A Few Comments on the Food & Environment Reporting Network (FERN)

I'm pleased to announce that this week the Food & Environment Reporting Network launched. I've been working on this a non-profit journalism venture quiety for some time (two or more years), and now serve as editor. It grew out of an impromptu discussion with several people into an organization with a staff, board and editorial advisory board. Our launch coincided with the publication of our first story in High Country News, an award-winning Western magazine which collaborated with us on the piece.

We're supported in this work by several foundations who believe in our vision of producing stories on food, agriculture and environmental health at a time when interest in those areas is growing but in-depth coverage is waning. In our model, we work closely with reporters and media partners so that these stories can see the light of day. We also have a code of ethics that governs our work. 

Now, you might wonder, why not just start a blog? Well, blogs are good models, but what we have in mind is traditional reporting: sending a reporter into the field on an in-depth investigation and giving them the chance to really look into a story. This kind of work is expensive and often falls through the cracks in the rush of the 24-hour news cycle. If you're tied to a blog, this work is especially tough. 

Our first story is a clear example of how this works. Reporter Stephanie Paige Ogburn went down to New Mexico to look into a story about water pollution arising from large dairy farms, focusing on a citizen who launched a campaign to fight it. The story is a good one, in part because the character isn't your typical "environmentalist." (He sports an NRA hat). Ogburn widens the net from what might be viewed as a local story, tying it into broader issues the West has faced with mega-dairies. She also explains the complex regulatory issues with ease.

In the coming weeks, you'll see more work out of FERN (I'm not going to scoop myself and tell you what it is) in a variety of publications. Until then, I leave you with the lead of Ogburn's story:

Jerry Nivens lives in a trailer in Caballo, N.M., 165 miles south of Albuquerque. A bulky Texas transplant who chain-smokes American Spirits, Nivens cares as deeply for his mesquite-speckled patch of ground as any rural New Mexican. He enjoys driving into the mountains, where he used to while away afternoons panning for gold. He goes fishing Lone Star-style–in reservoirs, not rivers.

On the sunny May day I met him, he spilled out of his GMC Jimmy sporting a National Rifle Association ballcap and Magnum P.I.-style sunglasses. He wore brown corduroy pants hung from suspenders with a matching jacket over a plaid shirt. A giant Marlboro belt buckle completed the ensemble. As we drove around, Nivens marveled at artesian pools supporting desert wildlife, exclaimed as a squadron of baby quail crossed our path, and wondered over underground rivers that run to the nearby Rio Grande. Retired from the refrigeration business, he earns money from an invention of his used for water purification. He spends much of his time alone. “I’m kind of an old hermit,” he says.

Which, in a way, was why I had come–to learn how and why this loner became the driving force behind a movement that brought the state’s mega-dairies to heel. The dairy industry is New Mexico’s largest agricultural sector and an influential lobbying force. Although the state Environment Department has long worked with dairies to reduce pollution, change has been slow: Almost 60 percent of the state’s dairies have polluted groundwater with manure runoff, yet not one has begun the required cleanup. (Read the rest at FERN or HCN). 

- Samuel Fromartz

Thanksgiving Clinic: How to shape a loaf of bread

Maybe you've got that favorite artisan bread loaf you're making for Thanksgiving but are a bit concerned about what it will look like. You've shaped bread before but it hasn't turned out quite right. And this is Thanksgiving. You want it to look good.

So what to do? This is a difficult problem, because shaping is one of the most demanding skills of a baker. It takes a lot of reptition to get it right. You have to learn the feel of the dough, how to stretch the outside skin of the loaf taught, without compressing the interior and destroying the bubbles inside. You also need to tighten the skin without ripping it, which will disfigure the crust. 

Every bread book seems to have a slightly different method, which is not surprising. Every baker I've worked with has shaped loaves somewhat differently. There is no universal technique. Many work well.

That said, it really helps to see how others do it. I posted an earlier video on shaping baguettes, but Jeffrey Hamelman, the head baker at King Arthur Flour, has a video on shaping as well that's I've posted below. It's part of a series that's worth looking at if you're serious about bread baking, and the tips here are invaluable. 

