In case you think pickling is just another excuse to put Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein in goofy wigs, think again. Along with products like jam, flour, and beef jerky, pickles count as “value-added” foods, and they’re at the core of what it will take for the local food movement to mature beyond an easily parodied trend.

You see, without these higher-value, less perishable products, farmers and ranchers working at a small, sustainable scale and selling their products locally can rarely make a real living. In addition to the home food preservation trend, small businesses are also working to fill the gaps that exist between heavily processed, industrial foods and local produce—and the result is often minimally processed “value-added products.” Such products allow farmers to extend their season, providing a way for locavore consumers to, say, eat peaches in February, and—perhaps more important—providing a product for farmers to sell long after peach season is gone.

Not that it’s easy to expand a farm operation in that way. It takes seed funding, market testing, and food safety chops to grow your business. That’s where—believe it or not—our government is trying to help.

On Friday, as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food effort, USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan announced the largest allotment of grants for value-added producers in recent history: nearly 300 grants across 44 states and Puerto Rico—to the tune of $44 million.

The Value Added Producer Grant Program has been around since 2000, and has seen increased funding with each successive farm bill since.

Merrigan announced the grants at The Many Faces of Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food, a one-day conference hosted at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. The event focused on “successful models, resources, strategies and opportunities for supporting, cultivating and growing local/regional food systems in the Midwest.”

Merrigan, whom I spoke with after the event, sees the grants as a critical piece of the concrete good USDA can do to make the local food movement stick.

“These grants are just some of the tools in USDA’s tool kits to help farmers. More value-added products increase their bottom lines,” she told me. “Like the kid who has a pumpkin operation, who grows up and develops a pumpkin puree product so there’s year-round business.”

The grants also went toward projects that educate value-added producers and provide them with infrastructure help, like Vermont Food Venture Center, a shared-use kitchen incubator for value-added and specialty food producers in Hardwick, Vt. Another example is the Food Innovation Center, where experts in the field conduct studies related to product development, packaging, shelf life, consumer acceptance, economic feasibility, and product marketing.

Jim Slama of Chicago-based Family Farmed attended Friday’s conference and has worked with just such USDA grants to train producers to enter the wholesale market, run a food distribution hub, and bridge the food safety gap for small producers who have often shouldered unfortunate burdens when it comes to the wholesale environment with the On-Farm Food Safety Project. He sees some of these less sexy elements of the local food to be just as crucial as seasonal eating and farmers markets.

“The local food movement really took off with most folks selling direct through farmers markets and CSAs, and that’s great,” says Slama, “and yet 97 percent of the food consumed in America goes through the wholesale markets. So if we’re really going to create new markets for family farmers and cut food miles, we have to figure out how to get into these markets.”

Photos: Top, psrobin. Bottom, USDA Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan at the Fifth Generation Farms Fresh Market–a grant recipient–in Lake City, Fla. by Ellen Boukari/USDA.

Originally published on Grist

The 2008 Farm Bill included reforms to protect small and medium-sized farmers who raise cattle, hogs, and chickens from unfair treatment at the hands of meatpackers and poultry companies. In 2010, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyard Administration proposed rules (known as the GIPSA Rule, after the agency) to protect poultry and hog farmers from unfair contract terms–like retaliating against poultry and hog growers who speak out about abuses–and ensured that cattle and hog producers could get a fair price from meatpackers for their livestock.

Nearly three years later, the fair livestock rules have been shredded and there is plenty of blame and shame to go around. The Obama administration failed to show leadership on this issue and reneged on President Obama’s campaign pledge to “fight to ensure family and independent farmers have fair access to markets, control over their production decisions, and transparency in prices.”

Agriculture Secretary Vilsack caved to meatpacker money and power by issuing significantly watered down rules–after nearly 18 months of foot dragging to issue the final rules at all. USDA’s final proposal indefinitely postponed any efforts to protect independent cattle and hog farmers and issued a much weaker set of protections for contract chicken and hog farmers. Many Democratic Senators on the Agriculture Committee–including Chairman Debbie Stabenow from Michigan–stood on the sidelines and refused to stand up for livestock producers in their states.

But the final attack came from the duplicitous House Republicans who included sneaky language in the agriculture appropriations bill that prevents USDA from finalizing or developing any rules on livestock markets and only allows the pending rules to address a few of the crucial reforms to poultry contracts. This essentially means that House Republicans, who claim to believe in a “free-market,” have empowered the meat industry to rig a competitive market through unfair and anti-competitive practices that are widespread in the livestock industry. While they mouth support for family values, small businesses, and the family farmer, their failure to allow the fair livestock rules to be implemented is two-faced and un-American. The policies they have supported by doing so will drive even more small and midsized independent producers out of business and increase the monopoly power of the meatpackers.

By prohibiting USDA from finalizing the fair livestock rules, House Republicans didn’t just vote against a new regulation that would have prohibited commonplace abuses in the meat industry. They voted against the family livestock producer by signing off on:
• Unfair and deceptive practices
• Abusive contracts
• Retaliation against farmers who speak out about abuses
• Sweetheart deals for factory farms that receive higher prices for livestock than independent farmers
• Secrecy so diabolical that it forbids the USDA from providing farmers with sample contracts that have fair terms and pricing.

