Paula Deen’s public admission that she has Type 2 diabetes and her follow-up announcement that she is also a paid spokesperson for the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, and its diabetes drug, Victoza, has sparked an interesting debate about the deeper issues surrounding our food system—especially the impact it has on the many people diagnosed with diabetes. And according to Deen’s comments on the Today show, she implies to her millions of fans, that the primary ways to deal with this largely diet-related disease are through personal responsibility and pharmaceuticals.

Indeed, when Al Roker, asks her if she is going to change the way she eats and the foods she cooks, Deen says, “Honey, I’m your cook, I’m not your doctor. You are going to have to be responsible for yourself.” Evading the question, Deen puts the onus back on the individual to decide what foods to eat or not, despite the fact that she promotes unhealthful and processed foods on TV. The one comment she does make about food choice is “moderation,” one of the most meaningless and confusing bits of nutrition advice. In fact, this is what the industry giants often use as their defense for harmful, unhealthful foods.

Personal responsibility and consumer choice are solutions heralded by conservatives and liberals alike—the idea being that ultimately good health comes down to what we choose to buy and eat. But it’s not that simple.

There are three main issues when it comes to the myth of personal responsibility about food choice and they get at the root of our nation’s health crisis: The public’s confusion about nutrition; the lack of time and knowledge about real home cooking; and the promotion of quick fixes like drugs, diet foods, and fads in lieu of addressing underlying causes. The Paula Deen diabetes story manages to hit on every single one of these issues.

Americans suffer from nutrition confusion, thanks to an array of conflicting and often inaccurate public health messages, misleading labels and claims on packaging, and a lack of nutrition knowledge by many doctors, dietitians, and other health care providers.

Deen’s cooking, and now her public diabetes announcement, only adds to this confusion. During the Today show interview she repeatedly mentions the amount of fat in her recipes, as do many in the media reporting on the story. “For 10 years, wielding slabs of cream cheese and mounds of mayonnaise,” a New York Times article begins, “Paula Deen has become television’s self-crowned queen of Southern cuisine.”

But real, unprocessed cream cheese and mayonnaise are not the problem. The issue that mainstream media has largely overlooked is that Deen uses the processed, packaged versions of these foods, which are full of chemicals, additives and trans-fats. Actual home cooking would require whipping these foods up herself in her kitchen using real ingredients. And that is the real story behind Deen’s diabetes diagnosis: Her health problems are largely due to her reliance on packaged, processed foods that are the foundation for many of her recipes.

Even though her cooking show is called Paula’s Home Cooking, there’s a lot going on in her kitchen that is as far removed from home cooking as you can get. Many of her recipes include “ingredients” like Krispy Kreme doughnuts, biscuit mixes, cans of mushroom soup, and sour-cream-and-onion flavored potato chips. This is processed food cooking, not home cooking.

Heaping the blame on all the “fat” she cooks with only serves to confuse the public further. A New York Daily News article also cites fat as one of the main culprits in Deen’s cooking and her diet. But the most recent research indicates that when it comes to diabetes, fat is not the problem. The problem foods are sugar, refined white flour, chemical additives, artificial sweeteners and flavors, trans-fats, and the various other chemicals and additives found in the processed foods that abound in Deen’s recipes.

Now Deen is pushing the idea that taking medicine is the real solution to diabetes. On the Today show, she says, “Here’s what I want to get across to people, I want them to first start by going to their doctor and asking to be tested for diabetes. Get on a program that works for you. I’m amazed at the people out there that are aware they’re diabetic but they’re not taking their medicine.”

According to Deen, the reason she waited three years to go public with her diagnosis was because she didn’t have anything to give her fans. “I could have walked out and said, ‘Hey ya’ll, I have been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.’ I had nothing to give to my fellow friends out there. I wanted to bring something to the table when I came forward.” So what is she bringing to the table? A sales pitch for a diabetes drug that costs $500 per month and has some seriously troubling side effects, including thyroid cancer, as Tom Philpott reports.

Just think of the kind of influence she could have wielded had she come out with a new cooking show that focused on using fresh, real food ingredients that cut way back on sugar and refined carbohydrates. In fact, if she had done so and eaten this way for the past three years she might have reversed her own diabetes diagnosis, which is entirely possible given the right diet.

But instead, Deen is getting paid to leave that task to a drug company. This isn’t her first corporate sponsorship (here she peddles Smithfield ham) and I doubt it will be her last. Diabetic and diet foods can’t be far behind in products she’ll attach to her name.

Alas, we can’t fairly discuss personal responsibility without taking into account the under-regulated advertising industry that pushes cheap, convenient, and processed foods on an overworked and cash-strapped population. Add to this the diminishing knowledge on how to shop for, cook, and prepare foods from scratch and we have a serious problem.

As Deen now joins the 25.8 million other Americans suffering with diabetes, she “brings to the table” the ideas of moderation, personal responsibility, and the drug Victoza as the solutions. She could do so much more with all the power she wields.

Anthony Bourdain put it squarely when he said of Deen, “If I were on at seven at night and loved by millions of people at every age, I would think twice before telling an already obese nation that it’s OK to eat food that is killing us.” And this was before her diabetes announcement. Bourdain has also said that Deen is the “worst, most dangerous person to America.” He might have a point.

The Just Label It campaign today launched a new video by Food, Inc. filmmaker Robert Kenner that empowers consumers to fight for their right to know what is in their food. The video, “Labels Matter,” is the result of collaboration between the Just Label It campaign and Kenner’s new project, FixFood, a social media platform that aims to empower Americans to take immediate action to create a more sustainable and democratic food system.

To date, more than 450 consumer, healthcare, environmental and farming organizations, manufacturers, retailers have joined the Just Label It campaign, which has generated more than 500,000 consumer comments calling on the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to label GE foods.  (We wrote about the launch of Just Label It here.) The video seeks to garner more consumer awareness and participation by galvanizing one million consumers to comment to the FDA by mid-April, the date that the FDA’s public comment period ends.

