By Tom Philpott
Grist Magazine 30 Aug 2007
Earlier this month, President Bush roiled U.S. vegetable farmers by announcing a crackdown on undocumented workers. Last week, industrial-meat giant Smithfield Foods goosed the hog-futures market by inking a deal to export 60 million pounds of U.S.-grown pork to China. These events, unrelated though they seem, illustrate a common point: that despite all the recent fuss around local food, the globalized food system, far from losing strength, continues to gain traction.
The apple doesn't fall far from the tree -- especially if no one's there to pick it.
Unwittingly or not, Bush's move puts a heavy squeeze on large-scale U.S. vegetable growers, and will likely result in more food hauled in from nations with weaker environmental regulations. Smithfield's triumph in China reflects that nation's diminishing food-production capacity -- one of the prices it has paid for its rise to global manufacturing preeminence. As more and more industrially produced food whips around the globe, the result is more pressure on soil and water resources, more greenhouse-gas emissions, and more fertile land made vulnerable to suburban sprawl. In this article and the next, I'll attempt to illuminate how global economic forces shift food production from one place to another, to the detriment of local communities and the environment alike.
Bottom of the Barrel
As U.S. fruit and vegetable farms have scaled up to meet the demands of increasingly large buyers like Wal-Mart, they've come to rely on a steady supply of low-wage and highly flexible workers, willing to toil long hours at peak seasons and make themselves scarce when not needed. Moreover, these mega-farms increasingly specialize in one or two crops, and rely heavily on poisons to keep pests and weeds away. Thus in addition to being poorly paid and monotonous, the work tends to be dangerous -- and undesirable for anyone with other options.
Not surprisingly, according to most estimates, 70 percent of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented, the great bulk of them underground refugees from the devastated rural economies of Mexico and Central America. For several seasons now, fruit and vegetable farmers have had to scramble to find enough workers to harvest their crops. One factor in the labor shortage has been an increasingly militarized border, making it more difficult for would-be workers to cross over. Another has been the building boom, which has lured undocumented workers into higher-paying construction jobs.Thus farmers in production centers like California and Arizona were already tense about the labor situation when Bush rolled out his hodgepodge of measures designed to force farmers (and other employers) to stop relying on undocumented workers. (For the record, as I've written before, I think it's schizophrenic and childish to make a big show of hunting down and deporting the people who feed you.) Farmers across the country quickly cried foul. In New York's Hudson Valley, where workers come from Mexico and Central America, apple growers fear a bumper crop could largely wither on the branches. "We have 3 billion apples to pick this fall and every single one of them has to be picked by hand," one grower told The New York Times. "It's a very labor-intensive industry, and there is no local labor supply that we can draw from, as much as we try. No one locally really wants to pick apples for six weeks in the fall."Down in Arizona -- epicenter of winter vegetable production in the U.S. -- farmers are taking a cue from their peers in Colorado and desperately hiring inmate labor. But an Arizona prison official acknowledged to The Christian Science Monitor that, as in Colorado, inmates can offset only a fraction of the state's farm-labor shortage. Bush's move came at the height of harvest season in California -- source of about half of the fruits and vegetables grown in the U.S. "I'm guessing 80, 90 percent of the ag work force is illegal," one grower told the Associated Press. "Implementing this rule will be catastrophic."
Less Veggies, More Sprawl
In a well-functioning market, farmers would raise wages to draw in more workers, and pass the increased costs on to their buyers: the big supermarkets, restaurant chains, and food processors. But as a California Farm Bureau official told AP, those entities will likely reject domestic price hikes and look to other parts of the world for produce. "If our guys try to raise prices, they are going to be replaced by foreign production," he said. In essence, he's arguing that fruit and vegetable farming, like manufacturing over the past generation, has entered a "race to the bottom": a relentless hunt for cheap labor markets and lax regulatory regimes.Is that just Farm Bureau spin? Not likely. Indeed, the U.S. is already outsourcing an increasing share of its fruit and veg production. As this USDA backgrounder [PDF] from April 2006 shows, the import share of U.S. vegetable consumption has been rising steadily, from about 7 percent in 1990 to 14 percent in 2005. Fruit imports (excluding bananas) as a percentage of consumption have also doubled, rising from 12 percent in 1992-1994 to 24 percent in 2002-2004. Much of that jump can be explained by off-season purchases -- the Chilean-asparagus-in-January effect.
But with marketing relationships and trade infrastructure in place, nothing stops distributors from buying, say, cheaper Mexico-grown lettuce over California product, or New Zealand apples over those grown in New York or Washington. California has already seen its once-huge garlic production dwindle, overwhelmed by a flood of cheap -- and nearly flavorless -- Chinese-grown garlic into the U.S. market. What happens when farmers can no longer work their land profitably? They generally sell it to developers, and land under cultivation succumbs to low-density sprawl. Again, that's already happening in California. In the state's lush Central Valley, home to probably the nation's most valuable territory for growing fruits and vegetables, developers bulldozed 100,000 acres of prime farmland in the 1990s alone, according to American Farmland Trust. If present trends continue, AFT warns, another million acres of farmland could vanish within a generation. Meanwhile, production of the fruits and vegetables we consume shifts to nations with even weaker regulatory regimes than ours, meaning more insecticides and other agricultural chemicals released into the biosphere. And increasing distances mean burning more fossil fuel to haul that suspect bounty from farm to table. While these grand global trends are indeed overwhelming to think about, there's no need to feel disempowered. Get involved with burgeoning movements, nationwide and globally, to rebuild local (and, yes, regional) food systems that don't thrive by exploiting labor and trashing the land.
Meanwhile, while U.S. vegetable farming gets squeezed between labor shortages and global competition, other, less labor-intensive forms of U.S. agriculture -- namely industrial grain and meat production -- thrive in the global marketplace. And that will be the topic of the next column.
Grist contributing writer Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
China food safety woes show U.S. vulnerability
It's not what you eat but where it comes from
By Emre Peker, Medill News Service
Last Update: 12:01 AM ET Aug 29, 2007
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- First, back in 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned Chinese honey that was found to be contaminated with potentially harmful antibiotics. Then, in May of this year, the FDA traced a tainted supply of pet food to a Chinese supplier of wheat gluten. A month later, the agency added shrimp, catfish and eel to its growing list of Chinese imports that are threatening consumer safety.
Despite all these headlines and the ensuing flurry of finger-pointing on Capitol Hill, China is not the worst offender: It ranks third behind Mexico and India among countries whose products have been refused by the FDA, the government agency responsible for safeguarding about 80% of America's food supply. The Department of Agriculture is responsible for regulating the other 20%, specifically meat, poultry and processed egg products.
