Comments Tom Philpott has made

Scientists at the University of Minnesota and the University of Iowa revealed last week they had identified the H1N1 strain in seven pigs at the Minnesota State Fair in late summer as part of a study of virus exchange between swine and people. Some of those animals may have caught the bug from the hordes of visitors at the 12-day event. But not all: One infected animal was swabbed while being unloaded and almost certainly arrived with the virus, said Gregory C. Gray, a physician and epidemiologist at the University of Iowa who helped run the study.

Hey Ariane, The technology thing got under my skin, too. Look at Salatin and Will Allen in the documentary Fresh--what those guys are up to simply wasn't happening in the 1930s. And just imagine if chemical-free farming had a whole multi-billion dollar research budget at land grants behind it. the Luddite argument is tired, wrong--and crudely effective. How do we revive the idea of appropriate technology?

Mmmm, maybe Magic Bean; but I think it was too glib by half for Pollan to say that Friedan "taught" women that cooking was drudgery; more likely, Friedan's idea gained traction because she articulated what lots of people were already thinking. And i think it's important to honor that history and not sugar coat the past.

Thanks, Marcie--spelling errors (my fault, not Lou's) fixed.

McDonald's sold its stake in Chipotle a couple of years ago. The two are no longer connected. And yes, McDonald's has signed the CIW penny-per-pound pledge.

Yes, JP, as Denverfairfood says, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that the CIW is some sort of supplier or wholesaler. It's not--it's a coalition of farm workers who have little to sell but their labor. And (as cllearly stated in the story), Chipotle freely acknowledges it buys tomatoes from Florida; and is holding an extra penny per pound in escrow. The issue, as clearly stated above, is accountability.

My analysis is strictly of the ag part. i'm extremely uncomfortable witht the coal concessions, but I'm told that no bill is possible without them, just as no bill is possible without goodies for Big Ag. It's profoundly depressing--but I haven't heard a better strategy for getting a climate framework in place.

Believe me, I'd be all about some Strauss, but I've never seen it outside of Cali and did not find it here in NC for this tasting.

Eileen, the issue here is no-till as carbon-sequestration strategy. Farmers can be and are compenated for those other benefits through other programs. And organic saves more fossil fuel than not-till, as the above-linked Rodale study shows.

Kiara,

Sorry not to respond sooner. Industrial-scale ethanol makers use antibiotics to control the fermentation process. Weird, huh?

Hey Sean,

Are you saying that wet-distilled doesn't have the residue problem, but dry-distilled does? That makes sense to me. Interestingly, if wet-distilled works better has human feed, it's a lot trickier as animal feed -- it goes bad faster, and has to be used soon after the process

The folks above are talking abput dry distillers grains, presumably because shelf-life issues.

Calmate, Bud. According to La Jornada (also linked in the post), the Mexican healthcare agency IMSS has said that Vera Cruz CAFOs might be the source of the pandemic. Here is La Jornada:

Indicó que según los facultativos estatales y del Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS), el vector epidémico serían las nubes de moscas que despiden las granjas porcícolas y las lagunas de oxidación donde la empresa mexicana-estadunidense arroja toneladas de estiércol.

Rough translation: "According to physicians from the state of Vera Cruz and the Mexican health agency IMSS, the epidemic's vector could be the clouds of flies created by hog CAFOs and the manure lagoons where the U.S.-Mexican company (Smithfield's Granjas Carroll subsidiary) through tons of manure."

Don't you think it's news that the Mexican healthcare ministry is looking at U.S.-owned CAFOs as the source of a global flu pandemic? Yes, there were flu pandemics before CAFOs, just as there were wars before the advent of  fighter planes and bombs. Things have changed a bit since, haven't they?

Thanks for that important bit of context, spaceshaper. It's pretty undeniable, given meaningful access (as Tim emphasizes), that fihieries managed by small players are better kept than ones managed by giants. For an example of what happens when big players ruin a fishery, see Somalia, where big European fleets sucked al the fish out of coastal waters, destroying fishing communities and leading to social collapse and the rise of piracy.

Thanks, Sean

Great background info. I had not been aware of that particular "other shoe" -- seems like we're facing a stampede of them these days.

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Unfortunately, VCF ...

... Sir Bob will be pumping biofuels. From Biofuels Digest: http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/blog2/tag/africa/

Sir Bob Geldof to keynote World Biofuels Markets; will describe African development vision

In Belgium, World Biofuels Markets announced that Sir Bob Geldof will be keynote speaker at the 2009 World Biofuels Markets, laying out a vision for African economic development and freedom including a vision for the global biofuels community.

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Toxic mortgages, nationalized banks

Good points, Jon and Whiskerfish.

When you read stuff like George Packer's recent piece in the New Yorker, "Ponzi State," about the massively overbuilt real estate market in Florida, you start to see what Wolf is getting at: our banks (and our banks' overseas partners) are holding trillions of dollars of assets that will be repaid at pennies on the dollar. You've essentially got too much supply and -- with job losses mounting -- not enough demand.

I agree with Jon that nationalization looks like the only way to go. Obama and his team should have expressed shock at the sheer scale of the problem and just done it. But then again, Obama tapped one of the architects of the old failed bailout, Geithner, as his Treasury chief. It would have been awkward for Geithner to express shock. But it really does look like the Geithner plan is doomed to failure. Wolf's conclusion is worth noting:

Why then is the administration making what appears to be a blunder? It may be that it is hoping for the best. But it also seems it has set itself the wrong question. It has not asked what needs to be done to be sure of a solution. It has asked itself, instead, what is the best it can do given three arbitrary, self-imposed constraints: no nationalisation; no losses for bondholders; and no more money from Congress. Yet why does a new administration, confronting a huge crisis, not try to change the terms of debate? This timidity is depressing. Trying to make up for this mistake by imposing pettifogging conditions on assisted institutions is more likely to compound the error than to reduce it.

Assume that the problem is insolvency and the modest market value of US commercial banks (about $400bn) derives from government support (see charts). Assume, too, that it is impossible to raise large amounts of private capital today. Then there has to be recapitalisation in one of the two ways indicated above . Both have disadvantages: government recapitalisation is a bail-out of creditors and involves temporary state administration; debt-for-equity swaps would damage bond markets, insurance companies and pension funds. But the choice is inescapable.

If Mr Geithner or Lawrence Summers, head of the national economic council, were advising the US as a foreign country, they would point this out, brutally. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, IMF managing director, said the same thing, very gently, in Malaysia last Saturday.

The correct advice remains the one the US gave the Japanese and others during the 1990s: admit reality, restructure banks and, above all, slay zombie institutions at once. It is an important, but secondary, question whether the right answer is to create new "good banks", leaving old bad banks to perish, as my colleague, Willem Buiter, recommends, or new "bad banks", leaving cleansed old banks to survive. I also am inclined to the former, because the culture of the old banks seems so toxic.

By asking the wrong question, Mr Obama is taking a huge gamble. He should have resolved to cleanse these Augean banking stables. He needs to rethink, if it is not already too late.

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Instead of killing more people ...

.. what say we repair our broken food-safety system -- and rebuild local and regional food networks so that one bad company in Georgia can't endanger folks nationwide?

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Hassebrook and the ag committee

I'm not sure that Hassebrook would have trouble at the Senate ag committee, Tom. Seems to me that his views aren't as controversial or radical as portrayed. Payments limits? Vilsack supports them, and he skated through the committee. The Obama rural document entrenches payment limits as a policy goal. And many Midwestern senators -- with the notable exception of Kent Conrad -- have supported them (again, think Obama). True, southern cotton heads like Saxby Chambliss would freak out; but there's no reason to assume they'd carry the day.

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Bravo, Peter!

I look forward to your posts. You sound suspiciously like a post-austistic economist -- and thus one after my own heart.

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it's coming!

Who's going to come up with cash to convert existing conventional facilities and build out new ones? Who's going to figure out how efficiently to haul tons and tons of bulky material (corn is much denser than cellulosic material) from field to processing plant? I guess the Berkeley Lab and other well-funded institutions will sort out how to economically turn cellulose into liquid fuel -- but here, too, they're five to 10 years away (as they have been for decades now).

What if, instead of this incredibly baroque and expensive process, we merely reinvested in train infrastructure -- and challenged (and paid) our finest scientific minds to come up with more efficient rail systems?

Bart, that was actually me who edited that biofuel series in 2006: http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2006/12/04/biofuels/ Two years on, I'm still pretty proud of how it came out (although stunned at its sheer volume).  

GMbiofuels guy, I'm sympathetic to what your saying, but the government has been for 20 years defunding mass transit projects, ignoring CAFE standards, and pumping cash into ethanol: which is why it seems more rational to drive a flex-fuel, corn-gulping SUV to work than take the (non-existent) train.

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Delmarva chicken industry

Mickie C,
If human population has grown rapidly in the Chesapeake area, chicken population has grown even faster.

In the so-called Delmarva Peninsula -- a chunk of land occupied by Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia whose waters flow into the Chesapeake -- production of broilers jumped from 260 million birds in 1965 to 602 million in 1998, the WaPo reports. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/aug99/po ...

Looks like production has dropped a little since then -- too 566 million birds, by one estimate. Still, that means well more than 10 percent of the chickens grown on U.S. soil come from one little Peninsula off the Chesapeake.

So, I think it's fair to say that poultry poses a threat to water quality in the Chesapeake. No?

For the record, it looks like four large companies process the birds grown on Delmarva:
Allen Family Foods, Inc.
Mountaire Farms Inc.  
Perdue Farms Inc.    
Tyson Foods, Inc.
Source: http://74.125.45.132/search?q=cache:DJTeh3cBdWMJ:www.dpic ...

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Justlou

The factors you cite explain why California would have a large tomato-processing industry -- say, 20 percent of the total, as it did in the '40s. but 95 percent? think of all the canneries around the country that have folded in the past 60 years, and all the little boxes that have been plunked down on prime farmland.

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Hard to say

The drop in oil prices does seem puzzling. no doubt falling demand puts downward pressure on prices -- but has demand really fallen steeply enough to drive prices from $140 to $50 in a few months?

Part of it could be that the financial panic swept speculative cash out of commodities -- both because some investors needed to raise cash to cover margin calls and the like, and also because people lost appetite for risk and diverted funds into Treasuries and the like.

Also, Opec discipline is hard to enforce when prices fall -- the individual countries are tempted to open taps to make up on volume what they're losing on price. The collective has an interest in cutting production, but the individual countries don't, at least in the short term. (Commodity farmers operate under similar conditions, but don't have a cartel to help organize production decisions.) But this scenario assumes Opec nations lack spare capacity, which the hardcore peak oil folks deny.

Then there is the possibility that the Saudis realize that oil at $100+ works against their long-term interest, and have, as Adam's friend suggests, merely flooded the market. I  posted on that theme back in mid-September: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/9/11/20630/3547

Whether they still have the spare capacity to to accomplish that is, I guess, the key question. At any rate, a 60+ percent drop in prices over a few months seems too extreme to blame on a demand drop.

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Great questions, Steph

The OCA stuff is scuttlebut I heard; I've also heard (this bit from Ferd Hoefner) that commodity groups opposed Vilsack. It doesn't seem to matter much that the Obama team never contacted Vilsack; they floated his name widely, and evidently decided they didn't like the way it went over.

True, the USDA chief doesn't write the farm bill; s/he interprets and executes it. (The USDA does come up with draft before debate starts; Congress is free to ignore it.) Colin Peterson recently said he doesn't want the job, on the grounds that his current post (chair of the house ag committee, which exerts huge influence over the farm bill) is more powerful. He's surely right about that.
I think people are viewing the pick as a proxy for whether or not Obama plans to deliver real change. But the real action might be in his economic picks. More on that soon.

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Joking ... right?

I don't want to play the irony-challenged dolt; I assume Wolverine is joking here. But I'll add something anyway.

If GMOs lower birth rates, they probably don't achieve that effect in isolation. The human reproductive system links all manner of systems within our bodies; if GMOs harm the reproductive system, they're quite likely causing serious, undetected harm to the people who eat them. Moreover, since GMO plants -- currently covering tens of millions of acres in the midwest -- interact with ecoystems in numerous ways, the birth-rate evidence also presents a strong possibility that GMOs are harming ecosystems in as-yet detected ways. One can't help but think of bee-colony collapse.

So the birth-rate study should be seen as a proxy for how GMOs are affecting ecosytems -- in this case, the human one -- and not (and I don't think anyone here sees it that way) a clever way to reduce human population.

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Just a reminder

Hi everyone,
Checkout Line is an advice column. A reader wrote in asking advice on a perfectly reasonable topic; and Lou responded in a perfectly reasonable way. Suddenly, a whole debate about veganism (or something) broke out -- very tedious for all, save perhaps for the participants (but aren't even they getting tired of the same ol' screeds?).

Rather than going after Lou for not addressing questions that weren't raised by the advice-seeker (Tired of Odious Meat made pretty clear s/he would be cooking a turkey, and wanted info on the various options), why not send in a question related to the topic you're interested in?
You might ask, for example, which is the greener option, occasionally eating meat from nearby pasture-based farmers, or seeking out highly processed meat-like soybean products that come from ... well, where do they come from?
Or something. Lou can only respond to the questions that get asked.

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PS

It's wrong to characterize the manifesto as somehow anti-science or anti-technology. Shiva herself holds a Phd in physics. Rather, it attacks a top-down, corporate led science/technology agenda, and instead champions open-source, public driven science and appropriate technology. Please let me publish the manifesto in its entirety -- or look it up in the above link -- before we get too far arguing its details.

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Good one, RD

Didn't Branson run one of his jets on cellulosic once?

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Ever heard of conservation and efficiency, Jonas?

What about mass transit?
As for RD Miller -- who so tirelessly champions all things ethanol that I sometimes wonder if he isn;t quaffing the stuff -- I checked out his CE Web page.

There's lots of stuff like this:

Cellulosic ethanol start-up Mascoma Corp. won $50 million in federal and state funding Tuesday for a new Michigan biofuel plant, after ending plans to build in Tennessee.

Mascoma Corp. said it had permission to shift $26 million in U.S. Department of Energy funding that had been announced for a plant in Tennessee to a plant to be built in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Michigan matched that award with a $23.5 million grant. The grants will speed the building and production of the factory, Mascoma said.

"This is the next generation of ethanol, using wood wastes from our sustainable forests," Gov. Jennifer Granholm said Tuesday. "It's really a home run for Michigan."

Mascoma's factory will make wood-cellulose ethanol, a renewable alternative to corn-based ethanol. The plant is to be built on state land near Kinross, south of Sault Ste. Marie in the eastern Upper Peninsula. The facility is expected to cost $250 million and eventually produce up to 40 million gallons of biofuel annually.

I'll let Backcut and that crew hash out whether "sustainable forestry" is going to supply significant fuel for our cars. I will note that the above-mentioned AP article claims that to satisfy mandates, we'll need "200-plus large-scale facilities are needed to meet the Environmental Protection Agency's standards -- each capable of producing about 100 million gallons a year."

This particular taxpayer-funded facility, if it ever works out, will crank out just 40 million gallons.

And where, RD, do you propose to place the "energy plantations" to which you refer?

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Welcome to Gristmill, Corn Refiners Assocition!

Look for more content on HFCS next week.

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Jon: yeah, but....

...is this capital-injection stuff in addition to the bailout? I've lost the ability to dig into the solution of the day coming out of the Goldman Sachs Department, I mean, Treasury Department.

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Another day, another $38 bill

Remember AIG?

From today's Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122348485787515823.html?m ...

The federal government said Wednesday it would lend American International Group Inc. as much as another $37.8 billion, a sign that its initial $85 billion effort to shore up the company is coming up short.

The move, which comes less than a month after the Federal Reserve agreed to bail out the giant insurer, raises questions about whether the government will need to keep injecting money into the troubled company. So far, the Fed has agreed to make nearly $123 billion available to AIG.

The government's original plan was that the initial loan would allow AIG to meet its obligations as they came due, buying it time to sell assets. The proceeds of those sales would be used to pay back the loan. As of Oct. 1, AIG had drawn down $61 billion. The Federal Reserve is expected to indicate Thursday the latest borrowing figure. AIG hasn't yet announced any significant asset sales.

The government's deepening involvement underscores its view that a failure of AIG could have devastating consequences for the global financial system. The government has a major interest in the fate of the company, because it took an 80% ownership stake in exchange for extending the original loan. Now, it is effectively loaning money to itself to keep its own insurance company afloat.

"How could this company have gotten itself into a position where it is reliant on the government for almost $125 billion of liquidity funding?" asks David Havens, a credit analyst at UBS. "Eighty-five billion was breath-taking."

By the way, liquidity funding is like taking out loans to pay your bills. Taking out a loan to buy a car that's going to get you to work is one thing; going into debt to pay the electricity bill is a pretty dire situation. Then an AIG flack says something even more breathtaking:

An AIG spokesman said that "it's just an extraordinary situation in the markets." He added that the new plan "is part of our effort to arrive at an overall solution." He said it is designed to help the company avoid needing to borrow the full $85 billion, and that it was not a sign that the initial plan was faltering.

So .... you're borrowing this $37 billion so you don't have to draw down the rest of that $85 billion? I'm afraid Sean and Adam are going to have to step up and explain the wisdom of all of this to us dunderheads.

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Open-pollinated, heirloom, and hybrid

Laura gets it right, Sindark.

