For all the environmental angst being expressed over livestock, we rarely mention its counterpart: deadstock. Most of a slaughtered farm animal cannot be transformed into edible flesh. About 60 percent of it — offal, bones, tendons, blood, and plasma — becomes abattoir waste and, as such, has to be either recycled or disposed of. Despite our earnest efforts to better understand our increasingly complex food system, deadstock reminds us that the highest costs of food production are often hidden in places we rarely venture as we track our food’s journeys from farm to fork.

The livestock industry in the United States produces 1.4 billion tons of waste every year. Ranchers, butchers, and slaughterhouses have traditionally sent carcass remains to rendering plants. Relatively cost-effective and environmentally efficient, these operations — comprising what’s often called “the silent industry” — have efficiently recycled the unsavory by-products of meat production, as well as downer cows, road kill, and euthanized cats and dogs, into a variety of commercial products (such as animal feed, soap, lard, candles, and “personal care products”). All things considered, rendering plants, although by no means without problems, have kept deadstock mercifully out of sight and out of mind.

But rendering plants have fallen on hard times of late. Mad cow disease, which was first identified in the U.K. in 1986, has led to costly regulations that rendering plants have passed on to their customers. In 1997, it became illegal in the United States to feed the remains of a dead ruminant to a live ruminant, thus eliminating one of the industry’s largest markets: cattle feed. In 2009, the FDA made matters worse for renderers by requiring them to remove the brain and spinal cord from cows older than 30 months (thus making it especially expensive for dairies, whose cows live longer, to render deadstock). The intention behind this provision was certainly sensible—it keeps prions, the bits of the nervous system that contain mad cow disease, out of feed destined for non-ruminant animals—but its economic impact has been considerable. Costs have gone up as much as fivefold, and the industry has consolidated into fewer operations.

How this problem will be solved remains anyone’s guess. Early responses, however, haven’t been encouraging. On-site burial of animals has always been popular, but it’s becoming increasingly commonplace with the decline of rendering plants. This legal option is certainly an improvement upon illegal off-site dumping (which anecdotal evidence also suggests is rising), but it’s still a case of sweeping waste under the rug. Feedlots and ranchers basically dig their own bins and windrows and bulldoze waste into a mass grave. Burial pits are capable of holding tens of thousands of pounds of carcasses. Some states require permits to dig them, others don’t. Negative impacts on water quality have been well documented both on site and downstream from burial grounds. Groundwater contamination is routine. The leaching of chloride, ammonium, nitrate, coliforms, and E. coli intensifies with rainfall and oozes for decades after burial (it can take 25 years for carcasses to decompose).

Outdoor incineration has also become more popular with the gradual decline of rendering. But incineration comes with its own rap sheet of environmental and health-related pitfalls. It reliably releases heavy metals into the atmosphere. Pyres emit pollutants including sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides. Incineration is almost always used for culled animals—beasts that have been condemned to death after a disease outbreak (burying them works poorly because they can literally explode as a result of methane build up—a conditioned known as “cattle bloat”). When infected animals are burned, a host of new poisons go airborne. Without the most rigorous monitoring, these toxins easily reach the human food and water supply. All in all, incineration is a mess.

Another alternative to rendering animal carcasses is composting. This option is relatively new, with many states making it legal to compost dead farm animals in the past ten years. On paper the procedure has its merits. Animals are aerated in a giant compost bin, where they decompose to produce humus that is rich in nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus—all of which potentially make it an excellent fertilizer. Many agriculture experts are optimistic about animal composting [pdf].

But (there’s always a “but” when it comes to animal agriculture) there are problems—some minor, others quite serious. Minor ones include the fact that bones do not compost easily or quickly. More serious problems center on the fact that what’s being composted is more than animal flesh and bones. The antibiotics, growth promoters, vaccines, and array of agricultural chemicals routinely used in animal agriculture are also composted. Composting, moreover, can also concentrate naturally occurring heavy metals. Currently, states that allow the use of composted animals limit its application to relatively innocuous tasks such as growing highway wildflowers.

A final, and by far the most hopeful, option is the anaerobic digestion of slaughterhouse waste. Anaerobic digestion generates biogas (a mixture of carbon dioxide and methane that can be converted into usable energy) and sludge (which can be used as a fertilizer). Biogas digesters have proven their effectiveness in China, where more than 20 million households receive their energy for lighting and cooking from small local digesters processing all manner of organic waste.

There are, however, numerous devils lurking in the details. Digesters do a poor job of processing long-chain fatty acids, leaving behind a thick layer of fat at the end of digestion. Experts insist that digesters work best when they are small and decentralized (to minimize threats of contamination during transport), but this requirement contradicts their other insistence that digesters be “constructed far from residential areas for reasons of biosecurity and to reduce odor problems.” Digesters are water-intensive. The sludge they produce can contain prions and dangerous heat-resistant bacteria—neither of which anaerobic digestion kills (not the kind of fertilizer we want). Trumping all these concerns is something more logistical: digesters are so rare that they are, for all intents and purposes, not a viable current option.

Unfortunately, the challenges we now face with respect to slaughterhouse waste and downed animals demand urgent solutions. With rendering plants on the decline, and with current alternatives beset with problems, we have every reason to start discussing deadstock with the same intensity that we discuss livestock. Next year, slaughterhouses in the United States will kill more than 10 billion animals. What will happen to the waste? The answer might seem to be beyond our power to influence. But it does give us yet another factor to contemplate before we tuck into our next animal.

Recently, at the farmers market, a woman rushed over to me excitedly, seeking out the vendor with the fresh eggs that her friend had told her about.

“She told me the yolks were deep yellow, and the eggs were the best she had ever tasted! How does he grow them?” she went on to ask.

Chickens on pasture

As I explained the process of raising chickens on pasture, I smiled to myself. One small victory for local family farms. One small victory for conservation.

My conversation with her made me more aware just then, that while Ohio is rich in natural resources, a great portion of its population feels no connection to the land, and it can seem difficult, if not impossible sometimes, to bridge the gap.

