Eating Liberally

Steak or salmon? Millions of menu-mulling diners ask themselves this question every day. Enjoy your dithering while you can, folks, because the day is coming when you may not have the luxury of choosing the lobster over the London broil. For those with a more populist palate, I’ve got some bad news, too; a future with no more fried clam strips or canned tuna, for you.

Why? Because fertilizer runoff from industrial agriculture and fossil-fuel use are causing catastrophic “dead zones” in our oceans, “killing large swaths of sea life and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage,” according to Scientific American.

It’s Agribiz vs. Aquabiz, and at the moment, the farmers are beating the waders off of the fishermen. Scientific American notes that “there are now 405 identified dead zones worldwide, up from 49 in the 1960s.” And once a marine habitat falls victim to hypoxia, i.e. oxygen deficiency, the outlook is grim:

How fitting! More toxic gas from the same chemical companies who gave the world Agent Orange. Except that in this case, it’s an unwelcome by-product. Oops! Sorry ‘bout that!

But don’t worry, Monsanto and DuPont are on the job. They’ve come up with a great new biotech solution to the mess they’ve made of our oceans; “NUE” crops, as in “nitrogen use efficiency.” These NUE crops are engineered to have roots that absorb more nitrogen, reportedly allowing farmers to “produce the same yield with half as much fertilizer."

I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we stop looking to the same corporations who have screwed up our environment to fix things? As Prince Charles told The Telegraph the other day, the multinational companies promoting the use of GM crops are conducting a "gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong." Charles has predictably been labelled a luddite for daring to challenge "a system that is fundamentally flawed," as Grist puts it. But it's the Better-Living-Through-Biotech crowd who's just too blinkered to see the Big Picture--you know, the one where all their brilliant breakthroughs come back to bite us on the ass.

There’s the Roundup-resistant strain of super weeds Monsanto’s helped create, for example, and let’s not forget another great Monsanto innovation, Posilac, aka rBST, the bovine growth hormone designed to wring more milk out of our dairy cows. Unfortunately for Monsanto, cows are not sponges but, in fact, living, breathing creatures whose bodies aren’t equipped to cope with the stepped-up production induced by artificial hormones.

Consumer rejection of rBST-tainted dairy products finally forced Monsanto to admit that it’s looking to dump Posilac, but you can bet they’ve got any number of equally ill-conceived “breakthroughs” in the pipeline that promise to solve all the world’s food crises. In fact, the Agribiz apologists will tell you that industrial agriculture is our only hope.

But as Frances Moore Lappé wrote on Huffington Post last week, the notion that we should be looking to Agribiz to feed the world is pernicious propaganda spread with the aid—sometimes unwitting—of a lazy and uninformed media. The story that’s not getting out is the fact that farmers all over the world are finding new ways—and reviving old ones--to produce food without destroying our soil and water. As Lappé notes:

We managed to feed ourselves for centuries without relying on chemicals and we can do it again. As environmental journalist Claire Cummings writes in Uncertain Peril:

Limited, indeed. Who could have predicted that those amber waves of grain we grow from sea to shining sea would wind up destroying those seas—aside, of course, from the marine biologists who’ve been “sounding the alarm on hypoxic zones for decades”? Imagine this; if we don't take drastic steps to halt the growth of these dead zones, the question of whether to order the meat or the fish could become as obsolete as VHS vs. Beta. Better learn to love your veggies.

Image by retrovore.com

The New York Times giveth, and the New York Times taketh away. On the one hand, Nick Kristof’s eloquent plea to treat our farm animals more humanely moved me to tears. On the other hand, I’ve barely got enough digits to count the noxious “let’s not save the planet” columns that John Tierney, Stanley Fish, and Stephen J. Dubner have tossed off in recent weeks like rancid croutons.

