A new report from the UN advises ditching corporate-controlled and chemically intensive farming in favor of agroecology.

There are a billion hungry people in the world and that number could rise as food insecurity increases along with population growth, economic fallout and environmental crises. But a roadmap to defeating hunger exists, if we can follow the course — and that course involves ditching corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive farming.

“To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available. And today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live,” says Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Agroecology is more or less what many Americans would simply call “organic agriculture,” although important nuances separate the two terms.

Used successfully by peasant farmers worldwide, agroecology applies ecology to agriculture in order to optimize long-term food production, requiring few purchased inputs and increasing soil quality, carbon sequestration and biodiversity over time. Agroecology also values traditional and indigenous farming methods, studying the scientific principals underpinning them instead of merely seeking to replace them with new technologies. As such, agroecology is grounded in local (material, cultural and intellectual) resources.

A new report, presented today before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, makes several important points along with its recommendation of agroecology. For example, it says, “We won’t solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations.” Instead, it says the solution lies with smallholder farmers. The majority of the world’s hungry are smallholder farmers, capable of growing food but currently not growing enough food to feed their families each year. A net global increase in food production alone will not guarantee the end of hunger (as the poor cannot access food even when it is available), an increase in productivity for poor farmers will make a dent in global hunger. Potentially, gains in productivity by smallholder farmers will provide an income to farmers as well, if they grow a surplus of food that they can sell.

With its potential to double crop yields, as the report notes, agroecology could help ensure smallholder farmers have enough to eat and perhaps provide a surplus to sell as well. The report calls for investment in extension services, storage facilities, and rural infrastructure like roads, electricity, and communication technologies, to help provide smallholders with access to markets, agricultural research and development, and education. Additionally, it notes the importance of providing farmers with credit and insurance against weather-related risks.

In the past, efforts to help the hungry involved developing high yielding seeds and providing them along with industrial inputs to farmers in poor countries. However, in poor countries, smallholder farmers who often live on less than $1 or $2 per day, cannot afford industrial inputs like hybrid or genetically engineered seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, or irrigation. Many work each year to make sure their crops go far enough to feed their families, with little left over to sell. And for those who live far from roads and cities, there might not be a market to sell to anyway.

Agroecology requires replacing chemical inputs with knowledge, often disseminated by farmers who work together with scientists and aid organizations to teach their fellow farmers. “Rather than treating smallholder farmers as beneficiaries of aid, they should be seen as experts with knowledge that is complementary to formalized expertise,” the report notes. For example, in Kenya, researchers and farmers developed a successful “push-pull” strategy to control pests in corn, and using town meetings, national radio broadcasts, and farmer field schools, spread the system to over 10,000 households.

The push-pull method involves pushing pests away from corn by interplanting corn with an insect repelling crop called Desmodium (which can be fed to livestock), while pulling the pests toward small nearby plots of Napier grass, “a plant that excretes a sticky gum which both attracts and traps pests.” In addition to controlling pests, this system produces livestock fodder, thus doubling corn yields and milk production at the same time. And it improves the soil to boot!

Significantly, the report mentions that past efforts to combat hunger focused mostly on cereals such as wheat and rice which, while important, do not provide a wide enough range of nutrients to prevent malnutrition. Thus, the biodiversity in agroecological farming systems provide much needed nutrients. “For example,” the report says, “it has been estimated that indigenous fruits contribute on average about 42 percent of the natural food-basket that rural households rely on in southern Africa. This is not only an important source of vitamins and other micronutrients, but it also may be critical for sustenance during lean seasons.” Indeed, in agroecological farming systems around the world, plants a conventional American farm might consider weeds are eaten as food or used in traditional herbal medicine.

De Schutter does not dismiss the U.S. government’s preferred strategies of crop breeding and fertilizers as potentially helpful in the fight against hunger, but warns of caution in using them. Crop breeding, he notes, can be complementary to agroecology. Perhaps referring to efforts to develop drought-resistant maize, the report says, “Agroecology is more overarching [than crop breeding] as it supports building drought-resistant agricultural systems (including soils, plants, agrobiodiversity, etc.), not just drought-resistant plants.”

When asked to provide more detail about crop breeding, De Schutter responded that “most [agroecologists] are very careful with some of these [crop breeding] technologies, particularly genetic engineering.” He noted that genetically engineered crops not only carry environmental risks, but are also “associated with unsustainable farming practices and with a worrying concentration of the seed industry.” In contrast, he sees promise in marker-assisted selection and participatory plant breeding, which “uses the strength of modern science, while at the same time putting farmers in the driver’s seat.”

De Schutter also highlights the risks of using nitrogen fertilizer, which contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and water pollution, saying that, “the use of fertilizers [in Africa] could increase a bit without major environmental damages.” He sees many reasons why agroecology is a better choice than nitrogen fertilizer, pointing out that, “many agroecological methods simply outperform mineral fertilizers: they result in similar levels of return on investments if you measure only productivity, but they create systems that are more resilient to climate change, some of them produce additional fodder for animals (nitrogen-fixing trees for instance), or fruit (thus vitamins).”

He adds that agroecological gains can be achieved with local resources, “while fertilizers need to be imported. This is not a minor issue for the balance of payment of countries! A country could thus use its foreign exchange to build modern industries and create jobs rather than buying fertilizers.” However, when an urgent situation of hunger needs to be addressed, nitrogen fertilizers should not be dismissed if they can, in fact, provide the best outcome in a short-term emergency situation.

The report also warns of the harmful impact of allowing volatile prices and dumping of subsidized commodities in poor countries. Dumping occurs when a country that subsidizes its farmers (like the U.S.) promotes overproduction and causes prices to fall very low. When the excess, cheap commodities are exported to poor countries that have no trade barriers, local farmers cannot compete on price. De Schutter notes, “While not the single cause, the lowering of import tariffs in poor countries and the inability of these countries to support their small farmers” were major causes of “massive rural poverty, rural flight, and widespread hunger.” He adds, “I believe that it is vital for poor countries to be allowed to protect their farming sector and to be helped in supporting this sector.”

Will the United States heed De Schutter’s advice, adopting a development approach that embraces agroecology and seeks trade agreements that are more fair to poor countries? Recently history does not inspire much hope. De Schutter is not the first to recognize the potential of agroecology. In 2008, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report also concluded that agroecology offered farmers a powerful means to increase production on smallholder farms, and thus decrease hunger in the world. Both De Schutter and the IAASTD report seek more than just food production from agriculture; they see agroecology as a way to improve rural livelihoods, mitigate climate change and provide resilience in the face of climate extremes.

However, the United States was one of only three countries that failed to approve the IAASTD report, due to its critiques of unregulated trade and biotechnology. American efforts to fight global hunger, to date, have focused more on crop breeding, particularly genetic engineering, and nitrogen fertilizer than agroecology. Whereas the new UN report notes that, “perhaps because [agroecological] practices cannot be rewarded by patents, the private sector has been largely absent from this line of research,” the U.S. aggressively promotes public-private partnerships with corporations such as seed and chemical companies Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont, and BASF; agribusiness companies Cargill, Bunge; and Archer Daniels Midland; processed food companies PepsiCo, Nestle, General Mills, Coca Cola, Unilever, and Kraft Foods; and the retail giant Wal-Mart.

The entire report on agroecology is available on the Web site of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Americans who are interested in seeing the U.S. follow the path outlined by De Schutter in this report should contact USAID and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Additionally, contact your members of Congress as well as the U.S. Trade Representative and the president if you wish to comment on American trade policy.

Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It..

Reposted from AlterNet.

http://www.alternet.org/story/149392/

The television series Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, shocks young parents today with scenes of children riding in station wagons without seat belts and putting dry cleaning bags over their heads for fun. Thank goodness we know so much more about keeping our kids healthy, we chuckle.

But as any one of the smooth advertising executives from the show would tell you, don’t underestimate the power of a well-crafted sales pitch.

Today, one of the most troubling and fastest growing threats to our children’s health is their diet. Pediatricians have seen an astounding jump for their patients in dangerous, diet-related ailments, such as cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes, and asthma.

The best-documented cause is the increased consumption of fast food. It’s a trend propelled in large part by sophisticated and pervasive advertising aimed at children too young to understand the difference between marketing and facts. Don Draper would be proud.

The American Academy of Pediatrics believes that “advertising directed toward children is inherently deceptive and exploits children under eight years of age.” This past June, a study published in the journal Pediatrics reported that children significantly preferred the taste of food when it was packaged with cartoon characters, and that effect was magnified for calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods.

Food and beverage corporations certainly know that advertising works. That’s why these corporations spend more than a half billion dollars each year on advertisements for fast food and toy giveaways targeting teens and children. Despite the attention paid to the childhood epidemic of diet-related disease, they aren’t slowing down their marketing.

In November, Yale University researchers found that preschoolers were exposed to 21 percent more fast food advertisements in 2009 than in 2003. The study from the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity also concluded that large fast food chains only offer parents healthy alternatives for their children 15 percent of the time. Experts consider it the most comprehensive study of fast food nutrition and marketing ever conducted.

Five years before the Yale Rudd Study, the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academies, concluded that television ads sponsored by food and beverage corporations succeed in getting children to consume large amounts of unhealthy food, leading to a dramatic increase in childhood obesity and diabetes.

The Institute recommended that Congress should step in if the food and beverage industry doesn’t change its ways. Advertising Age said the report could be “a watershed on the scale of the 1964 surgeon general’s report on tobacco.”

It certainly feels like societal attitudes have made a clear shift from viewing the marketing of junk food to kids as an accepted practice to something to be shunned, or even resisted.

By adopting voluntary codes to reduce it, the industry tacitly acknowledges that marketing junk food to kids is wrong. But these steps have proved less than half-hearted and, predictably, ineffective.

For our part, my organization launched a campaign in March to convince McDonald’s to retire Ronald McDonald, its iconic advertising character, and the suite of predatory marketing practices of which the clown is at the heart. A study we commissioned by Lake Research Partners found that more than half of those polled say they “favor stopping corporations from using cartoons and other children’s characters to sell harmful products to children.”

Local elected officials are joining the cause, too. Los Angeles recently voted to make permanent a ban on the construction of new fast food restaurants in parts of the city. San Francisco has limited toy giveaway promotions to children’s meals that meet basic health criteria. The idea is spreading to other cities.

Elected leaders will find growing support for taking action. People now realize that protecting our children from diet-related disease requires protecting them from junk food advertising. There’s nothing mad about that.

Kelle Louaillier is executive director of Corporate Accountability International.

Until very recently, food was invisible as a political issue. Something is stirring. Pollan reviews five books that address the heart of the food movement.

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front by Joel Salatin, Polyface

All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America? by Joel Berg, Seven Stories

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, Little, Brown

Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities by Carlo Petrini, with a foreword by Alice Waters — Chelsea Green


The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society by Janet A. Flammang — University of Illinois Press

1. Food Made Visible

It might sound odd to say this about something people deal with at least three times a day, but food in America has been more or less invisible, politically speaking, until very recently. At least until the early 1970s, when a bout of food price inflation and the appearance of books critical of industrial agriculture (by Wendell Berry, Francis Moore Lappé, and Barry Commoner, among others) threatened to propel the subject to the top of the national agenda, Americans have not had to think very hard about where their food comes from, or what it is doing to the planet, their bodies, and their society.

Most people count this a blessing. Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any people in history—slightly less than 10 percent—and a smaller amount of their time preparing it: a mere thirty-one minutes a day on average, including clean-up. The supermarkets brim with produce summoned from every corner of the globe, a steady stream of novel food products (17,000 new ones each year) crowds the middle aisles, and in the freezer case you can find “home meal replacements” in every conceivable ethnic stripe, demanding nothing more of the eater than opening the package and waiting for the microwave to chirp. Considered in the long sweep of human history, in which getting food dominated not just daily life but economic and political life as well, having to worry about food as little as we do, or did, seems almost a kind of dream.