From the Brooklyn Botanical Garden website:

On F1 hybrids (like Sweet 100s and Sungolds):

The term "F1 hybrid" means the first filial generation made by crossing two different parent varieties, the offspring of which produce a new, uniform seed variety with specific characteristics from both parents. For example, breeders may choose to cross two tomato varieties to make an F1 hybrid that exhibits the early maturity of one parent and a specific disease resistance of the other. The unique characteristics of an F1 hybrid are very uniform only in the first generation of seed, so seed saved from F1 plants will not come true if replanted and may exhibit many distinct types in the second generation, often reverting to various ancestral forms.

On open-pollinated seeds (like green zebras):

Open-pollinated seeds are a result of either natural or human selection for specific traits which are then reselected in every crop. The seed is kept true to type through selection and isolation; the flowers of open-pollinated or O.P. seed varieties are pollinated by bees or wind. Their traits are relatively fixed within a range of variability. For example, if I grew the 'Brandywine' variety of open-pollinated tomato in dry northern California summers year after year and saved seeds only from the best-tasting, earliest- ripening fruits in my climate zone, I would have a locally adapted strain of 'Brandywine', different from the 'Brandywine' grown by a gardener in humid, rainy Alabama who has been saving seeds from fruits that produce very well in his or her climate, rather than my California conditions.

Finally, on heirlooms, a subset of open-pollinated varieties:

All heirloom varieties are open-pollinated, but not all open-pollinated varieties can be considered heirlooms. Unfortunately, the definition of "heirloom" has been somewhat of a moving target recently, but generally it means a variety that is at least 40 to 50 years old, that is no longer available in the commercial seed trade, and that has been preserved and kept true in a particular region. So, for example, if a variety of open-pollinated pepper has been grown in Vermont or Maine for five or six generations and seed has been selected and saved by local growers and gardeners, it would be considered an heirloom variety. Obviously, heirloom varieties have been saved because they have some real virtues. The classic examples are heirloom tomatoes, which often have superior flavor, color, or texture, but lack the holding ability, disease resistance, early maturity, or other characteristics that would make them commercially viable.

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Looks like McCain...

...got in over his head.

From today's Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/26/us/politics/26campaign

Senator John McCain had intended to ride back into Washington on Thursday as a leader who had put aside presidential politics to help broker a solution to the financial crisis. Instead he found himself in the midst of a remarkable partisan showdown, lacking a clear public message for how to bring it to an end.
At the bipartisan White House meeting that Mr. McCain had called for a day earlier, he sat silently for more than 40 minutes, more observer than leader, and then offered only a vague sense of where he stood, said people in the meeting.

And this vague performance is supposed to be an excuse to skip the debate? Seems like he's bungling into a PR disaster.

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Go, James K

Very provocative article. He goes over so much territory in so few words that it's hard to wrap my head around how his plans would work. But his point seems to make sense: Wall Street has self-immolated and essentially no longer exists -- why bail it out? Might there be other, less ham-fisted ways to get credit moving again besides a $700b check to Henry Paulson, former CEO of former Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs?

Yes, by all means, the government could recapitalize ailing banks by injecting capital in exchange for preferred shares, like Warren Buffet did for Goldman. Why not?

This bit is priceless:

The second great crisis is in state and local government. Just Tuesday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced $1.5 billion in public spending cuts. The scenario is playing out everywhere: Schools, fire departments, police stations, parks, libraries and water projects are getting the ax, while essential maintenance gets deferred and important capital projects don't get built. This is pernicious when unemployment is rising and when we have all the real resources we need to preserve services and expand public investment. It's also unnecessary.

What to do? Reenact Richard Nixon's great idea: federal revenue sharing. States and localities should get the funds to plug their revenue gaps and maintain real public spending, per capita, for the next three to five years. Also, enact the National Infrastructure Bank, making bond revenue available in a revolving fund for capital improvements. There is work to do. There are people to do it. Bring them together. What could be easier or more sensible?

Note that Galbraith is one of my beloved post-autistic economists.

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'Nobody clearly understands how we got in...

...situation."

What? No!!!! Seriously, listen to Alex Blunberg's recent This American Life Report called "Giant Pool of Money."http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1242

Long story short: Wall Street convinced itself that housing prices always go up, no matter what. (Just like tech stocks go up, until they stopped in 2000.) Based on this comically faulty logic -- which I doubt few top execs believed, unless they're literal imbeciles -- they rigged up a novel "product" called "mortgage-backed securities," essentially vast clumps of mortgages. Selling these "safe," triple-A rated, solid-yielding securities was so profitable that they wanted more, more, more. So they completely gutted the requirements for loaning money for mortgages -- and then proceeded to bundle these dodgy mortgages into more "safe," triple-A rated, solid-yielding securities. Didn't they worry that folks making 40k a year and buying 400k houses would default? Sure, but they crossed their fingers that today's 400k house would fetch 500k next week. Rather than holding a loan in the case of default, the mortgage-backed security would now hold a  house that could be sold at a tidy profit. But they knew what they were doing carried enormous risks. And then the housing market did what it wasn't supposed to do, ever: it contracted. And the economy soured. And when people started to default on those 400k mortgages, guess what? They were only fetching 300k on the market. So the whole absurd house of cards began to crumble. And all the crappy debt these banks had sold to each other (at enormous fees) began to dive in value -- and the banks scrambled to flip it yet again. But this time, everyone was suddenly too smart to buy -- until Paulson stepped in and offered to buy all that worthless junk with your money. So we get the crappy debt, without the fat fees. Get it now? By all means, let's scratch our heads about what will happen; we're not seers. But we're not dolts, either. Let's not let ourselves be confused, dazzled, and flummoxed about what just happened. We got mugged.

Yes, the world runs on credit, and credit was threatening to seize up, risking a global depression. Something had to be done. But let's make sure this vast bailout results in real oversight over financial markets.

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Criminal negligence

As the bailout proceeds apace, I hope folks will remember the criminal negligence that got us into this FUBAR in the first place. Wall Street's self-immolation was no mere "inability to assess risk"; it was the result of people busily and knowingly profiting while quietly shuffling what everyone knew were bad assets onto the next guy's balance sheet. Everyone should listen, and listen again, to the great recent This American Life show called "The Giant Pool of Money." http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1242

Meanwhile, it's a bitter irony that the same guys who booked billions in real cash profits on the way up are now, evidently, going to get the contracts to manage the bailout's trillion-plus in "toxic" assets. Are you kidding me? These guys don't stop. This is like sending my cats in to clean up a cat-food spill -- that they caused by ripping open the bag.

Also, it it impolite to note that Paulson finally stepped in with his comprehensive plan just as short sellers were zooming in for the kill against Goldman Sachs?

I can't see the case for a comprehensive public bailout of this industry without a legal reckoning for the folks who caused it.  

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Maybe, Sean...

Your write: "the value could well exceed the share price on liquidation." I thought of that, too. Surely AIG has valuable assets. But if that were a likely scenario, then why didn't a private sector entity step in a take it over?

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But Sean ...

isn't that LIBOR + 8.5% bit essentially a death sentence? If the credit markets stage a dramatic turnaround, the taxpayers get their money back. Hmmm.

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Thanks, guys...

One more question: Did Lehman bail on its carbon desk because it's relatively such a low-income-generating activity for them?

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Oh dear

Why don't you guys go play somewhere else? I feel like these predictable back-and-forths between the same four people crowd out interesting commentary.

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Humbug

A lot of rhetorical energy has been spent establishing that Phoenix is overbuilt and lies in the desert. All very earth-shaking information, but doesn't that mean that students there should have access to solid environmental news and info?

I say this, at risk of sparking another spasm of righteous rants.

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Great comments

Archigeek, I two, was a UFW baby. I remember at a certain point in my childhood, grapes disappeared. It wasn't until college that I had them again. The CIW is working in that proud tradition.

To Michael Dimock, I'm very sympathetic with the logistics around organizing such a massive event. Holding it in a city -- much of it (like the Changemakers stuff) on public property -- made for a very rich experience, way more appealing than some vast faceless corporate hotel. But the location(s) also generated serious logistical knots. I still think a conversation such as the one moderated by Hank Herrera and including Ahmadi and Viertel at Changemakers should have been held front and center under the Slow Food banner.

Julia Day, agreed about the producers. I thought the food quality at the Taste Pavilion was breathtaking overall, and particularly the charcuterie and pickle installations highlighted truly small-scale artisans. Shining a light on that stuff is Slow Food at its best.

To Barry, I can only say that as long-time "foodie" and convert to "slow food" principles, I agree with your assessment: In many ways, SFN was a stunning success. But the question must be asked: How is this playing outside of these rarefied circles? And the feedback that results must be taken seriously and honored if "good, clean, and fair" food is going to break out of its gourmet ghetto. Slow Food itself is quite wonderful and important in many ways, but in itself it's not a movement. It can, however, play a constructive role in a broad-based movement to challenge a destructive food system.

Finally, to Thomas H., re: Viertel. I watched the video you link to. From the context, it looks like Viertel is talking to college food activists from across the country about how to broaden interest in school gardens. I think he's right that pretty, well-kept gardens attract people. I saw that play out in community gardens in some of Brooklyn's roughest neighborhoods. On Slow Food Nation was magnificent in many ways, but overshot its mandate posted 1 year, 2 months ago 17 Responses

Organic farm labor

Thanks, Matthew. Great question. From a labor-organizing standpoint, I think the reason organic farms haven't gotten much attention from activists is that organic production remains so tiny compared to conventional. Of the 1.2 million farm workers in the U.S., only a small portion work on organic farms. And given the extreme conditions faced by a large number of workers in Florida's tomato fields, it makes sense for people like Schlosser to concentrate their attention there. If workers in conventional ag can attain improved conditions and a living wage, that will pave the way for similar improvements in organic ag.

But Schlosser's point is clear: labor issues have to become central to the sustainable food movement. If we forget labor, we risk supporting "sustainable" farms that eke out profits by sticking it to their workers.

All of that said, conditions in organic ag remain troubling. I can point you to this 2005 survey by U of California researchers of California organic growers and their attitudes toward labor: http://www.sarep.ucdavis.edu/newsltr/v17n1/sa-1.htm

Short summary: Like their conventional counterparts, organic growers face severe economic pressure and thus resist paying decent wages. It's a pretty depressing account of the state of organic ag in California:

Our findings question expectations that organic agriculture systems necessarily foster social, or even economic sustainability for most farmers and farmworkers involved. Indeed, many farmers themselves forgo the kinds of employment benefits available to workers in most other sectors.

And to see an exception that proves the rule that things are rough on organic farms, check out the example of Swanton Berry Farm in California. Swanton owner Jim Cochran not only sought out the UFW to sign a collective bargaining agreement with his workers -- make him his the first and as far as I know still the only unionized organic farm in Cali -- but he also instituted what maybe the first-ever employee stock-ownership plan involving farmworkers. See: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/ar ...

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What I was getting at

Great discussion. Thanks, everyone.

Just to clarify, what I was getting at is the following. If Federoff is right that GMOs are really no different than traditional plant breeding, then why the incredibly stringent intellectual property regime? I can go to the farmers market, buy tomatoes, and save the seeds, and plant them, and no one has any claim on me. Why should it be any different with Monsanto's crappy Bt or RR corn?

but if what Monsanto and its few peers is doing is so earth-shaking and new and important that it can't happen without this whole new intellectual property regime, then it should probably be rigorously tested and highly regulated, which of course it isn't. The GMO industry insists on having it both ways. Guess you've got that luxury, when you've got the power and cash to stock the gov't with your cronies.

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Green Mom,

To be fair, financial markets were pretty nuts before the Bushies showed up. Rubin's time as Clinton's Treasury chief was sandwiched between major stints at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup (where last I heard, he's still clinging to a job, even after helping steer the great ship Citigroup right into the subprime iceberg, destroying billions of dollars of shareholder wealth in the process.) Clinton oversaw one one the greatest financial bubbles in history -- really part of the the same force that eventually pumped up real estate and subprime paper. And he oversaw the effective dismantling of Glass-Stengall, the depression-era act that forbade many of the conflicts of interest that became central to the investment-banking project over the last 20 years. By all means, let's deplore the looter mentality embraced by the Bushies. But nostalgia shouldn't cloud our view of what happened under Clinton -- or the role that is puzzlingly canonized treasury secretary played in i.  

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Good quesion, Mr. Mean

I'm trying to figure out why Organic Consumers Association published this link on their news feed on Aug. 19 (Tuesday): http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_14189.cf ...
More info as I get it.

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Oooh, snap!

Dear Bud,
I'm glad we agree on the substance of the post: that the EPA's refusal to release info on clothianidin is inexcusable. And thanks for taking the critique one step further: yes, it's scandalous that the EPA is relying on Bayer to test its own product.

So why the bee in your bonnet?

You suggest that clothianidin is back on the market in Germany. Really? Here's the last word I can find on it, from Germany's Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety, release dated July 15, 2008 (go here: http://www.bvl.bund.de/cln_027/nn_496790/EN/08__PresseInf ...)

In late April and early May 2008 a bee mortality occurred in parts of South-West Germany, which, according to the latest data, affected approximately 11,000 colonies of bees, some of them substantially. Immediately after this became known, an intensive search for the causes of these incidences was started. For this purpose the Ministerium für Ernährung und Ländlichen Raum (Ministry for Food and Rural Areas) of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg and the local authorities collaborated with the bee-keepers, the laboratory for the investigation of bee incidents at the Julius Kühn Institute, the BVL and the plant protection products industry. Soon, maize seeds which had been treated with the insecticidal substance clothianidin were suspected as a possible cause. In the meantime, a clothianidin poisoning has been confirmed by the Julius Kühn Institute. ....Presumably in autumn 2008, the BVL will decide whether the authorisations for the maize treatment products will re-enter into force under certain conditions and with certain restrictions, e. g. a limitation of the application rate, or if they will have to be revoked altogether.

In other words, clothianidin is still banned in Germany -- and its license remains under threat of being "revoked altogether." As I write above, German authorities evidently "reckon that giving clothianidin a rest would provide researchers time to look deeper into it without further endangering bees."

Unlike the EPA or FDA, Germany's Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety seems to have heard of the precautionary principle.

You do make one substantial claim:

Bayer has given the metabolites to the CCD research team to assist them in their research. Regardless of what Tom or the NRDC press release says a recent long term study of pesticides found in CCD honey combs found ZERO residues from the raw chem or the metabolites. ZERO!

OKAY!!!!!! But if you want to be taken seriously, you might consider revealing sources. Which "CCD research team"? Which "recent long term study"?

Rather than spiking your comments with personal invective -- which taxes your own credibility more than mine -- I suggest you spend a bit more energy backing up your arguments.

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Carl

Blume seems like a well-intentioned fellow, but I don't really get where he's coming from. Citing Bume, you write that "90% of the corn we grow goes to feed animals." Well, no it doesn't; as I write above, one-third of this year's corn crop will go to ethanol production, a portion that will rise steadily over the next several years.

Then there's this bit about distillers grains, the stuff that's left over after the ethanol process: "the production of ethanol from corn (feed corn is used)  only removes the carbs (which cattle don't digest very well), and all the protein and fat in what is left over leaves you with a better feed."

This may well be true with regard to the kind of small-scale, organic, artisanal alcohol production that Blume seems to champion. But it's certainly not true of ethanol production as it is. A while back, I posted -- http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/3/25/223211/808 -- about all the dodgy industrial chemicals that end up in distillers grains from the highly industrial ethanol process.
The Canadian government actually banned use of industrial distillers grains as feed based on the precautionary principle (an alien concept to U.S. regulators for at least a generation now). I urge ethanol enthusiasts to read that post in its entirety; here's an excerpt, summarizing the Canadian government's concerns:

"Antimicrobial drugs" are "currently used in the fuel ethanol fermentation process in Canada." Weird. I suppose they're used to control the fermentation process. Of the drugs, virginiamycin, streptomycin, ampicillin, and penicillin show up in distillers grains at levels too low to cause trouble, the agency says. But two others, monensin sodium and tylosin tartrate, were "assessed, and not found to be acceptable without further information or restrictions."

Evidently, to get the fermentation process rolling, ethanol producers in Canada -- and, presumably, down here as well -- are using microorganisms and enzymes with "novel traits ... e.g., ethanol-tolerant yeasts, heat- or pH-stable enzymes." Hmm.

Then there are the processing aids, "including anti-foam and boiler chemicals to generate steam," that are used to make ethanol, and which inevitably end up in the distillers grains. The agency has a list of processing aids that can end up in feed without causing harm, but ethanol makers use several that don't make the cut, including chlorine dioxide, EDTA, sodium borohydride, and sodium metabisulfite.

Next come mycotoxins -- toxic forms of fungus that can thrive in corn stocks and concentrate in distillers grains. "Mycotoxins in DG can impair growth and reproductive efficiency in livestock that consume them," the agency writes.

Finally -- whew! -- the agency has found "elevated levels of sulphur and sodium" in distillers grains, which could "cause adverse health effects in livestock if the amounts fed are not managed properly." (Excess sulphur causes neurological damage in cows.)

Then, of course, there's the whole unhappy fact that distillers grains seem to boost the already out-of-control presence of E. coli 0157 in beef cows: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2007/12/4/11018/1134/?so ...

On Blume's Web site, he purports to "bust the ethanol myths." http://www.alcoholcanbeagas.com/node/490 In the process, he repeat some real whoppers -- unwittingly, I assume. For example: "While it is assumed that these exports could feed most of the hungry in the world, the corn is actually sold to wealthy nations to fatten their livestock. Plus, virtually no impoverished nation will accept our corn, even when it is offered as charity, due to its being genetically modified and therefore unfit for human consumption."

