Posts by Natasha Chart
Recommended Reading
Published December 31, 2008 @ 11:34AM PT
The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land; edited by Norman Wirzba
“If being an affluent society doesn't mean eating well, I can't imagine what it does mean.” - Brian Donahue, in The Essential Agrarian Reader. This collection of essays is a farsighted and witty introduction to the subject of sustainable agriculture. With compassion for farmers, eaters, animals and the habitat that all of us share, authors like Barbara Kingsolver, Vandana Shiva and Herman E. Daly talk about what the food system means for our lives and future prosperity.
The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements; by Sandor Ellix Katz
Packed with action and information resources, would-be members of the Delicious Revolution never have to feel alone again with this book by their side. Katz, a fermentation enthusiast and cheerful gardener, spices the book with traditional recipes and practical money-saving advice for both urban and rural human habitats.
The Farm as Natural Habitat: Reconnecting Food Systems With Ecosystems; edited by Dana L. Jackson and Laura L. Jackson
A look at farms and farming communities that have made a commitment to preserving local ecosystems or expanding habitat for wildlife, all while maintaining the productive capacity of privately owned working farmland. Usefully, this book has several case studies of bringing local governments, farmers and nonprofits together through inclusive and respectful negotiation.
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus; by Charles C. Mann
It's easy to forget that potatoes, tomatoes, chilies, corn, chocolate and many other delightful foods came from the Americas; 1491 is the story of the sophisticated cultures that both fed people and preserved environment. Mann has drawn a vivid portrait of Native culture in North and South America from historians' and archaeologists' patient reconstructions of pre-contact societies. Far from being an untouched wilderness on which migrant bands of Noble Savages trod lightly, the Americas were intensively cultivated and managed for the production of food. Even the Amazon rainforest was the site of many stable, longstanding agricultural communities, with that jungle now considered by some to be the finest horticultural achievement in human history.
The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalized Economy; byVeronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Maria Mies
An ecofeminist perspective on the meaning of autonomy and wealth. The authors challeng the ethics of the corporate model of society and relate their ideals to having access to land from which you can provide food for yourself and a thriving, local economy to participate in.
The War on Bugs; by Will Allen
Why does poison end up on absolutely everything, especially things we're going to eat? This book charts the history of the market opportunism, government collusion and farm press takeover that matched companies with nasty chemicals to sell with farmers who were just hoping to make a living on a farm. From flim-flam artists unloading industrial waste as fertilizer to chemical weapons manufacturers looking to recycle nerve gas as pesticide, come meet the people who are getting rich off putting carcinogens and endocrine disruptors into your food, water and air.
Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment; by Sandra Steingraber, PhD
Steingraber grew up on a farm, got a doctorate in biology and survived a bout of cancer. Many of her relatives also have, or had, cancer ... but Steingraber is adopted. Her perspective on the need to further investigate the environmental toxins used in farming and industry is both personal and grounded in the forefront of scientific research.
Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy; by John Bowe
Just because there are laws against something, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Like the author, one could read this book and be left wondering if the only reason slaves aren't still formally bought and sold is because people aren't worth eight head of oxen anymore. This is a book about the seamy underbelly of globalized industrial agriculture and the hardworking people it eats for breakfast.
Empowering Women; by Vandana Shiva. What international development plans miss every time.
Organic agriculture's yields fully adequate to meet current and projected needs for food; University of Michigan study.
Fast Food Nation; by Eric Schlosser. Omnivore's Dilemma; by Michael Pollan. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; by Barbara Kingsolver. Food Politics; by Marion Nestle. Food Fight: A Citizen's Guide to the Farm Bill; by Daniel Imhoff. Diet For a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis; by Christopher Cook. Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You're Eating; by Jeffrey M. Smith.
These books have been adequately reviewed by, oh, about a million people. Chances are that if you run into anyone else in the sustainable food movement, they will recommend one of them. They're good. Read them when you can, keep them for reference if you haven't got time for a page-by-page.
Dinner With a Side of Controversy
Published December 31, 2008 @ 11:16AM PT
Sometimes, people disagree. In food and agriculture, these are some of the things they disagree about.
1. Genetically Modified Organisms (GM, GMO or GE crops)
Genetically engineered crops are hailed by giant agribusiness corporations as the future of food.
Unfortunately, they haven't been proven safe and they routinely interbreed with nearby crops, as the species favored for modification tend to be wind pollinated. The pollen of grains, like corn, is light enough to travel for miles. This has led to a rush of copyright infringement lawsuits by corporations like Monsanto against farmers whose crops have been contaminated by their neighbors' GMO pollen. Monsanto's position is that farmers should pay for this privilege.
Meanwhile, several domesticated crop species go extinct every hour, and the sort of small farms that harbored their abundant diversity are following them into the abyss. We're being pushed towards a future of nothing but thousand acre-farms growing a few patented commodity grains, with the copyrights owned by multinationals. A future where there's little else to grow because thousands of years worth of human horticultural work and knowledge has been allowed to vanish without a trace.
GM crops are being pushed on farmers for one reason only: they're immensely profitable. If Syngenta and the rest of them could make a lot of money off of heirloom beans and squashes, they'd be singing a different song.
2. Elitism
Some say that because our current food system makes healthy, non-toxic food expensive, that healthy, non-toxic food is itself elitist. Which makes perfect sense. It's entirely reasonable that people should have to pay extra for food with no poison in it. Head, meet desk.
It's also suggested that local food is elitist, because it can be hard for locals to get to farmer's markets. But consider that even the finest French cheese started out one day as farmer Jacques' curdled milk, and the most expensive Italian wines used to be farmer Giuseppe's home brew. What delicious things are you missing out on because your local grocery store will only purchase food that's been shipped in bulk from a warehouse hundreds of miles away?
