Last year, a colleague suggested I check out a startup with the intriguing, and so-very-California, name of Tao It.

Founded by Berkeley professor Dara O’Rourke, Tao It aimed to tap a multiplicity of databases to rank consumer products according to their health and environmental attributes. The idea: If people could instantly learn online whether there are bad chemicals in their food and other goods, they would start buying green, putting pressure on companies to make more environmentally friendly and healthier products.

When Tao It emerged from stealth mode, it was rebranded with the blander but apparently more marketable moniker GoodGuide. An iPhone app followed that let you type in the name of a product to check its rating as you shopped.

I gave it whirl a few times but tapping away on a tiny keyboard at a crowded grocery story with a child in tow grew tedious and GoodGuide soon got pushed to the iPhone graveyard, that last screen where little-used apps languish.

No longer. Thanks to the app’s new built in barcode scanner, GoodGuide has jumped to the home screen.  Click on "scan," point the iPhone at, say, a bottle of organic chocolate sauce, and the app uses the iPhone's camera to read the barcode and deliver instant feedback on the product's "health performance," "environmental performance" as well its its maker's "social performance.

"Barcode scanning is critical for us," O'Rourke, associate professor at Cal's Department of Environmental Science, Management and Policy, told me in an email. "This moves us closer to our goal of providing full environmental, social, and health information to consumers right at the moment they make purchasing decisions."

GoodGuide to date has rated 63,000 products -- from food and household chemicals to personal care items to toys -- according to various criteria, including how transparent a company is about disclosing information. GoodGuide's scientists, based in San Francisco, employ a extensive methodology to devise the ratings, which is detailed here.

After spending a few days scanning and shopping, I have to agree that it’s a game changer, even for someone like me, who lives in a locavore-loving, farmer-marketing, in-Alice-Waters' name-we-pray town.

To test my hypothesis as the annual American holiday glutton-fest approaches, I put the GoodGuide scanner app to the "koodie" test at Berkeley Bowl, one of the local temples of conspicuous culinary consumption. 

A koodie, as I learned from a tweet from Grist executive editor Russ Walker, is a pint-sized foodie, a child with an unusual awareness and interest in high-quality food and ingredients.

I just call him Gabe, my 11-year-old son, who along with his friends at Malcolm X Elementary are the children of the Food Revolution, schooled in organic gardens, taught to shop at thrice-weekly farmers markets -- organic only, thank you -- and parented by the food police. 

Which is all wonderful of course, but does have its downsides -- like when a koodie plants himself in an aisle of Berkeley Bowl and refuses to move until he has compared the ingredients of two brands of cereal bars needed for class snack, rooting out culinary incorrectness.

Now instead of arguing about whether the $14 bottle of organic maple is really that superior to the $8 version, we could just scan ‘em all and let GuideGuide settle the score for us.

Lured by the chance to play with dad's iPhone, Gabe soon was scanning everything in the store, including those items that escape his usual scrutiny.

First up, Ben & Jerry’s Phish food, a favorite. "Uh, dad, this doesn’t look good," he said, showing me the screen. GoodGuide gave the fatty ice cream only 2.2 points out of 10 for the health rating. (Ben & Jerry's did score high, not surprisingly, on environment and "society," earning Phish food an overall ranking of 5.3.)

Next Gabe pointed the iPhone at a pint of Haagen-Dazs "all natural" vanilla -- which we buy frequently but which scored a bottom-of-the-barrel rating of 0.6 from GoodGuide for high saturated fats, high cholesterol, and high sugars. (We also learned learn that, "the company that makes this product has an above average score in toxic or hazardous spills" but a below average score for energy use.)

Next time we'll check out the soy ice cream.

Gabe quickly learned how to work the GoodGuide system. "Dad, let's check out the chocolate syrup," he said, grabbing a couple bottles of a product we almost never buy.

No surprise that Santa Cruz Organics smacked down Smuckers. Brandishing the iPhone, he now had the statistical proof to argue why we should buy chocolate syrup. (Press a button in the app and you can email your findings to friends.)

Alas, GoodGuide could not resolve the great organic maple syrup debate of '09. Neither product showed up in the company's database.

Scanning can be a hit-or-miss proposition. Many products did not register when scanned or only did after scanning a few times. To get a detailed explanation of the ratings you still need to go to GoodGuide’s website.

Still, it's a powerful tool. And once the koodies get iPhones of their own, watch for them to be scanning the groceries you bring home, calling you to account for crimes against nutrition.

"The mobile space is where I think we have the most potential to really change the marketplace," says O'Rourke. "As more and more people use our mobile apps, I believe more retailers and manufacturers will realize that a new world of transparency is here, and that they might as well be more transparent about the full impacts of their products and supply chains."

And just in time for the holidays, on Dec. 4, GoodGuide will be adding 1,000 new toys to its database, analyzing the must-haves of the season.

Scan the Zhu Zhu hamster at your own risk.

Related Links:

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Ask Umbra’s video advice on making lunch matter

Ask Umbra’s video advice on making lunch matter

Michael Pollan (left) and Tom Philpott talk food.Celebrated food and ag author Michael Pollan debunked some myths about organic agriculture Tuesday night at a Grist event in San Francisco, in a conversation with Grist food writer Tom Philpott and the audience.

In response to a question about whether we can really feed the world without industrialized ag (ah yes, a perennial), Pollan pointed out that we're not feeding the world with it now.  He said we wouldn't be doing developing nations a favor by exporting a fossil fuel–dependent ag system to them when it's clear that fossil fuels are only going to become more scarce and expensive.  And overproducing government-subsidized food in the U.S. is certainly not the way to solve world hunger -- it just exacerbates it by putting small-scale farmers in developing countries out of business.  Give people in the developing world the tools to do sophisticated organic ag and it will help solve many problems, including undocumented immigration, Pollan argues.

And yes, sophisticated organic ag does exist.  Pollan disputed the idea that organic techniques are anti-technology.  Philpott agreed, pointing out that renowned farmers Joel Salatin and Will Allen use advanced technology to produce organic food -- it's just not the type of technology that Big Ag promotes and profits from.

Asked what the Obama administration is thinking on ag -- sometimes veering in the direction of progressive change, other times whipping back toward the agrichemical status quo, as Philpott puts it -- Pollan said the admin appears to be playing both sides of the street. Pollan related an anecdote in which the president implied that there needs to be a popular political movement for sustainable food before he can make big change -- and suggested to his wife that this might be her issue.  

Where, asked Pollan, are the members of Congress who will take up this issue as their own?  For now, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is letting Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and other Big Ag–oriented reps run the show on food and ag policy.  The recent farm-bill fight was a loss, but during the debate the sustainable food movement started to get its message heard in D.C. and rattle some of the vested interests.  The next fight on Capitol Hill will be over the school lunch program reauthorization, Pollan said.  

Though the sustainable food movement seems to be thriving in oases like the Bay Area, Philpott pointed out that still only 3 to 4 percent of food consumed in the U.S. is organic or local.  How do we grow that number and include more people?  Pollan said the movement, like many social movements, was started by elites, but is spreading to other parts of society.  He sees encouraging signs in the heartland and among young people.  But if in 20 years people are still talking about this as an elitist movement, we'll know we really screwed up.  

Grist offers a big thanks to Pollan, host Tony Conrad and the rest of our host committee, our caterer Dominique Salomon (the food was scrumptious!), and everyone who attended and helped to make the evening a success.  Let's keep the conversation rolling.

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Common wisdom tells us there’s no free lunch. But you can have a guilt-free lunch, thanks to Umbra Fisk’s recipe for midday munchers everywhere. You won’t have to swallow your pride -- you can eat well, save money, and help this juicy planet we call home.

“Ask Umbra” is the first video series produced by GristTV. Look for new video tips for greening your life from Umbra nearly every week.

Watch it on the go! Subscribe to GristTV video podcasts via iTunes.

