With more than 15 years of commercialized GMOs behind us, we know not to believe these promises any longer.

Around the world, from the Government Office of Science in the UK to the National Research Council in the United States, to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, there is consensus: in order to address the roots of hunger today and build a food system that will feed the future, we must invest in “sustainable intensification”—not expensive GMO technology that threatens biodiversity and locks us into dependence on fossil fuels, fossil water, and agrochemicals. And that’s never proven its superiority, even in yields.

By definition, sustainable intensification means producing abundant food while reducing agriculture’s negative impacts on the environment. Water pollution from pesticide run-off, soil degradation from synthetic fertilizer use, are just two examples of the cost of industrial agriculture. (And, mind you, nearly all of the GMO crops planted today rely on synthetic fertilizer and pesticides.)

Sustainable farming has many other co-benefits as well, including improving the natural environment by increasing soil carbon content, protecting watersheds and biodiversity, and decreasing the human health risks from exposures to toxic chemicals. In its policymaker’s guide to sustainable intensification, the FAO states clearly that the “present paradigm” in agriculture–of which Federoff’s beloved GMOs play a starring role–“cannot meet the challenges of the new millennium.”

So while we hear from GMO proponents about the wonders of these crops, the proof is in the fields. Says the FAO: sustainable practices have helped to “reduce crops’ water needs by 30 percent and the energy costs of production by up to 60 percent.” In one of the largest studies [pdf] of ecological farming in 57 countries, researchers found an average yield increase of 80 percent. In East African countries, yields shot up 128 percent.

What about the specific claims that GMOs confer much-desired benefits: nutritional improvements, drought-resilience, or fewer pesticides?

A much-touted effort in Kenya to develop a genetically-engineered virus-resistant sweet potato failed after 10 years, millions of dollars, and countless hours of effort. Not only did it fail, but researchers in Uganda [pdf] have developed varieties of sweet potatoes resistant to the same virus and with greater levels of beta carotene (Vitamin A)—not with genetic engineering’s tinkering, but with conventional breeding.

Federoff boasts that GMOs reduce pesticide usage, but an analysis of 13 years of commercialized GMOs in the United States actually found a dramatic increase in the volume of herbicides used on these crops that swamped the relatively small reduction in insecticide use attributable to GMO corn and cotton during that same period. On the other hand, an FAO ecological farming program in six countries in West Africa helped farmers reduce chemical pesticide use as much as 92 percent, while increasing their net value of production by as much as 61 percent.

Perhaps most gravely, Federoff’s message that GMOs are the key to addressing our planet’s food needs ignores the political and economic context of agricultural interventions.

What’s unique to sustainable interventions is that they build farmer and community capacity, they strengthen social networks. “Social capital”—as development wonks would say—is created. In a study of sustainable farming projects involving 10 million farmers across the African continent, researchers found that adopting sustainable intensification techniques not only upped production significantly, but more importantly increased the overall wealth of farming communities, encouraged women’s participation and education, and built strong social bonds that have helped these communities strengthen their economies and continue to learn, develop, and adapt their farming practices.

In a world rocked with volatile markets, a volatile climate, and diminishing natural resources, we need to turn our attention to investing in the proven sustainable intensification techniques that create resilient communities not to the still-hollow promises of GMO promoters.

The story makes a strong case for the correlation between saturated fat consumption and obesity. Michael Moss nails the issue of the USDA’s two-sided policy: promoting cheese consumption in the form of Domino’s Pizza, while simultaneously working to fight obesity by discouraging some of these very same foods.

But as I see it, cheese in itself is not the problem—the issues are deeper and more complex than that. Conventional wisdom says that saturated fat is bad and at the root of the American obesity and diabetes epidemics. The Times article says, “[O]ne slice contains as much as two-thirds of the day’s maximum recommended amount of saturated fat, which has been linked to heart disease.” But let’s look a little deeper at this claim.

Animal products, the primary sources of saturated fats, are foods that human beings have eaten since our beginnings. In fact, often times these were the only foods around in the form of wild game or fish and seafood. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors thrived on these animals as well as foraged vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and other plant materials.

These foods were unadulterated and in their full-fat form.

More recently, Americans ate animal products in their full-fat and whole form up until the turn of the century. In the 1950s the lipid hypothesis was developed, which claimed that saturated fats were the cause of heart disease. This prompted government and medical establishments to promote low-fat alternatives to traditional fats—like using margarine instead of butter, or soybean oil instead of lard.

Well-meaning scientists in the 1950s were trying to determine what could account for the steep rise in heart disease, which at the turn of the century, accounted for less than 10 percent of all deaths but by 1950 rose to 30 percent. Heart disease is now the leading cause of death in the U.S. and claims more than 600,000 lives every year.

But if saturated fats were the cause of heart disease, wouldn’t the rates be steadily declining as Americans obediently switched to low-fat and fat free products? What accounts for this disconnect? While natural animal fats were disappearing from the American diet, highly processed and refined foods were replacing them. The use of margarine quadrupled, the use of vegetable oils tripled, and egg consumption declined by half between 1900 and 1950. And after World War II, hydrogenated oils or trans-fats became commonplace.

