Thoughts on the President-Elect

I am extremely hopeful about the new presidency of Barack Obama. Hopeful, because the nation is fighting two wars that need resolution. Hopeful, because the economy needs stewardship to lead us out of a morass of debt and financial opportunism that reigned for a decade. And hopeful, because Obama has the promise of bringing together a nation.

Now this blog is about food, but what is food without culture, without polity, without a decent house and extended family around the table? Obama’s campaign more than anything was about how we relate to each other as a nation in order to make the promise of this nation work.

To be sure, Obama has challenges, major challenges, and like most candidates, we don’t necessarily know what he’s going to do to address them. Nor do we really know in our corner of the world whether sustainable agriculture, organic agriculture, farmers markets, healthy food, and food justice will now get the attention they deserve. But again, I am hopeful, because Obama is at least aware of these issues; he has read Michael Pollan, and presumably is aware of the folly of programs like ethanol subsides, as this industry implodes, despite his past support of them.

Government will likely take a bigger role -- it already has in the financial crisis-management of a Republican incumbent -- but it could also get smarter, far smarter. It could better harness markets so that they work towards social good, create incentives for clean energy and green jobs and green agriculture, and deal head on with the most fundamental issue facing the human race: climate change. In a more immediate sense, he could take leadership in a way that's been notably missing and begin to untangle the housing mess at the root of the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

The answer to all these problems isn’t just more government, as the Democrats have learned, but a government that sets the playing field, writes the rules and umpires the game as markets do their work. In the past administration, government was hands off in the most irresponsible fashion -- something that even Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted -- or hands-on in an unbalanced, even unfair way. What we need now is not a government that picks winners and losers and works for big lobbies, but rather sets the parameters for environmental goals and then unleashes markets to reach them. What Al Gore is calling sustainable capitalism. This is vital, because as he notes, nature does not do bailouts.

Will this happen? I don't know. But given Obama’s remarks, and perhaps more importantly, his bearing, I am more hopeful than I’ve been in any recent election. Let change begin.

- Samuel Fromartz

Now for your viewing pleasure, the Pointer Sisters, "Yes We Can Can"

Humane Animal Proposition Wins in California

Proposition 2, the modest humane measure that would give animals the right to stand up and move around, passed in California by a wide margin of 63 to 37%. 

What this shows is that when humane animal issues are put in front of voters, and the veil removed from factory farm practices, they will begin to support the animals.

Though opponents said it would put egg farmers out of business in California, that criticism ignored a shift that was already underway by major buyers such as Safeway, Burger King, and other food service operations. Chalk this up as a milestone in the animal welfare movement.
- Samuel Fromartz

Organic Pasture Rule Gets Media Ink

Bloomberg's Cindy Skrzycki had a good explanatory column on the organic pasture rule in the Washington Post, noting my "big win" comment she first read here. But she quoted others who questioned the USDA's motives, like Ronnie Cummins over at the Organic Consumers Association. The USDA has lost credibility in the past on decisions in the organic sector, so it will be interesting to see if this attempt to close the grazing loophole will restore its stature at all.

I also wonder if presidential politics played a role at all in the timing of the decision -- that is, in trying to get the rule through before a new administration comes in. The Bush administration is actually quite busy weakening regulations across the board so this might be that rare, under-the-radar instance of an actual tightening, reflecting a broad industry and consumer consensus. Still, they might have wanted to get it done before the new guys arrived and started meddling again ... just a guess.
- Samuel Fromartz

Organics on NPR's Marketplace

NPR's marketplace had a quick segment on organics in light of Whole Foods earnings report due out on Wednesday.

I'm quoted noting that organic consumers who believe strongly in organics will stick with it, but they will seek out value. They key for Whole Foods is how well they execute in value categories and shift their image. (They are succeeding beyond expectations in organic milk, their private label supplier tells me). My overall point was perhaps missed: organic consumers in this climate are shopping value, wherever it is, which is why Whole Foods is emphasizing the segment with products and even tips from its shoppers.

- Samuel Fromartz

Recession Hits: "Not Even Fruit Loops to Give Out"

By Samuel Fromartz

Given the recent financial crisis, deepening recession, and looming food crisis for the poor, I thought it a good time to contact Mark Winne, author of the excellent and readable book Closing the Food Gap, published earlier this year.

