yearofplenty

The Agri-Culture Wars - How Complex Food Issues Turned Simple Red and Blue

There is an interesting article by Marion Nestle at Atlantic Food explaining how issues of obesity and junk-food have fallen into the well-worn ruts of American politics.

Politicized? Of course they are politicized. Junk food and obesity are key indicators of political divisions in our society. For starters, junk food is cheap and obesity is more common among low-income populations. So right away we are into divisive issues of income inequality and class and, therefore, who pays for what and which sectors of society get government handouts.

The minute we start talking about small farms, organic production, local food, and sustainable agriculture, we are really talking about changing our food system to accommodate a broader range of players and to become more democratic. Just think of who wins and who loses if $20 billion in annual agricultural subsidies go to small, organic vegetable producers who are part of their communities rather than to large agricultural producers who do not live anywhere near their corn and soybeans.

While I understand the characterization that the food debates have come to reflect the polarities of our politics, there are indications that food also subverts these divides. For example, the recent debates about about the Food Safety Modernization Act created strange alliances. At various points, Monsanto and Michael Pollan were shoulder to shoulder as vocal proponents, and Jim Demint and treehugging locavores were working together to halt the bills passage. If anything, those are indications that food is an important disruptive force in our comfortable political ghettos.

I reported on this awhile back and said at the time:

Concerns about food short-circuit political divides in some wonderfully mischevious ways. Farmers' Markets may be the most politically diverse gathering in the community, with Glenn Beck conspiracy theorists rubbing shoulders with neo-hippie peace activists. The recent Whole Foods CEO curfluffle highlighted some of this diversity and forced the question, "Is it OK for conservatives and liberals, who disagree on so much, to agree on food and work together in that agreement?"

I sure hope so. In today's intense, hyped up political landscape, a good potluck with arugala and country style pork ribs (and of course grandma's jello salad) could do us a lot of good. There's something about gathering around food that makes us more human.

How My Little Blog Out-Reported the New York Times

On Monday I wrote up a post on the much heralded New York Times article, While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales. This kind of story is the bread and butter of the fast evolving food blogosphere, of which Year of Plenty is a very small part. A large media outlet like the Times does the original reporting and then it gets echoed throughout the blogosphere, Twitterverse, and Facebook Friend-Feed-Frenzyverse. It received so much attention that I initially wasn't going to bother linking to it, assuming that everyone had already seen it. But when I got around to actually reading the Times article, something didn't seem quite right. The article was factually correct in its reporting but cryptic in the way it described the relationship between the USDA and the Dairy Management Corporation. It hinted that the U.S. taxpayer-funded USDA was pulling the strings on the Domino's marketing campaign.

This subtle hint in the article was turned into the brash assertion all over the internet that U.S. taxpayers were not only paying for the $12 million campaign with Domino's for extra-cheesy pizzas, but that the USDA, and therefore the government, was running the ad campaign. While I highlighted in my post some smaller blogs that reported the story this way, Bill Bishop at the Daily Yonder gives a good summary of how this played out among some of the most influential people and news platforms in America:

Food writer and journalism professor Michael Pollan tweets that “our tax dollars (are) at work promoting Domino’s pizza.”

Kerry Trueman (co-founder of EatingLiberally.org) states on the liberal Huffington Post that Domino’s Pizza is selling gobs of cheese with the help of a “government handout.” 

The Atlantic says the “government wants to fatten you up with cheese.” Paul Waldman at The American Prospect writes a government agency uses “taxpayer funds” — “your tax dollars” — to promote double melt cheeseburgers.  Matt Yglesias writes a headline saying "Tax Dollars Going to Subsidize Cheesier Dominoes (sic) Pizzas," adding that this is the kind of “government spending…we could entirely do without.”

Because of previous stories I've done on the agricultural checkoff programs, these assertions didn't sound quite right. So I did something that Michael Moss, "ace New York Times Reporter" didn't do; I made a couple phone calls and actually talked to someone at Dairy Management about the program. As far as I can tell, in all the reporting that's been done on the story, I'm the only "reporter" that talked to Dairy Management to better understand their relationship to the USDA. I also talked to a representative of United Dairymen of Idaho to get a better understanding of how the checkoff system works.