That would be a substantial point, if the corn crop existed in a vacuum. But the planting decisions spurred by the corn-ethanol boom ripple well beyond corn. A recent study by a World Bank economist -- discussed in this post http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/7/31/95925/2107 -- makes those links with regard to food prices. And a recent U of Minn study led by Tim Searchinger -- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/08/science/earth/08wbiofue ... -- makes them with regard to environmental devastation.  

In general, Blume's embrace of industrial ethanol perplexes me. He writes that the "real ecological nightmare is industrial agriculture." Does he not know that the ethanol boom has sparked an extension and intensification of industrial agriculture? In 2007, in response to corn prices pushed up by the ethanol mandate/subsidies, farmers planted 13 percent more corn than the year before. And to squeeze as much yield as possible out of it, they drenched it with more fertilizers and agrichemicals than ever. I'm sick of hunting down links; if you're interested, search around for what ethanol mania has meant for the Conservation Reserve Program, which tries to keep environmentally sensitive land from going under the plow.

At any rate, Blume seems like one of the last ethanol boosters standing who's not on the industry dole. I'll invite him to air his views on Gristmill.

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Responses

Hi Jonas,
Creative defense: biofuels don't cause high food prices -- and high food prices are good for the poor anyway. But if you want to be taken seriously, then please point out flaws in Mitchell's logic and tease out why the report you cite makes more sense. One represents "science" and the other doesn't? That tells me nothing.

And Tdmeeh said this:

Other studies have shown that corn ethanol and soy diesel production have marginal net energy ratios and unfavorable carbon balance characteristics if they lead to further land conversion.  So the days are numbered for these technologies, and most folks accept this.

Are you aware of the Renewable Fuel Standard? See: http://www.ethanolrfa.org/resource/standard/

Under the RFA, conventional corn and soy-based biofuel are mandated to rise from 9 billion gallons this year to 15 billion gallons in 2015, and then hold steady at 15 billion gallons until 2022. All at $0.51 per gallon from the public purse. We're supposed to shut up about this, given the vast social and ecological damage being done?

Meanwhile, I'd be happy to look into "Second-generation" technologies. But last I heard, they were 5-10 years away.

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Thanks, Rbright

Fixed the E10 typo.

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Wolverine,

A lot of small, non-certified farms have open days where folks can go visit; that way you can see with your own eyes how they manage their fields. Meanwhile, a lot of large-scale certified-organic farms use all manner of off-farm inputs -- including stuff you'd probably prefer they didn't use. Good luck getting a close look at these operations. By rejecting non-certified farms, you're writing off literally thousands of fantastic,  ecologically robust operations -- including above-mentioned Rancho Gordo. And you're cutting off the possibility for conversation with interesting folks like Steve Sando.

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Jonas

I don't understand exactly what your agenda is, but your comments are misleading. If you are a troll, I regret spending time and space engaging you.

The US accounts for 44 percent of global corn production and 65 percent  of global corn exports (see: http://www.grains.org/page.ww?section=Barley%2C+Corn+%26+ ...).

So, a shortfall in our corn crop will ripple through global grain prices -- not just for corn, but also other crops like wheat. And food-importing nations -- ie, nations that have dismantled their ag sectors -- will be hardest hit. According to FAO back in April (see: http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2008/1000826/index.ht ...

The cereal import bill of the world's poorest countries is forecast to rise by 56 percent in 2007/2008. This comes after a significant increase of 37 percent in 2006/2007, FAO said today.

For low-income food-deficit countries in Africa, the cereal bill is projected to increase by 74 percent, according to the UN agency's latest Crop Prospects and Food Situation report. The increase is due to the sharp rise in international cereal prices, freight rates and oil prices.

And then this:

Should the expected growth in 2008 production materialize, the current tight global cereal supply situation could ease in the new 2008/09 season," the report said.

But much will depend on the weather, FAO cautioned, recalling that at this time last year prospects for cereal production in 2007 were far better than the eventual outcome. Unfavourable climatic conditions devastated crops in Australia and reduced harvests in many other countries, particularly in Europe.

Well, now we know that weather has let us down: floods in the US midwest, and drought in Australia.

As for the bit about the urban poor -- been to a city in the global south recently? -- I direct you to the UN's landmark study on cities that emerged in 2003. I can't find it free online, but here's how the Guardian summarized it ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/oct/04/population.jo ...):

One in every three people in the world will live in slums within 30 years unless governments control unprecedented urban growth, according to a UN report. The largest study ever made of global urban conditions has found that 940 million people - almost one-sixth of the world's population - already live in squalid, unhealthy areas, mostly without water, sanitation, public services or legal security.

The report, from the UN human settlements programme, UN-habitat, based in Nairobi, found that urban slums were growing faster than expected, and that the balance of global poverty was shifting rapidly from the countryside to cities.

Africa now has 20% of the world's slum dwellers and Latin America 14%, but the worst urban conditions are in Asia, where more than 550 million people live in what the UN calls unacceptable conditions.

The world's 30 richest countries are home to just 2% of slum dwellers; in contrast, 80% of the urban population of the world's 30 least developed countries live in slums. Although the report emphasised that not all slum dwellers are poor, the UN warned that unplanned, unsanitary settlements threaten political stability and are creating the climate for an explosion of social problems.

Evils

"There is a vacuum developing, because local authorities have no access to the many slums," said Anna Tibaijuka, the director of UN-habitat.

"Extreme inequality and idleness lead people to anti-social behaviour. Slums are the places where all the evils come together, where peace and security is elusive and where young people cannot be protected."

Ms Tibaijuka called on governments to urgently address a deteriorating situation which potentially threatened security and would increase pressures on immigration to rich countries. The report found that some slums were now as large as cities. The Kibera district in Nairobi, classed as the largest slum in the world, has as many as 600,000 people. The Dharavi area of Mumbai and the Orangi district of Karachi have only slightly fewer people, while the Ashaiman slum is now larger than the city of Tema in Ghana, around which it grew.

One word, Vinod: trains

Oh dear, another tangle of faulty assumptions and dubious logic.

Like this:

One hears slogans about how much corn and water are required to produce a gallon of ethanol -- a 16oz steak takes about the same amount of corn and more water. Are opponents of corn ethanol also calling for a ban on steaks, especially since chicken is a healthier food and takes less corn to produce?

Okay, so demanding that the government stop making this absurd intervention on behalf of ethanol -- the tax credits, the mandates, the protective tariffs, the grants to investors who build facilities -- is tantamount to calling for a ban on biofuel? If I want the government to stop allowing beef packers to torture animals, abuse workers, and create vast cesspools of toxic waste, is that the same as calling for a ban on beef?

Then we get this bit:

Add winter cover crops grown on current agricultural crop lands during the winter months when the land sits idle and is subject to nitrogen runoff and topsoil loss and we could, even after excluding up to 50 percent of our annual crop lands, replace most of our gasoline imports.

Fine, awesome. But guess what? If you harvest cover crops, they're not cover crops. They're just crops. Farmers put in cover crops between growing seasons to let them die and decay in the field. They keep in nitrogen and add carbon (organic matter). When you harvest them, you're leaching those things from the soil, and you need to replace them -- which in industrial agriculture means synthetic nitrogen, based on fossil fuel and a major source of atmospheric nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon by a factor of 297.

In his most stunning contradiction, Khosla states that "I have not advocated subsidies for food-based ethanol"; and then, a few gusts of hot wind later, adds:

It is clear that corn ethanol has served as a stepping stone for cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels, mitigating risk and establishing a market. As a venture capitalist, I would not have invested in cellulosic without corn ethanol's partial alleviation of the risks of creating a market, creating distribution terminals, E85 pumps and starting our flex-fuel fleet.

What the wily investor is saying here is that, I have not advocated subsidies for corn ethanol, but I have made investments that hinge on their existence.

Ok, what about this corn-as-stepping-stone-to-cellulsic business? I addressed it in a recent post on an absurd BusinessWeek piece praising ethanol: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/6/61340/51422

Let me reprise it quicly. If we're going to convert existing conventional ethanol infrastructure to cellulosic, then we're talking about harvesting cellulose in the midwest, where the existing plants are concentrated. Cellulose is bulky, and it isn't practical to move it around long distances. And concentrating production in the corn belt means displacing food crops to grow switchgrass -- pushing up food prices and financing the leveling of the rain forest.

The Business Week writer mentioned in the above-linked post proposes to get around this problem by suggesting we harvest biomass in the South. He envisions a "new commercial strain" of switchgrass sprouting up in "on former tobacco, cotton, and rice fields across the Southern U.S." (Hmmm -- won't moving from rice to switchgrass cause rice prices to spike?)

But guess what? There are few ethanol plants in the south. Building out the needed infrastructure will cost tens or hundreds of billions. This is the bridge, the stepping stone? Looks more like an industry paw reaching into the public purse, demanding that costs be socialized while profits be private.

Vinod, if you want to be constructive, I direct you to a recent piece on Grist by Ryan Avent on how our feeble, ill-funded public transit system is buckling under new demand sparked by high gas prices: http://www.grist.org/feature/2008/06/06/avent/

Demand is rising but structural impediments keep supply from meeting the challenge. It's a market failure. The government is too strapped from propping up biofuel production ($13 billion a year) and fighting an oil war to make the needed investments. We need an enterprising, charismatic venture capitalist with cash, connections, a propensity to write op-eds, and a zeal for fighting climate change to step into the breach. Know anyone like that?

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Come on, Sam

It's a natural phenomenon that the Mississippi carries lots of nutrients to the Gulf. That this effect should cause a vast dead zone is only natural in the way that a mobster who ends up with a knide in his back died of "natural causes." Here's how a researcher at Tulane explains it:
http://www.tulane.edu/~bfleury/envirobio/enviroweb/DeadZo ...

The Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone is a seasonal phenomena occurring in the northern Gulf of Mexico, from the mouth of the Mississippi River to beyond the Texas border.  It is more commonly referred to as the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, because oxygen levels within the zone are too low to support marine life.  The Dead Zone was first recorded in the early 1970's. It originally occurred every two to three years, but now occurs annually.  In the summer of 1999 the Dead Zone reached its peak, encompassing 7,728 square miles.

Of course, now it's expected to hot 10,000 square miles. The researcher goes on:

As the fresh, nutrient-enriched water from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers spread across the Gulf waters, favorable conditions are created for the production of massive phytoplankton blooms.  A bloom is defined as an  "increased abundance of a species above background numbers in a specific geographic region".  Incoming nutrients stimulate growth of phytoplankton at the surface, providing food for unicellular animals.  Planktonic remains and fecal matter from these organisms fall to the ocean floor, where they are eaten by bacteria, which consume excessive amounts of oxygen, creating eutrophic conditions.  Hypoxic waters appear normal on the surface, but on the bottom, they are covered with dead and distressed animal, and in extreme cases, layers of stinking, sulfur-oxidizing bacteria, which cause the sediment in these areas to turn black.  These hypoxic conditions cause food chain alterations, loss of biodiversity, and high aquatic species mortality.

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Nutrient loop

Canis,
I'm referring to the nutrient loop -- something I knew shockingly little about when I showed up at Maverick Farms five years ago, a food-obsessed finance writer ready to farm. In our society, we seem to have a generalized ignorance about how things work -- even key things, like how food is created.

Plants need nitrogen to grow, and -- until the rise of synthetic nitrogen a century or so ago -- there was a more or less stable amount of usable nitrogen for plants in the world. What came out o the ground had to be returned to the ground, or fields lost fertility (a constant problem in the 10,000-year history of ag). Turns out that animals concentrate nitrogen and other nutrients in their waste, which, when  spread over fields, rebuilds fertility.

Wendell Berry once famously wrote that the genius of industrial ag was to take a solution and create two problems. When agriculture was mixed, animal waste was spread on fields, and animals were fed crops, culls, and grass from those fields: a closed system. Now agriculture is highly specialized. The 10,000 -hog operation creates vast pools of toxic (from all the additives) waste that must be disposed off; and the 10,000-acre corn farmer needs to import vast amounts of fertility (artificial nitrogen) to keep his fields productive.

Now, I've been covering here on gristmill the mounting crises around the globe's complete dependence on synthetic nitrogen (derived from natural gas) and mined phosphorous and potassium. If we want to remove ourselves from this disastrous path, we'll need to develop a farming style that respects the old nutrient loop. Yes, Ron, we can recycle nutrients through composting -- though wouldn't the human waste now going into sewers have to come into play? Ehhh. We can and must also use "green manure" -- legumes, which have the magical power to fix free nitrogen from the air into the soil.

But given population pressure, mixed systems involving animals seem most efficient -- and thus necessary. I agree absolutely that we can't keep eating .75 pounds of meat a day, or drowning or coffee in oceans of warm milk. We need to start thinking about animal products as the special things they are, not throwaway commodities. And dialogs like these may be a good place to start.

Anyone interested in learning more about the nutrient loop should have a look at the work of Sir Albert Howard, whose book The Soil and Health I discussed here: http://grist.org/comments/food/2007/03/01/soil/

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I don't know, VT....

To me, it sounds like a bureaucracy panicking over low resources and lots of folks in need. As I understand WIC, every state gets a certain amount of cash, and when it's spent, it's gone. Hence the zeal to pinch pennies. During tough times, the government should be devoting more funds to these key programs, not pushing bureaucrats into insane policy choices. It does, however, seem like state WIC officials overreacted in this case.    

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Wrong, Green Granny!

The important thing to do is to harangue meat eaters, even ones that buy only pasture-based, humanely raised meat. The meat industry's vast concentration, its full-on embrace of odious labor, environmental, and animal-welfare practices, the USDA's feeble oversight -- these are all secondary issues at best.

It's all about consumer choice, don't you see? Forget that consumers have little influence over the  context under which their choices are made. Forget that no consumer in history has ever woken up one morning and said to herself, "Today, I want a burger from a cow that's been forced to eat foods that make it sick, some of which are industrial waste products; and stuffed into a pen with thousands of other cows, standing in their own waste -- which will then become a massive waste-disposal problem; then marched with electric prods into a line and killed without regard to pain or fear; and then butchered by workers bearing sub-living wages and sky-high injury rates; and then shipped hundreds or thousands of miles in refrigerated trucks."

Forget that those conditions exist not to please consumer desire, but rather the profit dictates of the meat industry.

Rather than focus on holding industry and government responsible, let's try to shame every single consumer into quitting meat. And while we're at it -- just for grins -- let's forget or ignore the fact that animals play a key role in sustainable agriculture -- and that organic-eating vegans rely on vegetable farms that rely on animals  for soil fertility. And all the while, let's remember to congratulate ourselves, loudly and publicly, about how awesome our own diet is.

Deal? Come on, Green Granny, get with the program! The system is quaking in its boots!  

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True, Erik....

...no doubt the food price surge stems from a "perfect storm": sudden hikes in EU/US biofuel production, drought in Australia, higher energy prices, growing meat consumption in India/China, the investor rush to commodities after the real-estate bubble burst.

Still, it's a bit much for a well-fed German to talk about the "second meal" in India as if it were an extravagance, and defend her nation's biofuel mandates as perfectly normal and even "green." Of course, per capita, Germans consume many more food calories, and higher on the food chain, than Indians.

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Backcut,

I'm fighting back the urge to highjack this conversation to make it be about my cats. Surely you can't discuss Cape Wind and Kennedy intrangisence without discussing my cats, right? OK, that's ridiculous -- I'll leave my cats out of this. And I wish you would stop trying to turn every thread into a 100-comment rant on logging. Please. Now.

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They should beware...

... the rake lying face up.

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Hmm.

From the Congressional Budget Office, 2004:

The manufacturing sector of the U.S. economy has experienced substantial job losses over the past several years. In January 2004, the number of such jobs stood at 14.3 million, down by 3.0 million jobs, or 17.5 percent, since July 2000 and about 5.2 million since the historical peak in 1979. Employment in manufacturing was its lowest since July 1950.

Note that these are absolute job numbers; as a percentage of overall working population, manufacturing losses have been even steeper. I doubt the sluggish growth of the past few years has dome much to add substantially to manufacturing jobs. Meanwhile, imports from China have exploded. Our old manufacturing base has been hollowed out. Yes, the Rust Belt originally lost manufacturing jobs to the non-union south; but those jobs eventually leaked out to Mexico and points south, and later to China.

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"this kind of discussion"

I eat meat because I like it, not because I don't know that I can get protein, or iron, or omega 3's elsewhere.

Yes, that is how this sort of discussion ends; and how unedifying. You guys are busting my chops for eating a little meat. What if I stop? What will change? nothing.

Meanwhile, the post above is about how ag researchers in public universities are tinkering with animal genetics and conjuring up sick animals, in an attempt to create something marketable for the meat industry to stuff in cages and torture.

Why are they doing that? Consumers aren't asking for GMO or cloned pork; industry is. Industry has essentially taken over public-university ag research. Organize against industry and make allies with people like me. Quit busting my chops (so to speak).

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My science is admitedly shaky....

.. and I'm trying to figure out why the bit above about Ph counts as a "bad fact."

In the post, I quote the law firm thusly:

Low pH may be to blame. During ethanol production, corn goes through a fermentation process that converts starch to dextrose. Cattle fed diets containing low levels of starch experience a decreased intestinal pH. Low pH may affect the survivability and growth of E. coli O157:H7, as most bacteria are killed by acids produced in the stomachs of bovines.