Federal agencies have the power to detain and ban imports, and lawmakers have promised to take action to better safeguard the country's food supply. However, the recent spate of Chinese food safety breaches highlights a new problem: As domestic consumption of imported food rises and foreign produce enters the U.S. from more than 300 ports, the FDA's capacity to monitor import safety simply cannot keep up.
"More and more of these imports are coming from developing nations, which don't have strong regulatory systems," said William Hubbard, former associate commissioner of the FDA, in an interview with MarketWatch. "Today you have food coming in huge volumes from hundreds of countries and many different types of food... The world has changed radically ... [and] these changes pose a problem."
America's reliance on imported food grew by more than 30% over 10 years, with imports reaching 15% of total food consumption in 2005, according to a July report by the Congressional Research Service. The report also showed the amount of Chinese food exports to the U.S. more than tripled from 1996 to 2006 to 1.8 million metric tons, enough food to feed about 2 million Americans for a whole year.
Meanwhile, the FDA, by its own numbers, inspected 1% or less of all incoming products in 2006, down from 1.7% in 1996.
Over the past year, the FDA has come under increased scrutiny for failing to protect the national food supply. Even before China made headlines with unsafe products, consumers also heard warnings about contamination of domestically produced spinach, lettuce and peanut butter, all of which were recalled.
"It's just suddenly coming to the fore that we have problems [and] that we have to drastically revise our systems," said Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union.
"Frankly, I don't want to rely on [self-policing] -- it only works when there is some enforcement."
Unsafe food takes a significant toll on the public. Each year, nearly 76 million Americans contract food-borne diseases, about 325,000 require hospitalization and about 5,000 die, according to a Government Accountability Office report released in February.
The GAO characterized the nation's food safety system as "high risk," noting "inconsistent oversight, ineffective coordination and inefficient use of resources." Adding to these problems are the changing nature of and the increasing dependence on food imports to the U.S.
Take, for example, wheat gluten, a high-protein product used in baked goods, vegetarian fake meat, pet foods, chicken nuggets, turkey burgers and imitation crabmeat. The U.S. imports 80% of the wheat gluten it consumes, including 14% from China. Also consider a product banned in the U.S.: melamine, which can enhance the protein content of animal feed but is digestible only by animals with more than one stomach, such as cows.
Two Chinese companies used melamine to boost the protein content of wheat gluten, which was sold to the U.S. and ended up in American-produced pet food. The FDA said it received more than 17,000 related consumer complaints related to the contamination, including the reported deaths of more than 4,000 cats and dogs.
"There are definitely times when things happen we don't expect," said Dr. David Acheson, recently appointed as the FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection. "Melamine in wheat gluten was an example of that. We did not consider wheat gluten to be a high-risk product."
In today's global food chain, the FDA's inspection of only one in 100 imports may not be enough to identify unexpected problems. Acheson maintains that the solution is not a higher number of inspections, but "more sophisticated and smarter" inspections. However, some trade partners still manage to get by with a little punishment, some happenstance and a bit of cunning.
In one instance, a government investigation found that after the FDA banned toothpaste from certain Chinese exporters for containing a deadly ingredient substituted to cut costs, brokers continued to import the item under the guise of a toothbrush, which was combined with the original product.
The ongoing entry of substandard products to the U.S. illustrates the holes in America's food safety net, but lawmakers and the FDA have different ideas for fixing it.
Incensed by the continued news of contaminated imports, Congress took action this year. Lawmakers held hearings, introduced legislation and even considered food's vulnerability to terrorist plots.
"The recent series of tainted food recalls has focused America's attention on the sorry state of federal oversight of the domestic food supply," said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, D-Mich. "This must change."
On the other hand, the FDA is calling for "enhanced collaboration" with foreign countries and "industry vigilance." The FDA proposal contained a controversial clause that would close seven of its 13 field laboratories over two years and consolidate its operations in six centrally controlled super labs, but that was recently withdrawn after consumer groups and lawmakers said the measure would further limit the agency's oversight capabilities.
The agency's proposal, which stresses risk assessment and stronger scientific analysis, came under fire during a House committee food safety hearing in July.
"The administration thinks that a leaner and meaner system is going to protect American consumers, but in fact it puts them at greater risk," said Dingell, who came out with a draft food safety bill before Congress went on recess in August.
Of the FDA proposal, Acheson said, "The goal is to test more products, to test it faster and to test it more efficiently and therefore cheaper. The shift here for the agency is trying to move more from being reactive, more to being proactive in terms of preventing the problems in the first place."
The FDA has field employees in about 90 ports of entry, about a quarter of all ports that receive agency-regulated imports. The government investigation found that during a typical day in the FDA's San Francisco office, which the agency wants to close, a safety reviewer would check about 1,000 entries -- or about one entry line every 30 seconds. It also said a single entry of Chinese herbs can take more than one hour to review.
Dingell's draft bill calls for charging manufacturers and importers user fees of about $500 million a year, restricting entries to ports in metropolitan areas with FDA labs, barring the agency's lab closures and consolidations, boosting civil fines and creating a certification system that would require foreign producers to meet U.S. standards. Committee staffers said the draft legislation would be finalized and introduced in the fall.
Other lawmakers have put forth similar bills, two of which aim to create a Food Safety Administration that would consolidate the review process in one agency.
Hubbard, the former FDA assistant commissioner who is now a senior adviser at the Coalition for a Stronger FDA, sees the creation of a single agency as unlikely and instead advocates strengthening the FDA -- fast.
"This isn't just a China issue. There are lots of other developing countries that are sending food to us," Hubbard said. "There's a long way to go, and Congress doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry to get there."
By Emre Peker, Medill News Service
Last Update: 12:01 AM ET Aug 29, 2007
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- First, back in 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned Chinese honey that was found to be contaminated with potentially harmful antibiotics. Then, in May of this year, the FDA traced a tainted supply of pet food to a Chinese supplier of wheat gluten. A month later, the agency added shrimp, catfish and eel to its growing list of Chinese imports that are threatening consumer safety.
Despite all these headlines and the ensuing flurry of finger-pointing on Capitol Hill, China is not the worst offender: It ranks third behind Mexico and India among countries whose products have been refused by the FDA, the government agency responsible for safeguarding about 80% of America's food supply. The Department of Agriculture is responsible for regulating the other 20%, specifically meat, poultry and processed egg products.
