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Last week some of us met with a delegation of Russian agricultural and health officials to talk about sustainable meat production. This group has been touring the country looking at aspects of meat and poultry production in the United States.

The delegation came here to evaluate how the United States operates within Codex Alimentarius compliance standards. Their visit ran the gamut from meeting with folks from ADM and Pfizer to meeting with Consumers Union and Food and Water Watch. Their agenda offered them the opportunity to hear a wide range of opinions. And among our visitors, there was clearly a diversity of opinion as well.

photo by Robin Madel

Russia is not currently producing enough food for its people, relying heavily on imports.  Aware that the desire to rapidly increase food production could result in the adoption of unsustainable practices, we spent much of our time with our visitors talking about what we believe is wrong with American-style industrial agriculture.

Most meat produced in the United States comes from confined animal feeding operations that pollute our water and air, while torturing the livestock unfortunate enough to be born into these horrendous environments. While the United States currently lacks the processing and distribution infrastructure to make sustainably-produced meat readily available, change is in the air, with both government agencies like the USDA and food activists working to change this picture. And, while sustainably raised meat is expensive, as my colleague pointed out, when you factor in the costs of industrial meat – including direct subsidies and the environmental and health costs, sustainably raised meat starts to look like the better bargain.

As things stand now in the United States, the rush to monopolize food and collect fat profits has left us with unsustainable factory farms, genetically-modified organisms that have never been found to be safe, and a water and air pollution problem that we are only just beginning to get our heads around. Russia, in its rush to produce food quickly, could face a similar fate unless the nation is mindful and deliberate in how it proceeds. It would be wonderful if, instead of going down this same dirty, destructive road, our Russian friends can, instead, learn from our mistakes.

Originally published at Network for New Energy Choices, by Dulce Fernandes.

Photo by Mykl Roventine

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently released final regulations that will triple the amount of biofuels produced in the United States.  These new regulations implement the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2), which mandates that transportation fuels sold in the United States contain a minimum of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels per year by 2022, a massive increase from the current 12 billion gallons.

The RFS2 also requires that biofuels produced at new facilities achieve at least a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions when compared with conventional fuels. According to the recent guidelines developed by the EPA, which created a new emissions accounting model, corn-based ethanol achieves a 21 percent emissions reduction, just enough to put the fuel above minimum polluting standards – barely.

While the biofuels industry was obviously happy, environmental groups greeted the new emissions model with skepticism. Jonathan Lewis, an attorney with the Clean Air Task Force, said that the “EPA appears to have bent over backward to allow some highly problematic biofuels to meet the environmental criteria set by Congress.”

While we are now on the path to a radical 300 percent increase in biofuels production, the EPA’s own Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) – a detailed examination developed by the agency to determine the potential impact of the RFS2 – warns of the effects of this expanded production on water resources. According to the RIA, “EPA anticipates that increased corn production for ethanol will increase the occurrence of nitrate, nitrite, and atrazine in sources of drinking water.” The RIA also states that “in addition to potential additional contamination of sources of drinking water, surface and ground water supplies may be strained by increased production of irrigated corn for ethanol and the ethanol production process itself in local and regional areas. Increased pumping from agricultural aquifers to support ethanol production may accelerate the long running depletion of aquifers which has been documented by the USGS.” [Read more →]

Today’s post comes from our friends at Meatless Monday…

Christina Roberto, M.S. and PhD candidate at Yale University, recently authored a study about the effects of calorie labeling on food choices. The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity study found that calorie labeling on menus improved choices, but posting the 2000 calorie a day recommendation as well maximized the effect.

Your study points out the increasing trend of eating out (i.e. food with generally lower nutritional value). How would calorie postings improve dietary patterns?

When eating out at restaurants, choices are no longer intuitive: it isn’t necessarily the case that a salad has fewer calories than a burger. Providing people with calorie information allows them to make informed decisions when dining. Requiring calorie information on menus also encourages restaurants to add lower calorie items.

Why is it that most of us have difficulty approximating the calories of restaurant meals?

Part of the reason is restaurants are businesses that need their food to taste as good as possible, so you keep going back. There is little incentive to balance taste and health. Most of us would never dream that a lot of restaurant foods have as many calories as they do! [Read more →]

Just Saying No to GMOs Over 200,000 voiced their opposition to genetically modified alfalfa during the USDA comment period, which ended Wednesday.

Not So Dynamite After All In what he described as perhaps his most important blog post ever, Tom Philpott lays out the problems with synthetic nitrogen.

This Doesn’t Sound Any Better The city of San Francisco is giving away free “compost.”  The catch?  It’s actually sewage sludge.

Snake Oil Admen Beware This week, the FDA sent 17 letters to food manufacturers whose advertising claims were deemed misleading, including POM Juice and Dreyer’s Ice Cream.

Bon Activiste? As the woman who channeled Julia Child goes up for an Oscar for that performance, our dear friend Bonnie Powell, founder of The Ethicurean, writes at Grist (where she is now writing and editing part-time — congrats, Bonnie!)about Meryl Streep’s little-known food activism.