Farmer and consumer advocates will not give up the battle to prevent the rapacious meat industry from destroying family farms and the future for a sustainable food system. The next farm bill must ensure that farmers are paid fairly and prevent meatpacking and food processing companies from running roughshod over farmers and consumers. It’s time for those who talk about the market with reverence, but who support non-competitive practices, to stop being hypocrites. Our coalition is hopping mad and don’t think for a minute we are going to let Big Meat and complicit politicians get away with this outrage.

Most reporters, pressed for time and resources, tend to simplify complex stories and this was no exception. In one camp, so the stories went, are nutrition advocates who want healthier school meals, while Republicans are saying the feds shouldn’t be making such decisions. Here is one example of this framing of the story:

Conservatives in Congress say the federal government shouldn’t be telling children what to eat. They say requirements proposed by the President went too far, costing budget strapped schools too much. Local schools are caught in the middle.

Meanwhile, a few other reports did a better job of explaining the massive industry lobbying at play. (See, for example, Mother Jones’ Tom Philpott and Ed Bruske aka The Slow Cook, a hero in school food reporting.)

And while it was easy to compare this current craziness to the Reagan-era infamous “ketchup-is-a-vegetable” school lunch proposal (which did not pass), a bit more history, common sense, and political context is needed.

History: As much as the GOP would like to hang this on Obama, the effort to improve the quality of school meals dates back decades. In the mid 1990′s a huge battle was finally won to bring school nutrition in line with federal government’s own dietary advice. Since that time, science evolved and the standards needed updating. We also had the increasing problem of school vending loaded with soft drinks and candy. Then in 2004, (yes, during Bush) Congress authorized USDA to improve nutrition standards for school food. Finally at the request of USDA, the Institute of Medicine released a report in 2009 with very specific recommendations for USDA to follow–based on science.  So this process has been going on long before the current budget crisis and before Obama could get blamed for everything since the dawn of time.

Common sense: If you stop and think about it, shouldn’t all food assistance programs (i.e., paid for with taxpayer dollars), at the very least, comply with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which is supposed to be based on the latest nutrition science? Recall the feds’ new MyPlate, released to much fanfare earlier this year, which recommends half the meal be comprised of fresh fruits and vegetables, not tater tots and pizza.

Politics: As I said, a few reports did mention the lobbying by, for example, the American Frozen Food Institute. (Yes, there’s a trade group for frozen pizza, fries, and other school food abominations; and surprise, they are thrilled with this outcome.) But almost everyone missed the industry front group,”The Coalition for Sustainable Meal Programs.” (I could not make that one up.) And once again, we need more context.

This issue isn’t just that the processed food industry is upset with proposed improvements to school meals, it’s how they are flexing their political muscle to get their way. The critical (and most under-reported) part of this story is how Congress has hijacked the USDA regulatory process to do the food industry’s bidding.

Congress is putting language to undercut the USDA rules into its agriculture appropriations bill, a sneaky move used when you want something to pass outside of the usual legislative (and in this case regulatory) process.

You know things are bad politically when even USDA (seeming a tad shell-shocked) defended its proposed rules, telling the Washington Post that keeping pizza in schools won’t save any money, as the GOP claimed.

Let’s recap: Congress authorized USDA to improve the nutritional quality of school meals seven years ago. USDA commissioned a report from the IOM to help the agency do exactly that, based on the best available science. USDA subsequently proposed regulations, has taken public comment, and should then come out with final regulations. Civics 101 folks: Congress makes the laws and the executive branch carries them out. Agencies such as USDA are the experts, not Congress. That is why the legislature delegates authority to the agency in charge. But here, the food industry didn’t get what it wanted through the normal channels, so it went to Congress, which usurped the entire process. I’d love to see reporters asking: how the hell did that happen?

And let’s not forget this is supposed to be about our nation’s kids. Which raises one more interesting question: Where exactly is Michelle Obama and her Let’s Move campaign now? The First Lady has been a champion for improving school meals but of course she has no real power. The food industry has plenty. And while politicians curry favor with lobbyists, schoolchildren will pay the ultimate price, with their health.

Originally published on Appetite For Profit

In case you missed the announcement, this week is National Farmers Market Week. No matter. If you shop regularly at one of the more than 7,000 markets across the country, every week is farmers market week. That’s true in my neighborhood, where FreshFarm Markets started the first producer-only farmers market in Washington, D.C., 14 years ago.

When I relocated to D.C. from New York, I had no idea I was moving to a food desert. Although Dupont Circle wasn’t poor by any means, we had limited access to healthy, fresh food. There was one small supermarket we called the “Soviet” Safeway because there were usually long lines and nothing on the shelves. The produce there was pitiful: The tomatoes, picked green and reddened with ethylene gas, could break your teeth.

FreshFarm came to the rescue in 1997 with 15 small, family farms hawking fruit, vegetables and flowers on Sundays from early July to mid-November. That first season attracted 21,000 customers. Today, the market boasts 42 stands selling fruit, vegetables, meat, cheese, eggs, seafood, baked goods, flowers and plants every Sunday all year round. Last year it drew some 162,000 shoppers.

