Origins of Our Food Crisis

How did we end up in this "tainted" food crisis? Here's one perspective on how it has happened. Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times June 13, 2008, writes, ". . . there always seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines — tainted spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes. The declining credibility of U.S. food regulation has even led to a foreign-policy crisis. ...

"... failure to regulate effectively isn’t just bad for consumers, it’s bad for business. And in the case of food, what we need to do now — for the sake of both our health and our export markets — is to go back to the way it was after Teddy Roosevelt, when the Socialists took over. It’s time to get back to the business of ensuring that American food is safe."

Bad Cow Disease By Paul Krugman

Change We Can Stomach: An Op-Ed by Dan Barber

Dan Barber is the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, and is a buyer of Hardwick Beef. In his May 11 Op-Ed piece in the New York Times, Dan argues that as the price of oil increases, small farmers have an easier time competing with industrial agriculture.

He writes, "With the price of oil at more than $120 a barrel (up from less than $30 for most of the last 50 years), small and midsize nonpolluting farms, the ones growing the healthiest and best-tasting food, are gaining a competitive advantage. They aren’t as reliant on oil, because they use fewer large machines and less pesticide and fertilizer."

Read the complete article.

Soil Being Depleted: A Global Crisis

by Ridge Shinn

A May 8 article by the AP's Seth Borenstein discusses the worsening crisis in the world's soil, a critical ingredient if we are to feed the world's population. No matter how good the seeds are for crops, they can't grow in poor soil.

He writes, "Soils around the world are deteriorating with about one-fifth of the world's cropland considered degraded in some manner. The poor quality has cut production by about one-sixth, according to a World Resources Institute study." Unfortunately, the article continues, this topic isn't "sexy" enough to interest governments and charities, and doesn't get the attention it deserves.

Read the complete article here.

Cows & Natural Gases

by Ridge Shinn

Two recent articles have come to my attention about the bad rap that cows have received regarding the methane they produce. In an article at IndyWeek.com, reporter Suzanne Nelson writes, "The methane cows exude has been blamed as a more potent contributor to global climate change than carbon dioxide, the primary byproduct of burning fossil fuels. ... But are cows really worse for the atmosphere than cars and all of the other implements of a global industrial economy? The answer, while complicated, appears to be no."

Finally, someone is talking sense about methane generation by bovines.

In a second report, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, "Pacific Gas and Electric Co. will unveil its latest renewable energy project today, a system that collects methane from manure on a Fresno County dairy farm and refines it into biogas, virtually identical to natural gas. The biogas then flows into a PG&E natural gas pipeline for use in homes and power plants. ... PG&E estimates that biogas could one day supply 5 percent of all the natural gas the utility needs."

Here are links to both articles:
IndyWeek.Com
San Francisco Chronicle

Some Thoughts on Michaeld Pollan's Newest Book & Clones

By Steve Campbell

In his newest book, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan writes:

The first time I heard the advice to "just eat food" was in a speech by the nutritionist and author Joan Gussow, and it baffled me. Of course you should eat food - what else is there to eat? But Gussow, who grows much of her own food on a flood-prone finger of land jutting into the Hudson River, refuses to dignify most of the products for sale in the supermarket with that title. "In the 34 years I've been in the field of nutrition," she said, "I have watched real food disappear from large areas of the supermarket and from much of the rest of the eating world." Taking its place has been an unending stream of food-like substitutes - "products constructed largely around commerce and hope, supported by frighteningly little actual knowledge."

Real food is still out there, still being grown and even occasionally sold in the supermarket. I agree with Michael's advice to help you recognize it, and then make the most of it.

Don't eat anything that your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

Why your great-grandmother? Because at this point your mother, and possibly even your grandmother, are as confused as the rest of us. To be safe we need to go back at least a couple generations, to a time before the advent of most modern foods. Some nutritionists recommend going back even further. John Yudkin, a British nutritionist whose early alarms about the dangers of refined carbohydrates were overlooked in the 1960s and 1970s, once advised: "Just don't eat anything your Neolithic ancestors wouldn't have recognised and you'll be OK."

Is Cloned Meat Safe?

More than 100 nuclear transfer procedures could be required to produce one viable clone. In addition to low success rates, cloned animals tend to have more compromised immune function and higher rates of infection, tumor growth, and other disorders. Japanese studies have shown that cloned mice live in poor health and die early.

About a third of the cloned calves born alive have died young, and many of them were abnormally large. Many cloned animals have not lived long enough to generate good data about how clones age. Appearing healthy at a young age is not a good indicator of long-term survival. Clones have been known to die mysteriously. For example, Australia's first cloned sheep appeared healthy and energetic on the day she died, and the results from her autopsy failed to determine a cause of death.