Here's how I understand the problem. Humans tend to have acid intestinal environs, while (grass-eating) cows tend toward basic. Thus bacteria that thrive in cow's guts get killed by our higher-acide systems. When cows eat corn and corn byproducts, their guts acidify (ie, the Ph lowers). The bacteria that evolve to survive this new environment are hardier than the old ones; and at least one, E. coli O157:H7, survives our systems and causes trouble. And that understanding seems consistent with the paragraph above. No?

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Oh dear

And I thought ethanol was the "biggest greenwash ever."

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Maybe the low density is the problem...

... and not the trains? Anyway, as gas prices go up, Dallas folks might learn to love the rails.

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Mark-to-market rule

Now isn't the time for ideological blather; instead, let's figure out what the hell is going on.

Colin, way above (in one of the few substantial comments on this post), mentioned Paul Craig Roberts on Counterpunch suggesting a suspension of the mark-to-market rule as a way to mitigate the crisis.

How would that help? Isn't the problem lack of transparency -- ie, no one knows how the hell to value these bundled mortgage assets? Seems to me that suspending mark to market would only decrease transparency and lead to more, not less, panic about what's festering on balance sheets. What am i missing?

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The scary part....

... is that the Fed engineered the JP Morgan deal and opened the discount window to investment banks (both extraordinary moves) on Sunday to try to get credit moving again.

Instead, they got this (from Reuters):

Financial trading and interbank lending almost ground to a halt on Monday as banks grew fearful of dealing with each other following Friday's near collapse of U.S. investment firm Bear Stearns (BSC.N: Quote, Profile, Research), prompting talk of another round of coordinated central bank aid.

As banking stock prices and the U.S. dollar plummeted, banks' access to unsecured borrowing from other banks fell to a relative trickle and dealers said the over-the-counter market had become highly discriminatory, depending on the bank name.

In other words, while Jason may be fanning himself and thanking his lucky stars that Uncle Ben is there to sort things out, actual investors and financial market players have their serious doubts. That old devil Greenspan, who puffed his share of wind into the mortgage bubble, is chuckling (or crying) into his martini somewhere.

Meanwhile, anyone want to talk about the nearly trillion dollars in credit card debt Americans are sitting on ahead of a recession -- which has been bundled into securities and sold to hedge funds, investments banks, etc, much like mortgage assets? Or the fact that the Fed's main lever for getting the credit markets rolling again -- slashing interest rates -- is killing the dollar and sending oil prices ever higher, thus fanning inflation?  

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Glycerin

From the NYT:

Glycerin, an alcohol that is normally nontoxic, can be sold for secondary uses, but it must be cleaned first, a process that is expensive and complicated. Expanded production of biodiesel has flooded the market with excess glycerin, making it less cost-effective to clean and sell.

And as Biod points out above, glycerin kills fish.

Ms. Tippett Mosby did not have to wait long to see the problem. In October, an anonymous caller reported that a tanker truck was dumping milky white goop into Belle Fountain Ditch, one of the many man-made channels that drain Missouri's Bootheel region. That substance turned out to be glycerin from a biodiesel plant.

In January, a grand jury indicted a Missouri businessman in the discharge, which killed at least 25,000 fish and wiped out the population of fat pocketbook mussels, an endangered species.

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Depressing

What a shame. Spitzer took on Wall Street at a time when Bush's SEC was splayed out like a puppy, showing its belly; and most heroically, intervened in favor of NYC's community gardens at a time when that little thug Giuliani was trying to sell them off. I hate to see him go out like this.

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You clearly don't understand, Biod...

You're getting lost in details. Cellulosic, biodiesel, kerosene jet fuel. Who cares? The message is: BIOFUELS RULE!!!!!!!

Don't forget it.

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Ooops

That last comment is from me, not "Grist."

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christophersj,

Well, the study says that switchgrass competes with the same land that now grows corn and soy. In order to get farmers to foresake some corn and soy for switchgrass, you've got to compensate them for it with higher subsidies. But when you do that, that pushes up the corn and soy price -- which pusges up the subsidy you need for switchgrass! These guys claim that the 36 b gallon mandate will exacerbate the "food vs. fuel" problem for this reason.

So for them, cellulosic will likely come from corn stover, or "waste"--which means the soil will need yet more mined and synthesized fertilizers.

The whole thing sounds like a bit of a mess, really.

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Oops

That last comment was from me, not Grist.org.

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Thanks, JMG

I admire the ILSR as well, and am puzzled by the group's reflexive stance in favor of corn ethanol -- even as big investors and corporations, not the farmer-owned cooperatives hailed by ISLR, gobble up the market.

And the group's dismissive attitude toward the environmentally ruinous aspects of industrial-corn production -- that just boggles the mind.

I wish David Morris, ISLR's main pro-ethanol hawk, would come over hear again and engage us on these points.

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Couple of notes, changes

Thanks for all the great comments.
Biod, I meant "flog" as in "mindlessly promote" (hi, Vinod). But I can see how it was unclear, so I changed it simply to "promote."

Also, Ron Steenblik emailed me the link" to Global Subsidies Initiative's new reckoning on U.S. biofuel goodies. (I can never find the update; thanks, Ron.)  The GSI had previously been figuring annual support at $5.5 billion to $7.3 billion. The new report states: "Under existing policies, the biofuels industry will, in aggregate, benefit from support worth over $ 92 billion within the 2006-2012 time frame." That comes out to about $13 billion/year, so I revised the post to reflect that. The new number makes sense to me, given the "renewable fuel" mandate in the Energy Act. If we reach 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol, that will be $7.5 billion just from the $0.51/gallon blender's credit -- one of many goodies in place for the industry.
Now to the question of phosphate in ethanol that remains in distillers grains. Yes, distillers grains are fed to cows (and hogs and chickens, too, in smaller doses), and the manure is often cycled onto farm fields near feedlots. But feedlot production tends to be concentrated geographically, and manure tends to be overapplied. So there is some recycling, but I'd bet a lot of the phosphate from distillers grain-manure ends up running off and ultimately, as Erik Hoffner reminds us, festering in the Gulf of Mexico, doing no one any good.

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Right on, Pompey Road

Absolutely agreed. In a sense, plowing up the Amazon and plowing up the Appalachians are part of the same insane logic.
And biofuels and "clean coal" coat that brutal logic with a shiny "green" tint.

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Got your back, Jon

I'm absolutely with you on relocalization. If I didn't comment on that thread, it was because I didn't have time to read through the whole thing and add my bit. But hell yes, relocalize production. I've even been re-reading Jane Jacobs' Economy of Cities.

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Fair enough; but...

I haven't read a convincing case that Wal-Mart's moves at the margins represent more than a tiny portion of its mammoth overall foot print. I'll be surprised if Wal-Mart's market power -- wise and benevolent use of its monopsony -- will end up being much of a constructive force for mitigating climate change. Walk into a Wal-Mart today -- all of its greening initiatives aside -- and you still see endless overwhelming piles overpackaged and flimsy stuff. You walk around, and think: for this, we're burning through mountains of cheap Asian coal in a time of climate change?

It's just hard for me to imagine how a company predicated on commoditizing everything, selling it as cheaply as possible, and turning a profit based on volume can contribute to a just and sane economy.

However, I pledge to keep my mind open.

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Ethanol v. oil

The case against corn ethanol, Khosla writes, "has been framed by the oil companies' marketing machine ...."

That rhetorical strategy -- ethanol as David against oil's Goliath -- is getting pretty frayed. I'll take a close look at it soon.

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Addendum to Karen's comment

Thanks for another info packed comment, Karen. About Mosaic, you wrote that:

Mosaic Phosphate Co., (200,000 acres)  sends 75% of their phosphate to the cornbelt in the Midwest. Mosaic plans to develop two new mines and extend existing mines in south-central Florida to continue meeting the demand for phosphate.

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Bernard,

As i can well testify, as long as returns on small-scale, local-oriented farming are mind-numbingly low, yes, your farmer is probably going to haul your produce to the farmers market in a beat-up old truck.

So does that make shopping at the farmers market less "green" than shopping at Wal-Mart, where the semis come in tightly packed over highways maintained with billions in taxpayer cash every year? Maybe.

On the other hand, we could divert some of that highway cash, now acting as a hidden subsidy to the long-haul food market, to rebuilding local food infrastructure. Say all the farmers in a certain area shared an energy efficient truck that would go around and collect everyone's produce and take it to market. Would that not rule?

And so so on.

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Post-autistic economics

From A Brief History of the Post-Autistic Economics Movement:

Theories, scientific and otherwise, do not represent the world as it is but rather by highlighting certain aspects of it while leaving others in the dark.  It may be the case that two theories highlight the same aspects of some corner of reality but offer different conclusions.  In the last century, this type of situation preoccupied the philosophy of science.  Post-Autistic Economics, however, addresses a different kind of situation: one where one theory, that illuminates a few facets of its domain rather well, wants to suppress other theories that would illuminate some of the many facets that it leaves in the dark.  This theory is neoclassical economics.  Because it has been so successful at sidelining other approaches, it also is called "mainstream economics".

From the 1960s onward, neoclassical economists have increasingly managed to block the employment of non-neoclassical economists in university economics departments and to deny them opportunities to publish in professional journals.  They also have narrowed the economics curriculum that universities offer students.  At the same time they have increasingly formalized their theory, making it progressively irrelevant to understanding economic reality.  And now they are even banishing economic history and the history of economic thought from the curriculum, these being places where the student might be exposed to non-neoclassical ideas.  Why has this tragedy happened?

Many factors have contributed, but three especially.  First, neoclassical economists have as a group deluded themselves into believing that all you need for an exact science is mathematics, and never mind about whether the symbols used refer quantitatively to the real world.  What began as an indulgence became an addiction, leading to a collective fantasy of scientific achievement where in most cases none exists.  To preserve their illusions, neoclassical economists have found it increasingly necessary to isolate themselves from non-believers.

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Yeah, and...

the idea of "if not ethanol, then oil," is just feeble. How about neither? Why are we investing billions in ethanol annually, and there's no well-functioning train system that links, say, Houston and Dallas?

As for my conclusion on cellulosic, here goes.

Although cellulosic-based production of renewable fuels holds some longer-term promise, much research is needed to make it commercially economical and expand beyond the 250-million-gallon minimum specified for 2013 in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

That's from a USDA analyst writing in September. "Some long-term promise"? The USDA, cellulosic ethanol's great champion and patron, seems a lot less enthusiastic than rbcololeman.

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Asset inertia

Tom,
I agree that economics are key; a headline writer came up with the jokey title "it's the agronomy, stupid," which I went along with; but yes, it is indeed the  economics.

We also agree on the following:
<blockqoute>Restoring more ecologically diverse and sustainable crop and livestock systems will not be easy or quick. It will take more than eliminating commodity subsidies. A much stronger and better-funded set of agri-environmental programs emphasizing agriculture's "multifunctionality" also is needed.</blockqoute>

However,Lugar's Fresh Act, mentioned respectfully by Pollan and promoted vigorously by Britt Lundgren, doesn't provide nearly the "much stronger and better-funded set of agri-environmental programs" needed to actually curb overproduction.

And surely, the Bush administration's vision of gutting the commodity title to make US agriculture WTO-friendly doesn't meet your test, either.

The fundamental problem is this: Billions have been invested in grain elevators, combines, and other equipment designed to grow and move million billions of bushels of corn and soy; and hundreds of thousands of families have been evicted from the land to accommodate those crops.

The grain belt has been carefully crafted into a corn, soy, CAFO, and now ethanol machine. If it's going to be restored to the grand biodiversity it once knew, if its soil is going to be valued as the key resource it is -- and not just as a neutral conduit for agrochemicals -- then somebody is going to have to invest in a whole new infrastructure.

And as you well know from living in South Dakota, the farmers now scraping by on those 1000-5000-acre corn and soy farms average nearly 60 years of age. They aren't about ready to  start doing 20 acres in mixed vegetables, 3-4 hundred in pastured meat, another hundred in orchards--and then figure out how to get all of that stuff to market -- all while paying off the the note on the combine, which is now gathering dust.

I don't think I'm being too cynical when I say that under current conditions, if and when the commodity title gets gutted, most of the savings will evaporate forever out of the Farm Bill, and go instead to paying off government debt.

And then neoliberal fantasies about how farming is just another industry that can and should make it on its own in a "free" (though absurdly consolidated) market will get a full test. And then we'll be back to cycles of overproduction, soil mining, etc.--the same conditions that got us a farm bill in the first place.

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Right, Liz

When you stuff hundreds of hogs together in pens literally on top of cesspools, their immune systems essentially vanish. And antibiotics become an important part of their diet regime -- and a major element in their waste that gets spread on fields and leeches into groundwater. Elizabeth Royte's recent piece on Grist also touches on this topic.

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Odo,

"The Democratic candidate knows that (s)he owns every vote here.

The same kind of thing is happening on the other side, as the Republican candidate knows that he owns every evangelical vote."

I don't know about that. Rudy G's been all but speaking in tongues lately. I think the difference is that the evangelicals don't offend corporate interests, while enviros (sometimes) do.  

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Jarmadi,

It's true that after Carter embargoed the Soviets, there was a massive glut and government programs helped push down corn production. But "fence row to fence row" ideology survived, and as this chart chart shows, corn production soon ramped up. The 1996 "Freedom to Farm" act dismantled any remaining programs that might manage supply, and corn production has been setting records for years.
True, erosion has been slowed with no-till methods, but that has merely meant a gusher of herbicides and an explosion in GM seeds.

And as far as waterways being protected, well, just look at the dead zone down in the Gulf. Attempts to "sod waterways" may be earnest, but they have failed.

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True about agrofuels,

... but the real agenda of Bush/ADM is maximum production. The subsidies are becoming inconvenient, because they're holding up trade talks and giving foreign governments a good excuse to protect their farmers. After what Nafta did to the Mexican corn market, Cargill, ADM, and their ilk have gotten rather enthusiastic about "free" trade. The subsidies are a compromise between the mega-farmers, who want to stay in business; and agribusiness, which simply wants cheap inputs. ADM doesn't give a damn about subsidies as long as farmers keep churning out as much product as possible.

If ADM is so into subsidies, why does Bush's own Farm Bill proposal promise a much more modest commodity title than either the house version or the Senate ag committee's? Remember, Bush threatened to veto the House version, because it wasn't a significant enough "reform."

Or are you arguing that ADM has no influence with the Bush Admin.? If so, how does one explain Chuck Conner, who has lately been a subsidy critic?

Here's what Conner said about the generous commodity title in the Senate Ag Committee's version:

This is just simply bad policy. It paints a bull's-eye on the backs of the American farmer, causes us enormous trouble internationally. It's just simply bad farm policy. No reform at all.

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Fair 'nuff, Ohio

I mean no disrespect to farmers. I know well that they're just trying to keep their land in the family--avoid being forced to sell out to the bigger farmer up the road. But go to Iowa and Illinois and see what's happening on the ground. A lot of folks are abandoning corn-soy-corn rotations for corn-corn-corn, to take advantage of higher corn prices.

The thing is, the incentives we have in place today reward gross output. There's no percentage in taking land out of production for a while, or lowering the nitrogen dose. Large-scale Corn Belt farms today survive by squeezing as much as possible out of the land. To change the incentive structure, I think we first need to scrap the insane and inane corn ethanol program; and then figure out some sort of supply management team.

The nature of farming means that farmers respond poorly to price signals, especially when prices drop. Falling prices tends to inspire farmers to plant more to make up for the loss. Look at years like 2004 and 2005--rock bottom corn prices, and record or near-record production.

As for irrigation, I'm well aware that most of the farm belt isn't irrigated. That's mostly because of the region's superior soil structure. My question is: If we continue to degrade that soil structure with artificial fertilizers, how long can they continue not irrigating?

As for Monsanto, I'm not sure what's more ridiculous--the image of this multibillion-dollar titan being somehow endangered by the green movement, or its conjuring up a nitrogen-fixing corn variety that's going to sort out our troubles.

What say we just plant less dent corn--an industrial input--and more food for people to eat?

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About the corporate agriobiz types?

I'll take answer A, with a heavy lashing of antitrust enforcement on the side.

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Well done

I love how this essay takes agriculture from the margins of the climate debate and places it where it belongs: at the center. We can't drive our way out the climate crisis in a Prius or some flex-fuel vehicle, but we can farm our way out. And eat a lot better as well.

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Jaw-dropping stupidity

Of all the infrastructural investments we could make to make this country function a little more sanely, this is what we get? The wall won't achieve its highly obnoxious stated end -- and if it did, we'd have to immediately tear it down! But it will likely cause active and monumental ecological damage.

It's a fitting monument to Bush's reign, and to the feeble official opposition to it. On Why environmental groups have been slow to fight the border wall posted 2 years, 1 month ago 38 Responses

Not sure i agree, grey

They made the front page of the Trib, didn't they?

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"setting a price on carbon emissions"

Yeah, sure, do it: a carbon tax. But the truth is, Cheney and his crew are correct in in a sense: a carbon tax hefty enough to curb these trends (accelerated oil and coal use) would likely result in economic crisis. why? Because the global economy as constructed is built on cheap energy, cheap labor, and cheap food. Anything that upsets one of those pillars fundamentally would be devastating. To repeat the WSJ:

For every extra dollar taken from drivers' pockets at the pump in the form of higher prices in recent years, low-cost exporters from China and elsewhere [buoyed by cheap coal and labor] have put roughly $1.50 back in the form of cheaper retail goods.

