Here's a new feature I hope to incorporate weekly: the bread of the week, by superlative bakers posting on the web. This bánh mi inspired baguette is by TxFarmer:
Image source: TxFarmer on The Fresh Loaf and seen on Yeastspotting.
ChewsWise Blog
ChewsWise Blog
How to eat seafood
The other day a friend told me she had stopped eating seafood, since it wasn't a "sustainable" choice. I replied by mentioning that many species were actually well managed and the best thing to do was to choose the right ones -- that way you help to shift the market a bit in the right direction.
As Barton Seaver writes in his new cookbook, For Cod and Country: Simple, Delicious, Sustainable Cooking
So why eat seafood at all, you might ask? Because if we don't, then we will lose a vital and necessary part of our diet. We would put even more hardworking communities out of work. We would lose control over the fisheries that we do have a chance to manage well. We would lose our chance to encourage the restoration of ecosystms. The compelling narrative of conservation is a story of responsible consumption.
My only quibble there might be with the word, "necessary." But for those who do choose to eat fish, Seaver is right. There are ample resources, such as Seafood Watch's wallet card and iPhone and Android apps, to help you make the right choices. Valuable books like Seaver's show in great detail just how many wonderful dishes can be made with sustainable fish.
It's not a hard sell. In Washington, I organized a sustainable seafood buying club for 17 families in which we buy fish direct from fishermen. The only requirement is that the fish must be sustainable. It's a bit of work arranging shipments but I've found the quality unmatched, and the price very competitive. (Next up, oysters, I think from the mid-Atlantic region).
While these choices may be confusing to the average consumer, supermarkets in the US and aboard are offering better choices and removing those species that are overfished or in decline. (Whole Foods even tags their fish as best, good, and avoid, based on the health of the fishery).
Finally, there are notable events such as Monterey Bay Aquarium's Cooking for Solutions, held annually, which draws thousands to cooking demos, talks, and an evening sampling of sustainable fish at a gala fundraiser. I highly recommend it.
Not to be outdone, though, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington held a smaller and more intimate affair just last night focusing on The Gulf and its Seafood: One Year Later. Many area chefs were on hand, including Seaver with a salted cod sampler (Atlantic cod was recently upgraded to a "good alternative"), Hank's Oyster Bar, with its superlative lobster roll (yes, lobster is in ample supply and sustainable), and many others with dozens of creative concoctions, including those made with Gulf seafood which has been deemed safe following the Big Spill. It's the stealth seafood event in Washington and is going on my calendar next year as well. My only quibble -- a day-long companion oceans conference would be a fantastic resource for writers and journalists like me, but I only found out about it after the fact.
But here's the main thing. If you like seafood, it is not difficult to make a sustainable choice. It may even be staring right at you in the supermarket: like whole rainbow trout, for example. I like to grill this fish, maybe three minutes a side, over a medium fire. If you have doubts about when it's done, gently poke it open with a knife -- the fish should be starting to flake and turning white. Don't overcook it! Squeeze a bit of lemon on it when it's done. Sprinkle it with salt. You can do a lot of fancier things, but with seafood I find fast and easy is often the best.
- Samuel Fromartz
In China, censored report shows political elite get special access to organic food
Although organic food from China has gotten a bad rap lately, apparently it's not too good for top party officials. A friend sent a link to this dispatch, which shows that top Chinese government officials have access to food from special organic farms, as well as farms tested for water quality and chemical residues. The report, from the paper Southern Weekend, was pulled from its web site by authorities shortly after it appeared and other Chinese media were ordered not to reprint it.
Here's how the report from the paper Southern Weekend begins:
Surrounded by two-metre high walls and watched over by five security guards, the “customs shed” would be a struggle to find without the help of local people. You would be even less likely to realise that it supplies vegetables for Beijing’s customs authorities. The site – full name Beijing Customs Vegetable Farm and Country Club – covers 200 mu of land (around 130,000 square metres) in the outlying Beijing district of Shunyi.
According to an informed source, the farm has been working with the Beijing customs authority, its sole customer, for 10 years. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning, a customs truck comes to the farm to pick up a load of at least several thousand kilograms of produce.
This is just one of many examples of food being produced specifically for government use. Southern Weekend understands that the customs authorities are not the only department to have a farm in Shunyi, and that some provincial level departments also source their food this way.
These foods, grown to government order, are genuinely green, and safety is put first....