“Labels Matter” tells the story of three women who share a belief in the right to know, but for entirely different reasons. Heather Donatini is a pregnant woman who knows she is feeding her developing baby, as well as herself, with every bite. Luann Clark recently had heart surgery and has to closely monitor what she eats. Robyn O’Brien is a mother whose child developed an allergic reaction to breakfast. “As a mother of children with food allergies, the labeling of GE foods is especially important, as it would provide essential and possibly life-saving information for the food allergic population,” said O’Brien, founder, Allergy Kids Foundation. (We’ve written about Robyn’s important work here and here.)

As the video connects with each woman, Kenner shows how the U.S. compares to other developed nations, including the European Union, Japan, Australia, Brazil, Russia, and even China, where genetically engineered (GE) foods are labeled. The video notes that the vast majority of Americans (90 percent in most studies) believe GE foods should be labeled.

Gary Hirshberg, Chairman of Stonyfield and a founder of Just Label It, collaborated with Kenner to produce the video. “While the pros and cons of GE foods is debated, an entire generation is growing up consuming them,” he said. “Until we have no doubt that GE crops are safe to eat, consumers should have a choice about whether we want to eat them. GE foods must be labeled. Consumers need to know.” Hirshberg recently published “Label It Now,” the first consumer guide to GE foods available at online booksellers. All proceeds of the e-book go to the Just Label It campaign.

The drumbeat for mandatory GE labeling is getting louder, as the FDA decides whether to approve GE salmon and a proposal advances at the U.S. Department of Agriculture to deregulate corn engineered to be resistant to the herbicide 2,4-D, a major component in Agent Orange. You can join in asking the FDA to allow consumers the right to know what’s in their food.

On behalf of Civil Eats we’re proud to have made it through our third full year of delivering some of the good food communities’ top stories and posts from the front lines of the food revolution. Occupy your food system people!

As we do on a daily basis, we gratefully acknowledge that this labor of love continues to grow and thrive. Without the tireless volunteer efforts of our talented and dedicated managing editor, Paula Crossfield, our co-founder and editor, Naomi Starkman, and the support of Stacey Slate, our tenacious deputy managing editor, we would not be here today.

We are very proud of our accomplishments to date. Since January 2009, we’ve now posted 1,471 pieces, averaging 30 per month this last year.

In 2011, we published 21 interviews with folks working towards a just and equitable food system. We talked with Mark Bittman, Kathleen Merrigan, Josh Viertel and Albert Straus to name a few. Ten of those interviews were part of our Faces & Visions of the Food Movement series which aims to highlight the motivations of people who work on behalf of food systems change and connect the dots between their goals, the people and groups in their community, and how they work together to realize their visions.

We covered critical stories relating to Genetically Modified Organisms, Occupy the Food System, the Secret Farm Bill, BPAs, Farm Workers and that irritating Food Plate.

We continued our monthly community conversation, Kitchen Table Talks, in San Francisco and in New York and hope to see one in Chicago in 2012. In those conversations we discussed critical topics relating to the growing food revolution including: Occupy the Food System, the secret Farm Bill, food activism, farm labor, war veterans turned farmers and chocolate, to name a few. (Please let us know if you’d like to start a KTT in your town. We are happy to help you get started.)

This year we also partnered with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism News21 course on food reporting and the class wrote a few stories for us and will continue to in 2012. And, we thank the New York Times and Washington Post for sending readers our way.

As an all-volunteer effort, we are thrilled to have accomplished so much.

Thanks, as always, goes to all of our writers who contribute their work without compensation. We’d love a shout out to all of our dedicated contributors: Tamar Adler, Vanessa Barrington, Helena Bottemiller, Haven Bourque, Siena Chrisman, Eve Fox, Twilight Greenaway, Rose Hayden-Smith, Sarah Henry, Kate Hoppe, Ulla Kjarval, Anna Lappe, Tom Laskaway, Ralph Loglisci, Dave Murphy, Kim O’Donnel, Antonio Roman-Alcala, Kerry Trueman, Amber Turpin, Adrianna Velez, Kristin Wartman, and Mark Winne. As always our goal is to pay our writers a fair wage for their efforts. We hope the work we do brings value and inspires continued efforts for a world that works for everyone.

Now, in no particular order, some of our favorite stories of the year:

1. Why Laying Off Ag Reporter Phillip Brasher is Bad for Food by Paula Crossfield got a lot of attention and played a part in why Gannett re-hired him.

2. Why the Food Movement Should Occupy Wall Street by Siena Chrisman connected the dots between the national Occupy movement and the good food revolution.

3. Andy Fisher’s piece, Growing Power Takes a Massive Contribution from Wal-Mart, generated a good deal of conversation on money and the movement.

4. A Big Fat Debate by Kristin Wartman was one of our most read pieces with 77 comments and 35,915 views. Kristin covered how the health and nutrition community are beginning to debunk misleading information about the importance of fat in our diets. The piece caused a big fat debate on Civil Eats as well.

5. The second most popular post was Where do Americans Get Their Calories (Infographic) by Andrea Jezovit. It was one of many articles posted as part of our ongoing partnership with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism News21 course on food reporting.

6. We are ever grateful that Anna Lappé has written a lot of pieces for us recently, a few exposing conflicting interests. Her post Who’s Behind the United States Farmers and Ranchers Alliance and Why it Matters generated 25 comments and contains very valuable information for any food activist.

7. The North East had it hard this year and Ulla Kjarval shared New York Farmers Struggle in Wake of Hurricane Irene … keeping us all up to speed with the challenging situation.

8. GMOs will continue to be a hot topic for years to come. GMO and Organic Co-Existence: Why We Really Just Can’t Get Along by Paula Crossfield highlights how we really must take a stand against GMOs if we value our organic farming heritage.

9. Transparency in labeling will also continue to be an important issue worth fighting for in 2012. Read Naomi Starkman’s piece on the Just Label It campaign and look for an updates in the year ahead.

10. Finally, for all those who say it’s too expensive to buy good food. Please read How to Stay a Foodie Family on Food Stamps by Corbyn Hightower.

