Posts by Jill Richardson
Food Safety Bill in the House
Published July 19, 2009 @ 10:08PM PT
There's a food safety bill moving through the House, HR 2749 (a.k.a. The Food Safety Enhancement Act). Here's a timeline of what has happened:
- The House Energy & Commerce committee introduced the bill, which included $1000 "user fees" for "food facilities" (excluding farms and restaurants) and an increased schedule for FDA inspections from on average once a decade to as every 6-18 mos for high risk facilities, every 18 mos to 3 years for low risk facilities, and every 3-4 years for warehouses. The bill also gave the FDA the ability to quarantine foods. You can see more details on it here.
- The House Energy & Commerce committee held a hearing about the bill. For details you can see Part 1 and Part 2.
- The subcommittee within the committee marked up the bill and then passed it. During the markup, the changed the $1000 fees to $500 fees.
- The committee marked up the bill and then passed it. They removed the FDA's ability to quarantine livestock (thanks to some heavy lobbying by the meat industry) and increased the inspections for high risk facilities from every 6-18 mos to every 6-12 mos. They also added a requirement for high risk facilities to submit any positive test results for pathogens to the FDA.
- A backlash started against the bill. The meat industry was opposed to the bill from the start and the packaged food industry was actually for it. However, this backlash came from the grassroots from groups that actually care about sustainable food. On the other hand, Consumers Union strongly supports the bill. You can see their arguments for and against the bill here.
- The bill went to the House Agriculture Committee, where the committee chairman Collin Peterson threatened to prevent the bill from moving forward if it is not changed to meet his demands. Among other things, he does not want the FDA on farms.
And that's where we stand now. The groups who oppose the bill still oppose it. The groups who support it still support it. Both are trying to reach the ears of Congress. And the one with all of the power over whether the bill will move forward is Collin Peterson, whose major motivation is allowing Big Ag to continue business as usual without being bothered by pesky food safety bills. The bill is going to change before it moves out of the Ag committee, and the only questions are how it will change, and whether those changes will be good for us. I'd like to see the bill changed so that it won't affect small farmers and small businesses as much as it does now, but of course I don't want to see any of the regulations on big business watered down. I don't know what Collin Peterson's plans are, but I'll keep an eye out for interviews with him and update you if I hear anything.
Google Mapping Food Destinations
Published July 18, 2009 @ 12:03AM PT
U.S. Food Policy put up a fascinating post of the top 10 food destinations in the US - with satellite images via Google. They show Joel Salatin's farm, a few CAFOs, and the urban farm in LA that was the topic of the documentary The Garden. What they don't have though are the Milwaukee or Chicago locations for the famous urban farm Growing Power. I'd like to see that. Fortunately, it doesn't take but a second to Google map it myself so I can have a look! What other food destinations would be fun to look at online?
Who is Lobbying on What?
Published July 17, 2009 @ 11:55PM PT
I've found a new toy lately. Lobbying records are public information! You can look them up at the Senate Office of Public Records. The records to look at are the quarterly reports - the registrations, terminations, and year-end reports do not contain nearly as much information. You will see who the lobby firm is, who the client is, how much money they spent (if it's over $5000), who the individual lobbyists were, and what they lobbied on.
What is this good for? Mostly, I like to use it to see where people's biases may lie. If you read an anti-sustainable food op ed or a statement by somebody and you want to know if they might be getting paid to lobby on the issue, you can check out the lobbying records and see if that's the case. This week I did that for several people and I hit one jackpot - Marshall Matz. He authored a heinous op ed earlier this year. And... it turns out he's lobbying for practically every Big Ag group under the sun. Other times, when you check to see if somebody has been lobbying and you come up empty, it's reassuring. They still might be biased in some way (check their campaign contributions if they hold or held elected office, or see if they sit on a corporate board), but if they aren't getting paid to lobby on behalf of anyone, well, that's something at least.
What's the Obsession With Bacon?