Federal agencies have the power to detain and ban imports, and lawmakers have promised to take action to better safeguard the country's food supply. However, the recent spate of Chinese food safety breaches highlights a new problem: As domestic consumption of imported food rises and foreign produce enters the U.S. from more than 300 ports, the FDA's capacity to monitor import safety simply cannot keep up.
"More and more of these imports are coming from developing nations, which don't have strong regulatory systems," said William Hubbard, former associate commissioner of the FDA, in an interview with MarketWatch. "Today you have food coming in huge volumes from hundreds of countries and many different types of food... The world has changed radically ... [and] these changes pose a problem."
America's reliance on imported food grew by more than 30% over 10 years, with imports reaching 15% of total food consumption in 2005, according to a July report by the Congressional Research Service. The report also showed the amount of Chinese food exports to the U.S. more than tripled from 1996 to 2006 to 1.8 million metric tons, enough food to feed about 2 million Americans for a whole year.
Meanwhile, the FDA, by its own numbers, inspected 1% or less of all incoming products in 2006, down from 1.7% in 1996.
Over the past year, the FDA has come under increased scrutiny for failing to protect the national food supply. Even before China made headlines with unsafe products, consumers also heard warnings about contamination of domestically produced spinach, lettuce and peanut butter, all of which were recalled.
"It's just suddenly coming to the fore that we have problems [and] that we have to drastically revise our systems," said Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives at Consumers Union.
"Frankly, I don't want to rely on [self-policing] -- it only works when there is some enforcement."
Unsafe food takes a significant toll on the public. Each year, nearly 76 million Americans contract food-borne diseases, about 325,000 require hospitalization and about 5,000 die, according to a Government Accountability Office report released in February.
The GAO characterized the nation's food safety system as "high risk," noting "inconsistent oversight, ineffective coordination and inefficient use of resources." Adding to these problems are the changing nature of and the increasing dependence on food imports to the U.S.
Take, for example, wheat gluten, a high-protein product used in baked goods, vegetarian fake meat, pet foods, chicken nuggets, turkey burgers and imitation crabmeat. The U.S. imports 80% of the wheat gluten it consumes, including 14% from China. Also consider a product banned in the U.S.: melamine, which can enhance the protein content of animal feed but is digestible only by animals with more than one stomach, such as cows.
Two Chinese companies used melamine to boost the protein content of wheat gluten, which was sold to the U.S. and ended up in American-produced pet food. The FDA said it received more than 17,000 related consumer complaints related to the contamination, including the reported deaths of more than 4,000 cats and dogs.
"There are definitely times when things happen we don't expect," said Dr. David Acheson, recently appointed as the FDA's assistant commissioner for food protection. "Melamine in wheat gluten was an example of that. We did not consider wheat gluten to be a high-risk product."
In today's global food chain, the FDA's inspection of only one in 100 imports may not be enough to identify unexpected problems. Acheson maintains that the solution is not a higher number of inspections, but "more sophisticated and smarter" inspections. However, some trade partners still manage to get by with a little punishment, some happenstance and a bit of cunning.
In one instance, a government investigation found that after the FDA banned toothpaste from certain Chinese exporters for containing a deadly ingredient substituted to cut costs, brokers continued to import the item under the guise of a toothbrush, which was combined with the original product.
The ongoing entry of substandard products to the U.S. illustrates the holes in America's food safety net, but lawmakers and the FDA have different ideas for fixing it.
Incensed by the continued news of contaminated imports, Congress took action this year. Lawmakers held hearings, introduced legislation and even considered food's vulnerability to terrorist plots.
"The recent series of tainted food recalls has focused America's attention on the sorry state of federal oversight of the domestic food supply," said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, D-Mich. "This must change."
On the other hand, the FDA is calling for "enhanced collaboration" with foreign countries and "industry vigilance." The FDA proposal contained a controversial clause that would close seven of its 13 field laboratories over two years and consolidate its operations in six centrally controlled super labs, but that was recently withdrawn after consumer groups and lawmakers said the measure would further limit the agency's oversight capabilities.
The agency's proposal, which stresses risk assessment and stronger scientific analysis, came under fire during a House committee food safety hearing in July.
"The administration thinks that a leaner and meaner system is going to protect American consumers, but in fact it puts them at greater risk," said Dingell, who came out with a draft food safety bill before Congress went on recess in August.
Of the FDA proposal, Acheson said, "The goal is to test more products, to test it faster and to test it more efficiently and therefore cheaper. The shift here for the agency is trying to move more from being reactive, more to being proactive in terms of preventing the problems in the first place."
The FDA has field employees in about 90 ports of entry, about a quarter of all ports that receive agency-regulated imports. The government investigation found that during a typical day in the FDA's San Francisco office, which the agency wants to close, a safety reviewer would check about 1,000 entries -- or about one entry line every 30 seconds. It also said a single entry of Chinese herbs can take more than one hour to review.
Dingell's draft bill calls for charging manufacturers and importers user fees of about $500 million a year, restricting entries to ports in metropolitan areas with FDA labs, barring the agency's lab closures and consolidations, boosting civil fines and creating a certification system that would require foreign producers to meet U.S. standards. Committee staffers said the draft legislation would be finalized and introduced in the fall.
Other lawmakers have put forth similar bills, two of which aim to create a Food Safety Administration that would consolidate the review process in one agency.
Hubbard, the former FDA assistant commissioner who is now a senior adviser at the Coalition for a Stronger FDA, sees the creation of a single agency as unlikely and instead advocates strengthening the FDA -- fast.
"This isn't just a China issue. There are lots of other developing countries that are sending food to us," Hubbard said. "There's a long way to go, and Congress doesn't seem to be in much of a hurry to get there."
Thursday, August 23, 2007
The Geography of Flavor
Bringing a European Idea Down to Earth: Producers, Farmers Pin Hopes on the Appeal of 'Terroir'
By Jane Black, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, August 22, 2007; F01
It was a risky move back in 2004 for Arlin Wasserman to launch his Minneapolis consultancy, Changing Tastes. His expertise: the esoteric concept of "terroir," a French term that literally translates as terrain but has come to mean the way foods and wine express the soil, climate, culture and tradition of a region. His proposition: show farmers and manufacturers how to sell food based not on price, but on where it comes from and how it is grown.
Americans are familiar with Vidalia onions, Idaho potatoes and Florida oranges. But even in gourmet circles, "people didn't know what 'terroir' meant," Wasserman recalled. "So we had to start to use words that made sense to businesses, like 'identity preservation' or 'geographic identity.' "
Google didn't seem to know what Wasserman was talking about, either. Back then, a search for the term "terroir" turned up almost no results, prompting the search engine to ask whether users had misspelled "terror."
