From “A Greene Generation” by Tim Grant

 The votes are in, and the winners of the Food and Farming Film Competition are . . . all of us!

Organized by writer and activist Anna Lappé’s Real Food Media project, the competition, a virtual film festival of brief (four minutes or less) documentaries about farming, the environment, and community, attracted more than 150 submissions from 25 states and the District of Columbia and four countries. Judges included Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and Robert Kenner. The five winners were announced this week and deal with everything from inner city gardening in the Bronx to hog raising in North Carolina to organic oregano farming in Mexico, but they are united by one theme: It can be done!

You can view all five winning films at Real Food Media’s site. They are thought provoking, moving, and truly inspiring.

Do yourself favor. Check them out.

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Drug Addicts

In 1977, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) let everyone know that there was strong evidence that the use of penicillin and tetracycline for anything other than treating disease in livestock, could lead to the development of super bugs strong enough to render the powerful antibiotics useless in people. That warning sparked a ferocious backlash from the powerful animal agriculture industry, which to this day still depends on feeding animals low doses of antibiotics to help grow them faster and compensate for crowded unsanitary living conditions.

Now, nearly 40 years later the embattled agency has finally mustered the courage to approve a strongly worded recommendation for producers to stop using medically important antibiotics as growth promoters and to give veterinarians oversight over therapeutic uses of the life-saving drugs.

But perhaps FDA’s announcement isn’t so brave after all.

READ MORE AT CIVIL EATS

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People always ask me, “What is the best tasting tomato variety?” My answer is simple: the one grown closest to your kitchen counter.

But until I met the dedicated crew at the Treasure Valley Food Coalition in Boise, Idaho, in September, I never realized that that the simple act of tending a few tomatoes in your backyard or on your balcony might also be the best way to break agribusiness’s stranglehold on our food system.

Disgusted with the “flavorless, rock-hard, industrially grown tomatoes in grocery stores” the coalition launched the Tomato Independence Project last spring as a way to take on the “industrial tomato complex” by encouraging residents in southwestern Idaho to grow their own. Workshops were held. Seedlings sold. And great tasting tomatoes harvested.

The coalition’s larger goal is to support local farmers and to promote a vibrant food economy in the Boise area. But the group also wants to help folks in the rest of the country break the “tyranny of tasteless tomatoes.” For information on how to bring the Tomato Independence Project to your area email treasurevalleyfoodcoalition@gmail.com.

And, if you’re looking for the perfect gift for that hard-to-please tomato geek on your list, what could be better than a Tomato Independence t-shirt? Proceeds go to a great cause. And as the owner of one myself, I assure you it will be worn proudly. It’s also quite slimming.

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My partner eyed me sternly when I announced that my next book was going to be an investigative look at pork production. “Does this mean that I’ll have to give up eating bacon?” she asked.

Deadly outbreaks of E. coli and Salmonella in spinach and cantaloupes, antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” connected to pork and chicken production, potent drugs that are banned in the United States in imported shrimp and catfish: Nothing has the potential to destroy your appetite quite as thoroughly as writing about industrial food production or living with someone who does. Somehow, I have remained omnivorous, more or less. But there are only five things that I absolutely refuse to eat.

 1. Supermarket Ground Beef

I lost my appetite for prepared ground beef in the late 1980s, when a friend’s three-year-old daughter died after eating a hamburger tainted with E. coli O157:H7, which lives in the intestines of healthy cattle and other animals, but can be found in water, food, soil, or on surfaces that have been contaminated with animal or human feces. She endured a painful, lingering death, beginning with a tummy ache, and over two weeks progressing to bloody diarrhea, convulsions, and seizures as the E. coli bacteria destroyed her kidneys.

It’s true that E. coli dies when hamburger is cooked to at least 160 degrees, by which point it is well-done. But even if you like dry, gray patties (I don’t), why take the risk? Every time you buy a package of supermarket ground beef, you’re playing culinary Russian roulette. E. coli comes from meat that has been contaminated with manure. A few E. coli cells can multiply into millions in a short time. Slaughterhouse scraps that go into ground beef come from the outside and undersides of carcasses, the areas most likely to come in contact with the hide and most prone to fecal contamination. Those parts can travel from several slaughterhouses to one facility to be ground and packaged.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning article describing how a Minnesota woman was left paralyzed after eating E. coli-tainted hamburger, New York Times’ Michael Moss reported that the meat in the single prepared, frozen patty she ate had been shipped to a Wisconsin processor from facilities in Nebraska, Texas, South Dakota, and Uruguay.

