New York City recently passed a regulation banning bake sales from public schools with the exception of one per month and after 6 PM (when no one is around). So what’s left to sell? Doritos, pop-tarts, bags of cookies and other processed junk-food permitted by the Department of Education. Instead of home-baked items prepared with love, care and admittedly, a bit of sugar, children will be left with the choice of factory-prepared, chemical laden “food-like products” with advertisements plastered all over the packaging.

Eric Goldstein, chief executive of School Food and Transportation for the Department of Education, defends the plan to the New York Times as “one piece in a holistic wellness puzzle,” stating that 40 percent of the city’s 1.1 million school children are obese or overweight. But did these children become overweight from eating their parents’ baked goods? Overwhelming evidence gathered from research on food deserts, school lunch programs and home-cooking would argue otherwise. In fact, it’s that industrialized junk food that started Americans down the path of obesity.

Allowing junk food to be the sole snack option outside of lunch further encourages the bad habits of already-confused children and teens about what foods they should eat. Rather than urging parents to provide healthier options, the Department of Education has once-again bowed to the interests of large corporations and circumvented the “healthy food” discussion altogether. This regulation allows for heavy advertising throughout the schools by corporations such as Kellogg and Pepsi Cola setting the course for a lifetime of irresponsible food decisions.

Parents, children and other concerned individuals will not take this issue sitting down. NYC Green Schools has organized a “Bake-In” and rally at City Hall on Thursday, March 18^th from four to six. Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio and Council Member Gale Brewer will attend the rally and Brewer will re-introduce the regulation for appeal on March 25^th. With enough support, there is hope that home-baked goods will once again be the focus of the bake sale and children will be spared the further bombardment of junk and ads.

While farmers were the star of the show at last Friday’s antitrust hearing in Ankeny, Iowa, the debate over the monopolization of farming is one where all of our interests are squarely at stake.

Anyone who eats and has a brain should be downright terrified that just a few giant businesses control the vast majority of food available to us as consumers.  Perhaps that explains why more than 15,000 people submitted comments in anticipation of the hearings – four more of which are scheduled this year as a joint effort of the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

To his credit, Attorney General Eric Holder seemed to be trying not to mince words in Iowa – always tough for an attorney – and particularly so for one under the right’s atomic microscope.  Noting that farming “has been at the core of the American economy ever since there was an American economy,” he went on to say, “[W]e’ve learned the hard way that . . . long periods of reckless deregulation can foster practices that are anti-competitive and even illegal. . . .  We know that a growing number of American farmers find it increasingly difficult to survive by doing what they’ve done for decades. And we’ve learned that some of them believe the competitive environment may be, at least in part, to blame.”

Farmers who attended a pre-hearing meeting Thursday evening made the case for themselves.  Noting that farming goes back “forever in my family,” Todd Leake, who grows wheat, soybeans, sunflowers and navy beans in North Dakota, said, “The crops we grow are the basis of civilization.  If anything belongs to the public domain, if anything belongs to the people of the world, it’s the crops we grow for food.”

Iowa hog farmer Larry Ginter, a long-time opponent of factory farms, also made the connection between the plight of American farmers and the struggles of so many people outside our borders, saying,”  “Labor, family farms, democratic rights are in a pitched battle against the dictatorship of capital. We’ve got to understand that this is an international struggle.  Those Mexican workers coming up here are family farmers. Those Sudanese workers in the packing plants are family farmers and workers being driven off by the big dictatorship of capital. We have to understand that we are not alone in America.” Urging his fellow farmers to action, Ginter concluded, “Nothing can happen on the farms unless farmers turn the wheel and plant the seed.”

Wisconsin dairy farmer Joel Greeno, said “My parents’ 29^th wedding anniversary was a farm foreclosure. Their 30^th anniversary was a sheriff’s auction on the courthouse steps.  My neighbor’s farm was stolen from him that was owned since 1942 by his family. He came to ask how to get food stamps because he’d always lived off his farm, no longer had that, and said that his social security of  $9,000 a year couldn’t feed him.  This has got to end. Washington has got to step up.  DOJ is our only lifeboat. They have to fix this. They have to correct it. Monsanto does not have the right to dictate the value of my life, my work, and the food I produce. Kraft Food does not have the right to set the price of my milk, which they do without question.”