The truth is, I know the farm where those eggs came from. But more than that, I know that countless hours have been spent there, designing and installing conservation practices, with countless more spent working and re-working the grazing system again and again, to find a good fit, because it’s a work in progress.

Getting message out

I know the farm family and how hard they work to get their message out, to promote conservation and to sell fresh products off the farm, products made possible through steps taken to treat the land and animals in such a way that promotes sustainability.

I know the challenges they face bridging the gap. I know, too, that there is no better time than now to buy locally grown and produced fare, and it has never been more important to keep farmland in sustainable production.

Like the harvests the season produces, Ohio is ripe with potential to help people make the connection to the land once again.

It is a connection that conservation partners have been encouraging for years, and there is no better time than now to help make it.

Local venue

Whether it is providing a venue for local farmers to sell or market their product, talking with local economic development authorities about the importance of agriculture and conservation to the economy, purchasing products directly from a local farm, or simply explaining the process of raising chickens on pasture to an inquisitive consumer, the connection is waiting to be made.

Local food initiatives have the potential to extend beyond the benefit of simply providing fresh food. They can spur economic development; encourage economic diversity and tourism; and ensure the sustainability of natural resources.

They have the potential to increase awareness of agriculture and food production, connecting people one again to the farm and how food is produced there.

They promote agricultural sustainability, keeping farmers in business by allowing them to make a living on the farm, while encouraging them to retain farmland in production.

Local heritage

Local foods initiatives protect local heritage and culture and instill pride in our communities. They foster appreciation, attract young farmers and promote a better quality of life.

And I realized then, as I spoke with that excited consumer, that for one brief moment, the connection was made.

Every conservation practice installed, every grazing management plan written, every small piece of advice given or tried culminated in the ultimate victory — the work paid off — the message was heard.

Wendee Zadanski has been the natural resources specialist for the Jefferson Soil & Water Conservation District since 2001. She has a bachelor’s degree in natural resources conservation from Kent State University. She can be reached at 740-264-9790 or wzadanski@jeffersoncountyoh.com.

What do a half-billion eggs have to do with democracy? The massive recall of salmonella-infected eggs, the largest egg recall in U.S. history, opens a window on the power of large corporations over not only our health, but over our government.

While scores of brands have been recalled, they all can be traced back to just two egg farms. Our food supply is increasingly in the hands of larger and larger companies, which wield enormous power in our political process. As with the food industry, so, too, is it with oil and with banks: Giant corporations, some with budgets larger than most nations, are controlling our health, our environment, our economy and increasingly, our elections.

The salmonella outbreak is just the most recent episode of many that point to a food industry run amok. Patty Lovera is the assistant director of the food-safety group Food & Water Watch. She told me: “Historically, there’s always been industry resistance to any food-safety regulation, whether it’s in Congress or through the agencies. There are large trade associations for every sector of our food supply, starting from the large agribusiness-type producers all the way through to the grocery stores.”

The salmonella-tainted eggs came from just two factory farms, Hillandale Farms and Wright County Egg, both in Iowa. Behind this outbreak is the egg empire of Austin “Jack” DeCoster. DeCoster owns Wright County Egg and also owns Quality Egg, which provides chicks and feed to both of the Iowa farms. Lovera describes DeCoster as “a poster child for what happens when we see this type of consolidation and this scale of production.”

The Associated Press offered a summary of DeCoster’s multistate egg and hog operation’s health, safety and employment violations. In 1997, DeCoster Egg Farms agreed to pay a $2 million fine after then-Labor Secretary Robert Reich described his farm “as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop.” In 2002, DeCoster’s company paid $1.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on behalf of Mexican women who reported they were subjected to sexual harassment, including rape, abuse and retaliation by supervisors. Earlier this summer, another company linked to DeCoster paid out $125,000 to the state of Maine over animal-cruelty allegations.

Despite all this, DeCoster has thrived in the egg and hog business, which puts him in league with other large corporations, like BP and the major banks. The BP oil spill, the largest in the history of this country, was preceded by a criminally long list of serious violations going back years, most notably the massive Texas City refinery explosion in 2005 that killed 15 people. If BP were a person, he would have been imprisoned long ago.

The banking industry is another chronic offender. In the wake of the largest global financial disaster since the Great Depression, banks like Goldman Sachs, flush with cash after a massive public bailout, subverted the legislative process aimed at reining them in.

The result: a largely toothless new consumer-protection agency, and relentless opposition to the appointment of consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren to head it. She would give the banks as much oversight as the new agency would allow, which is why the bankers, including President Barack Obama’s appointees like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and economic adviser Larry Summers, are believed to be opposing her.

The fox, you could say, is watching the henhouse (and the rotten eggs within). Multinational corporations are allowed to operate with virtually no oversight or regulation. Corporate cash is allowed to influence elections, and thus, the behavior of our elected representatives. After the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which will allow unlimited corporate donations to campaigns, the problem is only going to get worse. To get elected, and to stay in power, politicians will have to cater more and more to their corporate donors.

There is hope. There is a growing movement to amend the U.S. Constitution, to strip corporations of the legal status of “personhood,” the concept that corporations have the same rights as regular people.

This would subject corporations to the same oversight that existed for the first 100 years of U.S. history. To restrict political participation just to people will take a genuine, grass-roots movement, though, since Congress and the Obama administration can’t seem to get even the most basic changes implemented. As the saying goes, if you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour. Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Those docile black and white Holstein “milk machines” on today’s industrial dairies hardly evoke an image of their wild progenitor, the enormous auroch, Bos primigenius, that commandeered Eurasian forests some 8,000 years ago, on the cusp of its impending domestication.

European scientists, hot on the trail towards sequencing the complete auroch genome from ancient, well-preserved bone, intend to resurrect this extinct bovine from which all modern domestic cattle arose.

Motivation for such an undertaking derives from “Jurassic Park” fascinations as well as the potential utility of repopulating Northern Europe’s forests in which this native herbivore once browsed, contentedly munching on beech saplings, which today threaten to choke these boreal ecosystems.

