There's a nice article in USA Today about a new generation of public urban orchards, ripe for the picking:
Fruit-picking opportunities... are becoming more common, as volunteers in cities including Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia and Madison, Wis., mobilize behind a goal of planting fruit trees on public land in city parks and neighborhoods.
"This is part of what's obviously been an explosion in interest in locally grown and organic food," said Janet Parker, a founding member of a group called Madison Fruits and Nuts. "I think we're coming to realize more and more that it doesn't make any sense, at this late date with climate change being what it is, to truck in so much of our food from California, in the cases of apples, sometimes New Zealand."
Free fruit also is available for picking in season on public land in Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Minneapolis and New York, according to neighborhoodfruit.com, a site that helps people track down available fruit.
One of the compelling points in Sharon Astyk's A Nation of Farmers involves her observation that we've been trained to see "free" food as having minimal actual value-- we're better off buying our fruit in the store than gleaning from what's available around us.
But that's why this urban orchard movement is so compelling -- it's another way to bring the reality of food production closer to home for millions of urban residents. Also, note the shout-out the article gives to the Philadelphia Orchard Project, which has started 17 orchards in the Philly area in the last 3 years.
Oh, and for the rest of you wanting to find your nearest gleaning opportunity, there's an app for that.
Here's another example of the power of diversity over monocultures in agriculture. Writer Gary Nabhan has a great piece at Grist on how heirloom apples may save US apple growers from the risks of climate change:
Recent studies have suggested that orchard keepers face a new challenge to supplying a variety of apples to their customers. Shifts in weather patterns may be reducing the number of winter chill hours that apple and other trees require in order to bear abundant fruit. If trends continue as predicted, most California orchards are expected to receive less than 500 chill hours per winter by the end of the 21st century. Most apple varieties require 1,000 chill hours per winter to yield harvests large enough to keep orchards economically viable, although some require as little as 800 hours and a few can get by on just 500 chill hours.
In its "high emissions scenario" for climate change, the Union of Concerned Scientists has predicted that orchards in southeastern Pennsylvania will receive 1,000 or more chill hours in just 50 to 60 percent of winters. Because Pennsylvania is the fourth-largest remaining producer of apples in this country, and because much of its $60 million annual crop comes from the southeastern region, these predictions have generated considerable anxiety among orchard keepers. But no one knows how many of the varieties currently being grown there can actually tolerate fewer than 1,000 chill hours -- the meteorological projections have not yet been tangibly related to the specific responses of particular varieties. And of course, no one knows for sure how much of the perceived weather shifts are due to global warming or to more localized urban heat-island effects of changing land uses.
As Gary mentions, this is of particular concern in Pennsylvania. But farmers like Nick Botner in Oregon are doing their part to fill in some of the blanks on which varieties will thrive in the new conditions. Botner may be in his eighties, but he's not slowing down -- he's testing 3,000 heirloom varieties to see which will grow best in our changing climate. Will apples disappear from store shelves? Not if we remember that there are plenty of apples in the sea tree.
GMOs as Big Ag's Version of "Financial Innovation"
(Photoillustration by Grist)Financial blogger Felix Salmon has an essay in Foreign Policy called "How Locavores Can Save the World" -- expanded, by the way, from a wonderful blog post he wrote after attending a panel discussion on world hunger at the Davos World Economic Forum in the company of Blue Hill Farm's Dan Barber. Salmon usually focuses on issues involving economic crises, monetary policy, complex derivatives, macro-economics and governmental oversight of the financial markets, but here he's talking monocultures, sustainable agriculture, and transgenic seeds. Tom Philpott has in the past opined on the similarities between financial and food crises, so I suppose this turn of events is not too surprising.
But the bit I found most striking was how Salmon characterized Big Ag's claim that genetically modified organisms are an "answer" to the problem of world hunger:
[It] is the agricultural equivalent of creating triple-A-rated mortgage bonds, fabricated precisely to prevent the problem of credit risk. It doesn't make the problem go away: It just makes the problem rarer and much more dangerous when it does occur because no one is -- or even can be -- prepared for such a high-impact, low-probability event.
Junk Food Taxes May Be Better than Healthy Food Subsidies
An interesting new study was just published in Psychological Science, about a lab experiment at SUNY Buffalo that suggests junk-food taxes increase the overall nutritional quality of a shopping trip, while subsidies on healthy foods actually decrease the nutritionally quality (via Science Daily).
[Study author and clinical psychologist Dr. Leonard] Epstein and colleagues simulated a grocery store, "stocked" with images of everything from bananas and whole wheat bread to Dr. Pepper and nachos. A group of volunteers -- all mothers -- were given laboratory "money" to shop for a week's groceries for the family. Each food item was priced the same as groceries at a real grocery nearby, and each food came with basic nutritional information.
The mother-volunteers went shopping several times in the simulated grocery. First they shopped with the regular prices, but afterward the researchers imposed either taxes or subsidies on the foods. That is, they either raised the prices of unhealthy foods by 12.5 percent, and then by 25 percent; or they discounted the price of healthy foods comparably. Then they watched what the mothers purchased.
The study authors separated food into two categories, "high calorie for nutrient" food and "low calorie for nutrient" food -- i.e. junk food and healthy food. They did this so that they could specifically measure the effect pricing changes had on the nutritional content of a participant's shopping basket. As you might expect, taxing junk food reduced junk food purchases, and subsidizing healthy food increased healthy food purchases. But the story does not end there. The researchers discovered that taxing the bad stuff was far more effective from a nutritional standpoint than subsidizing the good stuff -- and not just because prices affected sales.
The junk food taxes caused a real shift in nutritional quality because the money saved on junk food was spent on healthy food, which has more nutrients per calories. However, when the researchers subsidized healthy food in their test, many participants spent the savings on -- wait for it -- junk food. A subsidy for health foods actually increased the amount of fat, protein, and carbohydrates from that simulated shopping trip by about 10 percent each.
Snow got you down? Would you rather be talking about spring planting? Well, if you happen to be in Philly this weekend, you're in luck. Urban farmer extraordinaire Dave Zelov, fearless leader of the Weavers Way agricultural empire, will be at the Allen's Lane High Point Cafe at the R8 Allen's Lane train station in NW Philly giving a presentation and answering veggie gardening questions this Sunday, February 28 at 2pm.
I can vouch for the fact that Dave is an amazing resource and a super nice guy. And yes, even in the middle of the snowiest winter in Philly history -- a winter which shows no sign of abating -- he's already harvesting chard, kale, bok choy, tatsoi, lettuce, arugula, pea shoots, and baby greens out of his hoop houses. But he's taking a break to help us all get a mental head start on the growing season.
Anyway, if you're around and want to think and talk about something green, swing on by this Sunday. Tell him Tom sent you.
This is wrong on so many levels. The NYT reports on the latest doings in the robotics lab:
With Dr. Rybski looking on like a proud parent, a bearded graduate student clacked away at a laptop on a roving service cart, and the robot rolled forward to fulfill its primary function: the delivery of one foil-wrapped Nature Valley trail-mix flavor granola bar.
"Hello, I'm the Snackbot," it said in a voice not unlike that of HAL 9000, from "2001: A Space Odyssey," as its rectangular LED "mouth" pulsated to form the words. "I've come to deliver snacks to Ian. Is Ian here?"
