Fantastic Site: Sustainable Table

I think we have blogged about this before, but I want to draw your attention to it once again.

THE SUSTAINABLE TABLE

Sustainable Table was created in 2003 by the nonprofit organization GRACE to help consumers understand the problems with our food supply and offer viable solutions and alternatives. Rather than be overwhelmed by the problems created by our industrial agricultural system, Sustainable Table celebrates the joy of food and eating.

Today’s dominant form of agriculture relies on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, large amounts of water, major transportation systems and factory-style practices for raising livestock. Industrial farming creates over-processed, over-traveled, and under-nourishing food that may contribute to health problems like obesity, diabetes and heart disease. This type of food production causes pollution and creates environmental and public health problems that cost taxpayers both money and quality of life. Sustainable Table was launched to offer consumers a choice and to show that fresh food from small, independent family farmers is still available.

I have been following them for quite a while and had the pleasure to meet Diane Hatz, the founder and Exec. Producer of the Meatrix video series.  (check out the video on the sidebar if you don’t know what this is).  Just recently, I started following them on Twitter, which introduced me to their blog: The Daily Table.  This has fantastic information about recommended summer reads and movies about food, information on school lunch programs, genetically modified foods and much, much more.

You can follow them on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/eatsustainable

weekend roundup

A listing of interesting articles, then I did not give expanded coverage.

GMO, article 1:
GMO Job: Will the Obama administration be the first to seriously regulate genetically modified food?, via Grist.org

On the heels of a report out of Germany, emphatically concludes that awidely used strain of GM corn appears to decrease both birthrates and the size of offspring in mice — and the problems seem to grow with each generation, Grist investigates if Obama will stop the GMO legacy. Given whom he just appointed to Secretary of Agriculture, and the fact that he has the hands of some Monsanto executives in his pockets, I am going to say: probably not.

GMO article #2:
Seeds of doubt: Rules for bioengineered crops need close monitoring

To create genetically modified crops, scientists swap the genes from one microorganism or plant to another plant, in combinations that could never occur naturally. The result might be corn immune to weedkillers; cotton that automatically fends off pests; even “pharma-plants” that are tiny, green laboratories for cultivating powerful medicines.

It’s easy to see how genetically modified crops might solve a range of ancient problems.

 

The problem is not that genetically modified crops are in some way “unnatural” — few plants are as unnatural as domesticated corn or wheat, which require intensive human effort to grow at all.

GMO article #3:
Monsanto Funds Groups to Improve Mississippi River Water

With a $5 million contribution from the St. Louis-based Monsanto corporation, The Nature Conservancy, the Iowa Soybean Association and Delta Wildlife will work with farmers to remove nutrients and sediment from agricultural runoff in the Mississippi River Basin.

“Our goal is to use science – research and data – to systematically develop and implement a suite of management techniques that help production agriculture measurably improve stewardship while maintaining or increasing profitability,” Wolf said.

another food one:
Multitasking canola: A California miracle crop?

Farmers, water managers and agriculture researchers are closely watching an experiment using canola plants to absorb the salt from soil and water. The seeds are then crushed to extract oil for blending into environmentally friendly biodiesel.

“It’s all part of what we have to try to do here to turn a profit,” said Diener, who also grows almonds, tomatoes, grapes and corn on 5,000 acres.

this is where the rubber meets the road

It is the end of the year. The United States has seen many changes, one of which being the political philosophy. Another being that more and more people understand and want to combat climate change. We have told the rest of the world that we are committed to change by the election of Barack Obama and his subsequent appointments of environmentally friendly staff.

However, this is also the time when the rubber has hit the road and the rest of the world wants to see how we are really going to act. It was easy for this country to go green as fuel prices rose, but what happens when the economy is suffering and oil prices have gone down?

The Guardian UK posted an interesting article that is a sort of “year in review” about climate change. One thing that stood out about this year is increase in malnutrition due to food shortages.

The problem, said the analysts, was a mix of climate change and extreme weather leading to poor harvests in major grain-growing countries such as Australia. But the blame was also laid on the many millions of acres of maize, wheat and other crops planted in the US and elsewhere in 2007 to provide biofuels for cars rather than food for people. Catastrophe loomed, said the UN.

Climate change is disproportionately hard on the poor: water shortages, weather extremes, lack of food make it hard for the lower classes to adapt to their conditions. And the article illustrates how poorer nations have reacted to the food crisis and the affect on poorer communities.

So here we are. The brink of major change is upon us to save the world. This author has fears:

Whether the world weans itself off oil and fossil fuels will probably determine global sustainability over the next 20 years. Low oil prices traditionally push energy efficiency off the policy agenda. Economic recessions have punctured green economic bubbles in the past. When times are tight, the wisdom goes, no one invests in new or risky technologies, and countries stick to cheap and dirty energy.

