Bobbi Katsanis
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- Name: Bobbi Katsanis
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and thank you
Thank you jratz for your perceptive response. From the posts here (and my perception of blog comments in general) I get the sense that many posters didn't even read the Times article (simplistic as IT is) before they started throwing tomatoes at Waters and Pollan. And you're right, most people - even enviros, but especially "lifestyle" journalists - don't seem to understand food issues.
The point Waters and Pollan were trying to make - AND THEY'RE RIGHT ON - is that the McDonald's and microwave food culture is predicated on an endless supply of cheap oil, as it takes oceans of the stuff to grow and transport the raw materials of Big Macs all over the planet. As the world seems to have noticed, oil is a fossil fuel and will not last forever. Thus, any market system predicated on the falsehood of its endless supply will ultimately collapse.
Local food, however, mostly doesn't depend on petrochemicals. So what is happening is that your in-season, locally-grown produce (including, not just fruits and veggies, but dairy products, honey, meats and fish, and here in Berkeley, brown rice) lately has a more stable price than comparable items trucked from Chile to the supermarket. This point WAS made in the Times article, but Philpott et al. chose to overlook it.
People, you cannot hear this often or loudly enough: READ THE ORIGINAL MATERIAL BEFORE YOU COMMENT. Sometimes even that's not too great so you have to learn to think critically. Our mental environment seems to me just as threatened as our natural one. FIGHT GLOBAL DUMBING. On Why Michael Pollan and Alice Waters should quit celebrating food-price hikes posted 1 year, 7 months ago 27 Responses
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Bananas are *tropical*....
Dear friends of the earth - don't forget that bananas are a tropical species and therefore can be grown nowhere in the mainland U.S. Therefore, even if you buy organic, large amounts of fossil fuels have to be burned and emitted to transport bananas to you. Our household has decided that the earth cannot afford Americans continuing this kind of high-traffic food lifestyle, even if the fruits and veggies are grown as ecologically sensitively as possible, so bananas for us are a rare treat. We live in northern California, and it's early March, so right now we are eating locally-grown organic oranges and storage apples.
I know that there have been studies (or at least one) indicating that locally-grown doesn't always win the prize - but I have yet to locate a detailed description of what was measured with these studies. It's like the British nappy study which found that cloth & disposable come out about even. Well, friends, that study was descriptive not prescriptive, and so measured the ecological footprint of the way people use cloth diapers - washed in a nearly-empty washing machine on HOT and dried in the dryer. I haven't been able to get hold of the details of that study either, but I suspect that it did not take fully into account the fact that a cloth diaper's useful life is somewhere passing 30+ years (my mother's still using mine to dust furniture) and they DON'T end up in a landfill.
The point is that if we environmentalists make use of these studies to endorse certain ecological bad habits without checking the specifics... well, that's just bad karma. On Umbra on organic bananas posted 1 year, 8 months ago 22 Responses
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Blueberries? In September???
Hey, Roz,
Are you still getting fresh local blueberries in September? 'Cause the blueberry season in northern California ended months ago. Hope you're not importing those (spendy eco-miles) from someplace far away just because blueberries = summer. (So do tomatoes, melons, and corn on the cob, and we've still got plenty of those.)On As the season fades, it's time for one last blueberry blowout posted 2 years, 2 months ago 3 Responses
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Food Miles
The "efficiently packed trucks" argument is specious. When I lived in Seattle, I had a choice between veggies from a CSA in the Green River Valley (30 miles from my house) and veggies from southern California (1300 miles from my house). Even if the SoCal trucks carry four times as much produce as my CSA, the CSA could make ten times as many trips and still come out ahead. That's even before taking into account the fact that SoCal produce relies extensively on heavy use of pesticides (which have to be trucked from somewhere), fertilizers (ditto), and shockingly energy-intensive irrigation, while much of the produce at my CSA is hand-cultivated and relies on Pacific Northwest rainfall, fertilized by compost from the farm itself, and with no chemical inputs whatsoever.
And Seattle is a lot closer to southern California than the East Coast is, so the number of trips possible to make local still the best choice increases by an order of magnitude. And there's no point in comparing the car trips made by individual consumers to the supermarket versus the farmers' market unless the nearest farmers' market is in the next county. Anyplace I've ever lived (Seattle, Minneapolis, Berkeley) the farmers' market is usually closer, or at least equidistant.
Here in Berkeley, I walk to the farmers' market, and the trucks from the farms are on average half the size of a semi-trailer. SoCal tomatoes are still 500 miles away, but my friend Efren's are only 65 miles away. This is not differential calculus. On If buying locally isn't the answer, then what is? posted 2 years, 3 months ago 28 Responses
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City-Slickers please be quiet and listen to farmer
Dear friends,
I grew up on a very small farm in North Dakota. A relative and member of the community hung himself from the beams of his barn when he could not make his mortgage payments. That was during the recession of the 1980s, when bad weather and worse prices (and horrible farm policies: Earl Butz's "get big or get out") were forcing family farmers from the land in droves.
Why should we care about small family farmers? Why are they "different" from other professions? Why should the government subsidize them to keep them in business (in a way that does NOT send taxpayer money to Cargill et al.)?
- Farmers grow our FOOD. Food doesn't come from the supermarket. However, we need it to live. OK, that's an obvious point.
- What is special about small family farmers is not their personalities, vocations, or any such thing. It's their knowledge. Every small farmer that has intimately worked the land for generations has a knowledge of that land, its climate variations, soil fertility, and needs, knowledge that is lost forever every time a farmer has to leave his or her "vocation" and go work for minimum wage in the nearest city. This is such a big problem that farmers in the eastern part of the country are now begging the Amish to come and give workshops about how to farm, because nobody else still knows all the secrets.
- Small farmers are a BIG part of the environmental and global warming solution. If Congress were to offer supports to struggling farmers below a certain income, acreage, and carrying a certain amount of debt (leaving out Cargill et al.), they could target supports for farmers who are using organic methods (not necessarily certified, that's another story) and selling their wares locally. The ecological footprint of most Americans is biggest when it comes to FOOD, not transportation, as southern California trucks (the transportation $$$ can be written off) produce all over the country. Every state should be largely responsible for growing its own food and we should not be importing fruits and vegetables from other countries. Locally-grown is environmentally much saner, more nutritious, tastier, and supports sustainable local economies. These are things we WANT, people.
- Small farmers do not enjoy the same legal contracts in their trade agreements as other industries. Example: an organic produce cooperative in Appalachia made an agreement with local supermarkets to supply their tomatoes for the year. When harvest time came, the supermarkets had discovered that they could get California tomatoes cheaper (see transportation write-off, above) and reneged on the agreement. The farmers had NO LEGAL RECOURSE and tons of tomatoes went to rot, and all their $$ inputs wasted. Can you sue your employer if they fail to pay you what was agreed on for work you had already done? Yup. But small farmers can't.
- Farmers grow our FOOD. Food doesn't come from the supermarket. However, we need it to live. OK, that's an obvious point.