Let's say that hadn't happened. Let's say that just as the oil price started to rise dramatically in 2001-2003, the Chinese government throttled back coal production with a stiff carbon tax. What would have happened? the price of Chinese goods would have rocketed. Higher-priced oil plus surging consumer-goods prices would likely have spurred inflation in the US; as someone noted above, we've essentially dismantled our industrial base, and would have had no choice but to import manufactured goods (or do without them). Inflation  would force the Fed to jack up interest rates, causing a recession. And then the recession would have to be deep enough to bring down oil and consumer-goods prices, so the whole merry cycle could start again.

We'd be flirting with an economic crisis like the ones in the 1930s and 1970s. But crises don't automatically bring progressive results. It depends on who takes charge and manages them. In Germany in the '30s, the Nazis rose from the dust of Germany's post-WWI meltdown; in the U.S., we got generally progressive Keynesians. But their work got undone by the 1970s "stagflation" crisis, when the Reaganites took charge. Anyone pining for a crisis should remember the spectacle of jack-booted racist thugs steamrolling Berlin, and later much of Europe.  

Sure, I support a carbon tax, but at the same time, let's rebuild hardy local and regional economies that can withstand crises in a global economy built on cheap food, cheap labor, and cheap energy. Right now, i look across the nation and see scant food or energy infrastructure designed to serve nearby communities; and in the southern hemisphere, "development" seems to mean building infrastructure to facilitate global trade--eg, Cargill's infamous soy port at the mouth of the Amazon--and the undoing of small-scale ag, the sphere of "unproductive peasants."

As for Green Engineer, yes, I was describing an "unstable feedback loop" -- and a weak one. I should have been clearer. A weaker dollar does not translate directly to higher oil prices, but puts upward pressure on oil prices. (Oil prices could still go down if another factor--say, a major new discovery, or a warm winter in the global north--outweighed the effect of a weaker dollar.) Likewise, higher-priced oil does not automatically weaken the dollar, but it puts downward pressure on the dollar because of its effect on the current-account deficit. (For example, conditions within the EU could inspire investors to dump euros and buy dollars even as the US current-account deficit ballooned, as happened in the late 1990s/early 2000s.)

But the pressures I described do seem to exist, and I find them interesting.

And if the oil markets dropped the dollar as the sole currency, of course, the engine for the above-described feedback loop would stall. A weakening dollar would no longer affect oil markets much, because sellers would be accepting other currencies.

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But we are doing something!

What, you never heard of biofuels?

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good question, JMG

The 1969 food miles study was def. from the Department of Defense. One paper mis-cited it as DoE, and it sort of rippled outward. A reader has tracked down the study in a university library and agreed to mail me a copy. Stay tuned.  

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Joel,

Not sure I get your point. You give a great list of wonderful cellulosic projects, but you ignore the central point of this post: that the USDA, cellulosic's great patron, thinks the technology is still years and years away from coming online. Let me repeat the quote:

Although cellulosic-based production of renewable fuels holds some longer-term promise, much research is needed to make it commercially economical and expand beyond the 250-million-gallon minimum specified for 2013 in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

I suspect that most of the nifty projects you mention exist not because hard-headed investors think the companies have hit upon a winning technology; but rather because those investors are convinced the government will keep throwing cash as cellulosic projects, results be damned.  

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Great post

Clark,
I hate it when you write a great post, and all you get in comments is spam from Jbailo.

This is good stuff, reminding me of the irony in the subtitle of EF Shumaker's Small is Beautiful: economics as if people mattered.

Cheers,
Tom

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Mcgerm,

Fair enough. If mustard factory workers started dropping dead, it would be time for the federal government to take a close look at the mustard-making process. If French chefs started coming down with obliterated lungs, then sure, masks would be in order. "Popcorn lung" is not some abstract thing that could happen in theory; it is happening, demonstrably, and the federal government and popcorn makers are being negligent by not acting.

The real holdup, I suspect, is that the food industry has been struggling to concoct an alternate artificial butter flavoring -- a pretty lame reason for workers to lose their lungs.

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Thanks, DaveK

Nor does this bit from the BusinessWeek piece inspire confidence in corporate Ben & Jerry's:

Dreyer's low-fat "Slow Churned" line, with 50% less fat and 30% fewer calories, has proved a runaway success, even forcing Unilever to roll out similar products under its Ben & Jerry's marque.

All that lowfat crap is full of adulterating chemicals to substitute for the "mouthfeel" of real ingredients.

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Well said, Brudaimonia

I didn't mean to suggest that I'm ant-trade, per se. I simply reject the neoliberal dogma that says cross-border trade must be maximized at any costs, or pretends that trade policies that benefit multinationals (like the tariffs on value-added goods mentioned by Ron) somehow redound to the common good.

Too often in quote-unquote developing nations, there's much more investment in food-distribution infrastructure that moves food out of countries than there is in infrastructure for moving food from rural areas to urban ones. These investment decisions tend to be made based on deals between national elites and transnational institutions. Smallholder farmers aren't consulted.

I'd like to see aid polices that consult smallholder farmers, leverage their knowledge, and try to link their interests with those of urban dwellers.

As for Singer and his daftness, I can't abide by his Puritanical disregard, or even disdain, for pleasure. For example, in The Way We Eat, he lays out a vision for "animal-free meat" that I find chilling. He conjures up an image of a "vast lump of meat, hundreds of feet across, growing in a culture fed on algae." He laments that with current technology, "producing muscle tissue in a laboratory equates to $5 million per kilogram," but holds out hope that one day such a process will be economical enough to "supply the entire world with meat." He awards the project with his  highest accolade: "we can see no ethical objection to it."

He thus proposes hyper-industrial food production as a remedy for the ravages of industrial food production. To that (yes, daft) vision of a meatless future, I reply: pass the rice and beans.

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Yes.

Excellent post, David. As with food, people have little idea of what it takes to bring them their energy; they have been conditioned to blithely expect that it will be there, and cheap.

And as with our government-subsidized cheap-food policy, our government-subsiidized cheap-energy policy depends on layers and layers of exploitation: human and environmental.

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re: offsets for flights

Wonder how that would go over in the Grist accounting dept.....

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Karen,

Yes, it is true, given that a certain time period (I think 90 days) elapses between application and harvest. I agree that it's scandalous, and for me, it underscores the need for small farms to raise their own animals, or be located near other farms that are doing so sustainably.

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I'm not sure...

...if you can buy certified-organic fish emulsion. You can certainly buy fish emulsion that's acceptable to use on certified-organic land. But one  thing you most certainly can't buy is vegan fish emulsion.

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Might they be sun golds?

Yes, quite addictive.

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Response to Sam

Sam,
I agree that the drive into organics by Wal-Mart, etc., makes the FTC's argument a little shaky. I'm genuinely surprised by the move, coming from an agency that stood idly by when hog-packing behemoth Smithfield picked off its largest rival, Premium Standard Farms. Of course, that deal was much more likely to push hog prices down for farmers than it was to push pork prices up for consumers; and as I wrote above, monopsony doesn't concern the various federal agencies that monitor antitrust.

Nevertheless, the FTC has come up with an impressive list of quotes from both Whole Foods and Wild Oats execs, both in marketing materials and internal documents, claiming that the "super natural" market operates in a different universe than regular retail.

Did the execs believe that, or was it just spin? Well, the  deal was predicated on the assumption that the natural market is fundamentally different. Mackey told his board he wanted to buy Wild Oats to keep a rival like Safeway from snapping it up. But why would Safeway do so, rather than merely beefing up fresh organic offerings in its existing stores?

He also said the merger would help end "nasty price wars" in key markets. How could it do so, if Safeway or Wal-Mart were just as able to start one?

Moreover, if Mackey was just spinning, then , if  why did he pay a 23 percent premium for Wild Oats?

The Bear Stearns analyst quoted in my piece also wrote that Whole Foods "seemed obsessed with running Wild Oats out of business and that they seek to circumvent that process by taking them out and essentially dismantling the company." Evidently, Mackey thought it was worth nearly half a billion of his shareholder's money to do so.

At the very least, Whole Foods' lawyers will be in the dodgy position of arguing that Mackey was in fact wrong about the natural foods market, that in fact it does compete directly with the likes of Wal-Mart, Safeway,and Trader Joes, and that Wild Oats was not worth the premium Mackey placed on it. Essentially, the case for Whole Foods hinges on proving Mackey's incompetence.

But I'm not certain Mackey was in fact wrong.
I myself will shop at Whole Foods for certain things, but I'd never buy food at Wal-Mart. I've found things worth buying in Whole Foods' produce , meat and dairy sections, but the produce you find in the tiny organic sections of regular supermarket chains always looks shriveled up and  worse for the wear of a long haul. As for Trader Joe's, as Mackey himself has said, they don't really do fresh food, and thus don't  compete directly (70 percent of Whole Foods' revenue comes from perishables.)

Are core Whole Foods shoppers really tempted to go check out the cheap organic produce at Wal-Mart? Doubtful. Give them choices between two natural foods places, though, and they might start choosing based on price.

More interestingly, in the 19 markets where they go head to head, if Whole Foods and Wild Oats  started competing to see which was going to be the more robust source of local organic produce, then you might see rising farmgate prices for organic goods produced in the region -- which would have all sorts of positive knowck-on effects.

It's doubtful that Safeway or Wal-Mart would be seen by consumers as a credible rival to Whole Foods as a source for locally produced goods. On Why the FTC is right to block Whole Foods' buyout of Wild Oats posted 2 years, 4 months ago 28 Responses

Corn ethanol!!!!

This dude has clearly never heard of corn ethanol, a powerful force that has big oil shaking in its boots!

Or doesn't.

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Great comment, sideshow...

It's true that the globalization of ag markets provides agribusiness a card that easily trumps any supply management scheme. There are still vast swaths of Brazil's savanna that can and will go under the plow for soy, and Argentina is churning out plenty of GM corn.

Plus, hell, subsidies for corn are going down, but we're probably going to see the biggest harvest in US history this year, because subsidy for corn has shifted from a direct payment to the tax credit and other goodies lavished on ethanol production. I didn't even get into the whole ethanol debacle in this post. Sigh.

With the ethanol program, we're getting more environmentally ruinous corn than ever, more expensive food for low-income folks, and no new investments in local-food infrastructure that would make local, organic food cheaper. It's a Gordian knot of regressive, pro-agrobiz policies.

Seen from that perspective, I'm reminded that small-scale projects and solutions are the way forward, and wonder if all the energy going into reforming/obsessing about the bloody farm bill might be misguided.

2002 Woodbury, Iowa, isn't waiting on the federal government to come up a food policy that makes sense; nor is Red Hook, Brooklyn. The rest of us should do the same.

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You go, Farm Bill Girl

"Also, Oxfam also buys into the dangerous myth that third world countries can "export" their way out of poverty. Exports geared toward the First World's tastes and consumption only devastates their own food security as well as destroying the environment (see Palm oil in SE Asia and soybeans in Brazil/rainforest)."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

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Oxfam

Sam,
I understand that about Oxfam. They've done great work analyzing, for example, the effect of cheap U.S. corn flooding Mexico. But I think they're being naive to assume that ending U.S. and European ag subsidies, and enshrining Doha, is going to automatically benefit farmers in the global south. Farmers, especially commodity farmers, don't respond to price signals like other economic actors. Take away subsidies,and farmers might well respond by planting more of the commodity crops, in an attempt to offset lost income.  

Anyone with an interest in ag policy should check out this 2002 paper by Daryll Ray that pretty much obliterates Oxfam's position. Ironically, Oxfam funded it.

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Doctors vs. farmers

 I didn't have the space to get fully into my take on why farming is different than other professions. Let's look at doctors. We have nearly one million physicians here, who have a potential customer base of 300 million. In our largely privatized system, that market is pretty disaggregated. Medical services are pretty much a seller's market, so doctors' wages are relatively high and people keep fighting to get into med school. "Not enough doctors" is not a factor in our healthcare crisis.

No let's look at farmers. We have around 2 million of them, with a customer base of 300 million eaters. Yet as I've written before, there are several layers of distributors, retailers, "value adders," etc. between farmers and their customers, each taking a chunk of the cash consumers pay fot heir food. And most of those levels are severely consolidated, giving the buyer the advantage at each layer, putting downward pressure on prices felt most heavily on the bottom, on the farm. The farm take of retail dollars has been falling steadily for decades.

And as prices at the farm gate fall, each farmer quite rationally tries to produce more to make up the difference. And as they do, total supply rises,putting yet more pressure on prices.

Doctors don't face these problems.

Then there's the whole uncertainty question. A patient arrives in a doctor's office and presents his insurance card. The doctor has a pretty good idea she'll be paid.

A farmer plants a crop, and it could be wiped out by any number of factors. And if the crop makes it to market, any number of things could drive its p down -- a bumper crop halfway across the world, a change in market direction.

Take corn at $4 per bushel. That price is completely and utterly propped up by the government's ethanol program. Say Congress decided to choose another alternative energy to subsidize. Overnight, commodity traders would drive corn futures into the dirt, down to $1.50 or lower.

If society expects people to produce food under such conditions, then society has a responsibility  to figure out a way to smooth out these sharp edges. On Don't blame farmers for the farm-subsidy mess posted 2 years, 5 months ago 21 Responses

'Solutions'

"All of our current problems are unintended negative consequences of our existing technology. The rapid advances in technology during the 20th century have been creating difficult new problems faster than they have been solving old problems: that's why we're in the situation in which we now find oursleves. What makes you think that, as of January 1 2006, for the first time in human history, technology will miraculously stop causing new unanticipated problems while it just solves the problems it previously produced?" --Jared Diamond, Collapse

Of course it's important not to merely complain and tear down; thinking ahead is key. But the search for "solutions" can become a fetish. It's possible that our real problem isn't finding a way to profitably turn corn or grass into liquid fuel for cars; instead, the real challenge may be convincing people in a society hinged on easy consumption to find pleasure in using less.

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Vietnam Memorial

Thanks for bringing that up, Canis. I didn't get a chance to visit it on a short trip to DC last week; I should have torn myself away from that damned coffeehouse to do so.

It's amazing that we're yet again involved in a  idiotic project that's going to require yet another monument to futilely destroyed lives. Unbelievable.

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Bush and bifuels

The IEA is simply stating the obvious. Biufuels pose no real threat to petroleum, and that's why they're the one "renewable" energy that Bush is willing to support with hard cash.

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That's all right, Gar

Just more incentive to keep the pressure on, and not go all goo-goo-eyed over him.

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Thanks, David

Someone recently hipped me to the anti-war origins of mother's day, and this poem drives the point home. Way to help rescue the holiday from Hallmark hell. Peace to all the mamas out there -- and a pox on the all the jackals who perpetuate the time-tested idiocies of war.

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Baby-starving couple make terrible mistake...

...might have made a better title.

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Ross,

Thanks for the comment, and the correction. So, if Bt toxins, and not the bacteria themselves, are built into Bt corn, does that mean that high-fructose corn syrup could be toxic to bees? At least half of industrial corn is GMO, and I think most of it is Bt.

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Thanks, Julia!

Thanks for the info, and for the great link on Dee Lusby I've heard of small-cell beekeeping. The idea is that bees have been bred to be quite big, and the large cell size lets mites into the colony that wouldn't otherwise be able to fit in. Slimming down the bees gradually to so that smaller cells work sounds like a brilliant idea.

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Good comments

Even Jabailo made sense this time. Yes, my conclusions are sketchy, not based on much data. There isn't much info out there. Anecdotally, much evidence points to the big apiaries having a much tougher go than small, localized ones. I talked to two small-scale beekeeper in my area, and a few around the country. None reported problems. One of them had attended a national beekeeper meeting. He said that there, the two common traits among folks who suffered big losses were transport and large size. Moreover, many sources have statements like this one, from a Mid-Atalntic ag extension document (PDF):

As of February 2007, many of the beekeepers reporting heavy losses associated with CCD are large commercial migratory beekeepers, some of who have lost 50-90% of their colonies. ...However, late in February some larger non- migratory beekeepers, particularly from the mid-Atlantic region and the Pacific Northeast have reported significant losses of >50%.

So the losses do appear skewed towards larger operations.

So while I don't think the stress of travel--or the diet of high-fructose corn syrup fed industrial bees when there's no forage --has caused the collapse, I do believe (speculatively) that it might make bees more vulnerable to threats.

Ditto GM crops, to address Werdna's complaint. I never blamed the collapse on Bt corn. But plantings of it have been increasing for years. Might millions of acres of Bt corn have something do?  (Interestingly, bees are also ingesting modified though HFCS, though its hard to imagine the Bt bacteria surviving the manufacturing process.) The Der Spiegel article cited a scientist who saw evidence for a Bt corn link, but didn't have the funding to keep going with the study. I don't think the Salon article you cite definitively refuted it.

Wiscidea, your questions are excellent -- and I don't know the answer to them. From beekeeper friends, I've heard tell of three available breeds originally brought from Europe: Italians, Caucasians, and Carniolans.  Now the USDA is introducing Russian bees because they resist varroa mites. But I don't know much about this stuff. I'll return to this question.

Finally, i'll leave you with a bit from a great AP article that came out just today, under the bracing title, "Bee collapse threatens food supply."

Recently, scientists have begun to wonder if mankind is too dependent on honeybees. The scientific warning signs came in two reports last October.

First, the National Academy of Sciences said pollinators, especially America's honeybee, were under threat of collapse because of a variety of factors. Captive colonies in the United States shrank from 5.9 million in 1947 to 2.4 million in 2005.