Now, Snackbot exists to help gather data on human/robot interactions. Although a careful review of the relevant data contained within such works as Battlestar Galactica, Terminator, 2001: A Space Odyssey or even the lackluster I, Robot will give a discerning viewer all the information he or she needs to understand the dangers robots pose to humankind.
But it gets worse:
The Snackbot is but one soldier in a veritable army of new robots designed to serve and cook food and, in the process, act as good-will ambassadors, and salesmen, for a more automated future.
The article then proceeds to describe some of these "soldiers" culminating in the shocking robot-human hybrid that is the innocuously named Motoman SDA-10:
First they make our sushi. Then they enslave us.
The scientists involved with these efforts readily admit that the whole idea is meant to counteract the important lessons we've learned from Terminator and BSG and acclimate us to the idea of a future populated with robot servers. We all know how that story ends, don't we?
My suggestion: boil your own pot of water and leave the robots out of the equation entirely.
The industry talks a good game, but keeps churning out the same old junk. It's no mystery that Michelle Obama's Let's Move anti-obesity campaign is built on industry cooperation. It's also true that many experts are skeptical of the wisdom behind it; nutritionist Marion Nestle has been particularly critical both of the government's food industry "health" partnerships as well as of the administration's unwillingness to fight the industry's relentless media advertising.
I tend to agree. While the Let's Move initiative is full of worthy proposals, especially in the area of addressing food deserts and promoting farm-to-city initiatives, the idea of leaving restrictions on junk food television advertising -- not to mention junk food taxes -- out of the equation seems to base the pitch just a bit too much as an appeal to our better angels. It's hard to see public service announcements and educational campaigns counteracting those hundreds of millions of dollars work of junk food ads Americans of all ages submit to every time they turn on their televisions.
And it certainly doesn't help when star athletes, some of whom will no doubt participate in Let's Move, continue to flack for junk food (from Petyon and Eli Manning and Oreos to Derek Jeter and Gatorade). Meanwhile, anyone who's been watching the Olympics knows that NBC's coverage of this ultimate athletic event has been awash in ads for soda and other junk food. Even the Olympians themselves are in on the act -- Alternet noted that snowboarder Brad Martin is featured prominently in a McDonald's ad shown repeatedly during the Olympics.
Let's go back to the co-op theme, shall we? Tom Philpott of Grist wrote some time ago about the need for a "less efficient and more robust food system." He sketched a vision, based on his experience with his own farm, of small interrelated businesses benefiting communities via the local multiplier effect and generating jobs, good wages and affordable, healthy food far beyond what globalized multinational corporations have been able to manage for most American regions. It's a vision that without doubt shouldn't be restricted to the food system. Philpott closed the piece with a question: "How do we get there?"
Well, Cleveland, Ohio -- of all places -- has attempted an answer which caused Philpott to review the Nation's coverage of this "new" phenomenon of large scale cooperatives:
In a must-read article in the March 1 issue of The Nation, Gar Alperovitz, Ted Howard, and Thad Williamson lay out what they call the "Cleveland Model," a reference to that city's emerging complex of worker-owned businesses under the Evergreen Cooperatives umbrella.
The key enterprise in the Cleveland initiative is the Evergreen Cooperative laundry, "a worker-owned, industrial-size, thoroughly 'green' operation" that "opened its doors late last fall in Glenville, a neighborhood with a median income hovering around $18,000," The Nation reports. Overall in Cleveland, the poverty rate stands at about 30 percent; the population has halved since 1950. The hollowed-out city, like Detroit, Pittsburgh, and other rust-belt metropolises, stands as a stark rebuke to 30-plus years of de-industrialization and corporate-dominated globalization.
While these are "not your traditional small-scale co-ops," the authors report, they are also not faceless entities that turn workers into cogs in a vast machine. The authors write:
The Evergreen model draws heavily on the experience of the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation in the Basque Country of Spain, the world's most successful large-scale cooperative effort (now employing 100,000 workers in an integrated network of more than 120 high-tech, industrial, service, construction, financial and other largely cooperatively owned businesses).
...To fund the Evergreen initiatives, the project's founders have been resourceful: they've cobbled together funds from a combination of local foundations, banks, and city government, The Nation reports. And get this:
An important aspect of the plan is that each of the Evergreen co-operatives is obligated to pay 10 percent of its pre-tax profits back into the fund to help seed the development of new jobs through additional co-ops. Thus, each business has a commitment to its workers (through living-wage jobs, affordable health benefits and asset accumulation) and to the general community (by creating businesses that can provide stability to neighborhoods).
Besides the laundry, Evergreen also runs Ohio Solar Cooperative, which installs PV solar panels on commercial and government buildings and provides weatherization to homes. The group will soon roll out Green City Growers Cooperative, "a 100% worker-owned, hydroponic, food production greenhouse."
That's change we can believe in. Sadly, I question how much commitment there will be from the administration for this kind of thing. From the federal government's perch in DC it's easy to mistake what Cleveland is doing as "too small" to address the jobs crisis that we face. But that is nothing more than a failure of imagination. Still, the leadership on this will likely come from cities. Even so, we should all be thinking about how we might be able to get something like the Cleveland model to take root in our own communities.
If you've been watching the Olympics, you might have seen an ad for Sun Chips that features its "compostable bag." The plastic in the bag is derived from GMO corn and made by Cargill. The ad neglects to mention those inconvenient truths, though it does claim that its bag will break down in home compost "under ideal conditions."
Even worse, with the possible exception of the Sun Chips bag, corn plastic generally will not break down in home compost, even under ideal conditions -- it's only compostable in "industrial-scale" composting systems. So for those of you who live in San Francisco, which actually has municipal composting, that's all well and good, I guess. But for the rest of us, this stuff is still plain, old [genetically engineered] garbage.
But now researchers in the UK may have just fixed all that:
Scientists at Imperial College London are working on bioplastic packaging - made from trees and grass - that can break down in home composting bins.
The polymer developed by the scientists is made from sugars that come from the breakdown of fast-growing trees and grasses, or agricultural and food waste.
The scientists from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council purposely focused on non-food crops - many common bioplastics come from corn or sugar cane waste - and using low-energy and low-water processes.
Very cool. Keep an eye on this stuff. It could really be the packaging of the future.
I love my food co-op. It's not a secret. Heck, I blog for it. And what works for consumers works for farmers like Sam Simon of upstate New York, too (via the NYT):
He began his dairy operation in 1999, more as a labor of love than a business venture. But he soon realized that the economics were unsustainable: Farmers couldn't survive being paid roughly the same price for milk that they were in the 1970s. "This is nuts," he thought.
So he looked for an alternative in which a farm could produce premium milk, process it and sell it on its own label. The farms he looked at that had tried it weren’t succeeding, so he came up with the idea of a nonprofit co-op selling premium-quality milk, without artificial hormones, traveling 80 or so miles instead of 1,200, to customers in the Northeast. The hope was that people would pay more for locally produced, higher-quality milk, and that the extra cost would be passed on directly to the farmers.