There is a body of research now that suggests the lipid hypothesis is faulty and that the addition of processed oils, refined flour, sugar, and chemical additives to the food supply is really what accounts for obesity and its related risks of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and a host of other health problems. A study completed this year and reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that, “There is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease or coronary vascular disease.” And in the current issue of the Journal of the World Public Health Nutrition Association, there is a report attributing the rise in obesity and diabetes to the “ultra-processing” of foods rather than the food items themselves. The author, Professor Carlos Monteir, writes, “The most important factor now, when considering food, nutrition and public health, is not nutrients, and is not foods, so much as what is done to foodstuffs and the nutrients originally contained in them, before they are purchased and consumed. That is to say, the big issue is food processing—or, to be more precise, the nature, extent and purpose of processing, and what happens to food and to us as a result of processing.”

Prior to the 1900s, humans were not eating much of what is commonly eaten now simply because it didn’t exist. Human beings have never eaten the combination of refined carbohydrates, refined sugars, trans-fats, additives, chemicals, antibiotics or artificial bovine growth hormones that most Americans are eating today. And as for that Domino’s Pizza—it contains all of the above.

According to the Domino’s website, there are about 60 ingredients in a deep dish pepperoni and cheese pizza, including refined wheat flour, poor quality oils, trans-fats, sugar, preservatives, artificial flavors and a myriad of chemical additives. In addition to the listed ingredients, add the antibiotics and bovine growth hormones that are regularly administered to dairy cattle and end up in the cheese on your pizza. Artificial bovine growth hormones are known endocrine disruptors (which I wrote about two weeks ago on Civil Eats) and are being studied now for their role in contributing to obesity, diabetes, and other health problems. Mysterious ingredients like “natural flavor” or “artificial flavor” as well as “modified food starch” “butter flavor” and “carrageenan” are often sources of MSG—another known endocrine disruptor. One preservative listed, BHT, is a petrochemically derived substance with a wide range of toxic effects and is a suspected carcinogen.

To be sure, eating too much cheese (or too much of anything for that matter) will amount to weight gain, but this is only part of a larger, more troubling problem as Americans continue to eat large quantities of unnatural, processed ingredients, endocrine disrupting chemicals, and hormones. There are no studies to date that evaluate this combination of ingredients and what they do to our bodies when ingested on a daily basis. But there are statistics—and given that two-thirds of the U.S. population is obese or overweight, and that the leading causes of death are all correlated to poor diet—it’s not too hard to connect the dots. Unfortunately for the American people, the U.S. government is working in the interest of the dairy industry and corporations like Domino’s Pizza and sending a clear message that their welfare is far more important than the health of its citizens.

This article is part of a regular column by holistic nutrition expert Kristin Wartman, in which she examines food, nutrition, and the way the industrial food industry affects our food system and our health.

Chalk up another victory for Stephen Colbert’s gut. Back in January, the touter of all things truthy declared Domino’s Pizza his “Alpha Dog of The Week” for a “game-changing ad campaign” to promote its new pizza recipe. Consumers had complained that the old formula tasted like ketchup-covered cardboard, a factor that presumably contributed to the company’s sagging sales.

So, Domino’s did two things: it reformulated its pizzas to contain nearly twice as much cheese; and launched an ad campaign which took the bold step of acknowledging just how awful its old pizzas were, while gushing about the “cheese, cheese, CHEESE!!!” that distinguishes the new recipe from the old one.

With the logos of Goldman Sachs, Citibank, Fannie Mae, Bank of America, and AIG on display behind him, Colbert applauded Domino’s “for joining the great American corporate tradition of screwing your customers and then having the balls to ask them to come back for more.”

Turns out that Domino’s had something else in common with these ethically challenged entities, aside from the dubious products they dumped on unwitting dupes.

As Sunday’s New York Times revealed, Domino’s effort to rebrand itself and thereby revive its flagging fortunes was partly financed by a government handout, or, if you prefer, corporate welfare. According to the Times’ Michael Moss, Domino’s $12 million marketing campaign was created and financed by a USDA-funded organization called Dairy Management.

The free market had spoken, and its collective voice said “Yuck!” But instead of standing by and letting Domino’s slide deeper into an apparently well-deserved decline, the government chose to intervene with an infusion of cash and a profusion of cheese.

And Dairy Management’s efforts to get more milk fat on the menus at Domino’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, and Pizza Hut have been a huge success, boosting cheese sales by “nearly 30 million pounds,” as Moss reports.

This is a great thing, if you are a dairy farmer saddled with surplus whole milk. For the rest of us, though, it raises some disturbing questions:

(1) Do we really need to eat more cheese, given that cheese consumption in the U.S. has already nearly tripled since 1970? Cheese is now the single greatest source of saturated fat in our diet. Is there no other use for all this excess milk fat? Given its artery-clogging capabilities, could it be used to fill the fractures in our ancient, decaying water mains, or the cracks in our highways?

