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Barack Obama to appoint Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture

by Jennifer Maiser, Editor

President-Elect Obama yesterday announced his choice for Secretary of Agriculture: Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack. The sustainable food community is incredibly invested in the choice for Secretary of Agriculture, and you have probably seen various petitions going around the Internet asking for Mr. Obama to make a Secretary of Agriculture choice taking a sustainable food system into consideration.

My inbox was full yesterday with people who were irate about the choice for Secretary of Agriculture, and wondering what to do next. Mr. Vilsack is known for his support of ethanol production and genetically engineered crops -- both issues which the sustainable food community opposes.

While it's frustrating to not see fast movement to save our food system with the new administration, I am encouraged by what I've been seeing. Since election day, I have never seen such a focused attempt by the sustainable food community to strategize what the nation needs, and how to achieve our goals. Expect to hear a lot more from the food community in the coming months.

I tend to not talk partisan politics here -- I feel that the choice to eat locally crosses party lines, and have seen proof of that theory.  But the choices being made at the top really do affect the power that the sustainable food movement has as a whole.

If you're interested in reading some really cogent responses to the Vilsack appointment, check out the following links:

Change we can Eat: an Immodest Proposal for Obama's Food Policy (Christopher Cook / Civil Eats)

Michael Pollan on Vilsack, Agriculture -- And Food (NPR)

AgSuck: Looks like Tom Vilsact to head USDA (Bonnie Powell / Ethicurean)

Dispatch from Slow Food Nation - on Serious Eats now

by Jennifer Maiser, editor

Over the weekend, San Francisco played host to Slow Food Nation, a first-of-its-kind event celebrating sustainable food.  I attended many Slow Food Nation events and reported on them for Serious Eats.

If you're interested in reading about my observations and conflicted thoughts about the event, click on through to these links:

#1: The Speaker Panels
#2: The Taste Pavilion
#3: The Marketplace
#4: Looking Forward

Low cost labor and untaxed fuel cause migrations of frozen fish

By Marc

Some of the world's sea creatures make incredible migrations to feed or mate.  Tuna, for example, swim back and forth across the Atlantic or Pacific.  In the globalized economy, some fish go on long migrations even after they have been frozen.

The new book "Bottomfeeder," by Taras Grescoe provides a fascinating look at the state of the world's oceans (I reviewed the book over at The Ethicurean). The book is a compelling combination of nature, history, politics, and culinary arts.  If you want to understand more about why certain fish are rated "best," "good," or "avoid" on lists like the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch list, "Bottomfeeder" is a must read.

Near the end of the book, Grescoe visits a fish processing facility in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.  Some of the fish that go through the plant have been on long migrations before arriving and some fish continue their migration after processing.

Agriculture Policy and Food Safety

This is the second in a series based on the Berkeley paper that covers agriculture policy's impact on food safety, health, and the environment.

Excuse me while I step up on the soapbox. Ahem. I’ve been chided before about being too political on my food blog. More recipes, Woman! But the thing is, food is all tied up with politics, and there are a few things we eaters need to understand about this. For our own safety. So we can make better choices. This is a pretty short primer on the basics, but there are a lot of great links in here that can help you get the full picture of our food system.

How does food policy impact the safety of what we eat?
I mean, it’s just legislation, right? Laws that are supposed to keep the food supply safe. The basis for these laws was established in 1906 by Theodore Roosevelt in response to the publication of Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle. Ironically, one of these laws, the Meat Inspection Act, was supposed to eradicate the use of “4-D” cattle in meats, meaning dead, diseased, decaying and downed. Over 100 years later we are still facing the same issues.

The other act, the Pure Food and Drug Act, was designed to insure the safety of drugs and non-meat food items. However, the two agencies overlap. A raw egg, in the shell, is the responsibility of the FDA. Once the shell is broken, the USDA is in charge. If a processed sandwich is to be inspected, the USDA would have jurisdiction over the meat, the FDA over the bread. Makes all kind of sense, right?

Learn what you need to know about food safety, policy and what you can do as a consumer after the jump.

So, the system doesn’t work. Worse, it’s not even enforceable.
Case in point, 2007 had a record number of meat recalls, followed closely in 2008 by the largest recall ever. Thus far, absolutely no action has ever been taken to penalize these companies. The two USDA inspectors who failed to report the downer cow incidents at Hallmark/Westland are currently only suspended — with pay. Further, neither agency actually has the authority to demand a recall, unless the recalled item is infant formula.