He signed up eight family farms in Dutchess and Columbia Counties that produce 1.6 million pounds of milk a month, 200,000 of it sold through Hudson Valley Fresh. So far it's working. The farmers get paid a price, now $21 per hundredweight of milk, based on their cost of production, not on the fixed commodity price, now about $16, up from as low as $11 last year. That can be the difference between breaking even and not. Hudson Valley Fresh sells a third of it in New York City, in places like Whole Foods, and the rest in the Hudson Valley and Connecticut and on Long Island.
Milk is a troubled commodity, of course, but much of that trouble comes from the fact that, thanks to Ronald Reagan, its price is set on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where large speculators can (and have) manipulated the price. Even though fluid milk is a perishable commodity, for some reason commodity traders get to determine the wholesale cost, which now has no relation to the actual cost of production. That's capitalism for you!
Meanwhile, the Philly area also has a great example of another kind of successful farmer co-op in Lancaster Farm Fresh, which joins fifty farmers into an entity that can efficiently distribute tons of produce into urban markets from New York City to Washington, DC.
And small scale co-ops may even provide the way forward for ethanol as well -- not as a means to produce fuel for cars on a massive scale, but as an alternative to diesel fuel for farm equipment.
Co-ops have a long history in agriculture but have struggled since corporate consolidation became the watchword in Washington DC and state capitals nationwide. To this day, the USDA remains far more interested in low retail prices of commodities, irrespective of the impact it has on farmers themselves or rural communities. But with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, there seems to be a bit more momentum coming from the USDA for helping farmers establish co-ops. Hoping corporations behave benevolently is not a plan. Giving farmers the ability to act as a countervailing force to corporate control of agricultural markets? Now that's a plan.
Did the President Just Create a National Food Policy Council?
Michelle Obama kicked off her campaign against childhood obesity today. Among the provisions are a revamping of the school lunch program, a small boost in funding for farmers markets, a major initiative to "end" food deserts by 2017, a focus on maintaining children's exercise levels, a set of broad public-private partnerships, along with reforms to front-of-package nutrition labeling and the food pyramid (see the WaPo's Jane Black for a good summary).
But the most intriguing element may have been the creation of The Presidential Task Force on Childhood Obesity. According to the White House blog:
The new task force is charged with developing an interagency action plan to solve the problem of obesity among our Nation's children as part of the First Lady’s Let's Move campaign. The campaign will take a comprehensive approach to engage both public and private sectors to help children become more active and eat healthier within a generation, so that children born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight.
Members of the task force include: the Secretary of the Interior; the Secretary of Agriculture; Secretary of Health and Human Services; Secretary of Education; Director of the Office of Management and Budget; Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff to the First Lady; Assistant to the President for Economic Policy; and heads of other executive departments, agencies, or offices as the Chair may designate.
By their nature, food policy councils are designed to circumvent the parochial interests and often "captured" status of regulatory agencies. By making people who don't normally talk sit together and consider the broader impact of their policies, food policy councils have the potential to keep special interests from dominating policy debates.
Most state-level food policy councils, such as New York's or Iowa's (created by then Gov. Tom Vilsack), include nutrition and access to health food as their core mission. And many find themselves moving towards involvement in local food and expansion of farmers markets and the like as a result of the inevitable conclusion that food production and food access are inexorably linked.
...The Nutter Administration is considering a tax on soda to help close the city's massive deficit. But the mayor himself claims that the real goal of such a tax would be to improve your health.
"What we're focused on primarily is obesity."
Mayor Nutter insists that his consideration of levying a tax on all sodas and sweetened drinks has a noble goal that goes beyond solving an economic crisis. He wants to encourage people to avoid sodas:
"It's something that we're taking a look at it, because we care very deeply about the issue of obesity, not only for children, type-2 diabetes, but also adults as well."
It's still unclear if Nutter will include a soda tax in the budget that he presents to city council in one month. Also unclear -- the rate of the tax, and who would pay directly -- distributors, retailers or consumers.
The Philly Daily News suggests a penny-an-ounce tax on soda and other sugary drinks might be a possibility -- though we won't find out until March 4 when the Mayor unveils his budget. In the unlikely event a Philly city soda tax could survive the vicious and inevitable blowback from the beverage industry, it would -- according to Yale's Rudd Center dead useful soda tax calculator -- generate up to $68 million dollars for the cash-strapped city. I say, go for it, Mike!
Tonight, when President Obama gives his State of the Union address, he's expected to acknowledge a fourth-generation New Jersey grocer who builds supermarkets in poor neighborhoods, including four in Philadelphia.
Jeff Brown, 46, who runs Brown's Super Stores Inc. of Westville, Gloucester County, acknowledged yesterday that he would be a guest of honor seated in Michelle Obama's box in the House of Representatives during the speech.
"It's cool," Brown said. "So cool."
Obama is expected to mention the idea of building more supermarkets in impoverished areas, commonly called supermarket deserts because of the dearth of stores large enough to sell fresh food.
It's great news that addressing food access for low-income folks truly is a priority in the White House. Brown operates several Shop-Rite's in struggling Philly neighborhoods and deserves credit for his efforts. The only thing I'll ding him for is his vocal and influential opposition to Philly's failed plastic bag ban of last summer. Still, net net, he's one of the good guys so good for him for getting his work (and Philly) some much-needed attention.
And the Winner of the USDA's Food Safety Sweepstakes Is...
Dr. Elizabeth Hagen! No, you're not expected to know who she is. Suffice it to say that, as anticipated, USDA Chief Tom Vilsack turned to an under-the-radar choice for Under Secretary of Food Safety. Hagen, currently the USDA's Chief Medical Officer, will, if confirmed, take charge of the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), which is responsible for the safety of meat and poultry products.
The interesting aspect of this pick is that she is an infectious disease doc and public health specialist who has been working at USDA for several years -- and thus should have a good grounding in food safety methods. It also means both the Under Secretary of Food Safety as well as the administrator of FSIS itself, Dr. Jerold Mande, will be medical doctors. One can hope we will on longer hear things like "I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health," coming from top FSIS administrators.
Hagen joined the USDA during the Bush administration so she's neither a fresh face nor someone who is untainted by the food safety failings of the last few years. But neither does she appear to be an industry flunky. While I would have preferred an outsider who might come in and shake up the ossified USDA food safety culture, that was clearly too much to ask. It's also true that no one outside of USDA seems to have had many dealings with Hagen, but hope abounds (via Food Safety News):
Carol Tucker-Foreman, a distinguished fellow at The Food Policy Institute at Consumer Federation of America, responded to the announcement with guarded optimism.
"Consumer advocates who work closely with the FSIS on policy issues have had limited direct experience with Dr. Hagen. We have been told, however, that she has been a strong advocate for improved food safety policies and has urged the agency to be more aggressive in asking companies to initiate recalls."
Better recalls are certainly a start (if for no other reason than to give bloggers a break). Yet it strikes me that nothing in the pick undermines the argument that the FDA's newly minted deputy commissioner for foods Michael Taylor is the true "national" head of food safety right now. That's neither a good nor a bad thing, just political reality. And with the top jobs now filled, there's no further excuse for inaction.
At some point soon, in the course of fixing our broken system, Hagen and Taylor will have to take a stand: Is the future of meat safety in this country one of decontamination and post-hoc treatments for routinely infected products (aka "Zap the Crap")? Or will the USDA attack the root causes of pathogens in our meat -- an unrelenting focus on low quality, high quantity production methods. Dr. Hagen, please surprise us.