Feed your mind with these links from the Grist archives:
Ask Umbra on food storage options
Let’s (re)do school lunch
Cargill, the National School Lunch program, and antibiotic-resistant salmonella
Maverick chef Ann Cooper aims to spark a nationwide school-lunch revolution
… and even more on school lunch

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Like a tractor driven by a drunk, the Obama administration keeps zigzagging on food/ag policy--sometimes veering in the direction of progressive change, other times whipping back toward the agrichemical status quo.

In the last couple of days, there's been a sharp turn toward the status quo. As I reported yesterday, Obama plucked Islam “Isi” Siddiqui from the nation's most powerful agrichemical lobby group and made him our chief negotiator on ag issues in global trade talks. This is a major coup for Big Ag. Ramming open foreign markets for our cheap food commodities and pricey ag inputs is critical to the industry's future profits--and perilous for global food security and the environment.

And today, Obama's Big Ag side got the best of him again. He tapped Roger Beachy, long-time president of the Danforth Plant Science Center, as chief of the USDA's newly created National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA).

A creation of the 2008 Farm Bill, the NIFA "replaces the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service, which distributes $200 million in competitive grants and about $280 million in 'formula funding' to land-grant universities," Science blog reports.

Science continues:

The Farm Bill adds another $106 million annually of competitive funding for research into organic farming, biomass, and fruits and vegetables. It also calls for a "distinguished scientist" to be appointed for a 6-year term as director.

So this is a critical post. If the sustainable farming movement is going to scale up and really start providing a large portion of the nation's calories--and deliver on its potentially huge environmental promises--than we're going to need a significant commitment of federal research dollars.

Roger BeachyPhoto: Courtesy of the Danforth CenterAnd what are we getting with the appointment of Beachy? The Danforth Plant Science Center, nestled in Monsanto's St. Louis home town, is essentially that company's NGO research and PR arm. According to its website, the center "was founded in 1998 through gifts from the St. Louis-based Danforth Foundation, the Monsanto Fund (a philanthropic foundation), and a tax credit from the State of Missouri."

Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant sits on the center's board of trustees, along with execs from defense giant McDonnell Douglas and pharma titan Merck. Another notable board member is Alfonso Romo, a Mexican magnate who cashed in big during his country's notoriously corrupt privatization /liberalization bonanza in the early '90s.

Romo used his connections to build a company called Seminis into the globe's biggest vegetable-seed concern, with dreams (as yet unrealized) of loads of new GMO veggie varieties. Monsanto bought Seminis in 2005. Here's a revealing Wall Street Journal profile of Romo from 1999; and here's what I wrote about him and the Monsanto/Seminis tie up back in 2005. (Interesting tidbit: Romo claims credit for innovating those insipid and ubiquitous "baby carrots"; and for reducing the spiciness of jalepeno peppers.)

On its short list of "partners" we find several research-oriented universities and one corporation: Monsanto. In the Danforth Center's 2007 annual report (PDF), Monsanto is mentioned no fewer than ten times funding this or that project.

So essentially, the public face of Monsanto's research efforts now has his fingers on the USDA's research purse strings. Score a big one for agribusiness!

So Obama has become an agribiz shill, right? Well, it's not nearly so simple.

Last winter, the administration tapped Kathleen Merrigan as deputy USDA secretary. This is traditionally a powerful position within the agency; under Bush, a paid-up industrial corn man held the post. Merrigan has pristine credentials as an organic advocate--and from the whispers I've heard, has been pushing that agenda within USDA.

I'm told she's met with many prominent sustainable-ag advocates--folks who were completely frozen out by the Bush USDA. The latest: On Twitter, Michel Dimock of California's Roots of Change recently announced he has "4 mtngs w/ USDA nxt 2 days." That sort of access simply wasn't available at Bush's USDA.

Then there's Merrigan's brainchild, "The Know Your Farmer Know Your Food" initiative (complete with splashy new web site). It's essentially an attempt to alert players in the sustainable food movement to possibilities of getting existing USDA funding. (I wrote briefly about its limits and promise lat week.) Again, you can call the initiative largely symbolic, but nothing remotely like it was happening under Bush.

It's certainly energizing sustainable ag NGO chiefs. On Chews Wise blog, Sam Fromartz reports that such folks are "pumped" by the initiative. He asked several for their reactions. Words like "fantastic," "thrilling," and "quite encouraging" tripped off their tongues.

Meanwhile, Michelle Obama--and her food ambassador, White House assistant chef/gardener Sam Kass--continues to push sustainable ag from the East Wing. One can assume she has some influence in the Oval Office.

So what's going on here? Whither the Obama administration on food and ag--toward a food future that seeks big, top-down, corporate-led answers, always straining to leapfrog ecological limits--and creating new sets of problems to be (lucratively) solved? Or toward one that works within ecological limits, builds resilience, and generates wealth and health within communities?

Right now, we're getting a kind of policy whiplash. But I have a conjecture--based completely on my own observation, not on any inside info. I'll give it here; and I urge readers to give their own conjectures below.

My conjecture is this: Obama likes cutting-edge ideas. You look at the ag landscape, and you see two distinct areas with great innovation, energy, and movement: biotech and organic/sustainable. So he's coming out strong behind both camps, and plans to sit back and see which one develops the best ideas.

The problem is that the biotech side has a massive advantage in terms of resources; and, as I've shown before, has benefitted from years of government cronyism and coddling. Moreover, it utterly dominates the university research agenda, aided by the draconian intellectual rights the government has awarded it.

So if Obama is setting up a kind of contest between the two camps, the game is rigged in advance.

That's what I think. Please write what you think below.

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Cows on pasture: potential solution, or menace to society? What is just food? One might answer: food produced without causing undue ecological damage, food grown under production systems that allow workers and farmers to earn livable wages, food that's healthy, accessible, and affordable to everyone who eats.

To James E. McWilliams, author of the new book Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, just food is certainly much more than food produced and purchased locally, and his book wags a contrarian finger at the "locavores" who believe purchasing food grown close to home somehow makes it more just, fair, or better for society and the planet.

"The locavore approach to reforming our broken food system has serious limits-limits that our exuberant acceptance of eating local has obscured," McWilliams writes. In their application of a simplistic valuing methodology (judging food purely by how far away from one's plate it originated), he claims, these 100-mile dieters could potentially do more harm than good, if they succeeded in their apparent mission to force the entire world's eaters to choose food grown within a short drive of their kitchen table.

The problem with this argument is its irrelevance. The few truly orthodox locavores who presumably exist (do you know even one?) aren't close to persuading the world to eat the way they do. To devote an entire book to debunking the impulse to eat closer to home doesn't address the points raised by food and farm activists. At their most relevant, today's alternative eaters illuminate the systemic problems created by industrialized food provisioning: negative impacts on the global climate as well as significant deterioration in water quality, soil quality, local economies, worker justice, and human health.

McWilliams reduces the message of the food movement to a simple prescription--eat local--and proceeds to debunk it. Yet it's hard to believe any thoughtful person could imagine that eating locally would address this multitude of issues. One imagines, rather, that consumers, when faced with a system they don't support, are voting with their dollars for the only alternatives they can find-local food at the farmers market and organic products at the store. What McWilliams seems to miss is that these purchasing choices don't make people fundamentalist locavores or organic purists. The locavores I know don't view shopping consciously as a solution; they view it as a protest.

The author often categorizes proponents of alternative food systems--first locavores, then organic advocates, then those who object to genetically modified crops--as wild-eyed extremists in need of some firm schooling on "a golden mean of producing food." McWilliams' vision of this agricultural golden mean promotes lifecycle assessments over food miles, and judicious pesticide use over organics. He preaches the potential of genetically modified cassava to feed starving Africans, dismisses grass-fed beef because it can't be scaled up to meet current demand, and advocates a drastic increase in freshwater aquaculture to meet demands for animal protein.

