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.

October 27, 2010

Dan Brook, Ph.D. & Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.

Global warming goes way beyond “an inconvenient truth”. We are overheating our planet to alarming levels with catastrophic consequences. Thirteen of the past fourteen years have been the hottest on record and 2010 is on a sizzling pace to break another record. Picture an overheated car (and what we drive), an overcooked dinner (and what we eat), and someone sick with a fever (and how we act). Now imagine that on a planetary scale.

Global warming is perhaps the biggest social, political economic, and environmental problem facing our planet and its inhabitants. Global warming refers to the increasing average temperature of the Earth’s air and water. People are becoming increasingly aware of and concerned about global warming and its serious consequences — despite corporate misinformation and right-wing obfuscation — due to frequent reports regarding record heat waves, blazing wildfires, an increase in the number and severity of storms, the length of droughts, the melting of glaciers, permafrost, and polar ice caps, rising sea levels, flooding, changes in wind direction, acidification of the oceans, endangered species, spreading diseases, shrinking lakes, submerged islands, and environmental refugees. While not all climatic changes can be directly attributed to global warming, most are consistent with the scientific projections for the warmer globe we are creating. Earthlings may be standing at a global precipice.

In recent years, we have been experiencing waves washing across and submerging islands, massive ice shelves breaking off in the Arctic, and the threatening of endangered species, most notably polar bears. Global warming is also endangering penguins, seals, walruses, salmon, elephants, frogs, butterflies, birds, and many other animals, threatening up to one-third of all species. In contrast, increases in carbon dioxide and heat levels will lead to an increase in the number and range of mosquitos, further spreading discomfort and disease.

In 2010 alone, we are witnessing many countries experience unprecedented heat waves, raging wildfires in Russia, profound drought in Australia and Israel, massive flooding in China and Pakistan, along with the continuing disappearance of glaciers — about 80% of the world’s glaciers are shrinking — and the snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro, and other ominous signs of disaster. In August 2010, an “ice island” more than twice the size of San Francisco calved from the Petermann Glacier in Greenland into the sea (earlier, the Ayles Ice Shelf calved entirely in August 2005 and the Markham Ice Shelf broke up in 2008, just to mention a couple of other such alarming events). “Such a path is not merely unsustainable”, according to John P. Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “it is a prescription for disaster.”

Humanity is threatened as perhaps never before and major changes have to occur to put our imperiled planet on a sustainable path — soon. Even though some individuals still deny the reality of global warming, there is a complete scientific and environmental consensus — among all major scientific and environmental organizations, journals, and magazines, and all peer-reviewed scholarly articles — that global warming is real, serious, worsening, and caused or exacerbated by human activity. The evidence is overwhelming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Fourth Assessment Report in February 2007, which was researched and written by about 2,500 climate scientists over a six-year period and then vetted by over 130 governments. The Report carefully delineates clear trends and potentially catastrophic consequences associated with climate change, warning of the possibility of irreversible change, unless we make concerted efforts to counter global warming. The IPCC makes it plain that the current and projected climate change is not simply “natural variation”, solar activity, or other cyclical phenomena, but “very likely” (meaning at least 90% certainty) the result of human activity. The case is closed on the problem of global warming, with only the mitigations and solutions to still debate.

It therefore should not be surprising that the U.S. Pentagon states that global warming is a larger threat than even terrorism. “Picture Japan, suffering from flooding along its coastal cities and contamination of its fresh water supply, eyeing Russia’s Sakhalin Island oil and gas reserves as an energy source”, suggests a Pentagon memo on global warming. “Envision Pakistan, India and China — all armed with nuclear weapons — skirmishing at their borders over refugees, access to shared river and arable land.” The Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, has said that climate change needs to be taken as seriously as war and, further, that “changes in our environment and the resulting upheavals from droughts to inundated coastal areas to loss of arable land are likely to become a major driver of war and conflict”. Fighting global warming may be one way to prevent future wars, simultaneously increasing energy security and physical security.

Progressives have additional causes for concern. The people disproportionately affected by global warming are the poor and socially disadvantaged, since they are in the weakest position to guard against environmental damages and will likely suffer the most harm. In the underdeveloped world, and perhaps especially in China, India, and Southeast Asia, as well as much of Africa and the Middle East, global warming will negatively affect urban drinking water systems, agricultural output, and commercial and other transport on rivers.

Further, increased suffering and increasing numbers of environmental refugees, along with greater anxiety over access to food, water, land, and housing — the material essentials of life — often lead to unstable conditions that give rise to anger, ethnic violence, terrorism, fascism, and war.  “It’s the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit,” states IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri. Those who needlessly degrade and destroy the environment to satisfy their own selfish pleasures are like the pre-revolutionary Queen Marie-Antoinette, declaring “Let them eat carbon dioxide”!