Then there those who suggest that opposition to technologies like GM, or to massive commodity monocultures, hide a secret belief that poor people in other countries should be left to starve. Right. But it wasn't sustainable agriculture activists and local food enthusiasts who insisted that farmers in Central America should let Chiquita have all the best land to grow bananas for US supermarkets, or that African farmers should be pushed into growing flowers and chocolate for export instead of food for their local communities. It was the interests of large agri-business - not the sustainable food movement -- that drove the price of corn so low that it put loads of Mexican farmers out of business, and that insisted on the ethanol mandates that drove imported corn prices so high that their families couldn't afford tortillas anymore.
Who's elitist now?
3. Subsidies
We'd rather talk about manure. Not kidding. This might be the most contentious issue of all. Over the years, subsidies have been enacted to correct for the fact that sometimes crops fail because of bad weather or natural disasters and, well, farming is not like other industries. Society survived the loss of buggy whip manufacture, but people need to eat and someone needs to grow that food.
Unfortunately, what were subsidies to farmers to help them cope in a competitive market have become a long-running subsidies to food processors who can buy certain protected crops at below the costs of production. Because of inequities in international power, poorer countries have generally been forced to drop agricultural product tariffs and subsidies, leaving their farmers at the mercy of both weather and market.
If US agricultural subsidies end outright, it will almost certainly cause problems and market disruptions. Though if New Zealand's example is anything to go by, the end of subsidies might mean a flourishing of agriculture, just a little bit changed.
There are also payments that go to keep land out of production for conservation purposes. Though the longterm preservation of agriculture and human communities that depend on it requires that there be wetland habitat maintained for birds and other wildlife. It requires that there be regular windbreaks to prevent erosion and plots of unplowed grassland where beneficial species like carabid beetles and earthworms can comfortably establish themselves. It requires that stream banks have enough surrounding vegetation that they don't become silted in from runoff and more prone to flood.
Since the market has failed to incentivize conservation, somebody should.
4. Animal Cruelty
And, there's worse. You may have heard that around seventy percent of antibiotics used in the US are used on livestock. While it's true that antibiotics help improve animal growth rates, what's undeniable is that they're often used as life support.
Antibiotics allow many factory-farmed animals simply to stay alive in conditions so foul, filthy and inhumane that only constant medication prevents them from keeling over dead. Some are fed mixtures of feathers and other animals' droppings. Some are fed diets so enriched with grain, instead of the grass they're supposed to eat, that their stomachs are permanently ulcerated. Some are crowded in so close that they're unable even to turn around, or in cages so cramped that their feet grow into the bars.
When they're slaughtered, in icy, sloppy warehouses staffed by exhausted workers that have to kill hundreds of animals a day, they may not even be dead when the dismembering starts.
Is this how we want to eat?
5. Slavery
While it is true that slavery has been outlawed, and individuals are no longer directly bought and sold, slaves and sharecroppers harvest and process much of our food.
They work for contractors who work for the farm operators who sell to the companies that process and ship our food to the grocery stores. That's a long chain of blame aversion.
So when the contractor brings terrified immigrants to shacks in the middle of nowhere, forcing them to work long hours for wages that haven't gone up in decades, paying them nothing or so little that they can never pay back their transport debts, ripping them off through the company store, threatening them with violence or deportation if they complain, everyone can pretend they don't know. When junkies are lured to live in guarded work camps where their employers sell them more drugs to help them escape their poverty in their imaginations, at the least, it was just a few bad apples.
Farm operators get, on the high end, 20 cents of every dollar we pay for food. No allowances are made for increased labor costs, and virtually all of the profit goes to distributors. So, slavery and sharecropping. Because while you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip, you can squeeze it out of a scared, immigrant picker in Immokalee, Florida, who's lucky to get paid $0.45 for gathering 32 pounds of tomatoes.
Great civilization we're running, here.
(Photo credit: iLoveButter on Flickr.)
Top Ten Ways To Make A Difference
Published December 31, 2008 @ 11:11AM PT
"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" - Julian of Norwich
What we're working for is nothing short of revolution. A delicious revolution, that is. With calls and letters to elected officials, organizing, activism, and a peaceable commitment to good meals for all, we hope to wake up one day to a world where getting healthy and delicious food is within the reach of every family.
The delicious revolution will not be a consumer revolution. If the only question is where to shop and what to buy, large-scale deliciousness will remain beyond our grasp. Yes, things would be better if a lot of people changed their buying habits, but not everyone has much choice in the matter. A parent who brings home a bucket of fried chicken every night for dinner because it's a 2 hour round trip on the bus to the nearest grocery store, because they're tired after a long shift and they're not sure they could afford better anyway, we'd be crazy to say that what they need is a new kind of shopping list.
Deliciousness will only come to all of us through a citizen revolution. One where we prioritize access, fairness, security and good health for our neighbors, as well as ourselves. One where we challenge the logic of a food system that favors candy over carrots and charges people extra for food that doesn't have synthetic hormone mimics and nerve toxins in it.
These are things you can do to help get us there.
1. Believe that everyone deserves access to wholesome, healthy, delicious food.
2. Get involved with your local food policy council, or start one.
3. Get involved with a Buy Fresh, Buy Local chapter, or start one.
4. Oppose farmworker slavery and the companies that turn a blind eye to it.
5. Look to see if your local schools or other institutional kitchens participate in a farm-to-cafeteria program, and if not, do something about it.
6. Eat locally grown and raised food from a farmers market or a subscription to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).
7. Start a garden, or get a plot in a nearby community garden, and grow some food of your own.
8. Eat free range, pasture-raised meat and poultry products. They're better for your health, the animals' health, and the planet's health.
9. Eat organic food.
10. Eat less meat.
(Photo credit: NatalieMaynor on Flickr.)