Seriously. There’s a guy in Vermont named Andrew Meyer who’s figured out how to make an awesome, super durable, non-toxic floor and furniture varnish from another by-product of the cheese industry, whey. Why not use the USDA’s resources to encourage this kind of innovation, instead of ladling more cheese onto every one-handed fast food item so that we can shovel even more saturated fat down our gullets like geese at a foie gras farm?

(2) Doesn’t this totally conflict with the USDA’s anti-obesity campaign? A spokesperson for the USDA gave Moss the department’s boilerplate spiel: “When eaten in moderation and with attention to portion size, cheese can fit into a low-fat, healthy diet.”

Yes, but how do the gooey, greasy, lactose-laden monstrosities that Dairy Management has helped to create fit into that mythical moderate diet? As Marion Nestle notes in my Q & A with her on this topic, “Who eats one-quarter of a pizza?”

And, about those portion sizes? Jonathan Bloom points out in his timely, terrific new book, American Wasteland (citing research from Nestle herself and her colleague Lisa Young) that portion sizes climbed steadily in the 1970′s, increased sharply in the ’80s and continued to rise in the ’90s:

In recent years, seemingly everything in the food industry, from portions to plates, has swelled, except for our common sense.

Bloom writes that “we grow about twice as much food as we need,” thanks to agricultural policies that encourage overproduction. And all that waste has to go someplace, whether it’s to the landfill, the compost heap (all too rarely), or our stomachs.

In his salute to Domino’s, Colbert didn’t fault the company for its unapologetic admission that it had been serving its customers a sub-standard product:

After all, we’re the human garbage cans who bought these trash discs by the millions. Domino’s is simply advertising that they weren’t fit to wipe your ass with.

The new formula is both a dietary disaster and a marketing triumph. But the Domino’s campaign is only a small part of the story; Moss’s piece also delves into the troubling history of Dairy Management’s attempts to manipulate consumers with unsubstantiated claims touting the alleged weight-loss benefits of increased dairy consumption.

Oddly enough, the USDA’s top officials declined to speak with Moss, passing up the chance to trumpet Dairy Management’s evident success.

Don’t they want to disprove the naysayers who claim the government can’t create–or preserve–jobs? Aside from aiding the dairy industry, this partly tax payer-funded pro-lacto largesse has a few other winners. Think of all the pizza deliverers, the cardboard box manufacturers, and the producers of bovine growth hormone who might have been laid off had Domino’s been left to its own devices and lousy slices. It’s great for cholesterol-lowering drug sales, too.

Who loses? The ‘little people’. Although, apparently, we’re growing bigger everyday, with the help of a heap o’ cheese.

The New York Times made a long-awaited (and much emailed) announcement on its front page last week: The mystery of the ongoing and agriculturally devastating bee die-off (aka Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD) has been cracked!

I’m not trying to hype the news. Here’s the headline and lede:

Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery

It has been one of the great murder mysteries of the garden: what is killing off the honeybees?

Since 2006, 20 to 40 percent of the bee colonies in the United States alone have suffered “colony collapse.” Suspected culprits ranged from pesticides to genetically modified food.

Now, a unique partnership–of military scientists and entomologists–appears to have achieved a major breakthrough: identifying a new suspect, or two.

A fungus tag-teaming with a virus have apparently interacted to cause the problem, according to a paper by Army scientists in Maryland and bee experts in Montana in the online science journal PLoS One.

It’s easy to miss, but in that last sentence, reporter Kirk Johnson takes a wrong turn. In essence, he confuses proximate and efficient causes (i.e. what bees ultimately succumb to vs. what makes hives susceptible to collapse) and from that logical error, a whole series of cascading failures ensue. But don’t take my word for it. Go read Katherine Eban’s crack piece of reporting for Fortune that dissects the problematic nature of the Times article; the underlying study; its lead author, Jerry Bromenshenk; and the role in the whole debate of the pesticide company Bayer CropScience.

The enigma wrapped in a mystery coated with pesticide

Let’s be clear: The study itself makes no conclusive claims about the causes of colony collapse disorder. Eban quotes from the paper that the research does not “clearly define” that the virus/fungus combination is “a marker, a cause, or a consequence of CCD.” A scientist interviewed by Eban very helpfully offers the metaphor of HIV to describe what’s going on with bees. HIV doesn’t kill you–it’s the opportunistic infections and diseases that follow HIV’s dismantling of a sufferer’s immune system that do. In the case of bees, the virus/fungus combo are most likely the follow-on infections that kill off an already weakened hive.

The Times blunder goes beyond whether Johnson or his editor misinterpreted the results of new research. Unfortunately, as Eban details–in part drawing on an unpublished piece she wrote for the now-defunct Portfolio magazine–the Times left out key pieces of the real story of the fight over research into what’s killing the bees.

