michelefield’s Recent Comments

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  Frozen food, however cleanly grown

  Everybody from Wayneluke and the recommendations for frozen organic like Kashi are pretending that their freezers are not part of the problem -- and not only their freezer at home, but the freezing at the manufacturers' sites, the 'refrigerated trucks', the retailers' inefficient freezers where the door is opened every 5 minutes (if they're lucky and selling).  The freezing itself, the energy involved (and the carbon cost -- high, as especially home freezers are not efficient), plus the high cost of manufacturing the freezer in the first place (about the worst appliance in your kitchen - forget kicking the microwave!), are issues that this conversation is turning a blind eye to.  Don't give up 'a food source' -- actually, and though I don't want this to be read as an apology for manufactured food, one virtue of those pre-packed meals is that the manufacturers are more cost-conscious and avoid more food waste than we do when buying fresh food to assemble ourselves, eventually...   But Do, please, give up your freezer, even if you're only using it to freeze the 2nd and 3rd servings of meals you've cooked yourself, and you're storing there for later.  Until freezer-makers lose the domestic market, they won't try harder to find new tech tricks that maybe one day will make these machines less culpable.On Umbra on the impact of food purchases posted 2 years, 1 month ago 21 Responses

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  Importing a workforce but not importing food?

  Seasonal agricultural work has always been for a 'class' of people who don't seem qualified to do anything else.  In the States, it used to be college students (me included)!--though many of Grist's bloggers would be glad that Starbucks now provides a less backbreaking alternative.  The experience in London, where I now live, is that 'farm jobs' will not be accepted by local people (so much for 'local farming'!) but only by the East Europeans who are used to this 'traditional' labour and treat it a bit ironically, as hops-gathering was once done in England (a rural holiday for the bohemian and upper classes.  Hops is a fragrant crop and part of the beer industry).  In most British rural areas, you don't disqualify yourself from unemployment benefit if it's a harvesting job you've refused to accept.

  Tom, you cite the rise in imports in vegetable etc production (against the rise in exports from the large-scale US crops like wheat).  This has a lot to do with the quality of arable soil in the States -- the black stuff trickling through your fingers couldn't grow beans.  Americans have over-used this resource (soil) and are thrown back onto the supplements to thrive (ie. chemical additions to the soil). But it's not just labour that is cheaper overseas, it's also soil that is better and less expensive to farm.  A rather scary piece I read recently said that the food tastes of European cities will look to the resources of EU farms in Poland, Romania, and so on -- where the soil is still like the soil of Britain in the 19th century.  Where in the States do you have 19th-century soil?--without mangling your wilderness areas?

  More to say, but another time.  My plea is for Grist to use its great forum to put the questions in a bigger policy picture.On How globalization is smothering U.S. fruit and vegetable farms posted 2 years, 2 months ago 11 Responses

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  Definition of 'local'

  In response to Mike who lives in London and eats 'local' -- well, for those London farmers' markets the definition of 'local' is 100 miles in all directions outside of the London area (which is already a big one).  There was a Slow Food survey of farmers' markets in Europe last year and it found a lot of variation in defining so-called 'local' -- most tried to stretch the distance so that they could sell 'local' fish, even very inland markets.

  I do cheer on arguments for reducing transportation but that's for all the products in our lives.  The 'local' food mantra is, I think, doing harm now, as the message is 'worked over' and made more convenient.  I am shocked that some 3rd world economies, who have been encouraged to specialise in one particular crop for export, are now being told to 'eat it' too because it's 'local'!  Third world prosperity is partly defined, for individuals, by how far they can break out of the conventional diet of their parents and eat  un-local luxuries like veal or beef, if you're Chinese.  Artichokes if you're American.

  My argument is that it's very easy to preach 'local' and very hard for anyone who does not own arable land (like 90% of the world?) and who does not lease an allotment, like Mike does (there's a waiting-list of 20 years for that plot of ground in most of London...) -- to take a comfortable position in this debate.  Making people feel guilty about the provenance of their food is not a way to encourage a better rapport with farmers, or with both foreign plants and meat which 'localism' encourages us to be xenophobic about.  I'd like to think that pressures are put on the American 'Farm Bill' vote that are really about good food and good environments for creating it -- not about its travel itinerary.   On If buying locally isn't the answer, then what is? posted 2 years, 2 months ago 28 Responses

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  Whose 'local' is this?

  I despair -- not about Phillpot who, though I live in London, has become the guru-without-a-face on many food issues.  But when it comes to the 'local' debate, Grist couldn't look more provincial to us.  As a London friend of mine said, "If I 'ate local food' it would be cannibalism or pizza."  The 'real world' now is not about populations surrounded by rolling fields of grain; it is about feeding very hungry cities. And the 'local' debate is, I think, a strangely disguised debate between those city people and their initiatives (I am a food business journalist, so see their side as well as yours), and what seems an unsustainable, bucolic idea that 'good people' live close to 'good food'.  

  Look at the problem of "food imports".  Are we talking about "food" in this phrase, or about "imports"?  It is a Sunday evening as I write & I am not going to consult my files for the tight figure, but the % of food import-content, by ship or plane, into most first-world countries is about 20%.  In Europe less.  

  So, if we are protesting against the idea of "import" and its consequences, let's start with the other 80%, by looking at our clothes -- how many were imported already made, or how much of the fibre came from elsewhere (like wool from the New Zealand lamb)?  When it comes to electronics and baubles from China, how many us rule them out because they have 'travelled'?  I agree that we should try, for sound ecological reasons, to reverse the 'traffic' in products, and American cars are a case in point as their 'parts' do more 'traffic' before they are assembled than they ever do later.  Before I give much credance to the 'localism' of food arguments, I think I want more information about those 'local' farms, their lives on the farm, and the machinery -- how 'local' are all these?  I am saying that I think we are locked into a global trade with food, as with everything else, but the narrow food-focus on the argument will not engage us with the wider and more interesting issues.On If buying locally isn't the answer, then what is? posted 2 years, 2 months ago 28 Responses

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  Roz Cummins' "Slow Food"

  The description of Slow Food in Roz's piece is out of date, as the founder, Carlo Petrini, has moved the 'frame' onto an organisation that is more about protecting traditional cultures (anti-GM, anti-largescale, and a conviction that "the way we used to do things" will save us from global warming etc) and about 'communities' (not convivia) that are socially and politically active, not a group of friends savouring the Rubenesque sandwich that Roz describes (and it is a good sandwich).  The wide and keen Slow Food movement is likely to split in two as Petrini's new environmental and socially-focussed direction is deeply disliked by some; and to some others (including me), his new environmental focus is fine but his solutions are bizarre.  To read more, Petrini's new book is called Slow Food Nation in the States and Slow Food Revolution in other English-language markets.  The spirit of SF that Roz describes sounds a bit quaint in the light of the wider, political push.On On slow food, communal eating, and Reubenesque sandwiches posted 2 years, 5 months ago 3 Responses