Yes, we need our governments, corporations, schools, religious institutions, and other organizations to get actively involved in fighting global warming. Yes, we need to stop deforestation and increase reforestation. Yes, we need more resource conservation and more energy-efficient buildings, houses, cars, appliances, electronics, batteries, and light bulbs. And, yes, our society needs to switch away from fossil fuels and toward renewable ones, such as solar, wind, tidal, wave, biomass, hydrogen, geothermal, and others. But while we are struggling for these important and positive large-scale social changes, we also need to say “yes!” to personal changes.

In fact, the latest IPCC report states that “Changes in lifestyles and consumption patterns that emphasize resource conservation can contribute to developing a low-carbon economy that is both equitable and sustainable.” A major study showing how personal “changes in lifestyles and consumption” can affect global warming is in the 2006 UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, entitled “Livestock’s Long Shadow”. It states that animal-based agriculture causes approximately 18% of greenhouse gas emissions (in CO2 equivalents), which lead to global warming, an amount greater than that caused by all forms of transportation on the planet combined (about 13.5%). A 2009 report for the respected WorldWatch Institute entitled “Livestock and Climate Change” determined that the FAO underestimated livestock’s contribution by excluding important phenomena and, instead, calculates livestock’s contribution at 51% — a absolute majority of anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

Cars are still problematic, of course, but cows and other animals raised for human consumption are contributing more to global warming, thereby causing more damage to our existence and, indeed, to life on Earth. Therefore, what we eat is actually more important than what we drive and the most important personal change we could make for the environment, as well as for our own health and for the lives of animals, is a switch to vegetarianism.

The world is feeding nearly 60 billion farmed animals, while millions of people, disproportionately children, starve to death each year. Almost 40% of the grain produced worldwide — and about 70% in the U.S. — is inefficiently and immorally diverted to feed farmed animals, simply to satisfy the lust for money and meat. The FAO study reports that the livestock industry, in total, uses and abuses roughly 30% of the planet’s surface, thereby “entering into direct competition [with other activities] for scarce land, water and other natural resources.” Further, overuse of the land by livestock, leading to overuse of fuel and water, also degrades the land and pollutes the water around it, contributing to additional environmental and health problems. While factory farms may be the worst offenders, similar dynamics occur with free-range livestock as well. In fact, free range livestock actually occupy and potentially pollute a greater amount of land.

An animal-based diet also uses energy very inefficiently. Grains and beans require only 2 – 5% as much fossil fuel as beef.  Reducing energy consumption is not only a better choice in terms of fighting climate change, it is also a better choice in terms of being less dependent on foreign oil and the vagaries of both markets and dictators.

Additionally, the editors of World Watch (July/August 2004) concluded that “The human appetite for animal flesh is a driving force behind virtually every major category of environmental damage now threatening the human future — deforestation, erosion, fresh water scarcity, air and water pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, social injustice, the destabilization of communities, and the spread of disease.” Lee Hall, the legal director for Friends of Animals, is more succinct: “Behind virtually every great environmental complaint there’s milk and meat.”

While growing concern about global warming is welcome, the many connections between the increasingly globalized western-style diet and global warming have generally been overlooked , marginalized, or outright denied. The production of meat contributes significantly to the emission of the three major gases associated with global warming: carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), as well as other eco-destructive gases such as ammonia (NH3), which contributes to acid rain, and hydrogen sulfide (H2S), which has been implicated in mass extinctions.

Indeed, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, Unit on Climate Change, “There is a strong link between human diet and methane emissions from livestock.” The 2004 World Watch publication State of the World is more specific regarding the link between animals raised for meat and global warming: “Belching, flatulent livestock emit 16% of the world’s annual production of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas.” Likewise with the July 2005 issue of Physics World: “The animals we eat emit 21% of all the carbon dioxide that can be attributed to human activity.” We now know that these statistics are actually underestimates. With the accumulation of scientific studies, the climate picture is getting increasingly — and frighteningly — clearer.

Eating meat and other animal products directly contributes to this environmentally-irresponsible industry and its devastating impact on the environment, including the dire threat of global warming. People who still deny the critical link between meat and global warming are not fundamentally different than those who still deny the critical link between fossil fuels and global warming. Either way, the climate change deniers are fooling while Earth burns.

While carbon dioxide is the most plentiful greenhouse gas (currently about 35% higher than pre-industrial atmospheric levels), methane and nitrous oxide are much more powerful than carbon dioxide in terms of global warming potential. Methane is at least 23 times, and possibly as much as 72 times, more powerful (and about 150% higher than pre-industrial atmospheric levels) and nitrous oxide is a whopping 296 times more potent (and about 20% higher than pre-industrial atmospheric levels). With the livestock industry emitting such a huge amount of methane and given that methane degrades relatively quickly in the atmosphere (in approximately 12 years as compared to hundreds or even thousands of years for carbon dioxide), a sharp decrease in animal consumption, and therefore subsequent livestock (re)production, would provide the necessary near-term alleviation from global warming potentially “spinning out of control”.