Moss explained in the article why he didn't have those conversations:

The Agriculture Department declined to make top officials available for interviews for this article, and Dairy Management would not comment. In answering written questions, the department said that dairy promotion was intended to bolster farmers and rural economies, and that its oversight left Dairy Management’s board with “significant independence” in deciding how best to support those interests.

The crux of the whole story is the nature of the relationship between the USDA and Dairy Management and Moss didn't speak to anyone at either entity? He apparently got a written response to questions from the USDA. This may be a case of the USDA and Dairy Management not doing their job of accurately explaining the nature of the relationship, but I'm baffled that I could get through to them to ask probing questions and he couldn't.

So is it possible that I did a more thorough job of reporting on the relationship between the USDA, Dairy Management, and taxpayers than the New York Times?

I'm flattered that the "So Good" food blog seemed to think so. In assessing the reporting on the USDA and Dairy Management the blog says;

The most accurate breakdown of this organization’s role in this story can be found in this post on Year of Plenty, Newsflash: Dairy Industry Wants You to Eat More Dairy – What’s So Controversial About That?

I'll let you read my blog post to decide if I did a more thorough job, but I do know that because of those phone calls I didn't take the "tax-payers paying to promote cheesy pizza" bait, like so many others.

There are a couple of lessons for me in this;

1. Don't believe everything you read on the internet.

2. Don't believe everything you read in the New York Times.

3. When it comes to food politics and debates about food systems, the problem is not the demonization of food, as the Daily Yonder proposes. The problem is the demonization of people. In this case the demonization of people at the USDA and Dairy Management as evil cheese-conspirators.

If this is the problem than the solution is to talk to people and give their perspectives a genuine hearing. In other words, to be in relationship with people. In my case, when it comes to writing about food, that means being in relationship with small local farmers and large scale farmers, conventional and organic, following Grist and #agchat on Twitter. It takes all perspectives to get the story straight. Go here for a recent post on why living in an agricultural region like Spokane where I am in ongoing relationships with people involved in all aspects of the food system makes me a better food blogger.

One of the grand lessons from our year-long experiment in eating local is that relationships with people involved in bringing food to market is the key to developing just and sustainable food systems. This includes farmers, but it also includes business people. The core crisis in the food system is a break-down in the relationships between people involved with bringing food to market and those sticking the food in their mouths. Relationships breed accountability, pride, quality, health, and sustainability. A vaccuum of relationships creates paranoia, pollution, corruption, unhealth, shoddy practices, and most of the other ills in the food system. That's why I am committed to eating locally and promoting local food.

My diagnosis of the situation is more than just about good reporting and blogging. (Warning: If you don't follow my blog this is going to sound totally random.) It's actually rooted in my Christian faith and my role as pastor at a Presbyterian church. My focus on relationships arises from my understanding of Jesus' commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. In my judgement, this call to be in relationship with people is the key lens through which to see everything, including food. In my upcoming book I have a chapter dedicated to explaining this perspective. I hope it will be a helpful contribution to food debates that too often get bogged down haggling about food miles, carbon footprints, or cheesy marketing campaigns.

Newsflash: Dairy Industry Wants You to Eat More Dairy - What's So Controversial About That?

The headlines have been blaring all over the internet since the New York Times reported, While Warning About Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales. The story highlights the work of an organization called Dairy Management to promote extra cheese on Domino's Pizzas. Here's how the NY Times article describes their work:

Dairy Management, which has made cheese its cause, is not a private business consultant. It is a marketing creation of the United States Department of Agriculture — the same agency at the center of a federal anti-obesity drive that discourages over-consumption of some of the very foods Dairy Management is vigorously promoting.

So the story gets framed as the U.S. Government pushing cheese like a drug dealer while at the same time creating "Just Say No to Fatty Foods" initiatives. With the narrative framework in place it has been cast as yet another sensational example of big government hypocrisy and waste.

Huffington Post made it a top story and the message about this being a government plot evolved into headlines like, Uncle Sam Wants YOU to Eat More Cheese and Federal Government Helps Dominos Sell Pizzas, Uses Tax Dollars to Push Dairy Products.

While I have often been critical of large U.S. agricultural interests on this blog, in this case I think the story is misleading.

The biggest misunderstanding is that taxpayer dollars are behind this promotional campaign. The NYTimes article states clearly,

Dairy Management, whose annual budget approaches $140 million, is largely financed by a government-mandated fee on the dairy industry.

