Anyone who decides to become a "certified" organic farmer makes a huge commitment in time, effort and money, and the payoff isn't always obvious.
This is how it was supposed to work: farmers with concerns about the environmental and health impacts of commercial fertilizers and synthetic pesticides would use more labour and smarts, more expensive natural pesticides derived from plants and bacteria, better land management, more humane treatment of livestock, to produce food. Consumers with similar concerns would pay a premium to get it. It's the consumer side of this bargain that really hasn't developed, and could be breaking down. In fact there are places like England where demand for organic food is falling, no doubt the result of the economic crisis.
Anyone who spends time with organic farmers know they are very very committed to what they're doing, it's almost a religious calling. At the same time, in order to justify the higher prices, they have to spend money to have their farms certified by an outside agency. I'm always left with the feeling that if there is one group of farmers who don't need this kind of supervision it's the farmers who can speak endlessly about organic matter, earthworms, and cover crops, and would see soil erosion as a mortal sin. I want more farmers like that, but unless the "marketplace" (and I'm talking about major food retailers not just farmers markets) send the right signals, we risk losing the very farmers we should want to keep in business. Months ago the big food retailer Sobeys ran commercials offering organic food at the same price as conventional food. It's hard to know whether this led to an increase in sales, but it certainly had a chilling effect on organic farmers at the time.
On PEI smart retailers like Barb MacLeod invested heavily in retailing organic food, but the store quickly closed. ADL, PEI's big dairy, made a serious effort to buy and market organic milk and cheese. The company discovered there just wasn't enough demand here to sustain paying farmers the higher price and reworking the production line to accommodate organic rules. The cheese is in storage and improving with age, and will be sold as markets develop, but farmers were sent a disappointing message that growing and sourcing organic feed, managing their herds a little differently, wasn't going to lead to the higher prices they were promised. And with economic anxiety high in Canada too, it's hard to see when demand will improve.
In the end it will be consumers who determine what happens. Farmers of all kinds are very entrepreneurial and will respond to the market signals they see. I don't believe that there is some kind of moral failing in farmers who continue to use fertilizer and pesticides (they need to be used properly, kept out of waterways, etc), just business people who look at the marketplace and see they're competing with South American and Chinese labour costs, government subsidies in the U.S., and a brutally competitive food wholesaling and retail business. Walmarts steady growth in food retailing in Canada will make it just that more difficult. It's the reason I don't think government regulations mandating organic farming makes any sense. Making sure that conventional farmers pay the full cost of what they do (carbon tax, environmental clean-up, etc), and that food imports meet the same standards, is much more important.
PEI consumers who do respect what certified organic farmers are doing get a chance to express that appreciation this weekend. The 8th annual Organic Harvest Festival will take place at the Farm Centre on University Avenue, Sunday October the 2nd, from 4 to 7 P.M.. More information here:
http://www.organicpei.com/ It will be an excellent chance to eat wonderful food, meet interesting farmers, hear some good music, and say thank you to farmers who are trying to do the right thing with very few rewards.
Friday, 30 September 2011
Wind and Watersheds in the PEI Election
Yes healthcare, education, jobs remain the big issues in provincial elections across Canada, but here on PEI political parties pay some attention to the environment as well. As expected Green Party Leader Sharon Labchuck has made it central to all the party's promises and platforms. She's also running in an urban riding against the province's environment minister, so we should get a better sense of how interested Islanders really are in this issue. Richard Brown has a long history in that district and will be difficult to beat, and the NDP is running a strong candidate in Rita Jackson, so there will be some split in the protest vote which will help Brown. The Conservatives have an interesting candidate too in radio personality Myles Mackinnon. It will be a district worth watching Monday night.
I was critical of the current Liberal Government for limiting support of watershed groups and farmers taking additional steps to protect the environment to sales of pop and beer ( http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/09/is-drinking-pop-best-way-to-support.html ) so will acknowledge a campaign promise made this week.
http://www.movingforwardpei.ca/uploads/pdfs/Lib-Backgrounder-Environment.pdf
"Watershed groups are among the most committed to environmental sustainability. The work they have
done over the past several years represents a true devotion to improving our Island. To support this work,
the Liberal Team is proposing to invest $4 million in watershed management over the next four years - and
further protect our water supply for the future."
This represents a 25% increase in support ($800 thousand to $ 1 million per year) and goes along with a promise to increase support in the ALUS program as well. If the Liberals are elected and keep their promise, this is definitely moving in the right direction.
I also wanted to point to one other major policy shift by the Liberals (if I were a real political journalist I'd call it a flip-flop). When Robert Ghiz was first elected he insisted that any new wind energy projects would be driven by the private sector. Years ago former Conservative energy minister Jamie Ballem had convinced then premier Pat Binns that there were a limited number of sites on the Island with wind regimes suitable for power production, and the public should own and develop them (remember those Energy Bonds we were encouraged to buy, and at a 5% return they look pretty good right now and you can see how screwy political ideology is here: Conservatives wanting public ownership, Liberals arguing strenuously that the government had no role in the wind power business). Now the Liberals have come to their senses and promised that the next big wind farm will again be built and owned by the public. If this project plays out like East Point and North Cape it will pay for itself, and actually make the province some money. Wind is the one energy source Islanders can tap into, it's good to see the benefits will stay here rather than disappearing into Ontario capital markets. The one exception in ownership here is the West Cape wind farm which is owned by the huge French energy company Suez. It ships most of its power to the United States.
I was critical of the current Liberal Government for limiting support of watershed groups and farmers taking additional steps to protect the environment to sales of pop and beer ( http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/09/is-drinking-pop-best-way-to-support.html ) so will acknowledge a campaign promise made this week.
http://www.movingforwardpei.ca/uploads/pdfs/Lib-Backgrounder-Environment.pdf
"Watershed groups are among the most committed to environmental sustainability. The work they have
done over the past several years represents a true devotion to improving our Island. To support this work,
the Liberal Team is proposing to invest $4 million in watershed management over the next four years - and
further protect our water supply for the future."
This represents a 25% increase in support ($800 thousand to $ 1 million per year) and goes along with a promise to increase support in the ALUS program as well. If the Liberals are elected and keep their promise, this is definitely moving in the right direction.
I also wanted to point to one other major policy shift by the Liberals (if I were a real political journalist I'd call it a flip-flop). When Robert Ghiz was first elected he insisted that any new wind energy projects would be driven by the private sector. Years ago former Conservative energy minister Jamie Ballem had convinced then premier Pat Binns that there were a limited number of sites on the Island with wind regimes suitable for power production, and the public should own and develop them (remember those Energy Bonds we were encouraged to buy, and at a 5% return they look pretty good right now and you can see how screwy political ideology is here: Conservatives wanting public ownership, Liberals arguing strenuously that the government had no role in the wind power business). Now the Liberals have come to their senses and promised that the next big wind farm will again be built and owned by the public. If this project plays out like East Point and North Cape it will pay for itself, and actually make the province some money. Wind is the one energy source Islanders can tap into, it's good to see the benefits will stay here rather than disappearing into Ontario capital markets. The one exception in ownership here is the West Cape wind farm which is owned by the huge French energy company Suez. It ships most of its power to the United States.
Sunday, 25 September 2011
Not So Fast Food
This article is really comfort food rather than challenging for many, but given what else is going on in the world (I'm also including a powerful piece from K'Naan on Somalia just to remind us what a real poet sounds like), maybe that's OK. There is growing interest in once more teaching young people basic cooking skills, and here's an excellent reason to do that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/is-junk-food-really-cheaper.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print
September 24, 2011
Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?
By MARK BITTMAN
THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ...” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”
This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)
In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)
Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)
Besides, that argument, even if we all needed to gain weight, is not always true. A meal of real food cooked at home can easily contain more calories, most of them of the “healthy” variety. (Olive oil accounts for many of the calories in the roast chicken meal, for example.)In comparing prices of real food and junk food, I used supermarket ingredients, not the pricier organic or local food that many people would consider ideal. But food choices are not black and white; the alternative to fast food is not necessarily organic food, any more than the alternative to soda is Bordeaux.
The alternative to soda is water, and the alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a trendy farmers’ market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home — in almost every case a far superior alternative.
“Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all,” says Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of “What to Eat.” “It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none.”
THE fact is that most people can afford real food. Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5 per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have to assume that money alone doesn’t guide decisions about what to eat. There are, of course, the so-called food deserts, places where it’s hard to find food: the Department of Agriculture says that more than two million Americans in low-income rural areas live 10 miles or more from a supermarket, and more than five million households without access to cars live more than a half mile from a supermarket.
Still, 93 percent of those with limited access to supermarkets do have access to vehicles, though it takes them 20 more minutes to travel to the store than the national average. And after a long day of work at one or even two jobs, 20 extra minutes — plus cooking time — must seem like an eternity.
Taking the long route to putting food on the table may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you can drive to McDonald’s you can drive to Safeway. It’s cooking that’s the real challenge. (The real challenge is not “I’m too busy to cook.” In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour and a half of television per day. The time is there.)
The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. “People really are stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don’t want to cook,” says Julie Guthman, associate professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of the forthcoming “Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism.” “Their reaction is, ‘Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.’ And it’s one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don’t have to cook.”
It’s not just about choice, however, and rational arguments go only so far, because money and access and time and skill are not the only considerations. The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.
Furthermore, the engineering behind hyperprocessed food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that overconsumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.
This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge.”
Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.
As with any addictive behavior, this one is most easily countered by educating children about the better way. Children, after all, are born without bad habits. And yet it’s adults who must begin to tear down the food carnival.
The question is how? Efforts are everywhere. The People’s Grocery in Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people. Zoning laws in Los Angeles restrict the number of fast-food restaurants in high-obesity neighborhoods. There’s the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a successful Pennsylvania program to build fresh food outlets in underserved areas, now being expanded nationally. FoodCorps and Cooking Matters teach young people how to farm and cook.
As Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, says, “We’ve seen minor successes, but the food movement is still at the infant stage, and we need a massive social shift to convince people to consider healthier options.”
HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler, “and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start. It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I feel. And we change how people feel by changing the environment.”
Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, “I wish you didn’t smoke.” Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.
A similar victory in the food world is symbolized by the stories parents tell me of their kids booing as they drive by McDonald’s.
To make changes like this more widespread we need action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don’t program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.
Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone. The political challenge is the more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.
What’s easier is to cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/returning-to-somalia-after-20-years.html?ref=opinion
September 24, 2011
A Son Returns to the Agony of Somalia
By K’NAAN
K'Naan is a musician and poet.
MOGADISHU, Somalia
ONE has to be careful about stories. Especially true ones. When a story is told the first time, it can find a place in the listener’s heart. If the same story is told over and over, it becomes less like a presence in that chest and more like an X-ray of it.
The beating heart of my story is this: I was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. I had a brief but beautiful childhood filled with poetry from renowned relatives. Then came a bloody end to it, a lesson in life as a Somali: death approaching from the distance, walking into our lives in an experienced stroll.
At 12 years old, I lost three of the boys I grew up with in one burst of machine-gun fire — one pull from the misinformed finger of a boy probably not much older than we were.
But I was also unusually lucky. The bullets hit everyone but me.
Luck follows me through this story; so does my luckless homeland. A few harrowing months later, I found myself on the last commercial flight to leave Somalia before war closed in on the airport. And over the years, fortune turned me into Somalia’s loudest musical voice in the Western Hemisphere.
Meanwhile, my country festered, declining more and more. When I went on a tour of 86 countries last year, I could not perform in the one that mattered most to me. And when my song “Wavin’ Flag” became the theme song for the World Cup that year, the kids back home were not allowed to listen to it on the airwaves. Whatever melodious beauty I found, living in the spotlight, my country produced an opposing harmony in shadows, and the world hardly noticed. But I could still hear it.
And now this terrible year: The worst famine in decades pillages the flesh of the already wounded in Somalia. And the world’s collective humanitarian response has been a defeated shrug. If ever there was a best and worst time to return home, it was now.
So, 20 summers after I left as a child, I found myself on my way back to Somalia with some concerned friends and colleagues. I hoped that my presence would let me shine a light into this darkness. Maybe spare even one life, a life equal to mine, from indifferently wasting away. But I am no statesman, nor a soldier. Just a man made fortunate by the power of the spotlight. And to save someone’s life I am willing to spend some of that capricious currency called celebrity.
We had been told that Mogadishu was still among the most dangerous cities on the planet. So it was quiet on the 15-seat plane from Nairobi. We told nervous jokes at first, then looked to defuse the tension. The one book I had brought was Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast.” I reached a chapter titled “Hunger Was Good Discipline” and stopped. That idea needed some contemplation. The very thing driving so many from their homes in Somalia was drawing me back there. I read on. Hemingway felt that paintings were more beautiful when he was “belly-empty, hollow-hungry.” But he was not speaking of the brutal and criminally organized hunger of East Africa. His hunger was beautiful. It made something of you. The one I was heading into only made ashes of you.
By now, the ride was bumpy. We were flying low, so I could see Baraawe and Merca, beauties of coastal towns that I had always dreamed of visiting. The pilot joked that he would try to fly low enough for my sightseeing, but high enough to avoid the rocket-propelled grenades.
FOR miles along that coast, all you see are paint-like blue water, beautiful sand dunes eroding, and an abandoned effort to cap them with concrete. Everything about Somalia feels like abandonment. The buildings, the peace initiatives, the hopes and dreams of greatness for a nation.
With the ocean to our backs, our wheels touch down in Mogadishu, at the airport I left 20 years before to the surround-sound of heavy artillery pounding the devil’s rhythm. Now there is an eerie calm. We clear immigration, passing citizens with AK-47’s slung over their shoulders.
It’s not a small task to be safe in Mogadishu. So we keep our arrival a secret until after we ride from the airport to the city, a ride on which they say life expectancy is about 17 minutes if you don’t have the kind of security that has been arranged for me.
Over breakfast at a “safe house,” I update my sense of taste with kidney and anjera (a bread), and a perfectly cooled grapefruit drink. Then we journey onto the city streets. It’s the most aesthetically contradictory place on earth — a paradise of paradox. The old Italian and locally inspired architecture is colored by American and Russian artillery paint. Everything stands proudly lopsided.
And then come the makeshift camps set up for the many hungering displaced Somalis. They are the reason I am here. If my voice was an instrument, then I needed it to be an amplifier this time. If my light was true, then I needed it to show its face here, where it counts. Nothing I have ever sung will matter much if I can’t be the mouth of the silenced. But will the world have ears for them, too?
I find the homeless Somalis’ arms open, waiting for the outside world and hoping for a second chance into its fenced heart. I meet a young woman watching over her dying mother, who has been struck by the bullet of famine. The daughter tells me about the journey to Mogadishu — a 200-mile trek across arid, parched land, with adults huddling around children to protect them first. This mother refused to eat her own food in order to feed abandoned children they had picked up along the way. And now she was dying because of that.
The final and most devastating stop for me was Banadir Hospital, where I was born. The doctors are like hostages of hopelessness, surrounded and outnumbered. Mothers hum lullabies holding the skeletal heads of their children. It seems eyes are the only ornament left of their beautiful faces; eyes like lanterns holding out a glimmer of faint hope. Volunteers are doing jobs they aren’t qualified for. The wards are over-crowded, mixing gun wound, malnutrition and cholera patients.
Death is in every corner of this place. It’s lying on the mattresses holding the tiny wrists of half-sleeping children. It’s near the exposed breasts of girls turned mothers too soon. It folds in the cots, all-knowing and silent; its mournful wind swells the black sheets. Here, each life ends sadly, too suddenly and casually to be memorialized.
