field notes: news & resources for re-linking the food chain

The Senate passed the Food Safety Modernization Act on Monday.  Jon Tester, the farmer-senator from Montana, authored an amendment that allayed concerns it would have a negative impact on small farms.

Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser call it “the most important food safety legislation in a generation.”  Just Means has a summary of the amendment.  And Senator Tester’s floor speech makes a simple, compelling case for the benefits of buying food direct from farmers in your community.

Want to feed the world? Let’s start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves?

Or better, How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself?

Dan Barber shares the story of Veta La Palma,  a 27,000 acre fish farm in Spain that has “completely reversed the ecological destruction” created by a large cattle farming operation that preceded it.  It’s an amazing story about repairing environmental damage while building a profitable business that produces great tasting fish.

And, Barber posits, “it’s a recipe for the future of good food.”  Watch. Renew your flagging optimism.

via Cherry Capital Foods

The conversation about fixing our food system continues to move further into the mainstream.  Last week, Oprah did a great show on Food 101 with Michael Pollan on Food Rules, Alicia Silverstone on changing her diet (including a funny exchange on poop), and excerpts from Food, Inc.

[UPDATE 2/4/10 - looks like Harpo Productions took the videos off YouTube and are making the Food 101 show available on DVD.  A shame they won't allow this information to be distributed more freely, but at least they did produce great content.  You can get more info on the Oprah site.

Just wondering - do you think Food, Inc. will get a share of the revenue from DVD sales of this episode that include excerpts from the film?  Sure - they get great PR, but still..... ]

Here’s video from YouTube, in 5 parts. No additional commentary needed!

Part 1

continue to watch the rest of Food 101

Mark Bittman posted a good piece by Russ Parsons.  It addresses conflicting perspectives in the increasingly audible conversation about building a better food system.  Parsons proposes a set of shared principles to anchor serious discussion about our shared problem.  While I question the 20th century “agricultural miracle” to which he refers, and not everyone in either “camp” views the issues in such extremes, the article, published in the LA Times earlier this week, bears re-posting here.

Let’s not join one of the armed camps deeply suspicious of one another shouting past each other.

The issues facing agriculture today are much more complicated than lining up behind labels such as “local” and “organic.” (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times)

One of the more pleasing developments of the last decade has been the long-overdue beginning of a national conversation about food — not just the arcane techniques used to prepare it and the luxurious restaurants in which it is served, but, much more important, how it is grown and produced. The only problem is that so far it hasn’t been much of a conversation. Instead, what we have are two armed camps deeply suspicious of one another shouting past each other (sound familiar?).

On the one side, the hard-line aggies seem convinced that a bunch of know-nothing urbanites want to send them back to Stone Age farming techniques. On the other side, there’s a tendency by agricultural reformers to lump together all farms (or at least those that aren’t purely organic, hemp-clad mom-and-pop operations) as thoughtless ravagers of the environment.

Well, at least we’re thinking about it, so I suppose that’s a start. But the issues we’re facing are not going to go away, and they are too important to be left to the ideologues. What I’d like to see happen in the next decade is a more constructive give-and-take, the start of a true conversation.

With that goal in mind, I’d like to propose a few ground rules that might help move us into the next phase — fundamental principles that both sides should be able to agree on.

read on for the ground rules

If we want an ecologically sound local food system that’s available to everyone, we’ll need to figure out how to reinvest in…lost infrastructure. Small farmers can’t do it on their own. (Tom Philpott)

Philpott is a new farmer who left a career as business writer five years ago.  Newsweek published his recent essay on the relationship between government farm subsidies, the cost of food, and how these funds can be better used to support small farms.

He looks at the consolidation of our food system; the loss of local food processing infrastructure; and the environmental, health and safety costs that have been enabled hundreds of billions of dollars in agriculture subsidies.

read on for excerpts

Ezra Klein talks to Ezekiel Emanuel, health care policy advisor to the Office of Management and Budget, in a recent Washington Post article. Emanuel doesn’t address the impact of corporate food marketing on our eating habits, but he offers excellent perspective on the disconnect between the health care debate and food, as well as cultural obstacles to encouraging better food choices.

The Obama administration is raising awareness about healthy eating through the high profile White House Garden and new local food campaigns such as Know Your Farmer.  It’s a good start, but, as Emanuel notes, “lifestyle issues are hard for the government to address.”

Along these lines, Adam Corner proposes that psychology is the missing link in the climate change debate: …while the consensus may be growing on the need for changes in behaviour, we’re no closer to understanding how we’re going to do it. Attempting an unprecedented shift in human behaviour without the input of psychologists is like setting sail for a faraway land without the aid of nautical maps.