Again and again, one gets the uncomfortable feeling that McWilliams creates fanatical straw men in order to make his own presentation of facts seem like a rational alternative. "The problems that I have with organic agriculture have less to do with how it is currently practiced than with the inflated claim that it's the only alternative to today's wasteful conventional production," he writes. But do any serious proponents seeking more sustainable alternatives to conventional agriculture claim this?

As he continues on his mission to disabuse the ecological faithful of their trust in growing organically, McWilliams uses the fact that sometimes organic growers use toxic natural compounds to knock organic off what he perceives to be its high horse of purity, and then cites the work of Bruce Ames, a controversial Berkeley scientist, to support the view that many modern pesticides don't hold the same risks as their older counterparts. Despite devoting pages to each of these points, they do little to move McWilliams towards his chapter's supposed conclusion: that organic should fall within a "continuum of farming systems." A discussion of the pros and cons of organic and conventional production, and a studied evaluation of other farming systems along such a continuum, would have been a good start.

McWilliams' defense of modern pesticides leads him to a contradiction. If pesticides aren't so bad, one wonders why the author's measured support for GMO crops hinges in part with the argument that they allow for a reduction in pesticide use. Or do they? "To be sure, there are many studies that show the exact opposite-that is, that GM crops have done nothing to reduce pesticide use," McWilliams writes.

Paying little heed to such inconvenient tangles in this chapter or others, McWilliams hurtles forward down the path of measured (the man loves his middle ground) support for GM crops. In his rush to the middle, though, the author misses some important facets of the GM debate. For example, he glosses over evidence that GM technology hasn't managed to boost yields, much industry hype to the contrary; and he ignores the vested interest in today's crop of herbicide-tolerant genetically modified seeds: namely, that the companies that sell seeds with herbicide resistance also peddle the herbicides that must accompany their product.

This blithe obliviousness to the profit-seeking motives of the GM seed industry allows McWillams to argue for development of GM technology for "subsistence oriented" crops so they might thrive in dry or salty soils. This argument falls short on economic and theoretical grounds. While Monsanto can make billions of dollars per year selling Roundup Ready corn and soy (and Roundup) to industrial-scale farmers, there's little cash to be made selling, say, drought-tolerant cassava to African smallholders. So what entity is going to develop such seeds? McWilliams' answer: the Gates Foundation. But while the aims of the foundation are admirable, there's plenty of evidence that Gates, like McWilliams, doesn't really understand hunger in Africa.

Gates and McWilliams, in promoting biotechnology as the solution to Africa's food troubles, take a shortsighted view of hunger, seeing it only through the lens of yield shortages and disregarding the ample historical evidence that hunger in developing countries has at least as much to do with world trade, democratic failures, poverty, and conflict as they do with the lack of a salt-tolerant sorghum seed.

McWilliams: courageously manning the middle of the road. The most sensible recommendation McWilliams makes is that if we want to lesson agriculture's impact on natural systems, we need to eat less meat. In forming this argument, he relies heavily on a 2006 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization, almost to the point where one felt reading the report and getting data firsthand might have been a better use of time. McWilliams' also hypes the importance of life-cycle analyses (LCAs) in pointing out inefficiencies in the food system. LCAs are good tools, but they hardly represent the sort of radical approach that's "off the public radar screen," as the author claims, ignored by locavores the world over as they persist in stubbornly clinging to food miles as their shortcut solution for determining a food's ecological footprint.

McWilliams' stated goal in writing Just Food was to lay a blueprint for "how we can truly eat responsibly." He's right in pointing out that eating locally and organically alone won't result in the creation of a just food system, and that there's much work left to do if the aim is sustainability in food provisioning. Yet his book fails to outline any sort of considered analysis of what a "truly" responsible food system might look like. Instead, the author wastes time promoting himself as the arbiter of rational thinking about the food system, an antidote to those rabid locavores and organic purists crowding the aisles of Whole Foods and farmers markets who vainly believe they've found the solution to our food systems' problems.

One imagines McWilliams, a historian at Texas State University, might have written a book more in tune with his academic training, perhaps an examination of the rise of the varied movements of local eating, organic growing, fair trade, and healthy food access. He could have combined this historical survey with an analysis of what these movements mean in the greater context of our increasingly globalizing food system, and concluded with how they might be woven together into a forward-thinking approach that moves us toward the "just food" he claims to care so much about. Instead, we're left with a treatise that focuses more on taking Alice Waters and Slow Food advocates down a peg than on putting forth innovative solutions to the problems within our food system. While this might be the author's idea of fun, it's ultimately a childish way to make a point, and a disappointing strategy on which to hinge a book.

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GoodGuide scanner makes healthy food shopping point and click

 When my info-larder gets too packed, it’s time to serve up some choice nuggets from around the Web.

----------------

Get 'em while they're hot.  • I've been writing a lot recently about how industrial agriculture is screwing up the climate (see here and here). I keep forgetting to add: a warmed-up climate will almost surely take its revenge against industrial ag.

• In my back-and-forth with Ezra Klein about whether organic veggies are more nutritious than ones grown with synthetic toxins (start here and work backwards, if you must), Klein basically argued: 1) I believe the British study that says they're roughly equivalent (and ignore other studies that contradict it); and 2) I really don't care that much; I just want people to eat more vegetables, and organics are more expensive and thus a harder sell.

But why not want people to eat more vegetables, but choose organic when they can? Because ... organics are more nutritious than conventional (and have lower levels of nitrogen, a possible toxin), according to a new study from the French Agency for Food Safety. (Interestingly, the British study came from the UK's equivalent of the FDA; and the new study comes from France's FDA.)

Better yet, rather than use one's pundit cred to urge people to change personal behavior, why not agitate for policy change: more government R&D support for organic ag, less for conventional, etc.? If your beef with organic is that it's more expense and prices low-income people out of the market, why not push policies that make it cheaper? After all, federal ag policy now makes highly processed food cheaper by subsidizing the two key inputs: corn and soy. An promoting organic ag would have benefits in multiple directions. For example, it would lower use of toxic pesticides and greenhouse gas-spewing (and fish-killing) synthetic nitrogen.

A brief note: in the blogosphere, the general reaction to my debate with Klein seemed to be: Philpott's missing the point; there are many reasons to choose organic, so why focus on nutrition? (See here, for example.) My response: food and agriculture are endlessly complicated and contain a tangle of issues; nutrition is one of them; and it can and should be discussed without neglecting all the many others.

• The Nation devoted its Sept. 21 issue, already available online, to food. This is the venerable magazine's second food issue ever; the first came out three years ago, and I wrote about it here. I haven't had a chance to dig in yet; looks like there's some fantastic content. I'll probably be commenting on some of it soon.

• I haven't read Ellen Ruppel Shell's book Cheap yet either, but I doubt this LA Times op-ed hack job by Charlotte Allen does it justice.

Judging from this interview with Ruppel Shell by Grist's own Vanessa Kerr, the author wants us to think about the hidden costs of the cheap stuff we blithely consume: the carbon- and mercury-rich coal that goes up in smoke to power China's gadget factories, the farm workers who live in poverty to put lettuce on Big Macs.

Allen ignores all of this and simply asks, like a slack-jawed teenager defending some deplorable habit, "What's wrong with low prices?"

• The blogger El Dragon of Fair Food Fight points to an obvious problem with low prices--maintaining them relies on a relentless attack on wages that leads in extreme cases to modern-day slavery, here in the United States.

El Dragon directs us to this disturbing report: the Justice Department has accused a Hawaiian vegetable farm called Aloun Farm with "conspiracy to commit forced labor and visa fraud." That's a nice way of saying slavery. According to the press release:

The charges arise from the defendants' alleged scheme to coerce the labor and services of Thai nationals brought by the defendants to Hawaii to work under the federal agricultural guest worker program.

It should be noted that Aloun Farm markets itself as a locavore institution. From its website:

Aloun Farm's mission is to provide the people of Hawaii with the highest quality of locally grown produce.