The proposed back-breeding project, using domestic cattle strains, which yet carry key portions of the ancient auroch genome, is reminiscent of a similar early 20th century effort carried out by the brothers Heck, directors of the Munich and Berlin zoos.

The Hecks seemingly “reversed evolution” by crossing numerous cattle breeds to combine remnant characteristics from their wild auroch ancestors, the last of which perished in 1627 on a Polish game preserve.

Without any sophisticated genetic tools beyond the fresh rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of inherited traits, the two German zoologists produced beasts that in all visual respects appeared identical to depictions of aurochs in famous French and Spanish cave paintings from the Paleolithic era.

This astonishing breeding experiment inadvertently launched much misguided interest in human eugenics, which the cruel Nazi regime pursued to a devastating end.

Several dairying friends of mine who transitioned their herds to pasture have quickly recognized that today’s cows, bred for maximum production on grain diets, do not perform particularly well when foraging grass.

These visionary herdsman are now calling upon out of favor breeds such as the Dutch Belted and others, well adapted to pasture, as genetic reservoirs of disease resistance and consistent production under new grass paradigms.

Western cultures, especially, have prospered by an eight millennia-long intimacy with bovine relatives, a profound respect for which has significantly eroded over our current industrial age.

Perhaps retrieving the great mother auroch from an abyss of extinction will engender in modern Homo sapiens some newfound appreciation for the fellowship and interdependence we share with all Earthly beings.

Every 15 minutes of a senator’s waking life in Washington is fully scheduled with meetings, hearings and votes, and much of the rest is devoted to a frantic search for money to fuel the next campaign. “Of any free time you have, I would say 50 percent, maybe even more,” is spent on fund-raising, Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa told the New Yorker recently in a scathing portrait of an overstressed and utterly ineffective legislative body, one that measures acts of real significance in the single digits per term.

So it was refreshing to hear how Senator Jon Tester, a Democrat of Montana, is spending his summer vacation. While other senators drove the campaign trail, dialed for dollars or lounged on a beach somewhere, Mr. Tester went home to his farm and harvested wheat.

The senator is the third generation of his family to operate an 1,800-acre farm near Big Sandy, Mont., where the Testers grow organic spring and winter wheat. He is spending the first week of his vacation in his combine, trying to gather the wheat before the sawflies get to it. “It brings me back to reality,” he told a local station, KFBB-TV, this week. “The combine doesn’t care if you’re a senator or not. It breaks down whenever it wants to break down.”

Congress used to be dominated by farmers, and it is unfortunate that Mr. Tester and Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa are the only ones left in the Senate who still actively work the fields. If more members had a life outside of campaigning and lawmaking, it might help put petty political disputes in a little perspective. Sit high up in the cab of a combine, stare out at an endless vista of swaying grain, worry about wheat futures and drought — your opponent a leaf-eating insect — and, suddenly, it should seem a little ridiculous to block an important piece of legislation back in Washington just because it would give the other party a victory.

Some nostalgics maintain the Senate was more functional in the days when many of its farmer-members used the spring and summer recesses to plant and harvest. That may be a myth, but it is good to know at least one senator is still firmly earthbound.

Until very recently, food was invisible as a political issue. Something is stirring. Pollan reviews five books that address the heart of the food movement.

Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front by Joel Salatin, Polyface

All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America? by Joel Berg, Seven Stories

Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, Little, Brown

Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities by Carlo Petrini, with a foreword by Alice Waters — Chelsea Green


The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society by Janet A. Flammang — University of Illinois Press

1. Food Made Visible

It might sound odd to say this about something people deal with at least three times a day, but food in America has been more or less invisible, politically speaking, until very recently. At least until the early 1970s, when a bout of food price inflation and the appearance of books critical of industrial agriculture (by Wendell Berry, Francis Moore Lappé, and Barry Commoner, among others) threatened to propel the subject to the top of the national agenda, Americans have not had to think very hard about where their food comes from, or what it is doing to the planet, their bodies, and their society.

Most people count this a blessing. Americans spend a smaller percentage of their income on food than any people in history—slightly less than 10 percent—and a smaller amount of their time preparing it: a mere thirty-one minutes a day on average, including clean-up. The supermarkets brim with produce summoned from every corner of the globe, a steady stream of novel food products (17,000 new ones each year) crowds the middle aisles, and in the freezer case you can find “home meal replacements” in every conceivable ethnic stripe, demanding nothing more of the eater than opening the package and waiting for the microwave to chirp. Considered in the long sweep of human history, in which getting food dominated not just daily life but economic and political life as well, having to worry about food as little as we do, or did, seems almost a kind of dream.

The dream that the age-old “food problem” had been largely solved for most Americans was sustained by the tremendous postwar increases in the productivity of American farmers, made possible by cheap fossil fuel (the key ingredient in both chemical fertilizers and pesticides) and changes in agricultural policies. Asked by President Nixon to try to drive down the cost of food after it had spiked in the early 1970s, Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz shifted the historical focus of federal farm policy from supporting prices for farmers to boosting yields of a small handful of commodity crops (corn and soy especially) at any cost.

The administration’s cheap food policy worked almost too well: crop prices fell, forcing farmers to produce still more simply to break even. This led to a deep depression in the farm belt in the 1980s followed by a brutal wave of consolidation. Most importantly, the price of food came down, or at least the price of the kinds of foods that could be made from corn and soy: processed foods and sweetened beverages and feedlot meat. (Prices for fresh produce have increased since the 1980s.) Washington had succeeded in eliminating food as a political issue—an objective dear to most governments at least since the time of the French Revolution. But although cheap food is good politics, it turns out there are significant costs—to the environment, to public health, to the public purse, even to the culture—and as these became impossible to ignore in recent years, food has come back into view. Beginning in the late 1980s, a series of food safety scandals opened people’s eyes to the way their food was being produced, each one drawing the curtain back a little further on a food system that had changed beyond recognition. When BSE, or mad cow disease, surfaced in England in 1986, Americans learned that cattle, which are herbivores, were routinely being fed the flesh of other cattle; the practice helped keep meat cheap but at the risk of a hideous brain-wasting disease.

