Planting the garden is just the beginning

Last week, I had dinner with a woman who works for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden doing outreach to the borough’s growing number of home gardeners and community gardens (plots of land managed by a dedicated cadre of neighbors). She said that a lot of the education she does is about the potential dangers of Brooklyn soil. In many areas, there are high levels of certain toxins that can seep into produce. A lot of it is from the dust of the World Trade Center that settled over the city after 9/11.

The NYT reports that the Obamas’ kitchen garden was tested for lead and was found to have 93 parts per million.

The level is well below the 400 p.p.m. considered hazardous by the Environmental Protection Agency, though not below the more stringent goals recommended by some countries like the Netherlands, at 40 p.p.m.

Sam Kass, who has the totally awesome job of both White House assistant chef and garden overseer, has remediated the soil organically, adding “lime, green sand and crab meal as well as organic matter in the form of compost made by the National Park Service.”

If you have a garden, even a small backyard one, you should take advantage of a program offered by the EPA’s Cooperative Extension office in your area.  Call (800) 424-5323 for more info.

Things are about to get real, fast.

Forget the threat of another Katrina, or Lower Manhattan under water, or drought and famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, or even the effin’ polar bears — French wine is in danger:

Leading figures from the French wine and food industries are urging their government to push for a strong global agreement at a United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in December, warning that failure to cut greenhouse gases will devastate their sector.

“The jewels of our cultural heritage, French wines, elegant and refined, are today in danger,” a group of 50 winemakers, sommeliers and chefs wrote in an opinion piece published on Aug. 12 in the newspaper Le Monde and addressed to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

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.

Study finds that it’s what you eat, not how far it traveled

I attended a couple sessions at the Brooklyn Food Conference on Saturday; there was, of course, a lot of talk of one’s “foodprint” (GHG emissions generated by diet). I learned that one person eating local for one year saves the equivalent GHG emissions as a 1,000-mile car drive — honestly, that isn’t much. It’s the same as taking a few dozen less trips to the store, or skipping a road trip. And given that local doesn’t always mean sustainable and efficient (for example, apples produced in New Zealand may have a lower footprint than those produced in New York, even for New Yorkers), it may be more critical to reduce emission-heavy foods, wherever they’re from.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have found that producing food in the average American diet generates more GHG emissions than transporting it to the supermarket. Their conclusion is that eating less meat, particularly red meat, and dairy products is the most effective way to reduce your “foodprint.” They write:

We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average) the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO₂e/yr footprint for food consumption. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. Different food groups exhibit a large range in GHG-intensity; on average, red meat is around 150% more GHG-intensive than chicken or fish. Thus, we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.” Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.