Then, scientists finished mapping the honeybee genome and found that the insect did not have the normal complement of genes that take poisons out of their systems or many immune-disease-fighting genes. A fruitfly or a mosquito has twice the number of genes to fight toxins, University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum.

What the genome mapping revealed was "that honeybees may be peculiarly vulnerable to disease and toxins," Berenbaum said.

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Brilliant post, Ron.

That's all I got to say.

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Thanks, typetive

Sure, let the market decide, but let people make decisions based on good information. Chocolate =  cocoa butter +c ocoa liquor/ Replace the first element with veggie oil, and what you have isn't chocolat.

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You sellout.

Just kidding.

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Gmunger,

You've got the right idea. Here are corn usage numbers for '06. Yes, nobody actually eats yellow corn; it's an industrial input.

Two things, thoough. The more prime land devoted to yellow corn, the less that can be used for food purposes. The corn boom is pushing up soy prices, for example, as farmers spurn corn for soy. It's also making land prices rise in the midwest, putting the pinch on anyone--and yes, they exist--who want to start a new farm in the midwest to grow food for people to eat.

Globally, the ethanol boom can be expected to crowd out food crops by inspiring farmers to plant, say, sugarcane on prime farmland. In the US meat prices are heading up, squeezing low-income folks. Processed food prices will rise, too, at least a little, which will fall hardest on people who can least afford it.

In the global south, it will impact the swelling numbers of un- or underemployed in megacities--people with no access to land to grow their own food, who lead precarious lives.  

Yes, food needs to be revalued, but this is hardly the way to do it.

You also have the right idea about Mexico. Two things. One, as the price of yellow corn spiked, livestock producers there in some cases switched to white corn, pushing up its price. Also, multinational grain traders like Cargill and ADM, along with dominant Mexican tortilla and corn-flour maker Gruma (partially owned by ADM), quite likely took advantage of the run on yellow to artificially jack up the price of white, or of its processed product, corn flour (masa harina). The grain traders dominate large-scale distribution of even white corn in that country, and Gruma makes the corn flour used by a huge portion of the country's tortillarias. I've written a couple of Victual Realities on this topic, if you search around.

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Another way to think of conservatives:

They hate the state but love the state police. You know, let's cut taxes, dismantle the safety net, and let "the market" sort oout climate change, but let's also erect a powerful "patriotic act," ramp up spying, etc.

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Amtrak

Ron,
You write that:

Defending the current Amtrak subsidy says nothing about its cost effectiveness. One could imagine a better, more-efficient passenger rail service returning to the United States some day, but it probably won't happen simply by marginally turning the tap on (out-of-shape) Amtrak's life-support system.

Why is Amtrak so lame? My understanding is that, after decades of disinvestment in trains, and hundreds of billions (trillions?) in public car-infrastructure investment (ie, roads), to speak nothing of the cascades in subsidies to liquid fuels (gas and ethanol), we now have a situation wherein driving is very much the path of least resistance. In this context, it's hardly surprising that consumers overwhelmingly prefer cars. But it's a myth that consumer preference created the situation--more likely, a series of decisions to withdraw funding from trains and direct them to cars did.

Given that history, is Amtrak, with its modest $1 billion or so annual federal budget (a fraction of what corn farmers get in a bad year; has GSI ever calculated the annual subsidies that prop up car use in the US?), really so bad?

The question isn't rhetorical. I've heard a lot of people talk about how bad Amtrak is, and I'm wondering if there's something within its institutional culture that I'm nor aware of, or if it's just the victim of a society who's leaders have chosen to spend lavishly on a rival transportation mode.

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Important stuff

As with food, people have lost touch with where their energy comes from. Just as getting food calories is as easy as pulling up to a McDonald's drive through or popping a box into the microwave, people can easily live with the idea that energy is harnassed by flipping a switch or gassing up a car.

I think the environmental movement should focus on reconnecting people to what sustains them -- largely because current modes of food production and energy storage are seriously threatening the planet. And a big part of that is ripping back the curtain and displaying the dirty work being done on their behalf.

So thanks for posting this, Stephanie, and thanks for the wake-up call, Ray Ring.

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Another idiotic demagogue who's opinions

 ... on biofuels  are worth ignoring is Bush. Unhappily, Obama, HRC, and Edwards are taking them very seriously.

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Puritanism, the left, etc.

My take on Slow Food USA is that despite a lot of high talk, the way I've seen it operate is mainly as a high-end tasting club. That's ok, but not particularly interesting.

But I've very much liked the tone of this discussion. I'd like to point everyone to a terrific article on the founding of Slow Food that appeared in the summer, 2003 issue of Gastronomica (unavailable on the Web, but easily found in a good library):  "Postrevolutionary Chowhounds: Food, Globalization, and the Italian Left," by Fabio Parasecoli.

Stephanie, I think you'd really appreciate it. Slow Food grew out of the Italian Communist Party and was a self-concious rejection of the Old Left's dourness, its tendency to view pleasure with suspicion, as a bourgeois indulgence. No, said Slow Food's founders: Pleasure is a right, not a privilege.

And that is a revolutionary politics that I can support.

Also, you guys might be interested in a little piece I did a while back on food, pleasure, and the left.

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Politicians follow overwhelming public opinion...

... and in its absence, they follow private cash.

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It ain't easy being green...

...amid the minivan-driving denizens of the suburbs. Sounds like a nightmare to go without a car there. Any chance of moving to a city with mass transit?

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Biod wrote:

"If Indonesia's economy were to light off like China's and start to generate wealth via manufacturing instead of scraping the living carpet off the surface of the planet and selling it to rich Westerners..."

Actually, China's manufacturing behemoth has swallowed plenty of prime farmland -- and now the country has to import titanic amounts of soy from Brazil, where (as you well know) they're busily clearing rainforest for soy. Our appetite for cheap stuff from China may be as damaging to carbon sinks as European demand for biodiesel.

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I'm with you, Biod...

@#$% biodiesel, too, if it comes from virgin oils.

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missing 'g'

another great post, that is.

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thanks, Erik!

That deserves a post all its own.

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Fair enough, Biod..

Profiting from small-scale vegetable production is very difficult under current economic conditions, and flogging the practice on Grist hasn't proven much of a help.
But I agree on principle, and try to be as up front as possible about my biases, etc.

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Great comments

I agree with Roz that many farms that drop out of organic certification aren't dropping out of organic farming -- they're just opting out of all the paperwork involved with maintaining certification.

Likewise, many new organic farms -- like my own Maverick Farms, now entering its 4th growing season -- don't dive right into certification; it's hard enough to farm w/o having to go through a whole bureaucratic process.

Moreover, when you farm on a small enough scale that you're selling directly to the people who cook and eat your food, there's no real incentive to certification. At farms like Maverick, the people who buy our vegetables are our certifiers -- they can come by and see exactly what we're doing in the field. Certification makes sense when you sell to a distributor or other middle man -- it literally commodifies your growing practices so they can draw a price premium in a market of anonymous products.

But here's the thing: While projects like Maverick and thousands of other small-scale, uncertified organic farms across the country do add up to a significant chunk of food production, they probably don't sum to enough acreage to much change the numbers cited above.

If we really want to make a dent in the huge amounts of poisons entering our soils -- as well as reestablish truly robust local and regional food systems -- we'll have to think of ways to convince mid-size farmers to convert to organic methods. And its precisely that middle of the farming game -- between niche direct-makerting operations like mine and the mega farms with economies of scale (and, often, subsidies) -- that probably faces the most vexing economic conditions. And that's a topic for a future Victual Reality. On If organic food is so popular, why are so few farms transitioning their land? posted 2 years, 8 months ago 21 Responses

This seems like a good place...

..to grind my ax about forests: something something something forests something something.

But seriously, why aren't people more freaked out by melting arctic ice? It boggles the mind.

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Oops.

Forgive all the typos in that comment. I meant "cult of the expert," not "professional."

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Abandoning the kitchen

Of course you're right that not everyone has abandoned his/her kitchen. You haven't; I haven't either. But there's little doubt that on average, people are getting more and more of their calories from food produced outside the home, by someone else -- often the very immigrants taken in for such verbal abuse but state legislators and cable-tv blowhards.

Here (PDF) is a USDA study looking at the decline of home cooking over the past century. The reasons behind it are of course complex: women entering the workforce being a main one. Another (not explicitly mentioned in the report) is stagnating incomes requiring all adults in the household to work in order for the household to "get ahead."

But all of these factors have combined to create a vast environmentally and socially destructive convenience food industry -- one that relies on immigrant labor from the field to the kitchen. Given that, it seems absurd to me for lawmakers and pundits, most of whom wouldn't know how to grow a tomato or roast a chicken, to be bellowing and fulminating about kicking out the "illegals." Who else would feed them? On Colorado's inmates-as-farmworkers plan says plenty about our food culture posted 2 years, 8 months ago 12 Responses

Are forests...

...even the issue here? Or is everything essentially about forests, and grist should simply change its name to forests.org?

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Consiracy?

Not in my piece. i just pointed out that a very well-connecected CEO got a highly sketchy product through the FDA -- happens all the time.

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Not fair to Scorse

Unlike Goldberg, Scorse does call for a carbon tax. That might not be enough, but it's not Goldberg's do-nothing-and-cross-fingers approach.

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Hmm.

The question, "why soy sauce?" has never occurred to me. It just ... is, like air. Yes, it's salty, but fermentation gives it a deep, slightly sour flavor that .... is Chinese food.

Try this: Get yourself a good, heavy mortar and pestle ($20 or so.) Pound a clove or 2 of garlic to a paste. Add some coarsely chopped fresh ginger, some coarsely chopped fresh or dried hot chile pepper, both to taste, and a few black peppercorns. Pound the hell out of it until it becomes a coarse paste. Work in a little soy sauce with the pestle -- not too much, just a splash or two. And then do the same with a little rice wine vinegar, and a little sesame oil. And then, if you like, some honey or sugar. When you've mixed it up, you'll have a little sauce. Taste. It should be great--sweet, slightly salty, spicy, garlicly, pungent. If it needs a little salt boost, add some more soy sauce. You probably won't even  taste the soy, but it will be adding this special little oomph, without which you would not be eating Chinese.

When everything's done cooking in the stir fry, stir that little sauce into the veggies and toss until coated (the pan will still be hot, but the heat will be off.) Taste your veggies. If they taste a little undersalted--they probably will--throw in a little more soy.

If you still don't like it, switch to Italian, like the poster above says. Instead of soy sauce, you'll be drenching everything in olive oil.

By the way, you've got to pay up for good soy sauce. Kikkoman will kick a man. Japanese tamari -- which is just pure soy sauce, no wheat -- is more delicate and less salty-tasting than most soys. (Not to diss Chinese soy sauce; just not an expert on various brands.)

My favorite tamari brand is called Nama Shoyu. It's unpasteurized, organic, and delicious.

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that '70s show

Good point, Julia. In the 1970s, high prices inspired farmers to leverage up to buy cutting-edge equipment, and then they got mauled when prices tanked and interest rates spiked.
A lot of farmers are now plowing their own cash and savings into ethanol plants.Uh-oh.

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Kathy F,

For what it's worth, David never claimed to have been offended by JS; he merely found the post pompous and sanctimonious.

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Subsidize beer...

..but make sure the cash goes to makers of real alee, not the likes of Budweiser, which uses rice instead of barley anyway, the devils.

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The 'developing world' and big ag projects

Ron Steenblik writes:

But in some parts of the world, the local soils have long ago lost their fertility and ability to sequester carbon. There are tens of millions of hectares of land in India like that, for example. Part of what some projects are trying to do is to both restore that fertility, and ability to sequester carbon, AND produce a valuable crop at the same time.

Fair enough. Before that, "Congofarmer" wrote:

Today, farmers there use hopelessly primitive techniques, simply because they don't have any income to invest in modern tools and technologies. The result: they slash and burn their way through. If a new market were to open up for them, they'd have the means to become more sustainable. They'd use fertilisers, increase yields, use up less land, rationalize water use, etc...

Here lies the problem: the Green Revolution package applauded by Congofarmer is precisely why in parts of India "local soils have long ago lost their fertility and ability to sequester carbon." So to the cure to the ravages of the Green Revolution is ... another dose of Green Revolution?

I know of no one who wants to "ban" biofuel production anywhere. I do wonder about the sustainability and justice of an arrangement wherein African soils, rather than being used to grow food for people to eat, are devoted to keeping European cars moving while maintaining Kyoto compliance.

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I don't know what you guys are talking about...

...but I hope you're calling your Congresspeople in defense of ATTRA.

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Where was the crakcpot conspiracy theory?

I merely pointed out some rather gaping holes in Bush's logic -- readily apparent to anyone who reads the paper. I did not attempt to explain them, because I don't know enough. Can you somehow reconcile Bush's belligerence viz. Iran/Iraq and his special friendship with Saudi Arabia?

As for your idea that the war has somehow been good for the enviro movement, I can also say this: what if some other country decided it had something similar to gain from invading the US? Somehow, I don't think your reaction would be quite as casual.

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Anybody who prattles about the free market...

...and how it's the only way transportation systems can work might as well sell their car and stop driving on all those Big Brother-built roads. Amtrak gets about $2 billion per year. How much does the Interstate Highway system suck in annually? To speak nothing of the petrol and ethanol subsidies that artificially lower the cost of driving,

We'd have to spend a lot of money building out train infrastructure before we got anywhere near a level playing field.

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Ah, Moosewood

I leaned a lot from Sundays at Moosewood, and cooked many a dish from it in the early 1990s. Another favorite from that time, though quite different in style, was Silver Palate. So decadent! Every recipe started with:
1 cup creme fraiche
1 stick butter
etc.
but the techniques were solid as a rock. On How a cookbook renaissance heated up the sustainable-food movement posted 2 years, 9 months ago 18 Responses

On the glorious grime and chaos of cities

Engineer writes: "Are you trying to say there are people who like the noise and grime?"  

For my reply, I'll turn to Burt Lancaster in that bitter '50s Valentine to New York, "The Sweet Smell of Success": "I love this dirty town."

Baudelaire, too, was good on the pleasures of roaming city streets. In prose poem "Crowds," he writes of strolling through what must have been quite-grimy 19th-century Paris:

It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming.

Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself of someone else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man's personality. For him alone everything is vacant; and if certain places seem closed to him, it is only because in his eyes they are not worth visiting.

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all it poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

It is a good thing sometimes to teach the fortunate of this world, if only to humble for an instant their foolish pride, that there are higher joys than theirs, finer and more uncircumscribed. The founders of colonies, shepherds of peoples, missionary priests exiled to the ends of the earth, doubtlessly know something of this mysterious drunkenness; and in the midst of the vast family created by their genius, they must often laugh at those who pity them because of their troubled fortunes and chaste lives.

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But engineer...

... you write that:

Given the thousands of megawatt hours consumed merely to provide decorative lighting on the exteriors of the 'up not out' buildings they brag about, I think an accurate overall energy accounting of all energy resources required to maintain that level of population density would look less environmentally beneficial.

By the evidence you bring to bear, the culprit is not density but "decorative lighting," which is no more fundamental to dense cities than McMansions are to rural living.

Is there really a serious green argument against concentrating people in cities? I can't imagine what it would be.

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Call me a naysaying green...

...but I'm not too impressed by this. People with huge public profiles and pocket books should be using their media might to spread the gospel of conservation, not indulging Bushean fantasies that climate change has some sort of techno-fix that can maintain our energy-guzzling ways. The fast-and-dirty way to "scrub" carbon from the atmosphere is to emit less in the first place.
And another thing...
The whole offset thing is starting to get on my nerves. Next time some boy band wants to make a green statement, they should forget tree-planting offsets and very publicly tour the country by train, showing graphically how lame the system is and how amazing it could be if we had a robust one. On Sir Richard to the Rescue? posted 2 years, 9 months ago 16 Responses

All that glitters isn't gold

The real joke is when a film that glorifies extractive economies as a savior of "the poor," and is funded by the gold-mining industry gets taken seriously at all.

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Agreed w/Sam

The diet described by Dave, and amplified by Sam, makes great environmental sense. Eating a very modest amount of meat and dairy, grown by nearby farmers in responsible ways, is not only healthy but will also help build a truly sustainable foodshed in your area.
But since vegans and vegetarians are doing miore than their bit to drive down our mindless level of meat consumption, I got nothing but love for 'em.

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BY Kira's logic ...

GWB's run should pretty much kill the chance for having a man elected president in 2008.

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Thanks, Ron

To emphasize the point, matching a 1mpg boost in milage standards would require "three or four corn ethanol plants or 13 biodiesel plants" in Oregon alone.

Now, Oregon is a pretty small state--3.4 million people. Extrapolating based on US population, it would take 308 ethanol plants to match that standard nation wide. To be fair, Oregon's distance from the corn belt makes it less efficient than many other states, since corn has to be hauled there. So let's say that it would take 200 new corn-based ethanol plants to match a 1mpg boost in milage standards.

There are currently 97 plants up and running. So, if my rough analysis is right, we could double the current number of existing plants, and just achieve the net energy benefits 1 mpg boost in standards.

Wouldn't it be smarter to chill on the ethanol and just start pushing up CAFE? Even the tiniest steps would be just as effective as spending billions building out ethanol infrastructure.

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No,ot the most impressive-sounding butcher ever...

...but if he traded places with the president, I somehow think things would start to go downhill rapidly in the meat department, and slowly and subtly change for the better in the White House. The new butcher-in-chief would probably declare war on those evil-doers over in produce.

