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Tyson Foods Sees Higher Meat Prices
Marcus Kabel, Associated Press
Tyson Foods Inc., the world’s largest meat processor, warned Monday that rising corn prices could mean U.S. consumers will have to pay more for chicken, beef and pork next year as it ended its fiscal year with a third straight quarterly loss.
…Tyson Pres. and CEO Richard L. Bond] said the price of corn, which is used as animal feed, is going up because of demand from ethanol plants that are springing up to provide alternative fuel sources to oil.
Corn prices recently reached 10-year highs.
“I believe the American consumer is going to have to pay more for protein. We are at new levels on corn that are not likely going to be retrenching back to ’06 levels,” Bond said in a conference call with analysts.
…”Quite frankly the American consumer is making a choice here. This is either corn for feed or corn for fuel, that’s what’s causing this,” Bond said.
(13 Nov 2006)
L.A. urban farmers plow new fields
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
LOS ANGELES – Farmers evicted from an urban farm in South Los Angeles are planting new roots in Watts, along a narrow power-line right-of-way on public land.
The farmers began tilling the soil at their new farm – about two-thirds the size of the old one – in January, after it became apparent to many of them that the South Los Angeles farm they had worked since 1992 could not be saved.
Sheriff’s deputies forcibly shut down that farm in June after a judge ruled in favor of businessman and landowner Ralph Horowitz after a years-long legal battle. The eviction – and the farmers’ opposition to it – attracted the support of activists and celebrities including Daryl Hannah, Joan Baez and tree-sitter Julia Butterfly Hill.
But those at the new Watts location, called the Stanford/Avalon Farm, left months before the bulldozers arrived.
“There was always a group of people who just wanted to garden. They just wanted to farm,” said Councilwoman Jan Perry, whose district was home to the disputed farm. “It was great to be able to offer people a solution to a difficult situation.”
Perry searched Los Angeles by helicopter, working with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the Department of Water and Power to find vacant public land for the farmers.
The nine-acre Watts site has room for more than 200 family farms and has a waiting list for plots. The 14-acre South-Central Urban Farm supported about 350 farmers.
Some of the other farmers have found new plots at other Los Angeles community gardens, the Watts farmers said. And some continue to fight Horowitz in court.
(Nov 2006)
A locally harvested menu takes some legwork
Jill Wendholt Silva, Kansas City Star
Have you tried the 100-Mile Diet?
It’s tastier than the cabbage diet and has a catchier name. But it’s not really a diet, per se. It’s more an eating philosophy – one that nails the true spirit of Thanksgiving.
The Pilgrims and their Native American guests planned a feast based on what they could grow – not what they could have shipped in 1,500 miles, the average distance food travels in this country.
I stumbled on the 100-Mile Diet while researching a series about local food. Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon, an environmentally conscious couple of Vancouverites, had spent an entire year eating only food grown and processed within 100 miles of their apartment.
Several groups have followed in their footsteps, challenging themselves to eat local for a day, week, a month or just Thanksgiving. (See 100mile diet.org, eatlocalchallenge.com and locavores.com.)
Eating food grown close to home automatically comes with all kinds of warm fuzzies – you can support local farmers and cut down on the fossil fuel needed to ship food, and food in season usually tastes fresher, always my prime motivator.
But eating local is not always easy. Smith and MacKinnon wound up eating turnip “sandwiches” when they couldn’t find wheat that was grown or processed in their area to make bread.
When House + Home editor Cindy Hoedel and I decided to embark on the 100-Mile Thanksgiving, we knew we’d have to modify the traditional New England-borne feast to fit Midwestern realities.
First major obstacle? No turkey … but two dandy local free-range chickens!
Why chicken? Not a lot of turkey is grown and processed within 100 miles of Kansas City. (If you decide to stick to turkey, we’ve included the directions.)
Next, Cindy and I trekked off to the specialty food stores and supermarkets with an ingredient list in hand.
She was supposed to pick up the goat cheese for the salad (you’ll have a difficult time getting your hands on local greens this time of year) and sorghum (OK, slightly outside our 100-mile radius but definitely indigenous to the region).
Then I got a frantic call: Cindy couldn’t find any sorghum or goat cheese even though the Food section has previously featured producers of both items. We spent a Saturday afternoon with cell phones glued to our ears as we tried to find the ingredients we wanted.
After a Sunday of recipe testing, we had a menu. But when I shared the local, seasonal bounty – pumpkins, squashes, cider, pecans, apples, even local sausage for the stuffing – my 8-year-old daughter, Daniela, looked at me dumbstruck.
“Where are the mashed potatoes?” she demanded.
“Oh, there aren’t many local potatoes available this time of year,” I explained. “Sure, there are new potatoes in spring and some more later in the summer, but not much in fall.”
It was a no-go.
“If there are no mashed potatoes in Kansas, I don’t care about eating local,” she passionately replied. “If I have to, I’ll move to Idaho.”
Thanksgiving is ultimately about taking time out of busy lives to share a home-cooked meal with our families. So if your loved ones insist on a turkey and mashed potatoes, by all means serve them.
Whether you adhere to the roughly 100 miles or not, the next time you’re out and about, keep your eyes open for ways to work more local foods into your diet.
To help with your journey, we’ve already put together a list of local sources that offer a taste of what’s in season now.
(19 Nov 2006)
A brilliant set of articles about local food – creating menus based on local ingredients, with a list of sources. Attention food activists: local newspapers would love the idea.
Want to know more about the eat-local movement?
100-Mile Thanksgiving Dinner Menu
The 100-mile shopping list
Registration (free) is required for access to most of the articles in the series.
-BA
Grandma’s Veggies May Have Been More Nutritious
Dan Charles, NPR
If you’re looking for evidence that today’s mass-produced vegetables don’t quite measure up to those your grandparents ate, you can find it in data published by the US Department of Agriculture.
For more than a century, the USDA has measured levels of vitamins and minerals in American food. Donald Davis, a researcher at the University of Texas, compared the USDA figures from 1950 and 1999, for 43 common fruits and vegetables.
“Of the 13 nutrients that we were able to study, we found statistically reliable declines in six of the 13,” he says. Levels of other nutrients stayed roughly constant over the years.
(18 Nov 2006)
One of the USDA researchers questions the accuracy of earlier methods. There’s an audio version of the story which has more information, and reports of a Rodale institute study which concluded that organic crops contain more nutrients. You can access the USDA Food Composition Data here. -AF