Politics also get directly in the path of food safety.
Many of the people who run the FDA and USDA, agencies that are designed to enforce food safety, also worked in the industries that these agencies are supposed to police. In fact, as of 2006, the chief of staff at the Agriculture Department used to be the beef industry’s chief lobbyist. Further, the head of the FDA was most recently an executive at the National Food Processors Association. It is indeed, the proverbial case of the fox watching over the hen house.

Farm Policy plays a major role.
Finally, from a farm policy standpoint, our food system is vulnerable. Important legislation such as the farm bill, recently being rewritten, encourages a highly centralized system that relies heavily on imported foods. Less than two percent of imported foods were inspected on entry to the country in 2006.

Farm policy also rewards the farmers in this country for only growing eight commodity crops through a system of subsidies. This near monoculture has been made worse by the misguided focus on ethanol production from corn. Farmers who grow any foods other than the commodity crops are ineligible for subsidies. Thus, we increasingly rely on imported foods for items that can easily be grown locally — our agriculture system just makes this less profitable for farmers to do. In fact, in 2004, less than four percent of total US cropland was planted with fruits and vegetables.

The same farm policies that were put in place under Earl Butz, also fostered a system of “Get Big or Get Out.” The number of farms since 1900 has declined by 63 percent, while the size of farms has increased by 67 percent. The result is a highly centralized system. The risk in such a system is that the product, be it meat or spinach, that is tainted is processed at a central location along with thousands of pounds of non-tainted product. The resulting contaminated shipment is then sent across the country. Instead of an easily traceable and localized illness, citizens across the country will be sickened.

This is how legislation, policy and politics directly impact what ends up on your plate. This is why you can’t separate “pork” politics from the pork chop. But, what is a consumer to do? You do have rights, of course, and choice. Remember that we still live in a demand-generated economy. If the demand grows, and farmers who produce crops other than the big eight can thrive, our food supply will improve as a result. It will take time, but there are many things you can do as a consumer to make this happen.

Here is how you can use your rights:

• You can exercise that right to track your representatives’ votes on the farm bill and food safety issues.
• You can write to your reps and tell them your concerns.
• You can source meats, milk and eggs direct from the farmers who raise food animals ethically and naturally, and process them safely. If you cannot afford to buy in bulk to save money, you can team up with other families and make it an affordable, lower cost than buying at the store.
• You can buy produce direct from your farmers market or a CSA.
• You can stop buying processed foods.
• You can stop buying fast food that is heavily subsidized by our agriculture system.
• You can cook at home and benefit from a family meal.
• Finally, you can stay informed on how and where your food is produced and make your own choices.

Agriculture Policy and Your Health

by Expat Chef

What if we all woke up tomorrow and said, “Today is the day I will eat right.” Oh, and we actually did it. The first thing we’d figure out is that there is a massive food shortage for a healthy diet even in a country where two-thirds of us are overweight.

Food shortage in the land of milk and honey? You betcha, for real food at least — 1.2 servings of milk per person per day less than recommended. Two servings per day of whole grains per person are not available, and about one serving a day of both non-starchy vegetables and fruits are absent as well. Additionally, most fruits and vegetables have to be imported.

Second, for what food supply there is, many Americans would simply not be able to afford that healthy diet. The price of fruits and vegetables have increased 118 percent from 1985 to the new millennium. Fats and oils have only increased 35 percent in that same time span, meaning, the cheapest foods are the least nutritious and most calorie dense. They are also the majority of the food supply due to farm policy.

How Legislation Can Make Us Fat
Farm policy rewards farmers for growing commodity crops, basically only eight types of crops; corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, cotton, barley, oats and sorghum. Growing “speciality” crops like fruits and vegetables – foods that Michael Pollan insists should be the majority of our diets — makes a farmer ineligible for a subsidy, even if he only grows a small amount of fruits and vegetables on his land. Even the name “speciality” implies that these crops are a rarity, and they are according to U.S. food policy. As a result, only four percent of U.S. crop land was dedicated to growing fruits and vegetables in 2004.

The dependency of farmers on subsidies does not help the situation. While the large-scale industrial farms reap unnecessary extra profit in the form of subsidy “handouts,” small farms are squeezed heavily by a system that only pays them about nineteen cents for every food dollar spent. The vast majority of the profits do not go to the farmer, but to the food industry that processes, packages, advertises and transports the finished “product.” In fact, some 77,000 processed food products, many of which contain primarily cheap inputs like refined flour and sugars like high-fructose corn syrup with flavors and colors and added “nutrients.”