In this somber and embittered forgotten place, at least they were happy to see I had come.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/is-junk-food-really-cheaper.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print
September 24, 2011
Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?
By MARK BITTMAN
THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli ...” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”
This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)
In general, despite extensive government subsidies, hyperprocessed food remains more expensive than food cooked at home. You can serve a roasted chicken with vegetables along with a simple salad and milk for about $14, and feed four or even six people. If that’s too much money, substitute a meal of rice and canned beans with bacon, green peppers and onions; it’s easily enough for four people and costs about $9. (Omitting the bacon, using dried beans, which are also lower in sodium, or substituting carrots for the peppers reduces the price further, of course.)
Another argument runs that junk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories. But given that half of the people in this country (and a higher percentage of poor people) consume too many calories rather than too few, measuring food’s value by the calorie makes as much sense as measuring a drink’s value by its alcohol content. (Why not drink 95 percent neutral grain spirit, the cheapest way to get drunk?)
Besides, that argument, even if we all needed to gain weight, is not always true. A meal of real food cooked at home can easily contain more calories, most of them of the “healthy” variety. (Olive oil accounts for many of the calories in the roast chicken meal, for example.)In comparing prices of real food and junk food, I used supermarket ingredients, not the pricier organic or local food that many people would consider ideal. But food choices are not black and white; the alternative to fast food is not necessarily organic food, any more than the alternative to soda is Bordeaux.
The alternative to soda is water, and the alternative to junk food is not grass-fed beef and greens from a trendy farmers’ market, but anything other than junk food: rice, grains, pasta, beans, fresh vegetables, canned vegetables, frozen vegetables, meat, fish, poultry, dairy products, bread, peanut butter, a thousand other things cooked at home — in almost every case a far superior alternative.
“Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all,” says Marion Nestle, professor of food studies at New York University and author of “What to Eat.” “It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none.”
THE fact is that most people can afford real food. Even the nearly 50 million Americans who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly known as food stamps) receive about $5 per person per day, which is far from ideal but enough to survive. So we have to assume that money alone doesn’t guide decisions about what to eat. There are, of course, the so-called food deserts, places where it’s hard to find food: the Department of Agriculture says that more than two million Americans in low-income rural areas live 10 miles or more from a supermarket, and more than five million households without access to cars live more than a half mile from a supermarket.
Still, 93 percent of those with limited access to supermarkets do have access to vehicles, though it takes them 20 more minutes to travel to the store than the national average. And after a long day of work at one or even two jobs, 20 extra minutes — plus cooking time — must seem like an eternity.
Taking the long route to putting food on the table may not be easy, but for almost all Americans it remains a choice, and if you can drive to McDonald’s you can drive to Safeway. It’s cooking that’s the real challenge. (The real challenge is not “I’m too busy to cook.” In 2010 the average American, regardless of weekly earnings, watched no less than an hour and a half of television per day. The time is there.)
The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. “People really are stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don’t want to cook,” says Julie Guthman, associate professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of the forthcoming “Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice and the Limits of Capitalism.” “Their reaction is, ‘Let me enjoy what I want to eat, and stop telling me what to do.’ And it’s one of the few things that less well-off people have: they don’t have to cook.”
It’s not just about choice, however, and rational arguments go only so far, because money and access and time and skill are not the only considerations. The ubiquity, convenience and habit-forming appeal of hyperprocessed foods have largely drowned out the alternatives: there are five fast-food restaurants for every supermarket in the United States; in recent decades the adjusted for inflation price of fresh produce has increased by 40 percent while the price of soda and processed food has decreased by as much as 30 percent; and nearly inconceivable resources go into encouraging consumption in restaurants: fast-food companies spent $4.2 billion on marketing in 2009.
Furthermore, the engineering behind hyperprocessed food makes it virtually addictive. A 2009 study by the Scripps Research Institute indicates that overconsumption of fast food “triggers addiction-like neuroaddictive responses” in the brain, making it harder to trigger the release of dopamine. In other words the more fast food we eat, the more we need to give us pleasure; thus the report suggests that the same mechanisms underlie drug addiction and obesity.
This addiction to processed food is the result of decades of vision and hard work by the industry. For 50 years, says David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of “The End of Overeating,” companies strove to create food that was “energy-dense, highly stimulating, and went down easy. They put it on every street corner and made it mobile, and they made it socially acceptable to eat anytime and anyplace. They created a food carnival, and that’s where we live. And if you’re used to self-stimulation every 15 minutes, well, you can’t run into the kitchen to satisfy that urge.”
Real cultural changes are needed to turn this around. Somehow, no-nonsense cooking and eating — roasting a chicken, making a grilled cheese sandwich, scrambling an egg, tossing a salad — must become popular again, and valued not just by hipsters in Brooklyn or locavores in Berkeley. The smart campaign is not to get McDonald’s to serve better food but to get people to see cooking as a joy rather than a burden, or at least as part of a normal life.
As with any addictive behavior, this one is most easily countered by educating children about the better way. Children, after all, are born without bad habits. And yet it’s adults who must begin to tear down the food carnival.
The question is how? Efforts are everywhere. The People’s Grocery in Oakland secures affordable groceries for low-income people. Zoning laws in Los Angeles restrict the number of fast-food restaurants in high-obesity neighborhoods. There’s the Healthy Food Financing Initiative, a successful Pennsylvania program to build fresh food outlets in underserved areas, now being expanded nationally. FoodCorps and Cooking Matters teach young people how to farm and cook.
As Malik Yakini, executive director of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, says, “We’ve seen minor successes, but the food movement is still at the infant stage, and we need a massive social shift to convince people to consider healthier options.”
HOW do you change a culture? The answers, not surprisingly, are complex. “Once I look at what I’m eating,” says Dr. Kessler, “and realize it’s not food, and I ask ‘what am I doing here?’ that’s the start. It’s not about whether I think it’s good for me, it’s about changing how I feel. And we change how people feel by changing the environment.”
Obviously, in an atmosphere where any regulation is immediately labeled “nanny statism,” changing “the environment” is difficult. But we’ve done this before, with tobacco. The 1998 tobacco settlement limited cigarette marketing and forced manufacturers to finance anti-smoking campaigns — a negotiated change that led to an environmental one that in turn led to a cultural one, after which kids said to their parents, “I wish you didn’t smoke.” Smoking had to be converted from a cool habit into one practiced by pariahs.
A similar victory in the food world is symbolized by the stories parents tell me of their kids booing as they drive by McDonald’s.
To make changes like this more widespread we need action both cultural and political. The cultural lies in celebrating real food; raising our children in homes that don’t program them for fast-produced, eaten-on-the-run, high-calorie, low-nutrition junk; giving them the gift of appreciating the pleasures of nourishing one another and enjoying that nourishment together.
Political action would mean agitating to limit the marketing of junk; forcing its makers to pay the true costs of production; recognizing that advertising for fast food is not the exercise of free speech but behavior manipulation of addictive substances; and making certain that real food is affordable and available to everyone. The political challenge is the more difficult one, but it cannot be ignored.
What’s easier is to cook at every opportunity, to demonstrate to family and neighbors that the real way is the better way. And even the more fun way: kind of like a carnival.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/opinion/sunday/returning-to-somalia-after-20-years.html?ref=opinion
September 24, 2011
A Son Returns to the Agony of Somalia
By K’NAAN
K'Naan is a musician and poet.
MOGADISHU, Somalia
ONE has to be careful about stories. Especially true ones. When a story is told the first time, it can find a place in the listener’s heart. If the same story is told over and over, it becomes less like a presence in that chest and more like an X-ray of it.
The beating heart of my story is this: I was born in Mogadishu, Somalia. I had a brief but beautiful childhood filled with poetry from renowned relatives. Then came a bloody end to it, a lesson in life as a Somali: death approaching from the distance, walking into our lives in an experienced stroll.
At 12 years old, I lost three of the boys I grew up with in one burst of machine-gun fire — one pull from the misinformed finger of a boy probably not much older than we were.
But I was also unusually lucky. The bullets hit everyone but me.
Luck follows me through this story; so does my luckless homeland. A few harrowing months later, I found myself on the last commercial flight to leave Somalia before war closed in on the airport. And over the years, fortune turned me into Somalia’s loudest musical voice in the Western Hemisphere.
Meanwhile, my country festered, declining more and more. When I went on a tour of 86 countries last year, I could not perform in the one that mattered most to me. And when my song “Wavin’ Flag” became the theme song for the World Cup that year, the kids back home were not allowed to listen to it on the airwaves. Whatever melodious beauty I found, living in the spotlight, my country produced an opposing harmony in shadows, and the world hardly noticed. But I could still hear it.
And now this terrible year: The worst famine in decades pillages the flesh of the already wounded in Somalia. And the world’s collective humanitarian response has been a defeated shrug. If ever there was a best and worst time to return home, it was now.
So, 20 summers after I left as a child, I found myself on my way back to Somalia with some concerned friends and colleagues. I hoped that my presence would let me shine a light into this darkness. Maybe spare even one life, a life equal to mine, from indifferently wasting away. But I am no statesman, nor a soldier. Just a man made fortunate by the power of the spotlight. And to save someone’s life I am willing to spend some of that capricious currency called celebrity.
We had been told that Mogadishu was still among the most dangerous cities on the planet. So it was quiet on the 15-seat plane from Nairobi. We told nervous jokes at first, then looked to defuse the tension. The one book I had brought was Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast.” I reached a chapter titled “Hunger Was Good Discipline” and stopped. That idea needed some contemplation. The very thing driving so many from their homes in Somalia was drawing me back there. I read on. Hemingway felt that paintings were more beautiful when he was “belly-empty, hollow-hungry.” But he was not speaking of the brutal and criminally organized hunger of East Africa. His hunger was beautiful. It made something of you. The one I was heading into only made ashes of you.
By now, the ride was bumpy. We were flying low, so I could see Baraawe and Merca, beauties of coastal towns that I had always dreamed of visiting. The pilot joked that he would try to fly low enough for my sightseeing, but high enough to avoid the rocket-propelled grenades.
FOR miles along that coast, all you see are paint-like blue water, beautiful sand dunes eroding, and an abandoned effort to cap them with concrete. Everything about Somalia feels like abandonment. The buildings, the peace initiatives, the hopes and dreams of greatness for a nation.
With the ocean to our backs, our wheels touch down in Mogadishu, at the airport I left 20 years before to the surround-sound of heavy artillery pounding the devil’s rhythm. Now there is an eerie calm. We clear immigration, passing citizens with AK-47’s slung over their shoulders.
It’s not a small task to be safe in Mogadishu. So we keep our arrival a secret until after we ride from the airport to the city, a ride on which they say life expectancy is about 17 minutes if you don’t have the kind of security that has been arranged for me.
Over breakfast at a “safe house,” I update my sense of taste with kidney and anjera (a bread), and a perfectly cooled grapefruit drink. Then we journey onto the city streets. It’s the most aesthetically contradictory place on earth — a paradise of paradox. The old Italian and locally inspired architecture is colored by American and Russian artillery paint. Everything stands proudly lopsided.
And then come the makeshift camps set up for the many hungering displaced Somalis. They are the reason I am here. If my voice was an instrument, then I needed it to be an amplifier this time. If my light was true, then I needed it to show its face here, where it counts. Nothing I have ever sung will matter much if I can’t be the mouth of the silenced. But will the world have ears for them, too?
I find the homeless Somalis’ arms open, waiting for the outside world and hoping for a second chance into its fenced heart. I meet a young woman watching over her dying mother, who has been struck by the bullet of famine. The daughter tells me about the journey to Mogadishu — a 200-mile trek across arid, parched land, with adults huddling around children to protect them first. This mother refused to eat her own food in order to feed abandoned children they had picked up along the way. And now she was dying because of that.
The final and most devastating stop for me was Banadir Hospital, where I was born. The doctors are like hostages of hopelessness, surrounded and outnumbered. Mothers hum lullabies holding the skeletal heads of their children. It seems eyes are the only ornament left of their beautiful faces; eyes like lanterns holding out a glimmer of faint hope. Volunteers are doing jobs they aren’t qualified for. The wards are over-crowded, mixing gun wound, malnutrition and cholera patients.
Death is in every corner of this place. It’s lying on the mattresses holding the tiny wrists of half-sleeping children. It’s near the exposed breasts of girls turned mothers too soon. It folds in the cots, all-knowing and silent; its mournful wind swells the black sheets. Here, each life ends sadly, too suddenly and casually to be memorialized.
In this somber and embittered forgotten place, at least they were happy to see I had come.
Saturday, 24 September 2011
Federal Conservatives Stick to Wheat Board Script
I was just waiting for Stephen Harper to say "marketing freedom", and he didn't disappoint. The surprise was that he responded at all to a question about the future of the Canadian Wheat Board on the opening day of the new parliamentary session. Apparently Prime Minister Harper doesn't normally answer questions on Mondays, and he certainly doesn't respond to questions from anyone other than the other party leaders.
The national media has started to pay attention to this story. (I've written about it here : http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/06/canadian-wheat-board-and-free-markets.html ) Earlier this month Western Canadian grain farmers voted in a a plebiscite to keep the Wheat Board's monopoly to market wheat and barley, but the Conservatives say they don't need the permission of farmers to move ahead, and that's just what they plan to do. "In this so-called plebiscite, not only did a significant portion vote against the Wheat Board, it didn't include those tens of thousands of farmers who have walked away from that institution," Harper went on to say. "The Wheat Board gets to pick its own voters, and I guess if they could do that over there, the Liberal Party could even win an election in the West," he added. "The fact of the matter is, western farmers voted for marketing freedom, that's what they're going to get."
Apparently, according to Harper, farmers who decided that there was more opportunity growing canola, soybeans, bird seed, mustard, etc. did so so they wouldn't come under the heavy hand of the wheat board, not that they simply wanted to grow another crop. There might be farmers who did that (don't forget the dairy farmers who decided to produce pork instead when supply management was brought in in the 1970's), but in my mind that's the kind of "marketing freedom" farmers deserve and already have.
There were a couple of commentaries on the Wheat Board story that capture how heavy handed this is, even for "free marketers" who blame the government for ideological stubbornness (crime bill ring a bell), rather than business smarts. It will take another five years before westerners can "vote" again on this, and by that time private companies will have invested millions to take advantage of the changes, and the toothpaste will be long out of the tube (a genie implies something good has happened).
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/playing-the-wheat-board-card/article2163369/
Playing the Wheat Board card
The results of the Canadian Wheat Board’s plebiscite over the Conservative government’s plan to end the CWB’s single-desk-selling monopoly for wheat and barley isn’t likely to change things.
According to the CWB, a majority of farmers oppose dismantling the board. But Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said earlier it’s full steam ahead no matter the vote.
While controversy will continue over whether Parliament has authority to change the Canadian Wheat Board Act without majority farmer approval, there are important international implications to be considered.
Under both the World Trade Organization Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement, the CWB is recognized as a “state enterprise.” Canada can legally maintain and operate it as such, provided it acts in a non-discriminatory manner when it buys and sells grain in the marketplace.
When the CWB’s operations were challenged by the Americans in the WTO a few years back, the case was thrown out. A dispute settlement panel and the WTO appellate body said the board was acting fully in accordance with Canada’s WTO obligations.
What happens if changes are made to the CWB’s powers so the market is opened up to other commercial players? Well, liberalizing trade is what the WTO (and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) is all about, so there’s no impediment to Canada’s unilaterally removing or reducing the board’s monopoly powers and freeing up the market for private operators.
The question is, why should Canada make these changes unilaterally, largely to the benefit of international grain companies and to the applause of U.S. politicians, without negotiating some quid pro quo with the Americans? Why voluntarily give up a valuable bargaining chip that can be used with the U.S. and other trading partners without securing something in return to benefit Canadian farmers?