Organic fertilizer fraud -- an in-depth look
I have a story posted over at Grist this week, California Schemin', on fraud in the organic fertilizer market. The issue has not gotten a lot of attention because, unlike pesticide residues, it doesn't end up on your food. But the scope of the fraud was truly mind-boggling. This story was in the works for months and delayed by internal staff changes at Grist. I was happy it finally saw the light of day.
Here's the intro:
It's no secret that the organic food industry has seen explosive growth, taking only a mild drubbing through the recession and then continuing its ascent. At the heart of that growth has been trust -- consumers are willing to shell out more bucks for organic because the food's been grown without synthetic chemicals, with that claim verified from farm to market.
Yet two major cases of federal fraud have been filed in the past six months, rocking the California farming world and alleging that probably millions of pounds of produce sold as organic over several years weren't worthy of the label.
So why haven't you heard about this? Because the shady practices came from a side of the farming world that few shoppers think about: the fertilizer industry. And the real dupes weren't consumers but organic farmers.
Forget the wedding, Prince Charles delivers remarkable talk on food and farming
I've known for a long time that Britain's Prince Charles had an organic farm. What I did not appreciate was the depth and breadth of his understanding of food and agricultural issues which were on full display at Wednesday's Future of Food Conference in DC.
In the speech, which I recommend reading in its entirety, he said that "over the past thirty years I have been venturing into extremely dangerous territory by speaking about the future of food. I have all the scars to prove it. Questioning the conventional world view is a risky business."
He then laid out his central concerns about the sustainability of food production for an ever growing world and the dependence of the current industrial model on shrinking resources.
We find ourselves in ... a system heavily dependent upon fossil fuels and other forms of diminishing natural capital – mineral fertilizers and so on. Most forms of industrialized agriculture now have an umbilical dependency on oil, natural gas and other non-renewable resources. One study I have read estimates that a person today on a typical Western diet is, in effect, consuming nearly a U.S. gallon of diesel every day! And when you consider that in the past decade the cost of artificial nitrogen fertilizers has gone up fourfold and the cost of potash three times, you start to see how uncomfortable the future could become if we do not wean ourselves off our dependency. And that’s not even counting the impact of higher fuel prices on the other costs of production – transport and processing – all of which are passed on to the consumer. It is indeed a vicious circle.
Then add the supply of land into the equation – where do we grow all of the extra plants or graze all that extra stock when urban expansion is such a pressure? Here in the United States I am told that one acre is lost to development every minute of every day – which means that since 1982 an area the size of Indiana has been built over – though that is small fry compared with what is happening in places like India where, somehow, they have to find a way of housing another three hundred million people in the next thirty years. But on top of this is the very real problem of soil erosion.
Again, in the U.S., soil is being washed away ten times faster than the Earth can replenish it, and it is happening forty times faster in China and India. Twenty-two thousand square miles of arable land is turning into desert every year and, all told, it appears a quarter of the world’s farmland, two billion acres, is degraded.
Given these pressures, it seems likely we will have to grow plants in more difficult terrain. But the only sustainable way to do that will be by increasing the long term fertility of the soil, because, as I say, achieving increased production using imported, non-renewable inputs is simply not sustainable.
He went on to talk about the alternative.
So what is a “sustainable food production” system? We should be very clear about it, or else we will end up with the same system that we have now, but dipped in “green wash.” For me, it has to be a form of agriculture that does not exceed the carrying capacity of its local ecosystem and which recognizes that the soil is the planet’s most vital renewable resource. Top soil is the cornerstone of the prosperity of nations. It acts as a buffer against drought and as a carbon sink and it is the primary source of the health of all animals, plants and people. If we degrade it, as we are doing, then Nature’s capital will lose its innate resilience and it won’t be very long, believe you me, before our human economic capital and economic systems also begin to lose their resilience.
It was that last point that was especially striking, because he linked the natural capital inherent in an ecologic system with the extractive economic capital that has driven agribusiness. The former shouldn't be sacrificed for the latter -- and in fact, ecological models should be rewarded.
This all depends upon us deepening our understanding of the relationship between food, energy, water and economic security, and then creating policies which reward producers who base their farming systems on these principles. Simply because, if we do not consider the whole picture and take steps with the health of the whole system in mind, not only will we suffer from rising food prices, we will also see the overall resilience of our economies and, in some instances, our ecological and social systems too, becoming dangerously unstable.