Published July 16, 2009 @ 11:53PM PT
OK, seriously. I don't get it. What's the big obsession with bacon? I get that it tastes good. But why do we need bacon bandaids. Or bacon lip balm. Or bacon in chocolate. Or this bacon twist on an ice cream cone:
the Bacone: three strips of bacon deep fried to make a cone shape, filled with a mixture of scrambled eggs, hash browns and cheese, and topped with biscuits and country gravy.
The rest of that stuff makes this Bacon Makes Everything Better shirt look relatively, well, tame. Maybe I'm reading the wrong blogs.
(Photo credit: Sappymoosetree on Flickr)
A Bad Review for a Sustainable Food Book
Published July 16, 2009 @ 10:38PM PT
I'd like to take a moment to talk about a bad review my book received. I'd like to bring it up not because it's a chance to discuss my book (surely I wouldn't call your attention to a bad review if that were my motive!), but because the reviewer had some preconceived notions about local and sustainable food that colored her views on the entire book. To me, that says that there are some crazy arguments against local and sustainable food getting out into the media. You can see a good review of the book here, by the way. The bad review called my book "myopic" and "shallow" and claimed that I never addressed the "costliness" and "impracticality" of eating local food (which the reviewer believed was an energy-inefficient fad).
And, actually, I've taken some time to read through the arguments of those who believe that local food is bogus - although I did so long after the book manuscript was finalized, partially because the anti-locavore arguments are quite new and they weren't on my radar yet. But I do think its important to read all sides and so I did read what I could on the subject.
The argument tends to sound very similar to something people say to me as a vegetarian, which is: "If everyone went vegetarian tomorrow, it totally wouldn't work! What would you do with all of those extra cows and pigs and chickens? Nobody would feed them if there was no beef, pork, or chicken industries! They'd starve!" The locavore parallel is to point out that if everyone went locavore tomorrow it wouldn't work. In fact, it also wouldn't work if we all decided tomorrow we wanted organic food or cage free eggs. It wouldn't work because there isn't enough of that food being produced. And even if you skip on the "organic" and just go for "local," it STILL wouldn't work. Something like half of our fruit and a quarter of our vegetables come from California. What's the rest of the nation going to do for fruit? And yet, I don't think anyone in their right mind IS calling for everyone to go locavore tomorrow. Surely they might call on people to do so, but not with the expectation that 100% of Americans will actually do so. Our food system took generations to evolve and it will take time to change. Thus, I don't see that as a valid argument.
How about the point that it's energy inefficient? Part of the "debunking" of the "eat local" idea centers around the efficiency of transporting food. If you filled up an entire Prius with oranges and drove them across several states, each orange might require less oil (on average) than, say, somebody who transported a few gallons of milk half that distance in a Hummer. Therefore, they say that we should look at more than just how many miles something traveled but also we should consider how efficiently it traveled. Another part of the anti-locavore argument comes from analyses showing that the amount of oil used in the production of a food occurs during its growth, harvesting, processing, and distribution. Thus, if you focus ONLY on the distribution piece, on buying food that used the least amount of oil to bring it from farm to fork, you might be ignoring the fact that it was an oil hog in its production stage. One anecdote I've heard is that (if you live in the UK) it requires less oil to eat grass fed lamb from New Zealand than it does to eat grain fed lamb from the UK. Sure, the grain fed lamb used less oil in its transportation BUT, it used more oil during the rest of its production. OK, fine. But what about eating grass fed lamb from the UK then? Wouldn't that be even better than the same product from New Zealand?
I don't often tell people to merely eat local when I give advice, because "eat local" can be watered down (local-washed?) easily, as Lay's Potato Chips is now trying to do. I tell people to know their farmers. Eating a Tyson chicken you bought from a Wal-Mart in Arkansas can be considered eating local, technically. But it completely betrays the spirit of the movement. To me, eating local has a lot more to do with forming relationships with people you trust whose values are similar to yours. By doing so, you can guarantee that they cared for the environment and for the people and animals who produced your food in the best way possible. Sadly, the term "greenwashing" exists because as soon as you allow marketers to come in between you and the person who produced your food, you might be getting sold on a bunch of eco-friendly ideas that don't actually represent how your food was produced. Theoretically, if you are buying from somebody you know, they won't sell you grain fed lamb because they know grass fed is better. And if they do that, the benefits extend FAR beyond just a reduction in oil usage. We should not simplify the benefits of sustainable food down to gallons of oil consumed, because truly sustainable (good, clean, fair) food provides so much more than that (like health to the eater and a fair wage to the farmer and a thriving economy and clean environment to the community).