But the article then proceeds to muddy the waters with the very next sentence,

But it also receives several million dollars a year from the Agriculture Department, which appoints some of its board members, approves its marketing campaigns and major contracts and periodically reports to Congress on its work.

If you read the whole article it actually does a good job of reporting accurately that Dairy Management "received $5.3 million that year from the Agriculture Department to promote dairy sales overseas." But if you only read the first page it's easy to misunderstand, as some have, that U.S. tax dollars used to fund the USDA are being used to promote Domino's pizzas with extra cheese.

I spoke with a representative of Dairy Management Inc. this morning and she clarified that the U.S. Dairy Export Council, which is not involved in domestic marketing partnerships like the one with Domino's, received $5.3 million of its $20 million budget from Foreign Ag. Services, an arm of the USDA. Those are the funds referred to in the Times article.

But what about the staff from USDA that provide oversight of Dairy Management? The NYTimes article hints that tax dollars that pay for employees of the USDA are being used to support Dairy Management. According to the representative of Dairy Management, the USDA does provide oversight of their programs as mandated by law, but Dairy Management reimburses the government for the costs of this oversight. I was also told that USDA employees do not sit on the board of Dairy Management, but do attend board meetings in their oversight capacity.

The other major misunderstanding is that somehow the government is running this program or "pushing" for cheesier pizzas. Dairy Management and its board of 80 dairy farmers are the ones who run the program and they are the ones who pay for it.

At the behest of the dairy industry, a law was passed in 1983 known as the Dairy Production Stabilization Act of 1983.

It, therefore, is declared to be the policy of Congress that it is in the public interest to authorize the establishment, through the exercise of the powers provided herein, of an orderly procedure for financing (through assessments on all milk produced in the United States for commercial use and on imported dairy products) and carrying out a coordinated program of promotion designed to strengthen the dairy industry's position in the marketplace and to maintain and expand domestic and foreign markets and uses for fluid milk and dairy products.

This established what is known as the Dairy Checkoff. Every commercial producer of dairy in the U.S. is required by law to pay a fee per 100 pounds of product. For example, Idaho dairy farmers pay a total of 16 cents per 100 lbs of milk. Of that, 10 cents stays in Idaho to fund a state version of Dairy Management called United Dairymen of Idaho, 1 cent funds the Idaho Dairymen's Association that lobbies for dairy interests, and 5 cents goes to Dairy Management for national programs.

With the Domino's Legends Pizza promotion, Dairy Management set up the marketing campaign nationally, and in Idaho's case, the United Dairymen of Idaho Communications Rep. did radio interviews and ran statewide radio advertisements. All of this paid for by dairy farmers, not tax-payers. Their activities are regulated by the government according to the 1983 law to ensure they are using the funds legally, but it's disingenuous to suggest then that the government is therefore promoting fatty fast foods and dishonest to imply that taxpayer dollars are being used for such programs.

I'm not a big fan of promoting fast foods to consumers, but I'm not sure why it's controversial that dairy farmers are paying for programs to promote the sale of their products. It's like saying it's scandalous that Starbucks wants consumers to drink more coffee.

Behind the faux controversy of tax-payer funded promotions for cheese pizza is a very real controversy about the juxtaposition of Dairy Management's promotional work and the USDA initiatives promoting a healthy diet. Marion Nestle and her Food Politics blog is a good place to start in getting up to speed on this ongoing debate. But let's not give dairy farmers a hard time for wanting us to eat more cheese.  They already have enough challenges.

Spokane Chicken Revolution Ctd - Meeting Nov. 17 to Change Spokane County Backyard Chicken Laws

On Wednesday, November 17 there will be an initial community meeting to discuss current zoning laws and draft new zoning language for backyard chickens in Spokane County. The meeting will convene at 5:30 pm at the Fresh Abundance Store, 2015 N. Division St., Spokane WA 99207. Email lparlange (at) hotmail (dot) com if you have questions. You can sign up for the Facebook Group related to changing backyard chicken laws in the Spokane area here. For more background go here and here.