Three years later, Wasserman has a growing roster of clients, from General Mills to a co-op of Amish goat and lamb farmers, as well as a group of Minnesota artisans with a line of charcuterie, preserves and wild rice dishes in the works. Similar projects are taking shape across the country. On Lummi Island, off the coast of Washington, salmon fishermen have formed a co-op to sell local sockeye salmon caught in reef nets, a traditional Native American method. Researchers in Iowa have done feasibility studies on bringing back the Muscatine melon (see "Certified Levels of Terroir," Page F6), a variety of cantaloupe that owes its juicy fragrance to the sandy soil on the banks of the Mississippi, and I-80 beef, ultra-marbled steaks from the northwest corner of the state.
Terroir may sound like just another opportunity for elite gourmets to one-up one another at dinner parties. But Wasserman is at the cutting edge of a new trend to bring the concept into everyday conversation and into the neighborhood grocery store.
Terroir has the potential to promote a variety of interests in ways that simple origin labeling, as with Vidalia onions, can't. Farmers believe that the focus on growing conditions and production methods will make their products stand out in a market where low prices reign supreme.
Economists see terroir as a device to help restore and protect rural communities; if farmers can earn more money, they're more likely to stay on the land. Others believe that promoting terroir could help quell fears about food safety.
The one group that has yet to embrace the concept, however, is the American consumer. Just say terroir (pronounced tare-WAHR) and, even at Whole Foods Market, you're likely to get a blank stare. "Where it comes from doesn't fit into how we think about food," said Amy Trubek, a University of Vermont professor of anthropology and author of the upcoming book "The Taste of Place: Food, Culture and the Pleasures of Terroir."
That's not the case in Europe, where consumers understand that champagne owes its finesse to double fermentation of the wine and the cool climate of the Champagne region of France. Much of the credit goes to European governments, which have stepped up to define, and protect, unique growing areas.
The first protected region in Europe dates to 1855, when Napoleon III established the Grand Crus areas of Bordeaux. Later, other wine regions were recognized, as were areas of traditional food production, such as Parma, which produces prosciutto, and Modena, which is famed for its balsamic vinegar. In 1992, the European Union introduced regulations to protect these so-called designations of origin. Over the past 15 years, the E.U. has identified 746 place-based foods.
Such traditions, and the bureaucracies that protect them, were never established in America. Indeed, the U.S. government remains locked in a battle with the E.U. over its demand that American producers refrain from using product names such as "feta," which by E.U. law is made only in Greece, and "champagne."
"We went to the Industrialized Age almost immediately," Trubek said. "We never had cute little towns with wine-and-cheese traditions. The American experience is all about expansion, to make it bigger, to keep moving."
Two hundred years later, an unlikely coalition is joining forces to invent American tradition by linking foods to the places they come from and, like American winemakers before them, to romance. Their hope is to offer a counterbalance to the commodity mentality that a strawberry from California is interchangeable with one grown in Florida.
Studies show that the strategy can be profitable. According to a May 2004 survey conducted by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, 56 percent of respondents were willing to pay at least 10 percent more for a place-based food, or "produit du terroir." The survey also revealed that 65 percent of respondents preferred products that would give farmers a higher percentage of profits than processors, distributors and retailers.
The theory has borne out for fishermen on Lummi Island. Five years ago, they formed a co-op and agreed to catch salmon with reef nets. The contraptions, a modernized version of a Native American invention, consist of an artificial underwater reef made of plastic ribbons. Fishermen stand on tall towers above the water and watch for salmon to swim into the reef, then pull up the nets, spilling the fish into an underwater pen in the boat's center. The fish are then moved into a separate tank, where their gills are cut and they swim slowly to their deaths.
It sounds cruel, but Lummi Island fishermen claim it's far less stressful than contemporary methods in which fish die full of adrenaline, struggling for breath on the deck of a commercial fishing vessel. "Reef-net fish have this amazing flavor," co-op member Ian Kirouac said. "We wanted to identify ourselves with a strong sense of place. There's a big difference between what we do and what other people do. "
By advertising their technique and the place of origin, this Lummi Island co-op has been able to command a premium for its fish, both from retailers and restaurant clients. Commodity sockeye salmon sell for about $3.25 a pound wholesale, while Lummi Island's fetch as much as $5.25 per pound.
Across the country, Vermont maple syrup producers are exploring how terroir can make their product stand out in a crowded marketplace. Led by Trubek, a team of researchers initiated a program in 2006 to test whether a syrup made from trees sitting on limestone bedrock has a flavor distinctly different from syrup made from trees growing on shale or schist. The researchers have yet to report on their findings, but the Vermont Department of Agriculture is paying close attention.
Cheaper Canadian syrups are now widely available. Many are made using reverse-osmosis technology that drastically reduces the amount of time the syrup needs to be boiled. The result, said Henry Markres, the agency's chief of consumer protection and official maple specialist, is that they taste simply sweet rather than maple-y. "People used to just accept that Vermont maple syrup was the best in the world," Markres said. "Anything we can do to quantify the uniqueness of Vermont will help."
Rural economists looking for alternatives to commodity crops for Midwestern farmers have watched such projects with interest and have conducted research to determine which heartland foods might have broad appeal. For example, researchers at Iowa State University assessed the potential for I-80 beef, terroir-based corn-fed beef from the ranches along Interstate 80, in answer to Japanese customers' clamoring for juicier, more marbled steaks. The project established such feeding standards as a minimum of 180 days on a diet of corn and documented how ranchers could distribute the product and protect the brand.
The project hasn't taken off -- yet. Spurred by fears of mad cow disease, Japan banned imports of American beef a second time in January. "The ideas of what could be profitable shifted," said Rich Pirog, associate director of Iowa State's Leopold Center. "Terroir is a harder sell here than it was a few years ago."
Still, Pirog thinks the concept will slowly become a part of the Midwest's agricultural landscape. Agritourism gives the concept a boost; if you taste a great farmstead cheese in Wisconsin, you're likely to seek it out back at home.
Concerns about food safety will be a motivating factor, too. "There is a demand from consumers who want to know where their food comes from. Place-based foods offer that kind of transparency," Pirog said.
The final driver, ironically, is globalization. "Our farmers are competing in a global market, and everyone else is using the concept to their advantage," said Gary Nabhan, co-founder of Slow Food's Renewing America's Food Tradition program. He cited the success of French cheesemakers, Mexican tequila distillers and Egyptian date and olive growers.
Even here at home: In May, Napa and the Napa Valley became the first American wine regions to be recognized by the E.U.