In 2002, researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reported that the genomes of cloned mice are compromised. In analyzing more than 10,000 liver and placenta cells of cloned mice, they discovered that about 4% of genes function abnormally. The abnormalities do not arise from mutations in the genes but from changes in the normal activation or expression of certain genes.

Problems also may result from programming errors in the genetic material from a donor cell. When an embryo is created from the union of a sperm and an egg, the embryo receives copies of most genes from both parents. A process called "imprinting" chemically marks the DNA from the mother and father so that only one copy of a gene (either the maternal or paternal gene) is turned on. Defects in the genetic imprint of DNA from a single donor cell may lead to some of the developmental abnormalities of cloned embryos.

In sum, this is just not a good idea.

Steve Campbell

Diet With Some Meat More Efficient Than Vegetarian Diet

Cornell researchers report that a low-fat vegetarian diet is very efficient in terms of how much land is needed to support it. But adding some dairy products and a limited amount of meat may actually increase this efficiency. "If everyone in New York state followed a low-fat vegetarian diet," they conclude, "the state could directly support almost 50 percent more people, or about 32 percent of its population, agriculturally. ... Surprisingly, however, a vegetarian diet is not necessarily the most efficient in terms of land use. ... The reason is that fruits, vegetables and grains must be grown on high-quality cropland, he explained. Meat and dairy products from ruminant animals are supported by lower quality, but more widely available, land that can support pasture and hay. A large pool of such land is available in New York state because for sustainable use, most farmland requires a crop rotation with such perennial crops as pasture and hay."

This suggests that adding grass-fed beef in the diet might be more efficient than the vegetarian diet.

Here's a link to the October 2007 article in the Cornell Chronicle.

GMO Grass Seed: Farmers Beware

Right now 100% grass-fed beef is GMO free. But will that be the case in the future? Grassfarmers need to weigh in on this issue now.

Specifically, the U.S. Department of Agriculture will be studying the environmental effects of a genetically engineered, herbicide-resistant alfalfa seed. The USDA published a notice in the Federal Register recently, alerting the public to the department's intent to prepare an environmental impact statement and giving the public 30 days to comment on what issues should be considered.

For more of this story, click on or type the URL below:

http://www.jacksonholestartrib.com/articles/2008/01/08/news/wyoming/2fae3a8109733018872573ca0000c330.txt

Jo Robinson Writes in Mother Earth News

Author and grass researcher Jo Robinson writes about the current beef industry in the February/March issue of Mother Earth News. She writes, "Supermarket beef is an unnatural, industrial product. The good news is there are better and safer options. Learn how to avoid hormones, antibiotics and other unwanted chemicals in your food; stay safe from mad cow disease and E. coli, and choose better beef, including grass-fed, organic and locally raised options."

In this article, she writes convincingly and passionately about returning to the era of pre-industrialized beef. She discusses the widespread use of hormones, antibiotics, and by-products, and the resulting bad side effects of these practices. Read her article here.

In addition to her article are five related articles:

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E. Coli Levels & Distiller's Grains

The Des Moines Register reports that USDA scientists are investigating if there is a link between increased E. coli in cattle that are fed distillers' grains, a byproduct of ethanol production.

The reason for the research study is that scientists at Kansas State University and the University of Nebraska concluded cattle that were fed distillers grain had higher levels of E. coli bacteria as compared to cattle fed regular corn.

Read the entire news report here.

Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler: A New York Times Article

Mark Bittman regularly writes about food for The New York Times, and his January 27 article focuses on the cheap and abundant availability of meat in the American diet, comparing it to a similar addiction for oil. Both meat and oil are subsidized commodities, he notes, and its wide availability is having some unfortunate effects.

He cites these statistics: "Americans eat about ... eight ounces [of meat] a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total. Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s icefree land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation."

Horrifyingly, with all the hunger in the world, he says, "the majority of corn and soy grown in the world feeds cattle, pigs and chickens." Deforestation, pollution, climate change, health problems for both people and the animals themselves ... all are factors that cry out for a change in how harmful our food system has become.

He concludes: "Perhaps the best hope for change lies in consumers’ becoming aware of the true costs of industrial meat production."

Read the complete article here.

Declining Biodiversity in Cattle

In a recent article in The New York Times by Andrew Rice, we read about a breed of longhorns known as the Ankole with traits suited to the hilly grasslands of western Uganda. Yet, they are being replaced by Holsteins. Rice writes, "Indigenous animals like East Africa’s sinewy Ankole, the product of centuries of selection for traits adapted to harsh conditions, are struggling to compete with foreign imports bred for maximal production. This worries some scientists. The world’s food supply is increasingly dependent on a small and narrowing list of highly engineered breeds: the Holstein, the Large White pig and the Rhode Island Red and Leghorn chickens. There’s a risk that future diseases could ravage these homogeneous animal populations. Poor countries, which possess much of the world’s vanishing biodiversity, may also be discarding breeds that possess undiscovered genetic advantages."