These convenient and less expensive foods have increased the number of calories per individual, per day available in our food system to 3,800. Normal caloric intake per average adult should be closer to 2350. Yet, for the additional portion size and caloric density, there is far less nutrition than unprocessed, “real” foods.

It is a broken system, and the victims of it are the small farms and the lower income families that cannot afford better foods. Quite often, the inability to afford (or have access to) better food choices, can lead to obesity and health-related issues — again for those who can least afford health care and medical bills. An estimated $75 billion a year is spent treating obesity-related diseases, half of these costs are borne by publicly-funded programs like Medicaid. As a result, we taxpayers bear much of the brunt of the true costs associated with the short-term profits of cheap and subsidized foods even as the food industry yields more profits.

Additionally, many of Americans who can afford better food, choose not to, preferring these processed versions of real food, or preferring to spend less of their budget and time on buying and preparing food. The table below shows what consumers actually buy from the choices available at the store. The current rise in food prices with the increase in fuel costs and use of commodity crops for ethanol, will not only increase processed food prices, but will do little to help the situation of making healthier choices more affordable.

The situation does not have to exist. Here are some things we, as consumers, can do to change things for the better:

1. Write your Congressmen and women and tell them you want a farm bill that makes sense and supports both “specialty crop” farmers and healthy food programs that will offer low-income families access to better food.
2. Join a CSA or shop at your farmers market, giving hard-working farmers 100 percent of your food dollar. LocalHarvest.org has a great search tool to help you find local food sources near you.
3. Purchase ethically- and naturally-raised meat direct from a family farm. Most use a USDA-certified, but small, local butcher, offering healthier and safer meats for consumers and the environment. Learn more about the perils of industrial farms and meat production so you can be aware as a consumer.
4. Items like eggs, milk and cheese can be found locally from small farms. Look for these items in addition to fruit, vegetables and meats. Sustainable Table has a good search tool if you want to find sources near you for specific products.
5. Support urban agriculture efforts in your area by donating time or money to gardens that supply healthy food for low-income families. Start a community garden project in your neighborhood or school, to share in the growing of your own healthy food and community.
6. Cook more at home. It is possible to have real food without being a slave to your oven, and you will also reap the social rewards that come from a real family meal. Shared time with family members in preparing meals is a great time to talk and be involved in one another’s lives.
7. Value food. Take the time to enjoy and share a meal, understand that what your put into yourself and your family is the fuel for a healthy life. Choose wisely and enjoy well.

Source material for this document can be found in “Agriculture Policy is Health Policy,” by Richard J Jackson MD MPH, Ray Minjares MPH, Kyra S Naumoff PhD, Bina Patel BA, University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health  Berkeley, California 94720-7360.  Developed with the Support of The Kellogg Foundation  September 16, 2007.

Little bites of hope

by Julie Cummins

The elections this week reminded me to keep my hope alive. I don’t think this is an appropriate place for political endorsements, so I’m not going to make one. But I want to tell a story about how Super Tuesday reinforced my belief in what we’re doing here at Eat Local Challenge.

I avoided thinking about the primary until a few days before the vote. I would get to it in my own jaded and curmudgeonly sweet time. I was feeling indifferent and even hostile about the electoral process. It wasn’t until I saw a campaign video, though, that I understood my own state of mind.

Shut Up & Eat?

by Jen Maiser

Amy Stewart's commentary on NPR's All Things Considered this week was a topic of conversation among ELC blog authors this week.  While Ms. Stewart believes that we should all "shut up and eat," I hardly think that many of us will be following her directive anytime soon.  Michael Pollan often speaks about the magic of voting with our forks.  Unlike major, huge, unsurmountable issues that our world faces, food issues are something that we all decide on many times a day.  I personally choose to put my hard-earned money in the hands of local farmers and local cheesemakers and local artisans over international conglomerates and mega-corporations. 

Ms. Stewart suggests that instead of focusing on where our food comes from, we should try taking public transportation or turning down the thermostat.  Most of us who are conscious enough to focus on where our food comes from don't turn off that consciousness when it comes to these sort of things -- we tend to tread lightly on the earth in many ways.

While I suspect that Ms. Stewart was trying to be sensationalist and contrarian about some of the pedantic, minutia-oriented conversations that can occur around food (and that many of us tire of at some point), I don't think that an overarching declaration against eating local is the answer.

Below, you'll find some opinions from other ELC authors around the nation.  Check them out -- I think they're fantastic.