Mesa-Bains’s exhibition, “Geography of Memory,” draws on her personal memories of the Santa Clara and San Joaquin Valleys and her family’s history as immigrants and farm laborers. An important retrospective of her intricate, sensory-rich installation work, the exhibit includes pieces such as “Transparent Migration” and “The Curandera’s Botanica” that incorporate synthetic and organic materials and that pay homage to family history, Mexican iconography, and the botanical world. To walk through and immerse oneself in these installations is to encounter a space of curio cabinets packed with botanical samples, family photographs, handmade journals, rows of sculptured maize, religious icons and, in the case of “The Curandera’s Botanica,” a stainless steel medical examination table. Spending time in the galleries containing these visceral and expansive installations is to see California’s shared, multiethnic histories that center on cultivation and food but also the violent realities of migrant labor and industrial agriculture.

Walking back through the atrium and past its permanent collection of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican art takes the viewer into Bixler’s exhibition, “A New Pastoral: Views of the San Joaquin Valley.” Comprising over forty photographs arranged into fragmented clusters that at once seem mechanical and organic, the exhibit includes images of state-of-the-art industrial dairies, rusted machinery, manure evaporation lagoons, brownfield sites, and austere grain elevators. These are the images that viewers notice first, perhaps seeing in them a searing critique of industrial agriculture and its environmental costs. With time, though, other images come into focus that offer a more ambivalent view: a newly planted field glowing yellow and green with young crops; perfectly still, fog-shrouded orchards in winter; doves taking flight from a burned-out trailer; and a man’s weathered hands held poised over the soil he stands on (the only photograph containing a person). In a recent article on Bixler’s project, Fresno Bee arts columnist Donald Munro captures the overall effect of “A New Pastoral”: “an almost ghostly tour of a familiar landscape, one that strips away the human presence while at the same time zeroing in on the human impact.”

“Geography of Memory” and “A New Pastoral” on the surface offer starkly different visions of California and its agricultural story. For Cano, the former “remind[s] the viewer of the difficult life journey of the immigrant,” the latter of the “environmental degradation caused by industrial farming.” But, as Bixler puts it, “both shows explore how agriculture simultaneously shapes the land and the fortunes of the people who live on it and work it. Both shows present a tension between growth and decay, wholeness and fragmentation.”

Given this backdrop, you’d think the Congressional agriculture committees would have understood that writing a secret farm bill tailor-made for their friendly agri-lobbyists and tacking it on to the super committee recommendations would only add to the toxic atmosphere permeating Washington. Since they didn’t, here are five lessons to be re-learned before the 2012 farm bill debate.

1. Secrecy makes for bad politics, bad PR, and bad policy.

Call us old-fashioned, but at the Environmental Work Group (EWG), we believe that new legislation needs to happen in the open, with full hearings and a mark-up in committee, and with debate and amendments on the House and Senate floors. This is especially true for legislation that covers food and farm policy affecting all Americans and that spends nearly $400 billion of taxpayer money. It wasn’t until after the super committee negotiations collapsed that the parade of defenders of status quo farm policy emerged, claiming a secret farm bill was a bad idea. These profiles in courage didn’t utter a peep of opposition during the profoundly undemocratic process. The man at the front of this pack is none other than Senate ag committee ranking Republican Pat Roberts of Kansas.

The secret farm bill was roundly thumped in the media, especially from editorial pages from Corn country to California. One-thing food reformers have learned (and the industrial ag lobby seems to have forgotten (see point 2) is that strong coalitions make a big difference. EWG joined Oxfam, Defenders of Wildlife, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and Americans for Tax Reform in opposition to the drafting of a farm bill through the Super Committee for fiscal, environmental, food security, and transparency issues. EWG either alone or with our coalition partners met with many congressional offices, including leadership from both parties and nearly every member of the Super Committee.

EWG also urged our dedicated supporters to get involved. They generated nearly 30,000 emails to members of the Super Committee and Republican and Democratic leadership to ensure that a secret farm bill wasn’t attached to the super committee proposal. Representatives Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Ron Kind (D-Wisc) held a briefing about EWG’s analysis of the revenue income guarantee proposal. Ironically this was the first congressional briefing for media on the secret farm bill. Congressman Kind and 26 of his colleagues also officially demanded an open and transparent process. And Rep. Earl Bluemenauer (D-Ore.) was an early critic of the covert ag committee process.

Also, our fearless friends at Food Democracy Now stepped into the fray and, according to their Tweets shut down the switchboard to the Ag Committee leadership offices. They are now offering a $500 shopping card to anyone who can produce a copy of the final version of the ag committee deal. EWG followed their action with a 30-second spot on CNN and Des Moines’ television, encouraging taxpayers to join the fight against the secret farm bill.

2. Subsidy lobby in disarray.

Any hope for serious reform in the secret farm bill was lost in the unseemly competition among the subsidy lobby to divide up the spoils from finally eliminating the utterly discredited direct payments. The result was a subsidy buffet designed to satisfy the demands of agribusiness lobbyists for corn, cotton, soybeans, wheat, and rice growers that ate up most of the savings from ending direct payments.

One of the prime subsidy buffet offerings was an entirely new entitlement designed to guarantee agricultural business income. Marketed as a safety net, in reality the so-called “shallow loss” program – stacked on top of already heavily subsidized crop revenue insurance – would mostly benefit the highly profitable mega-farms that harvested most of the direct payments the shallow loss program was supposed to replace.

EWG commissioned a study by Iowa State University economics professor Bruce Babcock that shows how current revenue insurance program costs have increased dramatically – tripling to $8 billion since 2000. Montana State University agriculture economist Vincent Smith wrote in Roll Call that “Any shallow-loss program can only be viewed as a transparent money grab by the rest of us, legislators and voters, unless we can be persuaded that farmers are stupid when it comes to managing their business.”