Reporter Ed Bruske spent a week working in a Washington, D.C. public school lunchroom. His series of articles (1, 2, 3) that resulted are fantastic reading for anyone following the ongoing debate regarding school lunches and the challenges for enacting real reform. Today's entry looked at how sugar is used in school food.
Bruske lists the multiple ways schools find to sugar up our kids -- Pop-Tarts, sugar cereal, canned fruit in syrup, flavored milk, cookies and other desserts and even juice. Yes, juice is part of the problem, too. By weight, it has just as much sugar as Coke. Bruske observes that a 4 oz cup of apple juice has the equivalent of 3 tsp of sugar. As for flavored milk, an 8 oz carton of the brand served in the DC school contains 6 tsp of sugar. It's the same percentage of sugar as juice but at twice the service size, it's almost the same amount of sugar as a can of Coke -- and handed out to many of our kids for free. Got diabetes?
I recommend an experiment. Take a cup measure and put in 4 oz (1/2 cup) of water. Then add 3 tsp of sugar. If you’re feeling saucy, double the amount of both. Now drink. That’s what we serve to our kids at school? Yuck.
Dust both sides of the sablefish fillets with sea salt. Cover the fillets in plastic wrap and transfer to the refrigerator. Let sit for 15–20 minutes.
Wash salt off the fillets with very cold water. Blot dry with a paper towel.
Tear the konbu into pieces the size of your fillets. Wet a new paper towel with sake and use it to moisten the konbu. Sandwich the sablefish between pieces of sake-moistened konbu. Cover the fillet in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30–40 minutes. Remove the konbu and return the fillet to the refrigerator.
Mix the soy sauce, sugar, mirin, and katsuobushi with 1 1/2 tablespoons of sake, and 1 1/2 tablespoons of water, in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer for about 10 minutes. Drain and remove the katsuobushi then set the sauce aside.
In a small bowl, combine 8 tablespoons of cold water with 2 tablespoons of potato starch to create a thickener (add the water to the potato starch gradually, whisking constantly to avoid clumping). Return the soy/mirin sauce to a boil then lower heat to a simmer. If desired, add the potato starch thickener to the sauce, gradually, until the desired consistency is reached. (Some people may choose to add very little or no thickener—you definitely won't want to use it all, but it's easier to mix a large batch.) Remove from heat and let cool.
To serve: Slice sablefish into portions approximately 1 inch wide by 2 inches long. Lightly char one side of the fish with a small butane torch or sear it very briefly in a hot saucepan. Top fish with a drizzle of the sauce and a sprinkle of sesame seeds. Serve slices of faux-nagi over bowls of hot steamed rice. You can also serve this nigiri style as they do at Tataki.
*Seafood Watch® recommends wild-caught sablefish from Alaska and British Columbia.
And don't forget to ask for sablefish at your favorite sushi place. They may not have it, but maybe they'll get the message and buy some... Thanks, Casson! Flickr photo: avlxyz
Journalist Merrill Goozner highlights some commentary from an FDA Insider who claims that the FDA is "more pro-industry than any time in 35 Years":
So says Jim Dickinson, editor of FDAWebview, an industry newsletter that closely follows enforcement issues at the agency. After reviewing the deregulatory shifts at the Food and Drug Administration since the Carter administration, he writes:
It has taken almost a generation, but by now, the pro-industry infiltration of FDA's culture is firmly entrenched. Not only is collaboration in product reviews officially encouraged, but good relationships across the regulatory fence hold the prospect of a possible future career in a well-paid industry job - a connection that is less likely to be publicly noticed in news media that now have to line up for information that has been filtered through agency press offices. The arm's-length relationship that formerly ruled every contact between agency and industry has become a fading memory.
He says the shift in culture accelerated after the 1992 passage of the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which made the agency dependent on industry funding. He concludes there's nothing that Margaret Hamburg, the new commissioner, and Joshua Sharfstein, her deputy, can do about it. Quoting a former chief of enforcement, he writes:
User fees at FDA are the primary villain, because they "allowed the industry to dictate the changes at the FDA in programs, procedures and practices. It will be impossible for the Obama administration to reverse the trend because as long as the user fees are in place the industry has the upper hand."
Radical stuff from an unexpected source.
It's hard to talk about the creeping takeover of the federal government by corporate interests without sounds like a conspiracy-minded crackpot. And yet, when presented with evidence like this, what other conclusion can you draw? There's no question that the "collaboration" Dickinson refers to continues to this day -- and not just for drugs. It's an established fact that the FDA relied heavily on chemical industry lobbyists to draw up the (hopefully) now infamous 2008 FDA bisphenol-A report that declared the plastics ingredient totally safe, despite all evidence to the contrary. And with concerns over the budget deficit now front and center any attempt to eliminate what is a legitimate funding source (by that I mean those drug company fees) will likely fail. In a word: Ugh.
With Obesity It's Not Just the Calories. It's the Chemicals
Michelle Obama's anti-childhood obesity agenda would have kids a little less round 'round the middle.White House Flickr streamWhile we await Michelle Obama's speech this Wednesday to the United States Conference of Mayors that will likely launch her new campaign against childhood obesity, I thought I'd offer a little perspective as well as a few bits of research that shed light on the enormity and complexity of the obesity epidemic.
First off, let's be clear: The First Lady will, of course, do everything she can to avoid picking a fight with Big Food -- I wouldn't be surprised to see corporate partnerships coming out of her efforts. Indeed, her team's first foray into the food policy arena, which included rumors of a White House embrace of former FDA Commissioner David Kessler's "junk food addiction" model for obesity, the president himself raising the possibility of a soda tax and the somewhat defensive posture of her policy team in an interview with NPR, were overshadowed by industry objections.
Even the most common-sense advice from her (drink water not soda, eat less processed food) prompted howls of outrage from food companies. We'll know for sure next week, but school food will probably be the focus of all her efforts. After all, school food is already the government's responsibility and even in the "reform-proof" Senate there is a fair amount of momentum for reducing access to junk food in the lunchroom and improving the quality of school food.
Unfortunately, the school environment is not the only one at issue for kids...
A story in Politico describes the soul-searching on Capitol Hill prompted by the sad, sudden death of Rep. John Boehner's 46-year-old chief of staff Paula Nowakowski:
"For a lot of us, this was a mortality check," said Justin Harding, 34, who's often on call seven days a week as chief of staff for Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and frequently gets home from work after his kids have gone to sleep. "It's causing us all to reflect and sort of check our own circumstances."
Hill staffers say Nowakowski's lifestyle mirrored much of their own. She smoked, she didn’t always eat well, and she often worked seven days a week.
A toxic combination, to be sure. Stressful jobs that require long hours are certainly unhealthy. But it's only recently that you could add diabetes to the list of job-related illnesses:
After working on George W. Bush's 2000 campaign in Michigan and enduring a lifestyle of horrible food and little sleep, Roe developed Type 1 diabetes [ed note: the reporter meant Type 2 since Type 1 doesn't "develop" in adults]. He knew he was getting ill, but he ignored the signs until he collapsed right after Bush's Inauguration and nearly died. He was hospitalized for a week and barely avoided a diabetic coma.
Other Hill staffers have also developed diabetes and high blood pressure.
