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 On the Table: Guest Columns for the New York Times Select website |
| June 8, 2006 |
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MAY 7: Voting With Your Fork MAY 10: Taking Food Seriously MAY 11: Why Eating Well is 'Elitist' MAY 12: An Organic Chicken in Every Pot MAY 15: Wal-Mart Goes Organic: And Now for the Bad News MAY 17: Eat Your View MAY 21: Food From a Farm Near You MAY 24: The Great Yellow Hope MAY 29: Profiles in Animal Courage JUNE 4: Attacks on the Food Police JUNE 7: What's For Dinner? For reader responses, see: http://pollan.blogs.nytimes.com MAY 7 8:30 pm Voting With Your Fork Categories: Food To someone who's spent the last few years thinking about the American food chain, a visit to Manhattan's Union Square in the spring of 2006 feels a little like a visit to Paris in the spring of 1968 must have felt, or perhaps closer to the mark, Peoples Park in Berkeley in the summer of 1969. Not that I was in either of those places at the appointed historical hour, or that the stakes are quite as high. (Isn't hyperbole an earmark of Internet literary style? O.K. then.) But today in these few square blocks of lower Manhattan, change is in the air, and the future -- at least the future of food -- is up for grabs. When Whole Foods planted its flag on 14th Street last year, setting up shop an heirloom tomato's throw from one of the nation's liveliest farmer's markets, two crucial visions of an alternative American food chain -- what I call, somewhat oxymoronically, Industrial Organic and Local -- faced off. And then this spring Trader Joe's opened in Union Square, further complicating the picture (for both the farmer's market and Whole Foods) with its discount take on both organic and artisanal food. The shopping choices laid out so succinctly for New Yorkers in Union Square today neatly encapsulate the kinds of question we will all be grappling with over the next few years as we navigate an increasingly complex, politicized and ethically challenging food landscape. The organic strawberry or the conventional? The grass-fed or the organic beef? And, if the grass-fed, the Whole Foods steak from New Zealand or the Hudson Valley steak across the street? The organic tomato or the New Jersey beefsteak? The omega-3 fortified eggs or the cage-free eggs? (That last phrase is one of my favorite snatches of recent supermarket prose: I mean, does an egg really care whether it's caged or not?) The ultra-pasteurized milk or the raw? The farmed fish or the wild? In January, the jet-setting winter asparagus from Argentina or the rutabaga from Upstate? And how do you cook a rutabaga, anyway? I've been doing a lot of food reporting over the past couple years and have discovered there are no simple, one-size-fits-all answers to these questions (several of which I hope to take up in future columns). But it seems to me the crucial thing is that such questions about how we should eat, and how what we eat affects both our health and the health of the world, confront us today in a way they never before have. My explorations of the American food chain -- or now, food chains -- have convinced me that these questions (except perhaps the one about rutabaga) are actually political questions, and much depends on how we choose to answer them. The market for alternative foods of all kinds -- organic, local, pasture-based, humanely raised -- represents the stirrings of a movement, or rather a novel hybrid: a market-as-movement. Over the next month I plan to use this column as a place to conduct a conversation with readers (or "r-eaters," as someone at a lecture proposed the other night) about the politics of food. Union Square, which 75 years ago served as the red-hot center of the labor movement, is now, at least symbolically, ground zero of the food movement. And while much separates the various choices and philosophies on offer here, it's important to recognize what unifies the Whole Foods and Trader Joe's and the farmer's market, and what has brought so many of us 21st century food foragers to Union Square and all places like it: the gathering sense that there is something very wrong with our conventional food system -- what I call the industrial food chain, by which I mean typical supermarket and fast food. It has become a commonplace to say that the industrial food system is not "sustainable" -- indeed, even Monsanto now acknowledges that American agriculture is not sustainable. (Which is why it supposedly needs the company's genetically modified organisms in place of pesticides.) But it's worth taking a moment to think through exactly what it means to say that a system is unsustainable, lest the word lose its force. What it means, very simply, is that a practice or activity cannot go on as it has much longer -- that, because of various internal contradictions, it will sooner or later break down. This is the the case with our industrial food chain: evidence of failure is all around us. While it is true that this system produces vast quantities of cheap food (indeed, the vastness and cheapness is part of the problem), it is not doing what any nation's food system foremost needs to do: that is, maintain its population in good health. Historians of the future will marvel at the existence of a civilization whose population was at once so well-fed and so unhealthy. This is unprecedented. For most of history, the "food problem" has been a problem of quantity. Our shocking rates of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, foodborne illness and nutrient deficiency suggest that quantity is not the problem -- or the solution. To say a system is unsustainable also means it cannot endure indefinitely for the simple reason that it is using up the very resources it depends on: it is eating its seed corn. Certainly this is the case in industrial agriculture, which is literally consuming the soil and the genetic diversity on which it depends: there's half as much topsoil in Iowa today as there was a century ago, and our single-minded focus on a tiny number of crops (and within those crops a tiny number of varieties) is driving untold numbers of plant and animal varieties to extinction. These are genes whose disappearance we will rue when our monocultures fail, as all monocultures sooner or later do. "Unsustainable" also means a system can't go on indefinitely paying the costs of doing business as it has been doing. In the case of the industrial food chain, that includes the cost to the treasury ($88 billion in agricultural subsidies over the last five years); to the environment (water and air pollution, especially from our factory animal farms); and to the public health. Cheap food, it turns out, is unbelievably expensive. Many of the costs of cheap food are invisible to us, but they will soon force themselves onto our attention. Take energy, for example. The industrial food system is at bottom a system founded on cheap fossil fuel, which we depend on to grow the crops (the fertilizers and pesticides are made from petroleum), process the food, and then ship it hither and yon. Fully a fifth of the fossil fuel we consume in America goes to feeding ourselves, more than we devote to personal transportation. (Unfortunately the industrial organic food chain guzzles nearly as much fossil fuel as the nonorganic.) If the era of cheap energy is really drawing to a close, as it appears, so will the era of cheap industrial food. The last sense in which the industrial food chain is unsustainable is that it depends on our ignorance of how it works for its continued survival. Indeed, our ignorance of its methods is as important to its workings as cheap energy. If I've learned anything over the past several years, as I've followed the industrial food chain from the supermarkets and fast food outlets back through the meatpacking plants and C.A.F.O.'s (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) and food science laboratories and farm fields, it is that the more you know about this food, the less appetizing it becomes to eat. If people could peer over the increasingly high walls of our industrial agriculture they would surely change the way they eat. Increasing numbers of Americans aren't waiting: they're changing now. This desire for something better -- something safer, something more sustainable, something more humane and something tastier -- is what's bringing people to the Whole Foods and the farmer's market, as well as to C.S.A.'s (community-supported agriculture programs, about which more in a subsequent post) and directly to farmers over the Internet. Taken together the fastest growing segment of the American food system are these alternatives to it. Change is indeed in the air. And this change is not limited to the marketplace. A vibrant grass-roots movement to change food (and beverages) in the schools is rapidly spreading across the country -- witness last week's tactical retreat of the soda makers from school cafeterias. A debate is just getting underway about food policy at the federal level, as Congress starts work on the next farm bill; it will have to decide whether the government should continue to subsidize high-fructose corn syrup at a time when we have an epidemic of Type 2 diabetes. Animal rights groups are forcing the fast food industry to change the miserable condition in which billions of food animals now live. I write from the road, where I'm on tour promoting my book, and I'm hearing a lot of anxiety around the subject food but also a lot of hope. Indeed, of all the issues before us today, the food issue is one of the most hopeful. As the tableaux in Union Square demonstrates, we have choices. We no longer have to take the food on offer, which makes this issue unique. A couple of weeks ago we all paid our taxes. Whenever I write that check, I can't help but think of the various uses to which that money is put. Whatever your politics, there are activities your tax money supports that I'm sure you find troublesome, if not deplorable. But you can't do anything about those activities -- you can't withdraw your support -- unless you're prepared to go the jail. Food is different. You can simply stop participating in a system that abuses animals