But that’s not all. Over the last decade, FreshFarm, a nonprofit spun off from American Farmland Trust in 2002, set up 10 other one-day-a-week markets in the region, which collectively attracted more than 350,000 customers last year.

These markets have not only been a boon for area residents hungry for tasty, locally produced food, they provide a lifeline for regional farmers–and create jobs in rural areas. Some 150 family farms in Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia now sell their goods at one or more of the FreshFarm Markets, and there are now some 40 other farmers markets run by other organizations within 10 miles of Dupont Circle.

Why aren’t these farmers selling their bounty to grocery store chains? “Grocery stores are not set up to buy from small local farmers, they’re worried about adequate supply, and they won’t pay a fair price,” said Bernadine “Bernie” Prince, cofounder of FreshFarm Markets. “Without local farmers markets, local farmers were not making it financially.”

With farmers markets, on the other hand, local family farms are not only making it, they are expanding to meet growing demand.

David Hochheimer and his wife, Emily Zaas, own the 65-acre Black Rock Orchard in Lineboro, Maryland, on the Pennsylvania border. They have been selling mostly tree fruit–apples, pears, peaches, plums and cherries–as well as seasonal vegetables and greenhouse crops at the Dupont Circle market since it began. They also have stands at six other markets in the area.

“Roughly 95 to 100 percent of my revenue comes from farmers markets,” said Hochheimer, who inherited the farm from his father, a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University, who bought it in 1970. “If we didn’t have them, we would be out of business. We would have to do something else.”

Over the years, Hochheimer and Zaas built two greenhouses, enabling them to sell more produce in the spring, and in June they bought a 26-acre farm nearby, which will allow them to increase production.

Another Dupont Circle founding farmer, Mark Toigo, owns the 450-acre Toigo Orchards in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, northwest of Gettysburg. He sells greenhouse vegetables and apples, peaches, pears and other tree fruit at 18 farmers markets in the D.C. area, which account for 75 percent of his sales. He employs 12 to 60 workers, depending on the time of the year. Last week, 25 people were handling the chores.

“I’ve been able to hire more people over the years directly due to access to farmers markets,” he said. “We now produce, transport and market, and we had to buy trucks, tractors and material handling equipment, and hire retail sales folks.”

Toigo grew up in the D.C. area. His father, an electronics engineer, bought a farm, eventually decided to switch careers, and moved the family out of the city. After college, Toigo, who also studied engineering, couldn’t find a job during the early 1980s recession, so he went to work with his dad. After selling directly to restaurants, they started selling at farmers markets, which have been their bread and butter ever since. “If it weren’t for farmers markets, there is no way our farm would have been multigenerational,” he said. “It would have ended. They are that important to us.”

FreshFarm Markets’ growth mirrors the explosion of farmers markets nationwide. Since the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched National Farmers Market Week in 2000, the number of farmers markets has jumped 150 percent, from 2,863 to 7,175. (To find a farmers market near you, go to the USDA’s Farmers Market Searchdatabase.) Currently more than 100,000 farms sell food directly to local consumers, and in 2007, the last year the USDA checked, direct agricultural product sales grossed $1.2 billion.

This dramatic increase in farmers markets has happened with relatively little support from the federal government. Last year, for example, most of the $13.725 billion Congress allocated in commodity, crop insurance, and supplemental disaster assistance payments went to large industrial farms, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The amount that went to support small family farms? According to USDA data, less than $100 million.

Granted, that money does help. Eli Cook, the owner of Spring Valley Farm and Orchard outside of Romney, West Virginia, was able to buy a 52-acre farm with the help of a low-interest USDA loan for young farmers. He was only 22, and had just graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in agricultural business, but he had been selling vegetables at farmers markets since he was 12. He’s now 31, and over the last nine years he purchased adjoining land to expand his spread to 230 acres, on which he grows tomatoes, peaches, apples, strawberries, cantaloupe, potatoes, broccoli and other produce. Another USDA loan covered 85 percent of the cost of erecting an 8-foot high fence to keep deer out.

Cook currently employs five full-time farm hands, 20 seasonal workers for harvesting, and more than 40 part-time high school and college students who sell his produce at six farmers markets, including the FreshFarm Market at Dupont Circle, and a roadside stand at his farm. About 85 percent of his revenue comes from farmers markets. “Farmers markets is where it started and where it’s at right now,” he said. “Farmers markets can eat up everything that we can grow.”

Likewise, Zachariah Lester and his wife, Georgia O’Neal, were able to buy 50 acres of farmland in Unionville, Virginia, two years ago with the help of a low-interest USDA loan. Previously, they had been leasing land. They also got a USDA loan to restore a barn, buy tractors and tillage equipment, and install passive solar greenhouse-like structures, called high tunnels, so they could grow greens, roots and tomatoes all year long.

“We needed USDA help,” said Lester, whose Tree and Leaf Farm is located about 80 miles south of Washington. He and his wife also need farmers markets. Dupont Circle and a market in Falls Church, Virginia, “are vital to our operation,” he said. “About 85 percent of our sales are at both markets. We would not survive without them. We have extremely dedicated customers.”