The 1993 deaths of four children in Washington State who had eaten hamburgers from Jack in the Box were traced to meat contaminated with E.coli 0157:H7, a mutant strain of the common intestinal bacteria first identified in feedlot cattle in 1982. Since then, repeated outbreaks of food-borne illness linked to new antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria (campylobacter, salmonella, MRSA) have turned a bright light on the shortsighted practice of routinely administering antibiotics to food animals, not to treat disease but simply to speed their growth and allow them to withstand the filthy and stressful conditions in which they live.

In the wake of these food safety scandals, the conversation about food politics that briefly flourished in the 1970s was picked up again in a series of books, articles, and movies about the consequences of industrial food production.Beginning in 2001 with the publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, a surprise best-seller, and, the following year, Marion Nestle’s Food Politics, the food journalism of the last decade has succeeded in making clear and telling connections between the methods of industrial food production, agricultural policy, food-borne illness, childhood obesity, the decline of the family meal as an institution, and, notably, the decline of family income beginning in the 1970s.

Besides drawing women into the work force, falling wages made fast food both cheap to produce and a welcome, if not indispensible, option for pinched and harried families. The picture of the food economy Schlosser painted resembles an upside-down version of the social compact sometimes referred to as “Fordism”: instead of paying workers well enough to allow them to buy things like cars, as Henry Ford proposed to do, companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s pay their workers so poorly that they can afford only the cheap, low-quality food these companies sell, creating a kind of nonvirtuous circle driving down both wages and the quality of food. The advent of fast food (and cheap food in general) has, in effect, subsidized the decline of family incomes in America.

2. Food Politics

Cheap food has become an indispensable pillar of the modern economy. But it is no longer an invisible or uncontested one. One of the most interesting social movements to emerge in the last few years is the “food movement,” or perhaps I should say “movements,” since it is unified as yet by little more than the recognition that industrial food production is in need of reform because its social/environmental/public health/animal welfare/gastronomic costs are too high.

As that list suggests, the critics are coming at the issue from a great many different directions. Where many social movements tend to splinter as time goes on, breaking into various factions representing divergent concerns or tactics, the food movement starts out splintered. Among the many threads of advocacy that can be lumped together under that rubric we can include school lunch reform; the campaign for animal rights and welfare; the campaign against genetically modified crops; the rise of organic and locally produced food; efforts to combat obesity and type 2 diabetes; “food sovereignty” (the principle that nations should be allowed to decide their agricultural policies rather than submit to free trade regimes); farm bill reform; food safety regulation; farmland preservation; student organizing around food issues on campus; efforts to promote urban agriculture and ensure that communities have access to healthy food; initiatives to create gardens and cooking classes in schools; farm worker rights; nutrition labeling; feedlot pollution; and the various efforts to regulate food ingredients and marketing, especially to kids.

It’s a big, lumpy tent, and sometimes the various factions beneath it work at cross-purposes. For example, activists working to strengthen federal food safety regulations have recently run afoul of local food advocates, who fear that the burden of new regulation will cripple the current revival of small-farm agriculture. Joel Salatin, the Virginia meat producer and writer who has become a hero to the food movement, fulminates against food safety regulation on libertarian grounds in his Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories From the Local Food Front. Hunger activists like Joel Berg, in All You Can Eat: How Hungry Is America?, criticize supporters of “sustainable” agriculture—i.e., producing food in ways that do not harm the environment—for advocating reforms that threaten to raise the cost of food to the poor. Animal rights advocates occasionally pick fights with sustainable meat producers (such as Joel Salatin), as Jonathan Safran Foer does in his recent vegetarian polemic, Eating Animals.

But there are indications that these various voices may be coming together in something that looks more and more like a coherent movement. Many in the animal welfare movement, from PETA to Peter Singer, have come to see that a smaller-scale, more humane animal agriculture is a goal worth fighting for, and surely more attainable than the abolition of meat eating. Stung by charges of elitism, activists for sustainable farming are starting to take seriously the problem of hunger and poverty. They’re promoting schemes and policies to make fresh local food more accessible to the poor, through programs that give vouchers redeemable at farmers’ markets to participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and food stamp recipients. Yet a few underlying tensions remain: the “hunger lobby” has traditionally supported farm subsidies in exchange for the farm lobby’s support of nutrition programs, a marriage of convenience dating to the 1960s that vastly complicates reform of the farm bill—a top priority for the food movement.

The sociologist Troy Duster reminds us of an all-important axiom about social movements: “No movement is as coherent and integrated as it seems from afar,” he says, “and no movement is as incoherent and fractured as it seems from up close.” Viewed from a middle distance, then, the food movement coalesces around the recognition that today’s food and farming economy is “unsustainable”—that it can’t go on in its current form much longer without courting a breakdown of some kind, whether environmental, economic, or both.

For some in the movement, the more urgent problem is environmental: the food system consumes more fossil fuel energy than we can count on in the future (about a fifth of the total American use of such energy) and emits more greenhouse gas than we can afford to emit, particularly since agriculture is the one human system that should be able to substantially rely on photosynthesis: solar energy. It will be difficult if not impossible to address the issue of climate change without reforming the food system. This is a conclusion that has only recently been embraced by the environmental movement, which historically has disdained all agriculture as a lapse from wilderness and a source of pollution.1 But in the last few years, several of the major environmental groups have come to appreciate that a diversified, sustainable agriculture—which can sequester large amounts of carbon in the soil—holds the potential not just to mitigate but actually to help solve environmental problems, including climate change. Today, environmental organizations like the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Working Group are taking up the cause of food system reform, lending their expertise and clout to the movement.

But perhaps the food movement’s strongest claim on public attention today is the fact that the American diet of highly processed food laced with added fats and sugars is responsible for the epidemic of chronic diseases that threatens to bankrupt the health care system. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that fully three quarters of US health care spending goes to treat chronic diseases, most of which are preventable and linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and at least a third of all cancers. The health care crisis probably cannot be addressed without addressing the catastrophe of the American diet, and that diet is the direct (even if unintended) result of the way that our agriculture and food industries have been organized.

