Fast-Tracking Sustainability at USDA

A lot of rich and worthwhile discussion has taken place lately about what government could do to promote greener agriculture, healthier food, and small scale farming, most notably in the comprehensive NY Times article by Michael Pollan. Supporters have gone so far as to petition the Obama transition team to appoint Pollan secretary of agriculture (he demurred in a comment on Ethicuraean).

Rather than push a dark horse, however, people interested in sustainable food and agriculture do have a real opportunity to support a significant appointment at the USDA. I'm speaking of Tufts University professor Kathleen Merrigan, who has been raised as a possible candidate for Undersecretary of Marketing and Regulatory Programs.

Who is Merrigan and why should we care?

I first heard about Merrigan while working on Organic Inc., looking into the origins of the Organic Food and Production Act of 1990 and sustainable agriculture policy. She was mentioned repeatedly by people I talked to, because as a senate staffer for Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Merrigan had drafted the organic law. She then went on to work at the USDA's agricultural marketing service (AMS), which runs the organic program. Even before then, she was involved in sustainable agriculture policy and has been ever since -- in organics,  conservation, food access, and small farm issues. While Pollan helped put these issues onto the national agenda, people like Merrigan have long been doing the wonky policy work.

Outside government, she has worked for the Henry A. Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture, served on a the Pew commission on biotechnology and has been active in the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture. She now heads the Agriculture, Food and Environment Program at Tufts School of Nutrition and Policy. As marketing and regulatory undersecretary, she would oversee AMS, GIPSA (Grain Inspection Packers and Stockyards Administration), and APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) - touching virtually every aspect of agriculture.

In short, this is a real shot for a major position at the USDA by someone who has pursued the change mantra in agriculture for nearly two decades. The political awareness Pollan has driven about agriculture could well sweep Merrigan into a position at the USDA -- and push a sustainable agenda ahead.

While we're on this topic, the Blog for Rural Affairs has an in-depth look at Tom Vilsack, who WaPo is calling a "near shoo-in" for Ag Secretary. It's well worth a read and not just for his view on organics and biotech.

- Samuel Fromartz

Image: Tufts University

Your Thanksgiving Challenge?

...To lose 10 pounds. Not.

Actually, Eat Well Guide and Consumers Union are launching a challenge you can eat -- a local and organic Thanksgiving. “Withthe holidays around the corner, and fuel-inflated food costs soaring, this is the perfect time to use our interactive Eat Well Guide to find locally produced turkey, fruit, vegetables, baked goods, dairy, meat and more, wherever you live,” says Eat Well Guide Director Destin Joy Layne. Post your recipe and check out those by Dan Barber, Mario Batali and Alice Waters on the Consumers Union site.

Another resource: The Local Harvest Catalog, which has a Thanksgiving section. I buy award-winning Pennsylvania garlic from Farmer Troy though that site (he also comments on the blog so it's mutual).

Also, many farmers markets have extended hours ahead of Thanksgiving or are opening up if they've already shut down for the season, Edible Chesapeake reports. The magazine also has a good read - and taste test - on heritage turkeys. The top bird: the Midget White which was actually bred in the 1960s.

 - Samuel Fromartz

Image: Turkeys at Nicks Organic Farm in Maryland

Talkin' Texas Shrimp (with Recipes)

By Clare Leschin-Hoar

I attended the New World Food and Wine Festival in San Antonio this past weekend, and was able to see first-hand what some of the best local chefs had to offer. As you might expect, there was a slew of tasty Texas beef dishes that had more than a dash of regional Mexican influence. There’s a burgeoning wine scene, so many dishes were paired with local Texan wines too. But what actually grabbed my attention more than once was the Texas white shrimp.

It’s hard (but not impossible) for me to find American wild or farm-raised shrimp here in the Northeast, but in San Antonio, chefs like Moses Cruz of Oro Restaurant and Bar, and John Brand of Pesca on the River have easy access to both sustainably farmed and wild caught white shrimp, which I found to have a sweet yet delicate flavor.

Russ Miget, environmental quality specialist for the Texas Sea Grant Program and the Texas AgriLife Extension Service, says boasts about the sustainability of Texas white shrimp are sound. Shrimp reach sexual maturity at six-months and spawn at least once, and more often twice a year, laying 250,000 to 300,000 eggs each. And while bottom trawling is used, the shrimp boats are fishing off a mud-bottom floor, and are not dragging heavy nets over coral reefs. Bycatch is about three pounds of non-shrimp to every pound of shrimp, but much of it, like crabs, can be used.

Brand especially is a fan of the local wild stuff. “Unlike a lot of farmed shrimp from overseas which can be frozen and refrozen many times, this shrimp is frozen only once, on the shrimp boat, with the heads still intact, and it’s a bit sweeter like the sea. The flavor is so good, you don’t have to fuss with it much,” he said.