The U.S. agriculture sector is so rife with internal government support and market-access barriers that there could be important gains in improving Canadian farmers’ and agri-food producers’ access to that market by skillfully playing the Wheat Board card. Whether this can be done under NAFTA without Mexico is a question, but some kind of reciprocal access arrangement should be possible.
As well, we’re in the middle of negotiating a major trade deal with the European Union. Rather than announcing in advance our intentions to unilaterally dismantle the Wheat Board, a clever strategy would have been to use the Wheat Board card as part of the negotiations to secure better Canadian agricultural access to the EU market.
There’s another issue to be faced down the road, should any future federal government decide to change direction and restore some of the CWB’s lost powers.
Under the WTO agreement, legal problems arise when governments try to re-establish monopoly powers of state enterprises that were previously given up. It’s simply not clear how much governments can add to or restore these kinds of powers once they’re relinquished.
As well, once foreign-based commercial operators enter the Canadian marketplace, they acquire investment protection rights, not just under NAFTA but under an array of Canada’s bilateral foreign investment protection agreements with other countries.
While this may not seem like a big deal now, any attempt by future governments to put Humpty Dumpty back on the wall will be faced with claims for substantial investor compensation under Canada’s treaty obligations. The dollars involved are significant. The CWB’s latest annual report shows $5.2-billion in export sales for the 2009-2010 crop year.
Because all of this involves significant changes and lots of money, dealing away the Wheat Board’s powers should be looked at through this prism. Nothing stops the Conservative government from proceeding down this road unilaterally. But any changes or modifications to this policy by future governments will face significant roadblocks.
There’s no question the Harper government’s policy is welcomed in Washington and by U.S. farm groups and large grain companies. But getting nothing in return from the Americans and from our major trading partners is an abandonment of our international negotiating leverage.
Lawrence Herman is a trade lawyer at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP in Toronto.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/in-the-west-dismantling-the-wheat-board-will-leave-mighty-grudges/article2176205/
In the West, dismantling the Wheat Board will leave mighty grudges
I’m an exiled city girl. For the past seven years, I’ve lived in a farm town. I don’t farm, curl, vote Conservative or attend church, which makes me a bit of an oddity.
I’m no Margaret Mead but, after long hours spent observing the local rituals from the fringes, I “get” sodbusters. It takes more than a Rider Pride truck flag and a Saskatchewan driver’s licence to gain admittance to the fold.
That’s why I’m so puzzled that Stephen Harper, a city boy who’s gained acceptance among Western Canadian farmers, would risk alienating this hard-won base. So which Tory MP had the bright idea to dismantle the monopolistic Canadian Wheat Board?
In the heartland, the gun registry debate is mere cocktail chatter compared to the CWB. Grain producers, currently overwhelmed with harvest, will soon be expected to play the salesman Herb Tarlek, too.
In a recent plebiscite, 62 per cent of farmers voted to retain the Wheat Board’s “single desk” structure. That’s far more popular support than Mr. Harper received in the last election (39.7 per cent). Like the contentious potash issue, watch for Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall to weigh in next. This populist politician, who will face his largely rural electorate on Nov. 7, will side with the producers or risk losing massive voter support.
Mr. Harper apparently feels secure enough to demolish a Canadian institution. But this is just more ideological claptrap from a rigid government that favours unbridled capitalism over “socialist” grain co-operatives.
Since 1935, the CWB has successfully matched up grain producers with global markets. Without CWB support, how will one individual farmer cope with that daunting task?
Rural Saskatchewan is not known for its marketing savvy. Primitive plywood signs line our bumpy highways. You have to crane your neck to read them from your vehicle because they’re mounted sideways. Motorists must slow down to decipher the tiny hand-scrawled signs that read: Rottweiler Puppies for Sale.
When I’m farm-gating for local food, I often find a harried producer at the other end of the phone, a person who doesn’t have an answering machine or even high-speed Internet. I’ve driven down many a bumpy road in search of fresh carrots or organic potatoes. But are large European grain buyers prepared to go looking for the family farmer?
The Harper government’s CWB decision will put many fragile family farms out of business. Only the massive corporate farms will have the necessary reach to sell their products to international markets.
Commodity analysts say prices will drop in a deregulated market. That’s the logical impact of thousands of farm operators flooding the marketplace with come-ons. As a freelance writer, I face stiff competition every day in a crowded and shifting marketplace, a factor that only drives rates down. Some editors even ask me to forgo payment. They tell me, “A byline is good for self-promotion.” “No thanks,” I reply, then quote Samuel Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
Like me, grain and barley producers just want a fair price for their product. They shouldn’t have to go door to door like a knife salesman to get it.
Mr. Harper will pay dearly for this policy shift. Prairie people hold mighty grudges, and they have long memories. Take it from this ex-urbanite: Dismantle the Wheat Board at your peril. You’ll be shunned at the post office, at the local curling rink and, most noticeably, at the polls.
Patricia Dawn Robertson is a Saskatchewan freelance journalist.
The national media has started to pay attention to this story. (I've written about it here : http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/06/canadian-wheat-board-and-free-markets.html ) Earlier this month Western Canadian grain farmers voted in a a plebiscite to keep the Wheat Board's monopoly to market wheat and barley, but the Conservatives say they don't need the permission of farmers to move ahead, and that's just what they plan to do. "In this so-called plebiscite, not only did a significant portion vote against the Wheat Board, it didn't include those tens of thousands of farmers who have walked away from that institution," Harper went on to say. "The Wheat Board gets to pick its own voters, and I guess if they could do that over there, the Liberal Party could even win an election in the West," he added. "The fact of the matter is, western farmers voted for marketing freedom, that's what they're going to get."
Apparently, according to Harper, farmers who decided that there was more opportunity growing canola, soybeans, bird seed, mustard, etc. did so so they wouldn't come under the heavy hand of the wheat board, not that they simply wanted to grow another crop. There might be farmers who did that (don't forget the dairy farmers who decided to produce pork instead when supply management was brought in in the 1970's), but in my mind that's the kind of "marketing freedom" farmers deserve and already have.
There were a couple of commentaries on the Wheat Board story that capture how heavy handed this is, even for "free marketers" who blame the government for ideological stubbornness (crime bill ring a bell), rather than business smarts. It will take another five years before westerners can "vote" again on this, and by that time private companies will have invested millions to take advantage of the changes, and the toothpaste will be long out of the tube (a genie implies something good has happened).
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/playing-the-wheat-board-card/article2163369/
Playing the Wheat Board card
The results of the Canadian Wheat Board’s plebiscite over the Conservative government’s plan to end the CWB’s single-desk-selling monopoly for wheat and barley isn’t likely to change things.
According to the CWB, a majority of farmers oppose dismantling the board. But Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz said earlier it’s full steam ahead no matter the vote.
While controversy will continue over whether Parliament has authority to change the Canadian Wheat Board Act without majority farmer approval, there are important international implications to be considered.
Under both the World Trade Organization Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement, the CWB is recognized as a “state enterprise.” Canada can legally maintain and operate it as such, provided it acts in a non-discriminatory manner when it buys and sells grain in the marketplace.
When the CWB’s operations were challenged by the Americans in the WTO a few years back, the case was thrown out. A dispute settlement panel and the WTO appellate body said the board was acting fully in accordance with Canada’s WTO obligations.
What happens if changes are made to the CWB’s powers so the market is opened up to other commercial players? Well, liberalizing trade is what the WTO (and its predecessor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) is all about, so there’s no impediment to Canada’s unilaterally removing or reducing the board’s monopoly powers and freeing up the market for private operators.
The question is, why should Canada make these changes unilaterally, largely to the benefit of international grain companies and to the applause of U.S. politicians, without negotiating some quid pro quo with the Americans? Why voluntarily give up a valuable bargaining chip that can be used with the U.S. and other trading partners without securing something in return to benefit Canadian farmers?
The U.S. agriculture sector is so rife with internal government support and market-access barriers that there could be important gains in improving Canadian farmers’ and agri-food producers’ access to that market by skillfully playing the Wheat Board card. Whether this can be done under NAFTA without Mexico is a question, but some kind of reciprocal access arrangement should be possible.
As well, we’re in the middle of negotiating a major trade deal with the European Union. Rather than announcing in advance our intentions to unilaterally dismantle the Wheat Board, a clever strategy would have been to use the Wheat Board card as part of the negotiations to secure better Canadian agricultural access to the EU market.
There’s another issue to be faced down the road, should any future federal government decide to change direction and restore some of the CWB’s lost powers.
Under the WTO agreement, legal problems arise when governments try to re-establish monopoly powers of state enterprises that were previously given up. It’s simply not clear how much governments can add to or restore these kinds of powers once they’re relinquished.
As well, once foreign-based commercial operators enter the Canadian marketplace, they acquire investment protection rights, not just under NAFTA but under an array of Canada’s bilateral foreign investment protection agreements with other countries.
While this may not seem like a big deal now, any attempt by future governments to put Humpty Dumpty back on the wall will be faced with claims for substantial investor compensation under Canada’s treaty obligations. The dollars involved are significant. The CWB’s latest annual report shows $5.2-billion in export sales for the 2009-2010 crop year.
Because all of this involves significant changes and lots of money, dealing away the Wheat Board’s powers should be looked at through this prism. Nothing stops the Conservative government from proceeding down this road unilaterally. But any changes or modifications to this policy by future governments will face significant roadblocks.
There’s no question the Harper government’s policy is welcomed in Washington and by U.S. farm groups and large grain companies. But getting nothing in return from the Americans and from our major trading partners is an abandonment of our international negotiating leverage.
Lawrence Herman is a trade lawyer at Cassels Brock & Blackwell LLP in Toronto.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/opinion/in-the-west-dismantling-the-wheat-board-will-leave-mighty-grudges/article2176205/
In the West, dismantling the Wheat Board will leave mighty grudges
I’m an exiled city girl. For the past seven years, I’ve lived in a farm town. I don’t farm, curl, vote Conservative or attend church, which makes me a bit of an oddity.
I’m no Margaret Mead but, after long hours spent observing the local rituals from the fringes, I “get” sodbusters. It takes more than a Rider Pride truck flag and a Saskatchewan driver’s licence to gain admittance to the fold.
That’s why I’m so puzzled that Stephen Harper, a city boy who’s gained acceptance among Western Canadian farmers, would risk alienating this hard-won base. So which Tory MP had the bright idea to dismantle the monopolistic Canadian Wheat Board?
In the heartland, the gun registry debate is mere cocktail chatter compared to the CWB. Grain producers, currently overwhelmed with harvest, will soon be expected to play the salesman Herb Tarlek, too.
In a recent plebiscite, 62 per cent of farmers voted to retain the Wheat Board’s “single desk” structure. That’s far more popular support than Mr. Harper received in the last election (39.7 per cent). Like the contentious potash issue, watch for Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall to weigh in next. This populist politician, who will face his largely rural electorate on Nov. 7, will side with the producers or risk losing massive voter support.
Mr. Harper apparently feels secure enough to demolish a Canadian institution. But this is just more ideological claptrap from a rigid government that favours unbridled capitalism over “socialist” grain co-operatives.
Since 1935, the CWB has successfully matched up grain producers with global markets. Without CWB support, how will one individual farmer cope with that daunting task?
Rural Saskatchewan is not known for its marketing savvy. Primitive plywood signs line our bumpy highways. You have to crane your neck to read them from your vehicle because they’re mounted sideways. Motorists must slow down to decipher the tiny hand-scrawled signs that read: Rottweiler Puppies for Sale.
When I’m farm-gating for local food, I often find a harried producer at the other end of the phone, a person who doesn’t have an answering machine or even high-speed Internet. I’ve driven down many a bumpy road in search of fresh carrots or organic potatoes. But are large European grain buyers prepared to go looking for the family farmer?
The Harper government’s CWB decision will put many fragile family farms out of business. Only the massive corporate farms will have the necessary reach to sell their products to international markets.
Commodity analysts say prices will drop in a deregulated market. That’s the logical impact of thousands of farm operators flooding the marketplace with come-ons. As a freelance writer, I face stiff competition every day in a crowded and shifting marketplace, a factor that only drives rates down. Some editors even ask me to forgo payment. They tell me, “A byline is good for self-promotion.” “No thanks,” I reply, then quote Samuel Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
Like me, grain and barley producers just want a fair price for their product. They shouldn’t have to go door to door like a knife salesman to get it.
Mr. Harper will pay dearly for this policy shift. Prairie people hold mighty grudges, and they have long memories. Take it from this ex-urbanite: Dismantle the Wheat Board at your peril. You’ll be shunned at the post office, at the local curling rink and, most noticeably, at the polls.
Patricia Dawn Robertson is a Saskatchewan freelance journalist.
Friday, 23 September 2011
Is Drinking Pop the Best Way to Support Healthy Watersheds?
There are moments when I think that PEI is so far behind the rest of the developed world, that it's actually ahead. I certainly felt that way about the regulations requiring refillable glass bottles for beer and pop rather than aluminum and plastic like everyone else. Yes the can ban lasted so long to protect jobs at island owned Seaman's Beverages, and yes there were all kind of juices and other products sold in cans, but so what. From an energy and environmental standpoint refillable glass will always be the better choice. Shiny thin aluminum cans are a modern miracle, but the bauxite mining and enormous energy resources needed to produce the cans are the industry's dirty secret. Don't get me started on plastic.
In 2008 PEI passed the Beverage Container Act which dragged/pushed the province into the glorious age of the six pack in a plastic holder that always seems to end up around the neck of some sea creature. (I'll stop the sarcasm., I think I've made my position clear). Just over 58 million (yes million) glass/can/plastic bottles were purchased on PEI last year. Just over 45 million were returned, a very respectable 78% recovery rate (compared to other jurisdictions). This includes 23 million aluminum cans, and 15 million plastic containers. (the rest: glorious glass refillable beer bottles, love the bottle, love what's in it).
And we were promised more than convenience, there would be large amounts of money raised that would be used to fund environmental programs. Just like the bottle count, the money attached to the deposit and return program is quite substantial: consumers paid $6 million dollars in deposits (other collected material push the revenue side up to $6.5 Million). Just over $2 million was returned to those who took the time to return bottles/cans to the recycling depots. As well a lot of cans and plastic end up in the blue-bag recycling program and Superior Sanitation gets the refund, that costs about $250,000. So there's just over $4 Million left, and we've still got a ways to go before getting to those promised environmental programs. The depot operators (many of the same people who recycled the glass bottles before) get about $1.5 million, and another million is spent on administration, collection and what's called processing. Bottom line: about 73% of the deposits are used for consumer refunds, and handling charges. According to people who follow the recycling/reusing industry nationally ( http://www.cmconsultinginc.com/ ), this is a respectable figure.
OK, now we finally get to what's left from the original $6.5 Million for 2 environmental programs: the Alternative Land Use Services (ALUS), and watershed management, $1.8 Million. ($1 Million for ALUS, and $800 Thousand for Watershed management) I've written a fair bit about both here: http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/03/building-trust-its-not-easy.html
I think both programs are very, very important to our economic and environmental well being, and both deserve as much public financial support as we can give them, and that's the rub. What the government has done with the Beverage Container Act is in fact get out of the business of supporting these programs and pass it on to the people who buy pop and beer. With the passage of the act the government no longer had to make room/ take responsibility for these programs using the hundreds of millions in taxes and transfer payments available every year. Instead it's been downloaded to pop and beer drinkers, and so far limited to what's left after refunds, handling and administrative costs are covered. The Liberals have mentioned ALUS during the election campaign, and promised $4.75 Million over 4 years (which would be an 18% increase from what's being paid now). Will the increase (about $185 thousand a year) come from general revenues, an increase in deposit fees, taken from the watershed management support which is already woefully inadequate? I'll be watching and if it's new money from general revenues (and if watershed groups also get increased support) then it's a useful promise.