The article is a good read and you can find it HERE.

how does your garden grow?

Our food choices affect many things, but one area that has always been a concern for me is its impact on climate change. Remember, climate change is not just the warming of our planet, but it also is the effect on our water and soil due to chemicals, overuse, over population, and much much more.

That is why I found it interesting when I read today that CalTech is studying methods of urban hydroponic gardening and roof top farms. I suppose one reason why is because I tend to think if a scientist is really researching something, then there is enough support to think we really need it.

Supporters point to the environmental cost of trucking produce from farms to cities, the loss of wilderness for farmland to feed a growing world population, and the risk of bacteria along extensive, insecure food chains as reasons for establishing urban hydroponic farms.

And, so far there seems to be some great data:

Cornell agriculturist Philson Warner, who designed the program’s hydroponics system, said his students harvest hundreds of heads of lettuce a week from an area smaller than five standard parking spaces by using a special nutrient-rich solution instead of water.

The numbers have some researchers imagining a future when enough produce to feed entire cities is grown in multistory buildings sandwiched between office towers and other structures.

You can find the whole article HERE, via Huffington Post

how does one say “I told you so” without sounding like a jerk?

and maybe I just don’t care….

Why eating GM food could lower your fertility, via Daily Mail, UK.

In an article published today, something I knew all along was verified: GM food affects us.

Professor Dr Jurgen Zentek, Professor for Veterinary Medicine at the University of Vienna and lead author of the study, said a GM diet effected the fertility of mice.

GM expert at Greenpeace International, Dr Jan van Aken, said: ‘Genetically Engineered food appears to be acting as a birth control agent, potentially leading to infertility.

‘If this is not reason enough to close down the whole biotech industry once and for all, I am not sure what kind of disaster we are waiting for.

‘Playing genetic roulette with our food crops is like playing Russian roulette with consumers and public health.’

In the article they state something that I think should make everyone open their ears and eyes: Most studies of GM food has been done in the Biotech industry and with mega-corporations like Monsanto. This is the one of the first, allowed, studies from an independent laboratory. I think as we see more labs providing scientifically backed research, we will start to see the truth. Remember, if the truth will effect the bottom line of a corporation, why in the world would they want you to know it?

Also, in the country, labels are not required to state whether the food you eat is GM. Therefore, farmer’s markets, organic, CSA’s, grow your own… those are the best options. Most of all, try not to eat prepackaged food. I know it is difficult but these are your children and your children’s children we are talking about.

they aren’t “super”markets, they’re “corn”markets

Even though it may seem contradictory to what “see” in the market, a huge percentage of our farming is commodity farming, specifically corn farming. In fact, when people talk about farms being subsidized, it is not all farms, it is only commodity farms (soy, cotton, wheat, and corn).

Corn is the biggest. As we know it is used as a sweetener and an ethanol, but did you know it goes into the box that your cereal is in? And, by the way, the cereal, too? In fact, corn is in everything. There is not one aisle, except ironically the produce aisle, where you do not see corn on a daily basis.

Even your meat.

What? You think I am insane, don’t you?

Some brief history… in the past, our livestock was raised eating grass, or worms, or our extra food. It benefits us for them to eat this way. Take the cow, for example. Grass is an amazing plant high in fiber and nutrients, like omega oils. We want those nutrients but it is nearly impossible for us to digest grass to get those things out. The cow has evolved over centuries to be ruminants just to be able to digest this food. The nutrients are absorbed into its cell tissue, we eat the cow, we get nutrition that we would otherwise have no access to. It is the circle of life. Cows were healthy walking around all day long, munching on clover, not standing in its own waste.

And then, demand for cow went up and farmers needed to get it raised, killed and out to market in the shortest time possible. Grass became a limitation and so they started working with the surplus from the corn growers and gave that to the cattle. But, they aren’t designed to eat the corn. So they get sick… hence, an increase in antibiotics. Not to mention that they are now contained, standing in inches deep of their own fecal material, so they need even more antibiotics.

Oooh… and, here’s a fun fact. Did you know that grass fed cattle does not have “marbling”? That this is a consequence of grain/corn fed cattle, and as a result ranchers heavily marketed to the USDA to make “marbling” a positive quality and a rating system, when in fact it is a sign of a diseased animal. Yum.

Why am I bringing this up? I just read an interesting article from some scientists out of Hawaii that studied the chemical composition of food from restaurants all over the country.

