Food & agriculture – May 14

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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

The ‘Process’ of Rebuilding a Local Food Economy
Peter Metcalf, New West Missoula (Montana)
As demand for local food increases, a resurgence of the local processing facilities that once dotted the American landscape has advocates of a more locally-based food system — and economy — optimistic.
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… Cleek manages the recently opened Montana Food Products, LLC, the state’s first for-profit contract packaging facility, or “co-pack” in industry lingo. President Ron Oberlander of Florence opened the facility because he wanted a place to process his line of U.S. Omega3 Food products. He also saw a business opportunity in a facility that other food product entrepreneurs could utilize such as the couple who were in making the salsa they sell in area restaurants shortly before my visit.

For folks who want to build a local food economy, the new food processing facility marks a significant step forward.

Despite soaring demand for locally grown food, it remains primarily available only fresh, raw and in season, such as the delicious piles of salad greens, snap peas and summer squash that will soon fill the stalls of the region’s Farmer’s Markets, or as baked goods and jams, products allowed under state regulations to be made without a certified commercial kitchen. But many people would also like to purchase salad dressings for those raw vegetables, sauerkraut to pile on their elk sausage, or frozen Bitterroot Macs to make an apple pie in the winter, all made from locally grown ingredients.

Yet processed local food products like these are practically non-existent in Montana due to a lack of processing and storage facilities. This lack of infrastructure severely restricts what months of the year and what Montana-grown food products Montanans can eat. Expanded food processing facilities like Montana Food Products will help more Montanans eat local food. This is especially true for institutions like Missoula County Public Schools which rely extensively on processed food from a supplier for their students.

“We really are looking at how do we increase the capacity of Montanans to feed themselves,” said Jan Tusick, a leading advocate for local economic development in the food industry.

Food processing facilities once dotted the state, especially creameries and meatpacking facilities but also canneries, sugar beet factories and cereal grain processing plants. Cheap, efficient transportation networks and the decades-long trend of consolidation in the food packing industry, like agriculture as a whole, shuttered most of these facilities in favor of mega-operations closer to the nation’s population centers.

That loss translates into a huge economic loss for the state as dollars flow out of state to purchase food.
(12 May 2009)

Michael Pollan Dishes out Advice on Healthful Eating
Rob Kasper, The Baltimore Sun
Michael Pollan’s advice on healthful eating is refreshingly straightforward: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

Pollan, who has written tomes on food including the best-seller The Omnivore’s Dilemma, said he deliberately kept his latest book, In Defense of Food, An Eater’s Manifesto, short and simple.

“The deeper I delved into the whole field of nutrition science and the whole issue of what you should eat, the simpler it got,” Pollan said in a phone interview from Berkeley, Calif.

“I was able to cut through the underbrush and discover that those seven words say it all. That was a little alarming to my publisher because she was expecting 50- or 60,000 words.

… Pollan said part of the reason we are confused about what to eat is that we recently got a lot of bad advice from so-called experts. For instance, the public-health campaign that urged eaters to abandon butter, which has saturated fat, and replace it with margarine, which is loaded with trans-fats, was based on bad science, he said.

“We traded in a fat that had been part of the human diet for eons for one that looked novel, but turned out to be much more dangerous. Getting people off lard and chicken fat and butter and putting them on hydrogenated oils has been a public-health disaster, and we are owed an apology,” he said.

Pollan, who teaches journalism to graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, was also critical of the way the media has covered food and nutrition.

“The authors of the new nutritional studies get hyped. The editors of the newspapers want front-page stories, and the net effect, since journalism thrives on change, is that journalists tend to exaggerate every change in the science. Science is an iterative process. Scientists make mistakes they refine, but as you watch the twists and turns in a newspaper, you would think every news study is blowing up the one before.”

… His career as a writer is, he said, a confluence of his passion for gardening and his study of American nature writing.

“One of the lessons you learn when you start gardening is that you have a legitimate quarrel with other species, weeds and pests. How you navigate that quarrel is going to define you as a gardener,” he said.
(13 May 2009)
Also posted at Common Dreams.

How should we eat to ensure a sustainable future?
University of Technology Sidney (UTS) – Australia
What do obesity, factory farming, fair trade, peak oil, peak phosphorus and climate change have in common? Why might our ‘pee’ one day be worth its weight in gold?

With three expert speakers, this lecture puts our daily dinner table and supermarket choices under the spotlight. It questions the kind of human diet our planet can sustain and looks at how we could reduce demand on global resources, while maintaining a balanced diet and ethical food industry.