I think the volunteers who make up the bulk of the watershed management groups, and farmers who take steps beyond what the law requires to protect the environment deserve our respect and our support. I don't think we should have to count on people drinking more pop and beer for them to get it..
In 2008 PEI passed the Beverage Container Act which dragged/pushed the province into the glorious age of the six pack in a plastic holder that always seems to end up around the neck of some sea creature. (I'll stop the sarcasm., I think I've made my position clear). Just over 58 million (yes million) glass/can/plastic bottles were purchased on PEI last year. Just over 45 million were returned, a very respectable 78% recovery rate (compared to other jurisdictions). This includes 23 million aluminum cans, and 15 million plastic containers. (the rest: glorious glass refillable beer bottles, love the bottle, love what's in it).
And we were promised more than convenience, there would be large amounts of money raised that would be used to fund environmental programs. Just like the bottle count, the money attached to the deposit and return program is quite substantial: consumers paid $6 million dollars in deposits (other collected material push the revenue side up to $6.5 Million). Just over $2 million was returned to those who took the time to return bottles/cans to the recycling depots. As well a lot of cans and plastic end up in the blue-bag recycling program and Superior Sanitation gets the refund, that costs about $250,000. So there's just over $4 Million left, and we've still got a ways to go before getting to those promised environmental programs. The depot operators (many of the same people who recycled the glass bottles before) get about $1.5 million, and another million is spent on administration, collection and what's called processing. Bottom line: about 73% of the deposits are used for consumer refunds, and handling charges. According to people who follow the recycling/reusing industry nationally ( http://www.cmconsultinginc.com/ ), this is a respectable figure.
OK, now we finally get to what's left from the original $6.5 Million for 2 environmental programs: the Alternative Land Use Services (ALUS), and watershed management, $1.8 Million. ($1 Million for ALUS, and $800 Thousand for Watershed management) I've written a fair bit about both here: http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/03/building-trust-its-not-easy.html
I think both programs are very, very important to our economic and environmental well being, and both deserve as much public financial support as we can give them, and that's the rub. What the government has done with the Beverage Container Act is in fact get out of the business of supporting these programs and pass it on to the people who buy pop and beer. With the passage of the act the government no longer had to make room/ take responsibility for these programs using the hundreds of millions in taxes and transfer payments available every year. Instead it's been downloaded to pop and beer drinkers, and so far limited to what's left after refunds, handling and administrative costs are covered. The Liberals have mentioned ALUS during the election campaign, and promised $4.75 Million over 4 years (which would be an 18% increase from what's being paid now). Will the increase (about $185 thousand a year) come from general revenues, an increase in deposit fees, taken from the watershed management support which is already woefully inadequate? I'll be watching and if it's new money from general revenues (and if watershed groups also get increased support) then it's a useful promise.
I think the volunteers who make up the bulk of the watershed management groups, and farmers who take steps beyond what the law requires to protect the environment deserve our respect and our support. I don't think we should have to count on people drinking more pop and beer for them to get it..
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
More Monsanto Questions
There are a number of Greek myths about the hubris of humans that end badly. Are we seeing a modern tale with the scientists and investors who have so much faith in their ability to harness and control the very building blocks of nature? It's looking more and more like it.
For those not familiar with the publication Mother Jones it may seem/sound a little crunchy granola, certainly left-wing. I've found that it has some excellent writers who take their beats seriously and don't assume they're just preaching to the choir, they really try to convince. One such writer is Tom Philpott who writes a lot about farm and food issues. I've written a fair bit about what are being called "superweeds" caused by the overuse of glyphosphate (here and elsewhere: http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/03/changes-coming-says-round-up-maker.html ). Philpott has written convincingly that BT products (corn and cotton that are supposed to kill the bugs that attack them) are going through the same resistance problems. All of this is totally predictable given the way insects and plants have adapted to pesticides for decades. I\ll let Philpott pick up the story. I'll only add that glyphospate (round-up) and BT (bacillus thurengiensis) have been some of the safest products (BT used by organic farmers) available and to see them lost so Monsanto et al can come to the rescue makes me really mad.
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/08/monsanto-gm-super-insects
Attack of the Monsanto Superinsects
New, from the company that has already brought you superweeds…
By Tom Philpott | Tue Aug. 30, 2011 3:04 AM PDT
Over the past decade and a half, as Monsanto built up its globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar genetically modified seed empire, it made two major pitches to farmers.
The first involved weeds. Leave the weed management to us, Monsanto insisted. We've engineered plants that can survive our very own herbicide. Just pay up for our patented, premium-priced seeds, spray your fields with our Roundup herbicide whenever the fancy strikes, and—voilà !—no more weeds.
The second involved crop-eating insects. We've isolated the toxic gene of a commonly used bacterial pesticide called Bt, Monsanto announced, and spliced it directly into crops. Along with corn and soy, you will literally be growing the pesticide that protects them. Plant our seeds, and watch your crops thrive while their pests shrivel and die.
Monsanto focused its technology on three widely planted, highly subsidized crops: corn, soy, and cotton. Large-scale farmers of these commodities, always operating on razor-thin profit margins, lunged at the chance to streamline their operations by essentially outsourcing their pest management to Monsanto. And so Monsanto's high-tech crops essentially took over the corn/soy- and cotton-growing regions of the country.
But now the pitches are wearing thin. Dumping a single herbicide onto millions of acres of farmland has, predictably enough, given rise to weeds resistant to that herbicide. Such "superweeds" are now galloping through cotton and corn country [1], forcing farmers to resort to highly toxic herbicide cocktails and even hand-weeding. More than 11 million acres are infested with Roundup-resistant weeds, up from 2.4 million acres in 2007, reckons [2] Penn State University weed expert David Mortensen.
And now insects are developing resistance to Monsanto's insecticide-infused crops, reports [3] the Wall Street Journal. Fields planted in Monsanto's Bt corn in some areas of the Midwest are showing damage from the corn rootworm—the very species targeted by Monsanto's engineered trait. An Iowa State University scientist has conclusively identified Bt-resistant root worms in four Iowa fields, the Journal reports.
The findings are not likely isolated to those fields—just like spotting a cockroach on your kitchen floor probably signals an infestation, not that a lone cockroach randomly stumbled in for a visit. Sure enough, farmers in Illinois are also seeing severe rootworm damage in fields planted in Monsanto's Bt corn. And it's not just in the United States: In 2010, Monsanto itself acknowledged [4]that in industrial-agriculture regions of India, where Monsanto's Bt cotton is a dominant crop, a cotton-attacking pest called the bollworm had developed resistance.
Just as Roundup-resistant superweeds rapidly bloomed into a major problem after first appearing in the mid-2000s, Bt-resistant superinsects may be just getting started. Colleen Scherer, managing editor of the industrial-ag trade magazine Ag Professional, put it like this: "There is no 'putting the genie back in the bottle,' and resistance in these areas is a problem that won't go away."
So what does all of this mean for Monsanto? If its main attraction for farmers—the promise of easy pest management—is turning to dust in a quite public way, should we expect the company be on the verge of getting crushed under the weight of its failures?
To get a glimpse of how the publicly traded company is faring, I looked at how its stock has been performing over the past year, compared to the broader stock market. Early Monday afternoon, Monsanto's shares were trading at about $71 [5]—a more than 25 percent gain over the past 12 months. Over the same period, the S&P 500—a broad gauge of US stocks—is up just over 10 percent. That means investors have high hopes for Monsanto going forward, despite the high-profile failures. Like weeds and bugs in farm fields, Monsanto shares have developed resistance to toxic tidings.
What gives? The Wall Street Journal article provides a clue:
The [Bt-resistance] finding adds fuel to the race among crop biotechnology rivals to locate the next generation of genes that can protect plants from insects. Scientists at Monsanto and Syngenta [6] AG of Basel, Switzerland, are already researching how to use a medical breakthrough called RNA interference to, among other things, make crops deadly for insects to eat. If this works, a bug munching on such a plant could ingest genetic code that turns off one of its essential genes.
In other words, Monsanto claims it has the answer to the trouble it's cooking up on corn, soy, and cotton fields: more patent-protected GM technology. It has managed to shove US farmers on a kind of accelerating treadmill: the need to apply ever more, and ever more novel, high-tech responses to keep up with ever-evolving pests. And while farmers run ever faster to stay in place, Monsanto just keeps coming up with highly profitable "solutions" to the problems it has generated.
Investors have embraced Monsanto's pitch. Large-scale farmers, battered and desperate for relief, probably will too. But the broader citizenry, in the form of the regulatory agencies that ostensibly guard the public interest [7], should start asking hard questions.
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/09/monsanto-denies-superinsect-science
Monsanto Denies Superinsect Science
As far back as 2002, scientists have been warning that bugs would develop resistance to Monsanto's Bt corn.
By Tom Philpott | Thu Sep. 8, 2011 3:25 PM PDT
As the summer growing season draws to a close, 2011 is emerging as the year of the superinsect—the year pests officially developed resistance to Monsanto's genetically engineered (ostensibly) bug-killing corn [1].
While the revelation has given rise to alarming headlines, neither Monsanto nor the EPA, which regulates pesticides and pesticide-infused crops, can credibly claim surprise. Scientists have been warning that the EPA's rules for planting the crop were too lax to prevent resistance since before the agency approved the crop in 2003. And in 2008, research funded by Monsanto itself showed that resistance was an obvious danger.
And now those unheeded warnings are proving prescient. In late July, as I reported recently, scientists in Iowa documented the existence of corn rootworms [2] (a ravenous pest that attacks the roots of corn plants) that can happily devour corn plants that were genetically tweaked specifically to kill them. Monsanto's corn, engineered to express a toxic gene from a bacterial insecticide called Bt, now accounts for 65 percent of the corn planted in the US [3].
The superinsect scourge has also arisen in Illinois and Minnesota. "Monsanto Co. (MON)’s insect-killing corn is toppling over in northwestern Illinois fields, a sign that rootworms outside of Iowa may have developed resistance to the genetically modified crop," reports Bloomberg [4]. In southern Minnesota, adds Minnesota Public Radio [5], an entomologist has found corn rootworms thriving, Bt corn plants drooping, in fields.
Monsanto, for its part, is reacting to the news with a hearty "move along—nothing to see here!" "Our [Bt corn] is effective," Monsanto scientist Dusty Post insisted in an interview with The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. [6] "We don't have any demonstrated field resistance," he added, pretending away the Iowa study, to speak nothing those corn fields that are "toppling over" in Illinois and and Minnesota.
But the company's denials ring hollow for another reason, too. Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, alerted me to this 2008 study [2], conducted by University of Missouri researchers and published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on this precise question of Bt corn and rootworms.
The first thing to notice about the study is that Monsanto is listed in the acknowledgements as one of the "supporters." So this is Monsanto-funded research, meaning that he company would be hard-pressed to deny knowledge of it.
The researchers found that within three generations, rootworms munching Monsanto's Bt corn survived at the same rate as rootworms munching pesticide-free corn—meaning that complete resistance had been achieved. Takeaway message: rootworms are capable of evolving resistance to Monsanto's corn in "rapid" fashion.
But such concerns were nothing new by 2008. From the early days of Bt-based GMOs in the '90s, everyone—Monsanto, the EPA, independent scientists—agreed that farmers would have to plant a portion of their fields in non-Bt corn to control resistance. The idea was that, as bugs in the Bt portion of the field began to develop resistance, they would mate with non-resistant bugs from the so-called "refuge" patch, and the resistant trait would be kept recessive within the larger bug population and thus under control.
The contentious point involved how large these refuge patches would have to be. Monsanto insisted that 20 percent was adequate—that farmers could plant 80 percent of their corn crop with Bt seeds, and 20 percent in non-Bt seeds, and in so doing, avoid resistance.
But the majority of a panel of scientists convened by the EPA countered that the refuge requirement should be 50 percent—which would have, of course, eaten into Monsanto's profits by limiting its market. The reason for the scientists' concern, Freese explained, was that the corn plants express the Bt protein toxic to root worms at a low dose, meaning that a large portion of the rootworms survive contact with the plants, leaving them to pass on resistance to the next generation. With just 20 percent of fields planted in non-Bt crops, the scientists warned, resistant rootworms would eventually swamp non-resistant ones, and we'd have corn fields toppling over in the Midwest.
The minutes [7] (PDF) of the committee's Nov. 6, 2002, meeting on the topic documents their concerns. The majority of the committee's members, the minutes state, "concluded that there was no practical or scientific justification for establishing a precedent for a 20 percent refuge at this time."
I asked Freese why Monsanto didn't simply engineer a high-dose version of its rootworm-targeted corn, since that would have lowered resistance pressure and thus addressed the panel's concerns. "Well, from the start, the EPA pushed for a higher dose for the toxin," he said. "My sense is that Monsanto came up with the best they could in terms of dose." Freese stressed that industry rhetoric to the side, the genetic modification of crops turns out to be a rather crude process: The companies can't always make the genes behave exactly as they want them to.
Nevertheless, the EPA registered the rootworm-targeted corn in 2003—and defied the scientific panel it had convened by putting the refuge requirement right where Monsanto wanted it: at 20 percent.
Jilted panel members, along with other prominent entomologists who hadn't been consulted by the EPA, greeted the decision with anger and disbelief, as this May 2003 Nature article [8] (behind a pay wall but available here [9]) shows."The EPA is calling for science-based regulation, but here that does not appear to be the case," one scientist who served on the panel told Nature. Another added: "This is like the FDA approving a drug with flimsy science and saying to then do the safety testing... I don't think that's how you do science."
Eight years later, Monsanto and the EPA have been proven wrong, and their scientific critics have been vindicated. Monsanto, meanwhile, booked robust profits selling its corn seeds without the burden of a 50 percent refuge requirement—and continues to do so today even as the tehnology fails.
For those not familiar with the publication Mother Jones it may seem/sound a little crunchy granola, certainly left-wing. I've found that it has some excellent writers who take their beats seriously and don't assume they're just preaching to the choir, they really try to convince. One such writer is Tom Philpott who writes a lot about farm and food issues. I've written a fair bit about what are being called "superweeds" caused by the overuse of glyphosphate (here and elsewhere: http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/03/changes-coming-says-round-up-maker.html ). Philpott has written convincingly that BT products (corn and cotton that are supposed to kill the bugs that attack them) are going through the same resistance problems. All of this is totally predictable given the way insects and plants have adapted to pesticides for decades. I\ll let Philpott pick up the story. I'll only add that glyphospate (round-up) and BT (bacillus thurengiensis) have been some of the safest products (BT used by organic farmers) available and to see them lost so Monsanto et al can come to the rescue makes me really mad.
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/08/monsanto-gm-super-insects
Attack of the Monsanto Superinsects
New, from the company that has already brought you superweeds…
By Tom Philpott | Tue Aug. 30, 2011 3:04 AM PDT
Over the past decade and a half, as Monsanto built up its globe-spanning, multi-billion-dollar genetically modified seed empire, it made two major pitches to farmers.
The first involved weeds. Leave the weed management to us, Monsanto insisted. We've engineered plants that can survive our very own herbicide. Just pay up for our patented, premium-priced seeds, spray your fields with our Roundup herbicide whenever the fancy strikes, and—voilà !—no more weeds.