As I wrote last January, many scientists believe that a novel class of pesticides called neonicotinoids–which are insect neurotoxins-has played a major role in CCD worldwide. An Italian entomologist at the University of Padua, Vincenzo Girolami, has research currently undergoing peer review showing that bees can be exposed to lethal levels of these pesticides through the use of seeding machines that sow neonicotinoid-coated seeds. These devices throw up a toxic cloud of pesticide as they work: bees fly through the cloud and either die or take the pesticide back to the hive. Once inside, even at low doses, it can cause disorientation or, as Girolami calls it, “intoxication” of whole hives.

The maker of this pesticide is Bayer CropScience. What does a corporation do when it discovers it may have developed and marketed a dangerous and potentially devastating product? Here in America, you confuse, you obfuscate, and you buy off scientists.

And as Eban skillfully details, that’s exactly what Bayer has been doing for the last decade or so.

Beeing clear

Which brings us back to Bromenshenk. He was an expert witness for a group of beekeepers that in 2003 sued Bayer over the pesticide Imidacloprid. Bromenshenk later backed out of the lawsuit and, soon after, Bayer gave Bromenshenk a “research grant.” But it gets worse. Eban reports something the Times piece doesn’t: that Bromenshenk’s consulting company, Bee Alert Technology, is developing diagnostic tools for “various bee ailments.” The company stands to profit from curing bee diseases–and thus it’s rather convenient that Bromenshenk has published research that points the finger towards “treatable” conditions, rather than pesticides, as the primary culprit in bee deaths. Indeed, he had admitted as much to Eban while she was researching her Portfolio piece.

While this tremendous potential conflict doesn’t necessarily invalidate Bromenshenk’s findings, it certainly warrants a mention.

So where does this leave us? In an email exchange with me, the Italian scientist Girolami said he agrees with many of the experts Eban interviewed: The virus/fungus combination is secondary. In Girolami’s opinion, the underlying causes of CCD–the factors that are weakening the hives and making them susceptible to infection and die-offs–are most likely neonicotinoids along with the Varroa mite, a parasite that can infect and destroy hives all on its own.

In fact, last year Italy banned neonicotinoid-coated corn seeds and, according to this report, after the first non-neonicotinoid sowing, nary a hive was lost, although neonicotinoid spraying is still allowed in some areas–and still linked with bee deaths. France has also banned coated seeds–though there, as in Germany, the pesticide lobby has fended off total bans for now. As for the U.S., Bayer successfully convinced a judge to throw out crucial evidence in the beekeeper lawsuit and has, to date, prevented the EPA from releasing the data the agency used to approve neonicotinoids in the first place.

Eban concludes with the observation that little neonicotinoid research is going on in the U.S .at the moment, thanks in large part to Bayer’s efforts to “support” scientists who work in other, shall we say, less-sensitive areas. It seems it is up to scientists outside the U.S., in countries less beholden to corporate interests, to do the scientific heavy lifting.

Ah, America. Fighting hard for the freedom to spray toxic chemicals everywhere.

Photo: nikonvscanon on Flickr

Republished with permission from Grist

It takes only 12 words before he drops Michael Pollan’s name, whose best-selling books argue eloquently for a better food system, and in the next paragraph he mentions Michelle Obama’s organic garden at the White House, though he makes no mention of her new “Let’s Move!” campaign against childhood obesity, for which this garden is a tool.

I was going to dismiss Mr. Darlin’s piece as not worthy of notice despite its prominent placement in the Paper of Record and thus avoid writing my third column lamenting this misplaced disrespect for eaters who care what they eat (I swear I do have better, more enjoyable things to write about), but then he said this:

Some of these so-called locavores may think they are part of a national movement that will replace corporate food factories with small family farms. But as much of the East Coast lies blanketed beneath a foot or more of snow, it’s as good a time as any to raise a few questions about the trend’s viability.

What struck me first about this statement was that it came the same week that talking heads in the media and politics (And even Donald Trump?) were blindly arguing that all this snow was proof that climate change was a hoax (perpetrated to what end? I’ve always wondered). The irony is that these bigger storms are likely a symptom of that same climate change, caused in no small measure by industrial agriculture.

Then I noticed the condescension. These so-called locavores may think they are part of a national movement. Mr. Darlin, we are part of a national movement, an international movement in fact, led by dozens of very worthy organizations working hard to create a food system that is good, clean, and fair. Our current system is none of these things. I happen to sit on the board of directors of one such organization, Slow Food USA, which has 26,000 members nationwide and over 100,000 members worldwide. Pretty sure that alone qualifies as a movement, but as I said we are not alone.

What Mr. Darlin seems not to understand though is that there is so much more to this movement. We are not a bunch of yuppie foodies stuffing our craws with foie gras, as he and others might have their readers believe. The system we envision, as I said, is one that is:

1. Good – meaning that the food tastes good and is nutritious
2. Clean – meaning that producing the food has only beneficial and not negative effects on the environment in which it is produced, and that there is nothing in the food that isn’t food (and if it wasn’t food 100 years ago, it is not food now)
3. Fair – meaning that the people who produce the food should be justly compensated for their work.