The easiest way to avoid supermarket hamburger is to buy a whole cut like a chuck steak or sirloin and grind it yourself. A few pulses from a food processor does the trick nicely, if you don’t own a meat grinder. Or have a butcher grind it for you while you wait. You can also buy from a small producer. When I went to pick up my beef order last fall, the owner of the custom slaughterhouse was standing beside a stainless steel table holding a mountain of ground beef waiting for her to pack it into one-pound bags. “I can tell you exactly how many animals this hamburger came from,” she said. “One.”

2. Salad Greens in Plastic Bags or Clam-Shell Boxes

For starters, salad fixings bought whole and chopped in your kitchen are more nutritious than those from containers. Bagged and boxed greens are in for the long haul, and can stay “fresh” for as long as 17 days. But vegetables begin losing nutrients the second they are picked. Within eight hours, 10 percent of Vitamin C and  between three and four percent of beta-carotene are gone. Chopping and shredding increase oxidation, driving out more nutrients.  Even short stretches of time at room temperatures further lower nutrient levels.

Packaged greens are also vulnerable to bacterial contamination. In packing houses, crops from many fields are washed in the same water, which allows bacteria from one field to spread to greens from clean fields. E. coli and other bacteria can hide in cut edges, safe from wash water.  Allowed to become warm for even a short time, the containers become perfect incubators for bacteria. The result is that bagged greens have sickened or killed consumers in dozens of outbreaks over the last several years.

In a 2010 investigation, Consumer Reports found that bags and containers of greens contained levels of coliform bacteria (which doesn’t make you sick, but is a sign of unsanitary handling) that were 39 percent higher than what is considered acceptable.

Avoiding packaged greens is simple: Buy whole heads or bunches and chop them yourself. While working on an article for the New York Times Magazine in 2011, I bought a head of romaine lettuce, rinsed the leaves individually, and chopped them. It took me two minutes and 53 seconds. As a bonus, I saved myself 80 cents.

3. Bluefin Tuna

Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean populations of Bluefin tuna are severely overfished. In the Atlantic, the species hovers on the brink of extinction. Some scientists say that it may have already passed the point of no return. In the Pacific, the population has been decimated by 96 percent. I liken eating bluefins to eating Bengal tigers. Both are beautiful, sleek predators. Bluefins can swim 60 miles per hour, dive to 4,000 feet, and migrate across oceans. Someone alive today could be the person who eats the last bluefin. I don’t want it to be me.

International organizations that are charged with setting catch limits for bluefins regularly set quotas far above what their own scientists recommend. And there has been a thriving market in illegally caught fish. If that’s not enough to put you off Bluefin, be warned, their flesh is extremely high in mercury.

4.  Out-of-Season Tomatoes

The first question is, why would you want to eat an out-of-season tomato? Most of the hard, pale orbs are pithy and tasteless, at best. Compared to their local, in-season cousins, they are bereft of nutrients. And varieties that do have a glimmer of tomato flavor are outrageously expensive.

But the real problem with winter tomatoes is the abuses suffered by the farmworkers who harvest them. These men and women in the tomato fields are underpaid, ill-housed, and often sprayed with toxic pesticides. Abject slavery is not uncommon. (I care so much about this topic that I wrote a book about it.)

In recent years, working conditions in Florida, the source of most American-grown winter tomatoes, have improved dramatically. New varieties have been developed that actually taste tomato-y, and most Florida growers have signed onto a Fair Food Program that guarantees workers some basic labor rights and provides them with a one-penny-a-pound raise (it doesn’t sound like much but it’s the difference between $50 and $80 a day).

However that’s only if—and it’s a big if—the end buyer of the tomatoes signs onto the program as well and agrees to pay that extra penny directly to the workers. So far, most fast-food and food-service companies have come aboard. But aside from Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods Market, not a single supermarket chain has signed on. Until they do, they won’t get my business.

