Your Diet and the Environment

I received my monthly issue of Co-Op America recently, which mainly consists of information concerning investments and ways to cool the earth through them. This month however, there was an interesting article concerning the diet and it's effects on the environment, specifically meat diets. A 2006 study conducted by Drs. Pamela Martin and Gidon Eshel of the University of Chicago, http://geosci.uchicago.edul~gidon/papers/nutri/nutri.html, provided a neat graph that compared different meat (and non-meat) diets with their average annual greenhouse gas emissions. The results: Vegan: 0 tons, Lacto-Ovo Vegetarian: .8 ton, Poultry: .9 ton, Avg. American: 1.485 tons, Fish: 2 tons, Red Meat: 2 tons. These diets are based on a 3,774 calorie diet. All diets including meat are calculated as 72 percent plant-based, 14 percent meat, 14 percent eggs and dairy. The lacto-ovo diet is 90 percent plant based, 10 percent eggs and dairy, reflecting the actual animal product consumption o the average lacto-ovo vegetarian. You might be asking yourself, why such an outrageous amount of calories when the usual average is 2000? Well- this 3,774 number is an "FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization) figure that represents the number of calories produced and distributed per person in the US, meaning that while we don't necessarily eat that much on average, we eat or waste that much at grocery stores and at home." This study took into account the entire life cycle of these diets. How much energy it took to grow, harvest , transport , and prepare them. The FAO released a report this past February stating livestock accounts for 18 percent of our world global warming emissions. Switching from a Toyota Camry to a hybrid Toyota Prius would save 1 ton of greenhouse gases annually while making the switch to a vegan diet would save 1.5 tons! After reading this article, it only reaffirms what I heard on Real Time a couple of weeks ago; "One can't be an environmentalist and a meat eater." These words spoken by a representative of PETA. What really surprises me is that the fish diet is equivalent to the red meat diet in avg. annual ghg emmisions. "I am a vegetarian, but I still eat fish" doesn't cut it anymore.

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Food Fight: the 2007 Farm Bill

Here is an interesting article about the role of legislation in determining our food and farm policy in the U.S. The essay is published as part of "Thinking outside the Lunchbox", an ongoing series of essays connected to the Center for Ecoliteracy's Rethinking School Lunch program.

Food Fight: The 2007 Farm Bill

By Dan Imhoff

Every five years, Congress revisits and passes a massive but little understood legislation known as the Farm Bill. This year will be one of those years, and if things play out the way they're headed, this could become the most scrutinized food and farm policy debate in recent history. Originally conceived as an emergency bailout for millions of farmers and unemployed during the dark times of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, the Farm Bill has snowballed into one of the most — if not the most — significant forces affecting food, farming, and land use in the United States. In a country consecrated to private property rights and free market ideals, it might seem hard to fathom that a single legislation could wield such far-reaching influence. But to a large extent, the Farm Bill determines what sort of foods we Americans eat (and how they taste and how much they cost), which crops are grown under what conditions, and, ultimately, whether we're properly nourished or not.

Why the Farm Bill Matters

If you pay taxes, care about the nutritional value of school lunches, or worry about biodiversity or the loss of farmland and open space, you have a personal stake in the tens of billions of dollars committed annually to agriculture and food policies. If you're concerned about escalating federal budget deficits, the fate of family farmers, a food system dominated by corporations and commodities, conditions of immigrant farm workers, the state of the country's woodlands, or the marginalization of locally raised organic food and grass-fed meat and dairy products, you should pay attention to the Farm Bill. The dozens of other reasons the Farm Bill is critical to our land, our bodies, and our children's future include:

* The twilight of the cheap oil age and onset of unpredictable climatic conditions;
* Looming water shortages and crashing fish populations;
* Broken rural economies;
* Euphoria over corn and soybean expansion for biofuels;
* Escalating medical and economic costs of child and adult obesity;
* Record payouts to corporate farms that aren't even losing money;
* Over 35 million Americans, half of them children, who don't get enough to eat.

"The farm policies we design now will likely determine whether we will continue to have a sustainable food system in the future," writes longtime North Dakota organic farmer and food activist Fred Kirschenmann, in the introduction to Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to a Food and Farm Bill. Although the economic challenges of modern agriculture may seem abstract to many urban and suburban residents, he argues, "an enlightened food and farm policy is of considerable consequence to every citizen on the planet." We all do have to eat, after all.

What Is the Farm Bill?

The Farm Bill is essentially a $90 billion tax bill for food, feed, fiber, and, more recently, fuel. Each bill receives a formal name, such as the Food and Agriculture Act of 1977, the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 (a.k.a. "Freedom to Farm"), but more often each act is simply referred to as "the Farm Bill."