Changing from the Standard American Diet (SAD) to a vegetarian or, better yet, vegan diet, according to geophysicists Gidon Eshel and Pamela Martin at the University of Chicago, does more to fight global warming than switching from a gas-guzzling Hummer to a Camry or from a Camry to a Prius. It has been said that “eating meat is like driving a huge SUV… [and] a vegetarian diet is like driving a [hybrid]”, while local, organic, vegan eating (LOVE) [www.truth-out.org/love-environment59878] is like riding a bicycle.

Shifting away from SUVs, SUV lifestyles, and SUV-style diets, to energy-efficient, life-affirming empowering alternatives, is essential to fighting global warming. Planetary sustainability and the well-being of humanity are greatly dependent on a shift toward plant-based diets. One easy and effective way to fight global warming every day is with our forks, knives, spoons, and chopsticks! If we don’t, the “procrastination penalty” will be painful.

It is increasingly clear that eliminating, or at least sharply reducing, the production and consumption of meat and other animal products is imperative to help reduce global warming and other grave environmental threats, in addition to greatly benefitting one’s physical and spiritual health and the lives of animals. For some people, this means becoming vegetarian or vegan; some vegetarians are leaning towards or becoming vegans; many omnivores are engaging in Meatless Mondays or otherwise increasing their number of meatless meals; others are becoming “weekday vegetarians”, “vegan before dinnertime”, or other types of flexitarians. Which path are you on?

Are you taking global warming personally? You should. Mark Twain once quipped that “Everybody talks about the weather, but no one ever does anything about it.” Now you can!

Richard H. Schwartz, Ph.D., is the author of Judaism and Vegetarianism, Judaism and Global Survival, and over 150 articles and interviews located at www.JewishVeg.com/schwartz. He is President of Jewish Vegetarians of North America (JVNA) at www.JewishVeg.com, Director of the Veg Climate Alliance at www.vegclimatealliance.org, Coordinator of the Society of Ethical and Religious Vegetarians (SERV) at www.serv-online.org, and can be contacted via President@jewishveg.com.

This article was reposted from World.edu.

09 October, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Food Not Bombs (FNB) is “one of the fastest growing revolutionary movements and is gaining momentum throughout the world.” Access its story on:

http://www.foodnotbombs.net

Through hundreds of autonomous chapters globally, it shares free vegetarian food to relieve hunger besides protesting against war, poverty, and social injustice. FNB isn’t a charity. Through grassroots activism, it advocates peace and liberation of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. In addition, for 30 years, it’s worked to end hunger and backs efforts against globalization, free movement restrictions, exploitation, and environmental destruction.

Co-founded in 1980 by Keith McHenry and other anti-nuclear activists in Cambridge MA, its autonomous, all volunteer groups advocate nonviolent social change. Among other activities, they recover edible, safe to eat food that would otherwise be discarded, using it to make “fresh hot vegan and vegetarian meals that are served in outside public spaces to anyone without restriction.” They also serve it at protests, other events and in disaster areas, but not free from disruptive government harassment.

For example, San Francisco members have been arrested over 1,000 times for their activism against homelessness and other social injustices, intolerable in a major city in the world’s richest country.

In the 1990s, Amnesty International took note. Its October 28, 1994 letter to San Francisco authorities requested information about arrested activists, voicing concern over the harassment and arrests of Keith McHenry, Robert Kahn, and 20 others for distributing free food and disseminating information on housing, homelessness, peace, social justice, military spending, and related issues.

AI cited a similar six-year pattern, including against McHenry. Arrested over 90 times on baseless charges, most often they were dropped, showing a clear intent to harass and disrupt legitimate social justice activities. He and many others been repeatedly targeted. His phone was tapped, and several times he was beaten and reportedly pushed down a City Hall flight of stairs while handcuffed behind his back in March 1991 – a clear case of police brutality.

Others arrested were also mistreated for engaging in lawful nonviolent activities, ones constitutionally protected. Yet, they’ve been charged with criminal acts for their legitimate activities and beliefs. AI stresses that “The right to peaceful expression, assembly and dissemination of information is recognized under the US Constitution. These are also fundamental freedoms enshrined in international human rights standards.”

If lawless police actions are proved, “the City of San Francisco would be in breach of international law and Amnesty International would adopt those imprisoned as “Prisoners of Conscience” and would work for their unconditional release.” McHenry and other FNB volunteers, in fact, hold that distinction, a significant honor reserved for the most worthy and unjustly oppressed.

Many AI chapters host FNB presentations at various schools. In addition, other organizations offer praise and support, including ACLU Legal Director Ann Beeson, saying:

“When the FBI and local law enforcement target groups like Food Not Bombs under the guise of fighting terrorism, many Americans who oppose government policies will be discouraged from speaking out and exercising their rights.”

On June 4, 2010, New York Times writer Jake Halpern wrote a lengthy article titled, “The Freegan Establishment,” saying:

On Buffalo’s West Side, a young man named Kit says “our society wastes far too much.” He’s a “freegan,” an ideology “drawing on elements of communism, radical environmentalism, a zealous do-it-yourself work ethic and an old-fashioned frugality of the sock-darning sort.”