Excerpts from What’s Missing in the Marketplace:

Our political system is a lot more comfortable talking about health care than about health. We’ll pay enormous amounts of money to treat diabetics, but we don’t do much to change people’s diets to prevent diabetes. That’s a strange use of resources: Focusing on health-care coverage without doing more to address the factors, such as diet, that determine our health is a bit like buying fire insurance while ignoring the fact that you have a gas stove and a large fireplace in a wood cabin. A dry wood cabin.

…”My own view,” says Emanuel, “is we know there are large parts of health that are primarily best approached as a public-health issue and not as a doctor-patient issue. Nutrition, wellness, exercise and smoking, for instance. But lifestyle change is hard to accomplish. What smoking showed is it’s not a single thing. It changed from being socially acceptable and doctors would recommend it in the ’50s to being scorned and barred indoors.”

The smoking case is an interesting one. Emanuel brings it up repeatedly as one of the few examples where public-health advocates managed to change the culture around a previously unexamined act, which is exactly what they’re going to have to do with diet. “On smoking, there are a combination of things that had to happen,” he says. “We had to make smoking socially unacceptable. We took it outside the building. We raised taxes on it. It became linked to cancer.” But as he admits, “you can’t take eating outside the building.” Nor can you demonize it entirely. Certain products can be attacked, but in a world of organic Oreos and Splenda with added fiber, it won’t just be an uphill climb. It’ll be a climb with constantly changing footholds.

Moreover, as Emanuel says, lifestyle issues are hard for the government to address. They’re personal, for one thing. Whether it likes it or not, the government is fiscally invested in the way we eat because it pays for the consequences of a bad diet. But few feel comfortable with the government’s involving itself in the choices that lead to that bad diet.

…So where does that leave us? “You have to change the whole culture around this stuff,” Emanuel sighs. “That’s a complicated thing. It’s even more complicated than how to change the health-care system, if you can believe it.”

Klein piece via ethanagri4 on the Comfood listserve

Corner piece via the foodtimes

Today’s post is a highly personal selection of recent articles and resources I’ve found interesting. Read together, they tell an expansive story of the promise, the failures and the complexity within our food system.

• urban animal husbandry
• the selling of a 144-year old Vermont family farm
• a local food revolution in northern Michigan
• the potential of urban agriculture in Detroit
• farming – the new American Dream?
• early action from the President’s Working Group on Food Safety
• Michael Pollan on how we can’t fix the health care system without fixing the food system
• tasting and tweeting to spread the word about small food businesses

read on for details and links

The White House has posted a video about the progress and impact of the garden.

Michelle: “The garden is really an important introduction to what I hope will be a new way that our country thinks about food.”

White House Chef Sam Kass: “Thomas Jefferson, more than any one man, changed the way we eat in this country and the way we grow food.  When his ambassadors would go out in the world, he would ask them to bring back seeds.  And he’s the first person to start seasonal growing, that is something people are coming back to now and thinking about ways to use a diversity of crops and keep  growing throughout the year.”

via The Ethicurean

Obama Foodorama writes of the “under the radar” coordination of the White House efforts with Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.  Merrigan’s recent memo, Harnessing USDA Rural Development Programs to Support Local and Regional Food Systems, takes an “imagine the possibilities” approach to three USDA funding programs that, as Eddie Gehman Kohan points out, has an echo of Michelle Obama:

Imagine an NGO receiving USDA grant money to construct a community kitchen where farmers drop off produce and families join cooking classes that teach about healthy eating while everyone prepares fresh nutritious meals to bring home…Imagine a community using USDA money to construct an open-sided structure to house a farmers market…Imagine a school using USDA loan money to set up cold storage as part of a larger effort to retrofit the school cafeteria to buy produce directly from farmers and return cooking capacity for school lunch…Imagine…

For all the grumbling you do about your weekly grocery bill, the fact is you’ve never had it so good, at least in terms of what you pay for every calorie you eat.  According to the USDA, Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. Those savings begin with the remarkable success of one crop: corn…But cheap food is not free food, and corn comes with hidden costs.

via America’s Food Crisis and How to Fix It – TIME

A decades long conversation about the sustainability of our food system has moved from books and blogs and food activist listservs into mainstream media.  Wherever you look there’s an article, a movie, a TV or radio segment about our broken food system, about food safety, about how our eating habits are making us sick.

And about how much organic lettuce the White House Garden is producing.
read on…