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from Liz (Maine):

No doubt local eating is old news where you live in California, the land of plenty. But it is an absolute triumph that the rest of America is finally paying attention to what goes on its dinner plate. Please don't begrudge us Mainers or Michiganders or Minnesotans for finally catching on to what you savvy Californians have known all along: that fresher foods taste better. What's more is that we're finding we can produce our food just as well, if not better than your fine state, cutting out the factory farms, middlemen, and days of travel on the way.

I don't often dole out advice, Amy, but it seems like you need to either find some non-foodie friends or start talking up some new cause. If it goes well, the rest of us should be buzzing about it in 2013. Until then, I will continue to celebrate the foods of my state with my friends and family. Don't worry, I'll make sure not to invite you to the dinner party.

Fair Trade vs. Eat Local?

by Jen Maiser

In an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday paper, William G. Moseley takes a swipe at the eat local movement in an article titled "Farmers in developing world hurt by 'eat local' philosophy in U.S."

While I respect Mr. Moseley's attempt to bring any attention to the admirable fair trade movement, his finger is pointed in the wrong direction.

Eat Local advocates are often painted as coffee-shunning, chocolate-declining masochists who eschew absolutely everything that is not local.  The truth is much less compelling in print, so the moderates among us are not often in the spotlight. 

The World Trade Organization, U.S. farm subsidies and local food

By Marc

Here's something unexpected:  the World Trade Organization (WTO) -- one of the most powerful forces for globalization and international homogenization -- might actually help the local foods movement in the United States. 

A little while ago I wrote about how planting restrictions in certain farm subsidy programs.  These restrictions impede the creation of a local food system by requiring farmers to permanently withdraw from the program if they grow fruits and vegetables on the program land.  Clearly, no one should receive corn, soy or cotton subsidy payments for land that is used to grow fruits and vegetables, but I think it makes no sense to permanently penalize farmers for trying to grow crops that people who live nearby might want to purchase.

It turns out that the WTO might have a problem with those planting restrictions. It is another example of the messiness that exists at the intersection of international relations and domestic politics.

A recent FarmPolicy.com newsletter explained the WTO's concerns and the implications for U.S. farm policy in great detail.  In less detail, the WTO agreements strive to eliminate all trade-distorting subsidy programs (subsidies that give certain producers an advantage over others), thus allowing something resembling "free trade."  In WTO documents, farm subsidies are classified into three "boxes" according to their trade distorting effects  "Blue box" payments are the most trade distorting and are essentially forbidden by the trade agreements; "amber box" payments are marginally distorted and are subject to a limit;  "green box" payments do not distort trade and therefore have no limits. 

Gary Paul Nabhan: Deepening Our Sense of What is Local and Regional Food

Editor Note:  Gary Paul Nabhan is one of the main reasons that I started this multi-year quest to eat local.  His book, Coming Home to Eat, gives us clear reasons about why to eat locally grown food.  I was thrilled this week to receive a post submission from Dr. Nabhan. This essay is sure to refocus my eat local energies, as it may yours, as Dr. Nabhan challenges us to look even more deeply into where our food is coming from.

Deepening Our Sense of What Is Local and Regional Food
By: Gary Paul Nabhan, RAFT founder

Now that Time magazine has done a cover feature article on the local foods movement and a book on the same topic by bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver and her family has climbed up the New York Times top-ten non-fiction list, we might want to ask what actually is it that we want to promote by using phrases like “Buy Fresh, Buy Local”. I can assure you that there will be increasing criticism of the so-called local food movement, building on the Hudson Institute’s feeble attempt to discredit it last fall in a variety of newspapers, with added absurdities being published in The Economist and by the American Farm Bureau. On the other hand, a reputable ethicist, Peter Singer, fears in his co-authored book The Way We Eat that 1) an emphasis on purchasing foods locally in U.S. communities will disadvantage needy producers in foreign countries-- as if India’s producers of Basmati rice actually gain much of the retail dollar spent on their rice in the U.S.--- or 2) the unethically raised beef or chicken will suddenly take over farmers markets and CSAs---as if Conagra and Tyson execs will soon be hanging out in overalls selling antibiotic-laced breast meat on Saturdays at their local farmers markets. I can predict, however, that more substantive critiques will arise, and I, for one, welcome them. It is time that we deepen our sense of what we mean by local and regional, offer others better reasons as to why these concerns matter, and steadfastly resist any pressure to endorse simplistic formulas such as a 100-mile diet or an in-state diet.

Here are some ways we can deepen what we promote by the terms local and regional: