yearofplenty

Beware Visions of a Vegetarian Dystopia

Roger Ebert's Journal pointed me to a forboding article at the Guardian by John Vidal that warns that the coming worldwide water shortage will force all of us into a meat-lovers apocalypse of vegetarianism.

Leading water scientists have issued one of the sternest warnings yet about global food supplies, saying that the world's population may have to switch almost completely to a vegetarian diet over the next 40 years to avoid catastrophic shortages.

Humans derive about 20% of their protein from animal-based products now, but this may need to drop to just 5% to feed the extra 2 billion people expected to be alive by 2050, according to research by some of the world's leading water scientists....

Adopting a vegetarian diet is one option to increase the amount of water available to grow more food in an increasingly climate-erratic world, the scientists said. Animal protein-rich food consumes five to 10 times more water than a vegetarian diet. One third of the world's arable land is used to grow crops to feed animals. Other options to feed people include eliminating waste and increasing trade between countries in food surplus and those in deficit.

This news also comes on the heals of the recent warning of a worldwide bacon shortage, otherwise known as the Baconpocalypse. 

None of these warnings are all that upsetting to me. Our family has gradually migrated toward a more vegetarian diet. We still eat meat but much less than we used to. Our foray into food and faith traditions has accelerated this shift. The Orthodox fasts are vegetarian, our kosher month was mostly vegetarian because of concerns about mixing meat and dairy, and now I'm experimenting with the Seventh-Day Advent regimen which is strictly vegetarian. (I haven't worked my way up to no caffiene yet but I'll get there.) These traditions affirm that vegetarianism is good for the body and the soul, and it sounds like scientists agree that it is good for the earth as well.

I'm not ready to give up bacon yet, but I don't live in fear of being a vegetarian, and I don't see why any of us should. It could be worse, we could be talking about a future without coffee and chocolate. Oh, wait a minute. Some scientists are warning that climate change could bring an end to coffee an chocolate as well. Now that's a future worthy of apocalyptic angst.

Decline of the Carnivore: American consumers are losing their appetite for meat

Almost everyone that's not selling meat agrees that it would be a good thing for Americans to eat less meat. Nutritionists tell us it would be good for our health. Environmentalists tell us it would be good for the environment and one of the most helpful ways to combat global warming. Animal welfare advocates tell us that reducing meat consumption is one of the most helpful ways we can address the horrors of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). As we're learning in our Tables of Plenty journey, most religious traditions teach that constraining the consumption of meat through fasting is helpful on the journey of spiritual formation. 

Apparently the message is starting to sink in because, as Mark Bittman reported earlier in the week, American consumers are putting less meat in their shopping carts and that trend is likely to continue into the future. (See chart taken from this Daily Livestock Report)

The rising price of meat is probably the single biggest contributor to these trends but Bittman attributes part of the decline to a shift in consumer conscience:

Some are choosing to eat less meat for all the right reasons. The Values Institute at DGWB Advertising and Communications just named the rise of “flexitarianism” — an eating style that reduces the amount of meat without “going vegetarian” — as one of its top five consumer health trends for 2012. In an Allrecipes.com survey of 1,400 members, more than one-third of home cooks said they ate less meat in 2011 than in 2010. Back in June, a survey found that 50 percent of American adults said they were aware of the Meatless Monday campaign, with 27 percent of those aware reporting that they were actively reducing their meat consumption.

The livestock industry in their report on the trend attributes the change to growing exports which reduced the amount of available meat in the market, higher costs due to the growth of the ethanol industry that diverts corn to the production of fuel and increases the costs of those inputs for animal feed, and finally they attribute the decline to "the fruition of 30-40 years of government policy." 

Bittman, along with many others, have expressed shock at the dubious nature of this last statement. One feature of the American food scene over the last 40 years are the generous farm subisidies that have fueled the industrialization of meat production. Instead of dealing with the reality that consumers are choosing to eat less meat, they are stuck on the idea of a government conspiracy against them. 

I guess I'm not surprised that the livestock industry doesn't mention changing consumer values but, as I've written in the past, the industry ignores this reality at their peril.

"The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity's Compassion for Animals" - A Book Review

While I dedicated a whole chapter in Year of Plenty to the topic animal dignity as it relates to faith and consumption, I am still a novice on the topic so I was grateful to recently come across Laura Hobgood-Oster's book, The Friends We Keep: Unleashing Christianity’s Compassion for Animals. It is a timely book on the hopeful and sometimes problematic relationship between the Christian faith and animals.