Jeffrey O’Hara, an agricultural economist at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), acknowledges the importance of USDA loan programs to small family farms and is enthusiastic about the agency’s “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” program promoting local farming, but he says the federal government should be doing a lot more to support local farmers–especially with unemployment running so high. “If the government diverted just a small amount of the massive subsidies it lavishes on industrial agriculture to support farmers markets and small local farmers,” he said, “it would not only improve American diets, it would generate tens of thousands of new jobs.”

Last summer, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack asked Congress to set a goal in the 2012 Farm Bill of helping at least 100,000 Americans to become farmers by, among other things, providing entrepreneurial training and support for farmers markets. Just last week, UCS released a report by O’Hara that takes up Vilsack’s challenge and argues that supporting local and regional food system expansion is central to meeting that goal.

O’Hara’s report, “Market Forces: Creating Jobs through Public Investment in Local and Regional Food Systems,” identifies a number of ways the federal government could encourage new farmers and the growth of farmers markets in the upcoming Farm Bill.

First, Congress should support the development of farmers markets and farm-to-school programs, which can create permanent jobs. For example, O’Hara calculated that the Farmers Market Promotion Program, if reauthorized, could generate as many as 13,500 jobs nationally over a five-year period by providing modest funding for 100 to 500 farmers markets annually.

Second, Congress should level the playing field for small family farms in rural areas by supporting investment in infrastructure, such as meat-processing or dairy-bottling facilities, which would help them produce and market their products to consumers more efficiently. Those investments would foster competition, provide more choices for consumers, and create jobs in rural areas that have been hit hard by the recession.

Finally, federal and state governments should allow farmers markets to accept food nutrition subsidies to enable low-income Americans to purchase fresh fruits and vegetables. Currently, only about 12 percent of the farmers markets across the country have the capability of accepting Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits on site.

“The farmers supplying these local markets are innovative entrepreneurs, and we should nurture them,” said O’Hara. “Supporting them should be a national priority.”

Originally published on Huffington Post

Poor Uncle Sam’s got a lot on his plate these days: a curdled economy, an overcooked climate, a soured populace. It’s enough to give a national icon a capital case of indigestion. Anti-government sentiment is running so high that half the country seems ready to swap his stars and stripes for tar and feathers.

Sure, Uncle Sam’s always been kind of a drag, with his stern face and wagging finger. But to “nanny-state” haters, he’s a Beltway busybody in drag, democracy’s Mrs. Doubtfire, a Maryland Mary Poppins. If you believe that government is always the problem, never the solution, then you have no use for, say, more stringent food safety regulations, or Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign to combat obesity.

But the new exhibit “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government’s Effect on the American Diet” at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. offers an intriguing display of documents, posters, photos and other artifacts dating from the Revolutionary War to the late 1900s which serve to remind us that our government has long played a crucial role in determining how safe, nutritious and affordable our food supply is.

So, after all this government-mandated meddling with our meals, do we eat better now than we did 100 years ago? Curator Alice Kamps didn’t set out to provide a definitive answer to that question. Her intent was simply to “add to the conversation” that we’re currently having about how Americans eat.

Kamps gives us plenty of fodder for discussion, if not heated debate; the exhibit, which runs until January 3, 2012, treads gingerly around hot-button topics like crop subsidies and factory farming. And it sidesteps the food stamp land mine entirely in an era when the very word “entitlements” is enough to make some folks’ heads explode.

That’s a shame, because there’s a little-known aspect to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), aka food stamps, that encourages self-sufficiency and complements the kitchen garden revival that gets a shout-out in this exhibit, thanks to Michelle Obama and White House chef Sam Kass.

The 1973 Farm Bill included an amendment to the Food Stamp Act that enabled food stamp recipients to use their stamps to buy seeds or vegetable plants. As any gardener knows, a few dollars worth of seeds can yield a return of $50 or even $100 worth of food. Senator James Allen of Alabama, who proposed the amendment, noted that “the recipients of food stamps would thus be able to use their own initiative to produce fruits and vegetables needed to provide variety and nutritional value for their diets.”

The program continues to this day, but remains largely unknown, so few food stamp recipients avail themselves of this chance to literally grow their benefits at no extra cost to Uncle Sam.

Missed opportunities aside, “What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” does a fine job of documenting just how consistent our issues with our food chain have stayed even as the way we eat has changed radically over the past century. Consider the following nugget of dietary wisdom from the first federally funded nutrition research, launched in the 1890s. Wilbur Olin Atwater, special agent in charge of nutrition investigations in the Office of Experiment Stations, concluded:

“The evils of overeating may not be felt at once, but sooner or later they are sure to appear–perhaps in an excessive amount of fatty tissue, perhaps in general debility, perhaps in actual disease.”

We knew it then, we know it now. And yet, we eat more than ever, egged on by a schizophrenic USDA whose dual missions–encouraging healthier eating habits and promoting the interests of the food industry–are in eternal conflict.

Check out the USDA’s 1945 Food Group Poster (a precursor to the Food Pyramid, which debuted in 1992). A pie chart lays out “The Basic 7″ food groups we should eat from each day for optimal health. Below it lies the message, “In addition to the basic 7, eat any other foods you want.”