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The Farm Bureau is hopelessly sold out to Big Ag

Marvel for a second at its legislative agenda, a craven reflection of abribiz's most horrifying fantasies. But as a farmer, I take no personal offense when someone points that obvious fact out.

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"Clean green coal"

Hey Sunflower and Amazing,
Think algae solar collectors are going to solve the problems discussed in this post -- "a 'dredge-and-fill' permit [that] allows Arch's Spruce No. 1 Mine to bury nearly seven miles of streams and is the largest permit ever issued in the history of mountaintop-removal mining in West Virginia"?

I can't think of any technology that can make the mountaintop-removal process remotely "renewable."

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Response to Dietician

I sympathize with the difficult and complex task faced by dieticians, and have no illusion that they can singlehandedly end our deep and growing diet-related health crisis. One key problem: 30 years of stagnating wages have robbed many of us of the time needed to properly prepare food. That's a huge structural problem that won't be easily addressed.

But many of the companies honoring the ADA with their presence and cash have benefited greatly from that situation.
Can the ADA emerge from the embrace of McDonald's, Coke, et al, with its integrity intact? I agree that sustainable-farming advocates and dieticians should form links. Indeed, it is happening all over the country in farm-to-school efforts and myriad projects associated with the LA-based Community food Security Coalition.

No, you probably won't see me at the Philly conference next fall. You've already identified why (lack of time and resources). But the ADA could reach out to all manner of sustainable-ag groups while there. Here's  one.

Rather then another grope-fest with Monsanto and ADM, I'd love to read about a revolt within the ranks: a kind of Society of Radical Dieticians, Any takers out there?

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The most impressive thing...

... is the interview itself. Can you imagine a reporter from the NYT asking such questions of ADM's Patricia Woertz?

Well, actually, the guy's bluntness is the most impressive thing here.

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Umbra on meat vs soy

Erin's depiction of Umbra's take on meat vs, soy is roughly accurate. However, the advice maven did add:

Let's be careful not to make the situation too black and white, though. Life-cycle analyses can help separate and elucidate factors at play, but they also raise questions. There is some indication in these studies that sustainably raised, locally procured meat-based diets can hold their own, environmentally, against heavily processed, far-shipped veggie diets. So I prefer to believe that eating my local bacon is better than eating frozen veggie burgers, not just gastronomically but ecologically. Of course, we still may eat veg for a multitude of other reasons. Like, for example, baby sheep are cute.

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Animals and ag

I agree with Greg that raising animals to kill them raises vexing ethical questions -- ones that i have no answer for. I'm deeply troubled that rather arbitrary human conventions allow me to keep three cats and a dog as beloved pets -- and yet eat equally sentient animals like cows and pigs. Every meat eater should grapple with this paradox.

And yet ... while it's true that sustainable agriculture can exist without animal waste, I wonder whether vegan ag can be productive enough to replace animal-based sustainable ag. Every time you eat an apple or a bite of lettuce, you have extracted nutrients from the soil that need to be replaced. Nitrogen-fixing "green manure" crops  are valuable and necessary, but I honestly don't know if they're sufficient for intensive small-scale planting.

It seems to make sense for small vegetable farms to keep animals to turn crops residues and other would-be wastes into valuable fertilizer. This utilitarian defense of animal ag, of course, doesn't confront the moral arguments, though.

Moreover, I resist renouncing meat on cultural-preservation grounds. Our human heritage is more than just old buildings, old texts, and ruined monuments. It also lies in the robust living culinary traditions of cultures that really value food--e.g., Thailand, Italy, Vietnam, France, Mexico, China, etc. The idea of banning, say duck confit or Pho seems as tragic to me as obliterating the glorious ruins of Rome.

These traditions are, of course, overwhelmed and undermined by McDonalds culture, the idea that every American has the right to polish off nearly a pound of meat per day.

This has been a great discussion, and a consensus has formed: we need to eat much less, and when we do eat it, we should do so conscientiously.

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U.S. fruit ad veg farmers

JS,
I'm not sure if US fruit and veg farmers serve your ideological purposes as much as you'd like. They're squeezed between rising labor costs, low prices from big buyers like Wal-Mart, and cheap imports. As you yourself recently pointed out, California garlic farmers recently made a plea for subsidies -- expect to see much more of that as the Farm Bill debate heats up.

Moreover, your agricultural patriotism is bracing, but the US stands in the midst of a crisis in diet-related maladies. It's hard to see whom our food-production system actually works for, apart from sharegolders in transnational food processors and retailers, or consumers affluent enough to shop at farmers markets where local, organic food is available. On Why federal farm support deserves a fresh look posted 2 years, 10 months ago 42 Responses

Smart post...

... but the "bridge to electrification" has two weak points. First, if cellulosic does break through, then it will retain the support of the farm lobby, which may be enough to keep the ethanol tariff in place. And if Big Ag keeps its grip on ethanol in a switch to cellulosic, then expect corn stover (waste) to be the dominant feedstock -- meaning more environmentally ruinous corn production.

Second, of course, there's coal gasification. As DR well knows, the 35 billion gallons minimum includes "alternative fuels," ie liquid coal. There's a huge lobby behind this, and Tom Friedman himself has arrayed his rhetorical girth behind it. The bridge to electrification could break there, too.

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JS,

I have not stated a position in favor of direct payments; I've merely laid out a case that farmers, since they do something vital and that almost no one in the US knows how to do anymore (grow food) probably deserve some sort of support. On the question of whether throwing farmers to the dogs of the insurance industry sorts out our food-security problem we'll have to agree to disagree. But if you want to know what sort of support I think makes sense, you'll have to wait for future columns.
Cheers,
TPOn Why federal farm support deserves a fresh look posted 2 years, 10 months ago 42 Responses

Re:Meat cost

CRFS,
You're right about direct subsidies, but remember, most of that subsidized, artificially cheap corn and soy goes into feeding livestock, representing an enormous indirect subsidy. On Why federal farm support deserves a fresh look posted 2 years, 10 months ago 42 Responses

David,

I think you're being baited here. You went on right-wing and didn't get into a shouting match or thunder against the dittoheads; and you've made clear that you find it perfectly reasonable to debate details like whether carbon emissions are causing hurricanes. So what, precisely, is "jfleck" hectoring you about?

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A measured defense of fried bologna

My dad used to fry bologna for me when I was a kid--in butter, to his credit, not the margarine that was so much in vogue in that time. It was sort of ... good. Not that I'm recommending it for school lunches -- or defending mega-producers of industrial bologna like Hormel.

But if someone were to apply traditional bologna-making techniques to meat from pastured hogs, and then someone else were to fry a few slices of the product in some thoughtfully made butter, and that person were to eat it mindfully, as part of a modest week's ration of meat, well, that fried bologna wouldn't be so bad. On Maverick chef Ann Cooper aims to spark a nationwide school-lunch revolution posted 2 years, 10 months ago 20 Responses

Right on, Julia

I do think that corn is subsidized in Mexico, but the payments are tiny compared to the US.

And i think you're right: there's already loads of government incentives to plant corn, and the next farm bill will no doubt offer more, under the absurd guise of "energy security." As i wrote in the biofuels series, the USDA is already openly talking about pulling environmentally sensitive land out of the Conservation Reserve Program and planting it with ... corn. And ass you wrote, farmers are abandoning corn-soy rotations and planting straight ... corn.

And when these huge harvests pile up, the slightest sign that demand is slipping will likely cause prices to plunge, leading to a windfall for big corn buyers and sending farmers scrambling back to the government to make up the difference.

None of it makes a corn kernel's worth of sense.

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Phillip Marlowe...

... the narrator of Raymond Chandler's detective novels, had a great way of responding to idiotic remarks: silence. Confronted by a feeble wisecrack from a would-be tough, Marlowe would describe his reaction something like like this:
"I let that one hang there. There was nothing in it for me."

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Please excuse...

... the egregious typos above; I shouldn't try to write before coffee.

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Who invented the term 'global warming'?

I think Al Gore did, while in the process of inventing the Internet.

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Yes, Jenny Price

Completely independent of the question of whether cities are sustainable -- and I think it's clear that if we can't make them so, then human civilization is doomed -- it would be wonderful and interesting if more writers began to investigate cities as sites as natural as a bird's nest. And not just "cool" places like NY's West Village, but also, say, Houston's sprawling subdivisions. On An urban denizen beseeches nature writers to focus on cities for a change posted 2 years, 10 months ago 28 Responses

'Green Manhattan'

The environmental advantages of cities -- which predate their scourge the car, by millennia -- are pretty clear. From in the New Yorker, here is David Owen:

Most Americans, including most New Yorkers, think of New York City as an ecological nightmare, a wasteland of concrete and garbage and diesel fumes and traffic jams, but in comparison with the rest of America it's a model of environmental responsibility. By the most significant measures, New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world. The most devastating damage humans have done to the environment has arisen from the heedless burning of fossil fuels, a category in which New Yorkers are practically prehistoric. The average Manhattanite consumes gasoline at a rate that the country as a whole hasn't matched since the mid-nineteen-twenties, when the most widely owned car in the United States was the Ford Model T. Eighty-two per cent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle, or on foot. That's ten times the rate for Americans in general, and eight times the rate for residents of Los Angeles County. New York City is more populous than all but eleven states; if it were granted statehood, it would rank fifty-first in per-capita energy use.

From Owen, David, The New Yorker, October 18, 2004, "Green Manhattan: Everywhere Should be More like New York" On An urban denizen beseeches nature writers to focus on cities for a change posted 2 years, 10 months ago 28 Responses

Agriculture and human history

Bart,
I'm puzzled by this statement: "Civilizations based on agriculture (and hence almost all human history)..."

As I understand it, human beings in more or less present form have existed for about 290,000 years, while agriculture originated (and didn't immediately permeate human societies) about 10,000 years ago. So ag represents a small fraction of human history, no?

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Not to pile on Bob from ALAMN...

...but his comment reminded me of an exchange I had a couple of years ago on my old blog, Bitter Greens Journal. The exchange involved an an anonymous person from the American Lung Association of Minnesota and that group's perplexing zeal for corn-based ethanol. It can be found here.

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JS,

What do subsidies have to do with organics, fair-trade, "buy-local," et al? These are producer- and consumer-driven movements that operate with scant public support. It is industrial ag and "free trade" arrangements that get the goodies. You seem to be flogging a non sequitur; it's like denouncing third-party movements and then, coming out firmly against corporate-dominated campaign finance.

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What really got me about this study...

... was the bit about how boys tend to go to Mars, to get more candy bars, while girls go to Jupiter to get more stupider. I'll have to download the whole report to make sense of that. Seems a bit farfetched.

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Piedmont Biofuels

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Piedmont Biofuels, a serious source of community-owned biodiesel in the Chapel Hill/Carrboro/Raliegh/Durham area. Anybody in that area thinking of going diesel should contact those folks.
On All the resources you need to hop on the biofuels bandwagon posted 2 years, 11 months ago 5 Responses

Piedmont Biofuels

I would be remiss if I didn't mention Piedmont Biofuels, a serious source of community-owned biodiesel in the Chapel Hill/Carrboro/Raliegh/Durham area. Anybody in that area thinking of going diesel should contact those folks.

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"guacamole dip"

Let me get this straight. Kraft gives itself license to slop together a bunch of hydrogenated fat and corn syrup (there's that stuff again; I can't get away from it), add less than 2 percent avocado, and call it guacamole, simply because it attaches the redundant word "dip"?

I suppose you'd shrug it off, then, if ADM were to come out with a bottled beverage called "Martini drink," featuring a dash of gin and a bunch of industrially produced corn liquor? After all, it wouldn't be marketing a Martini, but rather a Martini drink!

Corporate marketing logic has clearly outstripped my reasoning abilities.

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Wow!

Great stuff.  My favorite lines:
"And its about to get real wild in the half
You be buying evian just to take a fuckin bath."

and:
"Used to have minerals and zinc in it (new world water)
Now they say it got lead and stink in it (new world water)"

and
"Fuck a bank; I need a twenty-year water tank"

The poke at Johnny Cash did seem a bit gratuitous, though.

What ever happened to Mos Def? Did acting in Shaft wind up being a career-ending decision?

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Meander

Mexican farmers may indeed get some relief from higher corn prices. Looks like weaning the soft-frink industry off of HFCS is going to be tough, though. This this post from last week.
And just to two things up, looks like the HFCS industry has succeeded in bullying Mexico into accepting  US-made HFCS.On Check out the latest entries in the celeb-biofuels biz posted 2 years, 11 months ago 3 Responses

Meander

Mexican farmers may indeed get some relief from higher corn prices. Looks like weaning the soft-frink industry off of HFCS is going to be tough, though. This this post from last week.
And just to two things up, looks like the HFCS industry has succeeded in bullying Mexico into accepting  US-made HFCS.On It's time for a real "food vs. fuel" debate posted 2 years, 11 months ago 3 Responses

I have no idea if orwhen the honeymoon will end...

but I would be shocked if it managed outlast this thread, which promises to be infinite.    

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Huh?

If all of the big greenie groups are pushing Jason's agenda, then what, precisely, is he complaining about? Please -- don't respond. Instead, go save a whale, or raise some cash for one of the many groups who push that agenda. !Ya basta!

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Noah's got a point

Corn agriculture deserves most blame for the Gulf of Mexico dead zone; but most of that corn gets shoveled into industrial meat production. If people ate much less meat and focused on pasture-raised locally produced product, than meat ag would essentially disappear as a problem. Thus I salute the efforts of vegans, who by eating no meat lower the overall burden. Same with fish. We have to eat less, and do it very mindfully. The more people who go vegan, the more fish left for us -- what is the phrase? -- conscientious omnivores.

There's really no need for enmity on these issues.

I will, though, remind Noah of the centrality of animals to capturing nitrogen for sustainable ag. That doesn't mean Noah has to eat animals, though. On Umbra on sustainable sushi posted 2 years, 12 months ago 54 Responses

I Montesecondo that motion.

I shoulda bought a more local tipple. NC wine is problematic; a lot of it is composed of juice hauled in from California. And a lot of California wine is produced under awful environmental and labor conditions. To drink fwell rom my foodshed, I'd have done much better to choose from among many outstanding NC beers.

In my own area in the western part of the state, a lot of people are trying to introduce viticulture and are making wine, often from Cali juice. I salute their efforts, but I wonder how appropriate wine grapes are here. A better idea would seem to be hard cider. there are lots of apple orchards that produce fruit with fine flavor but with little pockmarks that turn off consumers used to Red Delicious.

Why not press those apples into delicious unpastuerized cider? all it would take is infrastructure.

While I'm prattling on about my drinkshed, my area of Western NC seems perfect for growing hops. In the lowlands around Chapel Hill, they can grow barley. Does anyone else see the possibility of happy, hoppy synergy, and a way to make our state's great beers even better and more sustainable? On Locally grown food shouldn't be just for those with cash to spare posted 2 years, 12 months ago 10 Responses

"huge costs"

I can appreciate the "huge costs" of opening the border to people; but what about the costs incurred by, say, Mexican farmers from the flood of cheap U.S. corn? Aren't such dislocations simply the genius of the market? Ie, when the millions flooded in, wouldn't wages tumble in the US and rise elsewhere, and then lead to rational population distributions?

People are, after all, rational actors -- according to market dogma. I don't see how the costs of letting capital seek its highest return should be dismissed as the cost of doing business, while the costs of labor seeking its highest return should justify state interventions, ie, tightly enforced borders, immigration restrictions, etc.

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Why thanks, Bart

And I guess I can see your point about Friedman, though I am repelled by his breathless enthusiasm for hyper-globalized consumer capitalism.

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And another thing...

If we keep concentrating vegetable production into smaller and smaller areas, and keep in turn plunking subdivisions onto those areas, where are we going to grow food? And if we the number of farms and farmers keeps dropping and we keep massing uniformed thugs with clubs and guns at the border, who is going to grow our food?

I do believe these strange trends might present opportunities for sustainable, local-oriented agriculture. I would, however, like to hear someone like JS Scorse explain the logic behind them.

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But Deborah,

I guess the issue is whether organic agriculture as a restorative process can survive Wal-Mart's embrace. If organic industrializes to meet Wal-Mart's needs -- say, vast fields of monocropped spinach, fertilized with manure hauled in from far away, or dairy cows penned in feedlots and fed monocropped corn, which is hard on the land organic or not -- than its restorative potentials might be scrificed. Many greens obsess over scaling up and coming up with a Solution to the problem of global warming. In this context, Wal-Mart seems like the answer and not the problem. It's at least worth considering that a wiser response is to scale down and search for many solutions. In this context, a highly consolidated operation like Wal-Mart seems outdated and irrelevant.

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Okay

Leaving the organic issue aside, I can applaud Wal-Mart using its market heft to squeeze suppliers to use less packaging, using green building techniques, etc. But Wal-Mart didn't make these changes because people applauded it. It made them because critics cogently bashed it and, well, raised placards.

And J.S., McDonald's has been buying some fair-trade coffee and contemplating phasing out hydrogenated oil. Lots and lots of people eat there. Perhaps you should sidle up and order a Big Mac, just to show support?

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Labor rights

I salute attempts to make meals free of animal cruelty, but also remember David's point. Even when you buy animal-free, organic, and sometimes even local, there's a lot of human exploitation embedded in your food. And there's no reason we can't make it a priority to change that,

Also, it's bears remembering that animals are critically necessary to sustainably capturing nitrogen for food production. Of course, that should only make us respect their welfare more, not less.  Pretending it isn't so, though, is a severely limited strategy for advancing animal rights or sustainable agriculture.