The dream that the age-old “food problem” had been largely solved for most Americans was sustained by the tremendous postwar increases in the productivity of American farmers, made possible by cheap fossil fuel (the key ingredient in both chemical fertilizers and pesticides) and changes in agricultural policies. Asked by President Nixon to try to drive down the cost of food after it had spiked in the early 1970s, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz shifted the historical focus of federal farm policy from supporting prices for farmers to boosting yields of a small handful of commodity crops (corn and soy especially) at any cost.

The administration’s cheap food policy worked almost too well: crop prices fell, forcing farmers to produce still more simply to break even. This led to a deep depression in the farm belt in the 1980s followed by a brutal wave of consolidation. Most importantly, the price of food came down, or at least the price of the kinds of foods that could be made from corn and soy: processed foods and sweetened beverages and feedlot meat. (Prices for fresh produce have increased since the 1980s.) Washington had succeeded in eliminating food as a political issue—an objective dear to most governments at least since the time of the French Revolution. But although cheap food is good politics, it turns out there are significant costs—to the environment, to public health, to the public purse, even to the culture—and as these became impossible to ignore in recent years, food has come back into view. Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of food safety scandals opened people’s eyes to the way their food was being produced, each one drawing the curtain back a little further on a food system that had changed beyond recognition. When BSE, or mad cow disease, surfaced in England in 1986, Americans learned that cattle, which are herbivores, were routinely being fed the flesh of other cattle; the practice helped keep meat cheap but at the risk of a hideous brain-wasting disease.

The 1993 deaths of four children in Washington State who had eaten hamburgers from Jack in the Box were traced to meat contaminated with E.coli 0157:H7, a mutant strain of the common intestinal bacteria first identified in feedlot cattle in 1982. Since then, repeated outbreaks of food-borne illness linked to new antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria (campylobacter, salmonella, MRSA) have turned a bright light on the shortsighted practice of routinely administering antibiotics to food animals, not to treat disease but simply to speed their growth and allow them to withstand the filthy and stressful conditions in which they live.

In the wake of these food safety scandals, the conversation about food politics that briefly flourished in the 1970s was picked up again in a series of books, articles, and movies about the consequences of industrial food production.Beginning in 2001 with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a surprise best-seller, and, the following year, Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, the food journalism of the last decade has succeeded in making clear and telling connections between the methods of industrial food production, agricultural policy, food-borne illness, childhood obesity, the decline of the family meal as an institution, and, notably, the decline of family income beginning in the 1970s.

Besides drawing women into the work force, falling wages made fast food both cheap to produce and a welcome, if not indispensible, option for pinched and harried families. The picture of the food economy Schlosser painted resembles an upside-down version of the social compact sometimes referred to as “Fordism”: instead of paying workers well enough to allow them to buy things like cars, as Henry Ford proposed to do, companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s pay their workers so poorly that they can afford only the cheap, low-quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of nonvirtuous circle driving down both wages and the quality of food. The advent of fast food (and cheap food in general) has, in effect, subsidized the decline of family incomes in America.

2. Food Politics

Cheap food has become an indispensable pillar of the modern economy. But it is no longer an invisible or uncontested one. One of the most interesting social movements to emerge in the last few years is the “food movement,” or perhaps I should say “movements,” since it is unified as yet by little more than the recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform because its social/environmental/public health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too high.

As that list suggests, the critics are coming at the issue from a great many different directions. Where many social movements tend to splinter as time goes on, breaking into various factions representing divergent concerns or tactics, the food movement starts out splintered. Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids.

It’s a big, lumpy tent, and sometimes the various factions beneath it work at cross-purposes. For example, activists working to strengthen federal food safety regulations have recently run afoul of local food advocates, who fear that the burden of new regulation will cripple the current revival of small-farm agriculture. Joel Salatin, the Virginia meat producer and writer who has become a hero to the food movement, fulminates against food safety regulation on libertarian grounds in his Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front. Hunger activists like Joel Berg, in All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?, criticize supporters of “sustainable” agriculture—i.e., producing food in ways that do not harm the environment—for advocating reforms that threaten to raise the cost of food to the poor. Animal rights advocates occasionally pick fights with sustainable meat producers (such as Joel Salatin), as Jonathan Safran Foer does in his recent vegetarian polemic, Eating Animals.

But there are indications that these various voices may be coming together in something that looks more and more like a coherent movement. Many in the animal welfare movement, from PETA to Peter Singer, have come to see that a smaller-scale, more humane animal agriculture is a goal worth fighting for, and surely more attainable than the abolition of meat eating. Stung by charges of elitism, activists for sustainable farming are starting to take seriously the problem of hunger and poverty. They’re promoting schemes and policies to make fresh local food more accessible to the poor, through programs that give vouchers redeemable at farmers’ markets to participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and food stamp recipients. Yet a few underlying tensions remain: the “hunger lobby” has traditionally supported farm subsidies in exchange for the farm lobby’s support of nutrition programs, a marriage of convenience dating to the 1960s that vastly complicates reform of the farm bill—a top priority for the food movement.

The sociologist Troy Duster reminds us of an all-important axiom about social movements: “No movement is as coherent and integrated as it seems from afar,” he says, “and no movement is as incoherent and fractured as it seems from up close.” Viewed from a middle distance, then, the food movement coalesces around the recognition that today’s food and farming economy is “unsustainable”—that it can’t go on in its current form much longer without courting a breakdown of some kind, whether environmental, economic, or both.

For some in the movement, the more urgent problem is environmental: the food system consumes more fossil fuel energy than we can count on in the future (about a fifth of the total American use of such energy) and emits more greenhouse gas than we can afford to emit, particularly since agriculture is the one human system that should be able to substantially rely on photosynthesis: solar energy. It will be difficult if not impossible to address the issue of climate change without reforming the food system. This is a conclusion that has only recently been embraced by the environmental movement, which historically has disdained all agriculture as a lapse from wilderness and a source of pollution.1 But in the last few years, several of the major environmental groups have come to appreciate that a diversified, sustainable agriculture—which can sequester large amounts of carbon in the soil—holds the potential not just to mitigate but actually to help solve environmental problems, including climate change. Today, environmental organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group are taking up the cause of food system reform, lending their expertise and clout to the movement.

But perhaps the food movement’s strongest claim on public attention today is the fact that the American diet of highly processed food laced with added fats and sugars is responsible for the epidemic of chronic diseases that threatens to bankrupt the health care system. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that fully three quarters of US health care spending goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which are preventable and linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and at least a third of all cancers. The health care crisis probably cannot be addressed without addressing the catastrophe of the American diet, and that diet is the direct (even if unintended) result of the way that our agriculture and food industries have been organized.

Michelle Obama’s recent foray into food politics, beginning with the organic garden she planted on the White House lawn last spring, suggests that the administration has made these connections. Her new “Let’s Move” campaign to combat childhood obesity might at first blush seem fairly anodyne, but in announcing the initiative in February, and in a surprisingly tough speech to the Grocery Manufacturers Association in March,2 the First Lady has effectively shifted the conversation about diet from the industry’s preferred ground of “personal responsibility” and exercise to a frank discussion of the way food is produced and marketed. “We need you not just to tweak around the edges,” she told the assembled food makers, “but to entirely rethink the products that you’re offering, the information that you provide about these products, and how you market those products to our children.”

Mrs. Obama explicitly rejected the conventional argument that the food industry is merely giving people the sugary, fatty, and salty foods they want, contending that the industry “doesn’t just respond to people’s natural inclinations—it also actually helps to shape them,” through the ways it creates products and markets them.

So far at least, Michelle Obama is the food movement’s most important ally in the administration, but there are signs of interest elsewhere. Under Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, the FDA has cracked down on deceptive food marketing and is said to be weighing a ban on the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in factory farming. Attorney General Eric Holder recently avowed the Justice Department’s intention to pursue antitrust enforcement in agribusiness, one of the most highly concentrated sectors in the economy.3 At his side was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, who has planted his own organic vegetable garden at the department and launched a new “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative aimed at promoting local food systems as a way to both rebuild rural economies and improve access to healthy food.

Though Vilsack has so far left mostly undisturbed his department’s traditional deference to industrial agriculture, the new tone in Washington and the appointment of a handful of respected reformers (such as Tufts professor Kathleen Merrigan as deputy secretary of agriculture) has elicited a somewhat defensive, if not panicky, reaction from agribusiness. The Farm Bureau recently urged its members to go on the offensive against “food activists,” and a trade association representing pesticide makers called CropLife America wrote to Michelle Obama suggesting that her organic garden had unfairly maligned chemical agriculture and encouraging her to use “crop protection technologies”—i.e., pesticides.

The First Lady’s response is not known; however, the President subsequently rewarded CropLife by appointing one of its executives to a high-level trade post. This and other industry-friendly appointments suggest that while the administration may be sympathetic to elements of the food movement’s agenda, it isn’t about to take on agribusiness, at least not directly, at least until it senses at its back a much larger constituency for reform.

One way to interpret Michelle Obama’s deepening involvement in food issues is as an effort to build such a constituency, and in this she may well succeed. It’s a mistake to underestimate what a determined First Lady can accomplish. Lady Bird Johnson’s “highway beautification” campaign also seemed benign, but in the end it helped raise public consciousness about “the environment” (as it would soon come to be known) and put an end to the public’s tolerance for littering. And while Michelle Obama has explicitly limited her efforts to exhortation (“we can’t solve this problem by passing a bunch of laws in Washington,” she told the Grocery Manufacturers, no doubt much to their relief), her work is already creating a climate in which just such a “bunch of laws” might flourish: a handful of state legislatures, including California’s, are seriously considering levying new taxes on sugar in soft drinks, proposals considered hopelessly extreme less than a year ago.

The political ground is shifting, and the passage of health care reform may accelerate that movement. The bill itself contains a few provisions long promoted by the food movement (like calorie labeling on fast food menus), but more important could be the new political tendencies it sets in motion. If health insurers can no longer keep people with chronic diseases out of their patient pools, it stands to reason that the companies will develop a keener interest in preventing those diseases. They will then discover that they have a large stake in things like soda taxes and in precisely which kinds of calories the farm bill is subsidizing. As the insurance industry and the government take on more responsibility for the cost of treating expensive and largely preventable problems like obesity and type 2 diabetes, pressure for reform of the food system, and the American diet, can be expected to increase.

3. Beyond the Barcode

It would be a mistake to conclude that the food movement’s agenda can be reduced to a set of laws, policies, and regulations, important as these may be. What is attracting so many people to the movement today (and young people in particular) is a much less conventional kind of politics, one that is about something more than food. The food movement is also about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other. As the Diggers used to say during their San Francisco be-ins during the 1960s, food can serve as “an edible dynamic”—a means to a political end that is only nominally about food itself.

One can get a taste of this social space simply by hanging around a farmers’ market, an activity that a great many people enjoy today regardless of whether they’re in the market for a bunch of carrots or a head of lettuce. Farmers’ markets are thriving, more than five thousand strong, and there is a lot more going on in them than the exchange of money for food. Someone is collecting signatures on a petition. Someone else is playing music. Children are everywhere, sampling fresh produce, talking to farmers. Friends and acquaintances stop to chat. One sociologist calculated that people have ten times as many conversations at the farmers’ market than they do in the supermarket. Socially as well as sensually, the farmers’ market offers a remarkably rich and appealing environment. Someone buying food here may be acting not just as a consumer but also as a neighbor, a citizen, a parent, a cook. In many cities and towns, farmers’ markets have taken on (and not for the first time) the function of a lively new public square.

Though seldom articulated as such, the attempt to redefine, or escape, the traditional role of consumer has become an important aspiration of the food movement. In various ways it seeks to put the relationship between consumers and producers on a new, more neighborly footing, enriching the kinds of information exchanged in the transaction, and encouraging us to regard our food dollars as “votes” for a different kind of agriculture and, by implication, economy. The modern marketplace would have us decide what to buy strictly on the basis of price and self-interest; the food movement implicitly proposes that we enlarge our understanding of both those terms, suggesting that not just “good value” but ethical and political values should inform our buying decisions, and that we’ll get more satisfaction from our eating when they do.

