, food safety bills often have the effect of crushing and pushing out small producers while giving advantage to large producers (who can afford to meet the regulations) and calming public fears of tainted food. Our job now is to make sure this bill does not do that. Congress has been open to some suggestions but the sustainable ag community but this bill may not be everything we hope for. And it will only cover the FDA (which oversees 80% of our food), not the USDA.
• Child Nutrition: In speeches he’s all for this. In his 2011 budget, not so much. This is VERY important as one of the biggest hurdles schools have in providing healthy food is funding, and with Obama recommending so little money, it will be hard for even the most well-meaning schools to make changes. On the bright side, we might finally see some funding for farm to school programs. Obama’s administration is also working on curbing food marketing to kids, but it remains to be seen what will actually happen. I’m hopeful that this will result in an improvement in the situation but skeptical that we’ll see real change, let alone “the change we need.”

Ag Subsidies: I hear talk of change, but I don’t see any credible evidence it will happen. One thing he did was open up a loophole to supposedly send more subsidy money to small family farms. First of all, 96% of all farms, sustainable or not, big or small, are family farms. So when you say “family farms” you might as well just say “farms.” Second, the farms eligible for this loophole aren’t exactly tiny. All the same, I don’t see this new loophole as a bad thing really. It’s just not as awesome as the headlines made it sound. Other than that, don’t expect any real change prior to the passage of the 2012 farm bill, and even then, don’t expect much. The Blue Doggiest of the Blue Dogs control both ag committees in the House and the Senate. If Blanche Lincoln loses her 2010 race, then we might have a bit more hope for the 2012 farm bill. The likely new Ag Committee Chair in the Senate will be Debbie Stabenow. She’s not exactly Bernie Sanders, but she’s way better than Blanche Lincoln.

On top of that, there are two MAJOR things that are going on that I’d like to give details on. One is good and one is bad. On the good side, the Obama administration just announced they are dropping the National Animal ID System. This is a HUGE victory for the grassroots. If fully implemented, NAIS would have put a lot of small farmers out of business. It was advocated as a food safety program, but in reality it was just to protect our export markets. And that’s a pretty clear picture of the government’s priorities. They will bend over backwards to help enormous corporations with exports, even if it means putting small farmers out of business. Only now they aren’t going to do that. They are still planning to have some kind of traceability system but it will only be for livestock crossing state lines and it will be much less intrusive.

Then there’s the bad thing. There’s something Obama said recently in a speech that made me spit out the Fair Trade organic shade grown coffee I was drinking:

We’re living up to our obligations as a wealthy nation, helping to promote food security around the world, helping to deal with diseases around the world.

He’s doing SOMETHING, but promoting food security ain’t it. According to his budget proposal’s goals for the USDA, he wants to:

Help America to promote agricultural production and biotechnology exports as America works to increase food security.

I’ve written about this issue at length (here and here). Haiti is a case study for why free trade and industrial, export-driven ag do not work to do much other than line corporate pockets. Cuba, on the other hand, is a beautiful success story for food sovereignty and organic, small scale agriculture. When Cuba was cut off from aid after the Soviet Union collapsed, they no longer had access to the oil or chemicals required for industrial ag. They went organic by necessity – and it worked! Currently, 70% of the produce eaten in Havana is produced within city limits.

The short version of the story is this: When the UN and World Bank brought together 400 scientists from around the world to determine how to best feed the world using modern technology, they published their results in the IAASTD report. And they recommended organic agriculture. They said that biotechnology is not consistent with the needs of the smallholder farmers who make up the majority of the world’s hungry and free trade is harmful to food security in the developing world. The U.S. is NOT doing what they recommended, and specifically doing what they said to NOT do (biotech, free trade). Obama just called for more free trade agreements (Columbia, Panama) in the State of the Union. And his appointees to key positions really make clear his intentions (Rajiv Shah to USAID, Roger Beachy to head up the new USDA agency for handing out research grants, and Islam A Siddiqui for Chief Ag Negotiator in the USTR’s office). You can read about Beachy and Siddiqui here, and I also recommend the New York Times editorial against Siddiqui. As for Shah, he comes straight from the Gates Foundation, where he promoted the use of biotech and pesticides to “feed the world.” He continues to do the same thing as the head of USAID. He’s in good company there, as Hillary Clinton’s science advisor, Nina Federoff, is also die-hard pro-biotech. She’s actually a holdover from the Bush administration. As Joe Biden once said about John McCain “That’s not change; that’s more of the same.”

photo courtesy of BlatantNews.com via flickr

I just finished reading a book I highly recommend: The War on Bugs by Will Allen. Allen grew up on a farm, then studied war chemicals in the Marines, and was surprised when he returned to the farm to find out that farm chemicals were “modified versions of the nerve poisons and antipersonnel weapons that [he] learned about when studying chemical warfare in the Marine Corps.” Today he’s an organic farmer and he serves on the policy advisory board of Organic Consumers Association (as do I).

Allen’s book was a FASCINATING read. I was familiar with part of the story, which I wrote about in my own book. Agricultural chemicals didn’t hit the big time until after World War II, for a number of reasons. But much of the story happens before World War II, before they became widely used on U.S. farms. That history is significant, and Allen uses primary sources to completely document it.

As early as the 1800’s, advertisers began promoting farm chemicals, often industrial wastes and often highly toxic heavy metals like lead and arsenic. The story of advertising and PR in the U.S. is its own story and it’s told very well in the book Toxic Sludge is Good For You (which I also highly recommend). Allen tells the history of advertising as it relates to pesticides and other farm chemicals. Even before pesticides hit prime time in the U.S., advertisers were hard at work, trying to figure out how to successfully overcome farmers’ and consumers’ concern about applying poisonous chemicals to food.