This is not an effort to create some Utopian state, nor is it a recreation of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” (another accusation Darlin hurls). It is a wholehearted effort to improve the lives of everyone who eats. We do not say: good food for us, we say good food for all! And when Darlin states, “People who grow vegetables in empty lots and schoolyards have a nice, wholesome hobby–but one that can make little sense economically,” he needs to do a bit more research than reading William Alexander’s “The $64 Tomato.”

In fact, during World Wars I, II and the Great Depression for example, more than half of America’s produce came from privately held or community-based “Victory Gardens.” But Americans have been sold a bill of goods, by Big Ag and other industrial interests, that has us all thinking that cooking, much less growing our own food, is a chore akin to washing windows, one to be avoided whenever possible and then done grudgingly only when absolutely necessary. In fact cooking is far more important. It is an almost spiritual act to provide nourishment to our loved ones, yet as a society we have come to mistake frenzy for efficiency, which has led to believing we are satisfied with expedient mediocrity, and in the balance as always it’s the children who suffer.

Meanwhile, with respect to making “little sense economically,” I’ve often pointed out that where I live in Johnson County, Iowa, there are about 50,000 households. If each of them redirected just $10 of their existing weekly food budget toward getting something locally–from a farmers market, a CSA, a local brewery, or eggs from the farmer down the road, it would keep $26 million in our economy every year. Now imagine same statistic in a major metro like Mr. Darlin’s native San Francisco.

We are not idiots and none of us expects to see the brick-by-brick dismantling of McDonald’s worldwide (well OK, some may wish it, but that’s different). But there is a massive amount of room for improvement and we want to see it. No health care system, no matter how it is reformed, can deal with the $157 billion we spend annually in the US alone on obesity-related illness. We live in a world with a billion people starving and another billion overweight and yet undernourished. Children born in the US have a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes before they are old enough to vote, and among minorities that ratio rises to one-in-two.

Clearly the industrial model, which may work just fine for Darlin’s primary field of computers, is not working for food. There must be a better way and we are out to find it. Trying to stick us with an elitist tag when we are trying to help farmers and raise healthy children simply won’t wash.

“The story we learned about over the weekend is unacceptable and tragic. We all know we can and should do more to protect the safety of the American people and the story in this weekend’s paper will continue to spur our efforts to reduce the incidence of E. coli O157:H7. Over the last eight months since President Obama took office, USDA has been aggressive in its efforts to improve food safety, and has been an active partner in establishing and contributing to President Obama’s Food Safety Working Group.

Bah, humbug. What’s your plan, Tom?

• Launched an initiative to cut down E. Coli contamination (including in particular contamination from E. Coli O157:H7) and as part of that initiative, stepped-up meat facility inspections involving greater use of sampling to monitor the products going into ground beef.
• Appointed a chief medical officer within USDA’s Food Safety Inspection Service to reaffirm its role as a public health agency.
• Issued draft guidelines for industry to further reduce the risk of O157 contamination.
• Started testing additional components of ground beef, including bench trim, and issuing new instructions to our employees asking that they verify that plants follow sanitary practices in processing beef carcasses.
• Designed the Public Health Information System (PHIS) in response to lessons learned in past outbreaks.

“USDA is also looking at ways to enhance traceback methods and will initiate a rulemaking in the near future to require all grinders, including establishments and retail stores, to keep accurate records of the sources of each lot of ground beef.”

Double “Bah, humbug.” As I said on Twitter just now, this is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic sort of stuff. As long as the industry is able to set the terms of its own regulations and do things like maintain bizarro “trade secrets” protections on key elements of our food safety system (not to mention base their business on corn rather than grass), real reform is impossible. Back to the drawing board, Tom.

h/t Bill Marler. Originally published on Beyond Green

The food policy wonks leaped, quickly exposing the holes in McWilliams’ alarmist piece.  (My two-cents is here) It seemed that leaving out the important details above left the author without a leg to stand on, yet The Atlantic was quick to give McWilliams a platform. He weakly defended his position, calling the National Pork Board funding matter a distraction, and half-heartedly admitted that he may have been wrong to leave out the details of seropositivity.  His limp-wristed retort included an admission that he was in fact a sustainable food supporter, playing devil’s advocate.

The only problem is, as McWilliams admits, this was a piece for lay readers, who without further information, could stop buying sustainable pork after reading such claims (and they won’t just be going vegetarian, as the author might have hoped).

Its worth congratulating the food writers who gave a retort to this piece, and it speaks to an important fact McWilliams seems not to have gotten: established sustainable food advocates and newbies alike can handle transparency.

This got me thinking about what a more considered and productive devil’s advocate would have done in this situation.  Instead of seeking only to shock the public with misleading information, a more nuanced critique (I’ll admit, it might not have made it into the Times, but thats another matter) could have presented the possibility that free-range pork is not all it’s cracked up to be, and balanced out this one-sided slam.

The root of the story, and the one I’d like to understand better, is the role of antibiotics in pig husbandry, and by extension, whether antibiotics are necessary or positive in any way.  An honest contrarian would have also disclosed the role of other serious pathogens like MRSA, which have been found in industrial pig operations where antibiotics are being used liberally to fatten up pigs. This would have served to give a better picture of hog confinement in general –  otherwise, McWilliams is only hurting the cause he claims to care about.