A glimmer of that instability was evident recently, as a result of rising food prices. But the issues are far more wide-reaching than a momentary (one hopes) spike in prices. And on that score, it was refreshing to hear another side of the debate that too often is drowned out by a monoculture of interests favoring the status quo.
Addendum: In the wake of his remarks, Prince Charles was criticized for talking about sustainability while riding around in a motorcade and living the life of, well, a royal. It's rather pathetic when these eighth-grade level arguments are rolled out. It would be like calling Bill Gates a hypocrite for devoting his billions to philanthropy, while living in a mansion. For a more subtle and highly recommended take on these issues click over to Paula Crossfield's piece "Elitism Is Dead" on Civil Eats.
A short video of Prince Charles' remarks are here.
Image source: The Daily Mail
- Samuel Fromartz
Food for thought - recent links
Tom Philpott, Grist: A USDA researcher has linked to colony collapse disorder in bees to Bayer's neonicotinoid pesticides, though other factors contribute to it. The pesticides are used extensively on corn, which covers a quarter of the nation's cropland.
Mark Bittman, NYTimes: His columns have become a must read, with this one warning about the effects of carbon emissions on the oceans. At the same time, he points out that the U.S. has made strides in controlling its catch -- something which can't be said globally.
Greenpeace: Related to Bittman's piece, the Seafood sustainability report (pdf) from Greenpeace rating supermarkets is worth a look. Safeway took top honors though it opined that Whole Foods would probably rise in the rankings once it eliminates red-listed species, as it plans to do in a phase-out plan. Overall 15 of 20 retailers had passing grades.
Barry Estabrook: Politics of the Plate takes a look at the recent suit filed by organic groups, seed companies and farmers against Monsanto over genetic drift.
WaPo: In a long, drawn-out Beer Madness tasting of 64 beers, a WaPo panel ends up naming this winning beer: Exit 4 American Trippel from Flying Fish Brewing Co. in Cherry Hill, N.J. All I know about Exit 4 is that we pass it on on the Turnpike on the way to NYC. Guess we'll have to stop now.
David Chang's new iPad app Lucky Peach. We saw the buzz in the NY Times and Bon Appetit but where the heck is the thing? An iTunes search comes up empty. The ramen awaits.
- Samuel Fromartz
How to shape and score a baguette
My baguette recipe continues to be a favorite post on this blog, so I figured I'd post these great videos by master baker Ciril Hitz on how to shape and score a baguette. Hitz chairs the baking institute at Johnson and Wales University, and is author of Baking Artisan Bread: 10 Expert Formulas for Baking Better Bread at Home.
The video shows how to build tension into the skin of the dough without compressing the middle, which is perhaps the most important lesson in shaping a baguette. I make a slightly smaller baguette to fit a home oven, at 275 grams.
This second video shows how to properly score a baguette, featuring Mitch Stamm.
GMOs and the myth of feeding the world
With food prices hitting record highs, people are rioting and political regimes are crumbling. We can only imagine what it will be like when the global population rises to nine billion in 2050 from just under seven billion now. More riots, more deforestation, more hunger, more revolutions? How are these people going to be fed? The unequivocal answer we so often hear: biotechnology.
Let's ignore for the moment the cause of rising food prices, which has been attributed to everything from bad weather and poor harvests to higher oil prices that push up the cost of fertilizers, the rise of biofuels, even commodity index funds (which are bidding up futures, though I'm skeptical they are leading the parade). The thing I get hung up on is the "nine billion." It makes a great sound bite but what's behind the figure?
So far the vast resources of commercial biotechnology have gone to commodity crops such as corn and soybeans (and soon alfalfa). The majority ends up as animal feed, and thus meat, which is the least efficient way to produce calories. Meat also happens to be available to the richest people, not the poorest. So, we haven't really used GMOs to "feed the world." Instead we've used them bring down the cost of industrial meat production and incentivize a transition to a meat-centric diet. The loss of calories that result from feeding grains to animals instead of humans represents the annual calorie needs of more than 3.5 billion people, according to the UN Environmental Program. In short, GMOs arguably are making matters worse by fueling the production of more animal feed and food-competing biofuels.