How Would Jesus Farm? Industrial and Sustainable Ag. Advocates Both Claim God is on Their Side

I follow various conversations in the agricultural world and I was intrigued to come across this post about the need to use Christian faith perspectives on feeding the hungry to support "modern" agricultural methods. Sarah Bedgar Wilson explains;

There are two main reasons why I feel Christians in agriculture are obligated to share the truths of why and how we farm/ranch within the context of faith:

1. Those whom oppose modern agriculture already have a presence in Christian circles.  For example, The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) has strategically begun a “Faith Outreach” program. My own church is struggling with the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America’s (ELCA’s) draft social statement on “genetics” that discusses the use of genetics in agriculture. I could list many more examples, amongst all the major denominations.
2. If we are faithful farmers and ranchers, following the command from the Lord to feed His people, then I believe He expects that we honor Him by sharing our testimonies on stewardship.  We also owe it to our fellow Christians who are not farmers/ranchers.  They are three to four generations removed from witnessing God’s miracles of growth and life in agriculture.

It is relevant, appropriate, and necessary that we in agriculture speak in terms of our faith about what we do.  Our consumers and our fellow Christians are demanding it.

Sarah is a Dairy Farmer in North Dakota and has a blog called Farmer on a Mission.

I have written from a Christian faith perspective on this blog generally in favor of sustainable agriculture. While the blog fades in and out of this focus on faith, my upcoming book fully expresses the way my Christian faith has informed my support, as a consumer, of local/sustainable agriculture and in some cases, my opposition to industrial ag. practices. There are certainly other more prominent voices whose faith informs their opposition to industrial agriculture. Wendell Berry and Joel Salatin are good examples of this.

The fact that people in the church, both consumers and farmers, are recognizing that faith should inform agricultural practices is very promising. It may actually be one of the most hopeful developments for sorting through the perplexing ethics of modern food.

Of course, there is always a danger that Jesus will simply be commandeered to support already established opinions and perspectives. This is the classic "Jesus is on my side!" debate that doesn't lead to any kind of helpful dialogue. (I'm as vulnerable to this possibility as anyone.)

It's also possible that Christian perspectives will simply be conflated with powerful secular voices. For example, the mission to "feed the world" tends to be the ethical catch-all for big agricultural interests like profit-seeking Monsanto. In response to questions of their practices they generally say, "Get off our back, can't you see we're trying to feed the world here." The danger is that the Biblical command to "feed the hungry" will be equated with Monsanto's mission to "feed the hungry." They are not saying the same thing even if they are using the same words.

I just spent a week with a friend who works with a Christian mission agency that works with impoverished villages around the world to develop sustainable agricultural practices toward the end of feeding the hungry. They have found in places like Haiti that you can't address the issue of hunger without addressing issues of deforestation and soil depletion. Maximum output at all costs is not the solution to world hunger.

I also recently spoke with Rev. David Beckmann who heads the Christian organization "Bread for the World." They focus their resources on lobbying Washington D.C. for policies and programs that help feed the hungry. He talked about the Farm Bill and how large agricultural interests have such a dominant voice in the process of forming the legislation that it's a challenge for other voices to be heard.

There is a great conversation to be had among people of faith around the issues of food and agriculture and I'm looking forward to seeing how the conversation develops and matures over the coming years.

Thanks Sarah for sharing your story and perspectives on faith and agriculture.

Food Fight, Ctd - Haiti an Important Case Study in Local Food Infrastructure and Food Security

The food fight continues (go here, here and here for previous installments of food fight) with Adam Ozimek's assertion that the push for local and organic foods in schools is more about using schools to advance progressive values vs. advancing educational objectives.

He says that if the goal is to get kids to eat more vegetables, then teaching them how to prepare frozen vegetables from far off places is a much better way to accomplish that goal.

(He doesn't seem to be aware that programs to teach kids and parents how to prepare healthy meals are already up and running. Here in Spokane County we have the Food Sense program, which is a model program, and I'm sure they use their fair share of frozen vegetables.)

The evolving debate has people lining up on one side saying that industrial food produced and shipped from far off places is best and an over-emphasis on local and organic is dangerous, while others are lining up on the other side saying that an over-emphasis on global food distribution is dangerous and local/organic food is best. The argument seems to focus mostly on the merits and benefits of each kind of food system, but I'd like to see more debate about which is more dangerous. In other words, which system has a bigger down-side for local communities?

I'll leave it to others to outline the perils of an overemphasis on local and organic food systems, but I'll take a shot at outlining two of the looming dangers of a global industrial food complex.