Given that Hawaii's few working vegetable farms have to compete with produce shipped in from California--whose vast farms are also generally staffed by low-wage migrant workers--it's not so surprising that this one resorted to slavery. And therein lies a major problem with an economic system predicated on driving down prices.

• Speaking of El Dragon, turns out his real name is Barth Anderson (not to be confused with sometime Grist blogger Bart Anderson), and he has a post up on HuffPo sparring with Michael Pollan over the Whole Foods/John Mackey/healthcare controversy. For those who haven't followed the story: Whole Foods CEO John Mackey penned a Randian screed on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page promoting "personal responsibility" (by which I think he meant shopping at Whole Foods) as the best alternative to real healthcare reform. (Fetishizing the creed of personal responsibility is a bit much, coming from a man who once assumed an Internet identity to pump up his own firm's share price and talk down that of a competitor, which he was simultaneously trying to buy.) A bunch of Whole Foods shoppers freaked out and launched a boycott. Michael Pollan publicly rebuked the boycott, arguing that Whole Foods' support of farmers outweighs its CEO's retrograde political views. I suppose Anderson's riposte wins on points. My take: I reject Mackey's warmed-over Ayn Rand take on healthcare and unions (do adults really take Rand seriously? I thought she wrote for disturbed teenagers). I deplore Whole Foods' active lobbying to gut the Employee Free Choice Act. But I don't shop there much anyway. I can't be bothered to actively boycott Whole Foods--or denounce those who do.

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"The whole problem of health--in soil, plant, animal, and man--is one great subject."
-- Albert Howard, The Soil and Health

Ezra Klein and I are engaged in a little debate over the value of organic food. I'm honestly a little surprised to be arguing with the Washington Post's food-policy columnist about the desirability of removing toxic, ecologically damaging chemicals from food production. But no matter.

I got the ball rolling here; and here's Ezra's riposte. Narrowly, we're debating whether organically grown foods offer more nutritional value than ones raised with synthetic chemicals.

I say they almost certainly do; Ezra is skeptical. From reading Ezra's post and several comments from his readers, I find that people seem downright nonplussed by the idea that soil conditions and growing methods might affect the nutritional content of the resulting food. Their puzzlement in turn puzzles me. If we are what we eat, then so are plants; and plants are mainly eating soil (and the various nutrients and substances contained therein).

It makes me wonder what--or if?--people in our post-agricultural society think about the whole question of soil. Yet methods of soil stewardship are key to this debate. So before I dig into the details with the celebrated policy wonk--which study says what, funded by whom--I want to take a broad look at soil. In the process, I hope to open people's minds to the idea that soil stewardship could affect food quality.

In his In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan pretty much debunked the tenets of what he called "nutritionism"--the idea that human nutrition could be reduced to a set of macronutrients (vitamin A, the B vitamins, etc.), which could then be isolated and fed to be people to keep them healthy. Scientists have known for a while that a given dose of, say, isolated vitamin A in pill form (or added to bread as fortification) does not provide anything close to the same benefit as an equal dose in the context of a carrot. You can't live well on 2,500 calories from sugar water plus oat fiber and a One a Day vitamin. Scientists now know that, but haven't quite figured out why. Human nutrition turns out to be more mysterious than people in white lab coats have so far been able to decipher.

For about 100 years now, a form of nutritionism has also held sway among soil scientists, too. Where human nutritionists focused on vitamin A, etc., soil scientists seized upon N, P, and K--nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. No one disputes that these are basic building blocks of plant life--without sufficient access to each of them, plants can't flourish. But just as human nutritionists at one time thought that nutrition could be isolated into macronutrients and delivered to people out of the context of food, so plant scientists decided that N, P, and K were sufficient, in isolated form, for plant life.

This idea marked the rise of what become known as NPK thinking--the nutritionism of soil scientists. By learning to synthesize nitrogen and mine phosphorous and potassium, technologists sparked an agricultural revolution. Farmers could abandon the time-consuming task of recycling nutrients and building soil; instead, they could merely purchase newly available inputs (on the installment plan, of course). Society had "solved" the whole vexing problem of soil fertility; farmers could now focus on growing food, and lots of it (meaning fewer farmers).

In the NPK-think that still rules conventional agriculture, soil is essentially an inert medium for conveying isolated blasts of synthesized and mined NPK to crops. The effect on soil quality has been dreadful. Writing in The Fatal Harvest Reader (2002), the California farmer Jason McKenney describes the effect:

We now know that massive use of synthetic fertilizers to create artificial fertility has had a cascade of adverse effects on natural soil fertility and the entire soil system. Fertilizer application begins the destruction of soil biodiversity by diminishing the role of nitrogen-fixing bacteria and amplifying the role of everything that feeds on nitrogen. These feeders then speed up the decomposition of organic matter and humus. As organic matter decreases, the physical structure of soil changes. With less pore space and less of their sponge-like qualities, soils are less efficient at storing water and air. More irrigation is needed. Water leeches through soils, draining away nutrients that no longer have an effective susbstrate on which to cling. With less available oxygen the growth of soil microbiology slows, and the intricate ecosystem of biological exchanges breaks down.

I saw it in extreme form on a trip last spring to Immokalee, Florida--source of 90 percent of the winter tomatoes grown in the United States. As I and many others have pointed out, workers are abused there as a matter of course.

But the growing conditions are also quite startling. When you look down in an Immokalee tomato field, what you see is sand--there's no evident organic matter in the growing medium (the word "soil" doesn't quite apply here). To prepare for tomato growing, you start by sterilizing the ground with an extremely toxic pesticide--and in the process wipe out any beneficial microbes that might be lingering there. Then you inject the doses of NPK to maximize output, and you're ready to go. (You may need more insecticide sprayings as the season wears on.)

More than in any other place I've seen, plants there live on a diet equivalent to sugar water, oat fiber, and vitamin pills. Can there be any real wonder that the resulting tomatoes are so pathetically lacking in flavor? And do people still doubt that they may be less healthful as well?

Indeed, there's strong evidence that the nutritional value of industrially grown vegetable crops has declined significantly since 1950.

In contrast to industrial agriculture's reliance on NPK, organic ag focuses on building soil as a living ecosystem. Even large-scale industrial-organic farms nourish their soil with nitrogen-fixing cover crops and well-composted manure, which along with NPK deliver loads of organic matter and micronutrients. And the nitrogen available from legume cover crops and manure releases slowly, not jolting crops into rapid growth like straight anhydrous ammonia. And whereas the harsh chemicals and poisons of conventional farming squeeze out microbial life in the soil, organic farmers seek to nourish it.

Given all of this, I would be surprised if a tomato grown in Immokalee's chemical-infused sands delivered as much health-giving properties as one grown in rich, living humus.

All right, so back to the details of the debate.

I pointed to a literature review conducted by the U.S.-based Organic Center, which is funded by Big Organic groups like Horizon and Whole Foods; Ezra pointed to one funded by the U.K. Food Safety Agency, the equivalent of the U.S. FDA. And like that agency, the FSA has not managed to remain free of food-industry influence. For example, its current chief executive is Tim Smith, whose bio reads like this:

Tim Smith is the former Chief Executive of Arla Foods UK plc. The company, which is responsible for a number of major food brands, is now part of Arla Foods amba, Europe's largest dairy manufacturer. He was appointed Chief Executive of Arla Foods in early 2005.

Tim Smith graduated from Leeds University with a degree in microbiology and zoology. He has spent his entire career in the food business: from 1979 to 1994 he was at Northern Foods, finishing his career there as a Divisional Director. After five years at Sara Lee Corporation, where he was President of UK operations, he joined Express Dairies plc as Executive Director. Express Dairies merged with Arla Foods in October 2003.

Impressive. I don't think even a U.S. president would appoint a career Big Food exec to the top food-safety post upon his first swing through the revolving door. Even Michael Taylor, the former Monsanto exec (and before that, lawyer) Obama recently handed a top position at FDA, served a few stints in government before the appointment.