Read the entire article here.

Expensive Oil? It's the Cow's Fault

Super-spook R. James Woolsey, former director of the CIA and now a vice president with Booz Allen Hamilton, argues that our dependence on Middle Eastern oil is a national security concern. In a satirical piece, Woolsey imagines a conference call between the nations of OPEC and the lobbyists of Washington, D.C.'s K Street. He explains, "[OPEC's] greatest fear is that the United States will become oil-independent -- and they're concerned that the crunchy types' campaign to feed cows grass rather than corn could mean not only a healthier America but one less dependent on OPEC."

Read the entire article by clicking here.

Jared Diamond on the Consumption Factor

Jared M. Diamond, professor at UCLA and author of the best sellers Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, asks in a January 2 Op-Ed piece for the New York Times, "What's Your Consumption Factor?"

He writes, "The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences."

This level of consumption cannot be maintained, he writes, as our world resources dwindle and as people in developing countries strive to adopt our high-consumption lifestyle. What is the answer?

"Willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable. Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life."

Read the entire editorial.

Corn As a Fuel Having Serious Side Effects

Ethanol, a fuel made from corn, is playing a significant role in our nation's energy policy, and the growth of corn-based ethanol production raises serious questions about its impact on the environment. It takes 1.2 gallons of fossil fuel to produce 1 gallon of ethanol from corn (including the use of fossil fuels for fertilizer, tractor fuel, ethanol plant operation, among other factors). Run-off from all that fertilizer is having a serious impact.

A recent article by the Associated Press reports:

"Because of rising demand for ethanol, American farmers are growing more corn than at any time since the Depression. And sea life in the Gulf of Mexico is paying the price. The nation's corn crop is fertilized with millions of pounds of nitrogen-based fertilizer. And when that nitrogen runs off fields in Corn Belt states, it makes its way to the Mississippi River and eventually pours into the Gulf, where it contributes to a growing "dead zone" a 7,900-square-mile patch so depleted of oxygen that fish, crabs and shrimp suffocate."

Read the complete article.

Sally Fallon's Books & Blogs

We recommend another author for you to read. Sally Fallon advocates returning to a traditional diet, advising that animal fats are not necessarily the enemy, as the "Diet Dictocrats" want us all to believe. She supports organic and biodynamic farming and pasture-feeding of livestock, as you can read in her blog entry, "Splendor From the Grass ."

Sally is co-author with Mary G. Enig of Eat Fat, Lose Fat and Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats.

Book Review: The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters

Alice Waters is likely more responsible than anyone for the revolution in the way Americans eat, cook, and think about food. She was named the most influential figure in the past 30 years of the American kitchen by Gourmet magazine, and she has “single-handedly chang[ed] the American palate” according to the New York Times. Her simple but inventive dishes focus on a passion for flavor and a reverence for locally produced, seasonal foods.

With an essential repertoire of timeless, approachable recipes chosen to enhance and showcase great ingredients, The Art of Simple Food is an indispensable resource for home cooks. Here you will find Alice’s philosophy on everything from stocking your kitchen, to mastering fundamentals and preparing delicious, seasonal inspired meals all year long. Always true to her philosophy that a perfect meal is one that’s balanced in texture, color, and flavor, Waters helps us embrace the seasons’ bounty and make the best choices when selecting ingredients. Fill your market basket with pristine produce, healthful grains, and responsibly raised meat, poultry, and seafood, then embark on a voyage of culinary rediscovery that reminds us that the most gratifying dish is often the least complex. All of her beef recipes specify grass-fed beef.

She is the owner of Chez Panisse restaurant and the author of nine cookbooks.

Grass-Fed? Not Without Grass
An article from the Washington Post

Farmers trying to build a grass-fed cattle business are facing unprecedented drought conditions, especially in the southeast. The Washington Post reports, "Since 2000, the number of grass-fed beef producers has soared from 50 to more than 1,000 to meet growing consumer demand. But the Southeast's "exceptional" drought -- the kind that comes around only once or twice every 100 years -- and extreme weather elsewhere are crippling many in the new generation of cattle ranchers. Just when ranchers should be cashing in, weather conditions have delayed production, slashed profits and slowed grass-fed beef's move into the mainstream."

Read the article here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/16/AR2007101600385.html