Be that as it may, we're still stuck with the nine billion problem. Population is like compounding interest, with small changes producing big results down the road. So the growth rate is hugely important and it doesn't always do what's expected. National Geographic had an interesting take on this, showing that the argument popular in the 1960s about a "population bomb" largely turned out to be a fiction. By the early 1970s, fertility rates around the world had begun dropping faster than anyone had anticipated. Since then, the population growth rate has fallen by more than 40 percent.
In industrialized countries it took generations for fertility to fall to the replacement level or below. As that same transition takes place in the rest of the world, what has astonished demographers is how much faster it is happening there. ...
“The problem has become a bit passé,” Hervé Le Bras (a French demographer) says. Demographers are generally confident that by the second half of this century we will be ending one unique era in history—the population explosion—and entering another, in which population will level out or even fall.
This is why numbers are important. On that score, Andrew Revkin had an interesting exchange on the dot earth blog at the Times that showed a range of opinion on what it would take to "feed the world." Revkin's post noted that Douglas Southgate, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University, "argues that a low growth scenario for population, leading to just under 8 billion people by 2050, could see a 26-percent drop in food prices even with substantial rise in consumption." This is considered the low-range for 2050, but considering how off the mark Malthusians were in the past, it shouldn't be entirely discounted.
But, let's say, we do get to nine billion. The impact on resources, it turns out, depends a lot on what we eat. Vaclav Smil, a University of Manitoba analyst, pointed out to Revkin "a menu of possible food lifestyles," which for a world of nine billion meant either bountiful supplies or scarcity. Here's the spectrum:
1) eating enough to survive with reduced lifespans (Ethiopia),
2) eating enough to have some sensible though limited choices and to live near-full lifespans when considering other (hygienic, health care) circumstances (as in the better parts of India today),
3) having more than enough of overall food energy but still a limited choice of plant foods and only a healthy minimum of animal foods and live close to or just past 70 (China of the late 1980s and 1990s),
4) not wanting more carbohydrates and shifting more crop production and imports to [livestock] feed, not food, to eat more animals products, having overall some 3,000 kcal/capita a day and living full spans (China now),
5) having gross surpluses of everything, total supply at 3,500-3,700 kcal/day, eating too much animal protein, wasting 35-40% of all food, living record life spans, getting sick (U.S. and E.U. today).
Obviously, we want to avoid option one and two, as much as possible. Option three and four would mean one billion people who lack enough food today would be better off. But Smil says, "The world eating between levels 3-4 would not know what to do with today’s food." In other words, we have enough already. But, he also adds, "the world at 5 is impossible." Nor is it desirable, considering the obesity crisis and health risks.
So really, the question isn't how will we feed nine billion by 2050? The question is how many people will we really have and what will they be eating?
Poverty of course plays a big role in both these issues because, as Juergen Voegele, director, agriculture and rural development, the World Bank, pointed out to Revkin: "We already have close to one billion people who go hungry today, not because there is not enough food in the world but because they cannot afford to buy it."
Raising incomes, or course, is a difficult nut -- one that doesn't succumb to a solution hatched in a lab. But more income means better-educated families, and even declining population growth. The flip side, though, is that rising incomes are also associated with higher meat consumption, which can get us closer to option five on Smil's lifestyle if we are not careful. So the best case: to raise incomes and to incentivize less resource-intensive food consumption.
But we don't need to become vegans to save the world (which would doom us even if we did because so few would go along). In many developing countries, such an approach would amount to culinary imperialism, given the importance of meat for both income generation, the result of having a cow or goat or two, and as a source of much-needed calories for children from milk and scant meat. Never mind the use of manure to grow crops. We're not talking about factory farms here, but animals that play a central role in cultures and livelihoods.
As the Nat Geo article concluded:
... it will be a hard thing for the planet if ... people are eating meat and driving gasoline-powered cars at the same rate as Americans now do. It’s too late to keep the new middle class of 2030 from being born; it’s not too late to change how they and the rest of us will produce and consume food and energy.
- Samuel Fromartz
Video slice: Una Pizza Napoletana
OK, your mouth may be watering but maybe you can't try this at home. What you can try instead is Really Easy Potato Pizza from Jim Lahey's "My Bread," which I blogged on previously.