John Tierney—the thinking man’s John Stossel--delivers his trademark contrarian drivel with 10 Things to Scratch From Your Worry List, in which he gleefully skewers a whole herd of sustainable sacred cows: plastic bags, plastic water bottles, food miles, the Arctic meltdown, and so on. Treehugger tackled half of his half-assed claims, noting that:

Then Stanley Fish had to weigh in with a weary, Larry David-style kvetch in which his eco-freak wife sabotages his quality of life with recycled toilet paper, fluorescent bulbs, and grass-fed beef, of which he says:

Never mind that he can’t spell agribusiness and writes off a whole world of botanical bounty from amaranth to zucchini. I’d dismiss this as a tedious Andy Rooney-ish tirade, but actually, Andy Rooney gave a shockingly spot-on spiel last month about how Agribiz has spoiled our milk; it was a rant worthy of a raw-milk renegade. Fish, by contrast, comes off like just another tired, deflated geezer à la McCain mocking Obama’s call to keep our tires inflated. Hey, when Andy Rooney’s hipper than you are, maybe it’s time to retire.

And then there’s Stephen J. Dubner and his Freakonomics blog, where he recently wrote a post entitled Do We Really Need a Few Billion Locavores? in which he recounts his family’s disastrous attempt to make homemade orange sherbet:

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(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: My Screening Liberally colleagues have asked me to recommend "a nutritious alternative to popcorn" that Screening Liberally chapters could serve at their film screenings. But is popcorn itself really such a terrible snack? Obviously, if you drench it in butter or oil, it becomes a fat bomb, and then there's diacetyl--the "butter" flavored chemical that gives the workers exposed to it the debilitating illness called "popcorn lung." But if you start with non-GMO, organic popcorn, say, and you pop it in just a wee bit of canola oil and sprinkle it with nutritional yeast, the way they do in those hipster indie movie houses, haven't you got yourself a pretty healthy snack, provided you don't consume a Paul Bunyon-sized tub of it?

Dr. Nestle: Hey--this sounds like my new column in the San Francisco Chronicle in which I discussed, of all things, pizza. The editors wanted to know whether pizza could ever be healthy? Of course it can. Popcorn too. Popcorn has the benefit of being mostly air (it's popped, right?). Air has no calories. So a cup of popcorn is just 30 calories. Air doesn't have much in the way of nutrients either, so that cup of popcorn has a few minerals, a gram of protein, and a teaspoon of starch. Not much good, but no harm done either. BUT: nobody has just a cup and nobody just eats popcorn. Every tablespoon of fat--butter or oil--adds at least 100 calories and throw sugar on top of it and you've added some more. It's still a lot better than most things you get in movie theaters, but I want real butter on mine, not that phony stuff.

In the quest for tips to live a more environmentally friendly life I came across National Geographic's True Green 100 everyday ways you can contribute to a healthier planet.

For a mere $19.95 (not including tax and shipping and handling) you can buy yet another book about how to save the planet.

These books of tips pop up all over the place, lining shelves of Barnes and Nobles, Whole Foods, and apparently National Geographic.

It is oxymoronic to spend 20+ dollars on a product that you could just as easily access on the internet without the use of resources like paper.

When did saving the planet become a niche in the already densely populated consumeropolis? Rather than coming to the table to share knowledge about preserving our planet, we have bullied our way to the market, milking consumers' guilty consciences to the last drop.

Telling people they are irresponsible if they spend their hard earned income on gas or food and not "green" products is not a valid response to the catastrophe that is today's environmental woes.

It is unethical to charge for a product that will advise them on something that should be part of the universal collective. It would be nice to see more sites and organizations that care more about the planet than profits.

Unless I see a disclaimer that profits from the product will be given to an organization doing work in environmental issues and that the product in question is made from reused materials, I see no justification for charging people for information that should be shared willingly and freely.

These are a few site I have found that provide useful greening tips freely online:

1. The Green Guide (National Geographic's very own website where you can find some of the same information as in their True Green)
   
2. Green Living Tips
   
3. Green Tips at About My Planet
   
4. Eco Tips from Global Stewards
   
   
   Happy greening everyone!

There’s an awful lot of b.s. being spread in this election year--thankfully, some of it’s actually being put to good use growing delicious, nutritious fruits and vegetables. The rising cost of food and gas is fueling a grassroots movement to uproot our grass and grow our own food instead. Once, throwing tomatoes was a form of protest. Now, growing tomatoes is the way to just say no to the status quo. Isn’t that a sad sign of the times?

If only we had a commander-in-chief who called on us to grow our own crops, instead of to shop! It sounds implausible now, but there was a time when our government actually encouraged us to get off our cans and get canning. The current administration is famously reluctant to encourage preserving of any kind, be it sweet or savory.