By Jane Black, Washington Post Staff Writer, Wednesday, August 22, 2007; F01
It was a risky move back in 2004 for Arlin Wasserman to launch his Minneapolis consultancy, Changing Tastes. His expertise: the esoteric concept of "terroir," a French term that literally translates as terrain but has come to mean the way foods and wine express the soil, climate, culture and tradition of a region. His proposition: show farmers and manufacturers how to sell food based not on price, but on where it comes from and how it is grown.
Americans are familiar with Vidalia onions, Idaho potatoes and Florida oranges. But even in gourmet circles, "people didn't know what 'terroir' meant," Wasserman recalled. "So we had to start to use words that made sense to businesses, like 'identity preservation' or 'geographic identity.' "
Google didn't seem to know what Wasserman was talking about, either. Back then, a search for the term "terroir" turned up almost no results, prompting the search engine to ask whether users had misspelled "terror."
Three years later, Wasserman has a growing roster of clients, from General Mills to a co-op of Amish goat and lamb farmers, as well as a group of Minnesota artisans with a line of charcuterie, preserves and wild rice dishes in the works. Similar projects are taking shape across the country. On Lummi Island, off the coast of Washington, salmon fishermen have formed a co-op to sell local sockeye salmon caught in reef nets, a traditional Native American method. Researchers in Iowa have done feasibility studies on bringing back the Muscatine melon (see "Certified Levels of Terroir," Page F6), a variety of cantaloupe that owes its juicy fragrance to the sandy soil on the banks of the Mississippi, and I-80 beef, ultra-marbled steaks from the northwest corner of the state.
Terroir may sound like just another opportunity for elite gourmets to one-up one another at dinner parties. But Wasserman is at the cutting edge of a new trend to bring the concept into everyday conversation and into the neighborhood grocery store.
Terroir has the potential to promote a variety of interests in ways that simple origin labeling, as with Vidalia onions, can't. Farmers believe that the focus on growing conditions and production methods will make their products stand out in a market where low prices reign supreme.
Economists see terroir as a device to help restore and protect rural communities; if farmers can earn more money, they're more likely to stay on the land. Others believe that promoting terroir could help quell fears about food safety.
The one group that has yet to embrace the concept, however, is the American consumer. Just say terroir (pronounced tare-WAHR) and, even at Whole Foods Market, you're likely to get a blank stare. "Where it comes from doesn't fit into how we think about food," said Amy Trubek, a University of Vermont professor of anthropology and author of the upcoming book "The Taste of Place: Food, Culture and the Pleasures of Terroir."
That's not the case in Europe, where consumers understand that champagne owes its finesse to double fermentation of the wine and the cool climate of the Champagne region of France. Much of the credit goes to European governments, which have stepped up to define, and protect, unique growing areas.
The first protected region in Europe dates to 1855, when Napoleon III established the Grand Crus areas of Bordeaux. Later, other wine regions were recognized, as were areas of traditional food production, such as Parma, which produces prosciutto, and Modena, which is famed for its balsamic vinegar. In 1992, the European Union introduced regulations to protect these so-called designations of origin. Over the past 15 years, the E.U. has identified 746 place-based foods.
Such traditions, and the bureaucracies that protect them, were never established in America. Indeed, the U.S. government remains locked in a battle with the E.U. over its demand that American producers refrain from using product names such as "feta," which by E.U. law is made only in Greece, and "champagne."
"We went to the Industrialized Age almost immediately," Trubek said. "We never had cute little towns with wine-and-cheese traditions. The American experience is all about expansion, to make it bigger, to keep moving."
Two hundred years later, an unlikely coalition is joining forces to invent American tradition by linking foods to the places they come from and, like American winemakers before them, to romance. Their hope is to offer a counterbalance to the commodity mentality that a strawberry from California is interchangeable with one grown in Florida.
Studies show that the strategy can be profitable. According to a May 2004 survey conducted by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, 56 percent of respondents were willing to pay at least 10 percent more for a place-based food, or "produit du terroir." The survey also revealed that 65 percent of respondents preferred products that would give farmers a higher percentage of profits than processors, distributors and retailers.
The theory has borne out for fishermen on Lummi Island. Five years ago, they formed a co-op and agreed to catch salmon with reef nets. The contraptions, a modernized version of a Native American invention, consist of an artificial underwater reef made of plastic ribbons. Fishermen stand on tall towers above the water and watch for salmon to swim into the reef, then pull up the nets, spilling the fish into an underwater pen in the boat's center. The fish are then moved into a separate tank, where their gills are cut and they swim slowly to their deaths.
It sounds cruel, but Lummi Island fishermen claim it's far less stressful than contemporary methods in which fish die full of adrenaline, struggling for breath on the deck of a commercial fishing vessel. "Reef-net fish have this amazing flavor," co-op member Ian Kirouac said. "We wanted to identify ourselves with a strong sense of place. There's a big difference between what we do and what other people do. "
By advertising their technique and the place of origin, this Lummi Island co-op has been able to command a premium for its fish, both from retailers and restaurant clients. Commodity sockeye salmon sell for about $3.25 a pound wholesale, while Lummi Island's fetch as much as $5.25 per pound.
Across the country, Vermont maple syrup producers are exploring how terroir can make their product stand out in a crowded marketplace. Led by Trubek, a team of researchers initiated a program in 2006 to test whether a syrup made from trees sitting on limestone bedrock has a flavor distinctly different from syrup made from trees growing on shale or schist. The researchers have yet to report on their findings, but the Vermont Department of Agriculture is paying close attention.
Cheaper Canadian syrups are now widely available. Many are made using reverse-osmosis technology that drastically reduces the amount of time the syrup needs to be boiled. The result, said Henry Markres, the agency's chief of consumer protection and official maple specialist, is that they taste simply sweet rather than maple-y. "People used to just accept that Vermont maple syrup was the best in the world," Markres said. "Anything we can do to quantify the uniqueness of Vermont will help."
Rural economists looking for alternatives to commodity crops for Midwestern farmers have watched such projects with interest and have conducted research to determine which heartland foods might have broad appeal. For example, researchers at Iowa State University assessed the potential for I-80 beef, terroir-based corn-fed beef from the ranches along Interstate 80, in answer to Japanese customers' clamoring for juicier, more marbled steaks. The project established such feeding standards as a minimum of 180 days on a diet of corn and documented how ranchers could distribute the product and protect the brand.