Winne worked on getting food for low-income communities in Hartford,  Conn., at a time when the middle class -- and supermarkets -- were exiting the city in droves. He sought to do this with food from local farms and fledgling community gardens (where the community was at times ambivalent about the endeavor, as he recounts in his book). Now this was long before local food was all the rage. In fact, we're talking about the late 1970s and 1980s .

Even back then, he saw the potential conflict in trying to protect the livelihood of farmers and also provide access to healthy and affordable food -- a conflict that lives with us, with even more intensity today.

With the news rising about food scarcity for the poor, I emailed him a few questions to muse on our current situation.

Fromartz: Economists are predicting the deepest recession since 1980-81, possibly the worst recession of the post-World War II era.  Was this the tsunami you always feared when working on food access issues in the inner city?

Winne: Yes, this could be the Big One that we've always feared. We indeed have all the makings of a perfect storm -- rising energy and food prices, caving financial markets, and high unemployment. There will be many victims, but unfortunately not the ones who got us into this mess, namely the tasseled loafer crowd.

What I dread the most is the impact that a massive economic downtown will have on the poor and the near poor. Taken together, those two categories constitute almost a third of all Americans. Just when we were starting to put together the political will and economic resources to turn things around in low-wealth communities, states are slashing their budgets, the federal government is using all their/our money to bail out the banks, and the lines at food banks are growing longer. Right now the Food Stamp Program has more people enrolled than at any time in its 40 year history, and food banks don't even have Fruit Loops to give out.

Fromartz: Wal-Mart recently reported that it noticed a spike in sales of baby formula around payday, which means these shoppers can only afford bare necessities when they get paid. In your experience, is this unusual?

Winne: When times get tough, as they are now, you will see unusual forms of consumer behavior. What's happening at Wal-Mart is nothing more than the kind of coping strategies that lower income families have always been forced to resort to: stretching the paycheck as far as they can, putting off paying the rent or the credit card bill in order to eat, or sending their children out to play with their friends late in the afternoon in hopes that their friends' family will invite them for supper. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has euphemistically labeled these strategies "food insecurity", which means nothing more than people adapting to harsh circumstances to survive. Right now, according to USDA, that's 35 million Americans, a number that is likely to go up when they release their latest findings very soon.

Fromartz: You've written about the lack of access to healthy, fresh food in the inner city. Have you encountered an example of any company really willing to tackle this issue or will the solutions come from elsewhere?

Winne: One of the best examples of a public/private partnership designed to bring food stores back into underserved communities is the Fresh Food Financing Initiative created by the State of Pennsylvania and advocated for by the Philadelphia Food Trust. Since the program was created in 2005, it has financed the development of over 20 new supermarkets, resulting in one million square feet of new food retail space and 2,500 new jobs. What I find particularly interesting about these new stores is that they are all independent food stores operators. Not a single major chain supermarket has stepped up to the plate.

This suggests to me that the answers are going to come from a combination of good solid advocacy and research by non-profit organizations, the public sector closing the financing gap with taxpayer funds, and indigenous businesses -- those that already exist in the communities and know the terrain. In saying that, I think it is unfortunate that major corporations that walked away from inner-city America over the past 30 years don't have the decency or the character to reinvest once again in those communities.

Fromartz: Michael Pollan and others have argued that cheap food (the subsidized corn-soy-meat driven food system) doesn't reflect its true cost, in terms of environmental damage or health-related expenses. If food did reflect its true cost would the poor be better off or worse off?

Winne: Like everybody else, I love Michael Pollan. We're both former Connecticut boys which means we have nutmeg running in our veins. But Michael gives short shrift to what his vision for a responsible food system would do to America's poor. Without a doubt, his ideas, if put into practice, would send the food insecurity rates into the stratosphere, unless there was a plan ready to be launched simultaneously that would enable low-income families to buy the same high quality, all-costs-accounted-for food that affluent foodies buy. So far, he hasn't shared that plan with anyone that I know.

Fromartz: What is your ideal vision for an urban food system?

Winne: Community gardens and farmers' markets in every neighborhood; food integrated into every aspect of the school life; supermarkets readily accessible to all major population centers and adequately serviced by public transportaton; and food policy councils that actively and effectively engage citizens and policy makers in monitoring and improving the performance of the community's food systems.

Fromartz: In a new administration, what is the No. 1 policy initiative the president can take to raise food access for low-income people?

Winne: One of the very little victories that came out the 2008 Farm Bill was the requirement that USDA conduct a "food desert" study, meaning that they assess the barriers and recommend solutions to making healthy and affordable food available in all communities.