And the disarray doesn’t end there. Add into the mix the American Farm Bureau Federation, which opposed the shallow-loss revenue scheme, a move that severely complicated the process for ag committee leaders accustomed to a unified farm lobby adamantly defending farm subsidies. Competing commodity trade groups further burdened the secret process by throwing sharp elbows at their fellow groups so they could shove their own snouts deeper into the public trough. Even Iowa Governor Terry Branstad conceded, “big ag subsidies aren’t nearly as important to Iowa as they used to be.” This despite that state’s haul of $22.3 billion in subsidies since 1995.

The secret farm bill finally bogged down when, according to reports from Politico’s David Rogers, the Congressional Budget Office concluded the subsidy buffet was a budget buster that cost too much.

3. Fear secrecy, not open debate.

Proponents of the secret farm bill repeatedly warned reformers that we should fear an open debate on the farm bill. Believers in the covert process asserted that nutrition, good food reforms, and conservation programs would fare far worse in open debate.

Defending nutrition assistance to the neediest is a top priority for EWG in farm bill deliberations, so it’s a concern that open floor action could lead to substantial nutrition cuts, even as more Americans than ever enroll in food assistance programs. But take one look at an amendment to the ag spending bill for the current year offered by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala,), which would have eliminated the automatic qualification for food stamps for individuals who receive certain other benefits or assistance from federal programs. The Senate soundly defeated the potentially harmful Sessions amendment, 58 to 41, with Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Thad Cochran (R-Miss.), and Dan Coats (R-Ind.) voting against it. Those senators are anything but your usual liberals. This indicates that nutrition cuts won’t necessarily earn conservative votes in the House.

Farm politics are changing. The deck is still stacked by agribiz lobbyists flush with cash, but the five-year farm bill is no longer an insiders-only game. With record numbers of Americans on food and nutrition programs, rising food prices, increasing health care costs, and appalling school lunch, the well-heeled ag lobbyists have become the new beltway bandits, a moniker often reserved for government contractors. But the industrial agriculture establishment has had to endure close or losing votes on many issues in the past year, including crop subsidy limits and corn ethanol policy.

Commodity programs have long had a target on their backs by Tea Party types in the House, and it was that hostile environment that frightened ag lobbyists into embracing a secret farm bill in the first place. A floor fight will make the sparks fly, but it is the only way to achieve fundamental reform of food and farm policy.

4. Restart the 2012 farm bill.

Clearly, it’s time to restart the 2012 farm bill reauthorization in an open and democratic process. The general public has yet to see the legislation or learn its price tag. As EWG’s Ken Cook pointed out last week, if the secret deal is supposed to be the starting point for the 2012 farm bill fight, then the committees should release the proposal and discuss it out in the open. Our proposal for a real safety net for working farm families can be found here.

When we released a summary of the secret farm bill proposal leaked to us, it became apparent that commodity groups for wheat, corn, cotton and rice are still the darlings of the agriculture committees. Meanwhile critical conservation programs were slated for yet another huge cut.

We were pleased that the leaked proposal did include some elements of a local food reform bill, offered by Rep. Pingree (D-Maine), but that is just the start of the national conversation about the best way to use tax dollars to fix our badly broken food and farm system. We need to invest in conservation and in a true safety net for working farm families — not more handouts to highly profitable mega-farms and city-dwelling absentee landlords.

The news that a lottery winner in Michigan continues to use his food stamp card because his lottery windfall didn’t count as “gross income” is troubling. What’s more appalling is that the leaked secret farm bill proposal aimed to end farm payments to single farmers with an adjusted gross income of more than $950,000 a year. This “limit” is particularly egregious, considering that farmers’ wealth is also expected to jump again this year. USDA announced Nov 29, that “net farm income will be up 28 percent this year and reach $100.9 billion, which would mark the first time that measure of agricultural profitability has ever exceeded $100 billion.”

5. Where’s there’s a deal there’s a way.

We have to be vigilant against another move to attach a farm bill to any moving piece of legislation (namely, the must-pass annual spending bill) this year. If the super committee was this close to a deal, the agriculture committees will keep trying to get something through without public scrutiny. Why? Because, as we’ve seen during the current Congress, passing legislation is hard. Democracy is hard. Compromise is hard — especially in this stark budget climate. But when the future of American food and farm policy is at stake, the hard fight is the right fight.

Given the political discontent evidenced by the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street phenomena, the 24-7 social media world and the growing good-food movement, more and more real Americans will be watching.

Farmers have been through this before–our lives and livelihoods falling under corporate control. It has been an ongoing process: consolidation of markets; consolidation of seed companies; an ever-widening gap between our costs of production and the prices we receive. Some of us are catching on, getting the picture of the real enemy.

The “99 percent” are awakening to the realization that their lives have fallen under corporate control as well. Add up the jobs lost, the health benefits whittled away, and the unions busted, and the bill for Wall Street’s self-centered greed is taking a toll.

It’s not the immigrants, the homeless, the unions, or the farmers that have looted the economy and driven us to the brink of another Great Depression. The public is catching on.

When Occupy Wall Street (OWS) welcomed the Farmers March to Zuccotti Park in New York on December 4, a natural rural-urban alliance–the Food Justice Movement, gardeners, farmers, seed growers, health care workers, and union members–was formed at Wall Street’s back door.

Change can come only when you confront your oppressors directly on their turf. That makes them uncomfortable, it gets attention, and it wakes up the distracted public.

The Occupy movement is doing exactly what the prominent student activist Mario Savio spoke of in 1964, when he declared: “There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even passively take part and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop–and you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from running at all.”

The people who are now forming a movement to occupy the food system agree with this sentiment too.

The food system isn’t working. People eat too many calories, or too few. There’s too much processed food on our plates. Too many Americans lack access to food that is fresh, nutritious, and locally grown. This is the food system that corporate America has given us. It’s the food system it’s selling to the rest of the world.

Clearly, this system doesn’t have the best interests of the public at heart. Nor does it consider the interests of farmers or farm workers or animals or the environment. It has one interest: profit.

We all have to wake up.