Certified master baker Jeffrey Hamelman and King Arthur Flour baker Martin Philip demonstrate the proper way to shape artisan bread loaves. Watch them shape a round, baguette and batard.

So give it a shot. While I strongly advise against making baguettes for the first time for your Thanksgiving dinner, a simple sourdough boule would be a good goal. Mix the dough Wednesday evening, and let it rise a bit before putting it in the refrigerator overnight. I would then shape the dough around 7 in the morning and bake the loaf around 9. It will be done in 45 minutes or so, depending on the size of the loaf -- ample time for your turkey to get in the oven. (Another way to go is to use the no-knead recipe, but that dough is generally too slack for the shaping methods shown in this video). You can also find a lot of recipes that home bakers have tried at The Fresh Loaf.

As for me, I'm making several breads for Thanksgiving: a rye loaf, a wheat/rye bread and the Norwich sourdough I've linked to above (a fantastic loaf if you've got sourdough starter on hand). 

Organic farming and the yield myth

You've heard the line often -- organic farming can't feed the world because it is so inefficient, producing 50 percent less than conventional methods. Then you hear the kicker -- "that's why it's only for rich people."

As Tom Philpott over on Mother Jones points out, there's been more than a few studies exploding this myth. He links to a couple, but one influential one he didn't mention was published in Science a number of years back -- a long-running Swiss study I talked about here in relation to energy use. 

Now comes yet another, from the Leopold Center at Iowa State University, which found that yields of conventional and organic farming were largely the same in a long-running trial.  

Averaged over 13 years, yields of organic corn, soybean and oats have been equivalent to or slightly greater than their conventional counterparts. Likewise, a 12-year average for alfalfa and an 8-year average for winter wheat also show no significant difference between organic yields and the Adair County average.

What the study also found was that organic fields were far more profitable, because of the premiums paid for the crops as well as lower costs for chemicals and fertilizers. (An early study looking at this was carried out by the University of California Santa Cruz back in the 1990's on organic strawberries -- it too found organic more profitable). 

This point is crucial, for another argument often heard about organic is that rotations mean far less production of a particular crop (you can't grow corn every year for instance). For a farmer, however, that doesn't matter. What matters is making enough money to keep farming the next year. Rotations are profitable in another sense as well -- they prevent depletion of soil nutrients. 

I don't expect this yield debate to be resolved anytime soon, but in many ways it's beside the point. Yield and production won't alone solve world hunger. India, which was ground zero for the Green Revolution, currently has a malnutrition rate for children under 5 of 48 percent. That's double the rate in sub-Saharran Africa which missed out on the Green Revolution. Figures like that have nothing to do with yield. They have everything to do with policies that bring food to people who most need it.

Charting corn, soy and wheat -- guess which declines?

At times, graphs can tell a story better than words, so here's a visual story of our changing agricultural landscape. Corn and soybeans are largely fed to animals, though the crops are also processed into sweeteners, oils, ethanol, even ink. Wheat goes directly to human food, except for the healthy stuff like bran which is sifted off and fed to animals. 

Sources: USDA, North Dakota State University

Chipotle's (anti-industrial ag) ad campaign, with Willie Nelson

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMfSGt6rHos]

A summer stop in Connecticut, The Dressing Room

Michel Nischan's a well-known guy in food circles, having launched a program through Wholesome Wave Foundation that cuts the price of farmers' markets by 50 percent for people in need.

They found -- surprise! -- that low-income people really want fresh fruits and veggies from local farms but the problem has been affordability and access. The foundation tackles this issue by doubling the value of federal food vouchers, or what used to be known as food stamps. On the back of the success at one farmers' market in Connecticut, they've now expanded the program to more than 30 states and gotten the attention of the White House.  

I had heard Nischan talk about this achievement a couple of times, then met up again at the Kneading Conference in Maine. Why was he there? Nischan says he got a wake-up call about whole grains after his son was diagnosed with diabetes and he began researching and changing the family's diet to include more veggies, fruit and grains. Then he brought that knowledge into restaurants he ran.

