Civil Eats

Corn prices peaked during the run up to the 2008 economic crisis at $7.88 per bushel and as the prices of corn and other commodities rose we saw food riots worldwide. Commodity prices soon came back the earth — corn is currently trading at about $4 a barrel. Given that we’re in the middle of an anemic recovery, you’d think spiking food prices are thankfully the last thing we have to worry about.

Not so, say a pair of economists from University of Illinois (via Phil Brasher of the Des Moines Register). In an analysis of past growing seasons, they suggest that commodity corn prices could reach $7 by summer. The reason for the potential coming price spike? Would you believe ethanol? Read More

Since the first commercial cultivation of Genetically Modified (GM) crops in 1996, Monsanto and the rest of the big six Biotech seed companies, (Pioneer/DuPont, Syngenta, Dow, BASF and Bayer) have become masters at the art of story telling. Farmers looking for the next big technology fix have loved their stories: the promise of better yields, less chemical need for weed control, higher profits and of course, a solution to the elusive goal of feeding the world.

Governments, seeing biotechnology as a huge economic engine, embraced the technology. University research was shifted almost exclusively to biotech crops. GM was the wave of the future, bankers encouraged planting GM crops to guarantee a “profitable harvest”. Crop insurance premiums were lower for farmers planting GM. Everyone bought the story. Read More

Folks across the country know something is wrong.  There’s just something about the system we’ve created over several decades that is inherently flawed. Some blame the government, others big banks, still others blame political parties, but all agree that there’s something that’s just not quite working the way it should.  People are losing homes, jobs, and health coverage at an alarming rate because of the societal turbulence in the enormous yet formless thing we call the economy.

Enter Change.org and their 10 Ideas for Change in America.  Read More

Ever feel like you were playing checkers and the other guy was playing chess?

That’s the sort of feeling I get often when I watch many of the recent spate of food documentaries to be released.  Activists announce that this or that is wrong with the food system, and on the rare occasion when something appears to be getting done about it, the folks who are doing things badly simply change their tactics, but not their strategy.

It happened again while watching the British documentary film Pig Business. Read More

This Saturday, New York City will be the first participant in a series of international conversations surrounding food and the city. The event is organized by The Foodprint Project, a collaboration between Nicola Twilley and Sarah Rich, a founder of Civil Eats. Their objective is to use food as a lens to study local connections between food and geography, food and social behavior, and food and our future.

Taking their cue from the research of Kathe Newman, who theorized that a spatial analysis of cupcake proliferation could also reveal the flow of capital investment in cities, Twilley and Rich hope to navigate through and uncover New York City’s changing socio-economic patterns by inviting panelists and curious New Yorkers to engage in a discussion centered on the city’s foodscape. Read More

One almost expected to see a Monsanto executive among the honored guests and presenters at the 19^th annual Farming for the Future Conference held Feb. 4 – 6 in State College, Pa. After all, the St. Louis-based agri-giant was recently named “Company of the Year” by Forbes magazine. And in its well-funded advertising campaign that strategically targets such media outlets as National Public Radio, Monsanto proclaims itself to be the very champion of sustainability.

While many of the more than 2,200 attendees of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture’s yearly gathering would have gladly entertained a dialogue with a Monsanto representative, it’s safe to say they view the conference’s central concept in a quite different light. Read More

In the age of corporate consolidation, one business owner has refused to sell his multi-million dollar company, and instead has handed it over to his 209 employees this week, who he considers a ’second family.’ Bob Moore, owner of Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods, started his business selling organic whole grain products in Portland, Oregon in 1978.

“Its the only business decision that I could make,” Moore told ABC News. “I could not sell the company. I don’t think there’s anybody worthy to run this company but the people who built it.” He continued, “There is a lot of negative stuff going into business today. There is a good old basic Bible lesson, and that is that ‘the love of money is the root of all evil.’ And unfortunately our entire philosophy today to get as much money as you can any way that you can has caused people to do a lot of things just for money that they feel in their hearts is just not the right thing to do. I’ve just truly tried to set some of that aside and do what I thought was the best thing for the group of people who made this all possible.”