Farmers need access to farm credit, a fair mortgage on their land, fair prices for the food they produce, and seeds that aren’t patented by Monsanto or other big corporations. Consumers need to be able to purchase healthy and local food, and to earn a living wage.

The parallels are pointedly exact. It may be the Wall Street banks that are controlling our lives, or it may be Monsanto, Cargill, DuPont, Kraft, or Tyson’s. The system isn’t working.

Why do agribusiness profits continue to grow while farmers struggle to pay their costs of production and more Americans go hungry? We can’t feed our people if we are forced to feed the bank accounts of the one percent.

Agribusinesses insist that we have the responsibility of feeding the world. Growing more genetically engineered corn and soy isn’t going to feed the world, nor will it correct the flaws in our food system; clearly it has created many of them.

The world can feed itself, without corporate America’s science-experiment crops and expensive chemicals. The world’s people can feed themselves if we let them–if we stop the corporate land grabs and let them develop their own economies for their own benefit.

The message from the Occupy movement needn’t and shouldn’t be a specific set of demands. It should be about asking the right questions.

Wall Street, the government, and corporate America need to answer one basic question: Why did you sell us down the river?

Originally published on OtherWords

*Editor’s Note: Please join us at Kitchen Table Talks in San Francisco this Thursday to discuss the Occupy movement.

In June, Pfizer announced it was ending arsenic-containing chicken feed which no one realized they were eating anyway, but its arsenic-containing Histostat, fed to turkeys, continues. Poultry growers use inorganic arsenic, a recognized carcinogen, for “growth promotion, feed efficiency and improved pigmentation,” says the FDA. Yum.

And in August, Cargill Value Added Meats, the nation’s third-largest turkey processor, recalled 36 million pounds of ground turkey because of a salmonella outbreak, linked to one death and 107 illnesses in 31 states. Even as it closed its Springdale, Arkansas plant, steam cleaned its machinery and added “two additional anti-bacterial washes” to its processing operations, 185,000 more pounds were recalled the next month from the same plant.

Since the mad cow and Chinese melamine scandals of the mid 2000′s, a lot more people think about the food their food ate than before. But fewer people think about the drugs their food ingested. Food animal drugs seldom rate Capitol Hill hearings which is just fine with Big Pharma animals divisions since if people knew the antibiotics, heavy metals, growth promotants, vaccines, anti-parasite drugs and feed additives used on the farm, they would lose their appetite. Besides, people aren’t Animal Pharma’s primary customers anyway and the long term safety of animals drugs isn’t an issue, since patients supposed to die.

One of the late Sen.Ted Kennedy’s last legislative fights was about the overuse of livestock antibiotics. “It seems scarcely believable that these precious medications could be fed by the ton to chickens and pigs,” he wrote in a bill called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2007 (PAMTA) which has yet to pass. “These precious drugs aren’t even used to treat sick animals. They are used to fatten pigs and speed the growth of chickens. The result of this rampant overuse is clear: meat contaminated with drug-resistant bacteria sits on supermarket shelves all over America,” said Kennedy.

Because antibiotics make animals use feed more efficiently so they eat less and control disease in confinement farming’s packed conditions at the same time, they are practically the fifth food group. On a turkey farm with five million hens, antibiotics would save almost 2,000 tons of feed a year, says an article in a poultry journal.

And when the FDA tried to ban cephalosporins in 2008, one type of antibiotic crucial for treating salmonella in children, it became apparent just what Kennedy was up against. Two months after the FDA announced a hearing about a cephalosporin “Order of Prohibition” in agriculture, the regulatory action had morphed into a “Hearing to Review the Advances In Animal Health Within The Livestock Industry” thanks to lobbyists from the egg, chicken, turkey, milk, pork and cattle industries.

“Order of Prohibition”… “Hearing to Review the Advances In Animal Health Within The Livestock Industry,” same idea, right?

At the House Subcommittee on Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry hearings [PDF], the National Turkey Federation’s Michael Rybolt defended antibiotics as a cost savings to consumers. “The increased costs to raise turkeys without antibiotics is real,” he said. “Today at retail outlets here in the D.C. market, a conventionally raised turkey costs $1.29 per pound. A similar whole turkey that was produced without antibiotics costs $2.29 per pound. With the average consumer purchasing a 15 pound whole turkey, that would mean there would be $15 tacked on to their grocery bill.”

Conventionally grown turkeys are even a better deal when you consider the cost of antibiotics!

And, antibiotic-based turkey farming is downright green, said Rybolt, calling 227 acre turkey operations, “small family farms.” Without them, more land would be needed to grow crops and house the animals because of the “decrease in density.” And, with 175,550 more tons of feed needed, there would be “an increase in manure.”

When the FDA capitulated to industry and turned the cephalosporin prohibition into a salute to animal “advances,” former Kansas governor and former dairyman John Carlin, asked, “What changed in less than five months? Certainly the problem hasn’t gone away.”

This month, the FDA also rejected petitions to ban human antibiotics like penicillins, tetracyclines and sulfonamides in livestock filed by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Environmental Defense, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Public Health Association, Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT), and the Union of Concerned scientists, some filed over 12 years ago. Why?  ”FDA cannot withdraw approval of a new animal drug until the legally-mandated process,” said an FDA spokesman. The process includes an “evidentiary hearing,” perhaps like the cephalosporin advances.

Of course germs in turkey and other meat, even antibiotic resistant germs, are neutralized by cooking–but drug residues are not. A report last year from the USDA’s inspector general accuses U.S. slaughterhouses of releasing products to the public with excessive drug levels in them and charges that, “The effects of these residues on human beings who consume such meat are a growing concern.”

Nor are the antibiotics just in the meat! Scientists at the University of Minnesotafound antibiotic residues in corn, green onions and cabbage after growing them on soil fertilized with livestock manure. The drugs siphoned right up from the soil in just six weeks.

A quick look at the Code of Federal Regulations for turkey drugs does not whet you appetite for Thanksgiving. There are several arsenic turkey drugs approved to provide an, “increased rate of weight gain and improved feed efficiency,” say the official guidelines. But they are also “dangerous for ducks, geese, and dogs,” and must be discontinued,  ”5 days before slaughtering animals for human consumption to allow elimination of the drug from edible tissues.” Whew.