Not Corny Enough? In more Oscar news, the National Corn Growers Association doesn’t think Food, INC deserves an Academy Award.

High and Dry Our friend, the illustrious Lorna Sass, has a new blog post and a great video interview with vegan activist Lisa Rayner, who grows her own in the high deserts of Flagstaff, Arizona.

Indigestion in California Air regulators in the country’s second-largest dairy state are raising a stink over methane digesters.

Big River Trailer from Wicked Delicate Films on Vimeo.

Frustrated swimming pool owners in thousands of backyards across this country have posted a sign that pleads “We don’t swim in your toilet, so please don’t pee in our pool!”

The message is crude but clear. Nobody wants to wallow in somebody else’s waste–or our own, for that matter. So why do we treat our seas like sewers? Why do we contaminate our streams, rivers, lakes and oceans with a horrible hodgepodge of chemicals, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, plastic debris and waste?

Evidently, the world’s waterways are a giant toilet into which we can dump anything and everything, and then simply flush it all “away.” As if river currents and rolling waves will pull our pollution into some giant cosmic garbage disposal.

Industrial agriculture’s synthetic fertilizers have given us lush green lawns and amber waves of grain. But the run-off from all those yards and farms seeps into our water table and feeds the “red tides”, those toxic algae blooms that cause massive die-offs of aquatic plants and animals.

Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, the filmmakers who fondly documented their brief stint as Iowa corn farmers in King Corn, explore agribiz’s downstream downside in Big River. In this thirty-minute sequel, Cheney and Ellis revisit their Iowa acre and trace its toxic trail all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

The film will make its Manhattan debut on March 15th at the Brecht Forum, followed by a panel discussion with Cheney, Ellis, King Corn director Aaron Woolf, Hudson Valley farmer and MacArthur genius Cheryl Rogowski, and Steve Rosenberg of Scenic Hudson.

The screening is a benefit for the Food Systems Network NYC, a non-profit organization whose members (myself included) are dedicated to bringing fresh, wholesome foods to all New Yorkers and supporting our region’s farmers, both urban and rural. [Read more →]

Peter Gleick at Columbia University. Photo by Robin Madel

Last month I attended a talk by Dr. Peter Gleick at the Columbia Water Center at Columbia University. Gleick’s talk, “The World’s Water Crisis – Peak Water and Moving To A Sustainable World,” was especially interesting given the many water crises we’re facing here in the United States. Gleick is one of the World’s most outspoken critics of bottled water (and author of a book on the subject due out this spring) yet, there on his table sat a bottle of Poland Springs water, standard fare for guest lecturers.  What better symbol of how, in just a very short time, bottled water has become insidiously ubiquitous in our lives.

Noticing the bottle at one point, Gleick stopped speaking, picked it up and, gazing at the object in his hand, said, “No, I’m not going to comment on this.” A few moments later, though, he reconsidered, and told us the story of Maine’s famous Poland Spring, which has been depleted by bottling operations. Yet, ultimately, with no other water in sight, the speaker had little choice but to open the bottle and drink.

[Read more →]

I’ve been working on a broad range of food and environmental issues since 2005, but food politics became especially personal for me came a few years ago, when I was helping a field producer for a popular comedy show research a story on rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone), a controversial man-made hormone supplement given to dairy cows to increase milk production.  The drug, at the time, was being marketed under the name Posilac by Monsanto (which sold it to Eli Lilly in 2008) and in the course of my research, I learned that Monsanto had also created DDT and more importantly – at least to me – Agent Orange, the chemical defoliant used by the US military during the Vietnam War and the likely cause of high rates of certain cancers, as well as birth defects, among millions of Vietnamese and thousands of veterans of that war, including my father.

At the time, Dad was about a year into treatment for prostate cancer, a common disease among all men but especially those who were exposed to Agent Orange, even sailors like him, who merely served offshore in the Navy, never putting “boots on the ground” but bathed in and brushed their teeth with desalinated ocean water contaminated with runoff.  The US government has acknowledged the association between Agent Orange and prostate and many other cancers, if only by paying exposed veterans, but no longer pays reparations to “blue water vets” like my dad. (This and several other things I’ll mention in this post are huge enough to warrant posts of their own, but Monsanto’s history is extensive, so click on the links for more details and try to keep up).  He’d had his prostate removed, which killed his sex life and caused him temporary incontinence, and was emotional all the time as a result of hormone therapy.  I was sympathetic to his plight but glad he was ok.  The people of Vietnam – who have also never received the reparations promised to them in the Paris Peace accords – have suffered much more serious fallout than men like my father, whose exposure to the chemical was limited.

I already knew a lot about Monsanto before I figured out the Agent Orange connection.  I knew that Posilac made cows’ udders hurt, and could cause pus to get into your milk.  I knew that Monsanto had long ago cornered the seed market and bought up the rights to Terminator technology, which, should they ever go back on their word not to use it, could put the world’s food production at the mercy of the corporate giant.  I knew the company had a very large team of lawyers, who’d been employed, at times, to sue or threaten to sue small farmers (Some of these farmers never even intended to grow GM crops but rather, found their fields to have been contaminated by drifting pollen.  You would think such a farmer could sue Monsanto for the contamination, but you would, unfortunately, be wrong.)