The second involved crop-eating insects. We've isolated the toxic gene of a commonly used bacterial pesticide called Bt, Monsanto announced, and spliced it directly into crops. Along with corn and soy, you will literally be growing the pesticide that protects them. Plant our seeds, and watch your crops thrive while their pests shrivel and die.
Monsanto focused its technology on three widely planted, highly subsidized crops: corn, soy, and cotton. Large-scale farmers of these commodities, always operating on razor-thin profit margins, lunged at the chance to streamline their operations by essentially outsourcing their pest management to Monsanto. And so Monsanto's high-tech crops essentially took over the corn/soy- and cotton-growing regions of the country.
But now the pitches are wearing thin. Dumping a single herbicide onto millions of acres of farmland has, predictably enough, given rise to weeds resistant to that herbicide. Such "superweeds" are now galloping through cotton and corn country [1], forcing farmers to resort to highly toxic herbicide cocktails and even hand-weeding. More than 11 million acres are infested with Roundup-resistant weeds, up from 2.4 million acres in 2007, reckons [2] Penn State University weed expert David Mortensen.
And now insects are developing resistance to Monsanto's insecticide-infused crops, reports [3] the Wall Street Journal. Fields planted in Monsanto's Bt corn in some areas of the Midwest are showing damage from the corn rootworm—the very species targeted by Monsanto's engineered trait. An Iowa State University scientist has conclusively identified Bt-resistant root worms in four Iowa fields, the Journal reports.
The findings are not likely isolated to those fields—just like spotting a cockroach on your kitchen floor probably signals an infestation, not that a lone cockroach randomly stumbled in for a visit. Sure enough, farmers in Illinois are also seeing severe rootworm damage in fields planted in Monsanto's Bt corn. And it's not just in the United States: In 2010, Monsanto itself acknowledged [4]that in industrial-agriculture regions of India, where Monsanto's Bt cotton is a dominant crop, a cotton-attacking pest called the bollworm had developed resistance.
Just as Roundup-resistant superweeds rapidly bloomed into a major problem after first appearing in the mid-2000s, Bt-resistant superinsects may be just getting started. Colleen Scherer, managing editor of the industrial-ag trade magazine Ag Professional, put it like this: "There is no 'putting the genie back in the bottle,' and resistance in these areas is a problem that won't go away."
So what does all of this mean for Monsanto? If its main attraction for farmers—the promise of easy pest management—is turning to dust in a quite public way, should we expect the company be on the verge of getting crushed under the weight of its failures?
To get a glimpse of how the publicly traded company is faring, I looked at how its stock has been performing over the past year, compared to the broader stock market. Early Monday afternoon, Monsanto's shares were trading at about $71 [5]—a more than 25 percent gain over the past 12 months. Over the same period, the S&P 500—a broad gauge of US stocks—is up just over 10 percent. That means investors have high hopes for Monsanto going forward, despite the high-profile failures. Like weeds and bugs in farm fields, Monsanto shares have developed resistance to toxic tidings.
What gives? The Wall Street Journal article provides a clue:
The [Bt-resistance] finding adds fuel to the race among crop biotechnology rivals to locate the next generation of genes that can protect plants from insects. Scientists at Monsanto and Syngenta [6] AG of Basel, Switzerland, are already researching how to use a medical breakthrough called RNA interference to, among other things, make crops deadly for insects to eat. If this works, a bug munching on such a plant could ingest genetic code that turns off one of its essential genes.
In other words, Monsanto claims it has the answer to the trouble it's cooking up on corn, soy, and cotton fields: more patent-protected GM technology. It has managed to shove US farmers on a kind of accelerating treadmill: the need to apply ever more, and ever more novel, high-tech responses to keep up with ever-evolving pests. And while farmers run ever faster to stay in place, Monsanto just keeps coming up with highly profitable "solutions" to the problems it has generated.
Investors have embraced Monsanto's pitch. Large-scale farmers, battered and desperate for relief, probably will too. But the broader citizenry, in the form of the regulatory agencies that ostensibly guard the public interest [7], should start asking hard questions.
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/09/monsanto-denies-superinsect-science
Monsanto Denies Superinsect Science
As far back as 2002, scientists have been warning that bugs would develop resistance to Monsanto's Bt corn.
By Tom Philpott | Thu Sep. 8, 2011 3:25 PM PDT
As the summer growing season draws to a close, 2011 is emerging as the year of the superinsect—the year pests officially developed resistance to Monsanto's genetically engineered (ostensibly) bug-killing corn [1].
While the revelation has given rise to alarming headlines, neither Monsanto nor the EPA, which regulates pesticides and pesticide-infused crops, can credibly claim surprise. Scientists have been warning that the EPA's rules for planting the crop were too lax to prevent resistance since before the agency approved the crop in 2003. And in 2008, research funded by Monsanto itself showed that resistance was an obvious danger.
And now those unheeded warnings are proving prescient. In late July, as I reported recently, scientists in Iowa documented the existence of corn rootworms [2] (a ravenous pest that attacks the roots of corn plants) that can happily devour corn plants that were genetically tweaked specifically to kill them. Monsanto's corn, engineered to express a toxic gene from a bacterial insecticide called Bt, now accounts for 65 percent of the corn planted in the US [3].
The superinsect scourge has also arisen in Illinois and Minnesota. "Monsanto Co. (MON)’s insect-killing corn is toppling over in northwestern Illinois fields, a sign that rootworms outside of Iowa may have developed resistance to the genetically modified crop," reports Bloomberg [4]. In southern Minnesota, adds Minnesota Public Radio [5], an entomologist has found corn rootworms thriving, Bt corn plants drooping, in fields.
Monsanto, for its part, is reacting to the news with a hearty "move along—nothing to see here!" "Our [Bt corn] is effective," Monsanto scientist Dusty Post insisted in an interview with The St. Louis Post-Dispatch. [6] "We don't have any demonstrated field resistance," he added, pretending away the Iowa study, to speak nothing those corn fields that are "toppling over" in Illinois and and Minnesota.
But the company's denials ring hollow for another reason, too. Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, alerted me to this 2008 study [2], conducted by University of Missouri researchers and published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on this precise question of Bt corn and rootworms.
The first thing to notice about the study is that Monsanto is listed in the acknowledgements as one of the "supporters." So this is Monsanto-funded research, meaning that he company would be hard-pressed to deny knowledge of it.
The researchers found that within three generations, rootworms munching Monsanto's Bt corn survived at the same rate as rootworms munching pesticide-free corn—meaning that complete resistance had been achieved. Takeaway message: rootworms are capable of evolving resistance to Monsanto's corn in "rapid" fashion.
But such concerns were nothing new by 2008. From the early days of Bt-based GMOs in the '90s, everyone—Monsanto, the EPA, independent scientists—agreed that farmers would have to plant a portion of their fields in non-Bt corn to control resistance. The idea was that, as bugs in the Bt portion of the field began to develop resistance, they would mate with non-resistant bugs from the so-called "refuge" patch, and the resistant trait would be kept recessive within the larger bug population and thus under control.
The contentious point involved how large these refuge patches would have to be. Monsanto insisted that 20 percent was adequate—that farmers could plant 80 percent of their corn crop with Bt seeds, and 20 percent in non-Bt seeds, and in so doing, avoid resistance.
But the majority of a panel of scientists convened by the EPA countered that the refuge requirement should be 50 percent—which would have, of course, eaten into Monsanto's profits by limiting its market. The reason for the scientists' concern, Freese explained, was that the corn plants express the Bt protein toxic to root worms at a low dose, meaning that a large portion of the rootworms survive contact with the plants, leaving them to pass on resistance to the next generation. With just 20 percent of fields planted in non-Bt crops, the scientists warned, resistant rootworms would eventually swamp non-resistant ones, and we'd have corn fields toppling over in the Midwest.
The minutes [7] (PDF) of the committee's Nov. 6, 2002, meeting on the topic documents their concerns. The majority of the committee's members, the minutes state, "concluded that there was no practical or scientific justification for establishing a precedent for a 20 percent refuge at this time."
I asked Freese why Monsanto didn't simply engineer a high-dose version of its rootworm-targeted corn, since that would have lowered resistance pressure and thus addressed the panel's concerns. "Well, from the start, the EPA pushed for a higher dose for the toxin," he said. "My sense is that Monsanto came up with the best they could in terms of dose." Freese stressed that industry rhetoric to the side, the genetic modification of crops turns out to be a rather crude process: The companies can't always make the genes behave exactly as they want them to.
Nevertheless, the EPA registered the rootworm-targeted corn in 2003—and defied the scientific panel it had convened by putting the refuge requirement right where Monsanto wanted it: at 20 percent.
Jilted panel members, along with other prominent entomologists who hadn't been consulted by the EPA, greeted the decision with anger and disbelief, as this May 2003 Nature article [8] (behind a pay wall but available here [9]) shows."The EPA is calling for science-based regulation, but here that does not appear to be the case," one scientist who served on the panel told Nature. Another added: "This is like the FDA approving a drug with flimsy science and saying to then do the safety testing... I don't think that's how you do science."
Eight years later, Monsanto and the EPA have been proven wrong, and their scientific critics have been vindicated. Monsanto, meanwhile, booked robust profits selling its corn seeds without the burden of a 50 percent refuge requirement—and continues to do so today even as the tehnology fails.
Monday, 12 September 2011
More on Meat
The make up of our digestive system, the shape of our teeth, all point to the fact that humans evolved to eat meat. The question for many is, should we? I've tried to present my own somewhat contradictory views before:
http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/06/thinking-about-meat.html
http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/06/i-have-friend-i-buy-pork-from-whenever.html
Like many issues with large ethical/economic/environmental impacts, we should at least think our way through to a conclusion. The excellent CBC program Ideas did a pretty good two part series on eating meat with a variety of informed and thoughtful people. Sometimes Ideas shows can be found on-line, but more and more shows have to be purchased now (budget shortfalls and so on at the CBC) but keep an ear out for that.
I find Heather Mallick's writing to be both provocative and funny, and she does both here looking at Mickey D's makeover. Then a U.K. Guardian columnist asks the basic question: "Is it time we all gave up meat?"
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1051886--mallick-a-canadian-walks-into-a-burger-bar
Mallick: A Canadian walks into a burger bar
September 11, 2011
Heather Mallick
McDonald’s is spending a billion dollars to tart itself up in Canada. Just so you know.
I wouldn’t want you to walk into a McDonald’s and do what you usually do, order an Angus Third Pounder Bacon & Cheese and fries and a Triple Thick Milkshake, stare at the greasy table and think that somewhere in life you took a wrong turn, and if you could just look in the rearview mirror and make serial beeping noises you could back up and start all over again.
Busy with regret, you might not notice that McDonald’s is reinventing itself with fireplaces and leather furnishings, earth tones rather than the red-and-yellow your children find so unaccountably attractive, and angles everywhere instead of those suddenly tacky curves. In other words it’s 1964 again, which would be okay if you were middle-aged and at your 1964 fightin’ weight, which you never will be again thanks to places like McDonald’s.
But that’s not fair, is it? We chose to eat at burger joints. They’re part of the reason Canadians have grown wider and heavier in the past 30 years, Type 2 diabetes is on the rise and fully 61 per cent of us are overweight or obese by StatsCan measures (note that these are not the sometimes-used “self-reported” numbers). Previously this might have been our funeral alone but health costs are soaring.
Ontarians are about to vote in an election that’s all about spending and yet we don’t discuss our own responsibility for expensive ill health. When we refer to “the stigma of obesity,” it’s never clear whether this implies the stigma lies in its existence or in talking about it. McDonald’s knows this fear and goes at it sideways.
They’re offering free Wi-Fi, a “Nutrition Calculator” app that lets you drag and drop how fat you’re going to get if you order a McFlurry, and a national “iPhone Restaurant Finder” to tell you where the nearest McDonald’s is should you be having some kind of beef-based panic attack.
Junk food used to be fast. The chain, trying to go upscale and slow-food, now wants you to linger as you would in a coffee shop, one that has flat-screen TVs because if there was one thing you always missed in a McDonald’s, it was a giant blaring television, am I right?
“We’re making sure our restaurants reflect our brand personality which is one of being playful, energetic and optimistic,” said the U.S. burger guy in charge of this, who I won’t name out of simple human kindness.
The website links to an energetic optimistic Canadian government effort called “Stairway to Health,” which is basically a plea to employers to get their staff to take the stairs. Have you ever seen a burger joint with stairs? Who’s being playful now?
I despair. Is the redecorated McDonald’s trying to lure adults with a lot of time on their hands, or children with a sense of style, or both? I don’t know, just as I don’t know if the new “family seats” in Toronto’s upgraded streetcars are for dads plus toddlers or a realistic assessment of the average Canadian back-end. I deleted many quotation marks from this column but McDonald’s is still herding me into the euphemisms that are my job to avoid.
Canadians are overweight. It is damaging our health. We can’t live this way, and won’t, because it is killing us prematurely.
There are 1,400 McDonald’s outlets in Canada and 14,000 in the U.S., most of them headed for a retool, and to what purpose? To help us conceal from ourselves what we know to be true, that we can’t eat massive amounts of heavy processed food product and still be the healthy people we want to be.
McDonald’s Canada CEO John Betts refers in interviews to “reimaged restaurants” and he at least has his wording right. He wants us to have a new image of his product, and so do I. Industrial food is bad for you. Try to eat locally grown delicious food. Eat less of it. Take the stairs occasionally.
There, would that kill you?
hmallick@thestar.ca
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/sep/10/giving-up-meat-felicity-lawrence
Is it time we all gave up meat?
The case for cutting meat consumption has never been more compelling. Yet we remain stubbornly addicted to big protein hits in animal form. Could that be about to change?
o Felicity Lawrence
o The Guardian, Saturday 10 September 2011
If you share the typical British appetite, you will have worked your way through more than 1.5kg of meat this week as part of your annual 80kg quota of flesh-eating. That leaves you behind your typical American counterpart – working his or her way to 125kg a year – but still near the top of the international league of carnivores.
The case for cutting our meat consumption has long been a compelling one from whichever perspective you look at it – human health, environmental good, animal welfare, fair distribution of planetary resources. But it has never been a popular idea. The number of people in this country claiming to be vegetarian or partly vegetarian has stayed stable over the last decade, at around 4.8m. We remain culturally programmed to desire big protein hits in animal form. But could that be about to change?
Meat-reducing, as the marketers have branded it, may just have acquired fresh momentum. Self-confessed king carnivore Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has switched from meat to vegetables as his latest celebrity cause. Food inflation is adding its own deterrent effect, with supermarkets unwittingly bolstering consumers' ethical resolve by increasing the price of minced beef 25% in the last month as soaring commodity values hit the cost of animal feed. Meat substitutes, such as the fungus-derived protein Quorn, appear to be flourishing too, with sales up 9% in the last three months.
The two most pressing reasons for cutting back on meat today are climate change and global population growth. The post-war years have seen an explosion in the numbers of animals intensively reared for meat and milk. This livestock revolution, and the change in land use that has gone with it, however, now contribute nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Most people could do more for the climate by cutting meat than giving up their car and plane journeys.
The UN predicts that the number of farm animals will double by 2050. Except, of course, it can't. The livestock of Europe already require an area of vegetation seven times the size of Europe to keep them in feed. If people in emerging economies start eating as much meat as we do, there simply won't be enough planet.
Intensive meat production is a very inefficient way of feeding the world. Farm a decent acre with cattle and you can produce about 20lbs of beef protein. Give the same acre over to wheat and you can produce 138lbs of protein for human consumption. If the grain that is currently used to feed animals were fed instead directly to people, there may be just enough food to go round when population peaks.