The heart of the book is three chapters on "non-human animals" as companions, in sport, and for food. Hobgood-Oster offers a compelling combination of scholarly research, historical review, and contemporary commentary on each of these topics as they relate to Christian faith and practice. While the emphasis on faith is the unique contribution of the book, I also appreciate it as a general resource of information about these topics. The sections on the evolving role of animals as companions in human history and the use of animals in blood sport in the ancient world are especially compelling.

The thesis that I took away from the book is that despite a rich history of animals involved in the unfolding good news of God in the Bible and in Church history, there is currently a troubling disconnect between Christianity and concern for the welfare of animals. Hobgood-Oster sets forth the goal of highlighting these many resources in order to "provide a foundation for contemporary Christian action and theological development" as it relates to animal welfare.

My general assessment of the book is that is delivers on this promise. It is a veritable treasure chest of stories about the role of animals in the Bible and church history. But Hobgood-Oster does more than just offer anecdotes, she takes this collection of disparate stories and passages and proposes a cohesive vision for animal welfare based on the Christian practice of hospitality in which we open ourselves up to the "the 'other,'"

Justly or not, we have, for all practical purposes, claimed the entire earth as our possession. We have taken over the homes of the many other animals who have lived here for millenia. It is in recognition of this reality that I chose the concept of hospitality as a way to consider our relationship to animals.

In a beautiful act of theological imagination she also speculates that humans are not the only ones with hospitality to offer:

If other animals are going to survive our presence, we must extend radical hospitality to them. I also wonder if we might not invert that idea as well. Might it be that for us--for humans--to survive, we must also find a way to live with other animals flourishing around us?

I love the idea of the flourishing of animals on earth offering hospitality to us humans. It adds a whole new way of understanding bees buzzing around the fruit trees and the bats swallowing up pests. For Hobgood-Oster it's not the "circle of life," rather it is a circle of hospitality with the image of the baby Jesus surrounded by animals as the icon.

Having offered an affirmative vision for the relationship of animals and humans within the Christian tradition, the author sets out in the concluding chapter to challenge the root causes of the disconnect. She argues that it can be primarily traced to overly anthropocentric understandings of Christianity that have proliferated in the western world where the earth is imagined as an incidental stage for the unfolding drama of human salvation. 

I offer my own version of explaining this disconnect in Year of Plenty, but I was very aware as I read this concluding chapter that Hobgood-Oster and I have different ways of understanding how the disconnect came to be and how people of faith might go about reweaving connections.

In a curious twist she points to central orthodox doctrines of the western church ("the Word of God" and "sacrifical atonement") as key developments in recent history that have contributed to the disconnect. Citing Karl Barth she writes of atonement theory:

This is the root of the turn to the human in Christianity. With all of God's attention focused on our story, there is little room left for any other creatures.

The references and historical background offered on these key doctrines of the Christian faith are too abbreviated and simplistic. For example I have an entire shelf of my library that is taken up by Karl Barth's Dogmatics wherein Barth lays out thousands of pages of complex theological perspectives (the joke is that not even Barth read all of Barth.) To sum up Barth's theology of the atonement in a few paragraphs and to suggest that this is a root cause of the problem is inadequate for the argument being put forth in the chapter. 

Hobgood-Oster's arguments in the concluding chapter regarding the influence of the Enlightenment on the disconnect are much more on target. The quote from Descartes regarding animals as unthinking "automata" is fascinating and informative. 

I highly recommend this book as a resource for discerning the relationship between Christian faith and animals. As someone who feels passionately that faith should inform the way we treat animals, I come away from the book feeling more deeply rooted in my conviction and more initiated in a wonderfully rich faith tradition of caring for animals.

New Report: 1 in 4 Packages of Meat at the Grocery Contain Multi-Drug Resistant Staph

A few weeks ago I wrote a post highlighting the book, Superbug by Maryn Mckenna. The book tracks the emergence of antibiotic-resistant MRSA and claims that the heavy use of antibiotics in industrial animal agriculture has contributed to the rise of these resistant strains of bacteria.

Mckenna has an article at Wired.com today that reports on a new scientific study on the presence of drug-resistant bacteria in meat for sale in stores. She reports:

A team of researchers from Arizona bought meat and poultry in five cities across the United States, tested them for bacteria, and found this: 47 percent of the samples contained the very common pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, and 96 percent of those isolates were resistant to at least one antibiotic. Of more concern: 52 percent of those staph isolates were resistant to at least three antibiotics that are commonly used in both veterinary and human medicine.

That is: Roughly one in four packages of meat and poultry from across the US contained multi-drug resistant staph.