No wonder Uncle Sam looks so pained; he’s been getting his arm twisted by lobbyists for nearly 100 years. Take the case of the seed giveaway program Congress created in 1839. The original purpose of the program was to expand the range of foods our farmers grew and encourage them to test rare plant varieties. By 1897, the USDA was distributing 1.1 billion free seed packets to farmers, many of them more common vegetable and flower varieties.

The program was wildly popular with farmers, but a thorn in the side of the growing commercial seed industry. So, in 1929, after intense lobbying from the American Seed Trade Association, Congress scrapped the seed giveaway.

The exhibit does highlight Uncle Sam’s more laudable legacies, such as the passage in 1906 of the Pure Food and Drugs Act and Meat Inspection Act, and the establishment of the School Lunch Program in 1946, which has since become “one of the most popular social welfare programs in our nation’s history,” according to the exhibit catalog. Geez, if that’s how we fund our most popular programs, I’d hate to see what kind of resources we allocate to the ones we like least.

“What’s Cooking, Uncle Sam?” strikes a nice balance between the wonky, somber food policy and safety segments and more lighthearted elements such as White House menus featuring favorite presidential recipes and those classic wartime propaganda posters encouraging us to can, garden and conserve. Other visual treats include the beautiful botanical illustrations commissioned by the USDA in the late 1800s to document the discoveries of the plant hunters we dispatched to far-off lands in pursuit of new fruit and vegetable varieties.

One of our more notable agricultural explorers, the intrepid, fur-hatted Frank N. Meyer, introduced us to some 2,500 new plants, including the lemon that bears his name. Meyer walked hundreds of miles through China at the turn of the century in his quest to “skim the earth in search of things good for man.”

Now, we outsource the task of finding horticultural breakthroughs to corporations whose motto could be “to scorch the earth in search of things bad for man.” Uncle Sam doesn’t commission botanical illustrations or promote rare seeds anymore, either; for that, I have to rely on my friends at the Hudson Valley Seed Library. Kicky propaganda posters? Back to the private sector–see Joe Seppi’s brilliant Victory Garden of Tomorrow posters on Etsy.

Uncle Sam hasn’t got the time or the budget for such extracurricular activities these days. He’s got his hands full just trying to maintain our food chain’s mediocre status quo. As Mark Bittman noted, Republicans are on a tear to gut vital food safety and nutrition programs in the name of deficit reduction. Nevermind that the programs in question actually save us billions of dollars in health care costs in the long run. What’s cooking, Uncle Sam? Off the record, he’d probably tell you that what’s cooking is our goose.

Originally published by AlterNet

In my recent critique of the new USDA dietary guidelines, I wrote that we’ll never see a real food version of MyPlate as long as the food industry holds sway over the guidelines and USDA continues to promote industrial foods.

While this is true, there’s no reason we can’t create our own “Real Food” version of MyPlate to promote what we think is healthy and what’s not. Admittedly, it’s difficult to convey a lot of information in a single graphic, but, in my opinion as a certified nutrition educator, MyPlate promotes foods that are unhealthy. There are structural problems with MyPlate as well—dairy should be included in the protein category and the glass next to the plate should be water.

Allowing industrial food corporations to influence the dietary guidelines—from dairy and meat to apple juice and corn flakes—makes it clear that the health of the American people is not the USDA’s top priority.

My “Real Food” approach to MyPlate clearly conveys what I think should be included and what should not be, and has no agenda other than presenting the healthiest real food diet for all Americans. The underpinnings of a real food diet is focused on plant-based, whole foods that are organic and sourced local, when possible.

Bottom Line: Simply giving these guidelines isn’t going to change the fact that too many Americans lack access to real foods. Change doesn’t appear to be happening from the top down anytime soon. In the meantime, by providing clear and accurate guidelines based on “Real Food,” I hope Americans can see what a “healthy” diet really looks like and start demanding access to these foods.

The following is an infographic of my “Real Food” Guide to MyPlate by Voltier Creative:

The European Union (EU) made a substantial step toward establishing a binding food labeling policy for its member states. According to an agreement reached by negotiators yesterday, all food products in the EU will be required within five years to display their energy, salt, sugar, protein, carbohydrate, fat, and saturated fat content. Once finalized, the food label policy would conclude a debate over the redesign of the European food label that started in 2008.

In the U.S., a comparable debate is about to take place. The Department of Agriculture recently released the “MyPlate” image as a replacement of the decades old food pyramid and the Food and Drug Administration is currently considering a redesign of the Nutritional Facts label, which lists values for calories, fats, sugars and other nutrients. While Americans negotiate which label might most effectively communicate nutritional values to consumers, it is worth looking to the experience of the EU.

Initially, lawmakers in Europe wanted to require a mandatory front-of-package labels and discussed requiring food companies to list Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) of calories, sugars, fat, saturates, and salt in a serving of food. The deal reached Wednesday does not require that labels be on the front of packages or that they include the GDA figures.

One nutrition label design that proved particularly popular among European consumers (and controversial among industry groups and law makers) was the “traffic light label” that uses the colors red, yellow, and green to indicate whether a food product contains high, medium or a low amounts of fats, saturated fats, sugar, and salt.