A couple of generations ago, our government championed home food gardening as a civic duty, a way for average Americans to help ease the food shortages we suffered during World War II. And the campaign worked; in 1943, we managed to grow 40 percent of the vegetables we ate in the U.S.

Our nation’s last energy crisis drove us into the dirt, too; in 1975, “49 percent of U.S. households were growing vegetables,” as Bruce Butterfield, the National Gardening Association’s market research director, told the Washington Post recently.

So as our current war drags on and gas prices rise, it’s no surprise that Americans are once again flocking to their local garden centers, snapping up seedlings, and supplanting Bermuda grass with Bermuda onions. But this time, we’re doing it without the inducement of any pro-produce propaganda from the White House. The folks at the helm of our sinking economy are too busy backing the lenders to rally the back-to-the-landers.

The call to tear out your turf and grow turnips comes, instead, from humble homegrown heroes like Roger Doiron, founder of Kitchen Gardeners International and the creative force—and face—of the Eat The View campaign to launch a new generation of Victory Gardens, starting with the White House lawn.

Alice Waters famously tried to persuade President Clinton to install a kitchen garden and compost pile on the White House grounds. If only she had succeeded--the Clinton legacy might be burnished with black gold instead of tarnished by dirt. But Waters, undaunted, continues to spearhead--along with Doiron and a small army of trowel-wielding terroirists —a visionary agrarian platform I call YIMBY-ism; the Yes, In My Back Yard! movement. Waters has helped created a stellar example in her own backyard by marshalling the forces that recently transformed the lawn in front of San Francisco’s City Hall into the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden. It’s a blueprint for greener grounds all around us, and a recipe for true energy independence. Calories, after all, are just another unit of energy. Grow your own, and you’re on the road to self-sufficiency. The Path to Freedom lies through the garden. So let’s get this presidential campaign out of the gutter and into the dirt!

Cross-posted from Slow Food Nation.

Well, of course arugula is bitter! Wouldn’t you be, if the media decided to disparage you as a symbol of all things elite and effete? The right is relentlessly deriding Barack Obama as “an arrogant, arugula-eating, fancy-berry-tea-drinking celebrity,” according to ABC’s Jake Tapper.

To which Jon Stewart replied:

The Beltway loves to stew over Obama’s eating habits; Maureen Dowd squandered valuable NY Times real estate to pontificate about his daughter Malia’s chilling revelation to Access Hollywood that her daddy doesn’t like ice cream. And now, the Wall Street Journal’s speculating that Obama’s thin frame may be as much of an issue for some Americans as his supposedly thin resumé. The article offers man-on-the-street soundbites from folks who say Obama is simply too fit to be president. And his healthy food choices could prove equally alienating:

Apparently there are plenty of voters who deem a candidate unqualified to be Leader of the Free World if he’s too much of a wuss to clog his arteries with fatty processed foods and develop even a hint of a beer belly. Do we dare elect a candidate with a fondness for fresh salad greens? He might do something really radical, like heed the pleas of the Rip-Out-The-White-House-Lawn-And-Grow-Veggies lobby (see This Lawn is Your Lawn video above.) And then what? We’d not only have arugula in the White House, but all around it, too. The horror!

Dickson Despommier, the brilliant mind behind the Vertical Farming idea that Travis recently wrote about, does an interview with BigThink.

When a suicide bomber blows a half dozen of our soldiers into smithereens, Americans get understandably outraged. And here at home, when a deranged malcontent goes postal and guns down classmates or co-workers, we call it a massacre.

But if you kill nine men for the sake of keeping the juice flowing through America's veins, well, evidently, we're so addicted to cheap energy that we're willing to write off dead coal miners as collateral damage. What looks like manslaughter, if not outright murder, is handled as some sort of infraction. The penance? A pittance. Not enough to make much of a dent in King Coal's deep pockets. As the AFP reports:

Two federal reports released on Thursday reveal previously unknown details about the August 6th disaster. Now we know, for example, that the sheer force of the collapse probably killed the six workers who were trapped in the mine pretty quickly. So, they were probably dead long before three rescue workers died 10 days later trying to save them.
It all adds up to nine needless deaths, because the reports also make it excruciatingly clear that the mine's operator, Genwal Resources, had to know that it was risking its workers' lives. One of the reports found that Genwal had ignored warning signs that the mine was unsafe, and concealed dangerous conditions from the MSHA:

Ah, but the other report--this one from the Labor Department--sticks Stickler's own agency with some of the blame, finding that the MSHA never should have approved Genwal's mining plan in the first place, and failed to take full control of the rescue operation following the collapse. As Nelda Erickson, whose husband Don was killed in the August 6th collapse, told the New York Times:

Terry Byrge, whose son-in-law, Brandon Kimber, was one of the rescue workers who died, told the Times:

What we've got here is a government agency and a corporation who shared the mindset that a miner's life has less value than the coal that lies so deep that you're courting disaster to extract it.

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As I zoomed across I-80 this weekend in a single shot from New York to Chicago and back, my mind drifted back and forth across the countless miles of corn and my gas meter, as all that 4 dollar gas dripped away. The big question in my mind was how the heck we were going keep shipping all this corn all the way to New York and California, not to mention shipping banana in refrigerated cars all the way from South America. The answer is not bringing the food to Manhattan but bringing the farms.

Vertical Farms are the way of the future, or so says Dr. Dickson Despommier who has been working on vertical farming technology for 10 years now. Take 35 acres of farmland, stack then into a precisely regulated farming skyscraper, and you have yourself a Vertical Farm. In fact an acre of vertical farmland is predicted to have 4-6 times greater output than a boring old acre of flat land. This is a big deal with a population slated to increase 3 billion, 80% of whom will be living in urbanized areas, by 2050. With ever increasing transport and fuel costs for farming our farming practices must evolve vertically if we are going to stop millions from starving and full nations worth of natural ecosystems laid waste by flat and fat farms.

Many designs have been published for these towering greenhouses, which can protect plants from irregular weather, pests and pesticides, recycle water, transform methane to energy, and provide a source for urban food and jobs, while leaving our battered world to recuperate a little. Still the notion as a few ominous sci-fi elements with the website describing them as a prerequisite for moon colonization and asking, “Don't our harvestable plants deserve the same level of comfort and protection that [people] now enjoy?” This may be the great green hope for agriculture but it is also implies a huge condensing of our food source and the complete stewardship of people creating a new ecosystem. Futuristic and yet surprisingly obvious, this is the thinking that will reshape both urban and rural landscapes, and could make some real change, leaving carbon offsets and the inefficiency of ethanol in the dust.

How many people out there like a good old fashioned Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich. I know I do and I think quite a bit of our population would agree with me. However, like many PB&J loving Americans, I haven't eaten one of those delicious brown'n'purple delights in a while.

Well, a new organization say that that's got to change. The PB&J Campaign is on a mission to save our environment one Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich at a time.

Every time you eat a plant-based lunch, like PB&J, you reduce your carbon footprint by 2.5 pounds of carbon emissions. If you want some comparison thats almost half the about of carbon emissions you would cut by driving a hybrid for a day.

The PB&J campaign also points out that eating a plant-based meal conserves about 133 gallons of water, meaning that "five PB&Js or other plant-based lunches per month would save more water than switching to a low-flow showerhead." You'd also be saving approximately 24 square feet of land that could be deforested, overgrazed or subject to pesticide and fertilizer.

So how does this all work?

Well, according the PB&J campaign, when you eat an animal-based lunch, anything that contains meat or dairy, you are being extremely energy inefficient. In effect, all food comes from plants because even if the food isn't a plant itself, it took plants to give the animals energy to grow and make meat or produce dairy. And as anyone who takes a basic course on Environmental science knows, energy is always lost to heat as you move up the food chain. So, when you eat equal proportions of meat and plant, you are getting about 10x more energy with the plant.

There are also many destructive factors that go into meat and dairy production such as the fossil fuels needed to power machinery, irrigation and transportation, and the vast amount of plants that need to be grown (taking up lots of farmland) to produce small amounts of meat.

When you eat a PB&J sandwich you are reducing the vast amount of resources put into meat and dairy production, which means cutting carbon emissions, and water and land usage.

So as they say, "Eat a PB&J, Save the world today!" Sounds delicious.