That satisfaction helps to explain why many in the movement don’t greet the spectacle of large corporations adopting its goals, as some of them have begun to do, with unalloyed enthusiasm. Already Wal-Mart sells organic and local food, but this doesn’t greatly warm the hearts of food movement activists. One important impetus for the movement, or at least its locavore wing—those who are committed to eating as much locally produced food as possible—is the desire to get “beyond the barcode”—to create new economic and social structures outside of the mainstream consumer economy. Though not always articulated in these terms, the local food movement wants to decentralize the global economy, if not secede from it altogether, which is why in some communities, such as Great Barrington, Massachusetts, local currencies (the “BerkShare”) have popped up.

In fact it’s hard to say which comes first: the desire to promote local agriculture or the desire to promote local economies more generally by cutting ties, to whatever degree possible, to the national economic grid.4 This is at bottom a communitarian impulse, and it is one that is drawing support from the right as well as the left. Though the food movement has deep roots in the counterculture of the 1960s, its critique of corporate food and federal farm subsidies, as well as its emphasis on building community around food, has won it friends on the right. In his 2006 book Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher identifies a strain of libertarian conservatism, often evangelical, that regards fast food as anathema to family values, and has seized on local food as a kind of culinary counterpart to home schooling.

It makes sense that food and farming should become a locus of attention for Americans disenchanted with consumer capitalism. Food is the place in daily life where corporatization can be most vividly felt: think about the homogenization of taste and experience represented by fast food. By the same token, food offers us one of the shortest, most appealing paths out of the corporate labyrinth, and into the sheer diversity of local flavors, varieties, and characters on offer at the farmers’ market.

Put another way, the food movement has set out to foster new forms of civil society. But instead of proposing that space as a counterweight to an overbearing state, as is usually the case, the food movement poses it against the dominance of corporations and their tendency to insinuate themselves into any aspect of our lives from which they can profit. As Wendell Berry writes, the corporationswill grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.

The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.

The Italian-born organization Slow Food, founded in 1986 as a protest against the arrival of McDonald’s in Rome, represents perhaps the purest expression of these politics. The organization, which now has 100,000 members in 132 countries, began by dedicating itself to “a firm defense of quiet material pleasure” but has lately waded into deeper political and economic waters. Slow Food’s founder and president, Carlo Petrini, a former leftist journalist, has much to say about how people’s daily food choices can rehabilitate the act of consumption, making it something more creative and progressive. In his new book Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities, Petrini urges eaters and food producers to join together in “food communities” outside of the usual distribution channels, which typically communicate little information beyond price and often exploit food producers. A farmers’ market is one manifestation of such a community, but Petrini is no mere locavore. Rather, he would have us practice on a global scale something like “local” economics, with its stress on neighborliness, as when, to cite one of his examples, eaters in the affluent West support nomad fisher folk in Mauritania by creating a market for their bottarga, or dried mullet roe. In helping to keep alive such a food tradition and way of life, the eater becomes something more than a consumer; she becomes what Petrini likes to call a “coproducer.”

Ever the Italian, Petrini puts pleasure at the center of his politics, which might explain why Slow Food is not always taken as seriously as it deserves to be. For why shouldn’t pleasure figure in the politics of the food movement? Good food is potentially one of the most democratic pleasures a society can offer, and is one of those subjects, like sports, that people can talk about across lines of class, ethnicity, and race.

The fact that the most humane and most environmentally sustainable choices frequently turn out to be the most delicious choices (as chefs such as Alice Waters and Dan Barber have pointed out) is fortuitous to say the least; it is also a welcome challenge to the more dismal choices typically posed by environmentalism, which most of the time is asking us to give up things we like. As Alice Waters has often said, it was not politics or ecology that brought her to organic agriculture, but rather the desire to recover a certain taste—one she had experienced as an exchange student in France. Of course democratizing such tastes, which under current policies tend to be more expensive, is the hard part, and must eventually lead the movement back to more conventional politics lest it be tagged as elitist.

But the movement’s interest in such seemingly mundane matters as taste and the other textures of everyday life is also one of its great strengths. Part of the movement’s critique of industrial food is that, with the rise of fast food and the collapse of everyday cooking, it has damaged family life and community by undermining the institution of the shared meal. Sad as it may be to bowl alone, eating alone can be sadder still, not least because it is eroding the civility on which our political culture depends.

That is the argument made by Janet Flammang, a political scientist, in a provocative new book called The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society. “Significant social and political costs have resulted from fast food and convenience foods,” she writes, “grazing and snacking instead of sitting down for leisurely meals, watching television during mealtimes instead of conversing”—40 percent of Americans watch television during meals—”viewing food as fuel rather than sustenance, discarding family recipes and foodways, and denying that eating has social and political dimensions.” The cultural contradictions of capitalism—its tendency to undermine the stabilizing social forms it depends on—are on vivid display at the modern American dinner table.

In a challenge to second-wave feminists who urged women to get out of the kitchen, Flammang suggests that by denigrating “foodwork”—everything involved in putting meals on the family table—we have unthinkingly wrecked one of the nurseries of democracy: the family meal. It is at “the temporary democracy of the table” that children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civility—sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending—and it is these habits that are lost when we eat alone and on the run. “Civility is not needed when one is by oneself.”5

These arguments resonated during the Senate debate over health care reform, when The New York Times reported that the private Senate dining room, where senators of both parties used to break bread together, stood empty. Flammang attributes some of the loss of civility in Washington to the aftermatch of the 1994 Republican Revolution, when Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House, urged his freshman legislators not to move their families to Washington. Members now returned to their districts every weekend, sacrificing opportunities for socializing across party lines and, in the process, the “reservoirs of good will replenished at dinner parties.” It is much harder to vilify someone with whom you have shared a meal.

Flammang makes a convincing case for the centrality of food work and shared meals, much along the lines laid down by Carlo Petrini and Alice Waters, but with more historical perspective and theoretical rigor. A scholar of the women’s movement, she suggests that “American women are having second thoughts” about having left the kitchen.6 However, the answer is not for them simply to return to it, at least not alone, but rather “for everyone—men, women, and children—to go back to the kitchen, as in preindustrial days, and for the workplace to lessen its time demands on people.” Flammang points out that the historical priority of the American labor movement has been to fight for money, while the European labor movement has fought for time, which she suggests may have been the wiser choice.

At the very least this is a debate worth having, and it begins by taking food issues much more seriously than we have taken them. Flammang suggests that the invisibility of these issues until recently owes to the identification of food work with women and the (related) fact that eating, by its very nature, falls on the wrong side of the mind–body dualism. “Food is apprehended through the senses of touch, smell and taste,” she points out,

which rank lower on the hierarchy of senses than sight and hearing, which are typically thought to give rise to knowledge. In most of philosophy, religion, and literature, food is associated with body, animal, female, and appetite—things civilized men have sought to overcome with reason and knowledge.

Much to our loss. But food is invisible no longer and, in light of the mounting costs we’ve incurred by ignoring it, it is likely to demand much more of our attention in the future, as eaters, parents, and citizens. It is only a matter of time before politicians seize on the power of the food issue, which besides being increasingly urgent is also almost primal, indeed is in some deep sense proto- political. For where do all politics begin if not in the high chair?—at that fateful moment when mother, or father, raises a spoonful of food to the lips of the baby who clamps shut her mouth, shakes her head no, and for the very first time in life awakens to and asserts her sovereign power.

1. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth made scant mention of food or agriculture, but in his recent follow-up book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (2009), he devotes a long chapter to the subject of our food choices and their bearing on climate. ↩

2. Ms. Obama’s speech can be read at www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-first-lady-a-grocery-manufacturers-association-conference. ↩

3. Speaking in March at an Iowa “listening session” about agribusiness concentration, Holder said, “long periods of reckless deregulation have restricted competition” in agriculture. Indeed: four companies (JBS/Swift, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef Packers) slaughter 85 percent of US beef cattle; two companies (Monsanto and DuPont) sell more than 50 percent of US corn seed; one company (Dean Foods) controls 40 percent of the US milk supply. ↩

4. For an interesting case study about a depressed Vermont mining town that turned to local food and agriculture to revitalize itself, see Ben Hewitt, The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food (Rodale, 2009). ↩

5. See David M. Herszenhorn, “In Senate Health Care Vote, New Partisan Vitriol,” The New York Times, December 23, 2009: “Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, said the political—and often personal—divisions that now characterize the Senate were epitomized by the empty tables in the senators’ private dining room, a place where members of both parties used to break bread. ‘Nobody goes there anymore,’ Mr. Baucus said. ‘When I was here 10, 15, 30 years ago, that the place you would go to talk to senators, let your hair down, just kind of compare notes, no spouses allowed, no staff, nobody. It is now empty.’”↩

6. The stirrings of a new “radical homemakers” movement lends some support to the assertion. See Shannon Hayes’s Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture (Left to Write Press, 2010).↩

Essay originally published in the The New York Review of Books.

29 September, 2010
CommonDreams.org

The food crisis of 2008 never really ended, it was ignored and forgotten. The rich and powerful are well fed; they had no food crisis, no shortage, so in the West, it was little more than a short lived sound bite, tragic but forgettable. To the poor in the developing world, whose ability to afford food is no better now than in 2008, the hunger continues.

Hunger can have many contributing factors; natural disaster, discrimination, war, poor infrastructure. So why, regardless of the situation, is high tech agriculture always assumed to be the only the solution? This premise is put forward and supported by those who would benefit financially if their “solution” were implemented. Corporations peddle their high technology genetically engineered seed and chemical packages, their genetically altered animals, always with the “promise” of feeding the world.

Politicians and philanthropists, who may mean well, jump on the high technology band wagon. Could the promise of financial support or investment return fuel their apparent compassion?

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) an initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation supposedly works to achieve a food secure and prosperous Africa. While these sentiments and goals may be philanthropy at its best, some of the coalition partners have a different agenda.

One of the key players in AGRA, Monsanto, hopes to spread its genetically engineered seed throughout Africa by promising better yields, drought resistance, an end to hunger, etc. etc. Could a New Green Revolution succeed where the original Green Revolution had failed? Or was the whole concept of a Green Revolution a pig in a poke to begin with?

Monsanto giving free seed to poor small holder farmers sounds great, or are they just setting the hook? Remember, next year those farmers will have to buy their seed. Interesting to note that the Gates Foundation purchased $23.1 million worth of Monsanto stock in the second quarter of 2010. Do they also see the food crisis in Africa as a potential to turn a nice profit? Every corporation has one overriding interest— self-interest, but surely not charitable foundations?

Food shortages are seldom about a lack of food, there is plenty of food in the world, the shortages occur because of the inability to get food where it is needed and the inability of the hungry to afford it. These two problems are principally caused by, as Francis Moore Lappe’ put it, a lack of justice. There are also ethical considerations, a higher value should be placed on people than on corporate profit, this must be at the forefront, not an afterthought.

In 2008, there were shortages of food, in some places, for some people. There was never a shortage of food in 2008 on a global basis, nor is there currently. True, some countries, in Africa for example, do not have enough food where it is needed, yet people with money have their fill no matter where they live. Poverty and inequality cause hunger.

The current food riots in Mozambique were a result of increased wheat prices on the world market. The UN Food and Agriculture organization, (FAO) estimates the world is on course to the third largest wheat harvest in history, so increasing wheat prices were not caused by actual shortages, but rather by speculation on the price of wheat in the international market.

While millions of people go hungry in India, thousands of kilos of grain rot in storage. Unable to afford the grain, the hungry depend on the government to distribute food. Apparently that’s not going so well.

Not everyone living in a poor country goes hungry, those with money eat. Not everyone living in rich country is well fed, those without money go hungry. We in the US are said to have the safest and most abundant food supply in the world, yet even here, surrounded by an over abundance of food, there are plenty of hungry people and their numbers are growing. Do we too have a food crisis, concurrent with an obesity crisis?

Why is there widespread hunger? Is food a right? Is profit taking through speculation that drives food prices out of the reach of the poor a right? Is pushing high technology agriculture on an entire continent at that could feed itself a (corporate) right?