“It is absolutely essential that it is simple, that you don’t need to sit down and start trying to work out what that percentage means,“ Dr. Vivienne Nathanson, head of science and ethics at the British Medical Association, told the BBC in 2010. “And the traffic lights system is something you can even see from a distance, so you can start to hone in on the foods that are predominantly green or green and amber and just cut down on the foods that are marked red.“

The traffic light label is already used on a voluntarily basis by a number of British food chains and manufacturers. It is supposed to help consumers compare products and make choices quickly when buying food.

In the European relabeling debate last year, the traffic light label received widespread support from the public and consumer protection groups. In one poll, 69 percent of the Germans favored the traffic light label. Also, separate studies of an Australian group of researchers and the UK consumer’s association found that the traffic light system was the most effective in assisting consumers to identify healthier foods.

Despite its popular support, EU lawmakers chose not to go with the traffic light label, deciding instead on the optional inclusion of a label that looks similar to the one recently proposed by the U.S. by the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute.

In Europe, the food industry groups criticized the traffic light label, saying it patronized consumers and that consumers who strictly adhered to the green lights would not be able to eat a healthy diet.  The non-profit research and campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory estimated that the Confederation of the Food and Drink Industries and its companies spent $1.45 trillion in order to assure the traffic light label was not chosen by lawmakers.

In June 2010, the politicians of the European parliament decided against mandating the traffic light label. The European Parliament’s chief negotiator on food labeling, Renate Sommer , said that the traffic light labeling was rejected because it over simplifies food choices.

“Coke Light is made with sweeteners instead of sugar, it would get a green light for sugar because it contains none, while natural fruit juice with no added sugar would get a red light because of its natural sugar content,” said Sommer. Also, one would create an incentive for the producers to substitute sugar with starch or sweeteners and salt with sodium glutamines in order to get more green lights.

In the U.S., there is a nation-wide design initiative to redesign the nutrition label that’s independent of the government and the food industry. Rethink the Food Label, a design challenge hosted by UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s News21 and Good magazine online is asking the public, graphic designers, and nutritionists to picture a revamped nutrition facts label.

Contributors are asked to incorporate the nutrition label’s existing break down of fats, sugar, vitamins, calorie count, and percent daily values; or completely re-imagine the label to include geography, food quality, food justice, added sugars or carbon footprint. The top designs will be judged by a panel of food thinkers and graphic designers that includes Michael Pollan, Robert Lustig, Andrew Vande Moere, and Laura Brunow Miner.

Top image via FSA; bottom image via GMA.

The USDA finally did away with the much-maligned Food Pyramid and replaced it with MyPlate. Many in the food world are calling it progress. It’s certainly a clearer and more concise image and deserves some credit for the fact that half of the plate is comprised of fruit and vegetables.

“This is a step in the right direction,” Marion Nestle wrote in an email. “It’s the best they could come up with and some education needs to go with it, as always.”

In my view though, when you look a little deeper, you see that beyond the clearer image not much has really changed.

The five food categories indicated in the image are: Fruits, Vegetables, Protein, Grains, and Dairy. At first glance the MyPlate image appears to eliminate many problematic sugary, processed foods, but when you actually click on the categories a host of unhealthy foods are revealed.

For example, the fruit category includes fruit juice which should be considered a “sugary drink” something the recommendations say to drink less of. There are 15 grams of sugar in one small four-ounce juice box of Mott’s 100 percent apple juice and an eight-ounce glass of Tropicana Orange juice has 22 grams of sugar—depending on how many ounces consumed, these fruit juices approach or even exceed the amount of sugar found in sodas.

There’s no doubt that fruit juice is a step up from soda but in a country where 26 million people have diabetes and many other people exhibit signs of insulin resistance (the precursor to diabetes) liquid sugar in any form is detrimental. This is why the fruit category should be strictly whole fruit—whole fruit contains fiber to help balance out the sugar content and thus has a lower glycemic load. Whole, fresh fruits also contain many vital vitamins, nutrients, and minerals not found in the processed juice version.

But many Americans don’t have enough access to fresh fruit—and the emphasis on drinking fruit juice appeals to food corporations who profit on fruit juices and other processed fruit products. Indeed, on the Web sites for Mott’s and Tropicana, you find out that your apple and orange juice provide the required fruit recommendations by the USDA.

When you click on the dairy category you find that chocolate and strawberry flavored milks are included—more examples of “sugary drinks” inexplicably deemed acceptable by the USDA.  Flavored milks, regularly served in school lunch cafeterias across the country and subject to much debate, contain loads of sugar. A serving of strawberry milk contains 27 grams of sugar, equal to the amount of sugar in eight ounces of Coca-Cola.

Meanwhile, the grains group remains amorphous. The guidelines do say to keep half of the grains you consume whole, but that’s not indicated in the graphic. Again, this group is far too inclusive and leads the consumer to believe that many highly refined ready-to-eat breakfast cereals, white buns, breads, and rolls are part of a healthy diet. Given these vague guidelines one could eat Lucky Charms for breakfast, a Subway sandwich on a white bread roll for lunch, and a few slices of Domino’s pizza for dinner and consider these processed grain-filled options as part of the healthy MyPlate meal.