Michelle Obama’s recent foray into food politics, beginning with the organic garden she planted on the White House lawn last spring, suggests that the administration has made these connections. Her new “Let’s Move” campaign to combat childhood obesity might at first blush seem fairly anodyne, but in announcing the initiative in February, and in a surprisingly tough speech to the Grocery Manufacturers Association in March,2 the First Lady has effectively shifted the conversation about diet from the industry’s preferred ground of “personal responsibility” and exercise to a frank discussion of the way food is produced and marketed. “We need you not just to tweak around the edges,” she told the assembled food makers, “but to entirely rethink the products that you’re offering, the information that you provide about these products, and how you market those products to our children.”

Mrs. Obama explicitly rejected the conventional argument that the food industry is merely giving people the sugary, fatty, and salty foods they want, contending that the industry “doesn’t just respond to people’s natural inclinations—it also actually helps to shape them,” through the ways it creates products and markets them.

So far at least, Michelle Obama is the food movement’s most important ally in the administration, but there are signs of interest elsewhere. Under Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, the FDA has cracked down on deceptive food marketing and is said to be weighing a ban on the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in factory farming. Attorney General Eric Holder recently avowed the Justice Department’s intention to pursue antitrust enforcement in agribusiness, one of the most highly concentrated sectors in the economy.3 At his side was Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, who has planted his own organic vegetable garden at the department and launched a new “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” initiative aimed at promoting local food systems as a way to both rebuild rural economies and improve access to healthy food.

Though Vilsack has so far left mostly undisturbed his department’s traditional deference to industrial agriculture, the new tone in Washington and the appointment of a handful of respected reformers (such as Tufts professor Kathleen Merrigan as deputy secretary of agriculture) has elicited a somewhat defensive, if not panicky, reaction from agribusiness. The Farm Bureau recently urged its members to go on the offensive against “food activists,” and a trade association representing pesticide makers called CropLife America wrote to Michelle Obama suggesting that her organic garden had unfairly maligned chemical agriculture and encouraging her to use “crop protection technologies”—i.e., pesticides.

The First Lady’s response is not known; however, the President subsequently rewarded CropLife by appointing one of its executives to a high-level trade post. This and other industry-friendly appointments suggest that while the administration may be sympathetic to elements of the food movement’s agenda, it isn’t about to take on agribusiness, at least not directly, at least until it senses at its back a much larger constituency for reform.

One way to interpret Michelle Obama’s deepening involvement in food issues is as an effort to build such a constituency, and in this she may well succeed. It’s a mistake to underestimate what a determined First Lady can accomplish. Lady Bird Johnson’s “highway beautification” campaign also seemed benign, but in the end it helped raise public consciousness about “the environment” (as it would soon come to be known) and put an end to the public’s tolerance for littering. And while Michelle Obama has explicitly limited her efforts to exhortation (“we can’t solve this problem by passing a bunch of laws in Washington,” she told the Grocery Manufacturers, no doubt much to their relief), her work is already creating a climate in which just such a “bunch of laws” might flourish: a handful of state legislatures, including California’s, are seriously considering levying new taxes on sugar in soft drinks, proposals considered hopelessly extreme less than a year ago.

The political ground is shifting, and the passage of health care reform may accelerate that movement. The bill itself contains a few provisions long promoted by the food movement (like calorie labeling on fast food menus), but more important could be the new political tendencies it sets in motion. If health insurers can no longer keep people with chronic diseases out of their patient pools, it stands to reason that the companies will develop a keener interest in preventing those diseases. They will then discover that they have a large stake in things like soda taxes and in precisely which kinds of calories the farm bill is subsidizing. As the insurance industry and the government take on more responsibility for the cost of treating expensive and largely preventable problems like obesity and type 2 diabetes, pressure for reform of the food system, and the American diet, can be expected to increase.

3. Beyond the Barcode

It would be a mistake to conclude that the food movement’s agenda can be reduced to a set of laws, policies, and regulations, important as these may be. What is attracting so many people to the movement today (and young people in particular) is a much less conventional kind of politics, one that is about something more than food. The food movement is also about community, identity, pleasure, and, most notably, about carving out a new social and economic space removed from the influence of big corporations on the one side and government on the other. As the Diggers used to say during their San Francisco be-ins during the 1960s, food can serve as “an edible dynamic”—a means to a political end that is only nominally about food itself.

One can get a taste of this social space simply by hanging around a farmers’ market, an activity that a great many people enjoy today regardless of whether they’re in the market for a bunch of carrots or a head of lettuce. Farmers’ markets are thriving, more than five thousand strong, and there is a lot more going on in them than the exchange of money for food. Someone is collecting signatures on a petition. Someone else is playing music. Children are everywhere, sampling fresh produce, talking to farmers. Friends and acquaintances stop to chat. One sociologist calculated that people have ten times as many conversations at the farmers’ market than they do in the supermarket. Socially as well as sensually, the farmers’ market offers a remarkably rich and appealing environment. Someone buying food here may be acting not just as a consumer but also as a neighbor, a citizen, a parent, a cook. In many cities and towns, farmers’ markets have taken on (and not for the first time) the function of a lively new public square.

Though seldom articulated as such, the attempt to redefine, or escape, the traditional role of consumer has become an important aspiration of the food movement. In various ways it seeks to put the relationship between consumers and producers on a new, more neighborly footing, enriching the kinds of information exchanged in the transaction, and encouraging us to regard our food dollars as “votes” for a different kind of agriculture and, by implication, economy. The modern marketplace would have us decide what to buy strictly on the basis of price and self-interest; the food movement implicitly proposes that we enlarge our understanding of both those terms, suggesting that not just “good value” but ethical and political values should inform our buying decisions, and that we’ll get more satisfaction from our eating when they do.

That satisfaction helps to explain why many in the movement don’t greet the spectacle of large corporations adopting its goals, as some of them have begun to do, with unalloyed enthusiasm. Already Wal-Mart sells organic and local food, but this doesn’t greatly warm the hearts of food movement activists. One important impetus for the movement, or at least its locavore wing—those who are committed to eating as much locally produced food as possible—is the desire to get “beyond the barcode”—to create new economic and social structures outside of the mainstream consumer economy. Though not always articulated in these terms, the local food movement wants to decentralize the global economy, if not secede from it altogether, which is why in some communities, such as Great Barrington, Massachusetts, local currencies (the “BerkShare”) have popped up.