- Samuel Fromartz
I'll drink to that: Beer barm bread with spent grains
Ahhh, beer making. I don't partake of this sport, but my step-mom, Patty, does, with a passion. And I have to say her IPA will put rivals to shame. But here's the thing. She's been brewing this beer for a few years, and even grows the hops in the backyard. I have long wanted to make a bread with the "wort" (that is, the pre-fermented beer) and the "spent grains" (the malted barley soaked in hot water that, with hops, makes the wort). This is the ultimate beer bread and the method goes back to England and Scotland, and probably much earlier historically, considering barley beer and bread built the pyramids.
British baker Dan Lepard explains that the mildly antiseptic qualities of hops prevent the barm leaven from turning sour. This might seem odd, given that hops are bitter, but in a small dose of leaven they actually sweeten the bread.
Hops give beer its slight bitterness, and were once used by both brewers and bakers to ward off a disagreeable sourness. Bakers would use a modified beer-making process, known as "barm," beating flour into a hot, liquid mix of hops and malt, so that the starch gelatinized. This proved a perfect medium for fermentation once seeded with a little barm from the previous weeks baking. This mixture could be kept for a week, as the bitter hops would keep the mixture sweet tasting.
Until the 20th C., when the use of commerical yeast became commplace, bakers struggled to make bread as cleanly flavored and white as they could. Sourness was considered a bad thing ... The newly available processed yeast made it possible to mix and bake dough quickly which meant that the bacteria did not have time to develop and sour the loaf. Bakers rejoiced except a few.
In Scotland, for example, the bakers weren't so taken with this new, clean-tasting bread. Comparing the two breads, one made in the old style with barm, and another with the new-fangled yeast, both bakers and customers preferred the old style. But barm-making was laborious, and the new yeast convenient. And convenience won.
That quote is from Lepard's The Art of Handmade Bread: Contemporary European Recipes for the Home Baker
The next morning, the barm was bubbly and alive with a foamy top. Loosely using Lepard's Barm Bread recipe, I made the loaf, but with a couple of additions: I added around a cup of the malted barely spent grains which had been strained out of the wort the day before. I also added a small amount of spelt flour (that was just sitting around and needed a use). After I mixed and folded the dough so it had developed a moderate gluten structure, I folded the grains into the dough. (You can see the flecked barley in the slice above). The bread took awhile to rise, as it was pretty cool -- three hours for the first rise with a couple of folds along the way. Then I shaped the loaf and let it rise another 3-1/2 hours covered by a towel on a sheet pan. Finally, I plopped the loaf into a hot dutch oven and baked it. The loaf rose beautifully.
Later, when we cut into the bread, it had the feint nutty smell of roasted barley. It also had a wonderfully complex flavor, with just the mildest note of bitter hops. We buttered a couple of slices, popped open two IPAs, and enjoyed our brewers feast.
I could see why the Scots liked a nice barm loaf. Convenience be damned.
submitted to yeastspotting
Chopping through McWilliams' weeds on GMO Alfalfa
Years ago, I had a history professor at Reed College who thought it was fruitless to understand the historical impact of contemporary events. He argued that a historian needed at least two decades remove from any event to come to any worthwhile conclusion because only then could it be understood within its wider political and economic context. Perhaps that’s why I find it curious that a historian like James McWilliams so confidently offers conclusions about the contemporary food system and does so often by looking at complex issues through such a narrow lens.
Take his most recent piece on genetically modified (GMO) alfalfa, where he took me to task about the risk of potential contamination of non-GMO alfalfa. Since organic alfalfa is grown on such a small percentage of land, he argued, the risk and impact of contamination from the genetically engineered crop was slight. He supported the argument by brandishing “the data” -- a study by a researcher which showed a small risk of cross-pollination. If the ignorant public only looked at the science, he argues, there wouldn’t be such a fuss.
But how would a historian approach this question? From a future vantage point, they would probably look at this study with interest, but then also examine the actual record of cross-contamination in the real word. Given what’s happened in the recent past, I wouldn’t be as sanguine as McWilliams.
They might find that in 2006, GMO rice spread to conventional rice farms in Louisiana and Texas. It wasn't from fully deregulated plantings like GMO alfalfa, but from closely controlled GMO test plots. It led losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Taco shells were pulled from shelves in 2000, because they contained unapproved genetically engineered corn meant for animal feed not humans. Genetically modified pharmaceutical corn crossed to non-pharma corn and also contaminated soybeans in 2002 and the crops were destroyed.