While many people equate its programs and subsidies with assistance for struggling family farmers, the Farm Bill actually has two primary thrusts: (1) Food stamps, school lunch, and other nutrition programs account for 50 percent of current spending — an average of $44 billion per year between 2000 and 2006. (2) Income and price supports for a number of storable commodity crops combine for another 35 percent of spending. In addition, the Farm Bill funds a range of other program "titles," including conservation and environment, forestry, renewable energy, research, and rural development.

For decades, Farm Bill negotiations have been dominated by a tag team of two powerful interest groups. The "farm bloc" (representatives from commodity states along with the agribusiness lobby) has orchestrated a quid pro quo with the antihunger caucus (urban representatives aligned with hunger advocacy groups). As a result, ever-increasing payments have been successfully directed toward surplus commodity production and the livestock feedlot industry. In return, the Farm Bill's desperately needed hunger safety net programs have survived relatively unscathed.

Who Gets the Money?

For the simplest answer, one might twist a line from Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, "It's the commodity groups, stupid." Thanks to a growing number of nongovernmental, governmental, and mass media resources, following the Farm Bill money trail is not that difficult. (Excellent places to start include Environmental Working Group, Oxfam International, Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the Washington Post, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.) According to the Congressional Research Service, 84 percent of commodity support spending goes to the production of just five crops: corn, cotton, wheat, rice, and soybeans. Half of that money currently goes to just seven states that produce most of those commodities. The richest ten percent of farm-subsidy recipients (many of whom are corporations and absentee landowners who can hardly be classified as "actively engaged" in growing crops) take in more than two-thirds of those payments.

A few other broad brushstrokes:

* Almost 50 percent of all commodity subsidies went to 5 percent of eligible farmers in 2005;
* Subsidies help the largest farms to acquire the best land and squeeze out smaller growers;
* The growth rate for jobs trailed the national average in nearly two-thirds of counties receiving heavy subsidies between 2000 and 2003, according to a recent report.

What about the Food Pyramid?

Very little of the agriculture we subsidize is directly edible, at least by humans. Out of the hundreds and even thousands of plant and animal species that have been cultivated for human use, the Farm Bill favors just four primary groups: food grains, feed grains, oilseeds, and upland cotton. Most are either fed to cattle in confinement or processed into oils, flours, starches, sugars, industrial food additives, and, increasingly biofuels.

It only takes a stroll down the supermarket aisles to understand how Farm Bill dollars flow into the country's food chain. A dollar buys hundreds of more calories in the snack food, cereal, or soda aisles than it does in the produce section. Why? Because the Farm Bill favors the mega-production of corn (resulting in cheap high-fructose corn syrup) and soybeans rather than regional supplies of fresh carrots, healthy fruits, and nuts. Unfortunately, eating a diet high in calories doesn't necessarily ensure that one is well-fed — even if that food is cheap.

While the USDA's Food Pyramid emphasizes the nutritional advantages of five daily servings of fruits and vegetables, Farm Bill funding for diversified row crop and orchard farming remains relatively disconnected from the balanced, healthy diet that professional nutritionists endorse. Meanwhile, most consumer food dollars spent in farm country end up leaving the region because our agricultural areas have effectively become "food deserts." There is at least one simple solution to this. Farm and food subsidy programs could be realigned to support the federal dietary guidelines and reoriented toward food chains that produce and distribute locally grown, healthy foods.

A Food and Farm Bill for the 21st Century?

The silver lining is that Americans actually do have a substantially large food and farm policy program to debate. Conditions for change have perhaps never been better, as market dynamics and public awareness rapidly align to create uncertainty about farm politics as usual. Indeed, the Farm Bill matters because it can actually serve as the economic engine driving small-scale entrepreneurship, on-farm research, species protection, nutritional assistance, school lunches made from scratch, regional development, and habitat restoration, to name just a few.

Our challenge is not to abolish government supports altogether, but to ensure that those subsidies we do choose to legislate actually serve as valuable investments in the country's future and allow us to live up to our obligations in the global community. How we get there is still to be determined. But most observers agree that the era of massive giveaways to corporations and surplus commodity producers must yield to policies that reward stewardship, promote healthy diets, secure regional economies, and do no harm to family farms or hungry kids and their families.

"Today, because so few realize that we citizens have a dog in this fight," writes Michael Pollan in his excellent foreword to Food Fight, "our legislators feel free to leave the debate over the Farm Bill to the farm states, very often trading their votes on agricultural policy for votes on issues that matter more to their constituents. But nothing could do more to reform America's food system, and by doing so, improve the condition of America's environment and public health, than if the rest of us were to weigh in."