An over-reliance on a few genetically modified seed stocks is a classic case of putting all of our eggs in one basket. A story this week about Monsanto's souring prospects is a bit foreboding;

Sales of Monsanto's Roundup, the widely used herbicide, has collapsed this year under an onslaught of low-priced generics made in China. Weeds are growing resistant to Roundup, dimming the future of the entire Roundup Ready crop franchise. And the Justice Department is investigating Monsanto for possible antitrust violations.

Creating a dependence on importing cheap food can decimate local communities as illustrated most recently in Haiti. A report out this week explains the predicament;

"Currently, U.S. rice subsidies and in-kind food aid undercut Haitian farmers at the same time as the U.S. government is investing in Haitian agricultural development," said Philippe Mathieu, Oxfam's director for Haiti.

"The international community must abandon these conflicting trade and aid policies in order to support the growth of Haiti's fragile rural economy."

I was talking to a friend last week who works for an agency trying to help develop a sustainable agricultural base in Haiti and he explained how the influx of cheap imports over the years put local farmers out of business, so when the earthquake hit, there was no way for the country to feed itself. It was completely reliant on cheap imports, and in many ways still is. Here's how the situation was reported back in March;

Decades of inexpensive imports – especially rice from the U.S. – punctuated with abundant aid in various crises have destroyed local agriculture and left impoverished countries such as Haiti unable to feed themselves.

While those policies have been criticized for years in aid worker circles, world leaders focused on fixing Haiti are admitting for the first time that loosening trade barriers has only exacerbated hunger in Haiti and elsewhere.

They're led by former U.S. President Bill Clinton – now U.N. special envoy to Haiti – who publicly apologized this month for championing policies that destroyed Haiti's rice production. Clinton in the mid-1990s encouraged the impoverished country to dramatically cut tariffs on imported U.S. rice.

"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else."

Haiti is an extreme example, but it points to the devastating effects of a country or region that relies completely on importing cheap foods from elsewhere.

Food Fight: Washington Post Foodie Ezra Klein Defends Industrial Agriculture

Earlier in the week influential blogger Ezra Klein of the Washington Post wrote a short post dismissing the influence of the local food movement and heralding that "Industrial farms are the future." He wrote;

Despite the dreams of many foodies, I can't think of a major industry that went from small, decentralized production methods to large, scaled industrial production -- and then back again. Are there any examples I'm missing? Maybe so. But for now, I think of the preference for farmers markets and small producers as being mainly important in sending certain signals about production methods and branding preferences to Big Ag than in actually creating some sort of viable alternative.

In the article he references an article from the Guardian in the UK where Jay Rayner argues;

Words such as local, seasonal and organic have become a holy trinity. But these are merely lifestyle choices for the affluent middle-classes, a matter of aesthetics, and nothing to do with the real issues.

If we are to survive the coming food security storm, we will have to embrace unashamedly industrial methods of farming. We need to abandon the mythologies around agriculture...and recognise that farming really is an industry, much like car manufacturing or steel forging, one which always works better on a mass scale, but which can still be managed sustainably.

Ezra Klein is a farmers'-market-shopping, meatless-monday-eating, full-on-foodie so his little post created quite a stir. Tom Philpot at Grist offered up the highest profile retort. He mainly takes down Rayner's editorial and tisk-tisks Klein for passing it off as meaningful commentary. He writes;

Rayner's argument goes like this: a) because the U.K. relies increasingly on food imports, and b) U.K. supermarkets demand flawless, uniform fruits and vegetables, forcing farmers to "grade out" much high-quality produce, and c) U.K. consumers have come to expect dirt-cheap food, then the nation "will have to embrace unashamedly industrial methods of farming" to avoid looming famine.

Really? The same line of reasoning could more logically have led Rayner in the opposite direction: that Britain's food problems stem from a globalized industrial food system consolidated into the hands of a few powerful companies.

Yesterday, Klein offered a little bit of an apology for citing the Guardian editorial, which he admits is weak, but he sticks to his guns when it comes to the future of food being industrial;

...I'm increasingly less convinced that small and big are, in the overall scheme of things, terribly useful dividing lines for the future of agriculture. Whether one could hypothetically imagine feeding the world using decentralized production methods, I don't see much reason to believe it will happen. At the same time, small farms can be run wastefully and large farms can be run sustainably.