What about the idea that it's impractical and costly to eat local? In some cases that is true and in some cases that is not true. Right now I buy my food from the farmers market. Some things cost more than others. Often I get deals by buying the last food leftover at the end of the market, when the farmers want to get rid of it. That means that I won't always get my pick of which foods I want, and the peaches left might be the mushy ones (which I can buy up for pennies on the dollar and make jam with). But at least I can afford it. At least it's real food and it's healthy.
That said, I get it - believe me I get it - how hard it can be to eat well in the modern world. Perhaps the reviewer who didn't like my book missed all of chapter 1 where I talk about that. But that's also why I am calling for policy change. No, sustainable food isn't available enough to all people yet - if it was, we wouldn't need change. Furthermore, I don't "make the perfect the enemy of the good." While I do make an effort to show where our goal is in my book, you'll find that the solutions I offer that are politically feasible now are really quite moderate and pragmatic. I think it's important to keep our eyes on our overall goal, but I get that if somebody eats no fruit, getting them to eat an apple - even if it's been shipped from New Zealand and grown with pesticides - is better than not helping them eat any fruit at all. So, to others who criticize our movement (and buckle up because they are out there and at least one of them has a book coming out), I think we need to keep in mind that we aren't the impractical hippies living in an ivory tower that they portray us to be. Just because we're imagining to what a perfect world might look like, that doesn't mean we are ignoring the realities of the world we have today and working within those boundaries to make our world a better place.
One Step Closer to Food Safety Legislation
Published June 10, 2009 @ 11:38PM PT
There's a major food safety bill in front of Congress right now (The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009) and today it moved one step closer to becoming a law. It passed the House Energy & Commerce committee's subcommittee on Health. The bill will:
- Require all "food facilities" (which does NOT include farms or restaurants) to pay $500 fees annually.
- Require all "food facilities" to be inspected every 6 mos to 4 years, depending on their level of risk (the riskier you are, the more you get inspected).
- Establish a new traceability system from farm to fork. This is going to be an enormous undertaking and it will be very difficult on a technical level for the FDA to accomplish it. It's hard to say right now how it's going to look in the end, but the bill does specifically exempt farms that sell directly to consumers and restaurants.
- Give the FDA the authority to call a mandatory recall or look through a company's records.
The next step will be a vote by the full House Energy & Commerce Committee, expected next Wednesday. Following that, there will be a vote by the full House of Representatives. Assuming the bill passes the House, it will then go to the Senate. I don't have any information yet on what sort of timeframe we should expect from the Senate - they might not even look at it for months, even after it passes the House.
Food Vocab Lesson: Specialty Crops
Published June 10, 2009 @ 09:38PM PT
What's a specialty crop? It sounds like something that is perhaps rare and unique. Heirloom varieties of expensive, organic vegetables that most people don't encounter because they are only served in elite restaurants? Turns out, that's not it at all. "Specialty crops" is government-speak for "fruits and vegetables." No joke. The food that people are supposed to eat for optimal health are considered so odd and rare in American Agriculture that they garner the name "specialty crops." And, indeed, they make up only about 3% of our cropland so they ARE pretty special, compared to the commodities grown on the vast majority of our land.
Currently, if a farmer has his or her land enrolled in commodity subsidy programs, then he or she is prohibited from growing specialty crops on that land. Want to rotate between corn and soy? Fine. Want to let the land lay fallow for a year? Go ahead. But if you suddenly want to do a rotation of tomatoes on that land... no way. There's a bill in Congress that would correct this. It's HR 800, sponsored by one of my favorite Congresswomen, Tammy Baldwin of Madison, WI. The bill is just kind of sitting there, quietly, with no real action or attention. Man, I would love to see it pass!!!
