Health
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Tests Reveal Poison in Nearly All Campbell's Soup
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Industry Disavows Smart Choices Campaign
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FDA Hits Back Against Stupid Food Labeling
Nutritional Bang for Your Grocery Buck
Published October 22, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
In an economic climate where people are pinching their grocery pennies and a food climate where the unhealthiest food is often the cheapest — or at least the most obviously cheap — it’s great to hear that someone’s come out with a most-nutritional-bang-for-your-buck assessment tool to prevent our thin wallets from killing our health.
Nutrition expert Adam Drewnowski, a professor at the University of Washington, presented his new Affordable Nutrition Index (ANI) at the American Dietetic Association’s Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo this week, Reuters reports. It is apparently the only tool to rate food according to how much nutritional value a dollar can buy.
Drewnowski did research that revealed how experts tend to silo food, nutrition and price considerations instead of regarding them as integrated elements in our eating lives. He is trying to steer the conversation toward addressing the fact that people account for many factors at once in making food-shopping decisions.
In Response to "The Omnivore's Delusion" Part 2
Published August 28, 2009 @ 02:45PM PT
(This is the second in a two-part response to "The Omnivore's Delusion" article written by Blake Hurst, a self-admitted "industrial" farmer from Missouri, a few weeks back for The Journal of American Enterprise Institute. The first part of my response can be found here.)
To continue my critique of Hurt's article, I'd like to now discuss the way he characterizes the acute need for the continuation of industrial animal agriculture. I purposely chose not to deal with this topic in my first post as I knew it would require its own space and time.
Part of the problem with agriculture today, as Nicholas Kristof points out in his recent New York Times Op-Ed, is that the profession has largely lost its soul over the past several decades as industrial farming practices have taken hold. This is not to say that there aren't any family farming operations in this country--in fact, there are many--but the way that we view the production of food has changed dramatically. There is no place where this is more true than in animal agriculture.
It's quite clear from Hurst's article that he is no animal rights activist. In his view, animals are commodities that are to be raised in a manner that maximizes the financial return for farmers with very little (legitimate) concern paid to the environmental and food safety costs incurred by this kind of production.
This is part of the lost soul of American agriculture. Where once farmers treated animals well in order to ensure a long, healthy and productive life, now many farmers choose to treat their animals as badly as possible while still turning a profit. We have lost respect for the key role animals have played (and always will play) in the history of our agricultural progression.
School Lunch Momentum of Sorts
Published August 21, 2009 @ 09:47AM PT
The New York Times ran a piece this week on the policy momentum behind giving children healthier school lunch options, which has champions in the White House and the Senate pushing to add $0.70 per lunch to the federal lunch budget. They highlight the work of Sen. Gillibrand (D-NY), who's gone beyond asking only for more to be spent to asking that it be spent better:
... “If you feed a kid chicken nuggets and canned peas and Doritos and canned fruit as a school lunch or you feed him grilled chicken, steamed broccoli and fresh fruits and a whole grain roll, the difference is night and day,” Senator Gillibrand said.
As part of this year’s work on the Child Nutrition Act, Senator Gillibrand is co-sponsoring legislation that would ban trans fat in cafeteria kitchens and give the Department of Agriculture more power to set tougher federal nutrition requirements for the lightly regulated à la carte program in schools. ...
In recent years however, federal reimbursement hasn't kept up with rising costs associated with providing school lunches, meaning that schools are often taking a loss on lousy food.
School lunches also have to vie for student's attention with 'competitive' foods of minimal nutritional value, such as candy bars. If the cafeteria staff get creative, they must face a student body that's been acclimated to lousy fast food, rarely get home cooked meals, and consequently don't recognize even a freshly made blackberry cobbler as food. Student rejection of prepared lunch options puts lunch budgets deeper in the red, pressuring menus to look more like the fast food restaurant menus that form the template of expectation when children think of 'food.'
In short, the foods marketed to children in general, and offered as competitive options in schools in particular, range from the nutritionally destructive to the merely low quality. But they've been engineered to taste good and hit all the right food addiction buttons, so there's that.
Further, as Tom Laskawy writes at Beyond Green, there's a structural impediment in the USDA to offering healthy lunches, and that impediment is a commodity purchase program whose main dumping ground is the nation's captive audience of school children.
These discussions always remind me of a classmate and fairly recent high school graduate, let's call him Joe, from four years back when I returned to college. My mom was a homemaker who cooked from a fairly traditional template that she picked up from her grandmother and most of my acquaintances now are either of the slightly older demographic who were more likely to have similar food choices at home and foodies (both urban and rural) who can be revolted by the mere mention of a McDonald's. Which is to say that turning down blackberry cobbler without a good reason is just strange to me and so I turn to Joe as a reminder that not everyone grew up that way.