The results of that study should be sitting on the new President's desk on January 20, 2009, and within his first 100 days he should send to Congress a bill to create a "Re-Store America" program that will do some of what the Pennsylvania FFFI program has done, but add to it funding for farmers' markets, community and urban gardens, infrastructure that will aid in the development of local and sustainable food systems, and initiatives that will promote food competency in our nation's schools.

Organic Controversy in Britain

There was a good segment on the BBC's Food Programme a couple of weeks ago on organic food in Britain, which is facing some of the same challenges and controversies over scale that have roiled the industry in the U.S. It also explores what consumers are doing in a world of higher prices and lower incomes. So if you've got  25 minutes and an interest in the organic food industry, check out this link for the Real Audio file.   

Organic Middlemen on a Mission

Did you ever wonder where your organic, local food might come from when it appears in a supermarket or restaurant?

In this article I wrote for Edible Portland, I highlighted a couple of wholesalers who are proving vital to the local and organic foods movement. Toooften, middlemen are derided in sustainable agriculture circles, where the emphasis is usually on buying direct from farmers markets and the like. But selling wholesale works for a lot of farmers, as the article points out. A shout out to Portland's EcoTrust for requesting this story!

Here's the lede:

It might be hard to believe that this cold, dank, 27,000-square-foot warehouse in Eugene, Oregon, across the road from several natural gas storage tanks and a giant commercial composting operation, represents a distant ideal of food distribution. But it just might. The cement loading docks of Organically Grown Company are quiet at 8 a.m., but earlier in the morning, well before dawn, workers here and at another facility twice as big in Portland were pushing pallets of organic produce into waiting trucks. Some are stamped with the LADYBUG label, indicating produce grown on farms in the Pacific Northwest. (read on...)

Farmers and Politics and Obama

If you look at those electoral maps of the United States, you often see a big red swath going right through farm country from the Dakotas to Texas. In the organic sector, my impression is that the biggest political force is libertarianism, because these are people who went off on their own, who didn't trust the dominant ideology, whatever it was, and who wanted to do their own thing on the farm.

But they still vote. And in that regard, I'll say two things. First I was encouraged that Obama had actually read and thought about Michael Pollan's Letter to the Next President in the New York Times magazine. Secondly, I thought of farmers when I viewed this video from People in the Middle for Obama (which I first saw on Andrew Sullivan's blog).

- Samuel Fromartz

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rBg_tFkjE0&hl=en&fs=1]

Organic Animals Must Graze, USDA Rules

Resolving a longstanding dispute, the USDA published a proposed pasture regulation that sets new grazing requirements for organic livestock and bans confined feedlots from the industry.

Dairy farmers had been pushing for this rule for at least three years, though variations had been proposed since at least 2000. According to the USDA's document on the regulation, published in the Federal Register, more than 85,000 people sent in letters in support of a stricter pasture requirement (pdf).

Advocates say the USDA actually got the new pasture regulation right. In a press release from the National Organic Coalition, Kathie Arnold, a New York State organic dairy farmer, said: “This draft rule provides specific language needed for enforcement of one of the central tenets of organically produced livestock—that organic livestock spend a considerable part of their lives in their natural pasture habitat and receive a significant portion of their food from fresh, green, growing pasture.”

Previously, the USDA required organic livestock to have "access to pasture," a term that was so loosely interpreted that  several prominent organic CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) arose in the industry, housing thousands of cows with little or no grazing on pasture. The pasture loophole undermined the purpose and intent of organic livestock agriculture.

Now, "Dry lots and feedlots are prohibited," the proposed regulation says.

Animals must graze throughout the growing season, which in some regions may be for the entire year. The bare minimum nationally would be 120 days. In the document, the USDA explains:

In the United States, growing seasons range from 121 days to 365 days, depending on location. By using the growing season as the minimum time period for grazing, the regulations ensure that ruminants raised in areas with longer grazing periods are not denied the opportunity to graze for more than the minimum of 120 days.

In addition 30% of a cow's nutritional needs must be met by pasture, which means they must be eating fresh grass.

If this rule is adopted, as expected, after the 60 day comment period, it will undo the disturbing rise of organic CAFOs and require that organic livestock graze on pasture, as consumers and farmers overwhelmingly expect.

In short, the regulation looks like a big win for organic integrity.

- Samuel Fromartz

The After-Shock of Contaminated Spinach

If you're interested in what happened after contaminated spinach sickened people across the country two years ago, hop over to this must read by my friend Barry Estabrook at Gourmet magazine.