Patrick Woodall, a research director for Food and Water Watch, and a panelist at the hearings said, “At the end of the day, farmers and activists could speak truth to power and delivered a tough message to the regulators that action was long overdue, it was time to bust the agribusiness trusts and level the playing field for farmers and consumers. Many audience members, like Marcia Ishii-Eiteman from Pesticide Action Network North America, also challenged the reliance on agrochemical inputs and the false hope of genetically modified crops.”

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said, “This is not just about farmers and ranchers. It’s really about the survival of rural America.”

He’s right, of course, but that’s not just some romantic Rockwellesque notion; almost anyone who eats depends on a shrinking number of farmers struggling at the other end of our fork. If they disappear, our freedom to eat what we choose will vanish as well.

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.

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.”

Concerns about the impact on water from biofuels production have been voiced before and are becoming louder. A little more than a year ago, then U.S. Department of Interior Secretary Dick Kempthorne, stated: “To reach our ethanol production target of 7.5 billion gallons per year by 2012 will require 30 billion gallons of water a year to process, or the amount of the annual water needs of Minneapolis, Minn. And if just 25 percent of the new corn crop requires irrigation, ethanol will demand more water than the combined annual usage of all cities in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho and Nevada. As we increase ethanol production, we must have a holistic approach that takes into account its impact on water supply.”

And late last year a report by the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan independent arm of Congress that investigates federal government spending, concluded that more research is needed regarding both the water impacts of feedstock cultivation and biofuel conversion, and more data on water resources is required as well.

With so many warnings and so many uncertainties, the rush to a massive increase in biofuels production looks nothing short of reckless.

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!

This was the first study to assess consumption patterns when posting the daily calorie recommendations. What led to the decision of testing this variable in your study?

We thought that providing people with calorie information alone, without offering context, might dilute the effects of such labeling. Seeing that an appetizer is over 1000 calories doesn’t really hit home until you realize you should only be eating about 2000 calories per day and that appetizer will get you half way there!

Do daily calorie intake recommendations posted at a single meal impact food choices throughout the day?

In our study, we learned that people who had the daily caloric intake statement and calorie labels on their menus ate 250 fewer calories throughout the day than either of the other groups. This suggests that putting a statement informing people about daily caloric requirements can maximize the effectiveness of menu labeling.

Do you think there is value in a weekly reminder to stay within a healthy calorie limit?

People are very busy and we live in a food environment that constantly promotes poor food choices, so I think reminders about making healthy food choices can be very beneficial!

Maintain a healthy body weight by heading the recommended daily limit of 2000 calories. For a weekly reminder to reset your caloric calendar, do the Monday 2000!

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.

Cheney and Ellis have chosen to go the grassroots route with the release of Big River, organizing screenings across the country in churches, schools, community centers, libraries, boardrooms and so forth. So if you’re not in New York, check out their website to find a screening near you.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben calls the film ” a sharp and clever reminder that nothing ever really goes away, certainly not the soup of chemicals we’re pouring on our fields.” And Big River is more timely than ever in the wake of a flood of stories this past week about our nation’s troubled waterways.

When Cheney and Ellis revisit Iowa, they discover that Atrazine, the herbicide they relied on to grow their corn, has tainted the local creek. Just this week, scientists reported that this widely used weed-killer, which has contaminated the tap water of millions of Americans, is “chemically castrating”–and even feminizing–male frogs. Their gender is literally reversed to the extent that they can bear eggs.

Atrazine is a known endocrine disrupter and suspected carcinogen. The European Union banned it back in 2004. Researchers in the US have called for a ban here, too, citing studies that have linked it to “human birth defects, low birth weight, prematurity and low sperm count.”

Nonetheless, we apply about 80 million pounds of Atrazine annually, and the Environmental Protection Agency has long insisted that it poses no risk. In October of last year, however, the EPA announced that it would “reassess atrazine’s safety, including its cancer risk.”

But there’s only so much the EPA can do to defend our waterways, because, as the New York Times reported last week in the latest installment of its superb Toxic Water series, the Clean Water Act doesn’t give the EPA the authority to pursue some of the biggest offenders:

Thousands of the nation’s largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act’s reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law.

The result?:

Some businesses are declaring that the law no longer applies to them. And pollution rates are rising.

Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.

Some members of Congress are trying to remedy this egregious state of affairs through a piece of legislation called the Clean Water Restoration Act, but as the Times reported:

…a broad coalition of industries has often successfully lobbied to prevent the full Congress from voting on such proposals by telling farmers and small-business owners that the new legislation would permit the government to regulate rain puddles and small ponds and layer new regulations on how they dispose of waste.