At any rate, neither Ezra nor I is leaning on a pristine study untainted by special interest. And in this age of industry dominance of research agendas, there may be no pristine studies. So let's look at details.

Ezra makes two major points to refute my position: 1) organic food may have more total antioxidants than conventional, but that's irrelevant, because of the "wealth of studies showing that antioxidants do not appear to reduce the risk of cancer or heart disease or anything else"; and 2) that my contention that the lower nitrogen content of organic foods makes them healthier is based on a "circumstantial argument" about the danger of nitrates "that is plausible, but hasn't been studied."

Ezra links to two studies to back up his claim about the irrelevance of antioxidants. The first one is itself irrelevant, because it is measuring the value of antioxidant supplements--ie, isolated antioxidants--and we're talking about antioxidants in whole foods. I agree that taking, say, beta-caratene pills is probably worthless; I doubt that beta-caratene in, say, the context of a carrot is worthless.

The second study is more interesting. This investigates whether "natural antioxidants, i.e. Vitamin C, Vitamin E and carotenoids" fight certain kinds of heart damage. It concludes:

Animal studies indicate that dietary antioxidants may reduce atherosclerosis progression, and observational data in humans suggest that antioxidant vitamin ingestion is associated with reduced cardiovascular disease, but the results of randomised controlled trials are mainly disappointing.

I assume that by "dietary antioxidants," the researchers mean nutrients from whole foods and not isolated supplements. So the finding would seem to support Ezra's claim. But then we get this:

The favourable effects shown by some studies relating antioxidant dietary intake and cardiovascular disease, may have been exerted by other chemicals present in foods. Flavonoids are the ideal candidates, since they are plentiful in foods containing antioxidant vitamins (i.e. fruits and vegetables) and are potent antioxidants. Tea and wine, rich in flavonoids, seem to have beneficial effects on multiple mechanisms involved in atherosclerosis.

So flavonoids may actually help, according to this study. Now, both the FSA and Organic Center studies measured something called "total phenolics," a category than encompasses flavonoids. The FSA study found no difference; and the Organic Center study showed a more than 20 percent advantage for organic food. Both studies are essentially gathering results from past studies and consolidating their results. As such, they're looking at much the same data. So why the difference? According to the Organic Center's critique of the FSA study:

Unlike the London study, The Organic Center review focused on nutrient differences in "matched pairs" of crops grown on nearby farms, on the same type of soil, with the same irrigation systems and harvest timing, and grown from the same plant variety. It also rigorously screened studies for the quality of the analytical methods used to measure nutrient levels, and eliminated from further consideration a much greater percentage of the published literature than the FSA team.

While the FSA team found 80 comparisons of phenolic compounds, the TOC [Organic Center] team focused on the more precise measure of total phenolic acids, or total polyphenols, and found just 25 scientifically valid "matched pairs." By mixing together in their statistical analysis the results of several specific phenolic acids, the FSA team likely lost statistical precision.

The "matched pairs" thing seems legit. Crops draw nutrients from soils; different soils have different levels and types of nutrients. Different vegetable varieties, too, have different properties--including levels of nutrient uptake.

At the University of California-Davis, scholars at the Long Term Research on Agricultural Systems project have been examining "matched pairs" of organic and conventional crops since 1993. In a 2007 paper, the group compared the nutritional content of organic and conventional tomatoes grown between 1994 and 2004. The result: organic tomatoes showed significantly levels of two flavonoids called quercetin and kaempferol that were on average, respectively, 79 percent and 97 percent higher than conventional. Moreover:

The levels of flavonoids increased over time in samples from organic treatments, whereas the levels of flavonoids did not vary significantly in conventional treatments. This increase corresponds not only with increasing amounts of soil organic matter accumulating in organic plots but also with reduced manure application rates once soils in the organic systems had reached equilibrium levels of organic matter.

Okay, on to the question of nitrogen. As I wrote in the earlier post, both the FSA and Organic Center studies acknowledge that organic foods show lower levels of nitrogen in organic food. I cited that fact as a serious nutritional advantage for organic food, and pointed to a recent study by a Brown researcher linking type-2 diabetes and Alzheimer's disease to increased exposure to nitrogen-related compounds.

Ezra dismissed the argument as "circumstantial."

I should have been more precise. As the Organic Center put it in its rebuttal to the FSA, "Elevated levels of nitrogen in food are regarded by most scientists as a public health hazard because of the potential for cancer-causing nitrosamine compounds to form in the human GI tract."

And it's nitrosamine compounds that the Brown study linked to diabetes and Alzheimer's. The researcher makes a circumstantial link between the explosion in nitrogen fertilizer applications after 1960 and the abrupt rise in Alzeimer's and diabetes over the same period. But they also demonstrate the ability of nitrosamines to cause significant cellular damage. According to the study's press release:

Nitrosamines basically become highly reactive at the cellular level, which then alters gene expression and causes DNA damage. The researchers note that the role of nitrosamines has been well-studied, and their role as a carcinogen has been fully documented. The investigators propose that the cellular alterations that occur as a result of nitrosamine exposure are fundamentally similar to those that occur with aging, as well as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Type 2 diabetes mellitus.

Given that information, it seems wise to minimize the level of nitrogen--which can turn to nitrosamines in the digestive process--in food. Moreover, the researchers evidently aren't finished with the topic. The press release adds, chillingly: "Two subsequent papers have been accepted for publication in the near future that demonstrate experimentally that low levels of nitrosamine exposure cause neurodegeneration, NASH [non-alcoholic steatohepatitis], and diabetes."

Nor are these the only ways that organics are "better for you." Here's an important one: they carry drastically lower pesticide residues. The Chicago Tribune recently obtained USDA data showing that "more than 50 pesticide compounds showed up on domestic and imported peaches headed for U.S. stores." Moreover:

Five of the compounds exceeded the limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency, and six of the pesticide compounds present are not approved for use on peaches in the United States.

Ezra ended his response like this: "[W]hat we do know is that organic produce is more expensive and harder to find."

I agree completely; but it seems clear to me that the answer is not to marginalize organics, but rather to stop using government cash and lax antitrust/environmental/labor regulation to prop up a destructive food system. We get the food system that we as a society pay for.

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I don't think our goal should be to make all food in America as cheap as cheap food is now.  ... If the goal is cheap food, we're going to hurt our farmers, we're going to hurt the environment, we're going to hurt the public health.  The goal should be to give people the money so they can afford to buy good food. 

We're in this kind of reverse Fordism situation.  You know, Fordism was this idea that Henry Ford said, "I'm going to pay my workers enough so they can afford to buy my cars."  It raised everybody's boats.  This was the social compact in America, an economic compact, up until the '70s, and then it collapses. 

We have the opposite, it's kind of the Wal-Mart model, which is, "We're going to pay you so little you can only afford to buy our crummy food." And that's the kind of cycle we're in.

The answer is to give people the buying power.  

-- Michael Pollan, in an interview on The Splendid Table

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Is organic farming productive enough to feed billions of people--or will it always be a yuppie niche in a food system increasingly dependent on agrichemicals, massive animal factories, synthetic fertilizers, and biotechnology?

Nina Fedoroff, the State Department's chief technology adviser, propounds the latter view. A trained scientist with ties to the biotech industry, Fedoroff thinks organic is a fraud. (She attained her current positon during the Bush Adminsration in Condoleeza Rice's State Department; SecretaryNina Fedoroff, with her previous employer. Clinton has elected to keep her on.) In a recent forum on biotech  in Seed Magazine (in which I also participated), Hillary Clinton's science czar had this to say:

Then there are the romantic agri-myths, like the "organic" one, which lots of people have bought into. It goes like this: Organic food, farmed using manure instead of chemicals, is better for you and better for the land. None of that's true-nitrogen is nitrogen-but it's pretty good marketing if you're selling poor produce at exorbitant prices. (Organic farming is inefficient, so production costs are generally higher.)