or poisons the water or squanders jet fuel flying asparagus around the world. You can vote with your fork, in other words, and you can do it three times a day. So this column will take the form of a discussion about how to cast those sorts of votes. I take seriously this idea of conversation. I've found that publishing a book in the Internet era (my last one came out in 2001, before the word blog had even been coined) is a completely new and bracing experience, far more reciprocal than writing has ever been. I get e-mail from people reporting they're on page six and have a question they'd like answered before they go on. (This seems a bit much…) When I go on the radio and say something dubious or sloppy, inevitably someone will straighten me out within the hour. Daily, readers and listeners force me to rethink my positions or consider questions I'd never known to ask. Make no mistake: not all of these questions are so provocative. The other day a reader emailed to ask, "So what do you think about dried fruit?" I take all these questions (well, almost all of them) as a sign of a healthy ferment rising around the politics of food, and have undertaken this blog to air the best of them in a more public way than my e-mail correspondence. So come gather around this table to talk. About anything -- except, unless you absolutely insist, dried fruit. MAY 10 8:57 pm Taking Food Seriously Categories: Food Whenever I'm in the company of other journalists and the conversation turns to our respective beats, mine -- food -- usually draws a silent snicker. It's deemed a less-than-serious subject, and I suppose compared to covering war or national security, it can be viewed that way. Even when someone is ostensibly complimenting a food story, as a colleague of mine recently did, it comes out backhanded, like so: "You wouldn't think a piece about food could be so … interesting." No? Excuse me, but are you not dependent on the stuff? This disdain for food journalism has several springs. One of them surely is sexism: at least in some quarters, food is traditionally women's work; therefore journalism about it is, too. In general, journalism that deals with everyday life close to home will never enjoy the prestige of the exotic dateline. Another source of this low esteem is the venue in which much food journalism is found: the Wednesday food supplements of daily newspapers, the historical purpose of which has been to keep full-page supermarket advertisements from bumping into one another. Tremendous quantities of fluff journalism have been committed in the name of covering food. But this is changing: look again at your paper's Wednesday food section, and you'll find it brimming with issues of politics, economics and health, not to mention agriculture and cultural politics. Today, instead of "Great Dishes for Which We Have Campbell's Soup to Thank," you're much more likely to find tough pieces on school board battles to drive fast food from the cafeteria, the links between E.P.A. air pollution rules and methyl mercury levels in tuna, backdoor efforts to weaken federal standards for organic agriculture--or as in today's Times, profiles of muckraking journalists like Eric Schlosser. If you're interested in reading sharp coverage of political economy, Wednesday newspapers have become one of the best places to find it. "When we try to pick out anything by itself," John Muir once wrote, "we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." Some of these things are better hitched than others, and food is surely one of them. We don't ordinarily think about it this way, but eating represents our most powerful engagement with the natural world -- it transforms the world by remaking the landscape more than any other human activity, and it transforms, and defines, us. Whenever a biologist wants to understand the role of a creature in the ecosystem, the first question he or she asks is, What does that creature eat, and what eats it? What, in other words, is its place in the food chain? Well, Homo sapiens is no exception. As William Ralph Inge, the English essayist, wrote early in the last century, "all of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive." Even the eating of a Twinkie represents transactions between species, though in the case of the Twinkie I'd be hard pressed to name all the species involved. (Have you read a Twinkie ingredient list lately? It's long and full of surprises, one of which is beef.) I teach a course at Berkeley's graduate journalism school called "Following the Food Chain," and what my students quickly discover as they go down that trail is that it takes them to a great many unexpected places. Food connects us to nature, first and foremost, but it also attaches us to all the other large systems that organize our lives -- from energy and economics to politics, public health and cultural identity. In recent years we've all come to appreciate the critical links between oil and things like the health of our economy and the conduct of our foreign policy. Crises have a way of laying bare such connections. I'll wager that food will soon take its place alongside energy as an issue of national security. This would be nothing new. Often in the past, when food has been in short supply or the desire for certain kinds of it (like spices) has been sufficiently powerful, food has shaped the destiny of nations. The fact that we don't think about food in these terms today is probably a testament to what a good job the food industry has done keeping us well (or at least abundantly) fed, our supermarkets fabulously stocked and our attention fixed on the glossy new products and "value meals," rather than on the way the food is produced or what it does to us when we eat it. During the last 50 years we've been living in a kind of fool's food paradise, marked by astounding bounty and apparent choice. Immediately after 9/11, we had a brief taste of the national security implications of the way we feed ourselves. There was much anxious talk about the terrorist threat to our "food security," a term unfamiliar to most Americans. People in Congress and the Food and Drug Administration worried publicly about the high degree of centralization in the industrial food supply. In a situation where a single meat-processing plant is supplying hamburger – typically ground together from hundreds of cows from many countries on multiple continents -- to hundreds of thousands of Americans at a time, a single act or accident of contamination could sicken or kill vast numbers of people. (Only four corporations process 80 percent of the beef consumed in America today.) There was talk in Congress of reorganizing our food safety system, now Balkanized among several far-flung federal bureaucracies. But that moment passed; the industry wanted to keep things as they are. And although security has since been tightened at many big food plants (incidentally, making it more difficult for journalists to gain access), no one had the stomach to confront the larger problem: that in an era of terrorism threats (and widespread concern about food-borne illness), a highly centralized food supply system is precisely what you don't want. No, what you want is a food system that is redundant and highly decentralized, so that a crisis in one region doesn't become a national crisis. In his farewell press conference as outgoing Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tommy Thompson broke the silence on this threat once again: "For the life of me, I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is so easy to do." Sooner or later, the inexorable trend toward free world trade also will force the food security issue to the forefront of our attention. Economists will tell you that when we stop subsidizing American farmers (and the pressure to do so is mounting, from an unlikely alliance of the World Trade Organization, developing world countries and U.S. agribusiness companies) and protecting their market with tariffs, our food will come from wherever in the world it can be produced most cheaply. That means it will come from countries where land is cheapest and environmental laws most lax. This is precisely where the logic of free trade is taking us: the iron law of competitive advantage dictates that we should put our land to "higher uses" -- like houses -- rather than doing something as old-fashioned with it as growing food. And indeed I've heard projections from people working for the governor of California suggesting that by the end of this century, the Central Valley – where most of America's fresh produce is grown -- will be wall-to-wall houses and highways: no more farming. Where will our food come from then? From Mexico, South America and, increasingly, China. And how do you feel about that? I find that, whatever people may think about free trade in sneakers and electronics, they are distinctly uncomfortable about giving up our ability to feed ourselves. Food feels different from other commodities, which may explain why, worldwide, many of the most powerful protests against globalization have centered around food: the protests against genetically modified crops, the movement to defend local food against the global tide of homogenization. We see every day how our dependence on foreign energy has crippled our foreign policy. Imagine how much more debilitating a dependence on foreign food would be. Make no mistake, how we feed ourselves is about to become a national security issue. MAY 11 9:06 pm Why Eating Well Is 'Elitist' Categories: Food Thanks for all the great posts from readers -- you've given me a lot to chew on, and there are many questions and comments I plan to address in future posts. But for today, I want to look briefly at the "elitism" issue raised by several of you. As you will see it also ties into the good question raised by Paul Stamler about whether consumer action -- voting with your forks -- is adequate to the task of changing the American way of eating. It is a fact that to eat healthily in this country -- by which I mean consuming food that contributes both to the eater's health as well as to the health of the environment -- costs more than it does to eat poorly. Indeed, the rules of the game by which we eat