Replacing meat with more plant foods would also reduce diet-related diseases such as obesity, heart disease, and some cancers, according to reports in the Lancet. Malthusian panics about how to feed the world are not new, but the question has added urgency now as available resources dwindle. Nor is it the first time the problem has been framed in terms of meat. In 1970 Frances Moore Lappé published the seminal book Diet for a Small Planet, arguing that the American meat-centred diet was shockingly wasteful of protein.
Her recipe book to accompany it was full of ideas for less resource-intensive sources of complete protein, from bean burgers to wheat-soy varnishkas and peanut butter protein sandwiches.
The received wisdom at the time was that meat was superior because it contains "complete" protein with all the amino acids humans need for growth and maintenance. This hangup about complete protein seems to be one of the reasons meat still holds its powerful attraction. Until recently it was thought that we needed to eat the eight amino acids we cannot synthesise ourselves in combinations at the same time to be able to make use of plant protein. In fact nutritional science has subsequently caught up with the wisdom distilled in peasant cuisines that depend on beans and grains, and found this not true. But this idea of complete protein being the master ingredient persists, and is used to sell meat alternatives. Quorn is marketed as "a high quality meat-free protein. It has all the essential amino acids you'd find in other proteins like beef or chicken."
Quorn emerged from a search for new kinds of food in the early 1960s, when experts were predicting the world would run out of proteins to feed its growing population within two decades. Researchers at the bakery giant Rank Hovis McDougall (RHM) isolated a fungus in the soil in fields near its Marlow factory that could be fermented to produce protein. Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), meanwhile, had developed techniques for mass production of bacterial single-cell proteins for its animal feed, Pruteen. In the early 1980s the two companies set up a joint venture with a grant from the Department for Trade to produce protein from the fungus for human food. The fungus was fed on glucose from wheat or maize in a fermenter for several hours where it multiplied, and was then filtered to yield fungal fibres which were rolled and frozen to create a mat with a chewy texture. Flavourings and egg albumen were added to bind it and "mycoprotein" was born. "Myco" comes from the Greek for fungus. It was approved by regulators for sale in the UK in 1985, then in the US in 2002, and is now marketed in 10 different countries.
The gospel of protein, as Geoffrey Cannon, editor of World Nutrition describes it, has been preached by governments for more than 100 years for three reasons: "power, empire and war". Protein became the master nutrient because concentrated animal protein promotes growth in early life. "This was a period when the most powerful European nations and then the USA were expanding their empires and preparing for mass wars fought by land armies. Growth in every sense was the prevailing ideology. Governments needed production of more, bigger, faster-growing plants, animals and humans."
American soldiers reared on diets high in meat and milk from the Midwest came over to help win the war in Europe in 1917 and in 1941 and seemed to be like young gods because they were so tall, broad and strong, even though their parents might have been smaller immigrant peasants from Europe. The physical weakness of the poorly-fed working classes in Europe was seen as an impediment to national growth. Increasing production and consumption of animal protein was a British national priority up to the second world war, Cannon explains.
Meanwhile, over in Germany in 1938, the German army high command was testing out its new Wehrmacht cookbook. "The soldier's efficiency can be maintained only if the elements consumed in working are supplied through the diet. The body is continually using up its own substance which has to be replaced in the form of protein, the body-building material," it declares. It had come up with the rather forward-thinking idea that reducing animal products would be more economically efficient, "as these products must be manufactured in a round about way from plant materials by the bodies of animals themselves. This is an extravagant use of food". Moreover, stocks of meat would be hard to accumulate and transport by the invading army. So instead the Germans tested mass feeding with protein from "pure soya". The infantry were given 150g a day of protein, with soya stuffed into everything possible, from liver noodles to goulash with brown gravy and sponge pudding with chocolate sauce, topped by rice and soya milk as a midnight snack.
Today's official guidelines are that adult men need just about one third of that Aryan-building calculation for protein. But recommended daily amounts of protein remain a somewhat movable feast. They depend on body weight, and have been adjusted as understanding has increased. What is clear, though, is that protein deficiencies are rare in developed countries and most of us, including vegetarians, eat much more than we need.
Joe Millward, professor of nutrition at Surrey University, has sat on several national and international expert committees that have drawn up recommendations on protein requirements. Vegetarians who eat eggs and milk "have no nutritional issues at all," he says. Their protein intakes are not much lower than the average meat eater's, and they get plenty of the micronutrients associated with meat, such as B12 and iron.
Dr Mike Rayner, director of the British Heart Foundation health promotion group, points out, in the book The Meat Crisis, that the average person in the UK is already getting about 31g a day of protein from cereals, fruit, nuts and vegetables including potatoes. The UK government estimates that the average woman needs 36g of protein per day and the average man 44g. "If official recommendations are right, then we don't need to eat much more of these foods to meet them."
Most people in this country and the US eat double the amount of protein they need. Excess is just broken down in the body for energy or stored as fat.
So if we don't need the protein, why not dispense with both the meat and the meat substitutes? Many Quorn consumers buy it because they want to lose weight, because it's convenient, or because they think it is healthier than meat, according to its manufacturers.
While many people clearly enjoy eating it, it is not without critics. The not-for-profit food safety campaign group in the US, Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), has raised concerns about its potential to provoke allergenic and other adverse reactions in some consumers.
The manufacturers acknowledge that some people can have adverse reactions, but insist the numbers are very low. They quote a figure from the Food Standards Agency of between one in 100,000 and 200,000 being affected. That compares to about one in 300 thought to be adversely affected by soya protein.
"All protein foods have the potential to cause an adverse reaction in some consumers. The level of intolerance of Quorn products is extremely low and much lower than for other protein foods such as soya, nuts, shellfish, dairy and eggs," the company said in a statement, adding that its "products have been extensively tested and approved as safe by the relevant regulator in each market in which it is sold".
The FSA admitted that its figures for adverse reactions are based on data from the manufacturers themselves. It is extremely difficult to assess the prevalence of allergic reactions generally – there is no formal system for registering them, nor is there any official monitoring of allergic reactions to novel foods once they have been approved.
CSPI director Mike Jacobson says it has received reports from more than 1,000 people in the UK who say they have been made sick by eating the mycoprotein. In some cases the reaction was severe, and in a few, he says, even life-threatening, as consumers went into anaphylactic shock. The CPSI subsequently commissioned an independent poll of 1,000 UK consumers. "Four per cent of those who consumed Quorn said they were sensitive to it. That's a higher percentage than soya," according to Jacobson.
The regulator thought it unlikely levels would be that high without more reports appearing in the medical literature, but agreed there could be some underreporting.
Quorn says it convened a panel of independent allergy specialists and toxicologists in January who were paid an honorarium to review the safety of mycoprotein. They did not look at CSPI's case reports but concluded on the basis of peer-reviewed published studies that it was safe, Quorn Foods said. Neither its findings nor the experts' declaration of interests, nor the CSPI survey have yet been published.
For Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, it's an issue we should simply sidestep. "I'm not so much interested in replacing meat as ignoring it," he says.
Giving up meat 1970s-style
Diet for a Small Planet (Ballantine Books) offered dozens of recipes using "complementary proteins" from plant sources – including these wheat-soy varnishkas. The book's aim was to persuade people to cut down on meat.
4 servings, average serving = approx 11g usable protein, 26-31% of daily protein allowance.
• Have ready 1 cup macaroni, cooked and drained.
• Saute and set aside ¼ to 1/2lb mushrooms, sliced, and 1 large onion, chopped.
• Turn off heat and in same skillet mix until coated:
• ¼ cup soy grits
• ¾ cup bulgar or buckwheat groats.
• 1 beaten egg.
• Toast over medium heat, stirring constantly until dry. Pour over grain 2 cups of stock. Cover tightly, lower heat and cook for 10 mins.
• When cooked, toss with onion and mushrooms, cooked macaroni, 1 tbsp butter, and plenty of salt and pepper.
http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/06/thinking-about-meat.html
http://foodmatters-petrie.blogspot.com/2011/06/i-have-friend-i-buy-pork-from-whenever.html
Like many issues with large ethical/economic/environmental impacts, we should at least think our way through to a conclusion. The excellent CBC program Ideas did a pretty good two part series on eating meat with a variety of informed and thoughtful people. Sometimes Ideas shows can be found on-line, but more and more shows have to be purchased now (budget shortfalls and so on at the CBC) but keep an ear out for that.
I find Heather Mallick's writing to be both provocative and funny, and she does both here looking at Mickey D's makeover. Then a U.K. Guardian columnist asks the basic question: "Is it time we all gave up meat?"
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1051886--mallick-a-canadian-walks-into-a-burger-bar
Mallick: A Canadian walks into a burger bar
September 11, 2011
Heather Mallick
McDonald’s is spending a billion dollars to tart itself up in Canada. Just so you know.
I wouldn’t want you to walk into a McDonald’s and do what you usually do, order an Angus Third Pounder Bacon & Cheese and fries and a Triple Thick Milkshake, stare at the greasy table and think that somewhere in life you took a wrong turn, and if you could just look in the rearview mirror and make serial beeping noises you could back up and start all over again.
Busy with regret, you might not notice that McDonald’s is reinventing itself with fireplaces and leather furnishings, earth tones rather than the red-and-yellow your children find so unaccountably attractive, and angles everywhere instead of those suddenly tacky curves. In other words it’s 1964 again, which would be okay if you were middle-aged and at your 1964 fightin’ weight, which you never will be again thanks to places like McDonald’s.
But that’s not fair, is it? We chose to eat at burger joints. They’re part of the reason Canadians have grown wider and heavier in the past 30 years, Type 2 diabetes is on the rise and fully 61 per cent of us are overweight or obese by StatsCan measures (note that these are not the sometimes-used “self-reported” numbers). Previously this might have been our funeral alone but health costs are soaring.
Ontarians are about to vote in an election that’s all about spending and yet we don’t discuss our own responsibility for expensive ill health. When we refer to “the stigma of obesity,” it’s never clear whether this implies the stigma lies in its existence or in talking about it. McDonald’s knows this fear and goes at it sideways.
They’re offering free Wi-Fi, a “Nutrition Calculator” app that lets you drag and drop how fat you’re going to get if you order a McFlurry, and a national “iPhone Restaurant Finder” to tell you where the nearest McDonald’s is should you be having some kind of beef-based panic attack.
Junk food used to be fast. The chain, trying to go upscale and slow-food, now wants you to linger as you would in a coffee shop, one that has flat-screen TVs because if there was one thing you always missed in a McDonald’s, it was a giant blaring television, am I right?
“We’re making sure our restaurants reflect our brand personality which is one of being playful, energetic and optimistic,” said the U.S. burger guy in charge of this, who I won’t name out of simple human kindness.
The website links to an energetic optimistic Canadian government effort called “Stairway to Health,” which is basically a plea to employers to get their staff to take the stairs. Have you ever seen a burger joint with stairs? Who’s being playful now?
I despair. Is the redecorated McDonald’s trying to lure adults with a lot of time on their hands, or children with a sense of style, or both? I don’t know, just as I don’t know if the new “family seats” in Toronto’s upgraded streetcars are for dads plus toddlers or a realistic assessment of the average Canadian back-end. I deleted many quotation marks from this column but McDonald’s is still herding me into the euphemisms that are my job to avoid.
Canadians are overweight. It is damaging our health. We can’t live this way, and won’t, because it is killing us prematurely.
There are 1,400 McDonald’s outlets in Canada and 14,000 in the U.S., most of them headed for a retool, and to what purpose? To help us conceal from ourselves what we know to be true, that we can’t eat massive amounts of heavy processed food product and still be the healthy people we want to be.
McDonald’s Canada CEO John Betts refers in interviews to “reimaged restaurants” and he at least has his wording right. He wants us to have a new image of his product, and so do I. Industrial food is bad for you. Try to eat locally grown delicious food. Eat less of it. Take the stairs occasionally.
There, would that kill you?
hmallick@thestar.ca
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/sep/10/giving-up-meat-felicity-lawrence
Is it time we all gave up meat?
The case for cutting meat consumption has never been more compelling. Yet we remain stubbornly addicted to big protein hits in animal form. Could that be about to change?
o Felicity Lawrence
o The Guardian, Saturday 10 September 2011
If you share the typical British appetite, you will have worked your way through more than 1.5kg of meat this week as part of your annual 80kg quota of flesh-eating. That leaves you behind your typical American counterpart – working his or her way to 125kg a year – but still near the top of the international league of carnivores.
The case for cutting our meat consumption has long been a compelling one from whichever perspective you look at it – human health, environmental good, animal welfare, fair distribution of planetary resources. But it has never been a popular idea. The number of people in this country claiming to be vegetarian or partly vegetarian has stayed stable over the last decade, at around 4.8m. We remain culturally programmed to desire big protein hits in animal form. But could that be about to change?
Meat-reducing, as the marketers have branded it, may just have acquired fresh momentum. Self-confessed king carnivore Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has switched from meat to vegetables as his latest celebrity cause. Food inflation is adding its own deterrent effect, with supermarkets unwittingly bolstering consumers' ethical resolve by increasing the price of minced beef 25% in the last month as soaring commodity values hit the cost of animal feed. Meat substitutes, such as the fungus-derived protein Quorn, appear to be flourishing too, with sales up 9% in the last three months.
The two most pressing reasons for cutting back on meat today are climate change and global population growth. The post-war years have seen an explosion in the numbers of animals intensively reared for meat and milk. This livestock revolution, and the change in land use that has gone with it, however, now contribute nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Most people could do more for the climate by cutting meat than giving up their car and plane journeys.
The UN predicts that the number of farm animals will double by 2050. Except, of course, it can't. The livestock of Europe already require an area of vegetation seven times the size of Europe to keep them in feed. If people in emerging economies start eating as much meat as we do, there simply won't be enough planet.
Intensive meat production is a very inefficient way of feeding the world. Farm a decent acre with cattle and you can produce about 20lbs of beef protein. Give the same acre over to wheat and you can produce 138lbs of protein for human consumption. If the grain that is currently used to feed animals were fed instead directly to people, there may be just enough food to go round when population peaks.
Replacing meat with more plant foods would also reduce diet-related diseases such as obesity, heart disease, and some cancers, according to reports in the Lancet. Malthusian panics about how to feed the world are not new, but the question has added urgency now as available resources dwindle. Nor is it the first time the problem has been framed in terms of meat. In 1970 Frances Moore Lappé published the seminal book Diet for a Small Planet, arguing that the American meat-centred diet was shockingly wasteful of protein.
Her recipe book to accompany it was full of ideas for less resource-intensive sources of complete protein, from bean burgers to wheat-soy varnishkas and peanut butter protein sandwiches.
The received wisdom at the time was that meat was superior because it contains "complete" protein with all the amino acids humans need for growth and maintenance. This hangup about complete protein seems to be one of the reasons meat still holds its powerful attraction. Until recently it was thought that we needed to eat the eight amino acids we cannot synthesise ourselves in combinations at the same time to be able to make use of plant protein. In fact nutritional science has subsequently caught up with the wisdom distilled in peasant cuisines that depend on beans and grains, and found this not true. But this idea of complete protein being the master ingredient persists, and is used to sell meat alternatives. Quorn is marketed as "a high quality meat-free protein. It has all the essential amino acids you'd find in other proteins like beef or chicken."
