One other aspect to the release of that British organic food nutrition study: one of the most maddening ways for conversations to descend to hell involves others accusing me of, essentially, wanting to bankrupt/lower the quality of life for everyone who makes less than $X thousand dollars a year.  This doesn’t come about because I’m talking about organic food so much as it does when I make the argument that Americans simply need to eat healthier, organic or conventional.  The assumption my interlocutors greet me with is that anyone making the case for eating healthier really just making a vaguely concealed case for buying organic and banning pesticides, if not outright Mad Farmer Revolution.

There are a list of reasons that I prefer buying organic to buying conventional (though I by no means only buy organic — especially if/when the conventional option is local and the organic option is imported from another country).  But the choice of tossing pasta in olive oil rather than buying the bottle of heavy cream sauce every time, or a baked potato (with minimal butter) over fries, or fruit over Cheetos — those are the choices that have a greater effect on nutrition.  And those are the choices that need to be presented when making the case for greater nutrition.

Making the case for organic food based on land and animal husbandry, pesticides, antibiotics, and so forth should certainly continue.  I’ll certainly continue making it.  But the case for simply eating healthier can’t afford to be presented in a way that gives the easy out of, “Well, I just can’t afford to buy that way!”  It’s a cultural matter far more than a regulatory one.  It starts with simple individual choices: fruit over junk food; making it oneself over buying it prepared.  And it starts with matters of self-control: more reasonable portions, a little less sugar, a little more green.  We can either lead ourselves and others by example (and the occasional schpiel), or we can shove the responsibility off on others — namely, government — to tell us what to do and how.  The former’s preferable, for multiple reasons.

That said, I see no problem with schools and school districts (and maybe even state governments!) getting rid of vending machines in schools.  I mean, they put them there in the first place; it ain’t tyranny to take them out after a change of heart.

(H/t Rod Dreher)

URGENT ACTION: Stop the NAIS, Anti-Family Farms Bill

HR 2749, the All Industrial Agriculture bill, could be voted on in the House of Representatives Tuesday.  Please call your Congressman immediately and request that he or she reject this bill.  Normal voting rules have been suspended to try and ram this through, so please call immediately.

This bill will:

• Mandate NAIS (National Animal Identification System)
• Allow industrializations of all farms
• Give the federal government arbitrary power to force any practices they choose on any farm.
• Allow the federal government to outlaw raw milk

This bill will not create the food safety it claims (it’s actually called The Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009).  It will make the our food supply less safe by eliminating small farms and centralizing production and processing more than it is already.

ACTION:  Please call your Congressman immediately and ask him or her to vote AGAINST HR2749.
Contact info: http://www.House.gov

There is no amendment that will “fix” this bill.  An amendment proposed by Representative Kaptur has not been accepted and will not fix the problems in this bill anyway.  We want to stop this bill.

Yours for small farms and real food,
Deborah Stockton, Executive Director
National Independent Consumers and Farmers Association (NICFA)
nicfa@earthlink.net
http://www.nicfa.org

This is, you might recall, the same piece of legislation concerning which Wendell Berry promised to go to jail before he’d bring his family farm into compliance. The CFL has a page to help you contact your representatives, and here and here are a couple of my essays on the standoff between small farms and big government should be of great significance to traditionalists and loves of liberty alike.

Now do something about it!

UPDATE: Here and here are two petitions you can sign.

E. coli outbreak requires a beef supplier to recall 420,000 pounds of its product.  (Again.)  Anyone surprised?  And then we get this:

The recall underscores the need for “a comprehensive animal identification system” that would allow meat suppliers to trace their products to an individual ranch, she said.

No, it underscores the need to keep the shit out of our meat supply – which would require actually doing something about the vile germ-farms that are our nation’s industrial feedlots and slaughterhouses.