We agree, and tapped the chefs for a couple of recipes for you, because we know what it’s like to scramble for that showy holiday appetizer. And if you're searching for a mail-order source, this list of Texas Shrimp suppliers has several that sell retail.

Recipes below the fold

Cold Poached Texas White Shrimp With Oven Dried Cranberries Kalamata Olives - by Executive Chef Moses Cruz

Serves 6

3 medium sized carrots peeled, sliced ¾-inch rounds
1 whole stalk celery cut into ¾-inch slices, washed
2 medium Texas yellow onions
1 bottle dry white wine
2 quarts cold water
3 ounces kosher salt
1 ounce coarse black pepper
In heavy pot bring all above ingredients to a boil for 10 minutes.

2 pounds large Texas White Shrimp peeled and deveined.

Add shrimp to boiling water (above), remove when it reaches a boil again, Let sit for 2 minutes Drain shrimp and chill in ice bath. Once cooled, remove and let air dry.

2 wheels of herbed Boursin cheese
2 ounces dried cranberries, finely chopped
1 ounces pitted Kalamata olives, finely chopped

Soften cheese add cranberries and olives. Mix well and let rest for one hour. Form into 1-inch balls. Split cooled shrimp and arrange on platter, tail up. Place cheese mixture in middle and serve. (Clare notes: the shrimp sitting on the plate fanned out tail up, and then the cheese is in a ball, stuffed on the back of the shrimp, under the tail, so you lift the shrimp and pop the whole thing in your mouth, minus the tail. It was surprisingly good.)

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Grilled Texas White Shrimp with Saffron Garlic Chimichurri, Grilled Bread and Serrano Ham - by Executive Chef John Brand

Serves 4-6

Chimichurri
2 teaspoons saffron threads
8 cloves garlic
1 shallot
1 bunch parsley
1 cup extra virgin olive oil
4 tablespoons sherry vinegar
Juice and zest of one lemon
Salt and pepper

One dozen large White Texas Shrimp, peeled and deveined
¼ pound shaved Serrano ham

Blend chimichurri ingredients in a food processor. Toss with shrimp. Thread shrimp onto wood or sugar cane skewer and grill both sides. Remove shrimp from the grill and toss in Aioli sauce (below). Arrange on a platter with grilled baguette, shaved Serrano ham and garnish with frisee or arugula.

Garlic Lemon Aioli
6 egg yolks
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons garlic oil
1 cup extra virgin olive oil
3 cup  light olive oil
1 1/2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
2 1/2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons freshly chopped chives
2 tablespoons freshly chopped parsley

In a large bowl whisk together yolks, Dijon, lemon juice, and red wine vinegar.
Slowly add the oils to form an emulsion. Add chives and parsley, season with salt and white pepper. Refrigerate.

Cash from Fish Trash

A friend alterted me to this story about an organic fertilizer start-up, Pacific Gro, which was founded by Jim Brackins four years ago, when he was 67.

He gets fish waste from seafood companies in Seattle that typically utilize, at best, 52% of the fish carcass. The remainder -- the guts, gills, skin, bones, fat and scales -- goes into the garbage, but rather than waste them Brackins picks the stuff up. “The name of the game in the industry is 100 percentutilization,” he is quoted as saying. “Everybody wants and strives to use 100 percent of the resource so there is no waste."

The article explains how he processes the fish waste into fertilizer then sells it to organic and conventional farmers.

Pacific Gro’s wet organic fish fertilizer is being used on 70,000 acres of Idaho farmland and Brackins recently secured a contract with Horizon Organic Dairy, the country’s largest organic dairy, in Twin Falls, Idaho. In 2009, Brackins will process 6.5 million pounds of fish waste, enough for 650,000 gallons of fertilizer, and hopes to expand his acreage by 25 percent.

This reminded me of another story I recently read that took a new look at China's oft-sited pollution troubles. It mentioned how greening is being viewed as a business opportunity and told the story of China's "Queen of Trash," Cheung Yan, reputed to be the nation's richest woman.

Ten years ago, when China stopped logging its own natural forests to prevent a recurrence of big floods, she anticipated a paper shortage. She went to the U.S. and drove around in an old pick-up begging municipal garbage dumps to sell her their waste paper. She was so successful that today her company, Nine Dragons, ships more than 6 million ton of waste paper a year into China, which she recycles into boxes for electronics goods that will be taking the next container ship back to Europe and North America. Nine Dragons is now the world’s largest manufacturer of packaging.