© 2007 Daniel Imhoff

Dan Imhoff is the author and publisher of numerous books, including Farming with the Wild (Sierra Club Books, 2003), Paper or Plastic (Sierra Club Books, 2005), Building with Vision (University of California Press, 2001), and Farming and the Fate of Wild Nature (University of California Press, 2006). His most recent book, Food Fight: The Citizen's Guide to a Food and Farm Bill (Foreword by Michael Pollan and Introduction by Fred Kirschenmann) was released by the University of California Press in February 2007.


This essay is part of Thinking outside the Lunchbox, an ongoing series of essays connected to the Center for Ecoliteracy's Rethinking School Lunch program. Read all the essays at www.ecoliteracy.org .

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The Future of Food, Documentary Film

"There is a revolution happening in the farm fields and on the dinner tables of America; a revolution that is transforming the very nature of the food we eat." What are both sides of the story? This documentary film by Deborah Koons Garcia and Lily Films explores alternative solutions to the garm crisis today. The Education Committee of the People's Grocery Cooperative invites you to join us for a free public viewing of The Future of Food Wednesday, March 28 at 7:30 PM in the Tubman Room of the Douglass Center Annex at 901 Yuma. There will be discussion and refreshments following. Original songs inspired by the film will open and close the showing. Questions?: Martha SEaton 785-537-0936

Type the rest of your post here.

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Eating Better Than Organic

Eating Better Than Organic
Friday, Mar. 02, 2007 By JOHN CLOUD

Organic apples in the produce section at a Whole Foods Market in Willowbrook, IL. on January 5th, 2006. Whole Foods Market along with other organic food distributors is trying to bring down the cost of organic foods to attract the family on a budget..


Not long ago I had an apple problem. Wavering in the produce section of a Manhattan grocery store, I was unable to decide between an organic apple and a nonorganic apple (which was labeled conventional, since that sounds better than "sprayed with pesticides that might kill you"). It shouldn't have been a tough choice--who wants to eat pesticide residue?--but the organic apples had been grown in California. The conventional ones were from right here in New York State. I know I've been listening to too much npr because I started wondering: How much Middle Eastern oil did it take to get that California apple to me? Which farmer should I support--the one who rejected pesticides in California or the one who was, in some romantic sense, a neighbor? Most important, didn't the apple's taste suffer after the fruit was crated and refrigerated and jostled for thousands of miles?

In the end I bought both apples. (They were both good, although the California one had a mealy bit, possibly from its journey.) It's only recently that I had noticed more locally grown products in the supermarket, but when I got home I discovered that the organic-vs.-local debate has become one of the liveliest in the food world. Last year Wal-Mart began offering more organic products--those grown without pesticides, antibiotics, irradiation and so on--and the big company's expansion into a once alternative food culture has been a source of deep concern, and predictable backlash, among early organic adopters.

Nearly a quarter of American shoppers now buy organic products once a week, up from 17% in 2000. But for food purists, "local" is the new "organic," the new ideal that promises healthier bodies and a healthier planet. Many chefs, food writers and politically minded eaters are outraged that "Big Organic" firms now use the same industrial-size farming and long-distance-shipping methods as conventional agribusiness. "Should I assume that I have a God-given right to access the entire earth's bounty, however far away some of its produce is grown?" asks ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan in his 2002 memoir, Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods. Nabhan predicted my apple problem when he vacillated over some organic pumpkin canned hundreds of miles from his Arizona home. "If you send it halfway around the world before it is eaten," he mused, "an organic food still may be 'good' for the consumer, but is it 'good' for the food system?"

I had never really thought about how my food purchases might affect "the food system." Even now I don't share the pessimism and asceticism of the local-eating set. In her 2001 memoir, This Organic Life, Columbia University nutritionist Joan Dye Gussow writes that her commitment to eating locally "is probably driven by three things. The first is the taste of live food; the second is my relation to frugality; the third is my deep concern about the state of the planet." I don't have much relation to frugality, and, perhaps foolishly, I'm more optimistic than Gussow about our ability to develop alternative energy sources.

But I care deeply about how my food tastes, and it makes sense that a snow pea grown by a local farmer and never refrigerated will retain more of its delicate leguminous flavor than one shipped in a frigid plane from Guatemala. And I realized that if more consumers didn't become part of the local-food market, it could disappear and all our peas would be those tasteless little pods from far away.