And there's more:
One longtime Democratic committee staffer and former staff director, who asked not to be identified, got his wake-up moment when he crashed his car driving back to the Capitol after working until 5 a.m. the night before.
"I must've fallen asleep at the wheel," the staffer said. "I banged the car into a curb and blew both tires."
Soon afterward, he discovered he had developed high blood pressure and was battling diabetes. He later bowed out of his position, taking a lower-key spot on the committee.
Meanwhile, Rep. Joe Barton blamed his heart problems on "eating too many chicken-fried steaks."
"In the long run, I'd say this lifestyle could certainly be detrimental to your health," said Rep. Kathleen Dahlkemper (D-Pa.), a freshman who previously worked as a dietitian and spoke with POLITICO by phone from the Blue Dog retreat on Tuesday. "I'm sitting here watching them bring out trays of snacks: cheeses and sweets. We just ate lunch, which was huge. And before that, we had a very big breakfast. I can't get over how much food they put in front of us."
...Those who worked around the clock on last year's stimulus package and, now, on the health care bill admit to getting the majority of their meals from the Capitol vending machines.
While Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved to upgrade the food choices in the House cafeterias, the value meal in Longworth still includes a fountain drink and choices like chicken wings, burritos and popcorn chicken salad.
The focus in the obesity epidemic is often on low-income communities and their food deserts and swamps. But for many farther up the income chain, the work environment is just as toxic. It's not just Congressional workers who indulge in vending machine lunches, pastry and candy-strewn conference room spreads and bottomless cups of soda.
I can only hope that Capitol Hill denizens realize why addressing obesity and the associated problems in the food system requires going far beyond demands of personal responsibility and virtue. They would, I imagine, agree that they eat what's available. And if it's junk that's available, that's what they eat -- they don't have a choice. And as a result that junk makes them sick.
It's an interesting experiment going on up there -- how much more do they themselves have to suffer before they take steps to clean up their own food environment? And if they do act to protect themselves (or even if they don't), one hopes they now see the value of fixing public school cafeterias if not the rest of American workplaces.
As a complement to my post on The Vine asking if we're doing enough to prepare for the climate change-induced -- and inevitable -- rise in sea level, here's something from the NYT that takes a slightly different tack on the issue (thanks to TNR's Brad Plumer for pointing it out to me):
This weekend, the public was given its first glimpse of a project a year in the making: a collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art and its affiliate P.S.1, an art exhibition house. The museums have asked five separate architectural teams to come up with plans for transforming the metropolitan area's coastlines after warmer oceans and melting Antarctic ice have raised global sea levels, something many scientists predict is inevitable.
A full exhibit opens at MoMA on March 24, but what the teams are already coming up with has people talking. They envision a city lined with marshes, permeable coastlines, and oyster farms used as wave breaks. To adapt to climate change, the teams are asking New Yorkers to look at things in a more positive light -- namely, as a chance to bring a city famous for blocking out the ocean back to dealing with it.
Oyster farms, eh? That's certainly seeing opportunity in the face of disaster. Of course, it's not just coastal development that kicked out the oysters -- it was water pollution. And New York Harbor, though far cleaner that it was a few decades ago, still "harbors" enough heavy metals, pollutants and bacteria that I don't think anyone will be slurping "ersters" from its waters anytime soon. Still, power of positive thinking and all that. And I do like one team's idea of letting parts of Manhattan go all Venice and just accept streets full of water at high tide.
Anyway, it's worth noting that the architects' plans only account for about a 2 foot increase in sea level. As I highlight in my TNR post, we should plan for a 7 feet rise and very likely will get even more. An increase like that would swamp any city's most ambitious adaptation plans.
This latest research confirms the worse fears of those who think Americans spend too much time in front of the idiot box:
Couch potatoes beware: every hour of television watched per day may increase the risk of dying earlier from cardiovascular disease, according to research reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Australian researchers tracked the lifestyle habits of 8,800 adults and found that each hour spent in front of the television daily was associated with: > an 11 percent increased risk of death from all causes, > a 9 percent increased risk of cancer death; and > an 18 percent increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD)-related death.
While the study focused specifically on television watching, the findings suggest that any prolonged sedentary behavior, such as sitting at a desk or in front of a computer, may pose a risk to one's health. The human body was designed to move, not sit for extended periods of time, said David Dunstan, Ph.D., the study's lead author and professor and Head of the Physical Activity Laboratory in the Division of Metabolism and Obesity at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute in Victoria, Australia.
"What has happened is that a lot of the normal activities of daily living that involved standing up and moving the muscles in the body have been converted to sitting," Dunstan said. "Technological, social, and economic changes mean that people don't move their muscles as much as they used to -- consequently the levels of energy expenditure as people go about their lives continue to shrink. For many people, on a daily basis they simply shift from one chair to another -- from the chair in the car to the chair in the office to the chair in front of the television."
This point was entirely ignored in the LA Times article linked by Drum. But it's a crucial point. Our society privileges and encourages desk work and frowns on activities that smack of manual labor -- you know, like farming. But that may ultimately prove to be a calamitous mistake.
A new study out of Tufts confirms that supermarket and restaurant calorie counts are inaccurate. From the abstract:
Measured energy values of 29 quick-serve and sit-down restaurant foods averaged 18% more than stated values, and measured energy values of 10 frozen meals purchased from supermarkets averaged 8% more than originally stated. These differences substantially exceeded laboratory measurement error but did not achieve statistical significance due to considerable variability in the degree of underreporting. Some individual restaurant items contained up to 200% of stated values and, in addition, free side dishes increased provided energy to an average of 245% of stated values for the entrees they accompanied.
It's easy to simply dismiss this as another case of corporate shenanigans, though the study authors observe that the variation from stated values is within USDA requirements for accuracy. Unfortunately, the authors also point out that the variation matters:
The extra mean measured energy in this study compared to stated information may cause substantial weight gain over time. For example, positive energy balance of only 5% per day for an individual requiring 2,000 kcal/day could lead to a 10-lb weight gain in a single year. It is also notable that free side dishes on average contained more energy than the entrees alone. It is unclear whether consumers are aware of how much energy free side dishes contain, and providing more accessible information on meal energy contents both with and without side dishes could help increase attention to the potential of these casual food items to more than double meal energy intake.
For better or for worse, if you really want to know what's in what you're eating, you need to cook it yourself from scratch. Short of that, you're putting yourself at the mercy of corporate nutritionists and government watchdogs. To date, those two have not exactly shown themselves to be good guardians of our national waistlines, have they? Flickr photo: Ken Yourdon
Yale's Environment360 has a new must-read report by Sonia Shah linking pesticides to the high-profile die-offs among amphibians, bees and bats. What makes this news timely isn't necessarily the toxicity of the pesticides per se, it's the indirect effects on these animals of chronic, low-dose exposure to chemicals:
In the past dozen years, no fewer than three never-before-seen diseases have decimated populations of amphibians, bees, and -- most recently -- bats. A growing body of evidence indicates that pesticide exposure may be playing an important role in the decline of the first two species, and scientists are investigating whether such exposures may be involved in the deaths of more than 1 million bats in the northeastern United States over the past several years.
...The recent spate of widespread die-offs began in amphibians. Scientists discovered the culprit — an aquatic fungus called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, of a class of fungi called “chytrids” — in 1998. Its devastation, says amphibian expert Kevin Zippel, is “unlike anything we’ve seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs.” Over 1,800 species of amphibians currently face extinction.