Here is a video by ABC News featuring Mr. Moore and his company: Read More

In Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack’s op-ed this week in the Des Moines Register, he recognized that hunger could not be solved by raising production, because production is in fact at record highs. Grappling with how these increases in productivity have not led to increases in profit, he explained that even though we’ve lost a million farmers in the last 40 years, “income from farming operations declined as a percentage of total farm family income by half.” He continued, “Today, only 11 percent of family farm income comes from farming, which may explain why fewer young people go into farming and why many families rely on off-farm income opportunities to keep their farms.” Vilsack gets the situation right, but his remedy is wrong. Instead of encouraging diversity and altering the pattern of overproduction which pits large farm owners against small by shrinking margins, the Obama administration’s way of dealing with the discrepancy in rural America is through increasing trade.

Read More

It’s citrus season in California, and yet many of us are drinking orange juice out of cartons — juice from Florida oranges picked last spring, stored without oxygen and then flavored with synthetically produced “flavor packs.” I recently spoke to Alissa Hamilton, author of Squeezed: What You Don’t Know about Orange Juice, about this irony, the industry behind it, and the value of fresh fruit. Read More

On January 14th Monsanto received some unwelcome news – the U.S. Justice Department was opening a formal investigation of its business practices surrounding its Roundup Ready soybean, the most popular genetically modified (GMO) crop. For the many farmers and seed cleaners who have lost their livelihoods fighting Monsanto, it was surely bittersweet news after years of ignored pleas and support from the Justice Department. Read More

The president of the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), Bob Stallman, threw down the gauntlet on Sunday in his annual speech to his industrial cronies. What got him riled up? Not rising seed prices, superweeds, or the unpredictable weather farmers face due to climate change. Instead, the focus of his speech was the critics of synthetic agriculture: “Emotionally charged labels such as monoculture, factory farmer, industrial food, and big ag threaten to fray our edges,” he said. “A line must be drawn between our polite and respectful engagement with consumers and how we must aggressively respond to extremists who want to drag agriculture back to the day of 40 acres and a mule.” His strong remarks came following a letter signed by 47 scientists imploring the AFBF to enter into dialog about their denier position on climate change.

In addition to the havoc being wreaked on the environment, one of the biggest trespasses of industrial agriculture has been the elimination of millions of jobs, resulting in the emptying out of rural communities worldwide. The repercussions of the loss of opportunity for rural America has been tragic: many towns are now plagued by dilapidated schools and poor health services, and a rising epidemic of methamphetamine use and production has filled in where more beneficial small businesses used to thrive. Read More

The Imperial Stock Ranch, which began in 1871, faces a new and serious challenge to its very survival: how to create new markets for its products to compensate for longstanding existing markets that have declined or shifted overseas. Some bold steps were needed to rethink what to do with the wool from the sheep they raise on their 30,000 acre ranch in Eastern Oregon. Their solution? Direct, value-added marketing to yarn retailers and apparel designers.

Jeanne Carver is following in a long tradition of farmers striving to distinguish their product in the marketplace—first and foremost by its quality, but also through processing, product enhancements, packaging, and suggestions for how consumers can use the product. As you watch the video, note the four key areas where producers focus their efforts in order to achieve success: Read More

What would you say if I told you that one company is making decisions about what you eat? As it turns out, a new report [pdf] released last week by the Farmer to Farmer Campaign on Genetic Engineering reveals that Monsanto controls the genetic traits — and thus the seeds — of most of the corn, soy and cotton grown in the US; and that they are using their control of the market to raise prices on their products and limit access to non-genetically modified (GM) seed.