Glenn Beck is warning that passage of the Clean Water Restoration Act will result in the government regulating virtually every body of water larger than your birdbath. This could conceivably include the puddles of crocodile tears that Beck routinely weeps, and maybe even the pools of drool that accompanied his ick-inducing interview with Sarah Palin.

Allowing the EPA to prevent industries from polluting our waterways is just bad for business, according to Beck. Never mind that letting manufacturers dump toxins into our waters is bad for us. For wingnut pundits whose populist veneer is thinner than the chocolate shell on an M & M, the concerns of common citizens must never be allowed to trump the needs of commerce.

It’s a view evidently shared by mega developers the Toll Brothers, who withdrew from a proposed project along the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn last Tuesday after the EPA finally declared the famously fouled Gowanus a Superfund site.

Thanks to “years of discharges, storm water runoff, sewer outflows and industrial pollutants, the Gowanus Canal has become one of the nation’s most extensively contaminated water bodies,” the EPA declared.

The Toll Brothers had grand plans to build 450 housing units and 2,000 square feet of retail space there. “We’re extremely disappointed in the EPA’s decision,” David Von Spreckelsen, a Toll senior vice president, told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s going to have a big impact on the properties along the canal…It’s unlikely you are going to see development there for many, many, many, many years.”

Admittedly, this news is a colossal disappointment for all those would-be home buyers who longed to live by a canal whose signature stench betrays its industrial past: a heady blend of “cement, oil, mercury, lead, PCBs, coal tar, and other contaminants.”

But as the New York Times reported last year, “Studies have shown that property values decline after a Superfund listing but rebound after the cleanup, sometimes to far higher levels.”

Given the choice, most folks prefer their creeks and canals to be contaminant-free. Sadly, too many communities haven’t got a choice. They’re up a rancid river without a paddle, while Glenn Beck piddles on the truth and peddles his twaddle about puddles.

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.

I’d like to hold Columbia University totally responsible for this bit of mindless hosting.  After all, if Columbia’s event planners had done their homework, they would have filled a pitcher with New York City tap water and given Dr. Gleick a glass.  Besides, if Columbia didn’t buy the water then the bottling company would go out of business, right? Nah, I just can’t let the bottling companies off the hook that easily.  I mean, how did we get to a point where we are even having this discussion?  Many of us remember a time, not that long ago, when we’d never seen a single-serving sized bottle of water for sale anywhere in the United States.  Now they’re found at every event, grocery store, gas station and vending machine.

In many places, water fountains have been disabled or removed from service, making bottled water an almost mandatory purchase if you find yourself in need without access to tap water.  Still, many times we have a clear choice but we’ve been so manipulated into believing that bottled water is cleaner or better for you than tap water (it almost never is) that we end up making the expensive and environmentally-unsustainable choice of bottled water.

You might think that the single bottle of water you’re about to purchase or throw away doesn’t amount to much but you’d be wrong.  When you consider the cumulative effects on the environment, not to mention the diminishing support for municipal water infrastructure caused by that single purchase, you realize that it really does have a huge environmental impact.

Many municipalities and college campuses across the country and the world have taken a pledge to get their communities back on tap. If Columbia University wants a chance to raise its failing grade, it should take that same pledge. For extra credit, it could check out Free Your Event From Bottled Water. If the University really wants to go for an A++ they should take an inventory of their water fountains, repair any that aren’t working and install additional fountains to encourage their faculty, staff and students to use the tap.  In doing this, Columbia would take serious steps toward achieving the water sustainability Gleick spoke of within Columbia’s own hallowed halls.

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.

I may be comparing apples to oranges here, but at the root of the Agent Orange controversy and the fight against GMO beets and alfalfa are the same issue – public health.  I’ve written before in favor of the precautionary principle, and though I can imagine the comments this post will receive from Monsanto’s PR people, I would challenge any one of them to argue against it.

When the US and South Vietnamese governments decided to dump chemicals into the jungle, we were at war, and expediency and efficacy were the order of the day.  No doubt, there is a PR man out there who would find a reason that GMO beets and alfalfa are not only safe but imperative.  But he’d have a hard time convincing most folks.  When I called my Dad last night to ask what he thought about GMOs, he said he thought that he hoped we’d learned a lesson from what happened to him and others in Vietnam, that the government and the chemical companies were too quick to call a product safe and that there needed to be greater accountability — to people, not just to the bottom line.

Ever my father’s daughter, that’s where I come down on this stuff, too.