In developing countries, those with hunger and poor food distribution, the small farmers, most of whom are women, have little say in agricultural policy. The framework of international trade and the rules imposed by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank on developing countries, places emphasis on crops for export, not crops for feeding a hungry population.

Despite what we hope are the best intentions of the Gates Foundation, a New Green Revolution based on genetically engineered crops, imported fertilizer and government imposed agricultural policy will not feed the world. Women, not Monsanto, feed most of the worlds population, and the greatest portion of the worlds diet still relies on crops and farming systems developed and cultivated by the indigenous for centuries, systems that still work, systems that offer real promise.

The report of 400 experts from around the world, The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), is ignored by the proponents of a New Green Revolution, precisely because it shows that the best hope for ending hunger lies with local, traditional, farmer controlled agricultural production, not high tech industrial agriculture.

To feed the world, fair methods of land distribution must be considered. A fair and just food system depends on small holder farmers having access to land. The function of a just farming system is to insure that everyone gets to eat, industrial agriculture functions to insure those corporations controlling the system make a profit.

The ultimate cause of hunger is not a lack of Western agricultural technology, rather hunger results when people are not allowed to participate in a food system of their choosing. Civil wars, structural adjustment policies, inadequate distribution systems, international commodity speculation and corporate control of food from seed to table— these are the causes of hunger, the stimulus for food crises.

If the Gates Foundation is serious about ending hunger in Africa, they need to read the IAASTD report, not Monsanto’s quarterly profit report. Then they can decide how their money might best be spent.

Jim Goodman is a dairy farmer and activist from Wonewoc, WI and a WK Kellogg Food and Society Policy Fellow.

Countercurrents.org

Today, the planet is on fire with global warming, toxic pollution and species extinction, with fundamentalism, terrorism and fear. The dominant media tell us that WE are to blame: our greed is the cause, and we as individuals must change our consumer habits. However, if we try to deal with these crises individually, we won’t get very far. We need to stand back and look at the bigger picture. It then becomes obvious that the driving force behind our crises is a corporate -led globalization. Despite the apparent enormity of making changes to our economic system, isolating this root cause can be very empowering. Rather than confront an overwhelming list of seemingly isolated symptoms, we can begin to discern the disease itself.In so doing it also becomes apparent that joining hands with others is a key to reversing environmental and social breakdown.

The most powerful solutions involve a fundamental change in direction – towards localizing rather than globalising economic activity. In fact, “going local” may be the single most effective thing we can do. Localisation is essentially a process of de-centralisation – shifting economic activity back into the hands of local businesses instead of concentrating it in fewer and fewer mega-corporations. Food is a clear example of the multi-layered benefits of localisation.

Since food is something everyone, everywhere, needs every day, a shift from global food to local food would have a great and immediate impact, socially, economically and environmentally. Local food is, simply, food produced for local and regional consumption. For that reason, ‘food miles’ are relatively small, which greatly reduces fossil fuel use and pollution. There are other environmental benefits as well. While global markets demand monocultural production – which systematically eliminates all but the cash crop from the land – local markets give farmers an incentive to diversify, which creates many niches on the farm for wild plant and animal species. Moreover, diversified farms cannot accommodate the heavy machinery used in monocultures, thereby eliminating a major cause of soil erosion. Diversification also lends itself better to organic methods, since crops are far less susceptible to pest infestations.

Local food systems have economic benefits, too, since most of the money spent on food goes to the farmer, not corporate middlemen. Small diversified farms can help reinvigorate entire rural economies, since they employ far more people per acre than large monocultures. Wages paid to farm workers benefit local economies and communities far more than money paid for heavy equipment and the fuel to run it: the latter is almost immediately siphoned off to equipment manufacturers and oil companies, while wages paid to workers are spent locally.

Local food is usually far fresher – and therefore more nutritious – than global food. It also needs fewer preservatives or other additives. Farmers can grow varieties that are best suited to local climate and soils, allowing flavour and nutrition to take precedence over transportability, shelf life and the whims of global markets. Animal husbandry can be integrated with crop production, providing healthier, more humane conditions for animals and a non-chemical source of fertility.

Food security worldwide would increase if people depended more on local foods. Instead of being concentrated in a handful of corporations, control over food would be dispersed and decentralised. If developing countries were encouraged to use their labour and their best agricultural land for local needs rather than growing luxury crops for Northern markets, the rate of endemic hunger could be eliminated.

Studies carried out all over the world show that small-scale, diversified farms have a higher total output per unit of land than large-scale monocultures. Global food is also very costly, though most of those costs do not show up in its supermarket price. Instead, a large portion of what we pay for global food comes out of our taxes – to fund research into pesticides and biotechnology, to subsidise the transport, communications and energy infrastructures the system requires, and to pay for the foreign aid that pulls Third World economies into the destructive global system. We pay in other ways for the environmental costs of global food and we will still be paying for generations to come.

When we buy local food, we can actually pay less because we are not paying for excessive transport, wasteful packaging, advertising, and chemical additives – only for fresh, healthy and nutritious food. Most of our food dollar isn’t going to bloated corporate agribusinesses, but to nearby farmers and small shopkeepers, enabling them to charge less while still earning more than if they were tied to the global system.

The benefits of localisation are not limited to food, as we can see from the wide range of local initiatives and trends springing up around the world. Increasing numbers of doctors and patients are rejecting the commercialised medical mainstream in favour of more preventative and holistic approache, often making use of local herbs and traditional methods. Many architects are finding inspiration in vernacular building styles, and are employing more local, natural materials in their work. Millions of farmers are switching to organic practices, and dietary preferences among consumers are shifting away from processed foods with artificial colourings, flavourings, and preservatives, towards fresher foods in their natural state. Community-supported projects like local media outlets—radio, television, art and journals like this one—help reconnect people to each other and learn about their surroundings. Small businesses provide meaningful employment and keep money circulating in the local economy. Spaces for people to gather and socialise help to revitalise community and a sense of belonging. In this age of escalating ecological crises, localisation is a key to reducing waste and pollution and conserving our precious resources.

Yet for these grassroots efforts to succeed, they need to be accompanied by policy changes at the national and international level. It is necessary to pressure governments into what I call a “Breakaway Strategy” forming an international alliance of nations to leave the WTO and formulate policies that would protect the environment and human rights. These policies would move society away from dependence an a few monopolies and promote small scale on a large scale, allowing space for more local economies to flourish and spread. Through localisation we open ourselves up to a world of richness and diversity. We can thus achieve true sustainability and well-being for ourselves, our communities and the planet.

Helena Norberg-Hodge is an analyst of the impact of the global economy on cultures and agriculture worldwide and a pioneer of the localisation movement. She is the founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC). He book Ancient Futures has been described as an “inspirational classic” by the London Times and together with a film of the same title, it has been translated into 42 languages. She is also co-author of Bringing the Food Economy Home and From the Ground Up: Rethinking Industrial Agriculture. In 1986, she received the Right Livelihood Award, or the “Alternative Nobel Prize” as recognition for her work in Ladakh

Americans love their shrimp. It’s the most popular seafood in the country, but unfortunately much of the shrimp we eat are a cocktail of chemicals, harvested at the expense of one of the world’s productive ecosystems. Worse, guidelines for finding some kind of “sustainable shrimp” are so far nonexistent.

In his book, Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, Taras Grescoe paints a repulsive picture of how shrimp are farmed in one region of India. The shrimp pond preparation begins with urea, superphosphate, and diesel, then progresses to the use of piscicides (fish-killing chemicals like chlorine and rotenone), pesticides and antibiotics (including some that are banned in the U.S.), and ends by treating the shrimp with sodium tripolyphosphate (a suspected neurotoxicant), Borax, and occasionally caustic soda.

Upon arrival in the U.S., few if any, are inspected by the FDA, and when researchers have examined imported ready-to-eat shrimp, they found 162 separate species of bacteria with resistance to 10 different antibiotics. And yet, as of 2008, Americans are eating 4.1 pounds of shrimp apiece each year — significantly more than the 2.8 pounds per year we each ate of the second most popular seafood, canned tuna. But what are we actually eating without knowing it? And is it worth the price — both to our health and the environment?

Understanding the shrimp that supplies our nation’s voracious appetite is quite complex. Overall, the shrimp industry represents a dismantling of the marine ecosystem, piece by piece. Farming methods range from those described above to some that are more benign. Problems with irresponsible methods of farming don’t end at the “yuck,” factor as shrimp farming is credited with destroying 38 percent of the world’s mangroves, some of the most diverse and productive ecosystems on earth. Mangroves sequester vast amounts of carbon and serve as valuable buffers against hurricanes and tsunamis. Some compare shrimp farming methods that demolish mangroves to slash-and-burn agriculture. A shrimp farmer will clear a section of mangroves and close it off to ensure that the shrimp cannot escape. Then the farmer relies on the tides to refresh the water, carrying shrimp excrement and disease out to sea. In this scenario, the entire mangrove ecosystem is destroyed and turned into a small dead zone for short-term gain. Even after the shrimp farm leaves, the mangroves do not come back.

A more responsible farming system involves closed, inland ponds that use their wastewater for agricultural irrigation instead of allowing it to pollute oceans or other waterways. According to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, when a farm has good disease management protocols, it does not need to use so many antibiotics or other chemicals.

One more consideration, even in these cleaner systems, is the wild fish used to feed farmed shrimp. An estimated average of 1.4 pounds of wild fish are used to produce every pound of farmed shrimp. Sometimes the wild fish used is bycatch — fish that would be dumped into the ocean to rot if they weren’t fed to shrimp — but other times farmed shrimp dine on species like anchovies, herring, sardines and menhaden. These fish are important foods for seabirds, big commercial fish and whales, so removing them from the ecosystem to feed farmed shrimp is problematic.

Additionally, some shrimp are wild-caught, and while they aren’t raised in a chemical cocktail, the vast majority is caught using trawling, a highly destructive fishing method. Football field-sized nets are dragged along the ocean floor, scooping up and killing several pounds of marine life for every pound of shrimp they catch and demolishing the ocean floor ecosystem as they go. Where they don’t clear-cut coral reefs or other rich ocean floor habitats, they drag their nets through the mud, leaving plumes of sediment so large they are visible from outer space.

After trawling destroys an ocean floor, the ecosystem often cannot recover for decades, if not centuries or millennia. This is particularly significant because 98 percent of ocean life lives on or around the seabed. Depending on the fishery, the amount of bycatch (the term used for unwanted species scooped up and killed by trawlers) ranges from five to 20 pounds per pound of shrimp. These include sharks, rays, starfish, juvenile red snapper, sea turtles and more. While shrimp trawl fisheries only represent 2 percent of the global fish catch, they are responsible for over one-third of the world’s bycatch. Trawling is comparable to bulldozing an entire section of rainforest in order to catch one species of bird.

Given this disturbing picture, how can an American know how to find responsibly farmed or fished shrimp? Currently, it’s near impossible. Only 15 percent of our total shrimp consumption comes from the U.S. (both farmed and wild sources). The U.S. has good regulations on shrimp farming, so purchasing shrimp farmed in the U.S. is not a bad way to go. Wild shrimp, with a few exceptions, is typically obtained via trawling and should be avoided. The notable exceptions are spot prawns from British Columbia, caught in traps similar to those used for catching lobster, and the small salad shrimp like the Northern shrimp from the East Coast or pink shrimp from Oregon, both of which are certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council. However, neither are true substitutes for the large white and tiger shrimp American consumers are used to.

The remaining 85 percent came from other countries and about two-thirds of our imports are farmed with the balance caught in the wild, mostly via trawling. China is the world’s top shrimp producer — both farmed and wild — but only 2 percent of China’s shrimp are imported to the U.S. The world’s number two producer, Thailand, is our top foreign source of shrimp. Fully one third of the shrimp the U.S. imports comes from Thailand, and over 80 percent of those shrimp are farmed.

