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Chef: Change We Can Stomach
Dan Barber, New York Times
COOKING, like farming, for all its down-home community spirit, is essentially a solitary craft. But lately it’s feeling more like a lonely burden. Finding guilt-free food for our menus – food that’s clean, green and humane – is about as easy as securing a housing loan. And we’re suddenly paying more – 75 percent more in the last six years – to stock our pantries. Around the world, from Cairo to Port-au-Prince, increases in food prices have governments facing riots born of shortages and hunger. It’s enough to make you want to toss in the toque.
But here’s the good news: if you’re a chef, or an eater who cares about where your food comes from (and there are a lot of you out there), we can have a hand in making food for the future downright delicious.
Farming has the potential to go through the greatest upheaval since the Green Revolution, bringing harvests that are more healthful, sustainable and, yes, even more flavorful. The change is being pushed along by market forces that influence how our farmers farm.
Until now, food production has been controlled by Big Agriculture, with its macho fixation on “average tonnage” and “record harvests.” But there’s a cost to its breadbasket-to-the-world bragging rights. Like those big Industrial Age factories that once billowed black smoke, American agriculture is mired in a mind-set that relies on capital, chemistry and machines. Food production is dependent on oil, in the form of fertilizers and pesticides, in the distances produce travels from farm to plate and in the energy it takes to process it.
… To encourage small, diversified farms is not to make a nostalgic bid to revert to the agrarian ways of our ancestors. It is to look toward the future, leapfrogging past the age of heavy machinery and pollution, to farms that take advantage of the sun’s free energy and use the waste of one species as food for another.
Chefs can help move our food system into the future by continuing to demand the most flavorful food. Our support of the local food movement is an important example of this approach, but it’s not enough. As demand for fresh, local food rises, we cannot continue to rely entirely on farmers’ markets. Asking every farmer to plant, harvest, drive his pickup truck to a market and sell his goods there is like asking me to cook, take reservations, serve and wash the dishes.
We now need to support a system of well-coordinated regional farm networks, each suited to the food it can best grow.
Dan Barber is the chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns.
(11 May 2008)
Recommended by contributor CL. Shepherd Bliss writes:
Yesterday’s Sunday NY Times published the following important article on farming. It reveals some of the consequences of the decine in oil supplies and the need to return to small family farms. It is something that many of us have been saying for years. As the signs grow that America is declining, it is urgent, in my opinion, that more people read such articles and consider if they might grow more of their own food, as well as for others.
Super Spuds
Big Gav, Peak Energy (Australia)
My recent post on in vitro meat sparked a little discussion about whether or not man can live on potatos alone. I’m not quite sure what the truth of the matter is (some say they lack Vitamin A and calcium, so you need to supplement them with milk for example – in which case man could perhaps live on mashed potatos alone – others that if you eat the skins as well you will radiate health – assuming you can make yourself eat enough of them every day).
It turns out that 2008 is the year of the potato and as I’ve seen a few stories on them lately I’ll do a mini spud news roundup.
(13 May 2008)
Excerpts, comments and photos at original.
Low cost labor and untaxed fuel cause migrations of frozen fish
Marc, Eat Local Challenge
Some of the world’s sea creatures make incredible migrations to feed or mate. Tuna, for example, swim back and forth across the Atlantic or Pacific. In the global economy, some fish go on long migrations even after they have been frozen.
The new book “Bottomfeeder,” by Taras Grescoe provides a fascinating look at the state of the world’s oceans … Near the end of the book, Grescoe visits a fish processing facility in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Some of the fish that go through the plant have been on long migrations before arriving and some fish continue their migration after processing.
About the plant’s operations, Grescoe writes:
High Liner’s fish sticks were made from pollock that was caught, filleted, chopped up and frozen in factory vessels on the Bering Sea. It arrived at High Liner, after being trucked across Canada in frozen pre-minced blocks, with the skin and fat removed. By the time they got to this factory, where they were sawn into oblong portions, covered in batter and bread, and deep-fried, they had already traveled 4,300 miles. In the worst case scenario, a salmon farmed on the Chilean coast would be sent by container ship to Dalian, China to be filleted, then shipped back across the Pacific to Vancouver. From there it would cross Canada by truck, be processed and packaged in Lunenburg, and go right back out the door. If it ended up in a supermarket in, say, San Diego, that salmon would have traveled 22,300 miles, a distance close to the circumference of the earth.
Although these journeys might seem crazy, I have no doubt that they make financial sense in today’s business environment where there is little, if any, cost to emit carbon dioxide.
(11 May 2008)
Recommended by contributor Bill Henderson.
Rooted in the Soil
Neva Hassanein, Edible Missoula via New West
Over the last decade, a movement to build a vibrant local and regional food system has gained tremendous momentum in Western Montana. As someone involved in this effort, I smile when I step back and look at how many pieces of the localization puzzle have begun to fall into place. While there is much to celebrate, the challenges have become clearer too. In the face of rapid population growth and development, one of the biggest hurdles of all may be saving fertile soil — the medium in which our local food system must be rooted. Yet, opportunities for innovative and collaborative problem solving present themselves.