They’re not revolutionaries. They instead challenge traditional lifestyles with their own, dedicated to “salvaging what others waste and – when possible – living without the use of currency.” Even the house he moved into was abandoned, one of many in Buffalo, so with no “for sale” sign, he and others moved in as squatters.

McHenry is another freegan, a nonconformist descendant of one of the Constitution’s signers and one of the Food for Bombs founders, the organization becoming “the most active force for spreading the ethos of freeganism” by distributing free food to the hungry and others needing it.

In his book, “Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal,” Tristram Stuart said American households, retailers and vendors waste about 40 million tons of edible quality safe to eat food annually. FNB distributes it, activities deserving honor, not harassment, accusations of terrorism, arrest, and for some, imprisonment.

Nonetheless, it members are targeted like criminals. For years, they’ve been investigated by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Pentagon, other US intelligence agencies, and local authorities. As a result, their volunteers have been arrested and charged with terrorism for distributing free food and advocating peace and social justice, hardly subversive activities. Not, in today’s America, however, nor as its been for decades, preaching democratic freedoms, while practicing repression to protect privilege over populism and equal justice.

Examples of FNB Activities

Besides distributing free vegetarian food in 1,000 cities, FNB also provides it for disaster survivors. For three days after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, it was the only local organization doing it. Also, the only one providing hot meals to 9/11 first responders, and there’s more. In 1999, it shared meals with Seattle globalization justice protesters, and through many chapters organizes Really Really Free Markets, planting Food Not Lawns community gardens, Homes Not Jails, and much more.

Its volunteers also provided meals to Republican and Democrat National Convention protesters, families of striking workers, and (2004) Asian tsunami and (2005) Hurricane Katrina survivors.

“Our volunteers organized a national collection program and delivered bus and truckloads of food and supplies to the Gulf region. We were one of the only organizations sharing daily meals in New Orleans after Katrina.” It also fed protesters at Camp Casey outside George Bush’s Texas ranch. Now it’s helping economic crisis victims organize community gardens, as well as housing for the homeless, besides establishing new chapters in other areas, and organizing “actions encouraging alternatives to the failure of capitalism.”

Moreover, FNB volunteers work cooperatively with groups like Earth First!, The Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, Anarchist Black Cross, the IWW, Homes Not Jails, Anti-Racist Action, In Defense of Animals, the Free Radio Movement, and other organizations “on the cutting edge of positive social change and resistance to the new global austerity program.”

Economist Michael Hudson calls it “economic suicide,” threatening to turn industrialized societies into dystopian backwaters, its citizens reduced to serfdom in “an era of totalitarian neoliberal rule.” It’s engulfing Europe and America under Obama’s anti-populist agenda, targeting populism, labor and civil rights for destruction.

Three Decades of Dedication and Achievement

A 30th year commemoration is planned, including local initiatives and a collective called “A Food Not Bombs Menu” to help others find and establish local chapters globally. Various materials are available to help, including books, t-shirts, and other ways to promote FNB principles. Through nonviolent direct action, it hopes to create “a world free from domination, coercion and violence,” in which “Food is a right, not a privilege,” but dark US forces threaten them.

FBI and Local Police Gestapo Tactics Against Nonviolent Activism

For many decades, federal and local authorities targeted groups like FNB. For example, on May 18, 2005, the ACLU charged the FBI and local police with investigating and intimidating “law-abiding human rights and advocacy groups, according to documents obtained through a series of Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests.”

Groups targeted, among many others, include Greenpeace, United for Peace and Justice, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and FNB.

“The FBI is taking tax dollars and resources established to fight terrorism and instead spying on (and harassing) innocent Americans who have done nothing more than speak out or practice their faith. By recruiting the local police (to help), they are also sowing dissent and suspicion in communities around the country” illegally.

Like others, FNB volunteers have been bogusly called terrorists. Some have been arrested, tried, convicted and imprisoned. Internal government documents suggest high-level concern that they’re turning Americans away from militarism, instead advocating social justice, including quality education, universal health care, and good living wage/essential benefits jobs – the direct opposite of current US policy under either dominant party, each like the other, only pretending to be different.

As a result, FBI informants infiltrate local groups, in some cases getting volunteers unwittingly to travel with them on government-paid missions “to burn down research laboratories, lumber mills, model homes or auto dealerships,” then charge them with domestic terrorism, the new Patriot Act established provision.

At times, in fact, “Federal prosecutors were able to get convictions because (FNB) activists were intimidated from expressing their” opposition to violence when infiltrators tried to incite them to commit it.

Yet as early as November 1988, federal authorities accused FNB of being “one of America’s most hardcore terrorist groups.” A San Francisco-based National Guard member said he’d just taken three days of classes on domestic terrorism, using FNB as a case study. In other ways, authorities tried to “paint (FNB) as a violent terrorist group.”

Even Interpol got involved, organizing smear campaigns and “try(ing) to bankrupt (FNB) by charging hundreds of dollars in calls” to one or more of its European offices. In addition, the FBI’s Operation Backfire against environmental and animal rights activists infiltrated FNB chapters, framing several volunteers for violent crimes, ones infiltrators “carried out on behalf of the government” to entrap nonviolent activists.