The next biggest sources of U.S. shrimp are Ecuador, Indonesia, China, Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia and India. Together, those countries provide nearly 90 percent of America’s imported shrimp. Interestingly, Ecuador’s shrimp industry exists almost entirely to supply U.S. demand, with over 93 percent of its shrimp coming up north to the U.S. The vast majority of those shrimp (almost 90 percent) are farmed. Sadly, shrimp production is responsible for the destruction of 70 percent of Ecuador’s mangroves. Farming practices in other countries range from decent to awful, but there’s currently no real way for a consumer to tell whether shrimp from any particular country was farmed sustainably or not.

Geoff Shester, senior science manager of Monterey Bay’s Seafood Watch, says that ethical shrimp consumption is a chicken and egg problem. On one hand, the solution is for consumers to show demand for responsibly farmed and wild shrimp by eating it but on the other hand, ethical shrimp choices are not yet widely available. Seafood Watch is working with some of the largest seafood buyers in the U.S. to help them buy better shrimp, but it’s currently a major challenge.

The first challenge is that labeling and certification programs do not yet exist to identify which farmed shrimp meet sustainable production standards. The second challenge is that even when such programs are in place, the U.S. demand will likely greatly exceed their supply.

Shester’s advice to consumers right now is “only buy shrimp that you know comes from a sustainable source. If you can’t tell for sure, try something else from the Seafood Watch yellow or green lists.” Knowing that many will be unwilling to give up America’s favorite seafood, he advocates simply eating less of it and keeping an eye on future updates to the Seafood Watch guide to eating sustainable seafood.

Jill Richardson is the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of the Organic Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It..

Republished from AlterNet.

You’re not going to believe what you’ve been eating the last few years (thanks, Bush! thanks meat industry lobbyists!) when you eat a McDonald’s burger (or the hamburger patties in kids’ school lunches) or buy conventional ground meat at your supermarket:

According to today’s New York Times, The “majority of hamburger” now sold in the U.S. now contains fatty slaughterhouse trimmings “the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil,” “typically including most of the material from the outer surfaces of the carcass” that contains “larger microbiological populations.”

This “nasty pink slime,” as one FDA microbiologist called it, is now wrung in a centrifuge to remove the fat, and then treated with AMMONIA to “retard spoilage,” and turned into “a mashlike substance frozen into blocks or chips”.

Thus saving THREE CENTS a pound off production costs. And making the company, Beef Products Inc., a fortune. $440 million/year in revenue. Ain’t that something?

And to emphasize: this pink slime isn’t just in fast food burgers or free lunches for poor kids:

With the U.S.D.A.’s stamp of approval, the company’s processed beef has become a mainstay in America’s hamburgers. McDonald’s, Burger King and other fast-food giants use it as a component in ground beef, as do grocery chains. The federal school lunch program used an estimated 5.5 million pounds of the processed beef last year alone.

Bush’s U.S.D.A. also allowed these “innovators” to get away with listing the ammonia as “a processing agent” instead of by name. And they also OKd the processing method — and later exempted the hamburger from routine testing of meat sold to the general public — strictly based on the company’s claims of safety, which were not backed by any independent testing.

Because the ammonia taste was so bad (“It was frozen, but you could still smell ammonia,” said Dr. Charles Tant, a Georgia agriculture department official. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”) the company started using a less alkaline ammonia treatment, and now we know — thanks to testing done for the school lunch program — that the nasty stuff isn’t even reliably killing the pathogens.

But government and industry records obtained by The New York Times show that in testing for the school lunch program, E. coli and salmonella pathogens have been found dozens of times in Beef Products meat, challenging claims by the company and the U.S.D.A. about the effectiveness of the treatment. Since 2005, E. coli has been found 3 times and salmonella 48 times, including back-to-back incidents in August in which two 27,000-pound batches were found to be contaminated. The meat was caught before reaching lunch-rooms trays.

In July, school lunch officials temporarily banned their hamburger makers from using meat from a Beef Products facility in Kansas because of salmonella — the third suspension in three years, records show. Yet the facility remained approved by the U.S.D.A. for other customers.

Presented by The Times with the school lunch test results, top [U.S.D.A.] department officials said they were not aware of what their colleagues in the lunch program had been finding for years.

The New York Times article today has a rather innocuous headline, “Safety of beef processing method is questioned.”

I’d say this quote from the U.S.D.A. department microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, who called the processed beef “pink slime” in a 2002 e-mail message to colleagues, represents the situation better: “I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling.”

I’ve been thinking about an action item on this issue, and I’ve got three ideas: a. write Michelle Obama through this web form: http://www.whitehouse.gov/… or snail mail: The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20500; 2. print out the NY Times article and give it to the manager of your local supermarket, and ask them if they sell any kind of ground beef that doesn’t contain this “pink slime” or if their butchers will grind meat fresh for you; 3. just stop buying the damned stuff altogether.

Republished from Alternet.org.

Countercurrents.org

The single greatest challenge facing our modern economic food chain is the insanely unnatural low cost of food to the consumer, making the simple and necessary act of eating dependent on food that is almost free. The global edifice of cheap food rests on the volatility of a single input; the exponentially depleting supply of easy, cheap oil. We are gorging ourselves at the $1.99 all-you-can-eat oil buffet. Food is too cheap, a “correction” is coming, and there is not a damn thing anybody can do about it.

Eat, or Die Trying

For the most part of human history, the cost of eating was a brutal, hard day of death defying exertion. You found food or you died, and you probably died trying. As civilization advanced, the cost of food fell. Social organization added efficiencies to food gathering, freeing time to reinvest in technology, develop specialists, get drunk, or fight. Commerce grew, trade developed, and the production of food ceased to be simple individual effort, becoming pooled resources that traded food for other commodities in ever increasingly complex exchanges. This primitive separation of end user from producer in no way relieved the individual from contributing to the general pool of wealth – idle laggards still starved to death with nothing to trade in the markets for food. Whether you bartered in kind, or used some form of money, you still had to expend a hard life’s toil to eat. Again, many died trying.

This is what has essentially driven the pace of history; ever-creative ways to produce more food per unit of person labour. It worked well enough. People ate better, mortality rates improved, populations grew, and technology and specialized work gained from the surplus of labour that could be directed their way. In the western world, and in particular England, receding amounts of arable land were required to feed more and more people. By the end of the 13th century, land became fenced and enclosed in a crude form of assembly line privatization; surplus people were forced into small subsidiary “cottage” industries, or streamed by the thousands into the safety of larger communities and cities. The factory, and unemployment, was born. Starvation was no longer reserved for lazy n’er-do-wells and became the providence of the economically displaced. Human exertion and effort became unlinked from the land.

Of course, as private property displaced whole communities, the new landed parvenu aristocracies gained control of the lands complete suite of resources. These new “capitalists” drafted up the economically useless as modern workers, returned to the land now as wage slaves who toiled for meagre subsistence, exchanging the better part of their labour for wretched scraps at the edges of the growing marketplace. The landowner took the rest as personal wealth, which we call profit now. Technology advanced at greater rates and civilization picked up steam…literally.

In 1712, at the Conygree Coalworks in England, the local capitalist – Lord Dudley – was having a devil of a time improving his bottom line. Half-starved and wretched labourers slogged below the earth’s surface in claustrophobic blackness, hacking coal from stubborn seams under his private lands. The mines kept filling with water, drowning his workers and cutting into profits. At this time, a remarkable new device appeared saving the unhappy aristocrat from such frustrating declines in production. Thomas Newcomen had perfected his “atmospheric engine”, a steam propelled device that could pump the water out of the mines with only a handful of dimwitted attendants. Free from the prospect of drowning, workers could now beaver away at an increased rate (we call that productivity now), padding the pockets of the Dudley’s at a pace never before encountered. It was a miracle, and the beginning of the glorious Industrial Revolution. Another separation became enshrined between humans and the earth.

For the first time, human beings were considered as productive chattel and productivity the measure of increasing profits. Commerce exploded and people left the land in droves, crowding into cities of productive convenience where labour became plentiful and the distribution of goods, cheap. Food became one of those goods. The aristocracy of private ownership rejoiced at the gap between sustenance wages and profitable consumer goods. Machines provided economies of scale that allowed a growing middle class to expend only a part of their lives trying to eat, and the aristocrats – none at all.

Law followed. Growing and complex states began to learn how to utilize the expanding power of the marketplace. Trade laws, taxation, and growing defences of private capital grew. Economies of scale visited both the growing hordes of urbanized landless, as well as the increasing foothills of private capital. Conglomerates of vested interests pooled resources, dragging legal scripture behind them. The earliest known “corporation” was founded in the 14th century in Sweden, however the concept of a legally protected business venture with an infinite life of its own quickly spread. By 1602, with the Dutch East India Company established in Amsterdam, the “conglomeration of vested interest” became the principle means by which sophisticated nation states launched the age of exploration and colonization.

Not since the advent of the steel plough – when tilling fields moved from dragging a sturdy stick across hard land – had the productivity of food taken such a monumental leap. Where once an individual could feed only himself and his dependents, now organized teams of agricultural workers employing wondrous new machines could feed dozens, and then hundreds of humans with ever decreasing human effort. For the emergent middle classes, less and less time was required working to feed one’s self. With the falling cost of food, more and more people could spend their time and money on other goods or pursuits. Machine made clothes, machine made furnishings, machine made gewgaws of all manner and description (we call that consumerism today). In a very real sense, western humanity was liberating itself from the tyranny of essential sustenance, and investing the freedom in greater liberty – and pointless, mass produced crap. Snow globes sold like hot cakes. Exactly like hot cakes.

The global food chain became organized thus; grow it, ship it to a central location, distribute it back to regional and then local markets and retailers, sell it to hungry consumers. At each step along the way, “value” was added to calories, where value meant profit. Where little value was realized there was malnutrition and starvation, where lots of value was available, there became increasing participation by corporations. By their nature, corporations squeegeed out the inefficiencies and brought increasing amounts of capital to bear. No profit, no food. Or snow globes. As the Industrial Revolution gripped the earth, colonization and mercantilism gave way to capitalism. Market places expanded and stratified, layers of value added enterprise employed less and less people to produce more and more food. Horses gave way to tractors; local farm markets gave way to dedicated food retail chains. Rail lines and steamships moved food across nations, continents, and the globe. Economies of scale at every step lowered the cost of eating along with everything else.

As the 20th century clicked forward, for the burgeoning masses of wealthy western nations, cheap food became a right, and then just simply assumed. Poverty and squalor remained the providence of the economically marginal, as it always had and in that sense, little had changed. However, for increasing members of affluent western societies, prodigious amounts of capital moved away from food production and into all the things that make powerful capitalist states breathless nations of discretionary consumers. Rich meant less and less time feeding one’s self, and more and more time accumulating stuff.

In 1914, western humanity inexplicably took time out to spend three decades denuding the earth of healthy, well-fed men, women, and children. A blind and irrational invisible hand swatted from the earth about 200 million or so. All these human folk had to be properly fed and supplied prior to their excruciating death, and industry celebrated by rising to the challenge. Machines leapt into the breach in a symbiotic reciprocating engine of feeding and killing on a truly industrial scale. “Total war” entered modern lexicon. Airplanes moved food and bombs in alternating waves. With the entire continent of Europe momentarily out of the food making business, America and good old Yankee know how took up the slack. America was an island fortress, island as in thousands of miles away by sea. Transport logistics was born; convoys of hundreds of specially designed ships moved back and forth across the oceans. The costs were staggering, food went short, and rationing was imposed on the rich and middle classes. For the last time in history, the cost of food rose to life and death again. And then peace broke out.

The next great step forward in food history came at the close of global hostilities in mid century. Having invested the no-cost-too-high capital of military supply and distribution, the ships, trains, trucks, and airplanes manufactured in the thousands were returned to civil use. Private, corporate industry vacuumed up legions of military logistics specialists. Transport and distribution costs collapsed around the world. The “container” ship was born. At the same time, complex munitions processes moved into synthetic, inorganic fertilizer production that dramatically increased crop yields. Incredible plenty drove prices down at the same time transportation costs fell. Abundance rejoiced. Farmers went broke. In their place arose massive agricultural conglomerates that vacuumed up the great diversity of the world’s local farms, replacing them with hectares upon hectares of dedicated crops, mechanically worked, industrially fertilized, and hooked by rail, sea, and air to far-flung markets offering the maximum return on investment.