In fact it’s hard to say which comes first: the desire to promote local agriculture or the desire to promote local economies more generally by cutting ties, to whatever degree possible, to the national economic grid.4 This is at bottom a communitarian impulse, and it is one that is drawing support from the right as well as the left. Though the food movement has deep roots in the counterculture of the 1960s, its critique of corporate food and federal farm subsidies, as well as its emphasis on building community around food, has won it friends on the right. In his 2006 book Crunchy Cons, Rod Dreher identifies a strain of libertarian conservatism, often evangelical, that regards fast food as anathema to family values, and has seized on local food as a kind of culinary counterpart to home schooling.

It makes sense that food and farming should become a locus of attention for Americans disenchanted with consumer capitalism. Food is the place in daily life where corporatization can be most vividly felt: think about the homogenization of taste and experience represented by fast food. By the same token, food offers us one of the shortest, most appealing paths out of the corporate labyrinth, and into the sheer diversity of local flavors, varieties, and characters on offer at the farmers’ market.

Put another way, the food movement has set out to foster new forms of civil society. But instead of proposing that space as a counterweight to an overbearing state, as is usually the case, the food movement poses it against the dominance of corporations and their tendency to insinuate themselves into any aspect of our lives from which they can profit. As Wendell Berry writes, the corporationswill grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into your mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.

The corporatization of something as basic and intimate as eating is, for many of us today, a good place to draw the line.

The Italian-born organization Slow Food, founded in 1986 as a protest against the arrival of McDonald’s in Rome, represents perhaps the purest expression of these politics. The organization, which now has 100,000 members in 132 countries, began by dedicating itself to “a firm defense of quiet material pleasure” but has lately waded into deeper political and economic waters. Slow Food’s founder and president, Carlo Petrini, a former leftist journalist, has much to say about how people’s daily food choices can rehabilitate the act of consumption, making it something more creative and progressive. In his new book Terra Madre: Forging a New Global Network of Sustainable Food Communities, Petrini urges eaters and food producers to join together in “food communities” outside of the usual distribution channels, which typically communicate little information beyond price and often exploit food producers. A farmers’ market is one manifestation of such a community, but Petrini is no mere locavore. Rather, he would have us practice on a global scale something like “local” economics, with its stress on neighborliness, as when, to cite one of his examples, eaters in the affluent West support nomad fisher folk in Mauritania by creating a market for their bottarga, or dried mullet roe. In helping to keep alive such a food tradition and way of life, the eater becomes something more than a consumer; she becomes what Petrini likes to call a “coproducer.”

Ever the Italian, Petrini puts pleasure at the center of his politics, which might explain why Slow Food is not always taken as seriously as it deserves to be. For why shouldn’t pleasure figure in the politics of the food movement? Good food is potentially one of the most democratic pleasures a society can offer, and is one of those subjects, like sports, that people can talk about across lines of class, ethnicity, and race.

The fact that the most humane and most environmentally sustainable choices frequently turn out to be the most delicious choices (as chefs such as Alice Waters and Dan Barber have pointed out) is fortuitous to say the least; it is also a welcome challenge to the more dismal choices typically posed by environmentalism, which most of the time is asking us to give up things we like. As Alice Waters has often said, it was not politics or ecology that brought her to organic agriculture, but rather the desire to recover a certain taste—one she had experienced as an exchange student in France. Of course democratizing such tastes, which under current policies tend to be more expensive, is the hard part, and must eventually lead the movement back to more conventional politics lest it be tagged as elitist.

But the movement’s interest in such seemingly mundane matters as taste and the other textures of everyday life is also one of its great strengths. Part of the movement’s critique of industrial food is that, with the rise of fast food and the collapse of everyday cooking, it has damaged family life and community by undermining the institution of the shared meal. Sad as it may be to bowl alone, eating alone can be sadder still, not least because it is eroding the civility on which our political culture depends.

That is the argument made by Janet Flammang, a political scientist, in a provocative new book called The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society. “Significant social and political costs have resulted from fast food and convenience foods,” she writes, “grazing and snacking instead of sitting down for leisurely meals, watching television during mealtimes instead of conversing”—40 percent of Americans watch television during meals—”viewing food as fuel rather than sustenance, discarding family recipes and foodways, and denying that eating has social and political dimensions.” The cultural contradictions of capitalism—its tendency to undermine the stabilizing social forms it depends on—are on vivid display at the modern American dinner table.

In a challenge to second-wave feminists who urged women to get out of the kitchen, Flammang suggests that by denigrating “foodwork”—everything involved in putting meals on the family table—we have unthinkingly wrecked one of the nurseries of democracy: the family meal. It is at “the temporary democracy of the table” that children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civility—sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending—and it is these habits that are lost when we eat alone and on the run. “Civility is not needed when one is by oneself.”5

These arguments resonated during the Senate debate over health care reform, when The New York Times reported that the private Senate dining room, where senators of both parties used to break bread together, stood empty. Flammang attributes some of the loss of civility in Washington to the aftermatch of the 1994 Republican Revolution, when Newt Gingrich, the new Speaker of the House, urged his freshman legislators not to move their families to Washington. Members now returned to their districts every weekend, sacrificing opportunities for socializing across party lines and, in the process, the “reservoirs of good will replenished at dinner parties.” It is much harder to vilify someone with whom you have shared a meal.

Flammang makes a convincing case for the centrality of food work and shared meals, much along the lines laid down by Carlo Petrini and Alice Waters, but with more historical perspective and theoretical rigor. A scholar of the women’s movement, she suggests that “American women are having second thoughts” about having left the kitchen.6 However, the answer is not for them simply to return to it, at least not alone, but rather “for everyone—men, women, and children—to go back to the kitchen, as in preindustrial days, and for the workplace to lessen its time demands on people.” Flammang points out that the historical priority of the American labor movement has been to fight for money, while the European labor movement has fought for time, which she suggests may have been the wiser choice.