create a situation in which it is actually rational to eat poorly. Let's say you live on fixed income, and struggle to keep your family fed. When you go to the supermarket, you are, in effect, foraging for energy -- calories -- to keep your family alive. So what are you going to buy with your precious food dollar? Fresh produce? Or junk food? A 2004 article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Adam Drewnowski and S.E. Specter offers some devastating answers. One dollar spent in the processed food section of the supermarket -- the aisles in the middle of the store -- will buy you 1200 calories of cookies and snacks. That same dollar spent in the produce section on the perimeter will buy you only 250 calories of carrots. Similarly, a dollar spent in the processed food aisles will buy you 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of fruit juice. So if you're in the desperate position of shopping simply for calories to keep your family going, the rational strategy is to buy the junk. Mr. Drewnowski explains that we are driven by our evolutionary inheritance to expend as little energy as possible seeking out as much food energy as possible. So we naturally gravitate to "energy-dense foods" -- high-calorie sugars and fats, which in nature are rare and hard to find. Sugars in nature come mostly in the form of ripe fruit and, if you're really lucky, honey; fats come in the form of meat, the getting of which requires a great expense of energy, making them fairly rare in the diet as well. Well, the modern supermarket reverses the whole caloric calculus: the most energy-dense foods are the easiest -- that is, cheapest -- ones to acquire. If you want a concise explanation of obesity, and in particular why the most reliable predictor of obesity is one's income level, there it is. The question is, how did energy-dense foods become so much cheaper in the supermarket than they are in the state of nature? This is not a function of the free market. It is very simply a function of government policy: our farm policies subsidize the most energy-dense and least healthy calories in the supermarket. We write checks to farmers for every bushel of corn and soy they can grow, and partly as a result they grow vast quantities of the stuff, driving down the cost of the processed foods we make from those commodities. In effect, we're subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup. And we're not subsidizing the growing of carrots and broccoli. Put another way, our tax dollars are the reason that the cheapest calories in the market are the least healthy ones. That situation is a public problem and can be addressed only through public action -- by rewriting the rules of the game by which we eat. We need farm policies that will somehow right this imbalance, so that healthy calories can compete with unhealthy ones -- so that it becomes rational for someone with little to spend on food to buy the carrots instead of the cookies, the orange juice instead of the Sprite. Until that happens, eating well will remain "elitist." MAY 12 10:00 pm An Organic Chicken in Every Pot Categories: Food, Organic Farming Let's take another look at "the elitism question" – the idea, trumpeted by the industrial food companies and their defenders – that because organic and other alternative foods cost more, they're an upper middle class luxury or, worse, affectation. It is true that organic food historically has cost significantly more than conventional food, but now that retailers like Wal-Mart have decided to move aggressively into organics, as reported in Friday's New York Times, that is about to change. For better or worse (and surely it will be both), Wal-Mart will for the first time bring organics into the mainstream, putting food grown without synthetic pesticides and fertilizers in reach of nearly all Americans. (The company aims to keep the price premium over conventional products to 10 percent.) Wal-Mart will single-handedly upend the argument that organic food is elitist. This is very good news for American consumers and for the American land. Or perhaps I should say, for some of the American land and a great deal of the land in places like China and Mexico, because Wal-Mart will hasten the globalization of organic food. (Today, 10 percent of the organic foods in our markets is imported.) Like any other commodity that multinational companies lay their hands on, organic food will henceforth come from anywhere in the world it can be produced most cheaply, because the land and the labor there is cheaper than it is here. Organic food will go the way of sneakers or consumer electronics -- yet another rootless commodity circulating in the global economy. Oh, wait… I was talking about the good that will come of Wal-Mart's commitment to organic. Sorry about that. But in global capitalism it's often hard to separate the good news from the bad. I'll try again. . . . Because of its scale, efficiency and ruthlessness, Wal-Mart will force down the price of organics, and that is a good thing for consumers who can't afford to spend any more for food than they already do. Wal-Mart will also educate Americans – many of whom have yet to learn what organic food is and how it differs from conventionally grown food. This is an unalloyed good for the world's environment, since it will result in less pesticide and chemical fertilizer being applied to land somewhere. Whatever you think of the prospect of organic Coca Cola, when it comes – and it will come – thousands of acres of the world's corn fields (needed to make all that organic high fructose corn syrup) will no longer receive a shower of Atrazine. Okay, I know, you're probably registering some cognitive dissonance at the conjunction of the words "organic" and "high fructose corn syrup" -- but keep your eye for a moment on that Atrazine. Atrazine is an herbicide commonly applied to cornfields in America (it's been banned in Europe as a suspected carcinogen), and traces of it show up in our water and food. Does that matter? Well, at concentrations as slight as .10 part per billion, Atrazine in the water has been shown to chemically emasculate frogs, turning healthy males into hermaphrodites. I don't know about you, but I sort of like the idea of keeping such a molecule out of my teenage son's diet, even if the nutritionists say they don't have any proof organic food is any healthier. (The Times' story about Wal-Mart's organic initiative, which appeared on the newspaper's front page, cited unnamed nutritionists who claimed the "health benefits of [many organic foods] are negligible.") Do you really need to wait for scientific proof (which would mean testing these chemicals directly on human subjects) that keeping such chemicals out of your family's food is a good idea? The fact that low-income Americans will soon be able to make the same choice I have been making strikes me as positive and important. The Times' coverage of Wal-Mart's plans was notable for its values-free attitude toward organics. In this it reflected the corporate relativism fashionable among the big companies now rushing into the organic marketplace. They have little choice but to sit firmly on the fence when it comes to making any objective claims about the superiority of organics. (Said one Wal-Mart executive, "Organic agriculture is just another method of agriculture – not better, not worse.") How do you introduce organic Coco Puffs without implying that there's something wrong with, or less-wonderful about, conventional Cocoa-Puffs? You adopt the postmodern perspective of the marketer, for whom consumer choice is a matter of self-expression that has nothing to do with old-fashioned ideas of "better" and "worse." When I was writing about the industrialization of organics in The New York Times Magazine five years ago, I spent a lot of time with the executives at General Mills, who had just acquired an organic division. From the chairman on down, no one wanted to answer the straightforward question, "Is organic food better than conventional food?" To a man (and they were nearly all men), they said things like, "If you think organic food is better, then it's better." Organic was, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder, purely subjective. Until, that is, I got to the basement laboratory, where the scientist in quality control whose job it was to make sure the levels of toxic pesticide in the breakfast cereal do not exceed federal tolerances, looked at me as if I were dense. The mass spectrometer offered a decidedly pre-post-modern picture of reality. When I asked whether the machine could discern any difference in organic foods, the scientist said, plainly, "Well, they don't contain pesticide." So don't believe the marketing talk that organic is just another lifestyle choice: it is, for all its limitations, a better agriculture and, if you care about ingesting neurotoxins and endocrine disruptors and carcinogens, an unambiguously better kind of food to eat. That more Americans will now be able to make that choice is something to cheer. As I suggested, however, there are problems with the Wal-Martization of organic food, and I will address those in a subsequent post. MAY 15 9:36 pm Wal-Mart Goes Organic: And Now for the Bad News Categories: Food, Organic Farming At the risk of sounding more equivocal than any self-respecting blogger is expected to sound, I'm going to turn my attention from the benefits of Wal-Mart's decision to enter the organic food market to its costs. You'll have to decide for yourself whether the advantage of making organic food accessible to more Americans is outweighed by the damage Wal-Mart may do to the practice and meaning of organic food production. The trade-offs are considerable. When Wal-Mart announced its plan to offer consumers a wide selection of organic foods, the company claimed it would keep the price premium for organic to no more than 10 percent. This in itself is grounds for concern -- in my view, it virtually guarantees that Wal-Mart's version of cheap, industrialized organic food will not be sustainable in any meaningful sense of the word (see my earlier column, "Voting With Your Fork," for a discussion of that word). Why? Because to index the price