Welcome to the Machines

Today, entire heartlands of biodiversity, countless expanses of small rural farms and communities, have been purchased by syndicates of corporate finance wizards from the urban bowels of Wall Street. Banks, hedge funds, and trusts receive billions of dollars worldwide from the accounts of thousands of scattered investors – most unwittingly – through pension funds and other retirement and savings vehicles. None of whom would recognize a carrot in the ground if it kicked them in the groin. Their only task is to maximize their clients return on investment. And food is a reliable investment it turns out. Once assembled and sold forward to international agri-businesses, hundreds of hectares are mechanically and scientifically ploughed under and replanted with “monocultures” of single crops. Electronically monitored machines prepare and renew the soil with mountains of synthetic fertilizer, more machines plant the crop, and more machines harvest it.

The crop is delivered to massive central terminals by rail and truck, where it is rerouted towards regional complexes and ports. Sometimes travelling the breadth of a continent, and sometimes travelling the expanse of the sea on huge ships designed for the purpose, the happy crop is delivered to yet more terminals where it is assembled, packaged, and labelled with paper, tin, and other things – all of which arrive in exactly the same way – for sale to food distributors. Large retail grocery outlets contract to have the increasingly angry crop loaded on yet more trucks, rail, or ships, after which it is finally delivered to urban hubs of people in the form of canned creamed corn, lined up on brightly lit shelves and slathered in marketing. Two cans for under a buck and a hat for your kid.

Millions of western homemakers in mini vans will spend twice that on fuel to drive to the store; pouring out of their urban sprawl like microbes, leaving behind their suburban castles, hot tubs, motorbikes, and heated driveways, bitching about the cost of food the entire way. They will spend twice what they can eat and throw out the rest. They will have money left for IPods and plasma TV’s. Absolutely none of them will toil from sun up to sun set for the single purpose of eating. None. A can of creamed corn from the other side of the planet for nothing more than a few moments worth of inconvenience.

The cost of food is almost zilch.

Humanity may have landed a man on the moon, but nothing compares with two cans of creamed corn for under a buck. It’s a freaking miracle. A miracle when one considers all the open palms that creamed corn had to pass through from seed to plate, throwing off profit into every sweaty one. Food is now corporate, and driven by the bottom lines of dozens of invisible enablers, corporate charters all regulated by law and designed for no other reason than the maximization of each shareholders value. Built atop every golden kernel of corn is a golden edifice of economic interconnectivity.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, US households may have spent as much as a third of their disposable income on food at the dawn of the corporate age in the early 20th century. By 1933, that number had shrunk to 25%. Well into the post war era, 20%. When the Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan, 15%. Iraq war – 10%. Economic meltdown…9.7%.

Food, clearly, is too big to fail.

Consider then, that all the efficiencies that are the miracle of cheap food rest entirely on technology and mechanization. Consider further, that each and every technological piece depends on – in its turn – nothing more substantive than gooey black oil. No oil, no food. The global edifice of cheap food rests on the volatility of a single input; the exponentially depleting supply of easy, cheap oil.

But of course, oil is infinite – or so we think. We don’t actually believe that, but we think it just the same. To a certain point, we are correct. When we worry about oil, we worry about it running out, which is in all probability not going to happen. However, while we fret away our time worrying about the earth’s supply of fossil fuels we completely miss the point. We will never run out of oil if only because the cost of slogging it out of the planet will become so exorbitant, we may never get a chance to pump that last, precious barrel. As the price of oil rises, and those costs are passed along the conga line of civilization, the real question becomes the effect those rising costs will have on everything. Everything, including creamed corn and snow globes.

The oil community has a name for this – peak oil. Peak oil is the place on the graphs where the easy, cheap to access oil runs out, and there is nothing but expensive stuff ahead. While all agree that the oil supply bell curve is real (the “Hubbard curve”), and that we are very near to conquering the air thin summit of said Hubbard curve, there is dispute about when the actual downward part of the trip will begin. Pessimists argue that we are there now, while sunny optimists say we won’t reach it for years…say about 2015. 2015 as in five years from now, when we will in all probability be bitching and screaming about spending eight or nine percent of our disposable income on food.

Let Them Eat Really Expensive Cake

The cost of food will rise with the cost of oil and the problem with that problem is that our technology won’t save us. Food in the ground can be made cheaper by simply making more of it. However, the issue is that all that food is way over there, and all of us rich westerners live way over here, tightly packed into teeming centers of urban sprawl. Between our food and us is a complex system of oil dependent logistics. Planes, trains and automobiles; combine harvesters, container ships, and mini vans.

Quick fact: it can take as much as 50 barrels of oil to produce a single calorie of food energy. Healthy people need about 2100 calories a day. If that seems ridiculous, consider that the average American calorie travels over 1500 miles, or that nearly 70% of seafood products are imported. Nearly 10% of beef stocks are also imported, and all those rump roasts require 35 parts of energy to produce a single unit of beef food energy. Grain is grown in one place, cows in another, fertilizer in another, and mountains of manure are collected and shipped to yet another. Think about all the things that have to happen, and all the places and people your Big Mac passes through in order for you to eat for under five bucks. Think about how many of these people, places, and things are powered by oil in some way. All of them – including you, the consumer. You don’t need to be an economist to get it; as the price of oil rises, the cost of food will keep in step. One only need think about it.

Oil prices must rise, and food prices must rise with them. What does that mean? It means that we will have less disposable income because we have to eat. We just have to, and so we will have to pay the price no matter what. We will have less money for other things. Less for cars. Less for plasma TV’s. Less for Target, American Eagle, and Home Depot, all of whom will have their own oil/price issues. Our growing food expense, which is not negotiable, will cannibalize our spending on everything else. If you are thinking at all about it at this point, you will quickly realize that you will be working more for food, and less for gewgaws. America is a gewgaw nation, and so you are also starting to realize that even more jobs will disappear, more companies fail, more banks will go broke. Banks that aren’t in the food business at least.

All that technology, all those machines and synthetics and drive and energy and Yankee know how that are directly responsible for food production are not owned by the humans that depend on them. Every link in the modern food chain is owned and operated by legal bundles of contracts and agreement called corporations. Absolutely every one of which is required by law to increase profits and return on investment. Not one is going to take a “haircut” on food. Not one cares who eats, and who does not. Instead, guaranteed an end user who must purchase by a separate law of nature, all will simply pass along the costs, no matter what they become. Falling purchases of calories will simply be made up by increased margins from smaller and smaller pools of rich folks who have the wherewithal to pay. History will regress and retrace its steps, back to times when great swaths of humanity spent the better portion of their lives simply trying to eat. Or more correctly, paying to eat.

For several generations now we have taken food for granted, its collapsing cost ensuring that it became a small but necessary evil every grocery day. Spending even 10% of our hard work on the necessity of food was too much for us. Our scorecards are measured in the amount of useless crap we can consume, free of the burden of eating. The sudden reversal of that historic trend, and its effects on every other facet of our consumer societies, is indeed the greatest challenge facing us today. Food is too cheap, a “correction” is coming, and there is not a damn thing anybody can do about it.

Think about it.

Aetius Romulous, Historian, Economist, Accountant, Writer, and blood sucking CEO. Born at the wrong end of the Baby Boom Generation – too late to enjoy the ride, too early to have missed it, and stuck in the middle with the mess. Aetius writes and blogs from his frozen perch atop the earth in Canada, spending the useful capital of a life not finished making sandwiches and fomenting revolution. t’s a living.

http://screambucket.com/aetiusromulous@rogers.com

Jonathan Safran Foer is a talented novelist with a gift for writing amusingly about serious issues. In Everything Is Illuminated (2003), he created a Ukrainian narrator, Alex, who describes in hilarious detail his work assisting an American Jew – named Jonathan Safran Foer – in finding the woman who hid his grandfather from the Nazis. So, when Foer publishes a non-fiction work on the subject that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has provocatively termed “the holocaust on your plate”, we can expect something different from the usual discussion about the ethics of eating animals.

The opening section of Foer’s new book meets those expectations. No character in Eating Animals (Hamish Hamilton, 342pp; $32.95) is as funny as Alex, but Foer’s flatulent, compulsively masturbating dog, George – with her bloodhound’s nose for a menstruating woman – briefly comes close. The most memorable human in the book is the author’s grandmother, known in the family as “The Greatest Chef Who Ever Lived”, and not meant ironically either (Americans don’t do irony), although she always cooked the same dish: chicken and carrots. The grandmother provides a link to Foer’s first novel, for she spent the war on the run from the Nazis, eating whatever she could find to survive – or, not quite whatever. Near the end of the war, when she was hungry and didn’t know if she could make it one more day, a Russian farmer recognised her condition and offered her a piece of meat. It was pork, not kosher. She didn’t eat it. Foer presses her: “But, not even to save your life?” She replies, “If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

Foer doesn’t share his grandmother’s religious beliefs, but he does take from her the idea that what we eat matters. At high school and university, he drifted in and out of vegetarianism, sometimes because he didn’t like the idea of hurting animals, sometimes just to be different, sometimes to meet women (which makes Foer one of the surprisingly small number of men who have noticed the obvious opportunities in the predominantly female animal-rights movement) and at one time because he was majoring in philosophy and wanted his life to conform to reason. Then he graduated, the demands of reason apparently became less pressing and he resumed eating meat. It turned out that the woman who was to become his wife had a similar history of ambivalence towards eating meat and, in the same week that they got engaged, they decided to become vegetarian. Still, this was not very consistent: “We were vegetarians who from time to time ate meat.” It was only when Foer was to become a father that he decided to resolve the question of diet one way or the other. A friend said to him, “Everything is possible again.” Foer felt he needed to decide “what story to tell” his child. To do that, he set out on the adventure that became this book.

After an opening that focuses on storytelling, the book settles down to a more familiar non-fiction style. Foer wrote to major producers of chicken, beef and pork, asking to speak to company representatives about animal welfare and environmental issues, and to visit some of their farms. He got no responses but he didn’t give up. In the middle of the night, in the company of “C”, an animal activist, he goes into a turkey shed to see what factory farming is like. He is distressed by the numbers of obviously sick and dead birds they find. We learn that the first time C went into a factory farm, she assumed it must be an exceptionally bad one, so she tried another, but found it just as bad. Still, she couldn’t believe that what she was seeing was representative of an entire industry so she went to yet another, and another. They were all the same. I know the feeling: I’ve been inside factory farms, too, and the appalling conditions in which billions of animals live are hard to believe until you’ve seen them. So I don’t think it is hyperbole when Foer describes KFC, the purchaser of nearly 1 billion chickens per year, as “arguably the company that has increased the sum total of suffering in the world more than any other in history”. He tells us that at a slaughterhouse supplying chickens to KFC – which had been recognised as a Supplier of the Year – workers were witnessed tearing the heads off live birds, spray-painting their faces and violently stomping on them, not once, but dozens of times. Similar acts of wanton cruelty have been documented repeatedly at many factory farms and slaughterhouses. The people who perform the unhealthy, unpleasant and poorly paid work involved in this stage of the supply chain are often frustrated and angry with their labour conditions and their lives. The hapless animals are the only beings below them on whom they can vent their rage.

Factory-farmed animals are routinely fed antibiotics to keep them alive and growing. According to industry figures, the quantity of antibiotics fed to farm animals in the US is six times that used by humans – and some think this is an underestimate. The indisputable result of this practice is the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The American Medical Association, the World Health Organization and other medical and scientific bodies have called for a ban on the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics on farm animals. Agribusiness has resisted, proving itself to have the most political muscle. A lessening of the effectiveness of many of our best antibiotics is one price we pay for factory farming but, according to scientists who study the factors that lead to the emergence of zoonotic diseases (diseases that spread \from animals to humans), that price could soon be multiplied a thousand-fold. The densely crowded sheds that house tens of thousands of animals provide ideal conditions for the development of new viruses. The H1N1 flu virus, it now appears, really did originate in pigs – specifically, in pig factories in North Carolina. From there it spread across the Americas, then around the world and has now killed more than 6000 people. Far more lethal viruses may emerge at any time from factory farms.

