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Reconsider What You Eat
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
The whole question of how to eat ethically can seem like a giant project. Do you focus on local? Organic? Grass-fed? Fair Trade? How do you find it?
We all are starting to wake up to just how huge an issue food is. Greenhouse emissions from CAFO livestock, local food security, soil depletion, water issues – the whole thing is complicated. Now I’m not going to tell anyone what to eat – personally, I think the most important thing one can do is adapt to one’s personal and local realities. That is, what I eat, here in the cold, rainy, rocky northeast, on a farm, in a Jewish family of six with strong culinary ties to Asia is likely to be very different than the right and ethical diet for a poor, African-American family in DC, or a Hispanic ranching family in New Mexico, or upper-middle class Swedish Lutheran suburbanites in Wisconsin. What you eat is shaped by multiple factors – where you live, what you can afford, what you care most about, what culture you come from, what you grew up eating, how much water you have, what your climate is, how hard it is to get the kind of food you want, etc…
But I will tell you what we eat, and how we made our own choices. …the basic issues, in, what I think is the correct order of priority, run like this to me.
- The health of my family – which includes the long term health of my family on a liveable planet.
- Greenhouse gas emissions
- Fairness for Farmers and farm workers (which includes support of local agriculture and fair trade)
- Local food sovereignty – that is, making sure my region can support its population if necessary
- Increasing biodiversity, the range of crops we rely upon and the range of species
- Careful use of water and soil
- Humane treatment of animals
(3 September 2007)
Short on Labor, Farmers in U.S. Shift to Mexico
Julia Preston, New York Times
CELAYA, Mexico – Steve Scaroni, a farmer from California, looked across a luxuriant field of lettuce here in central Mexico and liked what he saw: full-strength crews of Mexican farm workers with no immigration problems.
Farming since he was a teenager, Mr. Scaroni, 50, built a $50 million business growing lettuce and broccoli in the fields of California, relying on the hands of immigrant workers, most of them Mexican and many probably in the United States illegally.
But early last year he began shifting part of his operation to rented fields here. Now some 500 Mexicans tend his crops in Mexico, where they run no risk of deportation.
“I’m as American red-blood as it gets,” Mr. Scaroni said, “but I’m tired of fighting the fight on the immigration issue.”
A sense of crisis prevails among American farmers who rely on immigrant laborers, more so since immigration legislation in the United States Senate failed in June and the authorities announced a crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants. An increasing number of farmers have been testing the alternative of raising crops across the border where there is a stable labor supply, growers and lawmakers in the United States and Mexico said.
(5 September 2007)
Are air miles and organic food compatible?
Peter Melchett, Guardian
Air freight is the most unsustainable and fastest growing part of our food supply. Around 1% of all food comes to the UK by air, but it is responsible for 11% of CO2 emissions from UK food transport and pumps out 177 times more CO2 per food mile than shipping.
As climate change becomes a reality we have to make hard choices about how and where we grow our food. Partly as a result of weird weather patterns, global food and oil prices are rising. While the cost of fossil fuels will fluctuate, oil is becoming scarcer, and long-term price rises seem inevitable. We need food which not only produces less greenhouse gases but also enables us to deal with the instability caused by climate change and declining fossil fuel supplies. This will require robust farming and food distribution systems that do not contribute to climate change or rely on fossil fuels.
There is a contradiction between air freight and the core organic principles of care for the environment and for the well being of future generations.
Peter Melchett is policy director of the Soil Association.
(6 September 2007)
The Compost Post
Robert Rapier, The Oil Drum
“We stand, in most places on earth, only six inches from desolation, for that is the thickness of the topsoil layer upon which the entire life of the planet depends.” R. Neil Sampson in Farmland or Wasteland: A Time to Choose
One of my interests, dating back 25 years to when I was a member of my local FFA land judging team, is soil conservation. I have long been interested in things like terra preta and composting because of their ability to build topsoil.
But I never thought much about how difficult it can be to build up topsoil until I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy – Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars (great books, by the way). The books trace a future hypothetical terraforming of Mars, and one of the major difficulties the characters face is producing topsoil on the planet. It was then that my interest in the mechanisms for topsoil erosion and topsoil production greatly increased.
(7 September 2007)
The story of the English apple is one of patriotism, dysfunction and cheap jam
Ian Jack, The Guardian
In a field by the M2 grows the largest collection of fruit trees in the world
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The season of the English apple is approaching, the season when apple-eaters wonder why there aren’t more of them in the shops, contesting the dominance of fruit from North America, Chile, Europe, South Africa, New Zealand and China. Long before farmers’ markets, the slow food movement and Professor Tim Lang’s coining of the phrase “food miles”, the fate of the English apple (as well as the smaller crops of Scotland, Ireland and Wales) struck melancholy notes in conversations with greengrocers.
…No matter where they come from, carrots look like carrots and potatoes potatoes. With apples, the change from home-growns to imports struck the eye before it reached the tongue. From the mid-1970s, when Britain joined the common market and European fruit tariffs disappeared, France’s Golden Delicious apple in its uniform rows of pale yellow knocked the greens and reds of English apples from the shelves. It became a cliche to complain about them – their lack of taste and too-soft texture – but also to eat them. The French campaign was persuasive. Golden Delicious were easy to grow and resistant to disease. Their skins were smooth, their shape even, and they lasted a long time in a cool warehouse.
…The English apple would have been coming into season [in September], as in every year since the Romans introduced it nearly 2,000 years before. Henry VIII had orchards nearby in Teynham, and from about that time the apple began to be seen as a patriotic food. In an excellent history, The New Book of Apples by Joan Morgan and Alison Richards, the authors say it was an especially Protestant fruit, one favoured by God’s Elect as the food men and women ate before the Fall. It was conventional wisdom that France had no decent apples, the French being besotted with the pear.
Then things began to go wrong. When, in the 18th century, beer finally won its battle with cider as the national drink, many orchards were grubbed up. Worse was to come when Britain adopted a free-trade policy and lowered the duty on imported foodstuffs. French, American and empire apples were crated and barrelled into every industrial town. By the 1840s the Kentish orchards “had become gnarled, cankered and unproductive”
(8 September 2007)
Fascinating history. Food isn’t just calories – it’s culture, economics and health. One quibble — it’s not true that carrots and potatoes all taste the same, as the author asserts. Some carrots are orange-colored blahness, whereas the taste of others screams out “I am a carrot!”. -BA