When I say that the food movement is sending important signals to America's agribusiness giants, I mean it -- forcing them to innovate in organics and compete with Stonyfield and think about the success of farmers markets are types of pressure that could lead to really important transformations in how they do their business. And those are transformations that might then be copied by large producers in other countries. That's why I think the most important role of the food movement is potentially changing the behavior of players like Nestle and ConAgra, and creating some large companies that demonstrate how a different ethos of food production can be brought to industrial scale.

Andrew Sullivan just pinged this dialogue so I suspect it will get a lot of play on blogs and editorial pages in the coming weeks.

This little food fight touches on so many different aspects of what I blog about here that it's a little hard for me to decide where to enter in, but let me pick one aspect of the debate and see where it leads.

Klein mentions the hypothetical question as to whether it's possible to feed the world through decentralized production methods. It's typical in these debates for defenders of industrial ag to assert that it's not possible to feed the world using organic or local methods and others reply that, actually, you can. Klein dismisses this line of argument as irrelevant. He says it's not going to happen. He asserts that we have never seen "a major industry that went from small, decentralized production methods to large, scaled industrial production -- and then back again," which is what would need to happen in the case of food. The industrial cat is out of the bag and there is no turning back. All we can hope for is mega-corporations that are responsible and responsive to consumer demands for more sustainable and local food.

He takes the the pose of the realist and on one hand I agree with him. I often say (I just said it yesterday in fact), that real substantial change in food distribution will have to come through changes to big retailers like Walmart. For an example of how this is happening with potatoes go here.

But I disagree with Klein's and Rayner's foundational assumption - that the production of food is best viewed as an "industry, much like car manufacturing or steel forging, one which always works better on a mass scale..." For one, there is mounting evidence that food production does not work better on a mass scale. It's only over the last 75 years that food has been imagined as an industry and practiced as such. We fed the world for millennia with small, local and organic agriculture. Modern industrial food practices are a very recent innovation and the long term consequences are still unknown.

There is no doubt that modern technologies have been a boon to the task of feeding people around the world, but there is something different about food than making cars or forging steel. Manufacturing cars is a product of the industrial revolution. Eating food arises out of the very nature of the created order. For all of history food amounted to more than the shallow categories of industry. Food was culture, family, provision, and for the three major religions of the world, a sign of God's grace.

In the Genesis account of creation the first words out of God’s mouth to Adam and Eve are, “You are free to eat….” Not far behind is the warning, “You must not eat…” After their disobedience, God proclaims judgment, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:17-19). Even in judgment there is a grace of provision.

It's funny to me how casually we throw around the phrase "saving the world" in debates about sustainability. Isn't it so obvious that "going green" is a veiled, modern-secular way of entering into the territory of apocalypse and salvation, the ancient categories of the human quest for life and meaning and God. Food goes deep into mysterious and hallowed places of human existence. Food cannot be reduced to the limited categories of industry and it does great damage to imagine it exclusively as such.

There is one thing I agree with in the Guardian column. Rayner says that the local, seasonal and organic food movements are a matter of aesthetics, and have nothing to do with the real issues of industrial practices and pragmatics of feeding the world. He's right in pointing out that what drives the local food/sustainable food movement is, something beyond the pragmatism of calories and food miles, something more intangible. Aesthetics is a rather dismissive way of putting it. I would say that it arises out the human search for meaning and hope.

One last comment. Rayner claims that it's only the well-off middle-class who have the luxury to dismiss the reality of food as industry. In my experience it's actually the impoverished 2/3 world that understand the reality that food is more than industry. To the majority world food is culture, family and life. Most of the world gets that those are "real issues" that are relevant to conversations about food. Wealthy westerners are actually the innovators of the exclusive view of food as industry and profit margin. It is our particular single-minded lens that is foreign in the world. 

The insurgent foodies in the western world are attempting to lift up other issues that are very real, issues that touch on aspects of human life that industry can never reduce and control, and issues that impact and change industrial practices.

As I see it, the task is not to de-industrialize food, the task is to re-enchant, re-annimate, and re-new our imaginations around food, which by necessity means to re-connect with the land that supplies us with food (and perhaps the Creator of the land), and along with that to re-connect with the farmers who farm the land.

Wendell Berry - How I Would Fix the Economy

I'm reading through Wendell Berry's latest book, What Matters Most: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth, and I find his commentary on our current economic woes as insightful as any I've read. He laments that the economy has become disconnected from the land and is so out of whack that it's hard to see how it can be fixed.