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Jane Jacobs

Eric's point about "self-inspecting" systems harks back to the work of that great maverick economist, Jane Jacobs. She noted that in mixed-use city streets with a variety of shops at the street level -- Manhattan's West Village being her prime example -- crime rates tend to be low. Shop keepers have a de facto policing function. They keep an eye on the street, and if there's a mugging or something, they'll act quickly to intervene. Ritzier residential neighborhoods-- eg, townhouse blocks on the Upper East Side--achieve a similar result through a professional cadre of doormen. But in the high-rise apartment blocks that were fashionable under Robert Moses' (disastrous) reign over NY, there was no self-policing function. The result: chaos, lawlessness, police brutality, etc.

There's an analogy here between giant death factories and human-scale farms catering to nearby residents.

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The economist speaks

"i am well aware of the problems of industrial ag but buying local is such a small part of the solution- maybe 5%..."

Stellar job of quantification there, JS. When someone claims to have sorted out "the solution," they too often end up being part of the problem.

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Oh, and JS

To clarify my comment that since " global commodity market had proven such an economic disaster." I should have added: "for farmers." Of course it's been a great triumph for the firms that control it.

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This makes way too much sense

I think we should focus instead on powering our individual SUVs with corn-based ethanol.

Seriously, this needs to happen now. Gar, how much would it cost to set up ultra-light rail in a mid-sized city (eg, Austin, Tx.)

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Tana,

I've been coveting the French Laundry and Bouchon cookbooks for years. They look amazing. And I gave a sausage-loving friend Charcuterie for his birthday -- it's a book I plan to add to my own library. One day i'll read "Soul of a Chef," and other "of a chef"  books.
Note to readers: Tana runs a great blog called Small Farms that i plan to feature in a future Edible Media on sustainable-food blogs. On A revolutionary bread-making technique, and two new foodie blogs posted 3 years ago 5 Responses

Right on, Jones

Let's not be too cavalier about discarding 1000s of years of tradition. Just as beef consumption can be disastrous, innocuous or even beneficial, so, perhaps, can fish eating.
And remember, food is what tethers us to the earth and the sea. By appealing to people's senses, we might convince more to care about eco issues than we do by appealing to their sense of duty. On Worldwatch releases a hopeful plan for saving the world's fish. posted 3 years ago 9 Responses

There's certainly nothing wrong...

... with not eating fish. I salute you, Pandu. It was I who was being smug. Now the task is to convince the fish eaters among us to eat less and lower on the food chain. On Worldwatch releases a hopeful plan for saving the world's fish. posted 3 years ago 9 Responses

Pyewacket

Great comment. "The point is that it's actually harder than most people think to have a truly sustainable farm without animals." Actually, it's impossible. On Go veggie -- a poll posted 3 years ago 41 Responses

But Wiscidea,

What's being criticized here isn't the corporatization of organic; it's the watering down of organic by corporations. If Dean Foods makes a buck by paying a decent price to small-scale organic growers, I say, fine. (Although I will still try to locate a nearby dairy farmer and buy milk directly from him/her). But if their plan is to slash costs by consolidating production into 5,000-cow feedlots, and feed the cows "organic" corn, then I say, the hell with them.

Going forward, efforts by Wal-Mart and Whole Foods to "go local" will run into a fundamental problem: large-scale corporate enterprises, as they mature, make profit by cutting costs. And it's going to be very tempting to cut "transaction costs" by seeking out a few large suppliers, rather than dozens of tiny ones.

Sam, fellow finance journalist, am I right here?

Further, our food choices can potentially be a real force for economic development within given communities. Why sacrifice that power just because some big player did something remotely responsible?  Robust local economies with thriving small-scale producers deliver real environmental benefits: 1) because people who live where they produce are more likely to be responsible land and resource stewards; and 2) more local-based economic activity equals less environmentally ruinous long-haul travel.

There are environmentalists who take it as their goal to "green"  the likes of Wal-Mart or Dean Foods. That's fine -- and useful as far as it goes.  But the more fundamental and radical response is keep pushing to actually rebuild robust local and regional economies, in food and everything else.

Given the vast problems facing this culture, I think fundamental and radical approaches are justified. On Business Week article gave some the wrong impression, company says posted 3 years ago 20 Responses

Life-changing grits

I don't know if anyone retails Anson Mills products out there, but you can get them through the company's Web site. The prices are damned high for grits, but when you reflect that most corn is GMO and grown in environmentally hideous ways, and that farmers get a pittance for it, and that Anson pays a good price to its suppliers, then it starts to make sense. That, plus the fact that the grits have wonderful flavor--they taste of corn. Their suppliers use heirloom varieties bred for flavor, not yield.
I know AM is committed to small farmers because a few years ago, they approached my own Maverick Farms--a 3 acre operation--about growing for them. They were looking to diversify their growers geographically; we're in the mountains, and most of their growers are in the lowlands of South Carolina. A flood washed out the test plot of heirloom field corn we were growing for them; and then we never got certified organic, which is what they require. But i was damned impressed by the attention they gave us--and even more so by the quality of the grits. Try 'em out. On Great veggies -- and a model for city farming -- thrive at Boggy Creek Farm models. posted 3 years ago 5 Responses

I don't know, BioD

It's always worth pointing out when someone's flacking for industry. Of course, you still have to take on their arguments ...On A new series posted 3 years ago 24 Responses

While we eagerly await...

the Economist to reveal Truth to the non-expert masses, let's remember that the sort of ideologue who wants to secure long-term access to petroleum at all costs, and wants to block curbs on emissions, currently control the White House, Congress, and the judiciary. The other side controls a few blogs and NGOs. Which side has done more damage? Which will create more long-term economic ruin? On Denialists are not the only ones posted 3 years ago 27 Responses

Try consulting them?

Welcome to Gristmill, Samuel. I admired Organic inc.

First, I think, it would be wise to stop pursuing policies that push people from the land. As Mike Davis shows to devastating effect in Planet of Slums, IMf-sanctioned "structural adjustments" and other policies are forcing "the poorest of the poor" off of their land by the millions, into urban shantytowns. But unlike in, say, Victorian London, these megacities are simply not providing sufficient jobs to absorb these folks. And food from the much-celebrated Green Revolution boom isn't reaching them.

To the Gates Foundation and other agencies, this sounds like a big problem that demands a big solution -- preferably one provided by Western experts and corporations. However, they forget the role played by just such actors in creating the problem in the first place.

A wiser strategy might be to consult smallholder farmers about what they need to stay on the land and produce more food. On Will it really be green this time? posted 3 years ago 2 Responses

By all means, Jabailo...

...show us the way forward and fumigate your own house with that miracle stuff. I will be training my eye on both the DDT ban and the false promises of GMOs in future columns.
P.S. Thanks Theresa Binstock for an informative post. On Decades after Silent Spring, pesticides remain a menace -- especially to farmworkers posted 3 years, 1 month ago 7 Responses

Whew...

...that was close. On Business Week cover story looks at the watering down of the organic ethos posted 3 years, 1 month ago 29 Responses

My first reaction to the BW story:

coulna' said it better myself. And if I did, I'd be widely accused of being "negative."
More soon. On Business Week cover story looks at the watering down of the organic ethos posted 3 years, 1 month ago 29 Responses

That's not writing....

...that's typing. On A few choice bits from the hate mail that's come today posted 3 years, 1 month ago 9 Responses

Brilliantly done, Dave

What does that hoary old linguist know about geopolitics, anyway. On Woodward's new book is terrifying posted 3 years, 1 month ago 3 Responses

If you insist, Alex...

...but this is tedious.

Here is Reuters on common E. coli vs. E.coli O157:H7:

Escherichia coli is a common and usually harmless bacteria found in the guts of animals. A new, toxic strain called E.coli O157:H7 was identified in 1982. It now causes an 73,000 cases of infection and 61 deaths in the United States each year.

Okay, so the real question here is O157:H7, not E. coli per se. You write that is O157:H7 "notoriously hard to find." What's your source on that? According to the Reuters article linked above, authorities found it on a second bag of conventional spinach a few days ago. Oops, just today a third bag of tainted conventional spinach has been id'ed. All three have been branded Dole.

Alex, be honest, now: does Dole give Hudson money? Just asking -- I know gigantic Natural Selection Foods buys, processes, packs, and distributes spinach for Dole and nearly three dozen other brands. Such is the efficiency of the food system you've devoted your life to protecting.

Now, where were we? In addition to all three tainted bags being branded Dole, they're all conventional. I await news coverage of the case of tainted organic spinach you've been trumpeting.

However, I won't be surprised if it happens. Vast fields of organically grown spinach are just as susceptible to contamination by tainted streams as conventional ones. And  that's what looks likely to have caused the outbreak.

Finally, to the study you cite about O157:H7 in organic vs. conventional cattle. Its abstract doesn't mention whether the organic cattle are grass-fed. If they are, the study is pertinent to the debate; if not, then it's irrelevant. Dean Foods, the largest U.S. processor of conventional and "organic" milk, gets a significant portion of its "organic" milk from confined cows eating organic corn.

But that practice undermines the organic label; it reproduces many of the ills of industrial production while drawing a price premium from misinformed consumers. By the way, have you guys hit up Dean for cash? Might be worth the trouble.

Nina Planck points us to a lit review in the Journal of Dairy Science showing that grass-fed cattle have much lower incidence of O157:H7 than grain-fed cattle. Of course, I mentioned that in my above post as well.

By the way, how's Michael Fumento doing? Still, make that Monsanto cash fall out of the sky? On Why the Hudson Insitute needs to compost its manure a little better. posted 3 years, 1 month ago 12 Responses

Well done,

(new?) editorial intern Kate Sheppard. Another good post. Importing hundreds of millions of cut flowers from China, with all that it will take to keep them "fresh" until they reach the florist's cooling case, seems nonsensical to me--and a dubious "development project" for China. On The Times a bit too flowery on China's growing rose industry posted 3 years, 2 months ago 11 Responses

Who are these economists...

...who speak with one voice and have everything perfectly sorted out, if only us plebes would just do as they say? Do you really pretend, Jason D. Scorse, that Milton Friedman doesn't bitterly oppose government interventions into the market, including social safety nets, while, say, Robert Reich cheers them on? To speak nothing of my favorite economist, Robert Pollin.

There's a bit more contention within the dismal science on the issue of government intervention/safety nets then you let on. On As India modernizes, farmers and public health pay the price. posted 3 years, 2 months ago 20 Responses

Jason D thunders yet again: OUT OF AGRICULTURE

Sometimes I wish all farmers would get OUT OF AGRICULTURE and let the high-value knowledge economy workers of the world sort out where their next dinner is coming from.

And Jason, your zero-subsidy prescription might not work the miracles you promise. It wouldn't undo the stronghold over the food supply held by a few corporations; it wouldn't undo 50-60 years of disinvestment in local food-production infrastructure; and it probably wouldn't even compel farmers to stop overproducing a few commodities. Ag economist Daryll Ray has pretty persuasively argued the latter point; I'd like to hear your response.

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in college econ textbooks--which assume perfectly free markets and other fantasies. On As India modernizes, farmers and public health pay the price. posted 3 years, 2 months ago 20 Responses

Um, David....

... I think it's time to leaven this discussion with some nuggets of truly bad writing. I want Quinn prose that hits the page with the shrill crash of a chandelier hitting a stone floor. Bring it! On A short review posted 3 years, 2 months ago 114 Responses

Jason: The U.S. food-production model...

1. relies on an essentially exploited class of farmers;
   
2. produces lots and lots of really bad food;
   
3. treads quite heavily on the earth;
   
4. is highly consolidated within the hands of a few firms with outisized political clout;
   
5. and is propped up by regular infusions of government cash.

How do you propose to sustainably import this model to the global south? More important: why? On As India modernizes, farmers and public health pay the price. posted 3 years, 2 months ago 20 Responses

Alex, call Michael Fumento's agent

Hey, Alex, shame about that salary. You might want to go down the hall and scratch Michael Fumento's eyes out. Here's what BusinessWeek has to say to say about your colleague, who seems to be doing a bit better than the average teacher in your rural county:

Scripps Howard News Service announced Jan. 13 that it's severing its business relationship with columnist Michael Fumento, who's also a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. The move comes after inquiries from BusinessWeek Online about payments Fumento received from agribusiness giant Monsanto (MON ) -- a frequent subject of praise in Fumento's opinion columns and a book.

In a statement released on Jan. 13, Scripps Howard News Service Editor and General Manager Peter Copeland said Fumento "did not tell SHNS editors, and therefore we did not tell our readers, that in 1999 Hudson recieved a $60,000 grant from Monsanto." Copeland added: "Our policy is that he should have disclosed that information. We apologize to our readers." In the Jan. 5 column, Fumento wrote that St. Louis-based Monsanto has about 30 products in the pipeline that will aid farmers, "but also help us all by keeping prices down and allowing more crops to be grown on less land."

He listed some of the products Monsanto has on tap: drought-resistant corn, crops that could reduce the need for environment-damaging fertilizers, and soybeans that might reduce heart disease.

In his career at Hudson, Fumento has carved out a specialty debunking critics of the agribusiness and biotechnology industries. In 1999, he says, he solicited $60,000 from Monsanto to write a book on the business. The book, entitled BioEvolution was published in 2003. A spokesman for Monsanto confirmed the payments to the Hudson Institute.

A note on Asia and poverty

It's worth noting that the Asian Miracle of the past 20-30 years has been a repudiation of almost the entire neoliberal/IMF policy package. Yes, these nations geared their economies for export, as the IMF, etc., urged them to. But they had strong federal governments, they protected domestic industries, they invested heavily in education, they manipulated their currencies to boost exports, etc. In Latin America, where prominent countries like Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil have largely taken the IMF medicine, the result has been wage stagnation, financial crisis, and stubbornly high poverty rates. In other countries there, things tend to be even worse.

As for happiness, etc, one way to to measure it might be the level of satisfaction people feel from their occupations.  People spend a third or more of most days working--do they have to die every day in order to "make a living," or does their work make them full of life?On Just because GDP doesn't track happiness is no reason to reject economic growth posted 3 years, 2 months ago 29 Responses

Fair enough, Canis...

"Back when I was working in downtown Brooklyn, I was very happy with a caffe` americano at the Starbucks across from the courthouse."

Glad it made you happy; sounds pretty grim to me. Did you frequent Sahadi's around the corner--not for coffee but for groceries and prepared food? Now that place made me happy.On Lessons on how to live from the NYT food section posted 3 years, 2 months ago 9 Responses

Hell yeah

What are all of those people in all of those cubicles doing, anyway? They sure aren't producing happiness. Set them free! On If the U.S. could get happier and poorer, would it? posted 3 years, 2 months ago 16 Responses

Patrick,

Please show me evidence of Wal-Mart buying internationally from small farms. As I understand it, Wal-Mart and other multinational chains have sparked consolidation of farm holdings in the global south, helping chase hundreds of thousands of small farmers off the land and into megacities in search of non-existent work (or north toward treacherous and illegal immigration). Check out this post from a while back, in which I lean on the New York Times and the USDA for support.

Many progressives continue to hail the global trade in agricultural goods as a way for "Third World" farmers to "pull themselves out of poverty." Meanwhile, global commodity prices continue their inexorable downward trend, pressured in part by the consolidation of buyers as represented by Wal-Mart's rapid growth. On Big buyers make organic farmers feel smaller than ever posted 3 years, 2 months ago 25 Responses

Mad flavor

Caniscandida is right that I don't write enough about this critical topic--one very close to my heart. Pursuit of pleasure at the table is what got me into this mess in the first place. It's why i don't think i'll ever be able to leave this farm; and I think, pace David, it has amazing potential for the salvation of the U.S. food system.

But how do you get Americans, two generations off the land and with nearly all regional food traditions nearly dead, interested in flavor--especially with all that fast food and supermarket garbage available at artificially low prices?

The best answer I've come up with is school lunches. Start 'em young. Indoctrinate youth in the sublime skill of enjoying a meal. Reinvest in school cafeterias, which have become crude reheating facilities; bring recent chef-school grads to act as chefs de cuisine in each school, with the goal of grooming a current kitchen staff member for the job. That way, you're not only giving kids well-cooked food, but also delivering skills to a woefully deskilled work force. Finally, and most importantly, dedicate large chunks of school playgrounds to vegetable gardens, using the biointensive techniques of John Jeavon's How to Grow More Vegetables as a guide to serious food production. Chicken yards could provide eggs and fertilizer to the process. And who would do the work? why, child labor, of course. Meanwhile, the schools could combine to form buying clubs to source meat, dairy, and butter from local farms. How would they ever afford extra-virgen olive oil--that critical ingredient? Bought in the vast quantities, the schools could get a good price. Imagine all the learning that could get done: economics, politics, history, biology, chemistry ... it's all there. Alice Waters must become secretary of education!

We harvested 350 pounds of amazing heirloom tomatoes yesterday. Later, we cooked up a meal for a few friends of fresh pasta with eggs our hens had laid that day, pesto with basil and parsley from the garden, a tomato salad, and a green salad with walnuts and beets. For desert, we toasted, shelled, and ground cocoa beans someone brought us from Guatemala, and made it into ice cream using those same eggs.

Maverick Farms has been called a food cult. I wish you all could join. On Food and pleasure posted 3 years, 3 months ago 23 Responses