By H.C. Johns

(Cross-posted at The Other Right)

Many Wendell Berry fans, or at least those who have read the The Gift of Good Land, will understand why I am seriously pumped to read John Reader’s new book, Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent. Here’s a bit from the WaPo review:

The Spanish transplanted the spud to Europe in the 16th century, by way of the Canary Islands. Growing underground — bulbous, white, and strange — potatoes had image problems on the Continent at first. There was that leprosy smear. As far as millions of peasants were concerned, the subterranean bizarreness of tuberous growth compared unfavorably to the airy, sunlit, wholesomeness of the familiar cereal grains — barley, rye, oats and wheat — that had sustained Europe for centuries.

The spud did not become a staple food in Europe until the 17th and 18th centuries, when warfare was widespread and frequent. Reader argues that this was no coincidence: Disruptions and upheavals inflicted by marauding armies changed the diet and tastes of the Continent, with massive demographic and economic consequences. When grain fields weren’t being torched or requisitioned, armies were camping on them or marching through them. It wasn’t a matter of choice but a lack of options that really dropped the potato onto Europe’s plate around 1700. While cereal grains were exposed to the ravages of war, potatoes were safely hidden in the ground and, when the tides of war receded, could be harvested and stored. This was when Europe discovered that the potato may be monotonous, but it is also extraordinarily nutritious, yielding four times more calories per acre than grain. And if you’ve eaten frites in Brussels or Ulster colcannon, you know the marvelous variety the potato can offer.

Wondrous variety, but also huge problems.  The potato is one of the most under-appreciated factors affecting geo-politics in the modern era.  Almost everywhere it has gone has experienced major surges in population and concurrent political instability.  Europe, China, the Americas: all had their positions in the world radically altered by the introduction of such an efficient and reliable source of calories, something we would do well to consider as we idly tweak the genetic knobs of our food sources in the name of higher yields and better disease resistance.

Hello all! As John said yesterday in his extremely generous introduction, I will be guest blogging here (and at own my blog, The Other Right) for the next few weeks while he is on vacation. This is very exciting for me, as I’ve been reading Upturned Earth since quite a ways back and it’s been one of the major reasons I started blogging myself.  So I am very pumped to be here and hopefully I’ll be able to provide some content on par with what you’ve come to expect from UE.

While we’re working out whatever kinks may exist in the software, you should all go read this lovely piece on gastronomical outlook of the Pythagoreans. Though their geometric accomplishments were considerable, the Pythagoreans were arguably the first of a long line of cranks attempting to out-reason culinary tradition. How crazier were they? Pretty crazy.

They abstained from meat and fish. For some reason red mullet is singled out for especial prohibition, and Plutarch notes that they considered the egg taboo, too. Pythagoras and his followers also inherited from the Egyptians a strong revulsion to beans, because of their apparent resemblance to the genitalia. Apparently, “bean” may have been a slang term for “testicle.” But there are many other possible reasons for this dislike of beans.

It gets weirder. This is the kind of detail that makes me glad to study philosophy; for all that can be learned on the path to truth, its the flaming car wrecks by the side of the road that really make the trip worthwhile.

… grass-fed cows require up to 10 acres of land per cow. And the cows emit four times the methane of conventional cows. It’s not sustainable. Methane is 21 times more powerful than carbon as greenhouse gas. In the end, it’s hard, if not impossible, to be a meat-eating environmentalist. It is for that reason that the most effective thing a socially conscious eater can do is reduce, if not eliminate, meat consumption altogether. Not a very popular thing to say in Texas, but there you have it.

In my home, we’re solidly on the “reduce” side; especially with growing children and a perpetually pregnant and/or breastfeeding mom, going off meat altogether just isn’t an option for us. But we usually go heavy on the vegetables and grains and then restrict ourselves to much smaller portions when it comes to meat: hence a third of a pound of ground beef, say, is usually enough for all three of us. I hadn’t, however, understood that grass-fed cows actually emit more methane than, er, “conventional” ones – though as McWilliams says, the environmental (and ethical) disaster that is factory farming is clearly not a better alternative.