There is no good reason, economic or otherwise, to wish for the "recovery" and continuation of the economy we have had. There is no reason, really, to expect it to recover and continue, for it has depended too much on fantasy. An economy cannot "grow" forever on limited resources. Energy and food cannot stay cheap forever. We cannot continue forever as a tax-dependent people who do not wish to pay taxes. Delusion and the future cannot serve forever as collateral. An untrustworthy economy dependent on trust cannot beguile the people's trust forever. The old props have been kicked away. The days when we could be safely crazy are over. Our airborne economy has turned into a deadfall, and we have got to jack it down. The problem is that all of us are under it, and so we have got to jack it down with the least possible suffering to our land and people. I don't know how this is to be done, and I am inclined to doubt that anybody does. You can't very confidently jack something down if you didn't know what you were doing when you jacked it up.

He goes on to offer some suggestions for ways to re-anchor the economy in land and natural resources.

...Help young farmers to own farms...We should set appropriate and reasonable acreage limits, according to region, for family-scale farms and ranches. Taxes should be heavy on holdings above those limits...There should be inheritance taxes on large holdings; none on small holdings.

...Phase out biofuels as quickly as possible.

...Phase in perennial plants - for pasture, winter forage, and grain crops - to replace annual crops requiring annual soil disturbance or annual applications of "no-till" chemicals.

...High water quality standards (enforced) and a program to replace annual crops with perennials would tend strongly toward the elimination of animal factories. But let us be forthright on this issue. We should get rid of animal factories, those abominations, as quickly as we can. Get the farm animals, including hogs and chickens, back on grass. Put the animals where they belong, and their manure where it belongs.

...Animal production should be returned to the scale of localities and communities. Do away with subsidies, incentives, and legislation favorable to gigantism in dairy, meat, and egg production.

...Encourage the development of local food economies, which make more sense agriculturally and economically than our present overspecialized, too-concentrated, long-distance food economy.

...Study and teach sustainable forestry...Help and encourage small-scale forestry and owners of small woodlands.

In conclusion he says;

Would such measures increase significantly the number of people at work in the land economy? Of course they would. This would be an authentic version, for change, of "job creation." This work would help our economy, our people, and our country all at the same time.

Go here and here for previous posts on Wendell Berry and the economy.

Picture: Wheat ripe for harvest on Orchard Prairie

San Francisco Considers Ban On the Sale of All Pets Except Fish

The San Francisco Commission on Animal Control and Welfare has created quite a stir by considering a proposal that would outlaw the sale of all pets in the city.

Here's how the S.F. Chronicle reported it earlier in the month. The ban would include;

...dogs, cats, hamsters, mice, rats, chinchillas, guinea pigs, birds, snakes, lizards and nearly every other critter, or, as the commission calls them, companion animals.

"People buy small animals all the time as an impulse buy, don't know what they're getting into, and the animals end up at the shelter and often are euthanized," said commission Chairwoman Sally Stephens. "That's what we'd like to stop."

San Francisco residents who want a pet would have to go to another city, adopt one from a shelter or rescue group, or find one through the classifieds.

They were supposed to vote on the proposal on July 8, the day the Chronicle reported the story, but they were so overwhelmed with input, they postponed the vote until at least next month. Go here for a more recent AP rundown.

This grabs me as another sign that our human relationship to animals has gotten out of whack. On the one hand we turn a blind eye to the terrible conditions faced by millions of industrial farm animals (9 million chickens are slaughtered every year) and yet we fret over humanely euthanizing gerbils and hamsters.

I recognize that the folks advocating for this are also ones who would advocate for more humane treatment of farm animals, but it just grabs me as strange.

USDA: Soda Tax Will Help America Lose Weight and Get Healthy

USDA economists have just released a report that says a tax on high calorie soda pop will take a chunk out of America's flabby belly. They report;

A tax-induced 20-percent price increase on caloric sweetened beverages could cause an average reduction of 37 calories per day, or 3.8 pounds of body weight over a year, for adults and an average of 43 calories per day, or 4.5 pounds over a year, for children. Given these reductions in calorie consumption, results show an estimated decline in adult overweight prevalence (66.9 to 62.4 percent) and obesity prevalence (33.4 to 30.4 percent), as well as the child at-risk-for-overweight prevalence (32.3 to 27.0 percent) and the overweight prevalence (16.6 to 13.7 percent).

This chart sums up the potential impact.

h/t The Atlantic.