5. Farmed Salmon

A salmon farm, even a so-called organic one in Scottish waters, is nothing short of a floating feedlot. Excrement, uneaten food, and dead fish fall into the ocean, along with a witch’s brew of drugs and disease organisms that can kill wild salmon unlucky enough to swim in the vicinity of a farm’s net pens. Farmed salmon are susceptible to infectious salmon anaemia, aquaculture’s answer to highly contagious hoof-and-mouth disease. The “cure” is to eradicate entire farmed Stocks consisting of millions of fish. Captive salmon also spread sea lice to wild fish. The parasites feed on the mucous, blood, and skin and can kill young salmon.

Farmed salmon is also potentially harmful to humans who eat it. Studies have shown that farmed salmon contains significantly higher levels of chemicals known to cause everything from neurological damage to cancer than wild salmon.

As a way to produce protein, farming salmon is illogical. Although feed formulas have improved over the years, salmon still have to eat more pounds of fishmeal and oil than they put on as meat. That meal they are fed comes from stocks of small sardine-like fish that are already caught at maximum sustainable levels. It’s far better to raise fish like tilapia that can be fed a vegetarian diet. But that’s not where the money is.

Fortunately, there is a good alternative to farmed salmon. Wild salmon from Alaska is sustainable and its taste will remind you why you wanted to eat salmon in the first place.

So what about my partner? Will she feel obligated to forsake bacon? My pork research is still in the early stages, so I don’t have a final answer. But at very least, it’s looking like we’re going to want to become very selective about what goes in our frying pan.

This?

Or this?

This post originally appeared on Civil Eats

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Some big questions remain.

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In the latest Food & Environment Reporting Network report, in partnership with The American Prospect, reporter Paul Greenberg, author of the New York Times bestseller Four Fish, tells the story of how the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is the  result of decades-long U.S. agricultural practices and investigates some of the promising solutions to fixing its future.

The story, “A River Runs Through It,” features a first look at some of the key players working to keep nutrients out of the Gulf, from a Minnesota conventional commodity farmer to a leading scientist who has studied the marsh ecosystem for 25 years, to a MacArthur genius grantee in Louisiana, who was one of the first to shed light on the dead zone phenomenon. Greenberg also talks with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, who supports voluntary interventions. “Part travelogue down the Mississippi River, part intense conversation with those who want to fix the dead zone, part mourner’s prayer for a way of life that is under threat, ‘A River Runs Through It’ is a remarkable piece–and I’m delighted the Prospect is publishing it,” said Kit Rachlis, The American Prospect’s Editor-in-Chief. The story was photographed by Dennis Chamberlin, a Pulitzer-prize winning photojournalist and an associate professor of journalism at Iowa State University, while Switchyard Media of Seattle produced the infographic. “This story was kind of a ‘perfect storm,’ because Paul’s such an exceptional reporter and writer,” said FERN Editor-in-Chief Sam Fromartz. “But we also knew Dennis’s memorable photos and Switchyard’s strong visual storytelling would engage readers as well. The American Prospect worked hand-in-hand with us through the entire process.” You can read the full report on the dead zone at The American Prospect, or here on FERN’s Web site,

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The following very timely post was written on April 26 by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman for the Onearth blog.

Today marks the deadline for public comments on a genetically modified salmon currently under review by the Food and Drug Administration. If approved, the fish will be the first transgenic animal ever to enter the human food supply. Some say it’s about time. In an op-ed that appeared last month in the New York Times under the title “Don’t Be Afraid of Genetic Modification,” science writer Emily Anthes explained that the company behind the fish, Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies, has been waiting more than 17 years for approval of its product.

Anthes, author of the just-published Frankenstein’s Cat: Cuddling up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts, called the FDA’s extension of the comment period on its environmental assessment (the original deadline was back in February) “just one more delay in a process that’s dragged on far too long.” The tests were in, she suggested, and the diagnosis an obvious one. Couldn’t we please put this poor company out of its misery and give its salmon the green light already?

Not so fast. . . .

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Last fall I flew halfway across the country to go grocery shopping with Everly Macario. We set out from her second-story apartment in Hyde Park near the University of Chicago and walked to the supermarket to buy a couple of rib steaks that Macario planned to serve to her husband and two children, ages 7 and 13. Macario, who is 46, holds a doctorate in public health from Harvard University and has spent decades as a consultant, working to prevent deaths from chronic conditions such as cancer and cardiac disease.