This means that farmers are unable to make decisions about what they grow, and also that they grow more to make ends meet, pushing more corn and soy on the market to be processed into a proliferation of packaged foods — making up most of what is available to eat. This report details the history of seed consolidation (including excellent visuals mapping larger chemical companies’ acquisitions of smaller seed companies), provides recommendations, and importantly, gives a voice to some of the affected farmers from all over the United States. Read More

For those committed to growing, buying and eating local, the choice to support regional producers has become gospel. Local food devotees fiercely defend our farmers and the beautiful food they produce. But for those who have been working in food systems for the past few years, it has become clear that new players are entering into discussions around food and agriculture. We now have people at the food systems table we couldn’t have imagined a few years ago; from a First Lady who touts the benefits of eating local, organic produce to governments that are integrating farmland into their city plans (a la Detroit and Flint, Michigan), from social service agencies that are directing “troubled” youth to agricultural jobs to nutrition practitioners who are engaging with local bodega owners to get more fresh produce into low-income neighborhoods.

With all these new folks at the figurative table, a collective sense that the local food movement is gaining legitimacy outside of chef and hippy circles is growing. It is thus important for local agriculture advocates to be able to dialogue in many different jargons. Perhaps one of the most challenging is the economists’ tongue. Again and again, local food advocates have been criticized by economists (and, of course, the kings of corporate agriculture) as promoting a system that is outdated—cute at best. With the American (and global, for that matter) economy in a state of crisis, and the American people as underemployed as they have been since the Great Depression, it’s tough for any issue to gain credibility without the promise of more dollar signs. With his pioneering work in local food systems analyses, Ken Meter is working to “show us the money”, and give local food the backing of hard economic data that it so desperately needs. So when I was recently offered the opportunity to do some work with this innovative food systems thinker, I jumped at the chance to beef up my economic understanding. Read More

Urban Agriculture has become one of the hottest movements in the sustainable design world. During a recent Re:Vision Salon conversation, Josiah Raisin Cain—Chief Design Officer with Design Ecology and Urban Re:Vision—presented some interesting models proving that urban agriculture design “is close to exploding” given recent media, products, planning, and focus.

Urban edible gardens solve many design problems simultaneously. They help reduce gas, cost, water (depending on which system is used), while increasing food access and security and community connection. During the discussion, Josiah noted that challenges for designers typically include space and scale, but that there are alternative ways of imagining and planning our cities. Josiah showed projects with successful green roofs with edible gardens like this one at Trent University: Read More

“Community food enterprise” is the term Michael Shuman, author and Director of Research and Economic Development at BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), has coined to describe locally owned food businesses, which he argues are emerging as vital economic stimulators worldwide. His new report, Community Food Enterprise: Local Success in A Global Marketplace, illustrates how these businesses are becoming more competitive, scalable, and critical to global economic-development strategies. The work is the result of a multi-year partnership with a half-dozen analysts at the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies and the Wallace Center at Winrock International.

Recently, I talked to Michael about what why community food enterprises (CFEs) are so important, and why local food advocates should pay attention. Read More

Massachusetts poultry farmer Jennifer Hashley has a problem. From the moment she started raising pastured chickens outside Concord, Mass. in 2002, there was, as she put it “nowhere to go to get them processed.” While she had the option of slaughtering her chickens in her own backyard, Hashley knew that selling her chickens would be easier if she used a licensed slaughterhouse. Nor is she alone in her troubles. Despite growing demand for local, pasture-raised chickens, small poultry producers throughout Massachusetts, Connecticut, and even New York can’t or won’t expand for lack of processing capacity.

It isn’t only small producers who are feeling the pinch—a widespread lack of processing infrastructure appropriate for small farmers has caused supply chain problems for the big retailers as well. Whole Foods—the world’s largest natural-foods supermarket—wants to aggressively expand its local meat sourcing, according to its head meat buyer, Theo Weening. But it faces the same limitation as Hashley. Most regions of the country have “lots of agriculture but nowhere to process,” Weening told me, adding that the phenomenon is most acute in the northeast.

Whole Foods wants to change all that. In a move that has national implications, the retail giant has confirmed to Grist that it is working with the USDA as well as state authorities to establish a fleet of top-of-the-line “mobile slaughterhouses” for chicken. Starting with a single unit serving Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Hudson Valley, N.Y. area, Whole Foods hopes to offer small farmers an affordable way to process chickens as well as to vastly increase the amount of locally-sourced chicken it sells. If successful, this program could be expanded to any region of the country with similar infrastructure shortages.

