yearofplenty

Washington Monthly - How Washington D.C. is failing farmers

The Washington Monthly has an important article about recent efforts to help independent farmers who are increasingly victims of unscrupulous practices by large meat processors. The gist of the article is that the meat industry has become so consolidated with just a few large corporations that local farmers have no options in the marketplace. The article explains:

The practical result of all this consolidation is that while there are still many independent farmers, there are fewer and fewer processing companies to which farmers can sell. If a farmer doesn’t like the terms or price given by one company, he increasingly has nowhere else to go—and the companies know it. With the balance of power upended, the companies are now free to dictate increasingly outrageous terms to the farmers.

To make things worse, Washington D.C. has lacked the political will to make changes that would help the situation. 

It's a long article but worth the time if you're interested in really understanding the dilemma of our current food system. It also highlights the urgent need for the growth of alternative markets like Co-ops, farmers' markets, and CSA's. 

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.

Congress Rejects Healthier School Lunches - Insists Pizza is a Vegetable

This from the Associated Press:

Congress wants to keep pizza and french fries on school lunch lines, fighting back against an Obama administration proposal to make school lunches healthier.

The final version of a spending bill released late Monday would unravel school lunch standards the Agriculture Department proposed earlier this year, which included limiting the use of potatoes on the lunch line and delaying limits on sodium and delaying a requirement to boost whole grains....

Food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, the salt industry and potato growers requested the changes, and some conservatives in Congress say the federal government shouldn't be telling children what to eat.

I guess the problem with that logic is that the government currently is telling children what to eat based on what they subsidize in the school lunch program. The most jaw-dropping portion of the food bill is that it maintains the current categorization of pizza as a vegetable because of the thin smear of tomato sauce that covers the doughy concoction.

While Congress does the bidding of the tater-tot lobby a new study out of Harvard indicates that potatoes are the biggest culprit in weight gain:

On the basis of increased daily servings of individual dietary components, 4-year weight change was most strongly associated with the intake of potato chips (1.69 lb), potatoes (1.28 lb), sugar-sweetened beverages (1.00 lb), unprocessed red meats (0.95 lb), and processed meats (0.93 lb) and was inversely associated with the intake of vegetables (−0.22 lb), whole grains (−0.37 lb), fruits (−0.49 lb), nuts (−0.57 lb), and yogurt (−0.82 lb).

Maybe it's going to be up to innovative school districts like the one in Chicago to change the direction of school lunch programs. They just instituted an antibiotic-free chicken policy:

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) today began serving local chicken raised without antibiotics to students in 473 schools. This development comes on the heels of a fresh chicken purchase direct from the USDA earlier this fall. The district's new scratch-cooked chicken program includes about 1.2 million pounds from Amish farms that do not use antibiotics, for a total of about two million pounds of fresh chicken in the 2011-12 school year. Students will be offered bone-in chicken two to three times each month.

CPS' enormous purchase of chicken grown without antibiotics, made through food service provider Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality, is the first of its kind. No other district in the nation is serving this kind of poultry regularly at such a scale.

Go here for previous posts on the ongoing debates around school lunch programs.

"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):

Could Your Thanksgiving Turkey be Laced With Arsenic? Short Answer - Yes

NPR has an eye opening report on the common use of roxarsone in poultry like that big Thanksgiving turkey that's thawing out in the sink right now. Roxarsone has been widely used in the poultry industry to help meat birds grow faster and to fight disease, which is especially important considering the nasty conditions many birds are raised in these days. The only problem is that roxarsone contains arsenic, and when the birds eat it, the arsenic takes up residence in the meat.

I reported on this awhile back regarding some backyard laying hens that passed on arsenic to children through the eggs. Go here and here for more background on that particular story. At the time I noted that roxarsone is the organic kind of arsenic, which is less nasty than the inorganic form.

But NPR shares enough details to make me really glad I got my turkey this year from a local farmer:

Keeve Nachman is the science director for the Center for a Livable Future at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He studies arsenic in the food system and has recommended to Congress and the state of Maryland (a big poultry producer) that it ban roxarsone from all poultry feed.

So how big a problem is it for humans?

According to the Poultry & Egg Institute, an industry group, "the benefits of continued use of roxarsone far outweigh the concerns expressed by the media and special interest groups."

But Nachman says certain chemical forms of arsenic are toxic and have been linked to cancer. Recent studies have shown that 65 percent of arsenic in poultry is the inorganic form – the bad one.

Even though poultry producers have been using roxarsone for decades, scientists have only just begun to study how it makes its way through the food chain to humans.

Recently, the Environmental Protection Agency, which is responsible for setting toxicity values for chemicals, reported that arsenic's cancer causing power is 17 times higher than previously believed.

You can bet the cheaper your turkey, the more likely roxarsone was used to fatten it up. The quicker they get it fat the less they have to feed it and the cheaper they can sell it. But as is the case with most cheap food, there are hidden costs. This is a good reminder that when we eat the meat of any animal, we are essentially eating what the animal ate. As consumers we deserve to know what the animals we are eating ate and what they were injected with. For now, the onus is on consumers to do a lot of the leg work and one of the best ways to ensure healthy food is to buy it from a local farmer that you know.

This reminds me of one of Michael Pollan's Food Rules: Pay your farmer more than you pay your doctor.

Chicken Goodness

This picture of mechanically separated chicken has been floating around the internet for over a year. I think it originated here. According to Fooducate:

Someone figured out in the 1960’s that meat processors can eek eke out a few more percent of profit from chickens, turkeys, pigs, and cows by scraping the bones 100% clean of meat. This is done by machines, not humans, by passing bones leftover after the initial cutting through a high pressure sieve. The paste you see in the picture above is the result.

This paste goes on to become the main ingredient in many a hot dog, bologna, chicken nuggets, pepperoni, salami, jerky etc…

The industry calls this method AMR – Advanced Meat Recovery.

I noticed this weekend as I was eating a seafood version of Thai soup that I didn't mind so much eating the processed rolls of imitation crab made from fish paste. Maybe it's the blood or the bones but the picture above makes me glad I don't regularly eat industrial meat products anymore.