I'll leave aside for this post the "nitrogen is nitrogen" claim--whether synthetic nitrogen delivers the organic matter, micronutrient, or microbiological benefits to soil that compost and green manure do. (It's sort of like debating whether consuming a balanced, diverse diet is any different from living on sugar water and vitamin pills. Oops--guess I couldn't leave it aside.) Let's focus on the value of organic--a key question for Fedoroff, since she will help shape U.S. foreign policy toward ag development in the global south.

She dismisses organic agriculture as a "myth"--an inefficient farming system that delivers "poor produce": surely not something one should go around trying to "feed the world" with. And she does so with an air of "case closed"; she is, after all, a scientist, so whatever she says must be true.

Right? Nah. In fact, she's using her high position in government as a megaphone to amplify and legitimize a bunch of industry-friendly nonsense. (The fact that she enjoys direct access to our top foreign-policy official should give us all pause.)

In fact, a paper (PDF) published in the peer-reviewed journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems by a bunch of University of Michigan ecologists cogently challenges Fedoroff's view. They compare studies that gauge yields of organic and conventionally grown crops, and find that organic competes quite well. As a result, they conclude:

Our results suggest that organic methods of food production can contribute substantially to feeding the current an future human population on the current agricultural land base, while maintaining soil fertility.

Moreover, they indirectly address an old slur against organic promoted by Normon Borlaug, industrial agriculture's greatest apologist. In a notorious 2000 interview with Reason Magazine, the great man declared that "if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests." That's bunkum, according to the Michigan researchers. They write:

In fact, the models suggest the possibility that the agricultural land base could eventually be reduced if organic production methods were employed, although additional intensification via conventional methods in the tropics would have the same effect.

Crucially, the researchers acknowledge that a large-scale conversion to organic would be difficult--a fact that pro-organic enthusiasts often forget. They write: "In spite of our optimistic prognosis for organic agriculture, we recognize that the transition to and practice of organic agriculture contain numerous challenges-agronomically, economically, and educationally."

And getting there would require serious government action:

The practice of organic agriculture on a large scale requires support from research institutions dedicated to agro-ecological methods of fertility and pest management, a strong extension system, and a committed public.

Let's not forget, though, that our government for decades has been shoveling billions of dollars into subsidies and research for chemical ag--and paying little more than lip service to organic. Meanwhile, regulators have looked the other way while the food and industries consolidated into a few giant companies--ones that contribute lavishly to candidates and run well-funded lobbying operations. Fedoroff's lofty position proves that they still wield plenty of power--let's hope not sufficient power to make her vision of perpetual industrial-ag dominance self-fulfilling.

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Could. Not. Resist. From NYT's City Room Blog:

The sustainable garden with the most exclusive real estate in Washington is no doubt the one at the White House. The sustainable farm with the most exclusive view in New York City is the one that opened on Governors Island last week.

Oh. Yeah. Governors Island is an island in New York Harbor not far from the Brooklyn waterfront. It was an army base for almost two hundred years and then a Coast Guard base for a few decades after that. It was decomissioned in 2001 and since that time various redevelopment plans have been proposed for it. But this is the best plan yet.

The organic three-acre farm, one of a handful of commercial organic farms within the five boroughs, is a collaboration between the corporation and a Brooklyn nonprofit group called Added Value, which teaches teenagers about sustainable and local food by training them to work on urban farms.

The Governors Island farm is expected to produce tens of thousands of dollars in organic produce annually, and as much as $25,000 this year — mostly though sales at a farm stand and to a soon-to-be-opened Water Taxi Beach on the northern part of the island. Among the offerings, the earliest of which is expected to be ripe in late July, are squash, tomatoes, sunflowers, eggplants and groundcherries (a relative of the gooseberry).

The farm will have close ties to New York Harbor School, which is scheduled to move from Bushwick, Brooklyn, to the island in 2010. The farm will provide produce, and students can volunteer and do science work there.

This is just all good. The more urban gardening the better and what better way to promote it than through such a high-profile project as this -- and the money-making part isn't bad either. Again, that school/farm connection is crucial since putting kids into gardens (i.e. improving education surrounding food and farming) is fundamental to food system reform. Score several for NYC.

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"[P]lease don't blame organic producers for the high prices. Until the latest farm bill, which has a small provision for promotion of organic agriculture, organic farmers received not one break from the federal government. In contrast, the producers of corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton continue to get $20 billion or so a year in farm subsidies.

...Dealing with the elitism implied by the higher cost of organics means doing something about income inequities. If we want elected representatives to care more about public health than corporate health, let's work to remove the corruption from election campaign contributions. If Congress were less beholden to corporations, we might be able to create a system that paid farmers and farm workers decently and sold organic foods at prices that everyone could afford."

        -- Marion Nestle in a recent Q&A with the SF Chronicle

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The June National Geographic features a story The End of Plenty which starts off saying that even though humans produced a record amount of grain last year, we still had to dip into stockpiles from past years to feed ourselves. Sobering stuff. But then for solutions it goes deep on the same tired green revolution song and dance, and notes GMOs and the Malawi Miracle (hybrid seeds and a bag of fertilizer for every farmer) as points of hope. But at least it notes all the ways Borlaug’s theory has failed and gives time later in the piece to Vandana Shiva and an alternative project in Malawi that’s producing great yields while improving soil with classic organic methods.

Echoing this latter wisdom is the new book from Eliot Coleman, The Winter Harvest Handbook. One of the original American organic farmers lays out his system for producing vegetables year-round, even in northern climes, using super-sustainable ‘deep organic’ methods.

Key to his system are movable unheated greenhouses, plastic covered frames 22 by 48 feet on tracks that are parked over crops as needed. For example in the fall he’ll leave the house over tomato plants to extend their season into November or later, and then slide it down to the next area on the track that has leeks and greens already growing, allowing them to thrive through the winter.

But even a greenhouse can’t save vegetables from the winter freeze if it’s unheated, so what he does is deploy floating row cover, a standard season extender used by organic growers but usually only outdoors, to cover the indoor crops. This simple yet ingenious double coverage combo keeps crops just warm enough to survive even deep freezes in Maine where Coleman lives, and boosts daytime temps enough to encourage growth, allowing him to sell salad greens, leeks, and more all winter long, until it’s time for spring greens and summer crops once again. And the greenhouse moves once more…

Talk about elegant simplicity. Though he’s not the first to do this, Coleman has improved on the practice and has thereby added an important technique to the food security/sustainability toolbox with this generous 238 page blueprint. Why aren’t we doing this everywhere already? Granted, it’s resource-intense up front, plastic and row cover don’t grow on trees, and one needs to be able to afford the investment and a payback period of several years, but it’s easy to imagine such scenarios reducing food miles and carbon footprints from Brussels to Bellingham. Not that this will help us manage our problem with grain stocks, but it’s a start and folks like the Land Institute and their perennial grain crops could be part of that solution.

After blowing the doors off of the notion that we can’t eat local all year, Coleman’s book goes into his theory of ‘deep organic’ which he uses to define the truly sustainable organic route of food production. He calls out the co-opting of organic by industrial food interests for what it is, a sham system based in profit and not values.  What other than an industrial mindset would allow an organic megafarm to use ‘less toxic’ chemicals in order to protect their investment?

Alternatively, deep organic farmers like Coleman reject chemicals outright and seek better ways of farming by mimicking natural patterns and taking advantage of simple facts like the amazingly adequate amount of sun all of the continental US receives in winter, leveraged with a simple technique. Not that small farms like Coleman’s can replace enormous California row crop operations any time soon, but it’s certainly possible, and it’s definitely sustainable profit-wise. His mere 1.5 acres grossed $120,000 the last 2 years: not at all bad for a greenhouse operation. His miniscule gas bill is probably part of the reason.

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This is part one of a two-part series on organic ice cream; look for our review of select non-dairy brands later this month.

In my four-plus decades on this planet, I've gone through many transformations. One constant has been a devotion to ice cream.