Here’s the concluding bit from the interview, where McWilliams speculates on what the future of food ought to look like:

There’s an instinctive and quite understandable tendency to look at the problems of industrialized food and seek solutions in the agricultural past. The assumption, however, that our forebears hold all the answers is a bit romantic. We have to keep in mind that the world’s population has more than quadrupled since 1900, so the pre-industrial food systems that we often mythologize were nowhere near as burdened to achieve high yields. Beyond that, I’ve never been terribly convinced that pre-industrial food was so safe or ecologically correct.

The future of food production must achieve a balance between high yields and high sustainability. The only way I see this happening is if we stop polarizing our discussions of food into big industrial and small organic, and start seeking common ground over compromises that split differences. We’ll have to eat much less meat, many more whole grains, fruits, vegetables and legumes; tolerate the judicious use of chemicals in the production of our food; keep an open mind to the potential benefits of biotechnology; and worry less about the distance our food traveled than the overall energy it took to produce it.

As an aside, let me just say that it’s really this sort of compromising spirit that I was so frustrated to see missing from that NRO piece on Alice Waters. In any case, do read the whole thing.

Elsewhere: McWilliams’s forthcoming, provocatively-titled book.

These do-it-yourself programs may provide an enhanced safety level in segments of the industry that have embraced them. But with industry itself footing the bill, some safety advocates worry that the approach could introduce new problems and new conflicts of interest. And they contend that the programs lack the rigor of a well-run federal inspection system.

“It’s an understandable response when the federal government has left a vacuum,” said Michael R. Taylor, a former officer in two federal food-safety agencies and now a professor at George Washington University. But, he added, “it’s not a substitute” for serious federal regulation.

[…]

“Industry self-regulation didn’t protect our money, and industry self-regulation won’t protect our food,” said Carol L. Tucker-Foreman, a safety advocate with the Consumer Federation of America, in an e-mail message. “We want every inspector to be paid by and owe their loyalty to the people who eat, not to the owner of an unsanitary produce packing operation. You can’t work for both.”

Yes, because there are never problems or conflicts of interest when things are run by the government, are there? This is a case in which markets are working, in which the threat of safety hazards or bad publicity has led producers to develop a self-imposed regulatory regime and so bear on their own, rather than passing on to the taxpayers, the costs of responding to their customers’ perceived demands. If, in the face of all of this, you think that the desire to pass this burden on to the gummint is motivated more than a whit by a selfless desire to protect the public health, then you must be … well, you must be a Times reporter who ends up carrying water for the food industry, that’s who you must be.

As my friend Tim Carney has helpfully explained in connection with the Food Safety Modernization Act being pushed by the congressional Democrats (on which see more here), what’s going on in this case is every bit the rule rather than the exception:

Big business is not only more able to bear the costs of regulation, but also better positioned to craft the regulation in beneficial ways. Kraft Foods, for instance, spent $3.68 million last year on its lobbying effort, which includes William Lesher, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Agriculture.

When the fine print is ironed and when the agencies implement the regulations, Kraft and Big Agriculture will have a say, but your local organic farmer won’t. As Stockton puts it, “There is no distinction now between industrial agriculture and federal regulatory agencies.”

For the record, my CSA sends out their spinach literally caked in mud, ensuring us that this actually makes things safer, by allowing nature’s defenses to do their work and keeping contamination from spreading. If such practices aren’t good enough for the Consumer Federation of America, that’s their problem, not mine; a quick rinse and then a dunk in cold salt water cleans those leaves off just fine. That this isn’t the result of state-enforced policy doesn’t show that these decisions are made in a “vacuum”, or that a “well-run [sic!] federal inspection system” could keep things any safer than the collective power of a highly-motivated consumer base. It’s regulation, not individual choice and corporate responsibility, that fails to be a “substitute” for the natural state that it aims to displace.

Earlier: I interviewed Tim, and a host of other luminaries, on regulatory capture and the politics of food safety in my Doublethink article on the war against unboiled milk.

Even if you could use all the organic material that you have–the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues–and get them back on the soil, you couldn’t feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.

At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There’s a lot of nonsense going on here.