Halofuginone, another drug given to turkeys to kill pathogens, “is toxic to fish and aquatic life” and “an irritant to eyes and skin,” says the Federal Code. “Avoid contact with skin, eyes, or clothing” and “Keep out of lakes, ponds, and streams.” Bon appetit.

Drug-based farming has cut the time to “grow” an animal almost in half while doubling the market size of the animal itself.  For example, chickens were once slaughtered at fourteen weeks, weighing two pounds and are now slaughtered at seven weeks, weighing four and six pounds.

But the Brave New food techniques come at a price because the animals’ organs can not always keep up with the metabolic frenzy. Birds “fed and managed in such a way that they are growing rapidly,” are at risk of sudden death from cardiac problems and aortic rupture, say poultry scientists.

Growth drugs in turkeys may also “result in leg weakness or paralysis,” says the Federal Code, a side effect that a turkey slaughterhouse worker reports firsthand. Many turkeys arrive at the House of Raeford, in Raeford, NC with legs broken or dislocated, he told me in an interview and, “When you try to remove them from their crates, their legs twist completely around, limp and offering no resistance.” The turkeys, “must have been in a lot of pain,” says the worker, but they don’t cry out. “In fact the only sound as you hang them, he says, is the “trucks being washed out to go back and get a new load.”

The undercover employee’s reports of the “live hanger” culture at the House of Raeford, in which workers pulled the heads and legs off turkeys when they were stuck in crates and worse, led to Denny’s suspending its business from Raeford, the nation’s seventh largest turkey producer. The slaughterhouse is also infamous for a chlorine spill that killed a worker in 2003, an ammonia spill that evacuated  two towns the next year and a murdered worker in 2006.

Still, the mother of all turkey drugs is the asthma-like drug ractopamine, marketed as the “Medicated Tom Turkey Feed” Topmax. Approved for turkeys only two years ago, figures for Topmax use in turkeys are not yet available but the same drug is now used in 45 percent of U.S. pigs and 30 percent of ration-fed cattle.

There are two reasons ractopamine has raised safety questions. One is that itslabel reads, “WARNING: The active ingredient in Topmax, ractopamine hydrochloride, is a beta-adrenergic agonist. Individuals with cardiovascular disease should exercise special caution to avoid exposure. Not for use in humans. Keep out of the reach of children. The Topmax 9 formulation (Type A Medicated Article) poses a low dust potential under usual conditions of handling and mixing. When mixing and handling Topmax, use protective clothing, impervious gloves, protective eye wear, and a NIOSH-approved dust mask. Operators should wash thoroughly with soap and water after handling. If accidental eye contact occurs, immediately rinse eyes thoroughly with water. If irritation persists, seek medical attention. The material safety data sheet contains more detailed occupational safety information. To report adverse effects, access medical information, or obtain additional product information, call 1-800-428-4441.”

The other reason is that ractopamine is not withdrawn at slaughter. In fact, it is begun as the animals near slaughter and started during turkeys’ last 14 days. It is actually pumping through their systems as they arrive on the killing floor.

Like antibiotics and arsenic, ractopamine is given to turkeys to make them grow faster. It is similar to clenbuterol, a performance enhancing sports drug that is banned in the US, for both humans and livestock, and elsewhere. But ractopamine is also banned in Europe, Taiwan and China, where 1,700 ractopamine “poisonings” were reported and ractopamine-produced pork was seized in 2007. (You have to worry when China calls a food unsafe.)

Ractopamine caused actual riots in Taiwan in 2007 when 3,500 Tawainese pig farmers, some carrying pigs, threw dung and rotten eggs at police and military soldiers over the rumor that a ractopamine ban would be lifted.  ”Get out, USA pork” and “We refuse to eat pork that contains poisonous ractopamine,” they chanted for hours according to Taiwan News.

Reports of ractopamine’s lack of safety are not hard to find.  In 2009, theEuropean Food Safety Authority (EFSA) termed ractopamine a cardiac stimulator. Ractopamine residues “represent a genuine risk to consumers,” wrote a medical  journal article, citing “long plasma half-lives, and relatively slow rates of elimination.” And a report from Ottawa’s Bureau of Veterinary Drugs says that rats fed ractopamine developed a constellation of birth defects like cleft palate, protruding tongue, short limbs, missing digits, open eyelids and enlarged heart.

The FDA is well aware of ractopamine’s downside. In 2003, three years after the drug was approved for use in U.S. pigs, the FDA accused its manufacturer, Elanco, of withholding information about ractopamine’s “safety and effectiveness” and “adverse animal drug experiences” in a fourteen-page warning letter.

Elanco, said the FDA, failed to report furious pig farmers phoning the company about “dying animals,” “downer pigs,” animals “down and shaking,” “hyperactivity” and “vomiting after eating feed with Paylean,” and also suppressed clinical trial information. But, thanks to same probable lobbying that reversed the cephalosporin ban, the FDA approved ractopamine for cattle the following year and for use in turkeys in 2009! Last year, the FDA enlarged the approval for cattle.

Turkey meat produced with ractopamine is not the same as normal meat byElanco’s own admission! “Alterations” in muscle were seen in turkeys fed ractopamine like an increase in “mononuclear cell infiltrate and myofiber degeneration,” says its 2008 new drug application documents. There was “an increase in the incidence of cysts,” and differences, some “significant,” in the weight of organs like hearts, kidneys and livers. (“Enlarged hearts” had been seen in test rats feed ractopamine in the Canadian studies.)

Still, ractopamine, like antibiotics, is being hailed as “green” and for lowering the carbon footprint. It has “positive environmental benefits for livestock producers in terms of decreased nitrogen and phosphorus excretions,” extols one journal article. It results in a, “reduced amount of total animal waste,” unless, of course, you count the manure coming from Big Pharma.