It may be, as many experts believe, that the chytrid fungus is a novel pathogen, decimating species that have no armor against it, much as Europe’s smallpox and measles decimated Native Americans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But “there is a really good plausible story of chemicals affecting the immune system and making animals more susceptible,” as well, says San Francisco State University conservation biologist Carlos Davidson.
Shah goes on to explain a mechanism whereby pesticides applied to fields in California's Central Valley drift into the Sierra Nevada mountains "where they settle in the air, snow, and surface waters, and inside the tissues of amphibians." A scientist who studied the matter "found a strong correlation between upwind pesticide use... and declining amphibian populations."
Meanwhile, bees and bats have suffered a similar fate -- killed off by powerful pathogens that in theory could be novel but in practice seem to have taken advantage of animal populations immuno-compromised by pesticides.
One of the most interesting aspects of the piece was the description of an Italian scientists unpublished research that suggests the "missing link" between neonicotinoids, a powerful pesticide already banned in Europe but still in use in the US, and bee colony collapse. It relates to the practices of using neonicotinoids-coated seeds planted by machines that kick up clouds of pesticide as they work...
Not to overdo the food safety theme, but I thought it amusing gross to discover that fast food restaurants have contamination issues in more than just their meat. A team of microbiologists from Virginia's Hollins University just published a paper in the International Journal of Food Microbiology that indicates soda fountains harbor coliform bacteria (usually but not always fecal in origin), E coli and other harmful bugs at levels far beyond EPA safe drinking water limits. From the abstract:
More than 11% of the beverages analyzed contained Escherichia coli and over 17% contained Chryseobacterium meningosepticum. Other opportunistic pathogenic microorganisms isolated from the beverages included species of Klebsiella, Staphylococcus, Stenotrophomonas, Candida, and Serratia. Most of the identified bacteria showed resistance to one or more of the 11 antibiotics tested. These findings suggest that soda fountain machines may harbor persistent communities of potentially pathogenic microorganisms which may contribute to episodic gastric distress in the general population and could pose a more significant health risk to immunocompromised individuals. These findings have important public health implications and signal the need for regulations enforcing hygienic practices associated with these beverage dispensers.
And antibiotic resistant to boot! The good news, sort of, according to the researchers is that only one outbreak from about ten years ago was linked to a soda fountain. But there's an awful lot of unreported "gastric distress" out there. I guess it's not just the HFCS that soda drinkers have to worry about.
The NYT's latest ground beef revelation involves a substance that some in the meat industry refer to as "pink slime" and is a component in ground beef sold in supermarkets and at fast food restaurants like Burger King and McDonald's and fed to our children at school. At issue in the article is the question of safety. It appears that the disinfection process of injecting ammonia into the stuff in order to kill bacteria like salmonella and E coli isn't nearly as effective as claimed.
But that's not what jumped out at me. What jumped out at me was the description of what "pink slime" actually is:
[A] product made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil.
So, it's meat that was previously not considered fit for human consumption. But now it's in every McDonald's hamburger (and most supermarket patties) sold in the US. What changed? Pink slime purveyor Beef Products' "innovative" ammonia treatment supposedly fully disinfected the meat and thus made it safe to eat.
But is that the only definition of what's fit for human consumption? I mean, by that definition we could disinfect all sorts of nasty manufacturing byproducts and stick it in our food. Keep in mind that we're not talking about hunks of meat that got chopped off a side of beef and ground up. This is a highly processed product. Before it can be sold in frozen blocks of beefy mash, it goes through a process of "liquefying the fat and extracting the protein from the trimmings in a centrifuge." Sounds delicious!
Tom Philpott has a nice piece on some of the implications of this story. In it, he points to an AP article where fast food companies including McDonald's and Burger King stand by their decision to continue the use of pink slime in their hamburgers (only "a small percentage" of it is in any given burger assures a Burger King spokeswoman).
But the AP reporter missed an opportunity to ask this fundamental question. Why does anyone think it's okay to put this stuff in burgers? I mean, where's the shame? And I'm not the only one who thinks this is gross. From the NYT piece:
Another [USDA] microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, called the processed beef "pink slime" in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues and said, "I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling."
Right on! People simply shouldn't be eating this ammonia-soaked, industrially manufactured beef-like mash -- and I can't imagine they would be happy to find out that brands they trust have been "secretly" feeding it to them in order to save a few bucks. But all this raised another question in my mind. What if no one cares? Put a different way, are there limits for Americans? I'm starting to wonder. People who learn about pink slime and then walk into a McDonald's and order up a Big Mac need to ask themselves what it is they think they're eating. Because I can tell you that pink slime may have fat, calories and protein in it. But that doesn't make it food.
The NYT has another piece encouraging a flare-up in the cage match between organic farmers and those in favor of genetic engineering as the solution to future food needs. This one is centered on the "unlikely" but happy marriage of a plant geneticist and an organic farmer:
Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak have every reason not to get along.
Ronald, a plant scientist, has spent her past two decades manipulating rice from her lab bench, bending the grain's DNA to her whim. Adamchak, meanwhile, is an organic farmer, teaching college students the best practices of an environmentally gentle agriculture at his California market garden.
As Adamchak confesses, few have been more vociferously opposed to the genetic engineering practiced by Ronald than his organic movement, which has steadily grown in recent years to constitute an influential, if tiny, part of the U.S. farm system. So it can come as some surprise when Ronald and Adamchak let slip that they have been happily married for more than a decade.
Such a union should not be shocking, the couple argues. And a more modest version -- sans marriage -- must be considered by any farmer or consumer hoping for a sustainable future for agriculture.
Industrial farming, with its heavy use of pesticides, synthetic fertilizer and irrigation, is exhausting the environment, and with billions more mouths to feed in the upcoming decades, the problem will only worsen unless the efforts of organic farming and genetic engineering are combined, they say.
...To spread their message to two communities that rarely speak in measured terms, Ronald and Adamchak have written a book, "Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food," which came out in paperback last month.
What Adamchak and Ronald pursue in the book is in essence a unified theory of farming. While critical of Western seed companies that have co-opted genetically modified (GM) crops for questionable business practices, the couple argues that both current and future generations of altered crops will, if responsibly managed, allow much of the world's hungry to be fed from land already degraded by the plow's slice and the tractor's compressing wheel.
This news gets the usual contrarian suspects cheering, of course. But to read the article, you'd think there are all these fantastic genetically engineering seeds just waiting to be planted if only the "powerful" organic lobby would let it happen. Only there aren't. Not a one. And while Ronald, the plant scientist, urges open-mindedness among sustainable agriculture folks, her own major plant breeding project on flood-tolerant rice uses advanced breeding techniques and not genetic engineering.
It's worth revisiting a Newsweek article from the summer that talked about the "return" of conventional breeding as the favored technique for developing new crops:
Part of the story is that conventional breeding can still do certain things extremely well—even better than genetic manipulation. What GM techniques are best at is isolating particularly useful bits of DNA in a prized plant, and transferring that single gene to another plant that is less well endowed. (In the best-known example, Monsanto spliced a gene from naturally herbicide-tolerant grass into soybeans, so farmers could apply the chemicals without killing their crops.) Conventional breeding still does better at building up qualities that require a complex suite of genes, such as the ability to fight off certain insects or to resist drought, which involves a host of genes that determine the way plants take up and manage water.
