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.

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