of organic to the price of conventional food is to give up, right from the start, on the idea -- once enshrined in the organic movement -- that food should be priced responsibly. Cheap industrial food, the organic movement has argued, only seems cheap, because the real costs are charged to the environment (in the form of water and air pollution and depletion of the soil); to the public purse (in the form of subsidies to conventional commodity producers); and to the public health (in the cost of diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease), not to mention to the welfare of the farm- and food-factory workers and the well-being of the animals. As Wendell Berry once wrote, the motto of our conventional food system -- at the center of which stands Wal-Mart, the biggest grocer in America -- should be: Cheap at Any Price! To say you can sell organic food for 10 percent above the price at which you sell irresponsibly priced food suggests you don't really get it -- that you plan to bring the same principles of industrial "efficiency" and "economies of scale" to a system of food production that was supposed to mimic the logic of nature rather than that of the factory. We have already seen what happens when the logic of industry is applied to organic food production. Synthetic pesticides are simply replaced by approved organic pesticides; synthetic fertilizer is simply replaced by compost and manures and mined forms of nitrogen imported from South America. The result is a greener factory farm, to be sure, but a factory nevertheless. The industrialization of organic agriculture, which Wal-Mart's entry will hasten, has given us "organic feedlots" -- two words that I never thought would find their way into the same clause. To supply the burgeoning demand for cheap organic milk, agribusiness companies are setting up 5000-head dairies, often in the desert. The milking cows never touch a blade of grass, but instead spend their lives standing around a dry lot "loafing area" munching organic grain -- grain that takes a toll on both the animals' health (these ruminants evolved to eat grass after all) and the nutritional value of their milk. Frequently the milk is then ultra-pasteurized (a high heat process that further diminishes its nutritional value) before being shipped across the country. This is the sort of milk we're going to see a lot more of in our supermarkets, as long as Wal-Mart honors its commitment to keep organic milk cheap. We're also going to see more organic milk coming from places like New Zealand, a trend driven by soaring demand -- and also by what seems to me, in an era of energy scarcity, a rather forgiving construction of the idea of sustainability. Making organic food inexpensive means buying it from anywhere it can be produced most cheaply -- lengthening rather than shortening the food chain, and deepening its dependence on fossil fuels. Similarly, organic meat is increasingly coming not from polycultures growing a variety of species (which are able to recycle nutrients between plants and animals) but from ever-bigger organic confined animal feeding operations, or CAFO's, that, apart from not using antibiotics and feeding organic grain, are little different from their conventional counterparts. Yes, the organic rules say the animals should have "access to the outdoors," but in practice this means providing them with a tiny exercise yard or, in the case of one egg producer in New England, a screened-in concrete "porch." This is one of the ironies of practicing organic agriculture on an industrial scale: big, single-species organic CAFO's are even more precarious than their industrial cousins, since they can't rely on antibiotics to keep thousands of animals living in close confinement from getting sick. So organic CAFO-hands (to call them farm-hands just doesn't seem right) keep the free-ranging to a minimum, and then keep their fingers crossed. The industrial food chain, whether organic or conventional, inevitably links giant supermarkets to giant farms. But this is not because big farms are any more efficient or productive than small farms -- to the contrary. Studies have found that small farms produce more food per unit of land than big farms do). And polycultures are more productive than monocultures. So why don't such farms predominate? Because big supermarkets prefer to do business with big farms growing lots of the same thing. It is more efficient for Wal-Mart -- in the economic, not the biological, sense -- to contract with a single huge carrot or chicken grower than with 10 small ones: the "transaction costs" are lower, even if the price and the quality is no different. This is just one of the many ways in which the logic of capitalism and the logic of biology on a farm come into conflict. At least in the short term, the logic of business usually prevails. Wal-Mart's big-foot entry into the organic market is bad news for small organic farmers, that seems obvious enough. But it may also spell trouble for the big growers they'll favor. Wal-Mart has a reputation for driving down prices by squeezing its suppliers, especially after the suppliers have invested in expanding production to feed the Wal-Mart maw. Once you've boosted your production to supply Wal-Mart, you're at the company's mercy when it decides it no longer wants to give you a price that will cover the cost of production, let alone enable you to make a profit. When that happens, the notion of responsibly priced food will be sacrificed to the need to survive, and the pressure to cut corners will become irresistible. Right now, the federal organic standards provide a bulwark against that pressure. But with the industrialization of organic, the rules are coming under increasing pressure, and (forgive my skepticism) it's hard to believe that the lobbyists from Wal-Mart are going to play a constructive role in defending those standards from efforts to dilute them. Earlier this year, the Organic Trade Association hired lobbyists from Kraft to move a bill through Congress making it easier to include synthetic ingredients in products labeled organic. (What are any synthetic ingredients doing in products labeled organic, anyway? A good question, and one that was recently posed in a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture by a blueberry farmer in Maine, who argued that the 1990 law establishing the federal organic program had specifically prohibited synthetics in organic food. Within weeks after he won his case, the industry went to Congress to preserve its right to put synthetic ingredients like xanthan gum and ascorbic acid into organic processed foods.) For better or worse, the legal meaning of the word organic is now in the hands of the government, which means it is subject to all the usual political and economic forces at play in Washington. The drive to keep organic food cheap will bring pressure to further weaken the regulations, and some of K Street's most skillful and influential lobbyists will soon be on the case. A couple of years ago, a chicken producer in Georgia named Fieldale Farms induced its congressman to slip a helpful provision into an Agriculture Department appropriations bill that would allow organic chicken farmers to substitute conventional chicken feed when the price of organic feed exceeded a certain level. Well, that certainly makes life easier for a chicken producer, especially when the price of organic corn is up around $8 a bushel (compared to less than $2 for conventional feed). But in what sense would a chicken fed on conventional feed still be organic? In no sense except the Orwellian one: because the government says it is. An outcry from consumers and wiser organic producers (who saw their precious label losing credibility) put a halt to Fieldale's plans, and the legislation was quickly repealed. The moral of the Fieldale story is that unless consumers and well-meaning producers remain vigilant, the drive to make organic foods nearly as cheap as conventional foods threatens to hollow out the word and kill the gold-egg-laying organic goose. Let's hope Wal-Mart understands that the marketing power of the word organic -- a power that flows directly from consumers' uneasiness about the conventional food chain -- is a little like the health of a chicken living in close confinement with 20,000 other chickens in an organic CAFO, munching organic corn: fragile. May 17 9:33 pm Eat Your View Categories: Food, Organic Farming So which side of 14th Street should we shop on? The south side, where Whole Foods has planted the flag of industrial organic food, or across the street at the Union Square farmer's market? The last time I was in that neighborhood, I stopped by the meat counter at Whole Foods and was delighted to see they're now carrying grass-finished beef, the only kind I buy. It's one of the most sustainably grown foods you can eat. But I was dismayed to discover that the grass-finished beef at Whole Foods had traveled all the way from New Zealand. I walked across the street to the farmer's market and found two stalls offering grass-finished beef from the Hudson Valley. Oddly enough, the New York State beef, which had traveled less than 90 miles from pasture to market, cost more than the New Zealand beef that had come half way around the world. (I'm guessing that Whole Foods buys so much of this type of beef from New Zealand -- where it is the rule, not the exception -- that it gets a deal; also, the cost of processing local, artisanal meats in an era when the Department of Agriculture won't support small slaughterhouses adds about a dollar a pound.) In this case, buying local means paying more. Is it worth it? In this case, and in many others where we get to choose between a local product and a faraway organic one, the answer is yes. I hasten to add "for me." How you choose to vote with your fork depends on what values matter to you most. In general, if what you care most about is avoiding pesticides in your diet, and keeping pesticides out of the environment, then the choice is clear: you want to buy organic whenever possible. Simple enough. But there are other issues to weigh, and depending on your priorities, these may be just as important as the pesticide issue. Also, it's important to realize that the choice is not necessarily either/or -- local food is very often organic in all but name (and often even in name), and even Whole Foods occasionally carries local food (but not often enough -- more on that later). It's also not a choice between the Alimentary Good and the Alimentary Evil. Both choices are good ones -- we're lucky to have them -- and both represent a better agriculture and demonstrably better food. So no need to agonize about the question, or to demonize Big Organic. That said, here are my top three arguments for buying local: 1. The food is generally fresher, and in produce, fresher means tastier and more nutritious. The longer produce spends in a truck, the more tired it gets; many of its nutrients -- vitamins, anti-oxidents, phytochemicals of all kinds -- deteriorate over time. Typically the produce in the farmer's market has been picked that morning or the day before. All things being equal, any organic produce is often tastier and more nutritious than conventional produce, but after it's sat on a truck for five days, it may be inferior to that fresh conventionally grown carrot. 