Tastes like heaven.Somewhere, there exists a photo of three-year-old me with an ice cream cone rammed into my face, which is marked with splotches of Rocky Road. My expression is focused, beatific, like a religious fanatic at prayer. To this day, I remember howls of adult laughter echoing around me. I didn't give a damn -- what mattered was getting that creamy, crunchy, sweet stuff into my mouth.

I try to play it cooler these days, but the joy I take in the famed cold confection has changed little. Thus when my editor approached me with the assignment of tasting organic ice creams, I pretended to be put upon, before "reluctantly" agreeing. Inside my brain, I indulged a thunderous "Yes!" [Editor's note: What? You pitched me this topic!]

Given the broad variety of flavors available in store-bought brands, practical considerations forced me to choose a single one for comparison. I was sorely tempted to pick chocolate, which I think would have given a wide diversity of flavor profiles. But I settled on vanilla, a delicate flavor that wouldn't mask flaws in the product. To spice things up a bit, I threw in two variations on the plain-vanilla theme: Stonyfield Farms' Crème Caramel (caramel swirl) and PJ Madison's Southern Butter Pecan.

Now, I'm a devotee of full-on, full-fat ice cream, made with real dairy and eggs. (I love beans and rice, but find them best served hot with salsa, not extruded into liquid, sweetened, and then frozen. Look for a forthcoming product tester -- by another author -- on non-dairy ice "creams.") To see if I really needed all of that fat to enjoy a frozen dairy dessert, I added Stonyfield's no-fat vanilla frozen yogurt into the mix.

Then I assembled a tasting panel of six ice cream-loving friends -- plus a lactose-intolerant seventh who served us samples and kept us from knowing which was which. Everyone brings his or her own agenda to a blind tasting. What I was looking for were smooth, rich-but-not-too-rich, not overly sweet ice creams, yellow from the yolks of real farm eggs, dotted with flecks of real vanilla seeds, and delivering a pronounced vanilla flavor.

Here's what we found.

Julie's Organic Vanilla
Vanilla seeds or extract: Extract
Price: $3.69/pint
Eco-claim: Virtually free of pesticides, preservatives, chemical additives, food coloring, or genetically engineered ingredients

I found this pale ice cream well-made and satisfying, delivering a nice round vanilla flavor, but a little on the sweet side. I ranked it second-best. One taster declared it "yummy," with tapioca notes, while another liked it generally, but found an "oily" aftertaste. Its most enthusiastic taster found it "smooth and rich ... more complex than the others." One critic found it "dull ... really cheap commercial dairy ... almost plastic."

Alden's Vanilla Bean
Vanilla seeds or extract: Seeds
Price: $3.69/pint
Eco-claim: Our milk comes from healthy cows not raised on hormones or antibiotics

Oddly enough, this one turns out to be made by the same company as Julie's, an entity known as Oregon Ice Cream Company. It was my favorite of the lot, offering a restrained but well-rounded vanilla flavor and a light-cream texture. Bonus: not overly sweet. Two tasters praised the level of vanilla flavor but found an oily aftertaste; a fourth found it a "little chewy in texture." "Upscale" and "a little plain" were other reactions.

Stonyfield Gotta Have Vanilla Non-Fat Frozen Yogurt
Vanilla seeds or extract: Seeds
Price: $4.19/pint
Eco-claim: We use farm-fresh milk from family farms

This ringer -- the only non-fat product in the lineup -- landed with a thud. Can't believe it's not real cream? Not our panel. I found it thin, oversweet, and artificial-tasting, despite the vanilla-seed flecks. One person dismissed it with one word: SWEET. Another found it "medicinal -- not in a good way." Another found it "very low" in vanilla flavor and "watery." Still another judged it was "trying too hard ... mediocre." It did find one defender, who ranked it number one: "great texture ... [vanilla-]bean flavored."

Stonyfield Gotta Have Vanilla Ice Cream
Vanilla seeds or extract: Extract
Price: $4.19/pint
Eco-claim: We use farm-fresh milk from family farms

This one neither particularly pleased nor offended. I was encouraged by its rich yellow color, suggesting the presence of good farm eggs. I liked the light, smooth texture, but the flavor was oversweet and the vanilla muted. Several tasters concurred; others disagreed. "More robust and stronger vanilla," wrote one, adding, "something you'd find in a cute ice cream shop (in a good way)."

PJ Madison Southern Butter Pecan
Vanilla seeds or extract: N/A
Price: $3.99/pint
Eco-claim: Changed business models to focus on the research and development of organic ice cream after learning about the harmful effects of organophosphate pesticide levels in humans

I feared the non-vanilla ice creams would gain an unfair advantage, because of their contrast with the others. The opposite happened -- people generally disliked this one. I detected an artificial vanilla taste (the ingredients lists no vanilla, just "organic flavors"). And the texture, not so creamy. Other folks found it oversweet and unappealing. "Nothing to write home about, even if it is pecan," declared one. "Tastes like Splenda," said another.

Stonyfield Crème Caramel Ice Cream
Vanilla seeds or extract: N/A
Price: $4.19/pint
Eco-claim: We use farm-fresh milk from family farms

Full disclosure: This is typically my favorite store-bought ice cream these days. Of course I picked it out right away. Oddly -- perhaps because I had tasted five ice creams previously -- it didn't appeal as much as usual. I wanted more of a caramelized punch. Others liked it; "sweet and creamy," "smooth," and "full, not overbearing" were among the comments.

PJ Madison Bourbon Vanilla
Vanilla seeds or extract: Extract
Price: $3.99/pint
Eco-claim: Changed business models to focus on the research and development of organic ice cream after learning about the harmful effects of organophosphate pesticide levels in humans

This one failed to impress. I found it pale, with a faint-vanilla flavor and a decently creamy texture. Others were even less excited. "Boring," declared one panelist. "Tastes gross," opined another. "Too sweet," judged a third. One did find it had "good texture, not yogurt-y."

The Bottom Line: These ice creams, despite their similarity, drew a wide variety of responses. But two drew positive responses from enough panelists to stand out: Alden's and Julie's, both made by Oregon Ice Cream Company. When all the votes were tallied, Alden's took the crown by a nose. The real bottom line: Ice cream rocks.

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Here's some good stuff, via Obama Foodorama: While a camera rolls, White House chef/gardener Sam Kass shows baseball star Ryan Howard around the White House garden. They have some great dialogue, climaxing with Howard's reaction to the garden beehive: "Oh snap, son!" Kass hips Howard to the genius of composting--food scraps go from the White House kitchen to the compost pile to garden beds, from whence more food and more scraps. "You can't keep taking away without giving back," Kass lectures, a gloss on the "law of return" propounded another great Howard, organic founder Sir Albert. For his part, Ryan Howard reveals that he lost 20 pounds in the off season eating organic food. "And it was good!" he adds, somewhat surprised. Say what you want about the earnestness, but under Bush II, when guys strolled the White House lawn, I doubt they spent much time discussing organic ag.

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Wouldn't a bit of atrazine liven up this scene?India is a major player on the global stage--hub of the information-technology market, the world's second most populous nation, and a nuclear power to boot.

It would be a global-scale calamity if India's food security became compromised--and that is exactly what's happening, as NPR's Daniel Zwerdling showed in three excellent reports last month. 

In May, Zwerdling focused on the decay of industrial agriculture. His latest piece, which aired Monday, he turns to organic ag--which is becoming increasingly popular across the country as farmers grapple with declining soil quality and high costs for irrigation water and chemical inputs.

Zwerdling doesn't mention it, but what we know as organic farming in the west has roots in India. In the early 20th century, just as European and U.S. agriculture was moving toward a mechanized, chemical-dependent model, a British plant pathologist named Albert Howard spent time in Barbados and India. His charge was to teach the "native" farmers in the colonies how to better grow food for the Mother Country.

But the "natives" had something to teach him instead. Observing how small-scale farmers in Barbados and India built soil fertility through composting and manure, and avoided pest troubles by creating the conditions for balanced insect populations, Howard codified the practices that would soon become known as "organic" in the West. The great engine for productive agriculture, Howard concluded, was biodiversity--both among crops and literally within healthy soil, which bristles with the life of billions of microorganisms..