At the very least this is a debate worth having, and it begins by taking food issues much more seriously than we have taken them. Flammang suggests that the invisibility of these issues until recently owes to the identification of food work with women and the (related) fact that eating, by its very nature, falls on the wrong side of the mind–body dualism. “Food is apprehended through the senses of touch, smell and taste,” she points out,

which rank lower on the hierarchy of senses than sight and hearing, which are typically thought to give rise to knowledge. In most of philosophy, religion, and literature, food is associated with body, animal, female, and appetite—things civilized men have sought to overcome with reason and knowledge.

Much to our loss. But food is invisible no longer and, in light of the mounting costs we’ve incurred by ignoring it, it is likely to demand much more of our attention in the future, as eaters, parents, and citizens. It is only a matter of time before politicians seize on the power of the food issue, which besides being increasingly urgent is also almost primal, indeed is in some deep sense proto- political. For where do all politics begin if not in the high chair?—at that fateful moment when mother, or father, raises a spoonful of food to the lips of the baby who clamps shut her mouth, shakes her head no, and for the very first time in life awakens to and asserts her sovereign power.

1. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth made scant mention of food or agriculture, but in his recent follow-up book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (2009), he devotes a long chapter to the subject of our food choices and their bearing on climate. ↩

2. Ms. Obama’s speech can be read at www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-first-lady-a-grocery-manufacturers-association-conference. ↩

3. Speaking in March at an Iowa “listening session” about agribusiness concentration, Holder said, “long periods of reckless deregulation have restricted competition” in agriculture. Indeed: four companies (JBS/Swift, Tyson, Cargill, and National Beef Packers) slaughter 85 percent of US beef cattle; two companies (Monsanto and DuPont) sell more than 50 percent of US corn seed; one company (Dean Foods) controls 40 percent of the US milk supply. ↩

4. For an interesting case study about a depressed Vermont mining town that turned to local food and agriculture to revitalize itself, see Ben Hewitt, The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food (Rodale, 2009). ↩

5. See David M. Herszenhorn, “In Senate Health Care Vote, New Partisan Vitriol,” The New York Times, December 23, 2009: “Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana and chairman of the Finance Committee, said the political—and often personal—divisions that now characterize the Senate were epitomized by the empty tables in the senators’ private dining room, a place where members of both parties used to break bread. ‘Nobody goes there anymore,’ Mr. Baucus said. ‘When I was here 10, 15, 30 years ago, that the place you would go to talk to senators, let your hair down, just kind of compare notes, no spouses allowed, no staff, nobody. It is now empty.’”↩

6. The stirrings of a new “radical homemakers” movement lends some support to the assertion. See Shannon Hayes’s Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture (Left to Write Press, 2010).↩

Essay originally published in the The New York Review of Books.

Hemp for food and fiber has to be imported right now from countries like Canada. It would be beneficial for our environment, and family farmers here, if the lawmakers in Washington would quit confusing industrial hemp production with marijuana/cannabis. Industrial hemp has virtually none of the active compound (THC) that gives marijuana it’s recreational or therapeutic potency.

America’s Hemp King, by Dennis Rens, Grandson of Matt Rens -1995

Unsavory practices in meat processing have captured the public spotlight in recent months. The Oscar-nominated documentary Food Inc. stunned audiences across the country with scenes depicting the dark recesses of the food-processing business. More recently, articles in Time, The New York Times and other media outlets have generated a firestorm of public discussion on meat-processing practices.

Meat production is a margin business. The profit margin on an animal that takes two years to raise is measured in pennies per pound. And that profit depends largely upon the processor’s ability to find an outlet for hides, bones and offal, as well as every cut of meat.

The conventional food system has steadily increased profit-margin pressure on producers and processors alike. Intensive grain feeding, artificial growth hormones and feed laced with low-level antibiotics were all introduced to reduce the cost per pound of beef by speeding a steer’s journey from birth to slaughter.

Nowhere is this pressure more intense than in ground-beef production. Ground beef is regularly generated from the trimmings that remain after whole muscle cuts are removed from the carcass. That’s not necessarily bad; the processing creates a quality product that would otherwise not be used. But today’s high-volume plants regularly mix meat from multiple animals, and then combine those trimmings with even cheaper meat from “spent dairy cows” (cattle that are too old or sick to produce milk) and other low-grade stock.

One analysis conducted by Colorado State University meat scientists a decade ago found that an average 4 ounce beef patty contains muscle or fat tissue from between 55 and 1,082 cattle.

Under pressure to keep prices low, federal regulators allow ground beef tainted with E.coli H171 to be “washed” in ammonia, and for beef testing positive for salmonella to be “reprocessed” and included in precooked meat products.

Customers are starting to say “enough.” So, too, are the ranchers and farmers who raise these animals.

But unfortunately, independent farmers and ranchers who raise their animals without hormones and antibiotics, and with more grass than grain, too often flounder on a playing field that rewards high volume and marginal quality. Similarly, small processors across the country struggle to compete in a marketplace where price expectations are based upon the output of the 5,000-head-a-day plants.

Retailers can help drive changes to restore integrity in the meat-processing system. Regular product testing, changing allowable processing practices and enforcing honest label claims will all rebuild consumer confidence in natural meat and poultry products.

One more step is needed, and this is the tough one. We need to start a conversation with our customers regarding the true cost of raising high-quality, healthy, wholesome food. Retail prices must sufficiently reward everyone along the cha question in for producing that quality product.

In our country, we believe you get what you pay for. It’s time that we pay for — and receive — full value.

Dave Carter is principal of Crystal Springs Consulting and executive director of the National Bison Association. He maintains a small herd of buffalo in Colorado.

Source: Capital Press

In the fabled balcony scene, Juliet asks Romeo to reject his name.
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Oh, fair Juliet, a name is everything when you’re trying to sell a product or protect a brand, be it roses, yogurt or organic ginger cookies.