For good measure, here and here are a couple of my earlier posts on organic crop yields and the sustainability of sustainable farming (be sure to read the comments!), and here is Kevin Carson’s take on why the official “Green Revolution” mythology is a load of bunk. Also, here is what I wrote about the subject of crop yields in my TAC piece on “culinary conservatism”:

Proponents of a new way of eating are on shakier ground when they claim that a widespread turn toward small-scale and deindustrialized agriculture would not affect crop yields. McKibben proudly cites a study in which sustainable farming methods were found to lead, on average, to a near doubling of food production per hectare. He does not mention the many cases in which results have been less impressive. A much discussed study published in the journal Science in 2002 found that switching to organic farming reduced yields by 20 percent, though the possibility of lessening our reliance on petroleum may be worth the investment of some extra land. Reincorporating into the human food chain some of the millions of acres where corn and sorghum are now grown for ethanol production would also make a great difference.

But no reasonable person wants to remake the world or do away with modern agricultural technologies all together. The best solutions will come through honest, case-by-case engagement with the subtle demands of specific situations. As the UC Berkeley agroecologist Miguel Altieri puts it, a sound approach to agriculture “does not seek to formulate solutions that will be valid for everyone but encourages people to choose the technologies best suited to the requirements of each particular situation, without imposing them.” (That this could just as well be the summary of the ideal domestic or foreign policy ought to argue in its favor.) Respect for tradition and social and ecological responsibility can work together with technological innovation and capitalist resourcefulness to respect the ridges and valleys of regionalism in an increasingly flattened world.

In any case, a very happy birthday to Dr. Borlaug, and many happy returns indeed. In my home, we will be eating free-range chicken and organic brussels sprouts in his honor.

(Cross-posted at The American Scene.)

First, here’s Rod:

The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 attempts to streamline the unwieldy federal food regulation system, as does the similar Food and Drug Administration Globalization Act of 2009. Both, however, are written as a “one size fits all” bill that would ramp up fees and regulation on all producers of food (and, in the case of the latter, drugs and cosmetics). The little guy who sells homegrown tomatoes or homemade soap at the farmers market would be subject to the same regulation as industrial giants, without the resources to implement it.

As those familiar with my earlier writing on food safety and related subjects will be unsurprised to hear, I think this is exactly right. I’ll turn in a minute to my diagnosis of a similar sort of problem in the battle over raw milk in California, but for now here’s what Mark Thompson wrote about the regulatory dynamic in his terrific Culture11 piece on the CPSIA controversy:

The effects of these new restrictions on small and medium-sized businesses are difficult to underestimate. […] And Woldenberg, whose company is more properly classified as “medium-sized,” says that he conservatively estimates a minimum increase of 30% in the overhead for his company to manufacture an average product.  In one instance, a testing company estimated that it would cost $24,000 in testing fees for one of Learning Resource’s children’s telescopes to comply with the law — even though the product contains no parts that could conceivably be considered hazardous. Because this product only generates $32,000 in gross sales per year, it will need to be discontinued. Similar problems will exist for just about every niche children’s product, for which large production runs are impractical, such as educational materials for special needs children.

Meanwhile, however, massive multi-national corporations will be relatively well-suited to adjust to the new law. Their huge economies of scale mean they can afford to staff a few lawyers to oversee compliance with the law, and it is only a minimal change to their business models for them to mass produce and import their products in a way that minimizes testing fees. In sum, the net effects of this law are that the largest businesses will be relatively able to cope with the changes, while small and medium-sized businesses (and really, any domestic business) will be disproportionately affected.

It should go without saying that the fact that in food safety and toy safety alike it is the larger companies rather than the smaller ones that tend to be responsible for the worst crises makes this a self-defeating response indeed: the companies with the greatest intrinsic incentive to do the right thing anyway get run out of business, while those that remain are only barely compliant with the new regulations and have that much less to fear from the efforts of the competition. Hence Rod:

Ironically, the food safety problems that cause such legitimate public concern are caused by large-scale, technology-driven industrial food production and distribution methods – precisely the sort of thing that local, sustainable farmers don’t engage in. Yet they are the ones who will suffer the most from these government attempts to solve a problem caused by bigness and technology by imposing more bigness and technology.