Read the rest of this exclusive story at Grist

One thing we know for sure is that we just don’t know enough about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and biotechnology to know that in planting their seeds, we aren’t affecting future generations’ ability to feed themselves. For many people, the fact that they’re corporately controlled and thus make for bad social policy, or that they genetically contaminate other species and as such increase claims against farmers, while undermining a farmer’s ability to save seed and be self sufficient, are enough of an argument against their propagation. But in Claire Hope Cummings’ excellent book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, she weaves in the stories of the people and places behind a phenomenon that’s gotten a few rich, while farmers struggle with shrinking margins. Read More

The World Summit on Food Security convened in Rome this week, where world leaders discussed how best to combat worsening worldwide hunger and escalating food prices. Biotechnology has historically been a part of the debate.

As a polarizing subject, biotechnology has no peer.

On the one hand, it has potential to raise crop yields, increase the nutrient value in food and speed up traditional plant breeding through marker-assisted selection, a biotechnology that does not mix genes of different species.

On the other hand, biotechnology is generally funded and controlled by large corporations. The corporations then patent the products produced through the technology and sell them to farmers to make a profit. Read More

I often get asked whether I think fair trade is a bad idea, and my response is usually “it’s much better to buy fair trade than to buy unfair trade — but if you care about farmers, ask them what they want.” In general, I’m not favorably inclined toward green consumerism. Read More

A new report out today, Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use in the United States: The First Thirteen Years [pdf] authored by Dr. Charles Benbrook, chief scientist at The Organic Center, reveals that the use of genetically modified (GM) corn, soy and cotton crops has increased the amount of pesticides used in the past 13 years by 318 million pounds.

This information comes to light as the industry struggles to position itself as providing environmental benefit through use of bt technology — insecticide producing seeds — savings from which are diminished in light of a six times greater herbicide usage. Read More

If you eat, you rely on farmers, but you also rely on the labor of 2.5 million farm workers in the United States who earn wages below the poverty limit ($10,000 per year) while risking their lives in the harshest conditions in order to bring us most of the food we eat on a day to day basis.

Photographer and writer Rick Nahmias and the California Institute for Rural Studies have created a multimedia project called “Fair Food: Field to Table,” allowing farm workers to tell their own stories, and featuring the voices of farm worker advocates and producers who are pursuing solutions to creating socially just conditions on the farm and in food businesses. Read More

Big news came on Friday, when the USDA announced that Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan would lead the United States delegation to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations Ministerial Conference in Rome, Italy, taking place this week from November 18-23. She will chair the conference, the first time a woman has done so. In the press release, Merrigan had this to say:

President Obama has committed the United States to a whole-of-government approach to tackle the problem of global food security and the United States will work with more than 130 countries as we move forward with this important effort.

Today, in the days before the ministerial conference, the FAO World Summit on Food Security begins. The summit has already been criticized for its draft declaration [pdf], which doesn’t commit to previously discussed plans of ending hunger by 2025 or the $44 billion in annual aid needed to meet this aim. Read More

The discussion on American agriculture is evolving every day, and as a result, agribusiness has been stoking a backlash against those pushing for a change in how we grow our food. Notably, Michael Pollan has been a target at recent university speaking engagements; a few weeks ago at Cal-Poly, when a feedlot owner threatened to rescind a donation if Pollan was allowed to speak solo, the university caved, making his talk a part of a panel discussion. This is all an indication that the conversation on fixing our broken food system is gaining traction, as the discussion grows more nuanced, more solutions-oriented and more threatening to the status quo.

Last month in New York, Lisa Hamilton, author of Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, hosted just such a nuanced discussion on the current state of agriculture featuring Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times writer whose column is called “The Rural Life,” farmer Fred Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University and President of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and farmer Mary Howell Martens, who grows 1400 acres of organic corn, beans and other grains with her husband and three children in Penn Yan, New York.