A well-rounded critique of the work sustainable food advocates are doing in all arenas is valid. However in misleading the general public, and laying the contrarianism on thick, McWilliams didn’t start a conversation, but instead just threw in a rotten tomato.

The issues our food system faces are very serious, and one thing we can safely say is that industrial-scale animal operations have seen their day in the sun. Consumers are becoming more conscious of the treatment of the animals they eat, and from a food safety perspective, we can pretty confidently say that industrially raised meat is less safe. (Fortunately, there is more than one study to back this up). That being said, we have a lot of work to do, and everything we do will not be perfect.

Unfortunately, it seems that McWilliams has fallen prey to the wiles of marketing.  In seeking to market himself as a contrarian, he has even penned a book called Just Food: How Locavores are Endangering the Future of Food and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly.  Now honestly, did he pick out that title to scare the trichonosis out of people, or what? If he were a true sustainable food advocate, perhaps he would have written a book titled, A Closer Look at Locavorism: What’s Not Working and How We Can Fix It.  I might have been more excited to read that.

Today, a free-range dissenter ended up in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, seemingly to defend factory farmed pork. (One wonders if the NYT was attempting to temper the excellent coverage Nicholas Kristof has had of pigs and MRSA of late)

John McWilliams’ argument — that the exposure to disease which brought pigs into the factory farm setting in the first place still exists, and therefore in re-implementing free-range we are no better than we started — has little to base in reality. This is a classic shill, as the study that he cites (Foodborne Pathogens and Disease) was funded by the National Pork Board, a group that defends the interests of industrial pig operations.  If the New York Times had bothered to fact-check, they might have seen that the parasite trichinia found “present” in two of the free-range pigs was actually only antibodies (The Center for a Livable Future goes into more detail), which leaves us uncertain whether they carried the disease or not, and renders McWilliams’ argument moot.

Aside from this, though, McWilliams is missing the point. Locavorism isn’t about free-range, its about getting closer to the source; shaking the hand that feeds you and thereby knowing, even seeing, where your food comes from.  The reason there are no worthy studies cited in McWilliams’ piece is because grass-fed farmers often run size-manageable and responsible operations.  They don’t cut corners precisely because they are held accountable by the community.

I’m thinking about two things here. First, where are the media in this story? And second, can these contrarian attacks help us build the movement, or are they purely a distraction?

In this instance it seems that the New York Times, in its desperation to sell papers, fell into the trap of story building over truth-finding. On Grist, Tom Laskawy wrote a great piece on the counter-productive and even dangerous world of FUD — the corporate tactic of creating Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the consumer so as to sell the status quo. As Laskawy points out, this Times op-ed falls right in line with the tenets of FUD — a result of the Times’ use of false equivalency. In other words, in the interest of creating drama, many newspapers of note have failed to vet stories properly — creating the false appearance that the arguments on both sides of a story are equal and leaving it up to the reader to make sense of it.  What we get then is always a confused and nihilist public, uttering things like, “but didn’t you see that piece in the New York Times, free-range is not necessarily better.” The question is, then, how do we reclaim the media, and disseminate real information to consumers?

I think its a tough one to answer.  What I do know, is that at the farmer’s market, the answer lies with the beginning and the end of the food chain. Government needs to step in and lead on food issues with a better food policy agenda.  We’ve seen the beginnings of such a plan, with the White House garden and Kathleen Merrigan’s appointment as Under-Secretary of Agriculture — but these could end up being distractions. We must focus on the decentralization and diversification of the food system — starting with rethinking farm subsidies and hospital, school and military procurement — and insist that scientists get public sector funding and freedom to do real scientific studies (For the hell of it, lets start by really testing GMOs). The media also needs to press the reset button (Maybe this will happen on its own with the closure of so many papers) — this is our press, for goodness sake, not the voice box of industry. In the meantime, every eater has a responsibility to ask where their food is coming from, and when confused, to dig deeper and ask more questions.  These changes at the top and bottom are interdependent, and will not occur unless simultaneous.

Finally, I do think it is possible for opposition to make us stronger, and more able to articulate what it is we stand for and why.  In his recent book, Getting Green Done, Auden Schendler writes that we must take a long hard look at the bumpy road to implementing sustainability — and learn from our mistakes — something that at times we are afraid to do for fear of backlash. In the food movement, for example, we’d ignored food justice issues for a long time.  But through criticism that our movement was elitist, and that better food was only for the rich, we have begun to unravel this thinking and work towards building a more inclusive and fair food system.

Of course, we don’t always get a fair debate with our detractors. But it is still my hope that we can emerge from these arguments a more steadfast movement.

I was amazed when I opened my New York Times yesterday, after a busy Sunday working at the café. The first face I saw when I pull the paper out of its blue plastic wrapper was that of Alice Waters, gracing the cover of the Sunday Business section. The superb accompanying article by Andrew Martin raises the question of whether the sustainable food movement is ready for the visibility it is getting these days.