Much on the MyPlate Web site is based on outdated science. The low-fat and fat-free dairy recommendations are based on the premise that saturated fats are harmful (see my article on fats for more on this) and that Americans should cut down on these calories—but the truth is Americans are not getting heavier due to the fat in dairy products but rather due to the overconsumption of sugars and refined carbohydrates.

As is illustrated in this infographic, while obesity rates have soared since the 1970s the amount of calories consumed in the form of dairy, meat, and nuts has remained mostly stable. On the other hand, the amount of calories consumed in added sugars, added fats (the type of fats are not indicated in this graphic but I would bet they are in the form of highly processed vegetable oils and trans-fats) and grains has also soared. This suggests that the fats found in real foods like dairy are not the cause of our nation’s massive weight gain.

The underlying issue is quality of food not just quantity. But this won’t be addressed as long as industrial food corporations hold sway over the dietary guidelines. Discussing quality gets to the root problem of access to healthy, whole foods in this country. Quite simply, the USDA cannot insist that people eat only high quality foods while many don’t have access to them. Herein lies a conflict of interest for the USDA since it has the dual role of promoting the business of industrial food production and simultaneously advising Americans on healthy eating.

Indeed, the MyPlate recommendation to, “Enjoy your food but eat less” is hardly helpful when the goal of the industrial food industry is to encourage Americans to eat more. Industrial food corporations are great at filling bellies with highly caloric yet nutritionally void food—and sugar and refined carbohydrates are the main culprits. If the USDA truly wanted to endorse healthier eating, it would focus on promoting nutrient-dense foods. Switching to a nutrient-dense diet goes a long way in addressing portion control—it’s difficult to overeat a real food diet.

The ideal image would be more exclusive–that is to say, many foods now endorsed by the USDA as part of MyPlate would be eliminated. The fruit group would be strictly fruit, the vegetable group strictly vegetables. The protein group would include dairy (the fact that dairy is a separate category highlights the influence of the powerful dairy lobby) and would eliminate the many processed foods now listed as part of these groups: Flavored milks, processed cheeses, processed deli meats, and processed soy products. The grains group would eliminate refined and processed grains and reserve these to be used minimally in the form of treats. The same applies to all sugary foods and sugary drinks.

As Michele Simon rightly points out in her recent post, what’s really needed to affect change are policy changes. She writes, “It’s going to take way more than a measly $2 million educational campaign to get Americans to fill up half their plate with fruits and vegetables. It’s going to take a massive overhaul of our agricultural policies.”

And this is why we’ll never see a real food MyPlate. As long as our current agricultural policies and farm subsidies remain the same, the government can’t offer much else in the way of recommendations. What they’ve recommended is what’s available to most of the American population—processed and packaged foods subsidized by government policies.

MyPlate is simply a cleaner graphic image with mostly the same old information. I can think of a much better way to spend that $2 million dollar budget: Fund urban farming projects so more Americans can actually fill those plates with fruits and vegetables. Now that would be real progress.

On a slow Friday afternoon, a surprising bit of news came down the pike: Roger Beachy, head of  National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the main research arm of the USDA, has officially resigned his post, effective May 20.

Who is Beachy? When Obama hired Beachy in 2009, I got a case of policy whiplash, because it seemed to me that the administration kept whipping back and forth between progressive food-system change and agribusiness as usual. Beachy, you see, came to the post from the Danforth Plant Science Center, where had he served as the organization’s president since its founding in 1998. Nestled in Monsanto’s St. Louis home town, Danforth has long and deep ties to Monsanto.

According to its website, the center “was founded in 1998 through gifts from the St. Louis-based Danforth Foundation, the Monsanto Fund (a philanthropic foundation), and a tax credit from the State of Missouri.” Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant sits on the center’s board of trustees, along with execs from defense giant McDonnell Douglas and pharma titan Merck. Another notable board member is Alfonso Romo, a Mexican magnate who cashed in big during his country’s notoriously corrupt privatization /liberalization bonanza in the early ’90s, and who sold Seminis, the globe’s largest vegetable-seed company, to Monsanto in 2005. (Here’s my account of that deal from the time.)

In his short stint at USDA, Beachy never hid his enthusiasm for ag biotechnology–or his disdain for organic ag. When I met him at an agriculture conference in Mexico and asked him about funding for organic research, he came up with a novel slander against synthetics-free ag: “I’m concerned about the safety of organic food… I’m concerned about the issue of microbial contamination with organic.” It was a strange encounter; I wrote about it here. Beachy also hotly promoted GMOs, and thundered against organic, in a recent profile in Scientific American.

Now he has quit abruptly–according to the USDA’s internal announcement, posted on ScienceInsider, to “spend more time with his wife, his children, and his grandchildren” back in St. Louis. Be that as it may–sometimes, no doubt, people actually do abruptly quit jobs to “spend more time with family”–Beachy’s exit coincides with news that NIFA’s budget outlook has darkened considerably. Reports ScienceInsider:

This year’s pot for competitive grants is down about 1 percent, a far cry from the 64 percent increase that the Obama Administration had requested for FY 2011. And reflecting larger fiscal realities, the department’s request for FY 2012, submitted in February and still pending before Congress, was scaled back substantially, although still a robust 25 percent increase.