The panel focused on assessing the situation farmers are now caught in, and discussed solutions, including focusing on improving the foodshed, rebuilding rural communities and strengthening “ag in the middle” through trade partnerships. Read More

Last week, the European Commission made the decision to allow three types of genetically modified corn to enter the European Union, where genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been banned in six countries (Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary and Luxembourg), and where zero tolerance has been the rule for GMOs in imported grains. The decision seems to have come on the heels of numerous shipments of grain to be used for livestock feed being turned back in previous months because of contamination by these and other varieties.

In other words, the European authorities seem to be throwing up their hands, acknowledging the impossibility of avoiding contamination of the various types of grains being shipped around the world in containers that are never cleaned in between routes. Bryan Endres, an agriculture law professor at the University of Illinois, had this to say in an article in the New York Times on Monday: Read More

Ever wonder what this food fiasco is costing us? You and me? Taxpayers? Well, the Economist recently assembled these jaw-dropping food safety stats in a “Farm to Fork” article in their October 9 issue:

1. There are 26,000 food poisoning cases per 100,000 Americans, every year (an eye-popping 26% of the population)

2. Compare that to only 3,400 cases in the UK, and just 1,200 in France. Stunning.

3. 76 million Americans become ill with food poisoning. That’s as if every child in America were to get sick. All 75 million of them. And then some.

4. Insufficient food safety is costing the US $35 Billion a year (as a benchmark, the entire 2009 budget for the FDA was only $2.4 Billion).

According to the article, “the wave of food scares that has swept America over the past few years has caused a crisis in the country’s $1 trillion food industry” and is resulting in a food fight of epic proportions. Read More

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was getting lots of appreciative applause and head nods from the packed hall at the Community Food Security Coalition conference yesterday, held in Des Moines, Iowa. He described the USDA’s plans to improve school nutrition, support local food systems, and work with the Justice Department to review the impact of corporate agribusiness on small farmers. But then, with time for only one more question, I was handed the microphone. Read More

The Global Harvest Initiative, founded by agribusiness interests DuPont, Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, and John Deere, will meet today beginning at 9:00 am for a daylong symposium at which the focus is said to be on finding “ways to sustainably double agricultural output to meet rapidly growing global demand as anticipated by the United Nations.” Are big corporations finally seeking to do what is right by the nearly billion people who are currently food insecure in the world, or is this another instance of corporate green washing bought into by our politicians? Indeed, this so-called initiative needs a bit of parsing. Read More

IHOP tells its customers to “come hungry, leave happy,” but an increasing number of its customers are hungry for something that’s not yet on the menu—animal welfare improvements.

Unlike many other major restaurant chains—including Denny’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Quiznos, Hardee’s, Carl’s Jr., and Red Robin—every single egg IHOP uses comes from a hen confined in a cage so small, she can’t even spread her wings. That’s right: 100% of the eggs IHOP sources come from battery cage confinement operations. Even more, IHOP’s primary egg supplier, Michael Foods, was just exposed by an undercover investigation that documented particularly egregious acts of animal cruelty. Read More

Norman Borlaug — best known for winning the Nobel Prize in 1970 for his role in the Green Revolution (the transformation of agriculture to an industrial, monocropped system, which increased the amount of food being produced in Mexico, India, Pakistan, the Philippines and elsewhere) — died this past weekend at age 95.

Borlaug’s life was dedicated to ending hunger through technology, and increasing yields was his single-minded aim. Though I do not doubt his sincerity in seeking to prevent famine, what he failed to recognize was that hunger did not persist because of a lack of food. That in fact, the root of hunger issues in the world have had more to do with a lack of equal food distribution. (As the BBC recently reported, elimination of food waste alone in the UK and the US could lift 1 billion people out of hunger if that food were instead better distributed.) Technology brings with it both bad and good; and in fact, climate change could be the worst end result of our dalliance with it. But in believing that somehow technology will only perfect us, we’ve stayed in denial about the potential for technology to also destroy us, whether quick (think atomic bomb) or more subtle — through the destruction over time of our soil. Read More