Numerous innocent victims were targeted. Fear and distrust spread through local communities, FNB members active in animal rights activities harassed, arrested and convicted under the Animal Industry Terrorism Act. Innocent people were imprisoned by being implicated in FBI-paid provocateur schemes to entrap them.

As a result, FNB urges volunteers to stay focused, wary that infiltrators spread fear and disrupt constitutionally protected activities. Especially post-9/11, advocating peace and social justice are now crimes, engaged activists potentially facing charges of domestic terrorism and long imprisonment for supporting right over wrong. The reality of today’s America is much different than its pretence, making it unsafe for anti-war, social justice advocates like FNB volunteers.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

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

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

In addition to vitamins, minerals and fiber, fruits and vegetables contain phytonutrients, believed to come from the com-pounds that give these foods their vibrant colors. These phytonutrients provide a wide range of health benefits, includ-ing supporting a healthy immune system.

A new study, America’s Phytonutrient Report, found eight in 10 Americans are missing out on the health benefits of a diet rich in colorful fruits and veggies, resulting in a phytonutrient gap. The report looked at fruit and vegetable consumption in five color categories, specifically green, red, white, blue/purple and yellow/orange, and the phytonutrients found in each color category.

Eating a variety of colorful fruits and vegetables is one way to help keep you and your family healthy. Foods in the red category are especially helpful to our immune systems, in addition to supporting heart health. Tomatoes, pomegranate, red cabbage, cranberries, even pink grapefruit provide the phytonutrients lycopene and ellagic acid.

The health benefits of foods in the yellow/orange category support a health immune function too…along with vision and heart health. And they help maintain skin hydration—important as we head into these cold, dry months. These foods pro-vide beta-carotene, alpha-carotene, lutein, quercetin and other phytonutrients that can be converted into Vitamin A. Deli-cious and nutritious yellow/orange fruits and vegetables available now include: carrots, squash, sweet potatoes and pi-neapple.

For optimal health, aim to eat two foods from each of the 5 color categories – green, red, white, blue/purple and orange/yellow – for a total of 10 servings each day. A few of Amy Hendel’s favorite tips to help fill phytonutrient gaps:

1. Instead of tossing out fruits or veggies that look a bit wilted or bruised, use them. Add chopped vegetables to canned soup. Bake cored apples with a bit of cinnamon, a sprinkle of raisins and lemon zest. Or, perk up a muf-fin recipe with by adding an over-riped banana.
2. When baking omega-3 rich fish, top with tomatoes, onions and other veggies, brush with olive oil and sprinkle with oregano, red pepper flakes and rosemary. Herbs and spices are packed with antioxidants too.
3. Pureed fruit added to baking recipes gives moisture AND phytonutrients, while cutting fat. Try pureed plums in brownies and mashed cherries in meatloaf or hamburgers.
4. Finally, while eating whole fruits and vegetables is the goal, a natural, plant-based supplement like those made by Nutrilite can help fill phytonutrient gaps in your diet.

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More information about phytonutrients and the phytonutrient gap , including America’s Phytonutrient Report and simple tips for coloring up your diet, can be found at http://www.pwrnewmedia.com/2009/nutrilite90921nmr/index.html

Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain has never made a secret of his disdain for vegetarians and vegans. In his best-selling book Kitchen Confidential the former New York cook remarked somewhat amusingly, “Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.” After his book became a hit, Bourdain moved into television and currently hosts No Reservations, a rather unusual and unorthodox travel show which examines far-flung cultures and exotic cuisines of the world.

Over the course of his career, Bourdain has cultivated a cool, bad-ass image and during his program he sports a black leather jacket. On one of his shows shot in San Francisco, he made a point of taking on political correctness by heading to an old steak house and feasting on prime rib. “To me,” he has written, “life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living. Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, and an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food.”

A few days ago Bourdain took his relentless campaign against vegetarians and vegans to new heights on CNN. Speaking on Larry King Live, the TV personality remarked that we were designed by evolution to eat meat. “We have eyes in the front of our head. We have fingernails. We have … teeth and long legs. We were designed from the get-go … so that we could chase down smaller, stupider creatures, kill them and eat them,” he said. 

The conversation focused on contaminated burgers that had sickened, paralyzed and even killed some people who had eaten them. Bourdain conceded that factory farms and large meat processors had developed “unconscionable” practices which “bordered on the criminal.” Expressing concern about chopped meat, Bourdain said “The stuff they’re putting in these burgers would not be recognized by any American as meat.”

Still, the popular Travel Channel personality could not bring himself to turn against a carnivorous lifestyle. “I think certainly we could eat better in this country,” he remarked. “It would probably not be a bad thing if we ate less meat, if the ratio of animal protein to vegetables changed along the lines of the Chinese model. But to talk about eradicating meat is silly.”