Quorn emerged from a search for new kinds of food in the early 1960s, when experts were predicting the world would run out of proteins to feed its growing population within two decades. Researchers at the bakery giant Rank Hovis McDougall (RHM) isolated a fungus in the soil in fields near its Marlow factory that could be fermented to produce protein. Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), meanwhile, had developed techniques for mass production of bacterial single-cell proteins for its animal feed, Pruteen. In the early 1980s the two companies set up a joint venture with a grant from the Department for Trade to produce protein from the fungus for human food. The fungus was fed on glucose from wheat or maize in a fermenter for several hours where it multiplied, and was then filtered to yield fungal fibres which were rolled and frozen to create a mat with a chewy texture. Flavourings and egg albumen were added to bind it and "mycoprotein" was born. "Myco" comes from the Greek for fungus. It was approved by regulators for sale in the UK in 1985, then in the US in 2002, and is now marketed in 10 different countries.
The gospel of protein, as Geoffrey Cannon, editor of World Nutrition describes it, has been preached by governments for more than 100 years for three reasons: "power, empire and war". Protein became the master nutrient because concentrated animal protein promotes growth in early life. "This was a period when the most powerful European nations and then the USA were expanding their empires and preparing for mass wars fought by land armies. Growth in every sense was the prevailing ideology. Governments needed production of more, bigger, faster-growing plants, animals and humans."
American soldiers reared on diets high in meat and milk from the Midwest came over to help win the war in Europe in 1917 and in 1941 and seemed to be like young gods because they were so tall, broad and strong, even though their parents might have been smaller immigrant peasants from Europe. The physical weakness of the poorly-fed working classes in Europe was seen as an impediment to national growth. Increasing production and consumption of animal protein was a British national priority up to the second world war, Cannon explains.
Meanwhile, over in Germany in 1938, the German army high command was testing out its new Wehrmacht cookbook. "The soldier's efficiency can be maintained only if the elements consumed in working are supplied through the diet. The body is continually using up its own substance which has to be replaced in the form of protein, the body-building material," it declares. It had come up with the rather forward-thinking idea that reducing animal products would be more economically efficient, "as these products must be manufactured in a round about way from plant materials by the bodies of animals themselves. This is an extravagant use of food". Moreover, stocks of meat would be hard to accumulate and transport by the invading army. So instead the Germans tested mass feeding with protein from "pure soya". The infantry were given 150g a day of protein, with soya stuffed into everything possible, from liver noodles to goulash with brown gravy and sponge pudding with chocolate sauce, topped by rice and soya milk as a midnight snack.
Today's official guidelines are that adult men need just about one third of that Aryan-building calculation for protein. But recommended daily amounts of protein remain a somewhat movable feast. They depend on body weight, and have been adjusted as understanding has increased. What is clear, though, is that protein deficiencies are rare in developed countries and most of us, including vegetarians, eat much more than we need.
Joe Millward, professor of nutrition at Surrey University, has sat on several national and international expert committees that have drawn up recommendations on protein requirements. Vegetarians who eat eggs and milk "have no nutritional issues at all," he says. Their protein intakes are not much lower than the average meat eater's, and they get plenty of the micronutrients associated with meat, such as B12 and iron.
Dr Mike Rayner, director of the British Heart Foundation health promotion group, points out, in the book The Meat Crisis, that the average person in the UK is already getting about 31g a day of protein from cereals, fruit, nuts and vegetables including potatoes. The UK government estimates that the average woman needs 36g of protein per day and the average man 44g. "If official recommendations are right, then we don't need to eat much more of these foods to meet them."
Most people in this country and the US eat double the amount of protein they need. Excess is just broken down in the body for energy or stored as fat.
So if we don't need the protein, why not dispense with both the meat and the meat substitutes? Many Quorn consumers buy it because they want to lose weight, because it's convenient, or because they think it is healthier than meat, according to its manufacturers.
While many people clearly enjoy eating it, it is not without critics. The not-for-profit food safety campaign group in the US, Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), has raised concerns about its potential to provoke allergenic and other adverse reactions in some consumers.
The manufacturers acknowledge that some people can have adverse reactions, but insist the numbers are very low. They quote a figure from the Food Standards Agency of between one in 100,000 and 200,000 being affected. That compares to about one in 300 thought to be adversely affected by soya protein.
"All protein foods have the potential to cause an adverse reaction in some consumers. The level of intolerance of Quorn products is extremely low and much lower than for other protein foods such as soya, nuts, shellfish, dairy and eggs," the company said in a statement, adding that its "products have been extensively tested and approved as safe by the relevant regulator in each market in which it is sold".
The FSA admitted that its figures for adverse reactions are based on data from the manufacturers themselves. It is extremely difficult to assess the prevalence of allergic reactions generally – there is no formal system for registering them, nor is there any official monitoring of allergic reactions to novel foods once they have been approved.
CSPI director Mike Jacobson says it has received reports from more than 1,000 people in the UK who say they have been made sick by eating the mycoprotein. In some cases the reaction was severe, and in a few, he says, even life-threatening, as consumers went into anaphylactic shock. The CPSI subsequently commissioned an independent poll of 1,000 UK consumers. "Four per cent of those who consumed Quorn said they were sensitive to it. That's a higher percentage than soya," according to Jacobson.
The regulator thought it unlikely levels would be that high without more reports appearing in the medical literature, but agreed there could be some underreporting.
Quorn says it convened a panel of independent allergy specialists and toxicologists in January who were paid an honorarium to review the safety of mycoprotein. They did not look at CSPI's case reports but concluded on the basis of peer-reviewed published studies that it was safe, Quorn Foods said. Neither its findings nor the experts' declaration of interests, nor the CSPI survey have yet been published.
For Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, it's an issue we should simply sidestep. "I'm not so much interested in replacing meat as ignoring it," he says.
Giving up meat 1970s-style
Diet for a Small Planet (Ballantine Books) offered dozens of recipes using "complementary proteins" from plant sources – including these wheat-soy varnishkas. The book's aim was to persuade people to cut down on meat.
4 servings, average serving = approx 11g usable protein, 26-31% of daily protein allowance.
• Have ready 1 cup macaroni, cooked and drained.
• Saute and set aside ¼ to 1/2lb mushrooms, sliced, and 1 large onion, chopped.
• Turn off heat and in same skillet mix until coated:
• ¼ cup soy grits
• ¾ cup bulgar or buckwheat groats.
• 1 beaten egg.
• Toast over medium heat, stirring constantly until dry. Pour over grain 2 cups of stock. Cover tightly, lower heat and cook for 10 mins.
• When cooked, toss with onion and mushrooms, cooked macaroni, 1 tbsp butter, and plenty of salt and pepper.
Saturday, 10 September 2011
I Still Love the CBC, But C'mon Folks
Anyone following the provincial election on PEI knows there's been a dust-up over who can participate in CBC Television's Compass Leader's Debate. It's the most anticipated of the debates, with a huge audience, putting the leaders and CBC journalists through a stiff test. Someone (in Charlottetown, Halifax, Toronto? no one seems to want to take ownership) has decided to limit the debate to just two (the Liberals and the Conservatives) of the five party leaders ((NDP, Greens, and the Island Party are the others). The ousted leaders are quite rightly outraged, and to her credit Conservative Leader Olive Crane has said she won't participate unless the others are in, and Liberal leader and current premier Robert Ghiz says he certainly won't stand there by himself.
For what it's worth this is a letter I sent to a number of CBC managers, and senior producers.
I certainly understand the temptation to limit the Leaders Debate on Compass to the two main parties, we had a similar “discussion” each election during my time at CBC. Let’s get the two people who have the only possible chance of becoming premier and have them go head to head on the issues of the day. It will force the two into a true debate, and give viewers a much cleaner look at the choice they have to make. I suspect the addition of the Island Party and Billy Cann was just one fringe party too many for some. I argued then and now that it’s a mistake.
Yes Billy Cann won’t become premier, but if the Island Party becomes a home for disenchanted rural liberals who can’t/won’t vote Conservative (Olive Crane would not have been elected without Larry McGuire taking votes from the Liberals), then the Island Party will have an impact, and possibly an important impact, on the results.
This sends a very negative message to young Islanders, many of whom (like many in my generation) first get involved in politics (a good thing in a democracy) by being attracted to protest parties. The Greens have probably taken over from the NDP now as that party, but the CBC decision says these parties don’t matter. What it really does is reinforce to these young people that the CBC doesn’t matter, and that’s a shame.
The argument that all leaders will be on Radio, and in news stories may sound nice in the CBC bunker, but Compass is still the CBC for many, many Islanders (both in raw numbers and symbolically). All they’ll hear on the radio they listen to is that Compass won’t include three party leaders in a “leaders debate”. That will quickly become the CBC won’t allow these leaders in on the debate on the public broadcaster that everyone pays for.
There’s an obvious logical inconsistency that having seats in the legislature is necessary to participate in the leaders debate, because parties won’t get seats unless they have every opportunity to try to win support. What happens if the Liberals win all 27 seats, then the Conservatives won’t be allowed in the leaders debate in four years?? If the fact the Conservatives have had MLA’s is then used, why not let the NDP in now, it’s had representation in the House??
I know the decision to keep Elizabeth May out of the Federal Leaders Debate didn’t prevent her from being elected, and probably gave Jack Layton more face time, and with Ignatieff performing so badly, gave the NDP a boost, etc., etc. I think the political dynamics are a little different on PEI. Many, many people depend on the government for weeks work and EI to get them through the winter, and to step out from supporting the two main parties (which are ideologically virtually identical) takes some courage. The CBC is now sending a message that thinking/voting outside the box is a waste of time. These are many of the same people who have rallied and organized to keep Compass on the air, and maintain funding for the CBC. This isn’t a good way to maintain that critical sense of ownership of the CBC that so many have had.
I understand it’s hard to change a decision like this, that management will worry it would show journalistic and organizational weakness, that the CBC can be pushed around. I still think the long term damage to important democratic principles, and to the CBC is too high not to reconsider.
Ian Petrie
For what it's worth this is a letter I sent to a number of CBC managers, and senior producers.
I certainly understand the temptation to limit the Leaders Debate on Compass to the two main parties, we had a similar “discussion” each election during my time at CBC. Let’s get the two people who have the only possible chance of becoming premier and have them go head to head on the issues of the day. It will force the two into a true debate, and give viewers a much cleaner look at the choice they have to make. I suspect the addition of the Island Party and Billy Cann was just one fringe party too many for some. I argued then and now that it’s a mistake.
Yes Billy Cann won’t become premier, but if the Island Party becomes a home for disenchanted rural liberals who can’t/won’t vote Conservative (Olive Crane would not have been elected without Larry McGuire taking votes from the Liberals), then the Island Party will have an impact, and possibly an important impact, on the results.
This sends a very negative message to young Islanders, many of whom (like many in my generation) first get involved in politics (a good thing in a democracy) by being attracted to protest parties. The Greens have probably taken over from the NDP now as that party, but the CBC decision says these parties don’t matter. What it really does is reinforce to these young people that the CBC doesn’t matter, and that’s a shame.
The argument that all leaders will be on Radio, and in news stories may sound nice in the CBC bunker, but Compass is still the CBC for many, many Islanders (both in raw numbers and symbolically). All they’ll hear on the radio they listen to is that Compass won’t include three party leaders in a “leaders debate”. That will quickly become the CBC won’t allow these leaders in on the debate on the public broadcaster that everyone pays for.
There’s an obvious logical inconsistency that having seats in the legislature is necessary to participate in the leaders debate, because parties won’t get seats unless they have every opportunity to try to win support. What happens if the Liberals win all 27 seats, then the Conservatives won’t be allowed in the leaders debate in four years?? If the fact the Conservatives have had MLA’s is then used, why not let the NDP in now, it’s had representation in the House??
I know the decision to keep Elizabeth May out of the Federal Leaders Debate didn’t prevent her from being elected, and probably gave Jack Layton more face time, and with Ignatieff performing so badly, gave the NDP a boost, etc., etc. I think the political dynamics are a little different on PEI. Many, many people depend on the government for weeks work and EI to get them through the winter, and to step out from supporting the two main parties (which are ideologically virtually identical) takes some courage. The CBC is now sending a message that thinking/voting outside the box is a waste of time. These are many of the same people who have rallied and organized to keep Compass on the air, and maintain funding for the CBC. This isn’t a good way to maintain that critical sense of ownership of the CBC that so many have had.
I understand it’s hard to change a decision like this, that management will worry it would show journalistic and organizational weakness, that the CBC can be pushed around. I still think the long term damage to important democratic principles, and to the CBC is too high not to reconsider.
Ian Petrie
The Food Bill
Anyone who reads this blog knows I can be a little obsessed/pushy (pick a word) when it comes to farmers not getting a fair share of the consumer dollar. Often when speaking (lecturing?) to people about this they'll sometimes agree (probably to stop me going on), but then immediately say they simply can't afford to pay any more, that the weekly food bill, especially with children, is already way too high.
The statistics show us that Canadians pay a smaller percentage of their income on food than anyone else. That's small comfort to low income Canadians who struggle to pay every bill, but compared to Europeans, and certainly Asians, Canadians get a pretty good deal.
I think the disconnect between what farmers get, and how Canadians feel about their food budget, is linked to what people actually buy now at the supermarket. When I first shopped for food in the 1960's, that's what you got at the supermarket, meat, fruit, vegetables, dairy products. It was pretty closely linked to what local farmers produced. Now you can get just about anything from drugs to BBQ's to snow shovels, and more and more of the food that's sold has little connection to local farms. 53% of vegetables sold in Canada are imported, 85% of the fruit purchased is as well. A cold climate can explain some of that, but over the last forty years red meat imports have increased by 600%. Overall food imports have increased by 160% in the last fifteen years.
I don't expect anyone to do this, but if you were to look at the food basics in the shopping cart wherever it comes from, the things you can imagine actually come directly from a farm, and separate that from processed food products, mouthwash, dog food, paper towels, disposable diapers, etc, etc., then it would be a fairer assessment of what you're paying for "food", and whether it's too much. In the end we may be both right, that farmers aren't getting a fair price, and families just can't afford to spend any more at the supermarket. Maybe think about visiting a smaller store that sells local meat and produce, and pick up what you can't get at the supermarket. It is an extra trip, but your local community and economy will thank you.
And another in our ongoing discussion about the benefits of Canada's supply management system when it comes to the dairy industry. There's quite a bit on that a few posts ago (there's a search box at the bottom), and today this story from the UK Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/09/mega-dairy-farms-unsustainable
Mega-dairy factory farms are economically unsustainable
There is no denying our dairy industry is in desperate need of economic turnaround, but we must support small-scale farms
* Deborah Meaden
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 September 2011 11.29 BST
There is a sector of Britain's business that is in serious crisis. Companies are going bankrupt or simply shutting down as they find themselves unable to profit.The sector in question trades on a basic staple: a raw product that isn't in short supply. If we don't act now to preserve it, then this relatively quiet crisis will be over before most of us realise it is happening.
One day we will look out of the window and ask what happened to our countryside, where our cows went and why we only have a few hundred massive factory dairies instead of thousands of dairy farms, shaping our landscape and rural life.
Ten years ago there were around 30,000 dairy farms in the UK.
Now, every day across Britain one of our 11,000 remaining dairy farmers is turning their back on dairy farming and selling off their herds. There is no denying that our dairy industry is in desperate need of an economic turnaround.
The farming industry is looking to the mega-dairies of the US and likes what it sees.
The grass may well seem greener, but look into the actual economics behind the large-scale, intensive, indoor system and the picture is far from rosy.
Farmers are too often told to expand their herd size and with it change the way they farm, under the belief that a greater economy of scale will solve all the problems.
But as we learned the hard way with the global banking crisis, the notion of "too big to fail" is a myth.
The basic requirement of a good business model is insulation from as much unnecessary risk as possible, while still making a profit. If you have a choice of high-risk for an average position in the marketplace, would you pick that over low risk for long-term gain?