The project hasn't taken off -- yet. Spurred by fears of mad cow disease, Japan banned imports of American beef a second time in January. "The ideas of what could be profitable shifted," said Rich Pirog, associate director of Iowa State's Leopold Center. "Terroir is a harder sell here than it was a few years ago."
Still, Pirog thinks the concept will slowly become a part of the Midwest's agricultural landscape. Agritourism gives the concept a boost; if you taste a great farmstead cheese in Wisconsin, you're likely to seek it out back at home.
Concerns about food safety will be a motivating factor, too. "There is a demand from consumers who want to know where their food comes from. Place-based foods offer that kind of transparency," Pirog said.
The final driver, ironically, is globalization. "Our farmers are competing in a global market, and everyone else is using the concept to their advantage," said Gary Nabhan, co-founder of Slow Food's Renewing America's Food Tradition program. He cited the success of French cheesemakers, Mexican tequila distillers and Egyptian date and olive growers.
Even here at home: In May, Napa and the Napa Valley became the first American wine regions to be recognized by the E.U.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
More food imports from Mexico, not China, turned away
More food imports from Mexico, not China, turned away. In past year, inspectors found salmonella, other defects in goods entering the U.S.
By CHASE DAVIS Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle, August 16, 2007
Despite widespread alarm over tainted seafood from China making its way to American consumers, federal inspectors during the past year have turned away even more food shipments from Mexico — Texas' largest trading partner, according to a review by the Houston Chronicle.
Citing salmonella, prohibited pesticides and other defects, FDA inspectors refused more than 1,330 Mexican food shipments from July 2006 through last month, including fresh vegetables, processed foods and dietary supplements, according to inspection records from the Food and Drug Administration.
The refusals represent a small share of the roughly $198 billion in goods imported from the country last year, much of which entered through Texas trade hubs such as Laredo and Houston.
As the country's primary trade gateway to Mexico, Texas receives nearly 2 million shipments each year, according to FDA records. But most of that cargo is not inspected by hand — only 1 to 2 percent, according to FDA estimates.
"If it's a commodity that has no history of violations, it'll probably pass right on through," said Dan Sowards, food safety officer for the Texas Department of State Health Services, which regulates distribution centers that often house imported food. "What the FDA does is a snapshot."
Though FDA refusals account for less than 1 percent of goods entering the country each year, they provide a glimpse into what lawmakers have called an overburdened system for inspecting U.S. food and drug imports.
"If you look at the numbers, it's China and Mexico and India," said U.S. Rep. Gene Green, D-Houston, whose district includes the Port of Houston. China, which exports less food to the U.S. than Mexico, had about 930 food shipments rejected between July 2006 and July 2007.
"But there's a lack of resources to do more inspections," Green said. "We need to point this out."
Agency criticizedExperts and lawmakers argue that a lack of inspection resources, paired with a growing demand for imports, have exposed more Americans to harm from contaminated food. Food-borne illnesses hospitalize more than 300,000 Americans and kill about 5,000 each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In House subcommittee hearings last month, Green and other lawmakers criticized the agency for proposing to close several product testing labs amid budgetary concerns — a plan the FDA has since suspended.
"Instead of laying off microbiologists and chemists, we need to be sure we keep them and expand them," Green said in an interview. "If necessary, if we want to be sure what we're buying is safe, we might need to put an inspection fee on it."
FDA spokeswoman Catherine McDermott said that although inspectors have been stretched thin, "inspections are thoroughly carried out."
Tainted Mexican imports have made headlines several times in recent years. In 2002, the FDA banned the import of Mexican cantaloupes after they were linked to salmonella outbreaks.
Appearances countMore recently, in 2004, certain candies were found to contain dangerous amounts of lead, prompting several state investigations, including one in Texas.
Both products were among the cargo refused during the last year. So too were dirty peppers, salmonella-infected shrimp, and turnip greens treated with prohibited pesticides, according to the FDA records.
In all, inspectors turned away 1,724 Mexican shipments, more than three-fourths of which were foods or food ingredients. Another 17 percent were cosmetics or pharmaceuticals, such as prescription drugs, deodorant and lotions. The rest mostly were medical supplies and electronic devices.
Products were most often refused because they were deemed "filthy," meaning they appeared dirty, putrid or decomposed.
Unapproved drugs also were common refusal targets, as was produce treated with banned pesticides.
Many countries had much higher refusal rates than Mexico based on their quantity of U.S. exports. For example, the Dominican Republic, which exported $4.5 billion to the U.S. last year, saw 895 shipments turned away, mostly for pesticides.
China accounted for the highest number of total refusals with 2,031, but less than half were for food products. The country's exports have attracted attention several times this year, when additives in pet food ingredients were linked to the deaths of several animals, and when a poisonous chemical used in antifreeze turned up in some exported toothpastes.
Despite the refusals, long-standing commercial partnerships and refined production practices have made many Mexican goods safer than their Chinese counterparts, said Mike Doyle, director of the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety, which works with the food industry to improve product safety.
Food production standards in Mexico are "as good as or often better than what we've had in the U.S.," Doyle said. "It depends on the company. ... There are parts of Mexico that would be equivalent to China."
In response to Chronicle inquiries, the Mexican Embassy in Washington released a statement saying the country continues to work with U.S. officials to ensure the quality of its food exports.
chase.davis@chron.com
By CHASE DAVIS Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle, August 16, 2007
Despite widespread alarm over tainted seafood from China making its way to American consumers, federal inspectors during the past year have turned away even more food shipments from Mexico — Texas' largest trading partner, according to a review by the Houston Chronicle.
Citing salmonella, prohibited pesticides and other defects, FDA inspectors refused more than 1,330 Mexican food shipments from July 2006 through last month, including fresh vegetables, processed foods and dietary supplements, according to inspection records from the Food and Drug Administration.
The refusals represent a small share of the roughly $198 billion in goods imported from the country last year, much of which entered through Texas trade hubs such as Laredo and Houston.
As the country's primary trade gateway to Mexico, Texas receives nearly 2 million shipments each year, according to FDA records. But most of that cargo is not inspected by hand — only 1 to 2 percent, according to FDA estimates.
"If it's a commodity that has no history of violations, it'll probably pass right on through," said Dan Sowards, food safety officer for the Texas Department of State Health Services, which regulates distribution centers that often house imported food. "What the FDA does is a snapshot."
Though FDA refusals account for less than 1 percent of goods entering the country each year, they provide a glimpse into what lawmakers have called an overburdened system for inspecting U.S. food and drug imports.
"If you look at the numbers, it's China and Mexico and India," said U.S. Rep. Gene Green, D-Houston, whose district includes the Port of Houston. China, which exports less food to the U.S. than Mexico, had about 930 food shipments rejected between July 2006 and July 2007.