According to the article, Michael Pollan doesn’t think so:

Mr. Pollan, who contributes to The New York Times Magazine, likens sustainable-food activists to the environmental movement in the 1970s. Though encouraged by the Obama administration’s positions, he worries that food activists may lack political savvy.

“The movement is not ready for prime time,” he says. “It’s not like we have an infrastructure with legislation ready to go.”

While I entirely agree with him, I think this is perhaps the wrong question. My question is: does a grass-roots movement that is focused on re-localization and de-centralization of our food system need a centralized infrastructure in the first place?

Consider this: currently over 85% of large food manufacturing companies have a sustainability program in place. While it is certainly true that they are primarily focusing on “Sustainability 1.0” programs of waste and energy reduction, the fact is that Big Food is starting to take notice. And the reason they are taking notice is because people are increasingly choosing the most sustainable and green products that they think they can afford.

And this is why the NYT Sunday Business section decided to devote a full page and a half to the topic – because sustainable food is the food of the future. From my perspective, that makes the question a tautology. The cover of the Sunday Business section is prime time.

As is the recent 60 Minutes profile of Alice Waters that was discussed in the article. Her segment was followed by a deluge of discussion online and on the airwaves about the role she has played in creating this movement.

Lesley Stahl began the piece with a loaded statement, saying “When it comes to food, Alice Waters is a legend. At age 64, she has done more to change how we Americans eat, cook and think about food than anyone since Julia Child.” Provocative stuff, for a foodie.

Personally, I believe that Ms. Stahl is right. I was born in the same month that Chez Panisse opened, in August of 1971.  Nearly four decades later, I now run a café less than two miles from that honored institution. In that time I have seen first-hand how fresh local hand-crafted food has gone from being a fringe-of-the-fringe movement to where we are now.

As a infant and small child, I lived on a farm commune in the California foothills.  Later, my Mom bought a small farm on the outskirts of Sacramento, where we raised rabbits and chickens for food, and had a mixed vegetable and fruit garden year round.  Growing up, eating locally wasn’t a way of life or a political statement, it simply meant harvesting the days eggs and vegetables, maybe skinning a rabbit to roast, and perhaps pulling some apples or winter squash stored in the shed.

Being a farmer was definitely not culturally accepted where I lived.  As a child I didn’t appreciate it much – especially when asked to explain the roasted rabbit leg in my lunch bag during elementary school.  A rabbit leg was definitely a 4^th grade conversation stopper.  And my sister and I would get heckled, even pelted with stones, by passers-by when we would forget to change out of our knee-high mud boots before going to the local store.

We sold our eggs door to door around the neighborhood, to the Sacramento Natural Foods Coop, and later to a new crop of gourmet markets that were opening up in the early 1980’s. I remember clearly one spring when one of these markets asked if we could harvest our vegetables smaller. Smaller, we asked? Yes, they said, the new trend was for baby vegetables. We happily obliged. It wasn’t until much later that I learned this trend was in no small part the result of Alice Waters’ personal taste for Chez Panisse.

The impact of Waters’ choices has been discussed and dissected at great length in various articles and books. But I personally think that it is simply that she has kept her vision true and steady for so many years that her impact is so great. Restaurants come and go in America, even the great ones. A great 40-year old restaurant is a rare thing, indeed. And to have a venerated restaurant that forged long-standing relationships with farmers, ranchers and foragers directly has done more than a little to raise the respect they receive. Little by little. Year by year.

After university I specialized in tropical biology and worked and lived for about ten years in some of the most remote places on the globe, and I savored the local foods wherever I went.  In Brazil I feasted on flank steak from a cow butchered fresh that morning.  In Hawaii I spent the day digging a hole and slow roasting stuffed wild boar.  In Cameroon I learned to appreciate wild porcupine stew.  I lived with people naturally in their small villages while studying the local ecology, and ate what they ate.

It was the Cameroonian Baka and the forest they live in that truly changed my appreciation for food.  One of the world’s oldest surviving hunter-gatherer peoples, the Baka became my friends and guides in the African forest for nearly two years.  For my Masters research, I spent thousands of hours looking through binoculars and scopes observing natural animal feeding behavior.

One day, my Baka guide Michelle came across some edible wild fruit, and started gorging himself on them.  I ate a few – deep red, juicy like an orange, and flavored like a vitamin-C bomb in your mouth – delicious.  I then asked if we shouldn’t bring some back for the rest of the camp.  He laughed, and said “No, if they are here today they are everywhere tomorrow.  Enjoy them like the birds you’ve been watching.  Mangez comme les oiseaux. Eat like the birds.” Eat what is in season. Now. There is no reason to wait, he was saying.

Many years later, my life has come full circle.  Now I can offer rabbit legs for lunch at a popular café without scorn.  My farming childhood has become culturally accepted and even admired – a radical departure from my youth.

The fact that a festival like Slow Food Nation could have been created is due in large part to those various social / cultural forces I have lived with all my life – only now they are starting to become integrated from the edge to the mainstream.