Talk about cash from trash. Notwithstanding the debate over packaging, the point is: there is no waste -- only a resource stream -- and to those that see waste as a resource belong the spoils.
- Samuel Fromartz

image: flickr photo

Fish: Good News and Bad

The LA Times reports that fishery managers on the West Coast have decided to try and save the region's fishery by granting fishermen exclusive rightsto a portion of the catch. We've written about catch quotas before, but this is positive news in a place where three fisheries were declared an economic disaster eight years ago.

The new approach, often called "individual fishing quotas," will give commercial fishermen from Morro Bay on California's Central Coast to Puget Sound in Washington state the right to bring in their portion of the catch when the seas are safe and they can command higher prices.

It will also eliminate rules that forced fishermen to shovel tons of dead fish overboard because they didn't have permits to sell particular species inadvertently caught in their nets.

"We expect in five to 10 years this will be one of the best-managed fisheries in the country," said Johanna Thomas, Pacific Ocean policy director of the Environmental Defense Fund.

The same can't be said for Atlantic cod, which looks like it's crashing again. Kate Wing over at Blogfish writes:

The cod of the Gulf of St. Lawrence have 40 years left, at best, and only 20 years if fishing stays at current levels. Douglas P. Swain and Ghislain A. Chouinard report on this imminent extinction in the latest Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, only, being scientists, they call it extirpation. Technically, extinction requires you to prove all the fish are gone, while an extirpated population is barely hanging on -- too small to sustain itself, much less feed people or wildlife.

Junk Food: A Recession Diet?

My friend, the DC restaurant critic Tim Carman, has an interesting theory about why junk food sales are up and it has nothing to do with trading down.

Goes like this. When people get laid off and feel like crap, they eat crap. Which is why McDonald's sales are rising while Starbucks' are falling. Why not Starbucks? Because people don't need a caffeine jolt when they're worried about their job and finances. They want comfort food. Greasy food. Interesting theory. But for my comfort food, I'll take spaghetti carbonara. And no, it ain't junk. (Image from flickr)

Obama Iron Chef Contest

Talk about a meal change in the White House. Bush didn't care for anything "green" or "wet" but the Obamas eat a lot of fresh food, the NY Daily News reports.

"They try to limit the sweets and they include a lot of fruits,vegetables and lean meats in their meals," an Obama pal said. "Of course that isn't always possible when he has been campaigning."

Here's the three chefs in the running for White House chef: Art Smith, who prepared Obama's meal at Oprah's fund-raiser for the candidate; Rick Bayless, owner of Chicago Mexican restaurants Topolobampo and Frontera Grill; and Daniel Young, who cooked for Obama at the Democratic Convention, the paper says.

So who's in the running for White House Gardener?

Organic Lettuce Porn

Or lettuce you can't buy in a store. I had thought I planted this red iceberg lettuce seed too late in September, but it came up fine and kept growing. Dressing ideas anyone? I'm thinking Caesar at the moment.

ChewsWise Search

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Organic Pasture Rule, Part II

There was an early sense of relief at the USDA's newly proposed organic pasture rule, but the devil, as they say, is in the details. I've been hearing questions about the rule and its mandates that fall outside the much-debated 120-day, 30% forage minimum. I haven't digested the criticism or concern yet, so if you have, post a comment. I hope to write on this further as the issues gel.
- Samuel Fromartz

McKibben on Obama and Climate Change

Environment 360 has a provocative piece by Bill McKibben on Obama, politics, and climate change. Definitely worth a read. Here's the quick take aways:

What it all boils down to is: The bills are coming due. And not just, or even mainly, the bills from a failed Bush presidency, but the bills from 200 years of burning fossil fuel. Twenty years agowhen we started worrying about global warming, we thought we'd have a generation to pay those bills off. But we were wrong — the planet was more finely balanced than we'd realized. The melting Arctic is the call from the repo man.

Any hope of succeeding will require Obama to grasp, deep in his guts, the fact that climate, energy, food, and the economy are now hopelessly intertwined, and that trying to solve any one of these problems without taking on the others simply makes all of them worse....

....The political reality goes like this: George W. Bush was so terrible on this issue that the bar has been set incredibly low — Obama will get all the political points he needs with fairly minimal effort. Doing what actually needs to be done will be politically…unpopular isn't even the word. It might well wreck his political future, because it would involve — directly or indirectly — raising the cost of continuing to live as we do right now.

RFK Jr at EPA?

(Note: fixed headline... thanks for pointing out Barbara...)

Politico is reporting that "President-elect Barack Obama is strongly considering Robert F. KennedyJr. to head the Environmental Protection Agency, a Cabinet post, Democratic officials told Politico."

Even David Roberts over at Grist.org was taken aback because of Kennedy's activist history, but, hey, maybe that's what the EPA needs. Last time I heard JFK Jr a couple of years back he was suing factory farm pork producers in North Carolina, just one in the long list of actions he's taken.
- Samuel Fromartz