In describing the environmental problems of factory farming, Foer waxes eloquent about shit. Farmed animals in the US produce 130 times as much “waste” as the human population, and a single factory farm can produce more shit than an entire city.

Handling so much shit properly is costly, and the consequences of mishandling are many: when laid onto fields too thickly to be absorbed, it runs off into rivers, polluting, killing fish and making people sick.

When it comes to climate change, however, Foer actually underestimates the adverse environmental impact of meat production. He quotes a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report showing that the livestock sector is responsible for about 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. This is 40% more than the entire transport sector, including planes. Bad as this may seem, over the next 20 years, livestock will be responsible for a much larger contribution to global warming than that. The Food and Agriculture Organization calculation is based on an assessment of methane as 23 times as potent in warming the planet as carbon dioxide. That ratio applies to the global warming potential of methane over the next century. But methane breaks down more quickly than carbon dioxide, so if we take a shorter timeframe – like 20 years – methane is 72 times as potent as carbon dioxide. This shorter timeframe is the relevant one to use, because if we fail to slow global warming within the next 20 years, we are likely to pass a point of no return, beyond which we will have virtually no environmental control.

In a recent issue of World Watch, Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang estimate that livestock and their by-products are responsible for 51% of annual, worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Australia’s livestock emissions will do more to warm the planet over the next 20 years than all our coal-fired power stations. Foer concludes his discussion of livestock and climate change by saying “someone who regularly eats factory-farmed animal products cannot call himself an environmentalist without divorcing that word from its meaning.” But, as far as climate change is concerned, the emphasis on factory-farmed animal products is a mistake. While raising animals on pasture is much more animal-welfare friendly than confining them indoors, ruminants (cattle and sheep) produce more methane when they eat grass than when they are fed grain, because it takes more digesting to break down the cellulose in grass.

Foer does give a factory farmer the opportunity to defend what he does, but the defence essentially says that people want cheap meat and factory farming gives them what they want. That may be, but this argument ignores the costs that all of those involved, from producer to consumer, are imposing on others. The case against factory farming has been reiterated many times now, since Ruth Harrison’s 1964 Animal Machines. Yet, as long as this stinking, polluting, implacably cruel, dangerously unhealthy and utterly wasteful system of converting large quantities of grain and soy beans into small quantities of animal products continues to dominate meat and egg production, we can’t have too many books on the subject.

When Foer contacted organic farmers who raise their animals in accordance with higher animal welfare standards, he got a more positive response. He visits a pig farm and a cattle ranch, both places where the animals are able to go outdoors and behave in ways that satisfy their instincts. These producers meet standards set by the Animal Welfare Institute, which are among the strictest in the US. But Foer still finds some of the procedures permitted by these standards objectionable, such as castration without anaesthetic and hot-iron branding. And, of course, at the end of the road is always the slaughterhouse.

The only slaughterhouse Foer is able to visit is a small independent one that takes much more individual care of each animal than the larger commercial operations. Even so, Foer is troubled by the transformation of a living pig into a carcass. He can see that some people might find it acceptable to eat meat from farms that give animals decent lives but, in the end, it is not for him.

Foer doesn’t spare the fish-eaters either. He describes the crowded, stressful lives lived by farmed fish; the devastation done to the ocean and its creatures by fishing fleets that devastate fish stocks; and the waste of sea life caused by shrimp trawlers that throw back – dead – 80% to 90% of the sea animals they catch, because this ‘bycatch’ is of insufficient commercial value to bother keeping. Moreover, he reminds us, there is no humane slaughter of fish: “You never have to wonder if the fish on your plate had to suffer. It did.”

In the end, Foer’s reflections on George provide the book’s most powerful argument against eating animals. What justification do I have, he asks himself, for eating other animals, but not eating dogs? Yes, dogs are intelligent, feeling beings, but so are pigs, cows and chickens. Properly cooked, dog meat is as healthy and nutritious as any other meat. It is also said to be delicious. In fact, since many people now advocate eating locally produced food and stray dogs are killed in their thousands in most big cities every year, dogs are the ideal local meat. Foer helpfully provides a Filipino recipe for “Stewed Dog, Wedding Style” that begins, “First, kill a medium-sized dog, then burn off the fur over a hot fire.” His tongue-in-cheek suggestion helps us see what we are really doing when we eat pigs, cows and chickens.

Republished from The Monthly.

Patrick O. Brown, a Stanford University biochemist, has changed science twice by giving stuff away. In the early 1990s Brown invented the DNA microarray, a tool that measures how cells make use of their DNA; he then showed researchers how to make their own, transforming genetic research. In 2000 he was one of three scientists who launched a free, online scientific journal called the Public Library of Science (PLOS); it has already broken the stranglehold of $200-a-year scientific publications like Science and Nature.

Now he is tackling an even bigger foe. Over the next 18 months Brown, 55, will take a break from his normal scientific work (finding out how a small number of genes are translated into a much larger number of proteins) in order to change the way the world farms and eats. He wants to put an end to animal farming, or at least put a significant dent in our global hunger for cows, pigs and chickens.

Brown, who has been a vegetarian for more than 30 years and a vegan for 5, notes that while livestock accounts for only 9% of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, it accounts for 37% of human-caused methane (most of it emanating from the animals’ digestive systems) and 65% of human-caused nitrous oxide, according to the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Both are far better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, meaning that cows, chickens and their ilk have a larger greenhouse effect than all the cars, trucks and planes in the world.

The green cognoscenti are choosing animal husbandry as their new enemy. Jonathan Safran Foer, the bestselling novelist, has published articles declaring that he is raising his kids vegetarian because of the environmental consequences of meat farming and that if people are going to eat meat, they should consider eating dogs. Lord Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics, told the Independent that the West would have to become more vegetarian in order to combat global warming; without change in present trends, meat and milk output will double by 2050.

Brown brings scientific clout to the debate–he’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute–and a realization that the arguments for change need to be economic, not just ethical. Growing crops to feed animals requires a lot more land, energy and fertilizer than growing them to feed people, he says: 70% of the land that was once Amazon rain forest is dedicated to grazing. Even if scientists figure out how to make milk with stem cells, it’s unlikely they will be able to create milk with the same efficiency as they can corn or wheat.

“There’s absolutely no possibility that 50 years from now this system will be operating as it does now,” says Brown. “One approach is to just wait, and either we’ll deal with it or we’ll be toast. I want to approach this as a solvable problem.” Solution: “Eliminate animal farming on planet Earth.”

Diets are malleable. Thirty years ago nobody drank high fructose corn syrup. Now it’s a dominant part of the American diet. As Western diets move into China, people there are eating more beef. Brown argues that the key to removing meat from diets is to give foodmakers an incentive to make yummy vegetable-based fare. If vendors push the new foods, palates will follow.

Incentive? Brown thinks if he can convince food manufacturers that the costs of selling meat are too high, and rising, they’ll come around. Seemingly tiny changes in economics could make animal farming a lot less affordable. At the moment farmers around the world are arguing they should be immune from taxes and ceilings on greenhouse gases; if they are not exempt, the cost of meat will go up. Raising the price of water would have the same effect. It takes 1,000 liters of water to produce a liter of milk.

Brown plans to spend the first six months of his project hammering out economic models with colleagues, illustrating ways that animal farming is likely to become onerously expensive. Then he’ll take a year off to work with famous chefs and food researchers on tastier vegetarian dishes, and to develop a strategy to tackle the political, economic, legal, behavioral and food-security issues he’s sure to face.

If Brown can work it so that McDonald’s puts less meat in each Big Mac, that could count as a win. Until now little research has gone into making foods friendly to the environment.

“If you’re a big food producer now, this is absolutely inevitable,” he says. “You’d better start thinking ahead. You’d better seriously start investing and trying to find alternatives in order to stay alive.”

Republished from Forbes.com

Signatories of a statement issued by leading thinkers in development include five World Food Prize laureates, former heads of development agencies, former Ministers of Agriculture, and heads of the world’s leading alliance of agricultural research centers.

“No credible or effective agreement to address the challenges of climate change can ignore agriculture and the need for crop adaptation to ensure the world’s future food supplies,” according to the statement.

Crop adaptation refers to agriculture’s ability to withstand climate change. Farmers will encounter problems they have never before experienced: much greater weather variability, higher average temperatures, increased numbers of extremely hot days, shorter growing seasons, higher solar radiation, much greater moisture stress, added salinity from salt water incursion and irrigation systems, and new combinations of pests and diseases.

“The negative impact of climate change on agriculture, and thus on the production of food, could well place at risk all other efforts to mitigate and adapt to new climate conditions,” the signatories said. “The magnitude of change now being forecast, even in relatively optimistic scenarios, is historically unprecedented, and our agricultural systems are still largely unprepared to face it.”

The group called on negotiators to recognize the importance of crop diversity conservation and use as an essential element in the commitments they will make for climate change adaptation.

“It may be becoming more widely understood that agriculture will have to adapt to climate change, but just because it has to adapt, it does not mean it will,” said Gebisa Ejeta, winner of this year’s World Food Prize and Distinguished Professor of Agronomy at Purdue University. “Adapting crops to unprecedented conditions cannot be taken for granted. It requires rigorous research and complex, painstaking work and a serious commitment of public funding. This needs to be made an urgent priority for the sake of the billions whose future depends upon it.”

Studies by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) predict that climate change will have dramatic impacts on food production. Some estimate that crop yields in some regions could drop by as much as one third in just two decades without immediate investments in developing new crop varieties.

“Getting agriculture ready for such dramatically new growing environments is not a trivial matter,” warned the signatories. “For agriculture to adapt, crops must adapt, but there is no ‘climate change gene,’ no single characteristic, that can ensure that they will retain, much less increase, their productivity in new climates. Concerted adaptation efforts will be required crop-by-crop, country-by-country, and internationally.”

The basis for crop adaptation is the genetic diversity found in more than 1500 seedbanks around the world. This irreplaceable resource is under threat due to poor funding and institutional politics around access to seed collections. The issue of crop diversity received worldwide attention in 2008 after the opening of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a fail-safe, safety back-up facility in the Arctic.

“Current institutional and financial arrangements, however, are inadequate to guarantee conservation of this priceless resource,” according to the statement. “Indeed, diversity is being lost—diversity that almost certainly holds the key to future crop adaptation. Moreover, the time required to integrate new traits into crop varieties can be a decade or more. We cannot wait for disaster before initiating action.”

The group is calling for small investments now that could easily ensure the availability of crop diversity. “Billions of dollars were promised this year for food security. Billions will likely be promised for climate change at Copenhagen. We ask the negotiators at Copenhagen to recognise how interwoven these issues are. Without effective investment in agricultural adaptation right now, future food security will quickly fall victim to climate change,” said Cary Fowler, Executive Director, Global Crop Diversity Trust.

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To view the full statement and list of signatories, please visit: www.croptrust.org/climateadaptation.

The mission of the Global Crop Diversity Trust is to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide. Although crop diversity is fundamental to fighting hunger and to the very future of agriculture, funding is unreliable and diversity is being lost. The Trust is the only organization working worldwide to solve this problem. For further information, please visit: www.croptrust.org.

At the Net Impact conference last week, a waiter stopped by before lunch to ask if anyone at our table wanted a vegetarian meal instead of chicken. Just one or two people did.

This, as it happens, is typical. When a meat-based entrée is being served, and people are offered a vegetarian alternative, about 5 to 10 percent will request it.

But what if the choices were reversed? Organizers of the 2009 Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference, which began Monday in Washington, tried an experiment: They made a vegetarian lunch the default option, and gave meat eaters the choice of opting out.

Some 80 percent went for the veggies, not because there were lots of vegetarians in the crowd of about 700 people but because the choice was framed differently. We know that because, at a prior BECC conference, when meat was the default option, attendees chose the meat by an 83 percent to 17 percent margin.