Meanwhile, the Danforth Center, where Beachy is still listed as a researcher, is going great guns. According to the April 14 St. Louis Today, “Researchers working to develop genetically modified, nutrient-dense cassava got another major boost Wednesday with an $8.3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.” Total funding awarded to Daforth by the the Gates Foundation “now tops $20 million,” St. Louis Today reports.

Originally published on Grist

If you eat beef, or take milk and sugar in your coffee (and even if you don’t), here is why you should care: The move could put organic foods at risk for contamination and make it more expensive.

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack has attempted to stave off further litigation and quell the mounting antagonism between farmers growing GM seed and organic farmers by proposing “co-existence” between the two.

Part of Vilsack’s plan for co-existence includes using buffers between organic and GM fields and even placing geographic restrictions on the growth of GM seeds. This is the first time such a discussion had been broached by the USDA. New York University professor and food movement leader Marion Nestle called the move a “breakthrough,” and we also ran an op-ed pushing for co-existence as the lesser of two evils here on Civil Eats.

But Vilsack’s co-existence plan seemed to put President Obama’s pro-business agenda at risk. In fact, David Axelrod put the kibosh on the idea with a bad pun, encouraging “everyone to ‘plow forward’ on a plan for genetically produced alfalfa,” according to Maureen Dowd.

Monsanto, the company behind 95 percent of GM sugarbeet seed and all of the GM alfalfa seed, had fought against the deal behind closed doors.

Worries were expressed about our biotech credibility abroad should we discuss any fallibility at home. But in a nod toward co-existence, Monsanto spokesman Tom Helscher told the AP on Monday, “Since the advent of biotech crops, both biotech and organic production have flourished. We have no reason to think that will not continue to be the case.” What Monsanto execs don’t mention publicly is that co-existence is not possible, and as patent holders to the gene traits in their GM seeds, they have the right to sue farmers whose fields become contaminated by these traits.

“Certainly, on a commercial-scale crop, over time, you are going to get contamination,” said Doug Gurian-Sherman, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The provisions [in the EIS] will certainly reduce contamination, and they may delay it to some extent, but they’re not going to prevent it.”

Aside from the transfer of genetic material through pollen, there are many other ways in which it has proven impossible to contain the risk of contamination. And unfortunately, there are plenty of real examples in which contamination has already happened.

There are well-documented cases with papaya in Hawaii, corn in Mexico, canola most recently in North Dakota, and creeping bentgrass, which pollinated grasses 13 miles away in Oregon. A test plot of a GM rice was even responsible for contaminating long grain varieties in five states in 2006, five years after Bayer CropScience had abandoned trials of its LL601 rice, costing the industry $2 billion.

In 1999, a corn variety called StarLink–which was not approved for human consumption–contaminated half of the Iowa corn harvest. Whether batches of corn meant for animal consumption were mixed with corn for human consumption on accident or through cross-pollination–we will never know exactly what happened. What we do know is that our current regulatory process has significant–in many cases, insurmountable–problems, and the concept of co-existence is merely a smoke screen that will create more of the same.

This is why deregulation has huge implications for organic farmers as well as consumers. The USDA does not test for contamination after deregulating a biotech crop. In the StarLink case, it was a non-profit group that found traces of the corn in taco shells. This means that the impetus will be on organic farmers to test their own crops, further increasing food prices. Worse, organic food could become more limited in availability if contamination becomes a widespread issue.

“Today, there are many committed consumers who want to know their farmer, feed their families wholesome dairy products, and be assured that their food isn’t contaminated by GMOs,” said Albert Straus, an organic dairy farmer from California who has spoken out against GM alfalfa. “If the organic feed supply for dairy cattle is contaminated with GMOs, farmers will no longer be able to offer truly organic milk to consumers, and everything we have worked to build will be compromised.” Straus Family Creamery has been voluntarily testing its feed for GMOs since 2006, and carries the Non-GMO Project Seal on its label.

In addition, organic farmers fear economic loses in export markets–places like the European Union and Japan, where products containing traces of GM foods are consistently rejected. In addition to risks in the field, it is not uncommon for organic crops to be transported in rail cars, on boats and in truck beds where GM or conventional crops have also been transported. This means that a crop that has been tested by the farmer can still be contaminated later. With no protections in place, the organic farmer bears the majority of the risk.

The reason Japanese and EU consumers are driving the purity tests on crops coming from America is simple: When GM foods are sold in places like the EU or Japan, they are labeled as such. And this really is the critical issue. American consumers want to know what they are eating, but the industry doesn’t want to be forthcoming because letting the market decide would mean resistance to GM foods.

“We don’t challenge consumers on whether they want a red car or a blue car,” said Gurian-Sherman. “But when it comes to choosing what they want to eat, the people that are supporting this technology seem to be greatly offended that the market in Europe and other places is doing what markets are suppose to do.”

Letting the market decide would also mean more support for organics, which would force the USDA to protect that market–and thus our food supply–more conscientiously. Therefore, pushing for transparent labeling on food containing GMOs could be the first step in protecting our food supply from genetic contamination.

This will not be the last battle fought to preserve an agricultural product from contamination. In fact, any day now the FDA will be issuing a ruling about the first genetically altered animal–the GM salmon.

Meanwhile, here are a few things you can do to defend organic against the threat of GM food.