Joe had been raised on pizza (cheese or pepperoni only, please), tater tots, fries, hamburgers and iirc, macaroni and cheese. He was afraid of other types of food and wouldn't try them. I remember suggesting a taco at one point, a ground beef taco with lettuce and tomatoes, that I'd wrongly thought was close enough to having a hamburger as to make no particular difference. Well, Joe would have none of it. Tacos were just too strange sounding.
As a kid, I was also rather fond of the hamburgers and cheese pizza served at school. They beat the heck out of mushy, canned green beans, anyway. But having tried other kinds of food, they weren't all I would agree to eat, nor what I'd have always preferred to eat. I'd had options Joe never dreamed of. Options that made our tastes in food mutually incomprehensible, indeed, almost incommensurable, to each other.
Are the values of finding markets for US farm products and feeding children good food equally hard to translate into a common goal? Are good intentions at the federal level going to be consumed by mere price inflation? Are school kids going to be doomed to choosing between canned fruit and a 'fresh' fruit option that consists of the battery acid oranges and mealy apples that even I remember turning my nose up at? (The fresh fruit at school was never as good as what my mom brought home from the grocery store. I never realized how lucky that made me.)
I don't know. But I do know that it's going to take years, if ever, to fix school food. Kids can't vote and their parents often have a hard enough time trying to make sure they're well served educationally and have roofs over their heads to consistently take on the lousy food they're given. Particularly concerned parents often just opt out and do what they can to send their kids to school with a decent lunchbag.
All of which makes this a paramount political problem that transcends any 'consumer choice' response to a gross market failure. And I do mean gross in the literal sense.
(Photo credit: erin.kkr on Flickr.)
Boycott Whole Foods
Published August 19, 2009 @ 12:40PM PT
I've been looking the other way for a long time each time I go to Whole Foods, aka Whole Paycheck. I mean, I already know that they profit off of creating an image of sustainability- mixing organic produce with conventional. I know that the CEO John Mackey is a libertarian who opposes labor unions (none of the Whole Foods are union), and in general opposes most the ideals I fight for in my life. But, Whole Foods make my shopping pretty easy and made it easy for me to check my values at the door.
But, no more.
It is one thing to disagree with a CEO like John Mackey. Fine. We all have different politics. But, its another thing when he is taking his money and influence to fight against everything I believe in. And, right now we are a critical tipping point on health care, and the need for a public health care option.
John Mackey decided to tke the politics of the teabaggers and make them acceptable for the Wall Street crowd last week in the Wall Street Journal.. He started by throwing out the "socialism" charge at President Obama and then goes onto to argue for Health Savings Accounts, deregulation, and getting rid of insurance companies from being able to discriminate against medical conditions. Oh, and he throws in as well, people are fat so that is why we have a health care problem ( solution- shop at Whole Foods, duh!).
Mackey argues against the public option with: "While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system"And that is where he lost me, and my whole paycheck. We need a strong public option. We need to be able to have a system that can compete with the massive insurance industry. Our small businesses, including small scare organic farmers, need real health insurance reform.
I am for a sustainable food system and I believe a important key is looking to make sure all the players up the chain are supported. Which means- we need to make sure workers are paid well ( ahem- EFCA), that farmers and employees on farms can buy health insurance ( ahem- public option), and that the companies we buy from support our values for real, not just market our values back to us.
So, I am taking my money to the farmers markets, UFCW organized grocery stores, and smaller natural food stores. I hope you follow suit.
If you're on facebook, you can join the Boycott Whole Foods group here.
[Update: Natasha here, minor URL edit and corrections made, sorry to bump in.]
Administrative Note
Published August 09, 2009 @ 12:24AM PT
Hey folks,
Sorry to leave you hanging lately. I broke my foot last week right after I got back and after years and years of no insurance (and the fact that it didn't actually hurt as much as a migraine) I'd half convinced myself that it was just a sprain. Until the end of this last week, when more of my foot was covered by spreading bruises than not and it became clear that it needed to be x-rayed and properly seen to.
It's hard to even sit up for long, the swelling and bruising get worse when it isn't elevated. (Don't get me started on how bad it is getting downstairs from the 3rd floor.) Also, there's the prescription pain medication. As you can imagine, this situation isn't good for my computer use or focus.