In Canada, the market for organic canola collapsed because GMO canola crossed into organic fields (pdf). The market for Canadian honey exports suffered, because a GMO trait found in pollen collected by honey bees was not approved for human consumption in Europe. In Texas, last year, Monsanto sold mislabeled bags of GE cotton seed and it was planted in areas where it was prohibited. EPA fined the company $2.5 million. Also last year, researchers found that GMO canola had crossed into wild plants, spread in part by trucks. "We found the highest densities of plants near agricultural fields and along major freeways," Professor Cindy Sagers told the BBC. "But we were also finding plants in the middle of nowhere -- and there's a lot of nowhere in North Dakota."
Although a study might suggest little chance of such transgressions with alfalfa, in the real world, glyphosate-tolerant alfalfa (genetically engineered to resist the herbicide glyphosate) has already spread to non-GMO fields. The USDA had to address this issue in its own court-ordered environmental impact statement (PDF, see Appendix V). In one section, the report states:
Following 2005-2007, the alfalfa seed production firms of Dairyland and Cal/West seeds reported a number of instances where GT (glyphosate-tolerant) transgene presence was detected in non-GT alfalfa seed production fields in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and California. In 2006, Dairyland farmers reported 11 of 16 fields contained detectable levels of GT transgene; 9 fields in Montana and single fields in each Wyoming and Idaho.
The USDA said the transgenic levels ranged from 0.2 percent to 0.9 percent, which it did not find problematic, although it would be an issue for GMO-sensitive markets. Last year, Cal/West found the GMO crop in 12 percent of 200 fields where it planted non-GMO alfalfa seed.
The historian would likely consider the decision to deregulate GE alfalfa in a political context; looking at how a massive lobbying machine was able to push through the deregulation of the seed in concert with the new emphasis in the Obama administration to be more business-friendly. This decision, though, proved friendly to just one business interest. (Recall that USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack had floated a measured approach of “coexistance” precisely because of concerns about the impact on non-GMO farmers.)
Then there's the organic sector, where buyers are already refusing crop shipments due to GMO contamination, certifiers have told me. McWilliams stated this shouldn't be a problem. "The organic industry already allows less than 5 percent of its crops to be contaminated with synthetic pesticide drift," he wrote. This is just flat out wrong.
According to the USDA organic regulations, a product can't be labeled organic if it is found to have a prohibited substance (such as synthetic pesticides) at greater than 5 percent of its EPA tolerance level. What does that mean? Say the EPA allows a pesticide residue at up to 100 parts per million (ppm). If testing detects more than 5 ppm of that pesticide on an organic crop, it can't be sold as organic. That does not mean 5 percent of your organic crop can be contaminated with synthetic pesticides. And if synthetic pesticides are found, even from drift, the farmer has to find ways to mitigate the problem or risk losing certification.
In any case, that point is irrelevant, because genetic engineering is not a “prohibited substance” under organic regulations, where such thresholds apply. It’s a “prohibited method.” There is no stated threshold for its presence, so it's really not up to the organic farmer to just accept it. If organic seeds test positive for GMOs, they can't be planted by organic farmers to feed their organic cows. That's just the law.
But look at the issue another way. Alfalfa is the third largest commodity crop in the country, a minority of which is now grown with herbicides. The other top crops – corn, soybeans and cotton – have all been engineered to resist glyphosate. The result has been a rise in glyphosate use and glyphosate-resistant “superweeds.” Alfalfa was a useful rotation in keeping that evolutionary mutation at bay. No longer. Glyphosate use will grow and superweeds will continue to evolve to resist it, until the next more powerful weed killer is rolled out. McWilliams knows this, that's why he's careful to state glyphosate-resistance "presents no pest problems." He ignores the weeds that farmers are now chopping down by hand or killing with more toxic herbicides.
Of course, I don’t pretend to know how all these issues will play out, but I am fairly confident that full deregulation will mean greater risks of transgenic contamination for those who don't want it. That is patently unfair. It would be like forcing a vegetarian to eat meat because, sorry, that’s all we’re serving these days. Or worse, not identifying the hidden meat in the dish (because GMOs aren't labeled). But by McWilliams logic, that would be "perfectly reasonable" to accept. And he's a vegetarian.
Bob Scowcroft: An Agtavist Looks Back
Here's an interview I did on Grist with Bob Scowcroft -- on the past and future of organic. As he says: "I am actually most hopeful, if not utterly blown away, by the new youth movement in organic."
- Samuel Fromartz