The problem, though, is that the food safety scares of the past few years have given us every reason to think that those industrial producers simply aren’t growing and distributing food that is sufficiently clean and safe: something needs to be done, goes the standard response, and the only option available to us is this one. If saving a few small farms means allowing our food system to be overrun by bacteria-infested and otherwise potentially harmful meat and tomatoes, then that’s a choice that not many of us are willing to make.

Rod tries, though, to argue that there’s room for a third way:

We do need better food safety regulation of major producers, but local family farms and artisans shouldn’t pay for sins they didn’t commit. Consumers need to have the small-farm alternative – and if they are going to preserve it, they have to contact federal and state legislators now.

What Rod wants, then, is a system that puts stringent regulations in place on the larger producers while granting exemptions for smaller farmers who can’t reasonably be expected to meet them. But granting that this sort of route is clearly possible in principle, is it politically feasible? In my Doublethink piece on raw milk, the dynamic I detected in the battle over regulation in California was essentially the same one that Mark found in his work on the CPSIA controversy: in stark contrast to the naive image of anti-regulatory businessmen squared off against the would-be food nannies in government, the actual relationship between business and government was much more, well, symbiotic than that; it was the corporations that were pushing for the new regulations, and it was hard not to think that they were doing so at least partly because they were cognizant of the effects that such regulation would have on the competition. “Regulation”, as Tim Carney put it to me in a quotation from that article, “always helps the big guys by creating barriers to entry, but there’s a more important dynamic here: When you give the government power, you give the lobbyists power. It also works the other way: When only a handful of businesses dominate an industry, bureaucrats and politicians find it easier to control that industry.”

Which brings me to Tim’s very important column:

The lineup of backers and opponents of these [new food safety] bills has surprised some observers, but it shouldn’t. Big food processors—including the makers of some recently recalled foods—support the legislation, while leading advocates of local produce, organic food, and farmers markets are vocally resisting the measures.

Science and environment writer Steve Nash in The New Republic Monday praised Durbin’s bill as a “good idea,” and expressed surprise that Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, “who many decried as corporate, conventional, and something of a shill for Big-Ag” would come out for greater federal regulation, too.

But also supporting the Durbin bill, the DeLauro bill, or both, are Kraft Foods, General Mills, Kellogs, Pepsico (maker of Frito-Lay brand snacks), the Grocery Manufacturers Association, and the National Restaurant Associati
on.

[…] Galen Reser, vice president for government affairs at Pepsico, which processes snack food under its Frito-Lay brand, told this columnist “I think the industry is pretty comfortable with” the regulatory burden of Durbin’s bill, maintaining there are no significant “unnecessary costs.”

Big business is not only more able to bear the costs of regulation, but also better positioned to craft the regulation in beneficial ways. Kraft Foods, for instance, spent $3.68 million last year on its lobbying effort, which includes William Lesher, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Agriculture.

When the fine print is ironed and when the agencies implement the regulations, Kraft and Big Agriculture will have a say, but your local organic farmer won’t. As Stockton puts it, “There is no distinction now between industrial agriculture and federal regulatory agencies.”

And ‘round and ‘round it goes.

So look: either you support a new regulatory regime that is equally strict across the board and so will lay undue burdens on smaller producers, or you push for exemptions and likely lose the support of the big corporations that currently think the proposed regulations are just dandy. You’re damned either way, and to be perfectly honest I don’t know where I come down. I’d love it, of course, if someone could make the case that the food safety scares of recent years haven’t been so serious after all; short of that, however, it’s hard even for a near-libertarian like me not think that the implementation of even an unfairly strict set of regulations would be better than the reachable alternatives. Sadly, the possible world where we get a menu of choices less horrid than these ones is quite a long way away, and involves a political system with a very different character than ours.