Finally you’ll hear about the great global phosphorus crisis. Vital to plant and animal growth, the value of this element is sky-rocketing as supply from a few mines world-wide decreases. Our days of peeing phosphorus down the drain and food production processes demanding an excess of phosphorus may soon be costly habits of the past.
(23 February 2009)
Slides, audio and other material are available for this conference which took place in February. Individual talks at
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/foraradio/stories/2009/2561542.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/foraradio/stories/2009/2561528.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/foraradio/stories/2009/2561532.htm

There is No Box: Big Ideas About Urban Agriculture and Local Food Systems
Rose Hayden-Smith, Civil Eats
I’ve been pondering a lot the last three weeks, trying to think outside the box, and trying to proceed as if there is no box at all. Two weeks of conferences in a row, one the Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference, the second sponsored by the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources. Very different conferences, but a common theme: Food Systems All the Time.

At the UC-sponsored professional conference that I recently attended, I had the opportunity to hear historian James McWilliams speak. I have read some of McWilliams’s work previously and greatly admire his research and work. (He’s also an incredibly likable and humorous man on a personal level). Like me, McWilliams is an historian attempting to use the past to inform current public policy in the nation’s food system.

… McWilliams’ opened his talk by asserting that fixing the food system is one of the most pressing tasks we face in this country. Agreed. Nearly every problem we face as a nation can be addressed in some way – and in some big ways – by improving the current food system. But McWilliams made a statement with which I heartily disagree: essentially, that the Locavore movement seeks to “banish to the dustbin” other models.

I’ve never termed myself a “Locavore,” although I’m a strong believer in the value of strong local and regional food systems, and actively promote them. I believe that multiple food systems exist – and probably always will – and that most of us participate in several kinds of food systems simultaneously. I don’t seek the destruction of any food system. I seek instead, the room and opportunity to develop alternatives for the places and situations in our country where the predominant, or meta, food system is not working effectively.

McWilliams argued for a kind of pragmatism that I find appealing in a general and theoretical sense…work within the system rather than against it. There’s a certain logic in that…perhaps…sometimes. Using the success of Forest Ethics as a model, McWilliams argued that those of us advocating for local food systems should be more pragmatic, reconsider working with agribusiness, find common ground, seek real solutions, and be prepared to compromise some, to seek evolution in the food system rather than revolution. McWilliams presents a persuasive model, in a persuasive way. Evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

But I’ve had other people to persuade me, too, to remind me that real change is needed, and needed now. Will Allen is someone I admire immensely. I heard him speak (again) the week before McWilliams made his presentation at UC. The creator of Growing Power, a MacArthur genius grant recipient, and a national leader in the sustainable food systems movement, Allen provides eloquent testimony about the kinds of changes needed to make the food system more effectively meet the needs of some parts of urban America. In his case, that has involved creating a new kind of food system model. What he has done in Milwaukee within a framework of urban agriculture is simply astounding. There is a lot to be learned from this work. Allen is a big man, physically; he also has big ideas. What I love about his work is that he applies his visionary ideas in ways that are highly impactful on the local level. I believe his work has the ability to be scaled up, which could have positive implications for other urban areas.

Allen has recently published a manifesto proposing a novel and worthy public policy idea, suggesting the creation of a “public-private enabling institution” called the Centers for Urban Agriculture. Per Allen’s document:

It would incorporate a national training and outreach center, a large working urban farmstead, a research and development center, a policy institute, and a state-of-the-future urban agriculture demonstration center into which all of these elements would be combined in a functioning community food system scaled to the needs of a large city. We proposed that this working institution – not a “think tank” but a “do tank” – be based in Milwaukee, where Growing Power has already created an operating model on just two acres. But ultimately, satellite centers would become established in urban areas across the nation. Each would be the hub of a local or regional farm-to-market community food system that would provide sustainable jobs, job training, food production and food distribution to those most in need of nutritional support and security.

An academic with the University of California, Agriculture and Natural Resources, Rose Hayden-Smith’s work focuses on providing gardening and food systems education to youth, educators and community audiences. A practicing U.S. historian, she is a nationally recognized expert on Victory Gardens, wartime food policies, and school garden programs. She is a 2008-2009 Food and Society Policy Fellow (FASP). The creator of UC’s Victory Grower website and blog, her work can be found at http://groups.ucanr.org/victorygrower/
(12 May 2009)
The food specialists are having their worlds shaken up. What is the significance of McWilliams’s absurd claim that the Locavore movement seeks to “banish to the dustbin” other models?” And that the local food movement needs to be more pragmatic in working with agri-business?

Article is also posted at Common Dreams
-BA