Steph Larsen has written many times in this space about the need for universal healthcare in order to preserve farming as a viable small business. A lot of independent contractors and small business owners, or people who would like to be small business owners, know the truth of it. I broke my 5th metatarsal, the most commonly broken bone in the body, and I can right now barely do a job that involves typing from my home. This could mean the end of some people's entrepreneurial dreams, or the loss of a part time job with little security that supported a small business, like a farm. And many farmers do have second jobs to support their farming, both for the extra income and if possible, for even more valuable health coverage.
I'm lucky to have recently married into health coverage, but if it isn't retroactive to our wedding day, this one injury is likely to wipe out most of our recently acquired financial cushion. We were a little slow with the paperwork, being kind of busy and all.
Anyway, I hope I'll be back making a nuisance of myself again soon. But extensive reading and research, or even a lot of typing, are just not happening right now. Sorry.
cheers,
n
Animal Confinement Waste
Published August 06, 2009 @ 07:50AM PT
Fun facts from the recent Environmental Impact of Industrial Farm Animal Production (pdf) report issued for the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production:
... By any estimate, the total amount of farm animal waste produced annually in the United States is substantial. In its report for the year 2001, the usda estimated the output of manure from farm animals at 920,000 US short tons of dry matter per day (usda ars 2002). This translates to greater than 300 million metric tons of dry mass or more than 660 billion pounds per year. Of this mass, 86% (788,000 tons per day) was projected to stem from animals held in confinement. In contrast, the American Society of Agricultural Engineers provides a higher estimate of 540 million metric tons of dry weight excreta per annum (American Society of Agricultural Engineers, 2005). Lower estimates of 133 million tons of manure per year on a dry weight basis also have been reported recently in the peer-reviewed literature using information contained in usda online databases (Burkholder et al., 2007). Reporting the volume of excreta based on the lifespan of the food animal results again in a different set of data.
Regardless of the exact amount generated, farm animal waste exceeds human sanitary waste production by at least one order of magnitude (Burkholder et al., 2007). Yet in comparison to the lesser amount of human waste, the management and disposal of animal wastes are poorly regulated. This lack of protection may have been without consequence in traditional agriculture, because animal wastes produced by traditional animal husbandry methods in rural locations did not usually present risks to local communities that relied on ecosystem services for attenuating pathogens and absorbing or diluting nutrients. However, similar to large human settlements, improper management of feces from ifap facilities can and does overwhelm natural cleansing processes. ...
It isn't just waste, it's duplicative waste. We manufacture fertilizer (its use has gone up six fold since the 1950s, according to the report) and put it on the fields to grow feed for animals who produce fertilizer that then becomes unmanageable garbage. Oh, but not just a lot of garbage, biohazardous garbage. From elsewhere in the report:
Senate Cuts Animal ID Funding By Half
Published August 05, 2009 @ 02:05PM PT
Woohoo! I get to say nice things about the Senate!
I'm pleased to report that my usual causticity can be suspended for the duration of this post to applaud the Senate's unanimous consent vote to cut funding for the National Animal ID System. Go, Senate!
Jill Richardson at LaVidaLocavore has reposted the press release by R-CALF USA, the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America, and I think that the most salient point in the entire debate is encapsulated in this paragraph of their statement, here:
3) No food safety benefits. NAIS will not prevent food borne illnesses from e. coli or salmonella, because the contamination occurs at the slaughterhouse, while NAIS tracking ends at the time of slaughter. Thus, NAIS will neither prevent the contamination nor increase the government's ability to track contaminated meat back to its source. In addition, NAIS will hurt efforts to develop safer, decentralized local food systems. ...
If the program fails in its main, stated goal, if it is in fact structured such that failure is inevitable, what are we spending all this money for? As a liberal, progressive, believer in the possibility of government to do good, I have a deep and abiding interest in money given to the government not being wasted. When it's wasted, it creates an instant opportunity cost against something good and useful being done with that money.
Of the money that remains in the program, the Senate directives limit its use to rule-making activities, and on that front, I have a suggestion: lay the groundwork to institute premise ID, instead of animal ID.
I was talking a couple months ago with Margaret Krome, my former internship supervisor and policy program director at the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, about how NAIS implementation has gone in Wisconsin. She said that at this point, they've just done premise registration, which sidesteps many of the concerns raised directly by Amish communities and does actually provide a public health benefit.
Krome explained that when there were animal disease outbreaks, the premise registry let public health officials target their notification efforts to the right people. This registration simply lets officials know that there are livestock on the property and what type. That's actually useful to know should there be an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease, scabies, or what have you. It also isn't burdensome to farmers, needing to be neither expensive nor time-consuming. See? Useful.
Anyway, cheers again to the Senate for showing such good sense. It seems in short supply these days.(Photo credit: kimberlyfaye on Flickr.)