Here's the breakdown of how different types of meat compared:

Among the types of meat tested, turkey carried the most resistance, with 77 percent of the meat samples showing at least some; that was followed by pork (42 percent), chicken (41 percent) and beef (37 percent). Interestingly, it wasn’t all the same staph. Though there was a great diversity of staph types, each animal species seemed to carry mostly one sequence type or strain of staph: ST1 in pigs, ST5 in chickens and ST398 in turkey.

Perhaps the most important finding in the study is that the source of the bacteria was not human contamination, rather the bacteria came from the animals themselves. Mckenna quotes study team member Lance Price:

“There’s an important second point: We found that each of the meat and poultry types had their own distinctive staph on them. That provides strong evidence that food animals were the primary source of the resistant staph. The source wasn’t human contamination of the meat at slaughter, or when it was packaged for retail sale.”

This is an important data point in the debate about the impact of antibiotic use in raising farm animals. The Ag. community has argued for years that no one has been able to prove a link between such use and the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria that is harmful to humans. The evidence is mounting that concentrated animal operations are not only bad for animals, but they are bad for humans as well.

Go here for a previous post on safety issues with America's meat supply.

"Superbug" Book - Agricultural Use of Antibiotics Helped Create Drug Resistant MRSA

image: Manure Lagoon at a swine CAFO

In conversations about agriculture and health, I think the issues raised in the book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA by Maryn Mckenna, need to be front and center, especially as it relates to CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) and the use of antibiotics as a growth enhancer in animals. The book explains:

Food animals get many drugs for many reasons. They get them for disease treatment. They get them for disease prevention....Food animals also get antibiotics for "growth promotion," a metabolic mysterious process that has made possible the entire high-volume, low-margin business of industrial-scale farming....The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that, of those 29.5 million pounds of antimicrobials given to animals every year, only 2 million of them are actually intended to treat disease. The rest, almost 80% of all antibiotics used in the United States every year, are "non-therapeutic."

The process makes human-medicine experts furious. From their point of view, farmers are routinely practicing antibiotic misuse: giving drugs in the absence of disease, and giving them in such small doses that they kill off only vulnerable bacteria and leave the Darwinian battleground clear for the tough ones. Making it worse, many of the animal drugs are identical, or closely chemically related, to drugs used in humans to combat disease.

Mckenna explains that there has been a great debate through the years as to whether or not these agricultural practices are directly leading to drug-resistant bacteria that endanger humans. The ag. advocates have argued for decades that the direct link had not been demonstrated. Mckenna points out that, technically, this was correct for many years. Scientists had a hard time putting every piece of the puzzle together to prove the link because the chain of events spanned decades and a very complex processes of transmission. In 1976, Dr. Stuart Levy of Tufts U. was able to finally prove the link between drugged chickens and transmission of disease to humans handling the chickens. According to Mckenna, this led the EU to ban the use of a particular drug as an animal growth promoter.

The author makes a strong case that CAFOs have contributed to the spread of MRSA, one of the most problematic, multi-drug-resistant bacteria.

By the time MRSA ST398 arose in Dutch pigs in 2004, though, it seemed that the focus of the argument had shifted. The contention was no longer that the practice was safe for the humans who took care of the animals, or for those who ate their milk, meat, or eggs: instead, it was that it was economically impossible for agriculture to stop. In CAFOs, antibiotics were the only way to keep livestock healthy long enough to efficiently put on weight.

Mckenna outlines the problem with CAFOs and the way they contribute to the spread of MRSA:

From a microbiological standpoint, the problem with CAFOs is not just the drugs given to the animals, or the vast number of animals, which increase the chances of a resistant germ evolving, or the miserable crowding that creates a perfect setting for passing resistant bacteria from one animals to another. It is also what those animals leave behind: more than 300 million tons of manure in a year, twice as much as comes from all the humans in the United States....On a small-scale farm, the manure would be sprayed on cropland, but there isn't a lot of cropland near CAFOs. Instead, there are other CAFOs, clustered in tightly defined areas....With nowhere to spray it, the manure is stored on farms in enormous lagoons. Some gut bacteria survive in manure, and so there are bacteria in lagoons. Some of them may be resistant bacteria, carrying resistance genes that are available for other bacteria to acquire. If any antibiotics are being used on the farm, there will be antibiotic resistance in the manure as well, putting additional evolutionary pressure to develop resistance on whatever bacteria are present.

Two words that should have never been joined together in a sentence - manure and lagoon.

This is another example of the deferred costs to the environment and human health built into the current food system. The more I learn about the industrial animal food chain, the more it seems like a complex house of cards, full of potential weaknesses that could collapse the whole system. If you're looking for a way to respond as a consumer, I recommend eating less meat and sourcing the meat, eggs, & milk you do eat from local, small-scale farms. Getting your own chickens is also a great idea. (Book plug: Year of Plenty has a whole section on how to get started raising chickens.) A good rule of thumb - if the farm that produced this meat, milk, eggs has a manure lagoon than it's a good idea to find another source.