“The pair found that 100% of the chicken in these three chains had been reared on corn alone. Some 93% of the beef came from cows that had been fed a corn-only diet.” And, “the team was even able to determine what type of oil the fries had been cooked in – a mixture of vegetable oils at McDonald’s and Burger King, corn oil at Wendy’s. In fact, of 160 products purchased at Wendy’s, the researchers did not find a single one without some corn component.”

One conclusion: …notes that government subsidies that favour corn have encouraged pesticide- and fertiliser-intensive monoculture farming in the US. “We are using corn in ways that are completely unsustainable,” says Hird.

And, I hope he doesn’t mind, but I also really liked this comment:
The problems with corn also include nitrogen fertilizer runoff that has been cited in several scientific reports and a number of news articles as causing expanding dead zones off the USA Gulf Coast and in the Atlantic. What should be done for animal feed is turning to alfalfa and related legumes with some soybean meals as soybeans also give oil perhaps to be used as fuel or made into a butter. Soybean milk substitutes would avoid cows that belch methane.

But the one certain step needed is to forget biofuels. Why? Because they are only a carbon dioxide recycling process that removes not one carbon atom from the balance of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere. We need to get a shift for hydrogen, which seems to be getting ignored especially by big energy tangled with big oil that fears several trillion dollars in refineries and oil field investments will be wiped out. We should also be expanding windmills for electricity as they would be recovering some of the energy lost by burning fossil fuels causing global warming.

Dr. J.Singmaster, Fremont, CA, USA

“Vote with your fork. You get three votes a day.” – Michael Pollan, Food Fight

HERE is the article

not lovin’ this

McDonald’s surprised everyone on Wall Street a few weeks ago by posting an 11% increase in profit, placing itself among the few not being hit by this economy.

There is so much wrong with this, I do not know where to begin.

take that!

Have you seen those awful Kentucky Fried Chicken advertisements where they claim that you can’t go to the market and buy the fixins’ to make your own meal, so therefore you must go to KFC?

I squirmed in my seat every time that darn thing comes on! It is just so inaccurate and such terrible media manipulation in allowing you to believe that KFC is cheaper and better than anything you can do at home. (I have written about this in the past, which you can find HERE.)

I was so happy today when I went onto Grist and saw that someone had taken on the KFC challenge and won!

Even allowing for the whole batch of 24 biscuits, the meal still comes in at $8.45. In fact, using organic or other high-end items where the market carried them (flour, grapeseed oil, butter, milk), my total bill for the meal came to $10.62. Here’s a GoogleDocs spreadsheet of my prices in case you want to check my math or compare your own recipe.

You can go HERE for the whole article.

trend alert

Do you remember when I posted about Tazmanian Devils and their likely extinction?

You can go HERE to read the original post. Essentially, the Tazmanian Devil will be extinct in 10-20 years because of a rare form a cancer that is spreading throughout the population. I accurately write “spreading” since they have found this cancer has been able to mutate itself to be contagious. And, why is it contagious? Because of lack of biodiversity.

I warned everyone in that post about the possibility of other animals being afflicted with disease because of selective inbreeding and lack of space for animals to roam.

Well…. hate to say I told you so, but alas…. I told you so.

An analysis of commercial chicken populations around the world by William M. Muir of Purdue University and colleagues has revealed the extent of the problem. Fifty percent or more of the diversity of ancestral breeds has been lost, they report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. That could make chicken production more susceptible to disease outbreaks for which resistant genes have disappeared.

Just a note, chickens don’t really exist outside of commercial facilities, so it is silly to make it seem like they are some special population. Let’s just say “chicken populations”

You can find the whole article HERE

move over HFCS, there’s a new kid in town

I don’t really think that is true. The corn industry is way to big to fall off the face of the Earth. However, there is a new sweetener making a prolific rise to the top of the food chain.

Sugar Beets. A new player on the GMO scene and currently accounts for 30% of the world’s sugar consumption.

It is genetically modified by Monsanto and requires FOUR TIMES the space of a typical cane field. And, this shouldn’t surprise you, but the EPA just changed the requirements for sugar beets, by allowing a 5000% increase in the amount of pesticide allowed to remain on the beet prior to processing. Yum… sugar pesticide! Also remember that the FDA has allowed for legislation absolutely no labeling requirements of GMO products. So, you have no idea what you might be ingesting.

This is always a nice follow-up to their mess of the whole Bisphenol A situation:

In fact, FDA took no substantive action to study the food safety risks of GM food even after it concluded that the GM supplement, L-tryptophan, was the possible cause of 37 deaths and 1,500 disabling illnesses from a rare condition known as eosinophilia myalgia syndrome.

Hershey’s and Mars (yes, Mom, your M&M’s) are slated to switch over this year, if not already.

Look for products labeled: made with sugar cane, cane juice or certified organic.

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