That sums up the arguments of two advocacy groups who say words have meaning and convey images and, in separate complaints, want federal agencies to protect their franchises.

The National Milk Producers Federation has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to crack down on the misappropriation of dairy terminology on imitation milk products.

NMPF contends in its petition that not only have terms like “soy milk” continued to proliferate, but other dairy-specific terms like “yogurt,” “cheese” and “ice cream” are now being used for products made from non-dairy ingredients.

Beth Briczinski, director of food and nutrition for NMPF, said that she was aware of such items as soy milk, almond milk and rice milk, but found a plethora of other products claiming the milk label, such as “milk” made from potatoes, peanuts and peas.

“If you can grow it and put it in a blender, you can take what comes out of it and call it milk,” she said. “It’s gotten so pervasive and so ridiculous.”

In a separate complaint, Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based organic watchdog and advocacy group, wants the USDA to crack down on food companies that use the word “organic” on their packaging, but whose products fail to meet the statutory standard required for use of the label.

Cornucopia filed complaints with the USDA’s National Organic Program and the Federal Trade Commission highlighting what it calls labeling improprieties in three food brands. While the companies market some legitimately labeled organic products, Cornucopia says, some products labeled as “organic” contain only 70 percent organic ingredients while others have no certified organic components.

“Current organic standards specify that processed foods that are represented as organic must contain 95 to 100 percent organically produced raw or processed agricultural products,” said Charlotte Vallaeys, farm and food policy analyst at Cornucopia. “The only minor ingredients allowed that are not certified organic must be unavailable in organic form and approved by the National Organic Standards Board.”

Dairymen know that milk doesn’t come from plants, and producers who work hard to meet organic certification standards understand how important that identification on a label is to consumers.

We have to agree. Dairy farmers and organic growers each have valuable brands that should be protected. Substitutes and pretenders shouldn’t get a free ride. As wholesome and tasty as these products may be, they should not in any way represent themselves to be something they are not.

If “tofu frozen dessert” isn’t as appetizing as “tofu ice cream,” that’s too bad. If discerning consumers pass over processed foods bearing the less-desirable “made with organics” label in favor of the genuine article, so be it.

With deference to William Shakespeare’s prose, there’s a bit of Texas wisdom that says you can put your boots in the oven, but that don’t make them biscuits. Putting a picture of a cow on the carton doesn’t make soybean juice milk.

What is the latest taxpayer-subsidized economic stimulus scheme?

Why, manure digesters on factory farms, of course!

At the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen last December, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack unveiled plans to promote manure digesters as a way to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent. The trick is that you have to be a factory farm to qualify.

In his State of the State address in January, Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle announced his latest round of tax credits for factory farm expansion, including a whopping $6.6 million for two manure digesters in Dane County catering to just a handful of mega-dairies. Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk has also been pushing for $1 million in her budget for these digesters.

The real tragedy is that manure digesters actually make global warming worse while “solving” a manure problem that would not even exist if cows were allowed to graze on pasture rather than being confined indoors. As Paris Reidhead documents in the January 2010 issue of the Milkweed, methane is 21 times as bad as carbon dioxide when it comes to causing global warming, and this methane threat largely stems from factory farms that store liquid manure in lagoons under anaerobic conditions. In contrast, utilizing manure as compost under aerobic conditions reduces the “carbon footprint” of dairy cows by over 90 percent.

From Jan. 11 to 24 I was in Germany to speak on the dairy crisis in the U.S. as part of the International Dairy and Eco Fair Trade Conference in Berlin. Representatives from around the world spoke on the problems facing dairy farmers in their regions. We agreed on global strategies to raise farmgate prices and bring dignity to family dairy farmers.

The European Milk Board hosted the second half of my trip, including tours of dairy farms and milk plants. Our first stop was a 950-cow dairy on a former East German collective farm. The farm buildings and connected methane digester were several years old and received huge government subsidies to keep them operating. There were chronic problems with the digester and at the time the mixer in the tank was broken, requiring special scuba divers to repair it. Similar problems plague manure digesters in Wisconsin, which seem to be on perpetual high-tech life support.

While in Germany we also toured newer 600-800 cow dairies with digesters. The owners explained that these digesters were simply not profitable without huge government subsidies. As problems developed they were forced to install a newer more expensive system, and with that “fix” came newer problems. It seemed this treadmill was mostly designed to benefit sales people, technicians and manufacturers of manure digesters, not family farmers or the environment.

Without a fair milk price that actually covers their cost of production, many of the German farmers said they would not survive through 2010. The same crisis is facing dairy farmers in the U.S. who have endured a 50 percent decline in farmgate prices due to corporate control, even as consumer prices for milk have not budged and the dairy giants report record profits. In contrast, sustainable organic grass-based dairy farmers were a bit better off in Germany, as they are in the U.S., though their future is not secure either.

Numerous studies by Tom Kriegl of the UW Center for Dairy Profitability have shown that the most efficient dairy operations have less than 100 cows, mostly outside and eating grass — yet, such a family farm is not large enough to qualify for taxpayer support and does not create enough manure to require a methane digester.

As long as my tax dollars and those of other organic sustainable farmers are being used to bankroll schemes that just increase pollution for more corporate profit, there will be no economic recovery. Indigenous communities developed “earth-friendly” farming methods that kept our planet healthy for thousands of years. Many of these practices are being incorporated into family farming today. In fact, a recent 2008 study by 400 scientists for the United Nations International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development concluded that small-scale organic agriculture is not only the best means to feed the world, but also the best response to climate change.

Let’s stop wasting money on expensive digesters for a manure problem that does not need to exist, and put cows back outside on pasture where they belong. When manure is treated as a valuable resource, as it is on small farms, then we can eliminate or drastically reduce the need for petroleum-based chemical fertilizers. Ending factory farm subsidies and promoting sustainable agriculture instead will not only lead to fairer milk prices for family farmers and healthier food choices for consumers, but it will actually help spare the planet from climate change, too.

John Kinsman, an organic dairy farmer from La Valle, is president of Family Farm Defenders. The organization is located in Madison.

This article appeared in Capital Times, 3/14/2010