 Originally published on AlterNet

When I was an intern in Santa Fe, New Mexico a thousand years ago, my mother sent me a three-page letter (yes, a letter. It was that long ago).  Worried that her underpaid intern son might be starving in the desert, she wanted to pass along her wisdom on how to cook and eat on the cheap.  It was called “Good Old Mom’s Three Days on One Chicken and Other Depression Folklore.”  It kept me fed that long hot summer and later became a family treasure.

I was reminded of it recently when I had the opportunity to read An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, by Tamar Adler.  Ms. Adler has certainly made her bones as a cook, having worked in such legendary establishments as Chez Panisse in Berkeley and at Prune in New York.  It may have been there, under James Beard award-winning chef and author Gabrielle Hamilton that she found her voice as a writer.  Hamilton after all is not only among the most talented chefs in New York, but is also the author of the widely acclaimed memoir, Blood, Bones, and Butter–a must-read itself.

An Everlasting Meal is part memoir, part cookbook, and part self-help manual for all who wish to cook better with less; and these days, who is not among that group?  She points out, for example, that “Minestrone is the perfect food. I advise eating it for as many meals as you can bear, or that number plus one.”

The book is full of that kind of clever phrasing. Adler clearly shares my fondness for MFK Fisher, and can channel her at will, it seems.  Her writing is never pedantic, never preachy, always smart, descriptive, and leisurely.  It is as practical as the recipes she includes.

Her recipe for the classic Italian peasant soup is simple and uses lots of ends and bits, like Parmesan rind and the end of a good piece of hard salami.  These and many other ingredients are simmered “45 to 60 minutes, until everything has agreed to become minestrone.”

Adler reminds us that “Some vegetables are persistently underrated.”  Here I’d have listed turnips, but she looks toward ones we take for granted, like onions and celery, and finds both comfort food–onion soup–and less common dishes like celery poached with lemon and topped with a handful of breadcrumbs.

There is good food to be had in the barest of pantries, Adler assures us, if we are resourceful enough and know the basics of how to cook.  In a chapter entitled “How to Weather a Storm,” we find recipes for chickpeas with pasta, spicy green beans, and fish cakes made from canned salmon or mackerel.  There’s even one called Salad for a Natural Disaster, made of ingredients she found in a chef’s earthquake kit, presumably while in the Bay Area.

Perhaps most helpful for the frugal but passionate cook is the inclusion of an appendix subtitled “Further Fixes,” where we learn two dozen or so suggestions for what to do when things have gone wrong.  Meat a little dried out?  Make crispy lardons.  Chicken undercooked?  Remove it from the bones, simmer in butter and chicken stock and toss with egg noodles.  Curry too spicy?  Eggplant too salty? Rice or lentils overcooked?  Adler includes fixes for them all.

In a time when we can all appreciate the value of frugality in the kitchen, when each of us can ring a wry smile from the Tuscan proverb she quotes: Si stava meglio quando si stava peggio (“We were better off when things were worse”), it is refreshing to know that with just a little effort, and a lot of love, delicious healthy meals are waiting to be awakened from their slumber in the back of the pantry.

Sometimes a spoonful of sugar does, indeed, make the medicine go down. Though you won’t find that catchphrase in the just-released hardcover edition of Food Rules, Michael Pollan‘s best-selling little eater’s manual.

Food Rules does sport the whimsical and witty illustrations of well-known artist Maira Kalman, however. And the new book also boasts 19 new rules—many gleaned from eaters around the country that Pollan wished he had thought of and included the first time around.

Take two is again full of commonsense kitchen wisdom such as If you’re not hungry enough to eat an apple, you’re probably not hungry; and When you eat real food, you don’t need rules.

The takeaway message: food need not be complicated, and the act of eating is as much about pleasure and communion as it is about nutrition and health. In other words: lighten up a little and enjoy your dinner.

In case you’ve been living under a compost pile, Pollan is a champion of small-scale, sustainable farming, humanely-raised livestock, and access to real food for all. A foe of what he calls highly-processed, edible food-like substances, Pollan’s food philosophy is famously simple: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

He is the author of five previous books including the popular In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, andBotany of Desire, and he writes regularly about food matters for The New York Times. Pollan is also the Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley and co-instructor of the Chez Panisse Foundation funded Edible Education 101 at Cal this fall.

Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world last year and everyone from students and grandmas to Oprah and the Obamas listen up when the mild-mannered man speaks out about corporate food, Big Ag, school food, factory farming, eating culture, and food safety.

We talked, briefly, following an Edible Education lecture given by former Berkeley School Lunch Lady Ann Cooper, whom Pollan introduced before taking her to dinner at—where else?—Chez Panisse. And we spoke again the next day, at length, via phone.

Pollan, 56, dedicates his latest work to his mother, former New York Magazine style columnist Corky Pollan, “who always knew butter is better for you than margarine.” He lives in North Berkeley with his wife, the artist Judith Belzer. His formerly picky eater son, Isaac, recently dispatched to Wesleyan, misses family meals.

Why Food Rules Two?

I wanted to work on a more visual version of Food Rules to reach more people and continue the conversation that the first edition started. My wife and I saw an exhibit of Maira Kalman’s work at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and Judith suggested we collaborate.

When you look at Maira’s work—like a painting of a Snickers bar on a pink ground or a framed collection of onion rings—it often manages to be poignant, funny, and sad all at the same time.

Eating is important to her but she doesn’t take food too seriously and is not politically correct about it in the least. We’re already neurotic enough about our eating; I wanted this book to be fun while it covered some serious ground.

Can you give us insider insights into Edible Education 101?

It’s been an interesting experience for me personally because I’ve not taught undergraduates before, though I should note my co-instructor Nikki Henderson is carrying most of the load as I’m technically on leave. I’ve found the students terrific; they ask questions that are sharp but well phrased and polite. In a community meeting with corporate food people you might expect to hear the Berkeley hiss, but there’s been none of that. They’re an engaged and impressive group.