Yet she believes that what she buys—or more accurately, refuses to buy—in the supermarket is the most important action she takes, not only for her family’s health but for the health of every person in this country. “I am determined that no product from an animal that has been fed antibiotics will ever enter my home,” she said as we walked along the meat counter peering at beef, poultry and pork. “I look for labels that read ‘certified organic,’ ‘no antibiotics’ or ‘raised without antibiotics.’”

It’s not the antibiotics themselves that are troubling: animals pass the drugs through their systems long before they are slaughtered and animal products are tested for traces of antibiotics. What really worries Macario is the increasing wave of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that might be traveling on her food.

Macario has reason to be vigilant. Her 18-month-old son, Simon, died in 2004 from an infection known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (or MRSA, pronounced “mersa”). Simon was a husky, happy toddler. On his first birthday, Macario marveled to her husband that the baby had never been sick. Then one morning the boy awoke with, in Macario’s words, a “blood-curdling shriek.”

Read the rest at EatingWell.com

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The bad old days

Priest or pig farmer? Those were the only two callings that Russ Kremer ever considered. And really, it wasn’t even close.

Raised in the hamlet of Frankenstein in central Missouri, a few miles from where he still lives, Kremer wasn’t even old enough to attend grade school when his father gave him the job of bottle-feeding orphaned piglets in the house. By age six, he had graduated to tending sows and their litters. At eight, Kremer’s father handed him a recently weaned female and said, “She’s yours.” Kremer named her Honeysuckle and raised her like a pet, often lying beside her in her stall. She gave birth to 15 young — a challenge because she only had 13 nipples. Normally, at least three piglets would have died, but Kremer switched the babies on and off their mother during the critical early weeks. All 15 survived.

Happy days are here again.

For a time as a teenager, Kremer, a devout Catholic, considered becoming a priest. “I was always a person of faith,” he says. “I went to Catholic schools and was inspired by the work priests did to help people.” Even today, his voice, a soft twang, can take on reverential tones when he talks about his animals, and he’s been a life-long bachelor. But when he realized that he could never minister to a congregation and raise a herd of swine at the same time, he headed off to the University of Missouri, got a degree in animal husbandry, and returned home.

Instead of the catechism, he followed the canon of modern agribusiness.

To get more profit from the land, which his family had farmed for five generations, Kremer erected a long, low warehouse-like building and cycled 2,400 hogs a year through his operation. It wasn’t pretty. The sows that produced his piglets spent their entire lives confined to gestation and farrowing crates — metal enclosures barely larger than the animals themselves, which barely allowed them to move. The piglets grew up cheek by jowl in metal pens. Stressed and sickly, the animals were fed a constant diet of commercial feed laced with low levels of antibiotics. Slatted concrete floors allowed their excrement to drop into a vast pit below the barn. Massive fans pushed out poisonous gasses from the pit. In the mid-1980s, a thunderstorm struck in the predawn hours of a Sunday morning, knocking out power. Within a few hours, more than 200 hogs suffocated from the gas. Instead of going to church that morning, Kremer dug a pit and buried them.

“Raising pigs like that was the worst mistake I ever made,” he says.

The last straw came in 1989, when a 700-pound boar, eager to service a receptive sow, sliced open Kremer’s knee with one of its tusks. The leg became infected and ballooned to twice its normal size. Doctors treated him with a half dozen different antibiotics, but the virulent Streptococcus suisbacteria proved to be resistant to all of them. Kremer developed heart palpitations. His family was told to prepare for the worst.

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Civil Eats, one of my very favorite sources of information about food-related issues, has just been relaunched, and I’m delighted to report that it’s better than ever. Anyone who has an interest in the material covered by Politics of the Plate should bookmark Civil Eats. You’ll be visiting it often for the latest from the world of sustainable food.

This from the Civil Eats editors:

When we started Civil Eats in 2009, we saw a need to create a trusted community supported blog about food politics, from policy being made on Capitol Hill to new projects seeking to change our food system sprouting up on Main Street and everything in between. Since then, we’ve had 2.5 million pageviews, with clicks coming from decision makers in Washington, D.C. and ordinary citizens across the nation. We are proud to have featured the work of over 200 contributors. We hope to continue to grow our readership and find new ways to inform and provide resources to everyone interested in food politics. Today, we share with you the new vision of Civil Eats (in beta, of course, while we iron out the wrinkles). 

Visit Civil Eats

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