At this point another panelist on King’s show, Jonathan Foer, rightly took Bourdain to task. Foer, a best-selling writer and author of the upcoming book Eating Animals, declared “What Anthony didn’t say, and I wish he had, is that 99 percent — upwards of 99 percent of the animals that are raised for meat in this country come from factory farms.” Foer added, “When we’re talking about meat, when we’re talking about the meat they sell in grocery stores, when we’re talking about the meat we order in restaurants, we are effectively talking about factory farms. I think it’s a wonderful thing for someone with a reputation and as much intelligence as Anthony has to come out against factory farms. The crucial part of the picture is to say to America, this is almost everything.”

Foer is right about how enmeshed Americans have become in the factory farm system. Yet, the discussion on Larry King about meat and its downsides did not go far enough. Today, meat production is putting our planet in peril and hastening global climate change. It’s an issue which has been ignored by the likes of CNN but one which I deal with at considerable length in my upcoming book, No Rain in the Amazon: How South America’s Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet (Palgrave-Macmillan, April 2010).

Here’s the problem which Bourdain and other blissful carnivores choose to ignore: the world-wide cattle industry is linked to destructive deforestation and our climate destiny. Worryingly, deforestation is currently the second largest driver of carbon dioxide emissions after the burning of fossil fuels. To put it in concrete terms, tropical deforestation accounts for a whopping 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The Amazon rainforest is of particular concern and accounts for nearly half of the carbon dioxide emissions resulting from tropical deforestation.

In the Amazon the cattle sector is the largest driver of rainforest destruction, accounting for 60 to 70 percent of deforestation. To put it in concrete terms: every eighteen seconds on average one hectare of Amazon rainforest is being lost to cattle ranchers. As if the carbon emissions resulting from cattle deforestation were not enough, consider bovine methane emissions (or cow farts, if you want to be less delicate). While much of the debate surrounding global warming has centered upon carbon dioxide–the world’s most abundant greenhouse gas–methane, which has twenty-one times the warming potential of carbon dioxide, is seldom mentioned.

In Brazil, rainforest cattle has accounted for much of the country’s domestic demand in recent years. But now, the cattle and climate dilemma is becoming internationalized as the South American giant moves into the global marketplace. So far Brazil has exported most of its beef to Europe, though the country’s meat may have qualities that some markets view as favorable. Indeed Amazonian cattle are certainly free range, grass fed, and possibly organic, depending on your definition of the term. Ever wonder where that hamburger you just ate came from? There’s a chance it might contain meat from the Amazon rainforest.

In light of our climate difficulties, we’re going to have to reconsider our dietary choices. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization finds that meat production gives rise to more greenhouse gases than either transportation or industry. Furthermore, beef is the most carbon-intensive form of meat production. Consider: a one-pound patty results in about 36 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, or thirteen times the emissions from chicken.

But wait, there’s more: in order to feed the world’s rapacious demand for meat, Brazil has turned large tracts of land over to soy production. Soy has long been popular among vegetarians but it is now prized as a quick, cheap, and safe animal feed for poultry, pigs, and cattle. The Chinese and Europeans have become voracious consumers of Brazilian soy, catapulting the South American nation to agribusiness giant status. In China soy imports have increased exponentially, in large part because of growing affluence and a shift in the local diet. For many Chinese, consuming meat and dairy products symbolizes wealth, status, modernity, and escape from rough rural life.

Though the average American eats more than 250 pounds of meat ever year, the Chinese are now catching up and currently consume 115 pounds. Per capita consumption of pork in China has meanwhile almost doubled. Though China produces a lot of soy on its own, it is now the world’s largest importer of soy to feed its growing livestock sector. In Europe meanwhile, demand for soy has skyrocketed.

Though the soy planters cut down some forest, their influence is often more indirect. Once ranchers have cleared land in the Amazon the soy planters buy up property and move in. But as they take up cleared land, savanna, and transitional forests, the soy magnates push others such as slash-and-burn farmers even further into the forest. Soy then acts as a significant push factor and catalyst of climate change. The farmers who get pushed into the rainforest by agribusiness quickly find that Amazonian soils are notoriously low in fertility. After several harvests crop yields start to disappoint and eventually farmers abandon the land altogether or convert it to cattle pasture. In addition to pushing ranchers and slash-and-burn farmers into the forest, soy magnates exert pressure on the Amazon in other ways. For example, they lobby for highways and infrastructure projects which pave the way for yet more deforestation.

In Brazil, it is large international companies which are fueling the soy bonanza — companies like Minnesota – based Cargill. It’s a fact which apparently eludes Bourdain: speaking on CNN he remarked that it would be “ridiculous” and “silly” to replace Cargill, a huge corporation, with a food system based on fruits and vegetables. Bourdain has apparently failed to consider the nefarious social and environmental costs associated with corporate agribusiness. Perhaps he should talk to poor farmers in Brazil who have been displaced by soy production and must head to the rainforest to practice subsistence agriculture — all in the name of fueling agribusiness exports and expanding the global meat-eating lifestyle.