And I know that this integration, which I appreciate so dearly, is possible in no small part to that restaurant born in the same month as me back in 1971 on a sleepy street in Berkeley.  (Thanks Alice).

In his weekly address Saturday, President Obama announced that he had put together a “Food Safety Working Group,” whose focus will include fostering communication between federal agencies in order to make sure food safety policies are being enforced, starting with “closing loopholes” that have up to now allowed sick downer cows to make their way into the food system.  The goal, he said, is to ensure that the food we eat — including Sasha’s peanut butter sandwiches — are safe from contamination.

But while the Peanut Corporation of America recall is perhaps one of the largest and most dramatic recalls in our country’s history, the story is not a new one: its part of the continuing saga of food safety SNAFUs in the U.S. I would argue result from the use of band-aids in the food system instead of addressing the root causes of contamination.

According to the New York Times article covering the President’s address on Saturday, around 76 million people take ill after eating contaminated food annually in the U.S., while hundreds of thousands are hospitalized and about 5,000 die.  That is 1/4th of our entire population off work, in bed, recovering from a contaminated meal.

The discussion of MRSA seems an apt segue.  Today, Nicholas Kristof penned his second column this week in the New York Times focusing on the upswing in MRSA in humans, which seems to be stemming from the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in agribusiness pig feed. MRSA is an infection caused by a “superbug,” a bacteria that has developed a resistance to all the drugs we have tried to throw at it.  Pigs seem to be incubating MRSA: research from the University of Minnesota suggests that 25 percent to 39 percent of American hogs carry the bug. (Naomi Starkman reported on the correlation between MRSA and pigs on Civil Eats in January) And as Kristof wrote in his first column on pathogens at factory farms Wednesday, it was hardly a coincidence that around fifty of the inhabitants of a small Indiana town (population 500) near large pig operation facilities were coming down with MRSA — an infection that kills 18,000 annually, more people than die in the U.S. from AIDS.

Unfortunately, beyond being given growth hormones, livestock are kept alive in crowded and unsanitary conditions by being preemptively given a number of drugs in their feed. Without the drugs, the animals would probably die before they made it to your plate.  Therefore, the drugs are effectively shielding a larger problem in the food system: factory farms are too big to produce adequate, safe food.

To understand the sheer amount of drugged animals there are in this country, Kristof’s article states that in North Carolina alone, more antibiotics were given to animals than were administered to every person in the United States in that same period. The bottom line is that overexposure to antibiotics means antibiotic resistance — and Kristof points out that The Infectious Diseases Society of America has declared this a “public health crisis.” It has been proven that land fertilized with the manure of drugged animals has resulted in concentrations of antibiotics in vegetables, so is it so hard to imagine the myriad ways eating the antibiotic-doused livestock could be directly affecting our health over time?

Kristof’s column challenges the new administration to take these issues seriously:

“So Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack, will you line up to curb the use of antibiotics in raising American livestock? That is evidence of an industrial farming system that is broken: for the sake of faster-growing hogs, we’re empowering microbes that endanger our food supply and threaten our lives.”

For food policy advocates, the Food Safety Working Group is cause for a huge sigh of relief.  It appears that food safety was the way to get the public’s attention on the issues facing our food system all along, as its plays right into our inherent ability to respond to fear. Everywhere you look these days the talk is e. coli, salmonella and now MRSA contamination via pigs.  As a result, people are reading labels and questioning the food supply more than ever before.

But the battle for Obama, Vilsack and the Food Safety Working Group will be hard-fought.  Already, the pork lobby is holed up in meeting rooms trying to spin Kristof’s beast of a story.  The good news is that food advocates are not backing down on the pathogens-as-harbinger-of-a-broken-food-system story. U.S. Congresswoman from New York Louise Slaughter plans to reintroduce a bill in the House to ban nontherapeutic use of antibiotics this week.  And on Monday, HBO will air “Death on a Factory Farm,” a documentary exposing the realities of the way animals are treated in massive confinement operations, beamed straight into American living rooms.  Another documentary, Food, Inc., will debut in June — and while it successfully breaks down the problems our food system faces on the whole, food safety is a huge part of that discussion.  A factory producing so-called fixes like ammonia-laced meat filler is shown as the processors’ answer to contaminant-free meat. Another portion of the film features a mother seeking to change food safety laws beginning after the death of her two-year-old son from an e. coli infection following the ingestion of a hamburger at a fast food restaurant.

It is high time we change a system that is not working — the evidence keeps mounting that tweaking the system as it stands will never be enough to ensure eaters are safe; we must fundamentally alter how we bring food to our plate.  As David Murphy wrote on Civil Eats last week, “food safety cannot be cloned, genetically modified, implanted with an electronic chip, medicated or irradiated into being.”  There is no easy answer, but I hope President Obama will stay true to his commitment to bring the heads of federal agencies together, and honestly work to strengthen food safety in America.  We must reconsider — and rethink — the model of farming that has enabled us to produce the cheap food that is making us sick.  The American public is ready, willing, and asking for this change.

Photo: Gretchen Rolland