Go here to see a map showing the concentration of factory farms in the US.

Ag Community Paranoia in Florida Leads to New Law that Would Criminalize Farm Photos

There is a proposed law working its way through the Florida legislature, that would make it illegal to photograph or film farms without the permission of the farmer. The proposed law, that would take effect in July, reads:

A person who enters onto a farm or other property where legitimate agriculture operations are being conducted without the written consent of the owner, or an authorized representative of the owner, commits a felony of the first degree...

A person who photographs, video records, or otherwise produces images or pictorial records, digital or otherwise, at or of a farm or other property where legitimate agriculture operations are being conducted without the written consent of the owner, or an authorized representative of the owner, commits a felony of the first degree...

This law seeks to curtail the activities of undercover videogarphers posing as farm workers, documenting the horrific treatment of animals as shown in the above Humane Society video. While media law experts have pointed out that such a law is unconstitutional, some local farmers in Florida defend the law as reported in the Florida Tribune:

Wilton Simpson, a farmer who lives in Norman's district, said the bill is needed to protect the property rights of farmers and the "intellectual property" involving farm operations.
Simpson, president of Simpson Farms near Dade City, said the law would prevent people from posing as farmworkers so that they can secretly film agricultural operations.

In a surprising twist to the story, the proposed law has raised the most concern among legitimate photogaphers and stock photo enthusiasts, or "croparazzi," as the New York Times has dubbed them. I count myself as an avid amateur croparazzi, so I share in those concerns, and more generally see this as a big step in the wrong direction for the American farm community.

From what I have seen, there is a persecution complex that has taken hold in some segments of American agriculture that is not serving it well. I hear farmers say they are under attack by extremists and people who are ignorant about real farm practices. I hear passionate resentments expressed by ag leaders that non-farmers, like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, have unfairly painted American agriculture in a negative light. So on the one hand U.S. consumers are dismissed as ignorant, but then when consumers show interest in the actual practices of U.S. farms, like the use of gestation crates for pigs, the farm community comes up with a law like the one in Florida, that essentially says, "Our farm practices are none of your business." 

If I could sit down with the Florida Farm Bureau I would explain that U.S. consumers are actually very interested in the practices of the farms that bring food to their tables. The local food movement, concerns about the environment, and yes, movies like Food Inc., are rapidly changing the consumer landscape. And this movement is only just beginning to hit the mainstream. The presenting issue is not that consumers are ignorant, the problem is that they are actually very interested, and in some cases they don't like what they are finding. What the Florida Farm Bureau should really be afraid of is not guerilla reporters taking undercover video, but consumers passing up your products at the grocery store because of unacceptable farming practices. Trying to cover-up unacceptable practices is a losing proposition in today's information age.

Instead of reacting defensively, giving consumers and those interested in food production practices a metaphorical middle finger and a threat of 30 years of jail, why not clean up your act and open your doors to let people in. And if there is nothing to clean up, then all the better. Show consumers that the Humane Society video shown above is inaccurate and unfair. Create ways to bring people onto the farms to see what's going on. Follow the lead of the #agchat folks on Twitter who are working hard to get out the real stories of farms and farmers. 

The proposed bill has been so widely panned that the Florida Farm Bureau has stepped in to do damage control. They are supposedly working on revising the legislation to address concerns about roadside or aerial photography, and to ease the potential 30 year jail sentence currently attached to the bill. Unfortunately, they are defending the basic premise of the law, even though no one has cited a single instance of anyone doing malicious undercover filming at Florida farms. 

After the jump you can see some of my favorite "croparazzi" shots from the Inland Northwest.

Amazing New Google Books Ngram Search Tool - Foodie Index, Fast Food Index and More

The geniuses at Google have put together a search tool that allows you to search through a good portion of the books they've scanned into Google Books. Here is how it works:

The service draws on the absolutely massive Google Books corpus. Google estimates they've scanned and OCR'd more than 10 percent of all the books ever published, and they use about a third of the total books in the tool.

Language and book publishing trends are tricky things to nail down. For example, just because a word comes into more frequent use does not necessarily mean that the concrete realities we attach to those words in today's language have become more important or popular. But they do provide fascinating data points to consider when assessing cultural trends.