2. Local food generally leaves a much lighter environmental footprint. The average fruit or vegetable on an American plate has traveled 1500 miles from the farm, and a lot of diesel fuel has been burned to get it there. Local food has much lower energy costs, and as the era of cheap energy draws to a close, eating local will be more important than ever. Before you buy the Prius, start shopping at your farmer's market. 3. To buy local is an act of conservation -- of the land, of agriculture and of the local economy, all of which are threatened by the globalization of food. Anyone who prizes agricultural landscapes, and worries about sprawl destroying them, should buy local whenever possible. It will do more to defend agricultural landscapes than writing checks to conservation organizations and land trusts does. To buy grass-finished beef from the Hudson Valley or New England is to help protect that beautiful quilted landscape of green pastures tucked into forests and stitched with stone walls. That landscape was created not by the Hudson School painters, but by farmers and their animals and, in turn, by the eaters of those animals. The very best way to defend it is not to have the land trust mow the place to keep it looking the way it should (as is happening in many places), but to keep alive the food chain that created it in the first place. Otherwise the landscape will revert to second-growth forest or housing developments. The Europeans have a bumper sticker that makes this point in three short words: Eat your view! If you want to preserve those views, then eat from the food chain that created them. There are others good arguments for buying local whenever you can (please share yours with me), and I'll address them in future posts. I also plan to offer a list of resources for buying local, as several readers have asked. Stay tuned, and eat your view. MAY 21 10:30 pm Food From a Farm Near You Categories: Food, Eating locally The bottom line is, what does a mother supporting a family on a budget do? I can't research all the farms. How about some links? Comment by sustainablemom Several readers of my last few posts about eating locally have asked for some resources. Certainly it can feel daunting to leave the familiar confines of the supermarket, where you can find just about everything you want, arranged according to a comfortingly predictable map. Right there by the electronic doors sprawls the garden of fresh produce, while the dairy and meat cases line the far walls, and the great canyons of processed foods bestride the middle of the supermarket. Foraging for food gets much more complicated when you strike out for the farmers' market (where they don't take credit cards and you won't ever find a shopping cart) or, more adventurous yet, head directly to the farm or sign up to join a C.S.A. These "community supported agriculture" farms offer their "subscribers" a weekly box of seasonal produce (sometimes eggs and meat as well), selected by the farmer and either delivered to your door or collected from a drop-off point. The satisfactions of eating this way -- non-industrially -- are substantial, but there's no question it involves more thought and effort. The way we shop and eat is inextricably linked to the kind of agriculture and food system we have, and we won't change the one before we change the other. The reason organic food producers industrialized was so they could meet the expectations of the supermarket shopper or, as I prefer to think of it, the industrial eater, which is to say most of us. The industrial eater has come to expect strawberries 12 months of the year; tomatoes in January; apples that have been cleaned, sliced and bagged (everything but chewed and digested!); and dinner entrees pre-cooked and sold in individual, microwaveable portions. It takes a globalized, high-energy and large-scale food chain to meet the expectations of such a consumer. By the same token, building a local and sustainable food system will require a very different kind of consumer. With the help of journalist Jaime Gross, I've put together a list of resources to help readers like "Sustainablemom" navigate the local food landscape, wherever you happen to live. We have found excellent Web sites offering general advice on how to meet the challenge of eating locally (see locavores.com), and others with tools that, if you type in your ZIP Code, will point you to farmers in your area growing pastured chickens or organic produce or grass-finished beef (eatwellguide.com). Some of these resources will take you to organizations that aren't, strictly speaking, local -- they aim to support local farms raising traditional breeds and foodstuffs by linking them, through the Internet, to distant consumers (see heritagefoodsusa.com, below). Slow Food (slowfoodusa.org) calls this kind of trade "virtuous globalization," since it aims to exploit the reach and power of global commerce to defend local treasures from the rising tide of homogenization. There are more of these resources (as well as a downloadable guide) on the links page of my Web site, michaelpollan.com, and I discuss the political implications of shopping this way in the current issue of Mother Jones. SITES: Center for Informed Food Choices (informedeating.org) advocates a diet based on whole, unprocessed, local, organically grown plant foods; its Web site contains a useful F.A.Q. page about food politics and eating well, as well as an archive of relevant articles. Eat Well (eatwellguide.com) is an online directory of sustainably raised meat, poultry, dairy and eggs. Enter your ZIP Code to find healthful, humane and eco-friendly products from farms, stores and restaurants in your area. Eat Wild (eatwild.com) lists local suppliers for grass-fed meat and dairy products. Food Routes (foodroutes.org) is a national nonprofit dedicated to "reintroducing Americans to their food -- the seeds it grows from, the farmers who produce it and the routes that carry it from the fields to our tables." Heritage Foods USA (heritagefoodsusa.com) sells mail-order 'traceable' products from small farms -- maple syrup, pole-caught tuna, grass-fed Kobe beef -- whose labels provide every detail about how they were produced. Just Food (justfood.org) works to develop a just and sustainable food system in the New York City region through projects including City Farms (a New York community garden program) and community supported agriculture (which connects regional farmers with produce-hungry city dwellers). Local Harvest (localharvest.org) offers a definitive and reliable nationwide directory of C.S.A.'s, farmers' markets, family farms and other local food sources. Locavores (locavores.com), based in San Francisco, encourages people to eat only foods produced within a 100-mile radius of home. Their Food Web page offers an abundance of additional resources, including books, articles and Web sites. Organic Consumers Association (organicconsumers.org), a research and action center for the organic and fair-trade food movement, maintains a comprehensive Web archive of articles about genetically engineered foods, cloning, food safety, organics and globalization. Seafood Watch (mbayaq.org/cr/seafoodwatch.asp) -- a program of the Monterey Bay Aquarium designed to raise consumer awareness about the importance of buying seafood from sustainable sources -- offers a downloadable, pocket-sized, region-by-region guide to eco-friendly seafood. Slow Food USA (slowfoodusa.org) is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to ecologically sound land stewardship and food production and to living a "slower and more harmonious" life. Stone Barns Center for Food & Agriculture (stonebarnscenter.org) is a hands-on educational center and restaurant that aims to demonstrate, teach and promote sustainable, community-based food production on a working farm 30 miles from Manhattan. Sustainable Table (sustainabletable.org) offers an introduction to the sustainable food movement and the issues surrounding it, plus resources for further investigation (the links for 'Introduction to Sustainability' and 'The Issues' are good places to start). The U.S.D.A. Agricultural Marketing Service (ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets) includes a state-by-state listing of farmers' markets across the United States. BOOKS: "This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader," by Joan Dye Gussow "Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating From America's Farmers' Markets," by Deborah Madison "Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods," by Gary Paul Nabhan Farmer John's Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables, by Farmer John Peterson and Angelic Organics. "Holy Cows and Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide to Farm-Fresh Food," by Joel Salatin May 24 10:00 pm The Great Yellow Hope Categories: Ethanol, Environment I've been traveling in the American Corn Belt this past week, and wherever I go, people are talking about the promise of ethanol. Corn-distillation plants are popping up across the