I've covered aspects of the spinach crisis before, but Barry goes further and looks into the environmental aftershock that has occurred from farmers seeking to put a protective shield around their fields, with no evidence that they're addressing the root cause of the problem.

In the name of food safety, they have scraped 30-foot-wide borders ofbare dirt around the edges of fields, set up poison-bait stations for ground squirrels and mice, installed eight-foot-high fences to exclude deer and other wildlife, ripped vegetation from creeks and ditches, and drained ponds and lakes or treated them with chemicals that kill every living thing in them. Creeks flowing into the Salinas River run brown with silty water polluted with fertilizer and pesticides. Piles of bleached, bonelike tree trunks and roots have replaced wooded groves.

“The science isn’t there to prove that deer are a factor, but farmers are being required to moonscape the habitat around their fields in the name of food safety,” says Bob Martin, general manager of Rio Farms, a 6,000-acre operation. “That’s amputating a person’s leg because they have a hangnail.”

I'd heard about these draconian measures from wildlife and small farm groups and knew it was ripe for a deeper look. Luckily, Barry did too. His article makes you think twice about what "food safety" really means, when it's regulated with a bulldozer.  Here's another observation:

Of the 12 recorded E. coli outbreaks attributed to California leafy greens since 1999, 10 have been traced to mechanically harvested greens bagged in large production facilities. The source of two outbreaks has yet to be determined. None have been linked to small farms selling to local markets.

After the jump are Barry's tips for avoiding pathogens:

Think Outside the Bag

· Cooking is the only way to kill bacteria in greens for certain, but there are some less drastic steps you can take to protect yourself.

· You’ve heard it a thousand times: Buy local; buy small. Packaged produce in the supermarket can be more than two weeks old. Produce from a CSA or farmers market packed in ordinary, unsealed plastic bags is most likely picked a day or two before you buy it.

· Buy whole heads or bunches of intact plants; precut edges provide a particularly easy point of entry for bacteria.

· Washing won’t get all the bugs out of contaminated bagged greens, but it can remove some surface bacteria.

· If you do buy prewashed, factory-bagged produce, look at the “use before” date. If it’s getting close, avoid the product. The longer it has been in the bag, the more opportunities for pathogens to grow.

· Never, ever eat uncooked greens from bags whose expiration date has passed, no matter how fresh they appear.

What's the Cost of Depleted Fisheries?

It's clear that the world’s fishstocks are in trouble, but what's the cost of decades of mismanagement?  A new World Bank/FAO study puts the price tag at $50 billion dollars a year, or $2 trillion over the last three decades.

This isn’t just another doom and gloom study; the report's actually hopeful that the “economic hemorrhage” in this “underperforming global asset” can be transformed into one that creates “an economic surplus and….a driver of economic growth.”

So how do we get there? Catch shares, a fisheries management system that has picked up a lot of momentum recently as people recognize how well they work.

A study in Science magazine last month was the most authoritative validation to date of this approach. After examining 11,000 fisheries around the world, researchers found that those with catch share were much healthier, fishermen were at less risk from accidents, and the impact on other species was significantly reduced. Catch shares go beyond just keeping a good fishery healthy. They can even rebuild depleted fish stocks.

Catch shares work by allotting shares of the overall catch to individual fishermen, boats or fishing groups. Shares can be sold or rented, which gives fishermen a direct stake in the future of the fishery. The better the fish stock, the more valuable the fishermen’s shares.

For decades, scientists have shown how overfishing was killing off wild fish populations at a huge environmental and social cost. Now economists have put a price tag on the problem. And recently yet more scientists have shown us how catch shares can solve the problem. We know what’s at stake, we know what it’s costing us and we know how to fix it. So can we get on with it already?

- Tim Fitzgerald, Environmental Defense Fund

A Chicken in Every Yard

Image source: Bright Green Blog

Now, I know urban farming is the rage (hey I'm one of those urban farmers, I mean gardeners), but if you ever thought about raising chickens out back, check out this post on the Illicit urban chicken movement over at Bright Green Blog.

There's a wealth of info there, tied to a report from the Worldwatch Institute, as well as links to other "how to" sites.

I don't want to raise chickens here in D.C. Tending plots in two community gardens, and keeping the basil going in the backyard, is more than enough. And nevermind the cat. But if you like your eggs fresh, this post's for you.