It’s perplexing how Bourdain, whose show is easily one of the most lively and intelligent on TV, has become such an impassioned foe of “silly” vegetarians and their “Hezbollah-like” vegan cousins. Considering all the disadvantages, perhaps one of the best things anyone can do to tackle climate change is to have one meat-free day a week and gradually decrease meat intake thereafter. It’s not enough, however, to simply transition toward a vegetarian diet which includes lots of milk, butter, and cheese–this probably won’t reduce emissions significantly as dairy cows would still release methane through flatulence. While it may sound a bit naive to think that people will change their eating habits any time soon, such a move is certainly much less complicated than getting people to switch their mode of transport.

Tony Bourdain has a cool show though his overall coolness is rapidly wearing thin. Maybe he should channel his constructive energy into lambasting corporate cattle ranching and agribusiness as opposed to vegetarians and vegans. The host of No Reservations has a great appreciation for traditional cultures and local folk. Why not air a program about how soy and our unsustainable consumerist lifestyle are displacing poor people while simultaneously fueling deforestation and climate change? Now THAT would be a show worth tuning in for.

Nikolas Kozloff is the author of the forthcoming No Rain in the Amazon: How South America’s Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet (Palgrave-Macmillan, April 2010). Visit his blog at http://senorchichero.blogspot.com/

Autumn is a time of abundance – mushrooms, hazelnuts, red and orange carrots, potatoes, beets, parsnips, fennel bulbs, apples, squashes, pears, kale, leeks – and eating fresh, local, seasonal food is easy and appealing. Converting to a diet that is predominantly local may appear daunting, however. Who really wants to eliminate the avocados, citrus fruit and chocolate that come to us from sunny climates?

Yet when we explore the origins of our food, we may learn that our choices involve considerable use of fossil fuels through transportation and we may wish to use our dollars on food that is produced closer to home. The push to “eat local” has far less impact on the environment compared with eating lower on the food chain.

At the same time, some fans of eating within a certain radius have not done their homework regarding the production of specific foods. Others are simply marketing groups that fail to tell us the whole story behind the feeding of animals used for meat or milk production.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh did a comprehensive study of the carbon footprint of food. The study was published in the Environmental Science & Technology journal and won the annual award for “Best Paper on Environmental Policy.” Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews discovered that, by eliminating meat just one day per week per year, you would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the same amount as if you reduced your driving by 1,000 miles. Going vegan is the equivalent of driving 8,000 miles less per year.

A central fact that some advocates of eating locally do not grasp is that eating chicken, beef or other animals involves the use of grains and beans that were transported hundreds and thousands of miles (even when they are partly grass-fed). While the cow may have been raised, and even slaughtered, close to where you live, its fodder was transported great distances, using plenty of fossil fuels or other types of energy. And as we know, it takes many pounds of the protein from grains and beans to produce a pound of beef protein.

So if you think that eating local animals or farmed fish is a vote for the environment, think again. Your better choice is to eat locally baked whole grain bread and a steaming bowl of lentil or pea soup, comprised of several ingredients from the Prairies.

Tofu manufactured on Powell Street in Vancouver or in Sooke, BC, involves far fewer transported soybeans than the equivalent weight of meat from a locally raised cow. Furthermore, beyond the feed, cows from the range near Kamloops, BC, may be trucked to feedlots in Alberta to be fattened and killed, with the carcasses later trucked back to BC supermarkets. And can wild fish that swam hundreds of kilometres be considered local when caught within 100 miles? The story can be complex and uncovering the truth may require expert detective work.

Here are a few possibilities to bring you closer to the origins of your food:

• Explore farmers’ markets.
• Seek out community-supported agriculture (e.g. www.ladybugorganics.com).
• Take a weekend country drive to discover farm gate sales.
• Start a backyard or balcony garden; plant herbs on the windowsill.
• Grow garlic, kale, mustard greens, turnips, cabbage, spinach and Swiss chard outdoors well into winter. A hotbox or greenhouse allows plants to flourish in colder weather.
• Walk around your neighbourhood to find community gardens.
• Choose local produce at supermarkets and request that they buy locally.
• Buy seasonal foods in bulk and preserve or freeze.

Reference

www.cmu.edu/homepage/environment/2009/winter/wheres-the-beef.shtml

Vesanto Melina is a registered dietitian and author of a number of nutrition classics, including Becoming Vegetarian, Becoming Vegan, Raising Vegetarian Children and the Food Allergy Survival Guide. To book a personal consultation with Vesanto in Langley, call 604-882-6782. www.nutrispeak.com

Reposted from Common Ground.

I’ve been interested in issues of animal liberation since the 1970s, but there have been some important new developments in the past few years, particularly the increasing awareness of issues to do with factory farming.

There’s been a high level of awareness about factory farming in Britain for a long time, but much less in the United States. That has changed in recent years, particularly thanks to a wave of new writing on food, like Michael Pollan’s work and Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. It was in this context that I decided to write Eating to address not just the animal issues that I talked about in Animal Liberation, but also wider food issues, and environmental issues in particular.