More than lunch is at stake here. “Omnivores contribute seven times the greenhouse gas emissions, when compared to vegans,” says Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, the conference chair, who works for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy.

Might there be broad-based ways to promote a vegetarian diet, while giving people the freedom to choose what they want? How can smart-grid technology be designed to encourage people to conserve energy? Which green marketing messages work, and which don’t? Can the insights of behavioral economics help fight climate change?

Those are the questions that engaged the policy makers, academics, and business executives at this BECC event, which differs from most conversations about climate change. Typically, when politicians, environmentalists or corporate executives discuss the issue, they focus on technology (solar, wind, electric cars) or regulation (cap-and-trade, the UN climate talks). The BECC crowd focuses on another powerful lever, albeit one that doesn’t get as much attention: human behavior, and in particular the irrational, emotional, self-defeating, short-term, inconsiderate and plain old silly human behavior that most of us engage in every day.

Like keeping incandescent light bulbs burning, when we know CFLs are cheaper (and most work very well). Or looking at  the price tag of an appliance, rather than its lifecycle costs. Or buying things — like over-sized homes — that we can’t afford.

As Erhardt-Martinez notes, personal choices have a huge collective impact on the climate crisis. Home energy use and the use of personal vehicles — that is, the way we live — accounts for about 38 percent of U.S. energy consumption. Behavior change could generate energy savings of 25 to 30 percent over the next five to eight years, she said.

There’s no need to wait for technology breakthroughs. “We already have much better choices,” she said. “People aren’t making them.”

Dan Ariely, professor of behaviorial economics at Duke and director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight (!) — gave the opening keynote at BECC, and he left no doubt that most of us are not nearly as rational in our decision-making as we would like to think we are. (I blogged in June about Ariely’s entertaining book, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. If this topic interests you, I can also enthusiastically recommend Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard  Thaler and Cass Sunstein. Sunstein has since joined the Obama administration as a shaper of regulations.) Ariely, Sunstein, Thaler and others have all brought the insights of psychology to the study of economics, helping explain how we humans actually behave. Hint: we’re not always the dispassionate, rational, self-interested, utility-maximizers of Econ 101.

“We wake up every morning with an incredible sense of agency,” Ariely says, meaning that we see ourselves as masters of our own fate. But evidence suggests that emotion, not to mention the people who design user interfaces — from the lunch menu to the choices presented by our 401-K plans — play a large role in our lives.

The climate crisis is a particular challenge for behavioral economists. It’s a long-term problem, and we tend to focus on the immediate. (That’s why Americans can’t resist dessert, and had a negative savings rate for many years.) Greenhouse gases are invisible, unlike other pollutants. Measuring the impact of individual actions is all but impossible. Global warming will harm other people, mostly poor people in the global south, before it damages the U.S.

“If you said, I want to create a problem that people don’t care about, you would probably come up with global warming,” Ariely says.

Still, there’s creative work being done to change behavior. Check out the Energy Smackdown, a community-based competition to excite people about saving energy. Some utility companies put smiley faces on bills of efficient consumers, promoting friendly neighborhood rivalries. Speakers at the conference addressed such topics as “Consumption-Based Carbon Footprint Accounting Tools,” “Pay as You Drive Insurance” and “Framing Matters: The Impact of Policy Context on Willingness to Change Energy Consumption Behavior.”

Call me a geek, but I’d like to know more. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend most of the conference. So if you presented, or want to offer insights on how behaviorial economics can mitigate climate change, feel free to comment below, send me an email or propose a guest blogpost on the topic.

GreenBiz.com Senior Writer Marc Gunther maintains a blog at MarcGunther.com

Taxes can do a lot of good. They pay for schools, parks, police and the military. But that’s not all they can do. High taxes on cigarettes have saved many lives – not only the lives of people who are discouraged from smoking as much as they would if cigarettes were cheap, but also the lives of others who spend less time passively inhaling smoke.

No reasonable person would want to abolish the tax on cigarettes. Unless, perhaps, they were proposing banning cigarettes altogether – as New York City is doing with transfats served by restaurants.

A tax on sodas containing sugar has also been under consideration, by Governor Paterson among others. In view of our obesity epidemic, and the extra burden it places on our health care system – not to mention the problems it causes on a crowded New York subway when your neighbor can’t fit into a single seat – it’s a reasonable proposal.

But in all these moves against tobacco, transfats and sodas, we’ve been ignoring the cow in the room.

That’s right, cow. We don’t eat elephants. But the reasons for a tax on beef and other meats are stronger than those for discouraging consumption of cigarettes, transfats or sugary drinks. 

First, eating red meat is likely to kill you. Large studies have shown that the daily consumption of red meat increases the risk that you will die prematurely of heart disease or bowel cancer. This is now beyond serious scientific dispute. When the beef industry tries to deny the evidence, it is just repeating what the tobacco industry did 30 years ago.

Second, we have laws that ban cruelty to animals. Unfortunately in the states in which most animals are raised for meat, the agribusiness lobby is so powerful that it has carved out exemptions to the usual laws against cruelty.

The exemptions allow producers to crowd chickens, pigs and calves in stinking sheds, never letting them go outside in fresh air and sunlight, often confining them so closely that they can’t even stretch their limbs or turn around. Debeaking – cutting through the sensitive beak of a young chick with a hot blade – is standard in the egg industry.

Undercover investigations repeatedly turn up new scandals – downed cows being dragged to slaughter, workers hitting pigs with steel pipes or playing football with live chickens. We may not be able to improve the laws in those farming states, but taxes on meat would discourage people from supporting these cruel practices.

Third, industrial meat production wastes food – we feed the animals vast quantities of grains and soybeans, and they burn up most of the nutritional value of these crops just living and breathing and developing bones and other unpalatable body parts. We get back only a fraction of the food value we put into them.

That puts unnecessary pressure on our croplands and causes food prices to rise all over the world. Converting corn to biofuel has been criticized because it raises food prices for the world’s poor, but seven times as much grain gets fed to animals as is made into biofuel.

Fourth, agricultural runoff — much of it from livestock production, or from the fertilizers used to grow the grain fed to the livestock — is the biggest single source of pollution of the nation’s rivers and streams, according to the EPA. A meat tax would be an important step towards cleaner rivers. By reducing the amount of nitrogen that runs off fields in the Midwest into the Mississippi, it would also stop the vast ?dead zone? that forms in the Gulf of Mexico each year.

The clincher is that taxing meat would be a highly effective way of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and avoiding catastrophic climate change.

Here’s just how bad eating meat is for global warming.

Many people think that buying locally produced food is a good way to reduce their carbon footprint. But the average American would do more for the planet by going vegetarian just one day per week than by switching to a totally local diet.

In 2006 the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization surprised many people when it produced a report showing that livestock are responsible for more emissions than all forms of transportation combined. It’s now clear that that report seriously underestimated the contribution that livestock — especially ruminant animals like cattle and sheep – are making to global warming.

As a more recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has shown, over the critical next 20 years, the methane these animals produce will be almost three times as potent in warming the planet as the FAO report assumed.

Meat-eaters impose costs on others, and the more meat they eat, the greater the costs.

They push up our health insurance premiums, increase Medicare and Medicaid costs for taxpayers, pollute our rivers, threaten the survival of fishing communities in the Gulf of Mexico, push up food prices for the world’s poor, and accelerate climate change.

Red meat is the worst for global warming, but a tax on red meat alone would merely push meat-eaters to chicken, and British animal welfare expert Professor John Webster has described the intensive chicken industry as “the single most severe, systematic example of man’s inhumanity to another sentient animal.?

So let’s start with a 50% tax on the retail value of all meat, and see what difference that makes to present consumption habits. If it is not enough to bring about the change we need, then, like cigarette taxes, it will need to go higher.

Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University, the author of “Animal Liberation” and the author, with Jim Masion, of “The Ethics of What We Eat.”

I gave a talk in South Texas recently on the environmental virtues of a vegetarian diet. As you might imagine, the reception was chilly. In fact, the only applause came during the Q&A period when a member of the audience said that my lecture made him want to go out and eat even more meat. “Plus,” he added, “what I eat is my business — it’s personal.”

I’ve been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I’d never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?

We know more than we’ve ever known about the innards of the global food system. We understand that food can both nourish and kill. We know that its production can both destroy and enhance our environment. We know that farming touches every aspect of our lives — the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil we need.

So it’s hard to avoid concluding that eating cannot be personal. What I eat influences you. What you eat influences me. Our diets are deeply, intimately and necessarily political.

This realization changes everything for those who avoid meat. As a vegetarian I’ve always felt the perverse need to apologize for my dietary choice. It inconveniences people. It smacks of self-righteousness. It makes us pariahs at dinner parties. But the more I learn about the negative impact of meat production, the more I feel that it’s the consumers of meat who should be making apologies.

Here’s why: The livestock industry as a result of its reliance on corn and soy-based feed accounts for over half the synthetic fertilizer used in the United States, contributing more than any other sector to marine dead zones. It consumes 70 percent of the water in the American West — water so heavily subsidized that if irrigation supports were removed, ground beef would cost $35 a pound. Livestock accounts for at least 21 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions globally — more than all forms of transportation combined. Domestic animals — most of them healthy — consume about 70 percent of all the antibiotics produced. Undigested antibiotics leach from manure into freshwater systems and impair the sex organs of fish.

It takes a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of conventional beef. If all the grain fed to animals went to people, you could feed China and India. That’s just a start.

Meat that’s raised according to “alternative” standards (about 1 percent of meat in the United States) might be a better choice but not nearly as much so as its privileged consumers would have us believe. “Free-range chickens” theoretically have access to the outdoors. But many “free-range” chickens never see the light of day because they cannot make it through the crowded shed to the aperture leading to a patch of cement.

“Grass-fed” beef produces four times the methane — a greenhouse gas 21 times as powerful as carbon dioxide — of grain-fed cows, and many grass-fed cows are raised on heavily fertilized and irrigated grass. Pastured pigs are still typically mutilated, fed commercial feed and prevented from rooting — their most basic instinct besides sex.

Issues of animal welfare are equally implicated in all forms of meat production. Domestic animals suffer immensely, feel pain and may even be cognizant of the fate that awaits them. In an egg factory, male chicks (economically worthless) are summarily run through a grinder. Pigs are castrated without anesthesia, crated, tail-docked and nose-ringed. Milk cows are repeatedly impregnated through artificial insemination, confined to milking stalls and milked to yield 15 times the amount of milk they would produce under normal conditions. When calves are removed from their mothers at birth, the mothers mourn their loss with heart-rending moans.

Then comes the slaughterhouse, an operation that’s left with millions of pounds of carcasses — deadstock — that are incinerated or dumped in landfills. (Rendering plants have taken a nose dive since mad cow disease.)

Now, if someone told you that a particular corporation was trashing the air, water and soil; causing more global warming than the transportation industry; consuming massive amounts of fossil fuel; unleashing the cruelest sort of suffering on innocent and sentient beings; failing to recycle its waste; and clogging our arteries in the process, how would you react? Would you say, “Hey, that’s personal?” Probably not. It’s more likely that you’d frame the matter as a dire political issue in need of a dire political response.

Vegetarianism is not only the most powerful political response we can make to industrialized food. It’s a necessary prerequisite to reforming it. To quit eating meat is to dismantle the global food apparatus at its foundation.

Agribusiness has been vilified of late by muckraking journalists, activist filmmakers and sustainable-food advocates. We know that something has to be done to save our food from corporate interests. But I wonder — are we ready to do what must be done? Sure, we’ve been inundated with ideas: eat local, vote with your fork, buy organic, support fair trade, etc. But these proposals all lack something that every successful environmental movement has always placed at its core: genuine sacrifice.

Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing, the current proposals will be nothing more than gestures that turn the fork into an empty symbol rather than a real tool for environmental change.

James E. McWilliams, an associate professor of history at Texas State University at San Marcos and a recent fellow in the agrarian studies program at Yale University, is most recently the author of “Just Food.”

Republished from The Washington Post