Now, in these talks, Nischan always mentions The Dressing Room, the restaurant that he co-founded with the actor Paul Newman in Westport, CT. He usually refers to it in passing, since it's not the subject of his talks. But I was always curious about it and since we were driving right through the area on a summer vacation I figured, hey, gotta try it. 

The place is casual, friendly and inviting -- I was in shorts, we took our young daughter - but don't let that handicap any preconceptions of the food. The menu is driven by what's seasonally available, from local farms and the sea. Nischan used to cook here, but now that he's devoting himself to the foundation executive chef Jon Vaast has stepped up. What I loved was his ability to serve something simple, such as plate of crunchy sauteed green beans at the peak of summer, alongside an earthy buckwheat pasta with lamb ragout. Nischan mentioned that the restaurant grinds the flour (yes, the freshness makes a difference, as I've found in grinding grains for my breadmaking). Vaast's special of the night was a braised pork shoulder which happily married rich tender slow-coooked pork with creamy fennel. This is a go-to dish, if they have it on the menu. I stuck with a spicy lobster and mussel stew that was a riff on Mediterranean soups. Think of the sea with a spicy kick.

Nischan sent out a few plates for us to taste and nothing fell flat. In fact, when the kitchen went deep into its reperatoire, as with the pork shoulder, it shined but the cooks also knew when to hold their punches and keep it simple, as with a tomato salad from Nischan's garden.

Maybe it's that kind of approach which led him to Wholesome Wave. Nischan knew that linking a restaurant with homegrown food would be a success -- just as Wholesome Wave understands that farm fresh produce would be enticing to anyone regardless of income. The only difference? I'd make a reservation for The Dressing Room.

- Samuel Fromartz

Let me just say it, buy this book: "Tomatoland"

Over the past few years, a slew of food books have appeared on everything from oysters to oranges, Twinkies to beans. Heck, I'm even writing one about grains and bread, which explains my relative absence here recently. But in Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, Barry Estabrook takes what might appear to be a narrow subject -- tomatoes, grown in Florida -- and spins it into a much bigger and disturbing tale (or more accurately, indictment).

You might not know, for example, that these tomatoes are grown in nearly sterile sand devoid of anything resembling soil, thus requiring copious amounts of fertilizers and toxic pesticides; or that these pesticides have been doused on workers, causing pregnant farmworkers to give birth to babies without arms or legs and leading to multimillion-dollar lawsuits. Or that Immokalee, Florida, the heart of the industry, has become ground zero for contemporary cases of slavery. 

It might be easy to go overboard and bludgeon this story to death with a heavy handed "J'accuse!" but thankfully Estabrook is too good a writer to fall prey to such tendencies. Instead, he lets the details speak for themselves and they prove devastating. I will not forget the quote he gets out of the US Attorney prosecuting these cases of enslaved tomato pickers, asserting that anyone who has eaten a winter tomato from Florida has eaten fruit picked by a slave. "That's not an assumption," the prosecutor says, "that's a fact."

Estabrook told a version of this tale in the now-shuttered Gourmet magazine, but here he has the room to dig deeper. Some magazine stories when expanded in books look like fabric that has been stretched way too thin, but that's not the case here. There was obviously more digging to do, and amazingly, the stories didn't seem hard to find. They just kept coming because the abuse was so widespread. Estabrook has chosen well, citing, for example, court depositions in which well-meaning tomato company executives, when pressed to explain the pesticide poisoning incidents, tie themselves up in semantic knots.

Thankfully, though, Estabrook doesn't leave us to swear off tomatoes forever and tells how the industry has, with much cajoling, lawsuits, industry pressure, boycotts and highly publicized stories of abuse, finally begun to get its act together. He also spends time with these growers who appear like the eager entrepreneurs they are -- perhaps too eager to be all that concerned about the messy details of their business. 

He also presents alternatives, not only in new tastier tomato breeds the industry has sworn off, but in different methods of tomato farming such as organic. Then there are the social improvements in areas like farmworker housing. Of course, the growers will always claim that anything which raises costs will simply push production overseas, or in this case, to Mexico, where it will take another Estabrook to uncover other abuses. But I would imagine that consumers might actually want a U.S. tomato, even from Florida, especially if it wasn't the product of slavery. It might take a Madison Avenue whiz to craft that into a marketing message, however.