I did a few searches related to the content of this blog:

Below is the meat index comparing usage of the words chicken, beef, pork, and turkey (1900-2008):

 

Here's an "industrial agriculture" vs. "organic agriculture" throwdown (1940-2008):

 

Below is the fast food index showing the rise of pizza, hamburger, and fast food (1940-2008):

 

Here's what I'll call the foodie index showing community garden, farmers market, and csa (1900-2008):

Below is the vintage food index showing use of victory garden, pickling, and canning (1900-2000):

 Finally the ag index showing frequency of farm, farmer, and agriculture (1900-2008):

Anatomy of a Fourth of July Cookout

Mint.com has an interesting infographic about the likely sources of food at our 4th of July cookouts. Click on the picture to enlarge it and read the stats - odd are hamburgers from Texas, hot dogs from Iowa, baked beans from North Dakota, lettuce from California, tomatoes from Florida or California.

How the Movie "Food Inc." is Changing the Food Landscape

I was chatting with Gary Angel from Rocky Ridge Ranch last night and he explained that his meat sales have skyrocketed this year. What took him 3 months to sell last year is being snatched up in 2 weeks - whole chickens, steaks, hamburger, bacon, pork, you name it it's selling.

Reflecting on possible causes for the uptick in sales he speculated that the movie "Food Inc." has something to do with it. He's heard a lot of people mention that seeing the movie has led them to seek out alternative sources of meat. I hadn't given it much thought, but I also have heard a chorus of people saying they saw the movie and it has sufficiently freaked them out to seek out non-industrial chicken and beef alternatives.

These are just anecdotal observations, but I do think that Food Inc. may be a game changer in popularizing local small scale beef and chicken, and that along with that we may be on the cusp of seeing ordinary grocery stores get on the band wagon.

The mainstreaming of organic produce is a good example of how this works. Along with mentioning that meat sales are way up, Gary said that their organic produce offerings don't sell like they did five years ago. Another farmer chimed in that organic produce is now available everywhere, "even Walmart has organic produce," he lamented. Organic produce was seen, until very recently, as a fringe food movement, but in the last five to ten years it has moved into the mainstream. You can argue about the effectiveness of organic standards that many say are not strict enough, but there is no doubt that organic produce has arrived.

I'm wondering if we might be on the cusp of a similar transition in what is available at local grocery stores in the meat department. There are currently some half-hearted efforts to provide locally raised beef in grocery stores, but as this recent KREM story highlights, the industry hasn't really made offering meat alternatives a priority because they haven't had to. But Food Inc. may be a game changer. Seeing graphic images of "beef product" soaking in ammonia tends to mess with your head in a way that makes it difficult to turn a blind eye to the source of your meat.

This Diffusion of Innovation chart shows the process of how change is innovated and adopted, with the blue line indicating when various percentages of the population adopt an innovation and the brown line indicating the market share of a product. The blue line is helpful in understanding the various food movements. For my purposes I'll ignore the brown line.

I would put organic produce in the early majority stage of development, with organic produce available everywhere and a growing percentage of people making choices to buy organic. I think the movie Food Inc. signals the transition of local, naturally raised meat from the innovators stage to the early adopters and as the market responds to rising interest I think within the next couple of years smaller scale grass fed beef and more naturally raised chicken will find its way into grocery stores. I think the chorus for change in the meat industry may be reaching a critical mass that shifts markets and moves things like grass-fed beef into the mainstream.

Another way to look at the chart above is that industrial beef and chicken have ridden the wave of innovation over the last 60 years and now take up 100% of the market. What used to be a radical innovation is now the only way we do it. If I had a couple million dollars I sure wouldn't be investing it in a traditional CAFO. I'd be thinking about how to innovate a series of smaller scale, more local, more natural feed lots that have enough capacity to supply Costco. New innovations will rise up in response to the market and I'd want to be on the front end, not the back end of the innovation cycle.

These are just my anecdotal observations so take them for what they're worth.

100 Years of Eating in America in Four Handy Charts

The USDA's Economic Research Service now has a full century of data on food availability in America.

This one-of-a-kind data set measures which food commodities are available to eat at the national level and provides the foundation for estimating if the nutrients available support a healthy, well-nourished citizenry. The data date back to 1909, allowing researchers, marketers, and policymakers to examine historical consumption trends and shifts in food demand.

The four charts below from the linked article are great ways to absorb the data and see the trends in what foods are available per/capita. I'll take a stab at giving the charts names.

The "Have You Ever Noticed that Half the Items
on a Restaurant Menu Have Chicken" Chart

The Cheesehead Century Chart

The "Sweet Potatoes, We Barely Knew Ya" Chart

The "I Wonder What Foods the Government is Subsidizing
and Throwing the Whole System Out of Whack" Chart

Feel free to offer you're own "lame attempts at humor" chart names if you like.