Civil Eats

I’m a vegetarian. But my husband’s not. And, go figure, my kids aren’t either. Which is exactly why I care about the meat I buy. Yes, I buy meat. I’d rather not, but if it’s coming into the house–and into my kids’ bodies–then I need to know exactly what I’m buying. And I not only want to know how it’s affecting my family’s health, I also care deeply about how it’s affecting our family’s environmental footprint (including climate change).

Enter Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) new Meat Eater’s Guide to Climate Change + Health. In it, EWG took a close look at how a variety of protein foods rank when their total, “cradle-to-grave” greenhouse gas emissions are calculated. Then we factored in the non-climate environmental impacts (like water pollution) and health effects of meat and confirmed that, indeed, not all meat is created equal. Read More

Last week’s California Climate and Agriculture Summit, hosted by the California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN), made three things clear: California agriculture has a lot to lose if climate change is not addressed; agriculture can be part of the solution; there is a science gap and a practice gap, and more resources are needed to close them both.

The Summit took place at UC Davis on March 31 and the 200 participants included a diverse range of farmers and ranchers, researchers, non-profit staff, government agency representatives, and agricultural business people. Read More

Every year, in a tradition dating to the 1940s, thousands gather in the Spanish town of Buñol for La Tomatina, a giant “food fight,” in which participants gleefully pelt each other with tomatoes and get very, very messy. There’s blood in the streets, but it belongs to the tomatoes. However, according to a study in the prestigious journal, Science, and two in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), we are about to experience food fights of a very different, more deadly type. Read More

She had her epiphany at the dinner table. It was just a year and a half ago now. Dessert was lone gone, but her kids were still at the table talking. She sat back in her chair, and realized: oh my gosh, this is the one thing I’ve done right as a parent. She reflected how it hadn’t happened by itself. It had been a conscious effort to create family dinner rituals at home. Perhaps, she wondered, she could share this with other people…

Laurie David, producer of the Academy Award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and author of The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming, is fired up about family dinners. She’s used her epiphany to write a wonderfully inspiring, and deeply enlightening book that demonstrates how family dinners have the potential–if we embrace them–to be so much more than just, “Hey Mom, what’s for dinner?” Read More

The Food and Climate Connection: From Heating the Planet to Healing It, an excellent new short film produced by WHY Hunger and Anna Lappé, highlights how climate change is affecting farmers around the world (rural and urban), and how our industrial food system is itself one of the greatest contributors to climate change.  Farmers, especially in the developing world,  are being challenged by heavy rains, extreme drought/desertification, and unpredictable weather. As Monsanto and the like co-opt the sustainability message and present technological solutions to mitigating extreme weather—”change the seeds, that’ll do it!”–the experts in this film (including Lappé, Rodale Institute’s  Timothy LaSalle, Molly Anderson of Food Systems Integrity and various community farmers) urge us to examine biological solutions instead. Responsible farming practices can be part of a path forward. Read More

Anna Lappé’s latest book, Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, investigates the intersection between the environmental crisis and the food system in more detail than any book that has come before it. Lappé’s rendering makes us realize the imperative of addressing these issues, and empowers us to do so by demystifying corporate spin, giving thorough examples of people making change, debunking the myths for maintaining the status quo, and more. Lappé talked to me last week about climate friendly farming, policy and the state of the food movement. 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

Around one third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the way we produce, process, distribute and consume the food we eat according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Meanwhile, farmers the world over will be the most affected by climate change, as higher carbon in the atmosphere and higher temperatures increase erratic weather patterns, pests, and disease occurrence, while decreasing water availability, disrupting relationships with pollinators and lowering yield and the efficacy of herbicides like glyphosate (aka Roundup) — all detailed in a revealing new report from the USDA called The Effects of Climate Change on U.S. Ecosystems [pdf].

We should all give the USDA credit for keeping the ties between agriculture, food and climate change at the forefront of the discussion. Even in Copenhagen, where agriculture is getting less attention than it arguably should be considering its impact and potential for mitigating climate change, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack spoke about the need for research, and seeing agriculture as an opportunity for climate change mitigation. He even said to the delegates in Copenhagen, “We need to develop cropping and livestock systems that are resilient to climate change.” While I agree on the surface with these statements, taking a deeper look reveals potentially problematic ideas for just how to do this. Read More

“…the global economy and ecology are both systems. Global causes are systemic, not local. Global risk is systemic, not local. The localization of causation and risk is what has brought about our twin disasters. We have to think in global, system terms and we don’t do so naturally. That is why a massive communications effort is needed.” – George Lakoff

As an ecologically-minded horticulturist, I like to think about everything with an ecological framework. Ecology, simply, is the study of organisms in relation to other organisms and the environment. Many things could be said to be wrong with the state of our nation’s political life, but if there is one to emphasize, it is the lack of a political ecology.  We tend to compartmentalize political issues, along the lines of our individual political identities (sometimes referred to as issues “silos”), and this often negates efforts to connect the dots between diverse issues.

If there is one political identity that should be able to look past these divides and see the importance of ecological connections between movements and struggles, it is that of the environmentalist. The environmentalist’s worldview is steeped in the interdependent view of life; the understanding that one action can cause reactions beyond the expected.  And the most visible (and seemingly the most active) environmentalists, these days, are the food sustainability activists.  Yet even food activists themselves have their silos: urban food access, farmland preservation, nutrition education, and so on. I hope this article will help us see our commonality outside of our silos, and see how to use that to better work towards change. Read More

California is once again at the forefront of national climate change policy. California’s Department of Natural Resources recently issued the nation’s first state-wide strategy of its kind that lays out a blue print for how California should adapt and respond to the impacts of climate change. Many of these impacts, including severe drought, increased wildfires and floods, and prolonged warmer temperatures are already being felt across the state. The plan puts forth key recommendations across seven different sectors, including agriculture.

Unfortunately, the action plan for agriculture leaves out one critical proven strategy for coping with extreme weather events: the promotion of organic agricultural practices that will make soils healthier and more productive, while also conserving water and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The draft adaptation strategy points out what most critics of federal and state climate change legislation constantly fail to acknowledge: That taking no action to address climate change now could cost key sectors in the state “tens of billions of dollars per year in direct costs.” Read More

There’s some very big news on the environmental front, and it’s big news for the animals, too! Green food resolutions are starting to pop up, and this is a very good thing for everyone, as it’s an important sign that the public at large is beginning to confront the truly inconvenient truth: What and whom you consume has a direct effect on our planet. Read More

Sadly, the green I’m referring to is the color of money. As Tom Philpott reports, Big Ag is trying to get an agricultural technique known as “chemical no-till” established as a legitimate carbon offset in the Waxman/Markey legislation. There’s only one problem, all the research out there says that chemical no-till doesn’t actually sequester carbon: Read More