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If you eat food in America, see “Food, Inc.”

The 90-minute documentary will disgust, infuriate, and inspire you.  Multinational food conglomerates, with the help of their cronies in government, have spent millions of dollars to make sure the average consumer never learns the things you learn in this film.* 

As we watched pigs being roughly herded to their deaths in the nation’s largest slaughterhouse, I turned to Andrea. “So, will you join me? Twice a month and only if you know where it’s from?”

Without missing a beat, she said: “Oh, I made that decision back at the chickens” — the first segment of the film.

The movie has its flaws — as Ezra Klein put it, “It’s driven less by a thesis than by an intuition: Something is wrong with our food production system. It’s just not clear what.” — and you may feel powerless and hopeless by the end.

I think the best take-away is this: you vote for what kind of food industry you want three times a day. Consumers can change the system. You don’t need to give up industrially-produced meat and poultry full-stop, as I have, but you can significantly reduce, as Marco has.  Try food writer Mark Bittman’s “Vegan Before 6” strategy or his “lessmeatism” philosophy. Whatever works for you, do it. But, please: reduce your consumption of industrially-produced meat and poultry (and corn-fed, farmed fish, while we’re at it).

Sadly, most non-meat foods are not much better, because they’re produced with corn- and soy-based chemicals and genetically-modified organisms, and travels thousands of petro-miles to your door. You know the drill: whenever you can, avoid packaged foods, especially ones with ingredients you don’t recognize, and eat what’s grown locally. (Here’s a guide.)

Alright, enough with the soapbox.  I want to end with three images from the film that have stuck with me:

  • A chicken farmer in Kentucky, contracted (and indebted) to Tyson. Driving around in his pickup, he’s overweight, red-faced, jowly, and unhealthy-looking. His chickens are stuffed into huge buildings with black curtains over the windows which Tyson doesn’t allow the film crew to enter.
  • In contrast: Joel Slatin, the infamous “grass farmer” of Polyface Farm.  If you got rid of his funky eyeglasses, he’d be a farmer from central cating: tan, fit, muscular, and at ease as he walks his land, drives a tractor, and butchers a chicken. His animals are the platonic ideal, the image most Americans still have when they think “cow” — grazing on grass, nuzzling one another, basking in sunlight (this is not what the vast majority of cows in this country do every day). The irony is that Slatin is the black sheep and the quiet revolutionary that undermines the dominance of the angro-industrial approach.
  • A machine spewing out slabs of a putty-colored, SPAM-like substance that is destined to be added to 70% of fast food hamburgers in America. It’s a meat filler “cleansed” with ammonia to combat traces of deadly E. Coli found in industrially-produced beef.  That’s right: you are essentially eating bleach.

* Most of which is not news to anyone who’s read Michael Pollan and Eric Schloesser, but seeing bald corruption and abuse of people and animals on the big screen makes it all the more real.

PS: I just got the film’s companion book in the mail, which includes essays from Pollan, Schloesser, food policy maven Marion Nestle, and Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus, among others, so I’ll report back on what I learn.

July 1, 2009

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link Michael Pollan: "A Food Revolution in the Making, from Victory Gardens to the White House Lawn"

I’m creating an Urban Agriculture Study Group at the City University of New York (where I’m on the staff of a green building program) with a couple of crazy-passionate, very inspiring students.  One of them went off to Power Shift 2009 and came back excited to change the word through urban farming.  But he hadn’t even read Michael Pollan yet, so I set him to work.  Lesson One: Omnivore’s Dilemna.  (Eventually I hope to go on field trips with the group — maybe to visit my friends at the Queens County Farm Museum!).

I just emailed this HuffPo post to my students…

Resolarizing the food economy can support diversified farming and shorten the distance from farm to fork, shrinking the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet. A decentralized food system offers many other significant benefits: Food eaten closer to where it is grown is fresher and requires less processing, making it more nutritious, and whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience; regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks.

Here are few examples of how we could start:

  • Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers’ markets.
  • Make food-safety regulations sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that small producers selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market are not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer.
  • Urge The U.S.D.A. to establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve and support the local food processors that remain.
  • Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve to prevent huge swings in commodity prices.
  • Create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce which would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.

Link via Ms. Cathy.

April 22, 2009

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The “natural” artificial sweetener

“Stevia” is the common name for rebaudioside A, an artifical, no-calorie sweetener that is extracted from the leaves of the stevia plant.  Long popular in Japan, the FDA deemed it safe for use in food and drink this past December — after years of lobbying from “large food and drink manufacturers” who sensed ” an eager audience for a sugar substitute perceived as healthier than the rest,” the NYT reports.

Stevia is gaining popularity, thanks in part to bloggers like The Fitnessista, who champions whole food eating but uses stevia in everything from homemade almond milk to coffee. But what, really, seperates it from Splenda? Neither are things your grandmother would recognize as food (one of Michael Pollan’s rules for eating).

More on the marketing of stevia from the NYT article…

Stevia has one distinct advantage over all the rest. Because it comes from a plant, marketers can call it a natural sweetener. And that allows companies that have invested millions in new stevia products to tap into two powerful markets at once: natural ingredients and low-calorie products. […]

Two of the biggest backers [of stevia], Cargill and Whole Earth Sweetener Company, earlier this year began rolling out packets of stevia-based sweeteners, called Truvia and PureVia respectively. The extract is in the companies’ drinks, too. Among the new stevia products marketed as naturally sweetened are Sprite Green from Coca-Cola and Trop50, from the PepsiCo subsidiary Tropicana. It’s essentially half water and half orange juice doctored with stevia.