Roland would surely agree. And the fact is that the challenges before us require more than dropping in a gene here or there. To date, genetic engineering techniques have simply not shown itself to be up to the task. The result is that the debate over GMOs as a sustainable solution remains entirely theoretical. The existing GMO seed lines require heavy doses of synthetic fertilizer and water (in the case of the Bt crops mentioned in the article) or heavy doses of synthetic pesticides, fertilizer and water (in the case of Roundup Ready crops, the only other GMO seed line), neither of which are consistent with organic -- or sustainable -- practices.
In essence, this is an argument about federal research dollars not an argument about which seeds to plant. Wake me up when Monsanto invents a seed that can actually do all the things they've been promising us for the last couple of decades. In fact, don't. It's likely to be decades and decades before someone sees fit to rouse me. I could use the sleep
While launching a farmers' market in the dead of winter may seem both counter-intuitive and turnip-friendly, market manager Kyle Perry explains the clever strategy behind this maneuver and promises you'll see more than a pile of potatoes to welcome you.
...Perry says to expect, of course, root vegetables, from the lineup of 20 vendors, but since some of the farmers do have greenhouses, there should be cucumbers, tomatoes and salad greens. There will also be grass-fed beef, naturally-raised pork, free-range chicken and lamb. One vendor, M & B Farview Farm, out of Berks County, will also be grilling their meats, so you can grab a grass-bed burger or a pork sausage while you shop.
Salad greens? Tomatoes? In January? I'll be interested to find out how they heat those greenhouses (just compost, I hope) but I'm still excited. May the Teens be the decade in which "local winter veggies that aren't of the root variety" start to seem normal. The new market will be in the so-odd-it's-cool Piazza in the Northern Liberties starting January 16.
Ezra Klein sees this elegant image from Good that depicts seasonal eating and he snarkily (though accurately) observes that it merely proves why locavorism is best left to Californians.
Me? I see this image and think: Boy, we sure could use more hoop houses and winter gardening in the rest of the country. And thanks to the USDA, we should soon find out how realistic a thought that is. My hope is that the USDA's study of hoop house growing will put to rest the persistent myth that a geographically diversified food production system is 1) impossible or 2) would require large-carbon-footprint greenhouses heated by anything other than sunlight or compost. We shall see...
There have indeed been studies that have indicated genetically engineered crops like corn and soy might negatively affect our health. Most of these studies conclude by saying "more study is needed" -- but further study never happens because Monsanto, which owns the patents of most GMO seeds simply won't give them to independent researchers for scientific use without onerous restrictions. The federal government has been no help because under industry pressure the EPA and the FDA ruled back in the 1990s that GMO crops are "substantially equivalent" to their conventional brethren and they have shown no interest in re-opening the GMO can of worms.
This regulatory end-around has been aided in part by the industry's successful campaign to convince the media and our representatives that genetic engineering is just a super-duper cool version of conventional breeding. That is a lie. Genetic engineering involves inserting a new piece of DNA code into a plant's own DNA -- which sounds straightforward except you have no idea where your piece will end up and what disturbances it might cause in the plant. You just have to grow the thing and find out.
What you might get is what's known as "insertional mutagenesis" and it can result in all sorts of bad things happening. One example might be that you engineer a plant to produce some new substance -- like a herbicide, a vitamin or a even a drug -- but it also produces a potent toxin to go along with it. Oops!
Insertional mutagenesis is why pretty much all of Monsanto's promised innovations are five or ten years away and it's also why GMOs can come with all sorts of nasty surprises. And because these are subtle changes to the genome, it shouldn't be surprising that any health effects it would cause in creatures that eat them might be subtle, too.
All of which brings me to the news (via Tom Philpott) that there is increasing evidence that GMOs can and do cause health problems:
And now comes this study by three French university researchers. It's a fascinating piece of work. The researchers analyzed data from tests done on rats by Monsanto and another biotech firm, Covance Laboratories, submitted to European government in 2000 and 2001. The firms conducted the tests to prove that their products were safe to eat; scrutinizing the same data, the researchers arrived at a different conclusion.
The three products in question are still quite relevant: one strain of Roundup Ready corn, engineered to withstand Monsanto's flagship herbicide; and two strands of Bt corn, engineered to contain the insect-killing gene from the BT bacteria. Roundup Ready and Bt products are ubiquitous in the U.S. seed supply, often "stacked" into the same seed.
The researchers also found "clear negative impact" on their livers of rats fed all three kinds of GMO corn.
They added that it's impossible to tell, based on the data, whether the damage was caused by the specific genes introduced to the corn, or -- more troubling still -- if the very process of genetic modification creates a toxic effect.
Firstly, let's be clear -- industry scientists got bad results, fudged the analysis and then figured no one would notice. Well, it took almost a decade, but these enterprising French scientists did notice. And that last bit about a toxic effect of genetic modification: That's got "insertional mutagenesis" written all over it, no? Philpott then explains why, though no one's arguing that GMOs cause "illness" per se, this isn't some kind of crank theory:
Nearly our entire corn and soy crops crops are genetically modified -- and have been for nearly a decade. Corn and soy course through the food system like blood in a body. If GMOs caused harm, wouldn't it be obvious by now?
Moreover, most corn and soy goes into animal feed. Last I checked, pigs, chickens, and cows on factory animal farms haven't been dropping dead en masse before their date with the executioner. Again, if GMOs were dangerous, why aren't factory animal farmers rejecting them?
This thinking, I think, represents educated opinion on GMOs. The logic would be persuasive, if scientists were claiming that GMOs caused spectacular, virulent illnesses, the kind associated with, say, E. coli O157 or salmonella. But instead, the evidence I'm referring to suggests that GMOs cause low-level, chronic damage.
And think of the U.S. diet. People here tend to survive on refined sugars and processed food, and are routinely exposed to toxic chemicals like BPA. Moreover, we have high and growing levels of chronic ailments. To me, it's highly plausible that yet more low-level toxins could enter the food stream without causing immediately identifiable trouble.
Yes, after the fiasco of bisphenol A -- whose safety had been "proven" by industry-conducted research accepted by a gullible FDA -- I think we can conceive of the possibility that GMOs, which have never even gone through a thorough environmental impact review, much less a full safety review, might, just might come with serious long-term risks attached. Maybe someone should ask the FDA what they think about GMOs now?
Tom Philpott at Grist has a great post on Monsanto, its magic seeds and its monopoly status. In it, he reminds us that "climate change-ready" -- and non-existent -- drought tolerant GM seeds aren't the only false hopes currently being peddled by Monsanto:
Meanwhile, there also recently came a cold slap to one of Monsanto's most hyped promises: that it will soon deliver genetically engineered corn, rice, and wheat strains that demand much less nitrogen fertilizer. Nitrogen fertilizer is a major ecological liability of industrial agriculture--synthetic nitrogen pollutes streams and blots out fish life, destroys soil organic matter, and enters the atmosphere as nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon.
In a recent report (PDF), the Union of Concerned Scientists' Doug Gurian-Sherman pointed out that thus far, the GM crop industry has had zero success at engineering crops with "complex traits" like improved nitrogen efficiency.