Also important is the alliance of universities, government, and farm journals in favor of pesticides and other farm chemicals (like sodium nitrate fertilizer) EVEN WHEN FARMERS OPPOSED THEM. This continues today, and often people ask why, if synthetic fertilizer, pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and GMOs are bad, the government or universities are in favor of them. I wonder the same thing myself, actually. As it turns out, the history of this alliance dates back to the 1800’s, long before our food system was chemically dependent as it is today.

World War II is remarkable for a few reasons. DDT became a war hero, of course, and the U.S. dramatically built up its capacity to produce nitrogen for bombs… and then gave all of the taxpayer built plants away to chemical corporations. So nitrogen for bombs became fertilizer, DDT was the pesticide du jour, and excess planes became crop dusters. This was the turning point when U.S. agriculture became chemically dependent. Allen cites that in the late 1930’s, only 3.5% of U.S farm acreage was fertilized with synthetic nitrogen. By the late 1950’s, that number was up to HALF. By the 1990’s, it was over 90%.

Also important to note about World War II era chemicals is that the pests develop resistance to them in a matter of years. Chemical companies and advertisers relied on farmers to know very little about the world outside of their local area, so that they wouldn’t find out that a new pesticide had already failed elsewhere before they even bought it. In fact, there were reports of DDT resistance among pests before U.S. civilians used even a drop of it.

Surprisingly, the person who single-handedly “helped” the American people get comfortable with putting toxic chemicals on our food was Dr. Seuss. Standard Oil employed him to advertise their pesticide, Flit, and he drew clever and funny cartoons, similar to those in his children’s books. Just as he is popular with children the world over, his pro-pesticide cartoons had an enormous impact on grownups in gaining their acceptance for pesticides.

During the second half of the 20th century, many farmers lost their farms, and those who remained on the farm accumulated more acreage. Often, pesticides were adopted as a last-ditch or fear-based effort to help a farmer keep his or her farm. Also, when the pesticides failed, it was the farmer who suffered, not the chemical company.

Pesticides (and fertilizers) are like a drug. Often, after World War II, the chemical companies gave out the first sample for free. Once a farmer has used the free sample, he or she kills all of his or her soil life and beneficial insects – as well as the pests. With proof of the pesticide’s effectiveness, the farmer buys more. Then, as pests evolve resistance, the farmer has to buy even more. Ultimately, the pesticide fails and the farmer has to move on to a new pesticide to repeat the cycle. If the farmer quit spraying cold turkey, it would take a few years to build back up the biodiversity and beneficial insects that he or she once had, and the farmer WOULD experience decreased yields as a result. So the farmer keeps spraying.

So do we need all of these chemicals? The answer is actually no. I have a detailed explanation of how organic agriculture actually works, but the basics are simple. First of all, think about lush rainforests, or tall prairies, or old growth forests. None of them required synthetic fertilizers or pesticides to grow. The key is biodiversity. Insects, earthworms, and microbes play a number of important roles to help plants flourish, and the plants are actually pretty smart in how they work together with other species to get what they need. Beneficial species prey upon or compete on pest species. Some species like symbiotically with plants. And soil life makes the soil texture (its crumb structure) such that water can trickle down to the groundwater and the soil can hold water. Thus, plants become more resistance to floods and drought. For a wonderful description of how organics work, I recommend reading Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web.

The history of pesticides should not be viewed in a vacuum. I recommend reading it alongside the book Eating History by Andrew F. Smith. Eating History tells how American cuisine became what it is today in 30 essays that each tell about an important turning point in our culinary history. When America became a country, food was local, seasonal, and organic out of necessity. Obviously, the lack of known pesticides was one reason for that, but not the only one. Farmers lacked equipment to plant and harvest large amounts of crops, so farms were small by necessity. They were also diversified by necessity – you could grow more food by planting many different crops that could be planted and harvested at different times throughout the year. Animals were needed on farms for meat as well as for transportation and manure. Transportation costs were high, so food was local by necessity. And the technology for canning food was basically non-existent (Mason jars didn’t exist until 1858). Obviously, as each of these factors changed with new inventions, canal and railroad construction, immigration, and the Civil War, American food and farming changed as well.

Understandably, a small, diversified farm has little use for synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. Manure serves as fertilizer and pests can be controlled with crop rotation and weeding by hand. Besides, if one crop fails, you have many others. And, if you are just growing food for your family and maybe for the local market, you aren’t worried about fluctuations in the world price, and you aren’t trying to squeeze extra bushels of corn out of every single acre. As farms grew larger (aided by advances in technology to help them plant and harvest larger areas and advances in transportation to sell to far away markets) and less diversified, then chemicals were a way to save on labor costs.

I’m not anti-technology or anti-science. In fact, I am fascinated by the science behind sustainable agriculture – the science of viewing nature in an ecological (instead of a mechanical) way and looking for ways to produce more food by letting nature do the heavy lifting. Nor am I interested in sending the U.S. back to the 1700’s. But I do think that even though we have found a way to let less than 2% of the population produce enough food to feed all of us, we have NOT found a way to do that in a healthful and environmentally responsible way. I believe that more people need to become farmers (and gardeners), and – while I don’t expect everyone to eat only food grown locally – I do think we need to decentralize our food system. I think we have a tremendous amount of risk built into our food system by growing 50% of our fruit and 25% of vegetables in California (which is in the middle of a severe drought). It’s fascinating to read these books and to see how both scientific and technological advancement as well as propaganda fueled changes in our food system and to contemplate what we can do now to make it better.