We’ve learned things too. We might have had a more effective dialogue in the case of the corporate food lecture, which included Wal-Mart, if it hadn’t been webcast. That had an inhibiting effect on the conversation. I’m also used to three-hour classes; these 90-minute ones go by really fast. I think they work best when we have just one guest so we can really drill down and expound on the issues. At this stage of the semester I wouldn’t be sorry if one of our guests had to cancel just so we had some time for reviewing and contextualizing the material with the students.

And, it has to be said, what a gift this is from the Chez Panisse Foundation to the community as well as the students. The list of speakers and the subjects covered is impressive.

Has interest in the food movement peaked in the popular culture?

It’s hard to know where we are right now but I don’t think so. I remember when I was trying to finish The Omnivore’s Dilemma, published in 2006, I thought I was coming to the subject a little late. It took me forever to finish that book. I do feel a sense of urgency to keep writing about food. We’re just beginning to see the impact of our food choices on health care and insurance costs—obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are soaring—and we need to keep the pressure on the government and corporations for change. If anything, I only see the conversation deepening, and that’s especially encouraging given the economic situation since 2008.

Do you ever want to write about something other than food?

I haven’t always written about food but I find it’s a good place to talk about other things like the environment, the economy, health, culture, and politics. Food is a very big tent as subjects go. That’s why it’s held my interest.

How—and what—do you cook?

I make simple food. I grill more nights than I don’t and my wife and I typically cook together. We work well in the kitchen together. One of us makes the main and the other the sides. We’re fortunate to work from home so we’re able to make dishes that require slow cooking like braises and soups.

Some of our readers view you as an elitist foodie and roll their eyes at such stories as your New York Times Magazine piece, The 36-Hour Dinner Party. Is that unfair?

I reject that characterization while I’m sensitive to the fact that not everybody has access to good food. I appreciate that food and class are intimately tied: that story is set in Napa, which implies a lot of leisure in certain circles. But I don’t think Americans should be afraid of aestheticism; as a culture some times we can have an aversion to pleasure.

To eat healthily in this country—by which I mean consuming food that contributes both to the eater’s health as well as to the health of the environment—costs more than it does to eat poorly. That situation is a public policy problem. We need farm policies that will correct this imbalance, so that healthy calories can compete with unhealthy ones.

There is no question that there is an elite strand within the food movement, but a lot of social change movements in this country—I’m thinking of abolitionists, women’s suffrage, and civil rights as examples—have been started by the affluent because they have the leisure and resources to do so.

As a recognized leader in the food movement how do you handle the rock-star status?

A sense of humor helps, so does remembering that this type of attention is fleeting. And regardless of what people say about my books, the next morning I still have to get up and face the page and come up with sentences I like. All that other stuff doesn’t help with writing, which can be incredibly hard.

What’s the subject of your next book?

It’s about the transformation of food through cooking methods such as baking, fermentation, and cooking with liquids or heat. So it focuses on the science of cooking, the classical elements; I’ve been doing research about fire, for instance. It should be out in early 2013.

What gives you hope on the food front?

I see movement happening all around the country, like grass-fed beef in supermarkets and young people taking up farming. I’m now asked to speak in places like Troy, New York, Cleveland, and Lubbock, Texas. They aren’t typical food towns. People in their 20s are as engaged with this issue as their parents, whether it’s for health, the environment, or both. I have a lot of faith that as consumers we can change things by voting with our forks.

WATCH: Michael Pollan reads excerpts from Food Rules here, featuring the illustrations of Maira Kalman:

Photos: Top, Author Michael Pollan, by Fran Collin. Middle, Food Rules cover. Bottom, #76: Place a Bouquet of Flowers on the Table and Everything Will Taste Twice as Good. Illustration: Copyright (c) Maira Kalman 2011. Reprinted with permission from The Penguin Press from FOOD RULES by Michael Pollan.

Originally published on Berkeleyside

When most people think of factory farming they typically think of feedlots, hog factories or chicken operations–not massive open net pens growing millions of fish in our oceans. However, factory fish farming will soon pose many of the same threats to the environment and to consumers as its land-based counterparts.

Growing fish in a crowded environment in open net pens or cages and giving them antibiotic-laced feed inevitably leads to pollution. The waste, which includes excess feed, antibiotics and the chemicals used to treat the cages, flows directly into the ocean and, ultimately, on to our plates.

Food & Water Watch’s new report reveals that if the government used factory fish farming to reach its stated goal of offsetting the U.S. seafood trade deficit (that is, importing less seafood than it exports), 200 million of these fish would need to be produced in ocean cages off U.S. coasts each year. Calculations show that this could result in the discharge of as much nitrogenous waste as the untreated sewage from a city nearly nine times more populous than Los Angeles.

The environmental issues don’t end there. Escapes from open ocean pens are common, and when farmed fish escape they can compete or interbreed with wild fish, altering natural behavior and weakening important genetic traits. They can also spread disease to wild fish. Washington State and California, for example, are now dealing with a highly contagious disease that is linked to factory fish farms and is threatening to wipe out their wild salmon populations.

Currently, there are only a handful of factory fish farms operating in U.S. federal waters, although there are many closer to the shore in state waters (like those off the coast of Washington State and California). However, just this year the federal government announced a new national aquaculture (fish farming) plan that promotes the increase of these unsustainable farms farther out in the ocean, in federal waters. What’s worse, the government announced it will be bringing these fish farms to the already besieged Gulf of Mexico.

What happens when a hurricane hits the Gulf and tears through these massive fish farms, releasing millions of fish? The last thing we need is another “big industry” disaster in Gulf waters.

It’s important that we let Congress know that we don’t support factory farming–on land OR in the ocean, and that we educate ourselves on other types of more sustainable fish farming, like recirculating, land-based fish farms. These closed-system farms often incorporate plants that purify the water; fish escapes are impossible since the farms are on land; and consumers aren’t threatened by the types of antibiotics, pesticides and other toxins necessitated by crowded, ocean farm conditions. For more information, check out our report: Fishy Farms: The Government’s Push for Factory Farming in Our Oceans.

Photo: Courtesy Food & Water Watch