There is a growing acceptance that factory farming of animals is indefensible. It is too confining for the animals, it doesn’t allow them a decent life and it’s something we shouldn’t put up with. It’s been great to see not only philosophers and animal rights activists, but also leading chefs, like Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, taking that sort of stance about factory farming. There is now a growing movement against factory farming in the United States, though the US is some way behind Britain in this area.

The other big development is the increasing realisation that meat is a major contributor to climate change. People are starting to rethink their diets and that applies not only to factory farming, but also to free-range grazing of ruminant animals. For Western nations, that means beef, dairy and lamb. If we really want to reduce the impact we’re having on our climate, and we realise just how urgent action is, we have to cut the numbers of these animals fairly drastically.

Ultimately, we should be aiming to eat vegetarian diets. That might seem utopian to some people. Many people are suggesting that we should have a meat-free Monday to begin with and gradually phase out meat. It may be that that’s the best we can manage over the next few years, given how the public are about such things. But in the long term, I believe that if we aim to get to a sustainable place in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, it’s going to be very hard to have large herds of cattle and sheep as we do at present. That problem, combined with opposition to factory farming, really does mean we have to move towards vegetarian and even vegan diets in the medium term.

On a positive note, there has been a significant trend away from the worst forms of factory farming: battery farming of hens, the individual stall for pigs for breeding, veal crates and so on. That’s been particularly marked in Europe. A similar reaction is now becoming apparent in the United States, specifically following a referendum in California in November 2008 where the large majority voted against these forms of factory farming. There is also an increasing awareness about the climate impacts of meat and more people in the environmental movement are becoming vegetarian or vegan. We’re starting to head in the right direction, if rather too slowly.

Some have argued that factory farming and industrial-scale meat production must continue to allow meat to be affordable by the less well-off. It may be true that some people can’t afford free-range chicken, but that doesn’t mean you must eat chicken. Nobody has to eat chicken – or at least, nobody in Britain or America. There are plenty of very inexpensive plant-based foods available, like lentils and beans, that are good sources of cheap protein that would work out significantly cheaper per gram of protein then buying even factory-farmed chicken.

For us to cause avoidable suffering to animals is wrong. Even religious people who take the view that humans are made in God’s image and appointed by God to be stewards of creation would generally agree that stewardship doesn’t mean taking 20,000 chickens and putting them in a single shed with a very small amount of space per bird and treating them like they’re merely things to convert grain to flesh. That’s not stewardship, that’s simple exploitation of sentient beings.

On any ethical principle it is not acceptable to use other sentient beings in a way that disregards their interest in having a decent kind of life. That’s exactly what factory farming does and it is time to put an end to it.

This article is based on an interview by Rob Lyons.

Peter Singer is professor of bioethics at Princeton University and the author of numerous books including Animal Liberation (buy this book from Amazon(UK)) and, with Jim Mason, Eating (buy this book from Amazon(UK)).

Reposted from Spiked.

(NaturalNews) A drive towards reducing obesity could have important consequences for the environment and the long-term future of the planet, according to new study published by the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the UK investigated the link between Body Mass Index levels by nation in order to estimate the impact of being overweight on the levels of greenhouse gases emitted by a given population.

Results revealed that, compared with countries showing normal BMI averages, a population with 40% obesity requires a huge 19% more food energy for its total energy expenditure. A country with a slim population and low overweight level such as Vietnam will produce nearly one fifth less greenhouse gas emissions than countries such as the US or the UK, according to the findings.

Consequently, the current research suggests a population of one billion with high obesity levels could produce as much as 1 extra gigatonne of carbon dioxide emissions every year, approximately one sixth of the level produced yearly by humanity according to the European Environment Agency. [1]

Co-researchers Phil Edwards and Ian Roberts from the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health at LSHTM have called on governments to help create policies more conducive to a healthy lifestyle that encourages sustainability and a reduction in obesity.

“Policymakers can promote this by making active transports like walking and cycling safer, as well as making healthy food options available at schools and workplaces”, wrote Dr Edwards.

Being overweight should be recommended as an “environmental problem”, said the researchers.

However, the co-authors warned that all countries would need to consider the issue due to the fact that obesity levels are currently rising in every country in the world, with the average adult nearly 3kg heavier than s/he was fifteen years ago.

“Staying slim is good for health and for the environment. We need to be doing a lot more to reverse the global trend towards fatness, and recognise it as a key factor in the battle to reduce emissions and slow climate change”, Dr Edwards concluded. [2]

The current study follows on from similar research published in the Lancet in 2007 focusing on the impact of meat consumption for the environment. Australian scientists produced findings suggesting that many of aspects of the ‘meat chain’ significantly exacerbated climate change [3], conclusions echoed by Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and an individual considered by many to be the world’s leading expert on climate change, who urged consumers to begin with one meat-free day each week.

[1] http://www.eea.europa.eu/green-tips/human-activity-generates-six-gigatonnes-of-carbon-dioxide-per-year
[2] Edwards et al. Population adiposity and climate change. International Journal of Epidemiology. 2009; 1-5.
[3] McMichael et al. Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health. Lancet 2007 Oct;370(9594):1253-63.

Reprinted from NaturalNews.