"But there's a lack of resources to do more inspections," Green said. "We need to point this out."
Agency criticizedExperts and lawmakers argue that a lack of inspection resources, paired with a growing demand for imports, have exposed more Americans to harm from contaminated food. Food-borne illnesses hospitalize more than 300,000 Americans and kill about 5,000 each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
In House subcommittee hearings last month, Green and other lawmakers criticized the agency for proposing to close several product testing labs amid budgetary concerns — a plan the FDA has since suspended.
"Instead of laying off microbiologists and chemists, we need to be sure we keep them and expand them," Green said in an interview. "If necessary, if we want to be sure what we're buying is safe, we might need to put an inspection fee on it."
FDA spokeswoman Catherine McDermott said that although inspectors have been stretched thin, "inspections are thoroughly carried out."
Tainted Mexican imports have made headlines several times in recent years. In 2002, the FDA banned the import of Mexican cantaloupes after they were linked to salmonella outbreaks.
Appearances countMore recently, in 2004, certain candies were found to contain dangerous amounts of lead, prompting several state investigations, including one in Texas.
Both products were among the cargo refused during the last year. So too were dirty peppers, salmonella-infected shrimp, and turnip greens treated with prohibited pesticides, according to the FDA records.
In all, inspectors turned away 1,724 Mexican shipments, more than three-fourths of which were foods or food ingredients. Another 17 percent were cosmetics or pharmaceuticals, such as prescription drugs, deodorant and lotions. The rest mostly were medical supplies and electronic devices.
Products were most often refused because they were deemed "filthy," meaning they appeared dirty, putrid or decomposed.
Unapproved drugs also were common refusal targets, as was produce treated with banned pesticides.
Many countries had much higher refusal rates than Mexico based on their quantity of U.S. exports. For example, the Dominican Republic, which exported $4.5 billion to the U.S. last year, saw 895 shipments turned away, mostly for pesticides.
China accounted for the highest number of total refusals with 2,031, but less than half were for food products. The country's exports have attracted attention several times this year, when additives in pet food ingredients were linked to the deaths of several animals, and when a poisonous chemical used in antifreeze turned up in some exported toothpastes.
Despite the refusals, long-standing commercial partnerships and refined production practices have made many Mexican goods safer than their Chinese counterparts, said Mike Doyle, director of the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety, which works with the food industry to improve product safety.
Food production standards in Mexico are "as good as or often better than what we've had in the U.S.," Doyle said. "It depends on the company. ... There are parts of Mexico that would be equivalent to China."
In response to Chronicle inquiries, the Mexican Embassy in Washington released a statement saying the country continues to work with U.S. officials to ensure the quality of its food exports.
chase.davis@chron.com
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
USDA Cracking Down on “Organic” Factory-Farms
Country’s Largest Dairy Likely to Lose Certification
Cornucpia News, August 14, 2007
CORNUCOPIA, WI: The Cornucopia Institute has learned that the USDA appears about to revoke the organic certification of the nation’s largest industrial dairy operator, Aurora Organic Dairy, with corporate headquarters in Boulder, Colorado.
Aurora operates several giant factory dairies milking thousands of cows each in semi-arid areas of Colorado and Texas. The company has been the subject of a series of formal legal complaints filed with the USDA by The Cornucopia Institute. The complaints from the Wisconsin-based farm policy group filed in 2005 and 2006, called for a USDA investigation into allegations of numerous organic livestock management improprieties on Aurora’s facilities.
“After personally inspecting some of Aurora’s dairies in Texas and Colorado, we found 98% of their cattle in feedlots instead of grazing on pasture as the law requires,” stated Mark Kastel, Cornucopia’s senior farm policy analyst. Cornucopia also found that Aurora was procuring cattle from a non-certified organic source in apparent violation of the law. “Our sources tell us that the USDA’s investigators found many other violations when conducting their probe of Aurora.”
But Kastel warned that the USDA is under intense pressure to scuttle the Aurora decertification order. “We understand that powerful political influence is being brought to bear on the USDA in an effort to delay or water down the penalties against Aurora,” noted Kastel.
As part of their investigation of Aurora, compliance officers at the USDA took sworn testimony from Cornucopia staff, visited Aurora’s facilities and interviewed their organic certifier, the State of Colorado. The Institute found out about the impending enforcement action, and the potential for its delay, from officials in Colorado, a political appointee at the USDA and a highly placed industry executive.
The organic industry is carefully watching what the USDA does with the Aurora matter because of its size and impact on the marketplace. Aurora doesn’t directly market milk under its own name, but it is the country’s largest private-label producer of organic milk. Aurora packages store-brand organic dairy products for Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, Safeway, Trader Joe’s, Wild Oats, and other grocery chains. “The organic regulations are scale neutral,” added Kastel. “In terms of enforcement it shouldn’t matter if we are talking about a powerful corporate player, with thousands of cows, or a smaller family operation, bad actors in this industry need to be removed from the marketplace.”
Because of the delay in USDA enforcement against Aurora Dairy, The Cornucopia Institute today filed a Freedom of Information request (FOIA) with the USDA to secure documents that could uncover possible influence peddling and favoritism at the Department. “We hope that the USDA will issue tough sanctions, if warranted,” Kastel said. “And we want the agency to know that the organic community is very closely monitoring this case.”
Earlier this spring the 10,000-cow Vander Eyk factory dairy in Pixley, California lost its organic certification after an investigation revealed numerous violations of federal organic rules. The industrial-scale operation had been publicly spotlighted by The Cornucopia Institute for organic management irregularities. The Vander Eyk dairy had been selling its milk to Stremicks (Heritage-Foods) and Dean Foods (Horizon).
Based on documents recently received by Cornucopia through an earlier FOIA request, the Vander Eck dairy lost their ability to market organic milk not only because they lacked pasture for their cattle but also because they violated requirements for careful record-keeping to assure that all cows milked were eligible for organic certification and all the feed they consumed was actually organically grown.
“It now appears that our concerns about the giant industrial dairy cutting corners by confining cattle in a ‘factory-farm’ setting was just the tip of the iceberg,” said Will Fantle, Cornucopia’s research director. “The foundation of the organic certification process is the maintenance of a comprehensive farm audit trail which can be reviewed by independent certification inspectors and the USDA. The fact that Vander Eyk could not produce the documents requested by his certifier, and that he did not appeal the enforcement action, is just damning.”