country like dandelions, and local ethanol boosters in Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa and even Washington State (where Bill Gates is jumping into the business) are giddy at the prospect of supplanting OPEC with a homegrown, America-first corn cartel. But as much as I'd like to have a greener fuel to power my car, I'm afraid corn-based ethanol is not that fuel. In principle, making fuel from plants makes good sense. Instead of spewing fossilized carbon into the atmosphere, you're burning the same carbon that a plant removed from the air only a few months earlier -- so, theoretically, you've added no additional carbon. Sounds pretty green -- and would be, if the plant you proposed to make the ethanol from were grown in a green way. But corn is not. The way we grow corn in this country consumes tremendous quantities of fossil fuel. Corn receives more synthetic fertilizer than any other crop, and that fertilizer is made from fossil fuels -- mostly natural gas. Corn also receives more pesticide than any other crop, and most of that pesticide is made from petroleum. To plow or disc the cornfields, plant the seed, spray the corn and harvest it takes large amounts of diesel fuel, and to dry the corn after harvest requires natural gas. So by the time your "green" raw material arrives at the ethanol plant, it is already drenched in fossil fuel. Every bushel of corn grown in America has consumed the equivalent of between a third and a half gallon of gasoline. And that's before you distill the corn into ethanol, an energy-intensive process that requires still more fossil fuel. Estimates vary, but they range from two-thirds to nine-tenths of a gallon of oil to produce a single gallon of ethanol. (The more generous number does not count all the energy costs of growing the corn.) Some estimates are still more dismal, suggesting it may actually take more than a gallon of fossil fuel to produce a gallon of our putative alternative to fossil fuel. Making ethanol from corn makes no more sense from an economic point of view. The federal government offers a tax break of 54 cents for every gallon of ethanol produced, and this incentive is what has generated the enthusiasm for ethanol refining: the spigot of public money is open and the pigs are rushing to the trough. (At the same time, the government protects domestic ethanol producers by imposing a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on imported ethanol.) According to the Wall Street Journal, it will cost U.S. taxpayers $120 for every barrel of oil saved by making ethanol. Some "savings." This is very good news indeed for Archer Daniels Midland, the agricultural processing company that controls about 30 percent of the ethanol market. (And, it would seem, a comparable percentage of the U.S. Congress, which has been showering the company with ethanol subsidies since the days when Bob Dole of Kansas was known as the senator from A.D.M.) Absurd as it is, the rush to turn our corn surplus into ethanol appears unstoppable, and the corn belt, laboring under the weight of falling corn prices for the past several years, is celebrating the great good fortune of $3-a-gallon gas prices. We're desperate for alternatives, and all that corn is waiting to be distilled. As corn prices rise (and the giddiness has already given them a bump), farmers will be tempted to produce yet more corn, which is not good news for the environment this whole deal is supposed to help. Why not? Because farmers will apply more nitrogen to boost yields (leading to more nitrogen pollution) and, since soy bean prices are down, they will be tempted to return to a "corn-on-corn" rotation. That is, rather than rotate their corn crops with soy beans (a legume that builds nitrogen in he soil), farmers will plant corn year after year, requiring still more synthetic nitrogen and doing long-term damage to the land. It's not easy being green. But just because making ethanol from corn is an environmentally and economically absurd proposition doesn't mean ethanol made from other plants is a bad idea. If you can make ethanol from a plant that doesn't take so much energy to grow in the first place, the economics and energetics begin look a lot better. The Brazilians make ethanol from sugar cane, a perennial crop that doesn't require nearly as much fossil fuel to grow. Switch grass, too, is a perennial crop that grows just about anywhere, requires little or no fertilizer and needs no plowing or annual replanting. And although the technology for making ethanol from grasses (cellulosic ethanol -- distilled from plant cellulose rather than starch) is not quite there yet, it holds real potential. So why the stampede to make ethanol from corn? Because we have so much of it, and such a powerful lobby promoting its consumption. Ethanol is just the latest chapter in a long, sorry history of clever and profitable schemes to dispose of surplus corn: there was corn liquor in the 19th century; feedlot meat starting in the 1950's and, since 1980, high fructose corn syrup. We grow more than 10 billion bushels of corn a year in this country, far more than we can possibly eat -- though God knows we're doing our best, bingeing on corn-based fast food and high fructose corn syrup till we're fat and diabetic. We probably can't eat much more of the stuff without exploding, so the corn lobby is targeting the next unsuspecting beast that might help chomp through the surplus: your car. MAY 29 10:30 pm Profiles in Courage on Animal Welfare Categories: Food, Animal Welfare, Agriculture Late last month the Chicago City Council took the incredibly courageous step of banning the sale of foie gras -- the livers of ducks and geese that have been force-fed corn -- within the city limits. The move, which followed on the heels of an equally bold ban signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, risked offending such well-organized and powerful food-industry interests as, well, let's see …. the two tiny farms, one in Sonoma County and one in New York's Hudson Valley, that produce the entire U.S. foie gras crop. And don't forget the several dozen tony restaurants that serve the delicacy to a slightly larger handful of well-heeled Francophiles. Earlier this month these interests finally got it together to form a group -- the North American Foie Gras Producers Association -- to defend against the rising prohibitionist wave: to date, legislation to ban foie gras has been introduced in six states. How delicious it must feel for a legislator to strike a blow on behalf of defenseless ducks and geese at the expense of an unpronounceable and Frenchified delicacy that maybe .00000001 percent of their constituents would even dream of ordering, assuming they could afford it. Such an exquisitely painless political opportunity doesn't come along every day. For animal rights groups, the battle to ban foie gras must seem like a tasty target of opportunity -- the lowest-hanging fruit in their campaign to improve the lives of animals in industrial agriculture. "It's only a matter of time before practices like cramming nine hens into an 18-by-20-inch wire mesh cage for their entire lives is made illegal," Bruce Friedrich, an official of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), told a reporter after the victory in Chicago. We can only hope he's right. The lives of billions of animals on American feedlots and factory farms are horrible to contemplate, an affront to our image of ourselves as humane. But banning foie gras will not do much to advance the larger cause. By suggesting we've outlawed the most heinous practice in animal agriculture, the campaign against foie gras allows everyone to feel good about doing something for the animals. Yet it leaves the much larger problem untouched. Chances are you haven't had any foie gras today, but you may well have eaten eggs. It is routine practice to cram laying hens into cages so small that the birds are sometimes driven to cannibalize their cagemates. The solution to this "vice" -- as the industry and the Department of Agriculture call such counterproductive behaviors in livestock (talk about blaming the victims!) -- is to snip the beaks off the hens with hot knives, without anesthetic. Similarly, the U.S.D.A.'s recommended solution for the "vice" of tail-biting among hogs driven mad by close confinement is to snip off their tails -- with a pliers, without anesthetic. To peer over the increasingly high walls of our industrial animal agriculture is not only to lose your appetite but to feel revulsion and shame. Mutilating pigs and chickens while they are alive is as routine in modern American agriculture as bacon and eggs for breakfast. These operations are performed every day on thousands of factory farms that are owned by, or under contract to, Fortune 500 corporations that supply hundreds of thousands of restaurants and supermarkets. There is, as yet, scant appetite among elected officials to challenge these practices; so far, change has come, to the extent it has, because of direct action by animal rights groups like PETA. Whatever you may think of their tactics, they have won important concessions from the fast food industry, extracting a few more square inches of living space for those poor hens and for the sows, many of whom still live in pens so small they cannot turn around. Politicians sense a gathering outrage over the treatment of animals in American agriculture. So what to do? Or, more precisely, what to seem to do? Because to do anything of consequence would mean to confront the considerable power of agribusiness. Some of the best-organized and most widely dispersed political interests in America -- factory farmers, feedlot owners, meat processors and the restaurant industry -- will not yield without a fight their freedom to abuse animals as they see fit. Such abuse is extremely profitable, and it is the reason why meat in this country is so cheap. In fact, the abuse is protected by law: Most federal animal cruelty laws specifically exempt agriculture -- where most of the animals are. Thus you may not kick your dog in public, but you're free to mutilate pigs and chickens behind the fences of C.A.F.O.'s (concentrated animal feeding operations). Rather