So in many ways, the rise of organic agriculture in India is really a return, a revival.

Zwerdling's story doesn't paper over the difficulties of switching from chemical-based to organic ag. He focuses on Amarjit Sharma, a farmer in the Punjab, India's breadbasket. There, farmers fully embraced the Green Revolution--the effort, starting in the late 1960s, to move to large-scale, mechanized farming with heavy irrigation and lots of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

Sharma farmed that way for years, but went organic in 2005, after seeing his wheat yields stagnate and his agrichemical bills rise to crushing levels. Now, his rice yields are nearly equal to those of chemical-oriented farmers, but his wheat yields are just half. Zwerdling asks him about that, and Sharma has an excellent reply.

"I've been farming organically only for four years now. My land is still recovering from the Green Revolution. So I'm sure my yields will increase," he says.

Imagine how much organic farmers might be able to produce, Sharma says, if India's government spent even a fraction of the billions of dollars it has spent promoting chemical farming.

Zwerdling reveals that things have gotten so bad on India's conventional farms that even major players in ag policy are starting to promote organic in a serious way--and not as a trendy but ultimately frivolous niche, the way the USDA treats it here. Zwerdling quotes Gurcharan Kalkat, chair of the Punjab State Farmers Commission:

"For 70 percent of the area in the country (outside Punjab), farmers must go for organic farming," he says, because organic methods will replenish the soil and improve their productivity. As for Punjab, the report concluded that 20 percent of its farmers could go organic and remain productive, too.

That might sound timid, but imagine if the president of the American Farm Bureau called for transitioning 20 percent of the Corn Belt--and 70 percent of farmland outside it--to organic.

Already, Indian farmers are transitioning in growing numbers. In many ways, India's movement against chemical farming is stronger than ours here in the United States. According to Zwerdling:

India has about three times the population of the U.S., but 30 times more organic farmers than the U.S.

India's farmers have already taught the world plenty about low-impact, highly productive farming. Apparently, they're not done.

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Take a bite out of summer.It’s Memorial Day weekend! Say hello to the long, hot days of summer and goodbye to all the rest. However you celebrate this seasonal turning point, we’ve got advice for making it just a bit greener.

First, we hoist the flag with Umbra, who tells us how to be proud patriots 24 hours a day.

Now for the juicy stuff: Planning a cookout? Check out Umbra’s quick ‘n’ easy advice on eco-friendly grilling (quicker still: chuck the charcoal) and these illuminating BBQ FAQs. If you know how to fuel your fire but can’t decide what to cook, here are a few ideas on grilling without red meat and a cookbook or two to inspire.

Before you head out to buy watermelons and Not Dogs, check out our tips on prioritizing organic purchases, washing produce, and what those codes on produce really mean. And read Lou Bendrick’s beefy take on the real impacts of meat production.

Worried about bug bites? Check out our buzzworthy review of DEET-free bug repellents and read this rundown on eco-friendlier insect repellents and sunscreens. Be sure to keep an eye out for our brand-new test of eco-sunscreens, coming in early June.

And if you’re using this weekend as a chance to spruce up your grounds, check out our ideas for lawn alternatives, advice on fertilizers, and tips for the best way to water.

Finally, a verging-on-earnest note: we know Memorial Day is about more than cookouts and bug bites. But we don’t have many links to offer on the topic of sacrificing young lives in faraway lands. Still, we hope you’ll take a moment this weekend to thank the men and women who made your vegan sausagefest possible.

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Use our pesticide, or the spinach gets it.I'm no expert on the mafia, but I have seen the first two Godfather movies and Goodfellas, oh, a few times. One thing I've learned: "protection" is a major mob racket. It works like this: a thug drops by your shop monthly and makes small talk. You hand him some cash, and your shop runs smoothly. You refuse to pay, and ... things go wrong.

I've been thinking about protection rackets ever since an agrichemical industry group chided Michelle Obama for not using "crop protection" products on her White House garden. The group famously wrote a letter (intercepted by Jill of La Vida Locavore) urging the First Lady to do so back in March.

I just found out that Croplife.org, the industry's Web site, also launched a "letter writing campaign" among members. "The garden is a great idea and the photo op of the First Lady and local elementary schoolchildren digging up the ground was precious," the campaign informs Croplife readers. But ... "did you realize that it will be an organic garden?"

An organic garden--one that fails to utilize the agrichem industry's products? That simply won't do:

What message does that send the general public about the agriculture industry that the majority of you are so proud to serve? What message does that send to the non-farming public about an important and integral part of growing safe and abundant crops to feed and clothe the world -- crop protection products?

So Croplife urges members to drop a line to Ms. Obama:

I hope that you will take a moment to consider how important that message is to your livelihood, your passion for agriculture, and your growers' future -- and send your own letter, sharing the benefits of modern, conventional agriculture. Help allay any fears by providing a specific example of how what you do on a daily basis, including custom application and/or the sale of crop protection products and fertilizers, has saved a crop and/or improved yields to benefit more Americans.

So far, the First Lady seems to be holdiing out on using "crop protection." Does that mean that some really scary insects are going to come eat her spinach?

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Is Michelle Obama about to take on Big Food?

Jon Stewart had two green-related segments last night.

First was an interview with EPA administrator Lisa Jackson:

The second was a hilarious Samantha Bee bit on Michelle Obama's organic garden and Big Ag's opposition to it:

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Photo: Ron WurzerSeattle chef Maria Hines has cooked up an award-winning recipe for success: serve sustainable, organic foods from your local area in a welcoming atmosphere with a neighborhoody feel. The resulting dish? Tilth.

Nestled in small green home in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood, it's only the country's second restaurant to receive organic certification from Oregon Tilth, a distinction that promises 95 percent organic offerings and eco-responsible business practices. And its savory sups just won Hines a coveted James Beard Award -- essentially the Oscars of the foodie world.

Curious about her strong commitment to sustainable foods and her advice for cash-strapped organic-food shoppers, I spoke with Hines just after her return from the James Beard Award festivities in New York City.

Q. What does this award mean to you?

A. More than anything, it's recognition from the industry and from your peers in the industry, so it means a lot. We work very hard in this industry and to be recognized by one another is a big deal for sure.

Q. You cooked for the gala reception after the award ceremony -- what did you make?

A. Skagit River Ranch beef carpaccio with asparagus, sorrel, and horseradish crème fraîche.

Q. So you brought local foods from the Seattle area out to New York for the event?

A. I sure did. The asparagus was from Yakima and the beef was from Sedro-Woolley, which is northern Washington.

Maria Hines (right) with Tilth General Manager Adam Chumas.Q. Yours is the second restaurant in the country to be certified organic by Oregon Tilth. Why did you decide to make that commitment?

A. Because I think a lot of people tend to put "we are sustainable and organic as much as we can" and how do you quantify "as much as you can" -- is it as much as you can afford, or as much as is convenient?

I eat organically at home but there isn't really anywhere you can go where you know you're getting good, healthy, clean organic food. I figured I might as well open up a place so people have that place to go where they know that the food is 95 percent certified organic.

Q. And you also have a commitment to serving local foods as well.

A. You can be organic but oddly enough not be sustainable at the same time, in my opinion ... So we try to buy as local of foods as we possibly can so that we're being as sustainable as we're being organic.

Q. Do you see the restaurant industry as a whole moving in this direction?

A. I don't know; I hope so. I really hope it's not a fad. Now the movement has a lot of momentum, and I really hope that continues, and I think that it will.

Q. One thing on everyone's minds these days when trying to eat well is cost -- whether at the grocery store or out at a restaurant. Do you have any tips as to how to make good food purchases while sticking to a tighter budget?

A. I would say definitely cook food from scratch using whole, organic foods; that will be cheaper than going out and purchasing it. And grow an organic garden.

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