Advocates have done a good job of creating markets for local foods, and the examples are inspiring. Several towns in the region — from Noxon to Polson to Hamilton — host farmers’ markets.
… We are literally trying to build a local food economy that can serve and even expand these new markets in terms of production, processing and distribution. Moving toward a system of greater self-reliance when it comes to food — an essential need — increases our security, as factors like climate change, food safety, and rising oil prices raise serious questions about the sustainability of the global food system we have come to depend on. To meet these goals, though, we need to protect working landscapes now.
… Right now, agricultural lands are usually more affordable to developers than to farmers and ranchers. With development pressures pushing up land prices, new or expanding agriculturalists find it hard, if not impossible, to buy land and pay for it through agriculture, especially when economic returns are low.
… there is a growing recognition among policy makers, innovative developers and local food advocates that our agricultural soils are a finite and irreplaceable resource. Fertile soils take thousands of years to develop based on a combination of geology, climate, and biology. Each soil is unique, with its own character, history, and abilities to support plants and animals.
… Members of the Community Food and Agriculture Coalition (CFAC) have been learning about tools that other localities are using to protect agricultural land and thinking about how they might be tailored to our local area. Here are four ideas:
A Mitigation Ordinance. …
Transfer of Development Rights (TDR). …
Land Link Montana. …
Incubator Farms. …
Neva Hassanein is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Montana and a member of the Community Food and Agriculture Coalition of Missoula County.
(11 May 2008)
Phosphate latest craze for investors
Robin Bromby, The Australian
NO sooner does one mania finish, it seems, than another one is off to the races.
… This time it’s phosphate. Look what happened with Uramet Minerals (URM) and Krucible Metals (KRM) in the past few days. The former’s stock shot up to an intraday gain of 250 per cent after it announced finding phosphate in grab samples at its Thorntonia project north of Mt Isa and — more importantly — next to the Lady Annie deposit controlled by Joseph Gutnick.
… Peter Mourits of NZ’s largest fertiliser supplier, Ballance Agri-Nutrients, made two points. One, there is no shortage of raw materials reserves and, two, new projects are well into the planning stages.
He didn’t cite examples, but we can. Morocco and Western Sahara have enough known phosphate to meet the world’s demand at present levels for 300 years. And big money is going into new production, including a new mine in Morocco (the so-called Saudi Arabia of phosphate). An Indian company is to spend $US1.5 billion ($1.6 billion) to build a fertiliser plant in Mozambique, a country with large known resources of phosphate. And another Indian company has teamed up with Singapore money to develop new mines.
It is true that phosphate is going to be in huge demand to meet world food needs. But it’s a long way from grab samples to bagging the end product.
One final point: there may be pauses in demand growth as fertiliser use is hit by price resistance. In the past few days, there have been reports that farmers in The Philippines may no longer be able to afford it, and that NZ farmers may use less superphosphate due to cost blow-outs.
(12 May 2008)
Contributor SP writes:
Covers just about every major raw material known/needed for the technological society.
The authors spot in the paper is called PURE SPECULATION. Maybe.
BA:
The figure of “300 years” worth of phosphate seems strange. Most references in the literature are far less than that.
Planting ideas to solve the food supply crisis
David Runnalls, Leader-Post
… Unsustainable farming practices are at the heart of the [food/agriculture] problem, but changing practices will require co-operation and leadership of the world’s largest suppliers of food, which includes Canada as the fourth-largest agriculture and agri-food exporter, after the EU, U.S. and Brazil.
… In summary, Canada’s policy priorities to the world food crisis should be essentially threefold: to increase the resilience of Canadian agriculture to climate change; secondly, to critically review Canadian biofuels policy, and thirdly, to increase the agricultural component of Canadian ODA with the intent of increasing the food self-sufficiency in the most food-insecure countries.
– Runnalls is president and CEO of the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development, which champions sustainable development around the world through innovation, partnerships, research and communications.
(12 May 2008)
Food Crisis Symptom of Dubious Liberalisation
Aileen Kwa, IPS
The high food prices that have sparked riots in many parts of the developing world — from Indonesia, India and Bangladesh to Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire and Haiti — should come as no surprise. These are only the latest in a series of events many developing countries have suffered as a result of opening their borders and neglecting domestic agriculture.
A large number of developing countries have conscientiously implemented World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditions and World Trade Organisation (WTO) commitments. They have applied the given structural adjustment policies — and have seen the damaging consequences to their domestic agricultural sector.
The consequence has been the certain erosion of their capacity to produce their own food.
In the era of stronger state control in the 1970s and even the early 1980s, domestic food markets in the developing world were often in the hands of state marketing boards and cooperatives. Marketing boards would guarantee floor prices, and provide fertilisers and seeds. They also controlled import volumes, redistributed food where there were production shortfalls, and purchased commodities from cooperatives.
These marketing boards were not always run in the best possible way; there were many instances of corruption or inefficiency, but they did fulfil certain critical functions. Farmers were provided a market to sell their produce to, which meant they had a livelihood. Prices were stable even though they were often lower than what farmers would have liked.
(12 May 2008)