Perhaps yes if you were opening a pop-up shop, or capitalising on a commodity that will only be around for a short period of time.
But when you apply those options to the British dairy industry, the high-risk option surely loses its appeal. In the dairy economics report published on Friday by the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), the mega-dairy is found to be a high-risk option, and I agree with them.
The potential for financial ruin is enormous when a good farmer (who may not be a good businessman) switches production methods to that of a massive US-style dairy farm.
When things go wrong it affects not just the business but the animals , and too much can go wrong with a mega-dairy for me to be comfortable with it as the future of UK dairy farming. Yes, farming is ultimately a business, but it is an emotive one that doesn't pay enough for those in the industry to be in it solely for the money, so we know they care about their animals.
We must lose the idea that mega-dairies mean more milk and therefore more profit. Consider instead the profit lines from animals that live longer, with fewer health issues.
Consider that this means avoiding early culling, so maintaining longer-term profit margins becomes a sustainable reality and, above all, a more palatable approach to dairy farming.
Because what are we faced with instead if we go down the mega-dairy route?
Two years ago I invested in a woollen mill in Somerset. The textiles industry was suffering as many people had shifted production to China, but I believed in their specialist knowledge. Now, demand has shifted back to products which need those dedicated skills to produce them, but sadly most of those skills were lost when the production was exported.
This is worth remembering as our dairy farmers and herdsman face being replaced with cheap labour and machinery.
Britain – like many countries – has tried liberal economics and deregulation of the markets. It allows for an incredible financial boom, but the following bust in the 1980s and 1990s and our current situation has become more devastating each time, with today's levels of unemployment at a record high.
Perhaps it is time for a more socially responsible approach?
Economists say that the most robust marketplace is one of many small-scale buyers and sellers, none of which can individually influence price. Reducing the number of dairy farms can only take us farther from the robust marketplace.
I suggest that our dairy industry deserves the chance to try something truly economically sustainable rather than going through a financial groundhog day and wondering where all the dairy farms went, 10 years from now. Let's change this quiet crisis into a loud revolution.
We all have a part to play in this – if we don't support our small-scale dairy farmers now, tomorrow will be too late.
• Deborah Meaden is an entrepreneur and an investor on the BBC programme Dragons' Den
The statistics show us that Canadians pay a smaller percentage of their income on food than anyone else. That's small comfort to low income Canadians who struggle to pay every bill, but compared to Europeans, and certainly Asians, Canadians get a pretty good deal.
I think the disconnect between what farmers get, and how Canadians feel about their food budget, is linked to what people actually buy now at the supermarket. When I first shopped for food in the 1960's, that's what you got at the supermarket, meat, fruit, vegetables, dairy products. It was pretty closely linked to what local farmers produced. Now you can get just about anything from drugs to BBQ's to snow shovels, and more and more of the food that's sold has little connection to local farms. 53% of vegetables sold in Canada are imported, 85% of the fruit purchased is as well. A cold climate can explain some of that, but over the last forty years red meat imports have increased by 600%. Overall food imports have increased by 160% in the last fifteen years.
I don't expect anyone to do this, but if you were to look at the food basics in the shopping cart wherever it comes from, the things you can imagine actually come directly from a farm, and separate that from processed food products, mouthwash, dog food, paper towels, disposable diapers, etc, etc., then it would be a fairer assessment of what you're paying for "food", and whether it's too much. In the end we may be both right, that farmers aren't getting a fair price, and families just can't afford to spend any more at the supermarket. Maybe think about visiting a smaller store that sells local meat and produce, and pick up what you can't get at the supermarket. It is an extra trip, but your local community and economy will thank you.
And another in our ongoing discussion about the benefits of Canada's supply management system when it comes to the dairy industry. There's quite a bit on that a few posts ago (there's a search box at the bottom), and today this story from the UK Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/sep/09/mega-dairy-farms-unsustainable
Mega-dairy factory farms are economically unsustainable
There is no denying our dairy industry is in desperate need of economic turnaround, but we must support small-scale farms
* Deborah Meaden
* guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 September 2011 11.29 BST
There is a sector of Britain's business that is in serious crisis. Companies are going bankrupt or simply shutting down as they find themselves unable to profit.The sector in question trades on a basic staple: a raw product that isn't in short supply. If we don't act now to preserve it, then this relatively quiet crisis will be over before most of us realise it is happening.
One day we will look out of the window and ask what happened to our countryside, where our cows went and why we only have a few hundred massive factory dairies instead of thousands of dairy farms, shaping our landscape and rural life.
Ten years ago there were around 30,000 dairy farms in the UK.
Now, every day across Britain one of our 11,000 remaining dairy farmers is turning their back on dairy farming and selling off their herds. There is no denying that our dairy industry is in desperate need of an economic turnaround.
The farming industry is looking to the mega-dairies of the US and likes what it sees.
The grass may well seem greener, but look into the actual economics behind the large-scale, intensive, indoor system and the picture is far from rosy.
Farmers are too often told to expand their herd size and with it change the way they farm, under the belief that a greater economy of scale will solve all the problems.
But as we learned the hard way with the global banking crisis, the notion of "too big to fail" is a myth.
The basic requirement of a good business model is insulation from as much unnecessary risk as possible, while still making a profit. If you have a choice of high-risk for an average position in the marketplace, would you pick that over low risk for long-term gain?
Perhaps yes if you were opening a pop-up shop, or capitalising on a commodity that will only be around for a short period of time.
But when you apply those options to the British dairy industry, the high-risk option surely loses its appeal. In the dairy economics report published on Friday by the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), the mega-dairy is found to be a high-risk option, and I agree with them.
The potential for financial ruin is enormous when a good farmer (who may not be a good businessman) switches production methods to that of a massive US-style dairy farm.
When things go wrong it affects not just the business but the animals , and too much can go wrong with a mega-dairy for me to be comfortable with it as the future of UK dairy farming. Yes, farming is ultimately a business, but it is an emotive one that doesn't pay enough for those in the industry to be in it solely for the money, so we know they care about their animals.
We must lose the idea that mega-dairies mean more milk and therefore more profit. Consider instead the profit lines from animals that live longer, with fewer health issues.
Consider that this means avoiding early culling, so maintaining longer-term profit margins becomes a sustainable reality and, above all, a more palatable approach to dairy farming.
Because what are we faced with instead if we go down the mega-dairy route?
Two years ago I invested in a woollen mill in Somerset. The textiles industry was suffering as many people had shifted production to China, but I believed in their specialist knowledge. Now, demand has shifted back to products which need those dedicated skills to produce them, but sadly most of those skills were lost when the production was exported.
This is worth remembering as our dairy farmers and herdsman face being replaced with cheap labour and machinery.
Britain – like many countries – has tried liberal economics and deregulation of the markets. It allows for an incredible financial boom, but the following bust in the 1980s and 1990s and our current situation has become more devastating each time, with today's levels of unemployment at a record high.
Perhaps it is time for a more socially responsible approach?
Economists say that the most robust marketplace is one of many small-scale buyers and sellers, none of which can individually influence price. Reducing the number of dairy farms can only take us farther from the robust marketplace.
I suggest that our dairy industry deserves the chance to try something truly economically sustainable rather than going through a financial groundhog day and wondering where all the dairy farms went, 10 years from now. Let's change this quiet crisis into a loud revolution.
We all have a part to play in this – if we don't support our small-scale dairy farmers now, tomorrow will be too late.
• Deborah Meaden is an entrepreneur and an investor on the BBC programme Dragons' Den
Saturday, 3 September 2011
Both Sides of the Food Industry Ledger
To tell a good story you need a villain. When it comes to the food racket it's very tempting to focus on the big corporate names: Loblaws, Sobeys, Walmart, Monsanto, Maple Leaf, Cargill, etc, I do it myself all the time. It looks right because of all those zeros in the revenue column, and you know farmers are only getting a small percentage of the consumer dollar. These companies got to be making a bundle right??
I was reminded of the importance of getting the whole story this week. Steve Sharrett wrote an excellent piece in the Guardian about farm income improvements. The part of the story on the front page had this:
"Stats Canada figures for 2010 indicate P.E.I. enjoyed a long overdue 23 per cent increase in cash receipts – including crop and livestock revenues – and 2011 might be just as good if Island farmers can harvest without problem this fall."
A casual reader would conclude things are looking pretty good down on the farm. It was the rest of the story on the next page that was was needed to get the full picture:
"But while the cash receipt increases are welcome, they pale in comparison to the “outstanding” in the field column. Liability receipts show farmers throughout Atlantic Canada have, since 2005, increased their amount of debt by almost $100 million. In many cases, net farm income on P.E.I. is zero."
PEI farmers, and others in the region, took on tens of millions of dollars in debt to get through the last decade, and it will take several years of improved cash receipts to start chipping away at that mountain of red ink, and start building up equity again. It would be like refinancing your mortgage, then taking out a second mortgage, and refinancing again all tied to the value of your home. On the surface it looks like you're doing just fine, but as many are finding or will find out, this house of cards can collapse pretty quickly.
So in fairness to the big corporate players mentioned earlier, a piece of the Globe's business pages about the challenges in the food retailing business. And after that an unusual discussion by two big players in the food business in England on the future of organic food. It gives us all something to think about.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-news/global-exchange/globe-correspondents/grocers-check-out-of-the-old-economies/article2150113/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/the-conversation-organic-food
I was reminded of the importance of getting the whole story this week. Steve Sharrett wrote an excellent piece in the Guardian about farm income improvements. The part of the story on the front page had this:
"Stats Canada figures for 2010 indicate P.E.I. enjoyed a long overdue 23 per cent increase in cash receipts – including crop and livestock revenues – and 2011 might be just as good if Island farmers can harvest without problem this fall."
A casual reader would conclude things are looking pretty good down on the farm. It was the rest of the story on the next page that was was needed to get the full picture:
"But while the cash receipt increases are welcome, they pale in comparison to the “outstanding” in the field column. Liability receipts show farmers throughout Atlantic Canada have, since 2005, increased their amount of debt by almost $100 million. In many cases, net farm income on P.E.I. is zero."
PEI farmers, and others in the region, took on tens of millions of dollars in debt to get through the last decade, and it will take several years of improved cash receipts to start chipping away at that mountain of red ink, and start building up equity again. It would be like refinancing your mortgage, then taking out a second mortgage, and refinancing again all tied to the value of your home. On the surface it looks like you're doing just fine, but as many are finding or will find out, this house of cards can collapse pretty quickly.
So in fairness to the big corporate players mentioned earlier, a piece of the Globe's business pages about the challenges in the food retailing business. And after that an unusual discussion by two big players in the food business in England on the future of organic food. It gives us all something to think about.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/international-news/global-exchange/globe-correspondents/grocers-check-out-of-the-old-economies/article2150113/
Grocers check out of the old economies
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/02/the-conversation-organic-food
Is it all over for organic food?
Is it still worthwhile buying organic? Farmer Helen Browning and Michelin-starred chef Shaun Hill debate the pros and cons
Farming and purchase of organic produce is on the decline with sales falling by 5.9% in the UK last year. Oliver Laughland brings together Helen Browning, organic farmer and director of the Soil Assocation, with Michelin-starred chef Shaun Hill to discuss what's driving people away.
Helen Browning: The big dynamic going on is that the price of non-organic food is rising very fast. The price that farmers could get for conventional grain or milk is much higher than it has been, so the gap between the two is closing rapidly and those people who aren't really committed to producing organic might well think they've got an easier life going back to standard production. I'm worried we're going to end up with some quite big shortages in the next year or two of our key ingredients, if we don't keep our farmers farming this way.
Shaun Hill: I use quite a few small producers and for them it's not possible to pay the fees for organic certification inspections. I use them and it's fine by me, but isn't the organic movement maybe losing out a bit?
HB: We've bent over backwards to try to make sure that it's affordable for very small producers, but that's hard. There's a limit to how affordable you can make it. In an ideal world, you wouldn't need to certify things because we'd all be visiting our farms and buying directly from producers. We're not living in that world.
SH: I'm broadly in favour of the organic movement, I just don't think it covers all the options. The veg box movement, for example, was a pain for people such as me because I don't want somebody else to choose what veg I have on a weekly basis. The ingredients I buy specifically because they are organic are meats such as chicken where there is an enormous difference in the welfare and the feed that the animals get. But organic has been a bit of a victim of its own success, you can get Zimbabwean courgettes in January with thousands of air miles on them because they tick all the organic boxes.
HB: We looked quite hard at banning air trade a few years ago and decided not to. We know that the developing world needs to generate cash. Air trade isn't perfect, but less than 1% of our food is air traded. Organic certification gives you the guarantee that even if it's come from Kenya, you know it has been grown in the right way, and that people are likely to have been rewarded fairly for growing it; the soil would have been looked after and it would have been a much better and more sustainable system.
SH: Do you not think though, with the expansion of organic food, producers whose hearts aren't in it are able to jump on the bandwagon and tick boxes that aren't actually doing us much more good? A lot of the quality of a vegetable or poultry is to do with the breed or variety. I'm not sure under this system whether we're getting the right varieties of vegetable and the right breeds of pig and chickens with an organic label.
HB: It's hard to specify, "You must grow this particular variety". It's one of the reasons we run the organic foods award. We're trying to showcase fantastic taste.
SH: But the next difficulty is when you move away from production to manufacture of, say, organic wine. There's a lot of pretty awful organic wine out there that is presumably there because it's organic rather than because it's good.
HB: I think a lot of the organic wines that were dreadful have gone because people stopped buying them. I'd be interested to think about how we could help. Is there a way that we could put up taste barriers? Whose taste buds do we use to evaluate?
SH: You can borrow mine!
HB: It's always in our interest to make sure that our produce is as great to eat as it can be. Anybody, whether they're organic or not, who doesn't think about the quality of what they're producing and whether people are going to eat it, is bonkers. It's common sense that's gone out of farming for a long time. If you look at what's happened to the pork industry over the past 30 years, we've bred lean, lean pigs that grow at a million miles a day and they don't taste of anything and so people have stopped eating pork.
SH: They've stopped eating pork because pork is bloody awful. You can sometimes imagine that you're not cooking it properly but it's just rubbish materials.
HB: They are. I run a farm and pub, and we produce and sell a lot of pork because once people come to eat great pork again, they love it. And I think there is a demand, you just need to introduce people to things and you need to build the market up.
Oliver Laughland: What can be done to make organic and better produce more affordable?
SH: I don't think it should be a more affordable option. I think the cheap food lobby has done a huge disservice to people by giving expectations of having chicken the same price as the packaging.
HB: One of the things we're attempting to do is to launch a campaign that is very much about trying to make sure that people most in need will benefit from a better, more organic diet and are not prevented from doing that by accessibility and affordability. We've got schools in Hackney 40% organic on 60p a day. It can be done. I agree with you that the cheap food culture is one that has dogged us terribly, but we also need to be aware that there are people who are on really tight budgets and we need to make sure that organic food is accessible to them.
OL: Do restaurateurs have an obligation to encourage awareness?
SH: The main obligation of a restaurateur is to stay in business despite rocketing overheads. I manage but it's a tough call for anybody who's attempting to do anything a bit better than the rest because you're competing with people who are less scrupulous than yourself. You've got to hope for the best, really. But you still get people in restaurants looking for a children's menu full of alphabet spaghetti and chicken nuggets – how on earth do you think these poor devils are going to appreciate a decent meal 10 years down the line?
HB: For all of us, wherever you're coming from, farming or owning a restaurant, it's quite hard to be doing something that's better, and to make a success of it. Luckily, I think the world is changing. More and more people appreciate the value of food in its widest sense.
SH: Well, we'll live in hope!
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