Splicing in a gene that makes corn tolerate a certain herbicide is one thing; improving a highly complex, multi-gene, not-completely-understood process like nitrogen efficiency is completely different. Despite all the hype around nitrogen-efficient GM corn, the GM seed giants are conducting relatively few trials to test crops in the field, Gurian-Sherman reports.
"Although a few genes that appear promising for improving NUE [nitrogen-use efficiency] have been identified in the public literature, they have yet to demonstrate that they can improve consistently in various environments, and without significant undesirable side effects that could harm our agriculture, environment, or public health," Gurian-Sherman writes. Meanwhile, other methods of reducing nitrogen use, like traditional breeding and ecosystem approaches, have proven track records.
So, all together now, traditional breeding paired with agro-ecological techniques work better than Monsanto's over-hyped, overpriced, over-sprayed products. That's better.
Paula Crossfield has an excellent piece in Civil Eats on food, agriculture and climate change:
Around one third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the way we produce, process, distribute and consume the food we eat according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Meanwhile, farmers the world over will be the most affected by climate change, as higher carbon in the atmosphere and higher temperatures increase erratic weather patterns, pests, and disease occurrence, while decreasing water availability, disrupting relationships with pollinators and lowering yield and the efficacy of herbicides like glyphosate (aka Round-Up) -- all detailed in a revealing new report from the USDA called The Effects of Climate Change on U.S. Ecosystems [pdf].
She then goes on to observe that, for all the benefits of having the USDA 100% behind climate mitigation, the techniques USDA Chief Tom Vilsack endorsed during his speech in Copenhagen can be deeply problematic if incorrectly implemented.
Vilsack talked up no-till farming, carbon markets, genetically engineered crops and ethanol. All of these techniques are either of questionable value as climate mitigators or come with serious negative consequences for soil and water quality. Sadly, the USDA continues to ignore agro-ecological techniques for addressing climate change -- techniques with a proven ability to build soil quality and sequester carbon and which places like the Rodale Institute have spent decades perfecting and studying. Agribusiness has a stranglehold on the USDA for sure. But they don't have a stranglehold on the facts. It would be nice if Vilsack and other members of the administration finally recognized that.
Remember NYC's anti-soda campaign "Don't Drink Yourself Fat"? Well, prepare yourself. Because the NYC Department of Health has made themselves a YouTube Video. And it's a doozy:
I think I'm going to be sick -- which is, of course, the point. So, what do you think -- will it stop people from drinking soda or is it just a cheap gag? Get it? Gag?
When Thinking about Saving the Future, Don't Forget about Family Planning
McClatchy has a big article on how the Bush administration extended its hostility to family planning to its massive multibillion dollar global anti-AIDS inititative:
On a continent where fewer than one in five married women use modern contraception, an explosion of unplanned pregnancies is threatening to bury Adongo's family and a generation of Africans under a mountain of poverty.
Promoting birth control in Africa faces a host of obstacles — patriarchal customs, religious taboos, ill-equipped public health systems — but experts also blame a powerful, more distant force: the U.S. government.
Under President George W. Bush, the United States withdrew from its decades-long role as a global leader in supporting family planning, driven by a conservative ideology that favored abstinence and shied away from providing contraceptive devices in developing countries, even to married women.
Bush's mammoth global anti-AIDS initiative, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, poured billions of dollars into Africa but prohibited groups from spending any of it on family planning services or counseling programs, whose budgets flat-lined.
The restrictions flew in the face of research by international aid agencies, the U.N. World Health Organization and the U.S. government's own experts, all of whom touted contraception as a crucial method of preventing births of babies being infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
The Bush program is widely hailed as a success, having supplied lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs to more than 2 million HIV patients worldwide.
However, researchers, Africa experts and veteran U.S. health officials now think that PEPFAR also contributed to Africa's epidemic population growth by undermining efforts to help women in some of the world's poorest countries exercise greater control over their fertility.
With local economies and governments unable to absorb that kind of growth, this is a disaster in the making. While the article doesn't connect these dots, I'd point out that the debate over agricuture, GMOs, hunger -- over global warming itself -- comes down to various opinions on how to deal with a planetary population of 9 billion people by 2050.
Meanwhile, programs that focus on empowering women, including but not limited to giving them access to real family planning, could go a long way toward reducing that "Peak People" figure, which would make our goals that much more achievable. Those of us who spend a lot of time thinking and writing about food, ag and climate need to focus on the extent to which our future is linked to that of the developing world. Right now, there's a subtext of "better them than us" floating through much of the climate and food-related discourse. As a remedy, I feel compelled to paraphrase one of Bill Clinton's best lines from the 1992 campaign: when we're talking about the health of the plant there is no them -- there's only us.
One of the most important historic developments in the food economy is embodied in this statistic: in 1900, 40 percent of every dollar spent on food went to the farmer or rancher while the rest was split between inputs and distribution. Now? 7 cents on the dollar goes to the producer and 73 cents goes just to distribution. That's worth keeping in mind when you read things like this:
... Walmart, now the nation's largest supermarket chain as well as retailer, has gotten into the local scene, embarking on an effort to procure more of its produce from local growers.
Uh, oh.
Now, there is an intriguing (and concerning) wrinkle to all this. As the St Louis Dispatch piece linked above observes (and as Tom Philpott and I have observed many times before), one of the big obstacles to expanding local food systems is the collapse of local distribution infrastructure. There are often no wholesalers to buy and store, and no delivery infrastructure to move, produce locally. Conveniently, Walmart has its own regional distribution system that rivals anything that ever existed before -- why reinvent the wheel (again). So, it's only natural for them jump in.
Still smarting over the industry's shenanigans over the "Smart Choices" label, the FDA has decided to pick up the pace of change. Marion Nestle dug up a set of proposed new front of package nutrition labels that the FDA is studying and one of which may ultimately get the agency's final approval. Here they are:
My faves are the "Nutrition Tips" label with colors and the last one, dubbed "Waitrose," with the stop light label -- they actually present meaningful information. The others just focus on calories, which is not necessarily even the most important piece of nutrition information. If I had to bet, I'd suggest that the industry will push hard against any label that tries to characterize the nutrients levels as too high. But we'll see. What do you all think? Don't just tell me! Click here to write an email to the FDA (with the recipient, subject, and required header for your message all filled out for you -- they want your feedback.
At the same time as they're working on the front of package label, the FDA is also now accepting comments on its initiative to remake the existing side-panel nutrition labels. And the suggestions are starting to roll in. A good example comes from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, shown at right. In some ways, it's got a bit of a behavioral economics, "Nudge"-y style to it -- small changes that alter the way you look at the label and possibly the way you think about the product.
I like how the red text used for nutrients that exceed the recommended daily amount as well as the increased font size for calories draw the eye. Breaking out the amount of added sugars into its own category also represents a helpful improvement. Also, note the idea of classing all the sugars together in the ingredients list, which specifically defeats food companies' technique of using a half dozen forms of sugar to hide the fact that it's often the number one ingredient by weight.
But admiring CSPI's work isn't the end of it. The FDA wants to hear from you. Go here and tell them what you think. If you want a helpful cheat sheet, check out Fooducate's 7 suggestions for labeling improvements.