Still, the fact that not all locally grown products are organic had me worried. Even if most Americans wanted to buy locally grown organics, they wouldn't be able to find many. In a few not-too-dry, not-too-wet, not-too-warm regions--central California is one--it is possible to find abundant organic produce grown locally. But if you live in a humid climate, say, the moisture that encourages bacteria and fungi means that growing without pesticides is much more risky, expensive and rare. Consequently, in the Hudson Valley of New York, near me, it's very difficult to find fruit that hasn't been sprayed with chemicals at least once. In other regions, like the upper Midwest, most big farms don't grow any vegetables for local markets, conventional or organic. Instead, they produce commodity crops like corn and soybeans for sale to food processors. At a large Hugo's grocery store in Jamestown, N.D., last summer, I noticed only one local product: flour, which is milled in-state from local wheat. But there were organic apples and oranges from out of state.

Farmers' markets often feature organic produce from nearby farms, but not everyone lives near a farmers' market--and most products at the markets aren't organic. "I've been to farmers' markets, and there's people hauling stuff from the truck that they got at a wholesaler," says Joseph Mendelson III, legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a liberal Washington group that supports strong organic standards. Mendelson prefers the "gold standard" of locally grown organics, but he is rather frightening on the subject of nonorganic food, whatever its origin. When I asked him whether I should favor local products, he replied, "I don't know what local means. Do they use local pesticides? Does that mean the food is better because they produce local cancers?"

All of which further tangles my original question: The organic apple or the conventionally grown local one?

It turns out to be a frustratingly layered choice, one that implicates many other questions: What's the most efficient way to grow food for all? Should farms be big or small, family- or corporate-run? How do your choices affect the planet? What tastes better? And then there's that little matter of cancer.

Let's get that one out of the way at the start. If scientists could conclusively prove that agricultural chemicals are harmful, we would all go organic. But it's not clear, for instance, that the low levels of pesticide typically found on conventional produce cause cancer. The risks of long-term exposure to those residues are still undetermined.

Even if conventional foods don't turn out to be as dangerous as organic advocates claim, several recent studies have suggested that organic foods contain higher levels of vitamins than their conventionally grown counterparts. In a paper published in October in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a team from the University of California, Davis, demonstrates that organically grown tomatoes have significantly more vitamin C than conventional tomatoes. Even so, the same study shows no significant differences between conventional and organic bell peppers.
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9th Annual Farmers Exhibition

The Kansas City Food Circle is hosting the 9th Annual Farmers Exhibition

WHEN:Saturday March 24, 9 AM to 2 PM
WHAT: The Kansas City Food Circle is hosting the 9th Annual Farmers Exhibition:
Meet local organic farmers who can supply high quality organic fruits and veggies and free range, natural meats for the coming seasons, Seedlings for a nearly start on your garding, and Pick up a fre copy of the 2007 Food Circle Producers Directory.
Original music by eco-troubadour, Stan Slaughter.
WHERE: Civic Centr, 13817 Johnson Dr.,Shawnee, KS (Free Admission and Parking)

For more info: Craig Volland, KC Food Circle, 913-334-0556, hartwood2@mindspring.com

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Cloned Animals not Necessary to Sustain U.S. Food Supply

The FDA's recent approval of cloned animals for introduction into the food supply offers no direct or immediate benefit to the general carnivorous public.


Cloned beef? No, thank you.

The FDA's recent approval of cloned animals for introduction into the food supply offers no direct or immediate benefit to the general carnivorous public.

Already our beef is plentiful. Kansas is second in the nation for the number of beef cattle on feedlots with 2.3 million head, according the the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the total number of feedlots with a capacity of 1,000 or more head is 10.7 million nationwide.

Also, cloned animals produce offspring with genetic abnormalities, as attested by K-State's own experts, so the long-term viability of cloned beef cattle is limited at best.

Certainly the element of cost does not work in its favor. Anything that is experimental and lab-intensive isn't likely to be economical. Reasonably priced cloned beef still is years away.

Petri-dish burgers also are not likely to taste any better than your average mass-produced cow. Their genes might be strong, but it's the way they're raised and fed that ultimately affect their sapidity.

If you're looking for superior taste or redeeming nutritive value, try grass-fed beef as an alternative to feedlot cattle, whose meat often is laced with antibiotics. Beef from cows that are allowed to graze is lower in calories and fat and higher in omega-3 fatty acids. For its slightly higher grocery store price tag, at least grass-fed offers some quantifiable benefits.

To date, cloned meat has shown no such benefits. Perhaps down the line it will be practical to have of pens of cows with identical genes, but ultimately, it won't improve the condition of the pot roast sitting on our dinner table.

Setting aside the debate over the ethical soundness of cloning, currently, there is no reason to support the introduction of cloned meat into our food supply.

Megan Moser, Kansas State Collegian, 7/8/2007

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