To underline their natural claims, stevia products come packaged in green.

April 16, 2009

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link Where the Obesity Grows

Interesting article about the political connection between the obesity epidemic and our industrial agricultural system, starring Tom Vilsack, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, who calls his “the most important department in government,” and Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “In Defense of Food.”

“All flesh is grass” says the scripture. Much of the too-ample flesh of Americans (three of five are overweight; one in five is obese) comes from corn, which is a grass. A quarter of the 45,000 items in the average supermarket contain processed corn. Fossil fuels are involved in planting, fertilizing, harvesting, transporting and processing the corn. America’s food industry uses about as much petroleum as America’s automobiles do.

March 8, 2009

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photo Another Nail in the Coffin of Biofuels? With the global economic crisis dominating the headlines, the global food crisis — which, arguably, has a greater impact on a larger percentage of the world’s population — has faded into the background.  But a report released today by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization put it back in The New York Times, if not on the front page. The authors of the report blame the production of biofuels for the high cost of food around the world.  Farmers can get a better price for their corn and sugarcane crops when they’re converted into fuel, in part because of subsidies set by national governments, including our own. In August, Michael Pollan, the author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, said: “Corn domesticated our land, our diet, and our gas tanks.”  Ethanol, he added, is “the spark that lit the fire of the current food crisis.” The U.N. report urges that nations stop subsidizing biofuels and begin phasing out existing mandates. I’ve heard several people say that because the climate crisis is so grave and we’ve taken so little action, we have room for just one major error.  And we’ve already made it, with our investment in ethanol and other biofuels. The New York Times reports: A host of studies in the past year concluded that the rush to biofuels had some disastrous, if unintended, consequences for food security and the environment. Less food is available to eat in poor countries, global grain prices have skyrocketed and precious forests have been lost as farmers have created fields to join the biofuel boom, the studies said. Worse still, specialists say, so much energy is required to convert many plants into fuel that the process does not result in a savings of carbon emissions. Ethanol is the worst of the biofuels, in part because of the amount of energy it takes to make ethanol from corn, and because our agricultural system is run on petroleum.  On a factory farm, it takes a half a gallon of oil to produce every bushel of corn. I agreed with McCain exactly once during the debate last night.  “I’d eliminate ethanol subsidies. I oppose ethanol subsidies,” he said.  Obama has continued to support them, and included biodiesels, another word for biofuel, in a list of alternative energy sources his administration would invest in. But it seems that, with a global recession looking more and more likely, access to affordable food will be increasingly important. As Pollan said, “Even though the candidates are not talking about it, they will have to.” Photo sources, clockwise from top left: Show Me the Honey, ABC News, Wendy Usually Wanders, Triple Pundit.

Another Nail in the Coffin of Biofuels?

With the global economic crisis dominating the headlines, the global food crisis — which, arguably, has a greater impact on a larger percentage of the world’s population — has faded into the background.  But a report released today by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization put it back in The New York Times, if not on the front page.

The authors of the report blame the production of biofuels for the high cost of food around the world.  Farmers can get a better price for their corn and sugarcane crops when they’re converted into fuel, in part because of subsidies set by national governments, including our own.

In August, Michael Pollan, the author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, said: “Corn domesticated our land, our diet, and our gas tanks.”  Ethanol, he added, is “the spark that lit the fire of the current food crisis.”

The U.N. report urges that nations stop subsidizing biofuels and begin phasing out existing mandates.

I’ve heard several people say that because the climate crisis is so grave and we’ve taken so little action, we have room for just one major error.  And we’ve already made it, with our investment in ethanol and other biofuels. The New York Times reports:

A host of studies in the past year concluded that the rush to biofuels had some disastrous, if unintended, consequences for food security and the environment. Less food is available to eat in poor countries, global grain prices have skyrocketed and precious forests have been lost as farmers have created fields to join the biofuel boom, the studies said. Worse still, specialists say, so much energy is required to convert many plants into fuel that the process does not result in a savings of carbon emissions.

Ethanol is the worst of the biofuels, in part because of the amount of energy it takes to make ethanol from corn, and because our agricultural system is run on petroleum.  On a factory farm, it takes a half a gallon of oil to produce every bushel of corn.

I agreed with McCain exactly once during the debate last night.  “I’d eliminate ethanol subsidies. I oppose ethanol subsidies,” he said.  Obama has continued to support them, and included biodiesels, another word for biofuel, in a list of alternative energy sources his administration would invest in.

But it seems that, with a global recession looking more and more likely, access to affordable food will be increasingly important. As Pollan said, “Even though the candidates are not talking about it, they will have to.”

Photo sources, clockwise from top left: Show Me the Honey, ABC News, Wendy Usually Wanders, Triple Pundit.

October 8, 2008

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quote
Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.
—

Albert Einstein

Michael Pollan said that he admires vegetarians because they have taken the time to consider their diet — but that the conscientious omnivore is okay, too.  My admiration of him and my love of meat is such that this pronouncement spelled delicious relief for me.

August 28, 2008

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