than take on that big fight, the politicians have hit on a wonderful simulacrum: going after America's two little, politically unconnected foie gras producers. I'm not about to defend foie gras from the legions of righteous animal defenders. But do we have any reason to believe that feeding ducks and geese corn through tubes put down their throats is any more brutal than snipping off tails and beaks? I have not visited either of America's foie gras farms, but I note that they have invited journalists to visit and see the operations for themselves. (Just try to wangle your way into an industrial chicken or hog facility.) Some of the journalists who have accepted that invitation report that the birds rush over to the farmers at feeding time. Our own visceral revulsion at the prospect of having tubes stuck down our throats may have to do with the fact we have a gag reflex; ducks and geese do not. I seriously doubt you'd ever see pigs rushing over to the man wielding the pliers. To ban foie gras is symbolic politics at its worst, a way to create the appearance of doing something about a problem that politicians -- and, let's face it, most of us eaters -- would rather not confront. So we close down a couple of foie gras farms. (Though the California law gives the farmers till 2012 to desist, which is odd: if force-feeding ducks is really so heinous, then how in good conscience can we abide the practice for six more years?) We brace ourselves for a major change in our eating habits: no more foie gras after 2012. What a sacrifice! And, after patting ourselves on the back for all we've done for the animals, we can now, with clear conscience, turn back to our breakfast, ordering bacon and eggs, sunny side up. JUNE 4 10:30 pm Attacks on the 'Food Police' Categories: The Food Industry So who are these "food police" we're starting to hear so much about? The term has begun showing up in media accounts of campaigns to reform school lunch or in discussions of the food industry's growing legion of critics in the media. It's the "food police" who want to get soda out of the schools and who argue that fast food outlets should disclose nutritional information about what they sell. The "food police" supposedly want to take away your constitutional right to a Big Mac -- or, at the very least, your right to enjoy a Big Mac with a clear conscience. The Center for Science in the Public Interest is often mentioned as a leading institution in the world of food law enforcement. Yale University professor Kelly Brownell, whose concept of culinary law-and-order includes proposals to tax junk food, is a prominent member of the force. Several authors have been added to its ranks as well -- Eric Schlosser and Marion Nestle hold high positions down at the stationhouse and, apparently, I have recently joined the force as a new recruit. I'm honored to be counted in their company, but before I accept the badge I want to take a moment to think through the implications of the title. As near as I can determine, the whole notion of the "food police" got its start in the fevered brain of Rick Berman, a lawyer and former restaurant industry executive who founded the Center for Consumer Freedom. This nonprofit organization was originally funded by the tobacco and restaurant industries to fight smoking bans in bars and restaurants. Fresh from that resounding defeat, the "center" (it's unclear whether there's anything more to it than Mr. Berman, his Web site and his sizeable budget) expanded its mission, which is summed up on its site: "The growing cabal of 'food cops,' health care enforcers, militant activists, meddling bureaucrats and violent radicals who think they know 'what's best for you' are pushing against our basic freedoms. We're here to push back." The Center for Consumer Freedom is actually not a consumer group, but an astro-turf (that's faux grassroots) advocacy group funded by Big Food to discredit those in the media and government who would do anything -- including litigate, regulate and, apparently, express disagreeable opinions -- to interfere with the industry's freedom to make as much money as possible selling us junk food. Many of the same groups that Big Tobacco launched to attack its critics (including the Center for Consumer Freedom and the Heartland Institute) have seamlessly moved into attacking the critics of Big Food. This is hardly a coincidence: large segments of the food industry share corporate parents with Big Tobacco. Not surprisingly, the highest priority of these groups is to counter every suggestion that food, like tobacco, is a public health issue that demands public education and action. In an interview with the trade publication Chain Leader a couple of years ago, Mr. Berman explained that one of the best ways to "push back" against criticism of the industry was to "shoot the messenger." That can take many forms, including the personal attack: the site has made pictorial fun of the fact that Professor Brownell, who writes on obesity and advocates junk food taxes, is not quite as buff as a leading "food cop" is supposed to be. But though the phrase seems to have begun its life in this right-wing corporate incubator, it's been picked up all over the place, and is now used unselfconsciously even in the pages of The New York Times. Last Tuesday, the Science Times section ran a piece about the unintended consequences of the campaign to reform school food under the headline, "Well-Intentioned Food Police May Create Havoc With Children's Diets." Well, at least these food cops are "well-intentioned." But the phrase should be examined closely before being so lightly tossed around. To describe critics of agribusiness as cops or police is to imply that their messages are somehow repressive, while the activities and competing messages of the food companies represent the opposite: freedom, a word they dearly love. When a journalist writes critically of the cooking or marketing practices at McDonald's, he is somehow interfering with people's freedom to enjoy their chicken nuggets -- the journalist stands for control. Yet for some reason the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by McDonald's to market its food represents not control but freedom. Keep in mind that this marketing involves the routine manipulation of children -- bribing them with toys, enticing them to eat more with cleverly designed packaging and portion sizes, and deploying the arts of food science to exploit their inborn cravings for fat, salt and sugar. So who exactly is the more "controlling" party here? American food companies spend an estimated $36 billion to market food to us -- that is to say, to get us to eat more of their products than we otherwise would. Their techniques include putting health claims on junk food (my current favorite: Whole Grain Lucky Charms); supersizing portions; slipping high-fructose corn syrup into every imaginable and heretofore unsweetened product; and offering seemingly healthy alternatives to high-fat foods that turn out to be just as fattening (check out McDonald's new grilled chicken Caesar salad with Newman's Own dressing: more calories than a Quarter Pounder). Now compare this $36 billion worth of powerful, hidden and manipulative messages with the voices on the other side endeavoring, openly, to point all this out -- in articles, books, academic studies, op-ed columns and a handful of independent films. How much is spent getting that message out? Marion Nestle addresses the discrepancy in resources in her book "Food Politics." She compares the $1 million spent by the National Cancer Institute on its Five a Day for Better Health campaign (to get Americans to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables) to the $32 million spent in 2004 to advertise a single minor food product -- Cheez-Its. Some of the same food companies that preach the virtues of freedom of choice are considerably less enamored of freedom of thought and opinion. They decry litigation against the food industry, yet when Oprah Winfrey, a "food cop," did a show suggesting there might be mad cow disease in the U.S. beef supply, the beef industry sued to silence her, using one of the "veggie-libel laws" that agribusiness has secured in more than a dozen agricultural states. Under these laws it is a crime to speak ill of a food product. For a journalist today, it is far riskier to criticize a rib-eye steak than a human being. (Oprah won her suit, at an estimated cost of $1 million, though you have to wonder if she'll ever do another show on the beef industry. Her concerns about the American beef supply turned out to be well-founded; since her program aired 10 years ago, three cases of mad cow disease have turned up in the U.S.) But while the food industry is quite prepared to attack its critics using veggie libel laws, it seeks to insulate itself from litigation by pushing Congress and state legislatures to pass "cheeseburger laws" that grant the industry immunity from obesity lawsuits. Eric Schlosser, the author of "Fast Food Nation," knows how the industry "pushes back" against its critics. In April The Wall Street Journal reported that McDonald's had launched a campaign to attack "Chew on This," a new book by Schlosser and Charles Wilson. The company distributed a memo to franchisees, alluding to plans to "discredit the message and the messenger." According to The Journal, several groups affiliated with the conservative Washington lobbying firm DCI Group, which counts McDonald's and Coca-Cola among its clients, launched attacks on Mr. Schlosser. One charge is that he supports the decriminalization of marijuana. (He outlined his position in an April 2004 essay in The New York Times, "Make Peace With Pot.") This might not seem terribly germane, until you remember that "Chew on This" is directed at middle school children. Mr. Schlosser reports that several schools that invited him to speak about the book have received letters urging them to cancel his talks on the grounds he is not fit to speak to children. Hecklers, industry representatives and pamphleteers have also been showing up at his public appearances. Healthy debate, you might say. But debate is healthy only when it is conducted openly, and that is