If I have a quibble with the book, it's this: the slavery abuses were largely carried out by contractors, who were also immigrants. The behavior was obviously condoned by the tomato companies -- it was too flagrant not to be -- but it wasn't entirely clear what drove these contractors to act this way. Was it simply their twisted version of the American Dream in a community where laws were ignored? Just getting ahead any way they could? Or were they part of a larger criminal enterprise (it appears they were, loosely). It was just a question that lingered.

Now, you might think this isn't the best book to read on your summer vacation, sitting on the beach or in the country thinking about what you're going to eat in the evening. But I would beg to differ. The book is a great yarn. I devoured it in all of two days. More importantly, it will make you think about all the choices we make in how we produce the food we eat. And you'll never think of a tomato as "just a tomato" again.

- Samuel Fromartz

Welcome to the spin era! Leading ag reporter loses his job

At a time when food policy -- and politics -- is rising as an issue of national concern, one of the leading reporters in this area, Philip Brasher, was let go from the Des Moines Register yesterday. Yes, the paper in the heart of the corn belt shuttering its almost 80-year-old Washington bureau. The news set off a firestorm on Twitter, as Paula Crossfield points out at Civil Eats.

Brasher amazingly was cut just as the jockeying ahead of the 2012 farm bill is getting underway. Conflicts over how to cut agricultural subsidies -- $262 billion between 2005-2010 -- are rising at a time of exploding budget deficits. Brasher was one of the few people around who could cut through the weeds of these issues, which was not only of interest in Iowa. He was also a must-read in food and ag circles.

The take away here: expect more decisions behind closed doors, with a lot more spin. Sure, papers will run a story when something big happens, but the majority of "news" will dribble out from agribusiness associations and farm organization web sites that have a big stake in the outcome -- and the public interest groups that try and counter them. With the ranks of ag reporters exceedingly thin, what you read won't be filtered with an independent set of skeptical eyes; that is, if you manage to read anything at all. Ironic, considering the importance and interest in this area -- food -- only grows.

- Samuel Fromartz

Whole Foods crunchy granola image is so yesterday...

.[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UFc1pr2yUU] 

Amazing, small donations fund DC public school teaching kitchen

Two days ago, when I blogged out this public school teaching kitchen, I was skeptical they would be able to raise the $60,000 needed to reach their goal. After all, they were barely half way there. But it's amazing what collective action can achieve: they raised more than $30,000 in two days -- and here's the key, the vast majority of donations were below $100 each. Here's what the organizer wrote:

Thanks to over 470 people who pledged their support to build our FoodPrints teaching kitchen at Watkins Elementary School. We have received pledges from as far away as Australia and all throughout the USA, mostly in the greater metro DC area where we have had a lot of special friends who pledged support. Thanks to the families at Watkins who made gifts and to all the friends of FRESHFARM Markets for your support. And very special thanks to many of your who helped us over the last two days with blogs, tweets, emails, calls and special appeals for this campaign. We will thank all of you individually but for today, BIG THANKS, WE MADE THE $60,000 GOAL!

Then, tomorrow, we will begin talking about next steps—followup, meeting with DCPS folks, etc…..amazing!!!!

Hugs to all of you!

Image source: FoodPrints teaching kitchen

Can a school teaching kitchen get built?

[kickstarter url=http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/547484901/build-the-foodprints-kitchen-at-watkins-elementary-0 width=480]

I'm highlighting a Kickstarter campaign to build a teaching kitchen -- it's the companion to a school garden that is a leading example in DC. The project is being run by Jennifer Mampara, who I once worked with on another school project. She did cooking demos in a kindergarten class while I took the kids out to a community garden to transplant and grow lettuce. They loved it and one day we all sat down for a big salad lunch with lettuce the kids had grown.

Now, the project at Watkins Elementary is more ambitious, and they have just two days left to reach a $60,000 goal. Can they do it? You may help decide.

Bread of the week - bánh mi baguette

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.