These days, not surprisingly, Monsanto is the subject of a number of growing controversies.  A series of “workshops” organized by the USDA and the Department of Justice (part of an investigation into possible antitrust behavior) start later this month, and at least two states – Iowa and Texas – are holding independent investigations in the anticompetitive realm, as well.  At a meeting with the Kellogg Foundation back in December, USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan called the DOJ investigation “long overdue.”

Indeed.

I would argue that, while competition in business is incredibly important, especially when dealing with seeds and by extension, food supplies, that if the US government is interested in protecting farmers, citizens, markets and global ecosystems, a broader – and deeper, and longer – investigation into the safety of genetically modified organisms is also long overdue.  Government agencies have approved all of the GMO products that are on the market today, but the overtaxed agency’s tendency to rely on industry science places too much trust in a company that my Dad thinks has proven would “rather make a buck than worry about what happens next.”

So it’s good to see that in addition to the antitrust investigations, the USDA is at least considering the regulation of two genetically modified crops, sugar beets and alfalfa.  Both glysophate resistant, otherwise known as “Roundup Ready,” they are designed to be sprayed with Roundup, Monsanto’s popular weed killer.  The overuse of glysophate as an herbicide is problematic in and of itself (carrying the risk of breeding “super weeds” that could build resistance to glysophate and require the application of ever more potent chemicals) but at issue is also the safety of ingesting a plant whose genes have been tampered with enough – by injecting, among other things, E. coli bacteria (is it just me, or does this stuff read like a John Grisham novel?) into them.

The alfalfa case is further along (the USDA has already written an Environmental Impact Study on GE alfalfa — the sugar beet lawsuit would require one), and according to most people, the one to watch, as it may have broad implications for all genetically modified seed.  The organic industry is up in arms on both fronts, as are farmers, and a recent Consumers Union study reveals that consumers are freaked out, too.  The comment period on alfalfa ends today, and even the Canadians are watching, and they want you to weigh in, dear reader, as does Food Democracy Now.  For their part, Monsanto has a signon letter, too. [Read more →]

Today’s post comes from our friends at Meatless Monday…

Manhattan Borough President, Scott Stringer, has embraced Meatless Monday – and is recommending that the New York City Department of Education institute Meatless Monday in all city public schools! As part of his recent report, “FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System,” Stringer points to the success of the Baltimore City Public School MM program, and maintains it sends a positive message to kids about the health benefits of eating less meat and more vegetables.

As reported in the New York Times, Stringer stresses, “You’ve got to reach the next generation of New Yorkers early.” Baltimore schools’ food and nutrition services director, Tony Geraci, adds, “There’s not a culture on the planet that doesn’t have vegetarian offerings. You just have to remember to make it taste good.”

Meatless Monday is about giving people a choice – the option to start the week with a meat-free meal. We’re delighted that the Manhattan Borough President is casting a vote for public health with his support of Meatless Monday. We now encourage the city’s education department to enact the recommendation, and to bring nutritious, tasty lunches that will, ultimately, help to fight obesity and chronic disease!

That’s Not Really a Bake Sale, Then Here in New York City, some strict rules came down this week on public schools’ longtime fundraising go-to, the bake sale.  Home-baked goods are now a no-no, while foods approved for school vending machines, like Doritos and Pop-Tarts, are ok.

Pre-emptive Lawmaking In Idaho, lawmakers are revamping animal cruelty laws in order to attract new livestock operations and safeguard industry against animal welfare advocates like the Humane Society.

Crop Mobsters In North Carolina, would-be agrarians, as yet landless, are descending upon farms and donating valuable labor hours, often accomplishing more in one day than a smaller team could in months.  Smart!

Bold Move The Farm Bureau is legally challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s December announcement that greenhouse gases threaten public health.

A Case for Small in the Tropics Two University of Michigan researchers released a paper this week where they make the case that small family farms better preserve biodiversity, in part by providing better pathways for migrating organisms.

Slightly Less Rotten Tomatoes? We hear from friends at The Ethicurean that the Florida Tomato Growers’ Exchange, a group that has long barred progress made by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers and its Fair Food Campaign (by disallowing the penny-a-pound wage increase  agreed to by such mega-buyers as McDonald’s, Burger King and Whole Foods, but still not — ahem — Chipotle) has finally agreed to pass along the increase, but included in the agreement a troubling item that would force laborers to pursue complaints against employers through their employers.

The Wild, Wild West In Wyoming, the Food Freedom Act has passed committee.  The controversial act would allow willing buyers and sellers to forgo currently mandatory food testing procedures.

Our colleague, Dulce Fernandes, shot this video of Annie and Ben last summer.  We’re running it now as a reminder in these dark winter days that spring is on its way.  For those who are in New York, you can help support Eagle Street Rooftop Farm by attending their Urban Rustic fundraiser this Saturday, February 27th.  Visit growingchefs.org for more info.