surely not the case here. As Mr. Schlosser pointed out in a recent e-mail message, "One of the fundamental differences between us food police and these food pushers is that we put our names on what we write, whereas these food companies hide behind front groups, and the front groups refuse to disclose their corporate funding. They love the word 'freedom' but try to destroy anyone with a different point of view." For more information on the campaign against Mr. Schlosser and his new book, go to chewonthisnews.com. Source Watch documents the links between various public relations and lobbying firms and their corporate funders. JUNE 7, 2006 10:30 pm What's for Dinner? Categories: Food, Organic Farming, Eating locally I've spent the last two months mostly on the road, talking to audiences around the country about my book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma," and the questions it raises about how and what we eat. Most of the posts here on TimesSelect represent my thoughts in response to questions put to me by those audiences as well as readers of this site. Complicated as they may seem, many of the questions -- Local or organic? Carnivore or vegetarian? -- boil down to variations on the most basic question of all: What should we have for dinner? People often ask how I answer that question for myself. They're curious to know how my investigations of the food chain have changed the way I and my family eat, whether we still eat meat (yes, but much less often and only from a handful of suppliers I can vouch for); whether I buy organic (usually, though given the opportunity I much prefer to buy local); whether I go out of my way to avoid high-fructose corn syrup (yes, though not so much because it's an evil molecule as because it's a reliable marker for the kind of highly processed foods I try to avoid); and whether I ever eat junk food. (Busted. I have a weakness for Cracker Jacks, corn chips and pizza, and therefore I don't think of those delicacies as junk food.) So after spending the past month trying to answer the dinner question in the largest ethical, environmental and nutritional sense, I thought a good way to wrap up my column here would be to answer it in the narrowest sense: What am I having for dinner night? The answer to that question is found in a box. One of the biggest changes I've made in my eating was to join a C.S.A. farm. C.S.A. stands for community supported agriculture, an awkward name for an elegant scheme. C.S.A. farms are a little like magazines: you "subscribe" to them, on an annual or monthly basis, and in exchange for a fee ($60 a month in my case), you receive a weekly box of produce, which you can pick up either from the farm or from a drop-off location or, for an additional fee, have delivered to your door. Dozens of good C.S.A.'s operate in the Bay Area, where I live. I chose to join -- and that is the operative word, as I'll explain -- Full Belly Farm's. (To find a C.S.A. near you, go to localharvest.org or the Department of Agriculture's C.S.A. Web page; see also the other Web resources listed in my earlier post, "Food From a Farm Near You.") I was familiar with Full Belly Farm from shopping at the Berkeley Farmer's Market, where they sell produce every Tuesday. The farm in the Capay Valley, a couple-of-hours drive northeast of Berkeley, grows 80 different fruit and vegetable crops, and they've offered C.S.A. boxes since 1992. (America's first C.S.A. was started in the 1980's in Western Massachusetts; the concept began in Europe a few years before that.) Full Belly has always been highly diversified, economically as well as biologically. In addition to the C.S.A. and farmer's markets, they sell food wholesale to small and large grocers in the Bay Area, including Whole Foods. I'd always been impressed by the quality and variety of their vegetables. So when we decided to join a C.S.A., Full Belly seemed a logical choice. I pick up my box from the front porch of a house a couple of blocks away from mine. I have no idea whose house it is, or why they lend their porch to a C.S.A., but every Tuesday the porch is stacked high with boxes. There's also a table on the porch, set with a vase of fresh flowers, some brochures and a sign-up sheet. I initial my name on the sheet, return last week's box to the pile of empties, and pick up a new box, wondering what this week's harvest will bring -- and what we will have for dinner that night. It is less like shopping for food than going out in the garden to see what's ripe. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays we never plan dinner in advance, preferring to let the farmer -- which is to say, a particular patch of soil and the weather -- determine the menu for us. I remember reading in one of Alice Waters's cookbooks that she would never decide on the night's menu at her restaurant Chez Panisse till she'd visited the farmer's market, where the vegetables would speak to her and tell her what to cook. Sometimes the vegetables speak loud and clear, as when asparagus is in season. Last week, these spears, cut just hours before they were boxed, were so fresh it would have been criminal to do anything more elaborate than to steam them and drizzle a little lemon juice and olive oil on them. But there are times when the vegetables in the box speak inscrutably, or not at all. For a few weeks this winter, the box offered rather more rutabagas than you ever want to see, and I had to consult a few cookbooks before determining how best to deploy them. One week I made a puree with carrots, also from the box; another time I sliced and simply roasted them with olive oil. Interesting. I would never buy rutabagas at the market, but I was happy to be forced into exploring this vegetable's (mildly) underestimated possibilities. Actually the folks at Full Belly -- who include a helpful and nicely written newsletter, The Full Belly Beet, with each box -- sounded a little apologetic about some of those late winter, rutabaga-heavy boxes. But as the newsletter explained, the winter rains were brutal and unremitting this year clear through April, delaying spring planting and devastating some of the crops, including the peaches and strawberries. So we got more root crops than usual and, to make up for it one week, a gorgeous bunch of flowers. But that's the point: as "shareholders" in a C.S.A., we share equally in the farm's bounty and shortfalls, its triumphs and disasters. The word shareholder is not empty in this case; certainly it more closely describes the relationship we've entered into than the words "consumer" and "producer" would. As John Peterson, the C.S.A. farmer from Illinois who is profiled in the new documentary "The Real Dirt on Farmer John," describes it, the "C.S.A. is a new socioeconomic form in which the farm and consumer enter into a sort of partnership, an alliance to take care of each other's needs." For the farmer, the C.S.A. relationship means a reliable cash flow through the growing season (with money up front to help pay for planting) and shareholders who share in the risks and rewards of an enterprise that will always be at the mercy of the weather. For the shareholder, it means the freshest possible food received at the end of the shortest possible food chain. More important, the C.S.A. reconnects you as an eater with the source of your food, offering a vivid reminder that, whatever we eat, we eat by the grace of farms and farmers, of the land, the weather and the season -- not supermarkets. The C.S.A. means I also eat in the knowledge that I'm doing my small bit to defend a gorgeous patch of bottomland along Cache Creek outside the tiny town of Guinda from the oncoming wave of sprawl that threatens to engulf California's entire Central Valley into one big, wall-to-wall housing development. Eating from the C.S.A. box constitutes the very opposite of industrial eating, that sort of unconscious consumption based on our desire to eat whatever we want whenever we want it -- tomatoes in January, strawberries in October -- food that's been cleaned, cut up, processed, cooked, everything but chewed and digested for us. That food chain offers convenience, sure, yet in the end it depends on ignorance -- of the cost of eating that way, and of all the labor, energy and technology it requires. To eat from the C.S.A. box, with its newsletter chronicling the week's doings on the farm, is to eat in a fuller knowledge of all that's involved in getting food to our plates, including the necessity, and pleasure, of cooking. (Most C.S.A. newsletters offer recipes.) There's a lot more going on than the exchange of money for food. So what's in the box this week? It's a good one, suggesting we've arrived on the cusp of summer. There's asparagus again, a big bunch of pencil-thin spears; a bag of new potatoes and a bunch of carrots; a big bag of salad mix; a little bag of walnuts; a fat head of garlic; and -- I could smell it through the box the moment I lifted it from the porch -- the season's first bunch of basil. Even before I consulted the newsletter, which offered the suggestion and a recipe, I recognized the summery possibility: pesto for dinner tonight. Thanks to everyone who read these offerings and, especially, to all who offered their two cents in response to my posts. I've profited enormously from your comments, criticisms and leads. Still, a great many topics never quite made it to the "Table." In fact, the list keeps growing: the coming debate over the farm bill (which you can keep tabs on by going to the Web site for the American Farmland Trust); the question of whether organic can feed the world (yes, according to a terrific article by Brian Halwell in the May/June issue of "World Watch," which effectively rebuts Steven Shapin's offhand dismissal of the possibility in the May 15 issue of The New Yorker); and the need to address the food system's role in the energy and climate-change crisis (an important truth overlooked by Al Gore in "An Inconvenient Truth" and Whole Foods president John Mackie's recent open letter to me in response to both my book and this blog). So I may have to come back here and post again from time to time. Watch this space. And remember: Vote with your fork! |
Copyright © Michael Pollan