The controversy about the growing number of factory-farms producing organic milk has come to a head this year as the number of farmers transitioning to organic dairy production has dramatically increased causing a surplus of organic milk for the first time. That surplus, largely attributed to the mega-farms, is now driving down prices to family farmers around the country endangering their livelihoods. It’s also become a tragedy for some family farmers around the country who have gone through the arduous and expensive three-year transition to organic management but now have nowhere to ship their milk.
“With at least 15 of these giant dairies operating, mostly in the arid west, they have succeeded in jeopardizing the livelihood of the 1500 or so ethical dairy farm families who are doing this right,” said Merrill Clark, an organic livestock producer from Cassopolis, Michigan and former member of the USDA’s expert advisory panel, the National Organic Standards Board.
“The good news for consumers is that in our survey of organic dairy brands, a full 90% of namebrand products received very high ratings in our scorecard that critiqued the environmental and animal husbandry practices used in sourcing the organic milk for the dairy products,” the Cornucopia’s Kastel said. “With a small amount of research, consumers who care about maintaining the integrity of organics can easily find organic dairy products they can believe in.”
Aurora is owned by some of the same conventional factory-farm operators that founded the Horizon Organic brand and then later sold it to Dean Foods. Aurora’s largest equity stake is controlled by CharlesBank of Boston, which invests capital for the Harvard endowment fund.
Rumors have also been swirling in the investment community that Aurora’s owners are seeking to sell the company or to take it public.
Cornucpia News, August 14, 2007
CORNUCOPIA, WI: The Cornucopia Institute has learned that the USDA appears about to revoke the organic certification of the nation’s largest industrial dairy operator, Aurora Organic Dairy, with corporate headquarters in Boulder, Colorado.
Aurora operates several giant factory dairies milking thousands of cows each in semi-arid areas of Colorado and Texas. The company has been the subject of a series of formal legal complaints filed with the USDA by The Cornucopia Institute. The complaints from the Wisconsin-based farm policy group filed in 2005 and 2006, called for a USDA investigation into allegations of numerous organic livestock management improprieties on Aurora’s facilities.
“After personally inspecting some of Aurora’s dairies in Texas and Colorado, we found 98% of their cattle in feedlots instead of grazing on pasture as the law requires,” stated Mark Kastel, Cornucopia’s senior farm policy analyst. Cornucopia also found that Aurora was procuring cattle from a non-certified organic source in apparent violation of the law. “Our sources tell us that the USDA’s investigators found many other violations when conducting their probe of Aurora.”
But Kastel warned that the USDA is under intense pressure to scuttle the Aurora decertification order. “We understand that powerful political influence is being brought to bear on the USDA in an effort to delay or water down the penalties against Aurora,” noted Kastel.
As part of their investigation of Aurora, compliance officers at the USDA took sworn testimony from Cornucopia staff, visited Aurora’s facilities and interviewed their organic certifier, the State of Colorado. The Institute found out about the impending enforcement action, and the potential for its delay, from officials in Colorado, a political appointee at the USDA and a highly placed industry executive.
The organic industry is carefully watching what the USDA does with the Aurora matter because of its size and impact on the marketplace. Aurora doesn’t directly market milk under its own name, but it is the country’s largest private-label producer of organic milk. Aurora packages store-brand organic dairy products for Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, Safeway, Trader Joe’s, Wild Oats, and other grocery chains. “The organic regulations are scale neutral,” added Kastel. “In terms of enforcement it shouldn’t matter if we are talking about a powerful corporate player, with thousands of cows, or a smaller family operation, bad actors in this industry need to be removed from the marketplace.”
Because of the delay in USDA enforcement against Aurora Dairy, The Cornucopia Institute today filed a Freedom of Information request (FOIA) with the USDA to secure documents that could uncover possible influence peddling and favoritism at the Department. “We hope that the USDA will issue tough sanctions, if warranted,” Kastel said. “And we want the agency to know that the organic community is very closely monitoring this case.”
Earlier this spring the 10,000-cow Vander Eyk factory dairy in Pixley, California lost its organic certification after an investigation revealed numerous violations of federal organic rules. The industrial-scale operation had been publicly spotlighted by The Cornucopia Institute for organic management irregularities. The Vander Eyk dairy had been selling its milk to Stremicks (Heritage-Foods) and Dean Foods (Horizon).
Based on documents recently received by Cornucopia through an earlier FOIA request, the Vander Eck dairy lost their ability to market organic milk not only because they lacked pasture for their cattle but also because they violated requirements for careful record-keeping to assure that all cows milked were eligible for organic certification and all the feed they consumed was actually organically grown.
“It now appears that our concerns about the giant industrial dairy cutting corners by confining cattle in a ‘factory-farm’ setting was just the tip of the iceberg,” said Will Fantle, Cornucopia’s research director. “The foundation of the organic certification process is the maintenance of a comprehensive farm audit trail which can be reviewed by independent certification inspectors and the USDA. The fact that Vander Eyk could not produce the documents requested by his certifier, and that he did not appeal the enforcement action, is just damning.”
The controversy about the growing number of factory-farms producing organic milk has come to a head this year as the number of farmers transitioning to organic dairy production has dramatically increased causing a surplus of organic milk for the first time. That surplus, largely attributed to the mega-farms, is now driving down prices to family farmers around the country endangering their livelihoods. It’s also become a tragedy for some family farmers around the country who have gone through the arduous and expensive three-year transition to organic management but now have nowhere to ship their milk.
“With at least 15 of these giant dairies operating, mostly in the arid west, they have succeeded in jeopardizing the livelihood of the 1500 or so ethical dairy farm families who are doing this right,” said Merrill Clark, an organic livestock producer from Cassopolis, Michigan and former member of the USDA’s expert advisory panel, the National Organic Standards Board.
“The good news for consumers is that in our survey of organic dairy brands, a full 90% of namebrand products received very high ratings in our scorecard that critiqued the environmental and animal husbandry practices used in sourcing the organic milk for the dairy products,” the Cornucopia’s Kastel said. “With a small amount of research, consumers who care about maintaining the integrity of organics can easily find organic dairy products they can believe in.”
Aurora is owned by some of the same conventional factory-farm operators that founded the Horizon Organic brand and then later sold it to Dean Foods. Aurora’s largest equity stake is controlled by CharlesBank of Boston, which invests capital for the Harvard endowment fund.
Rumors have also been swirling in the investment community that Aurora’s owners are seeking to sell the company or to take it public.
UN urges rethink on biofuels
By Javier Blas in London
The Financial Times
Published: August 14 2007 17:42 Last updated: August 14 2007 17:42
The world risks deeper poverty and greater environmental damage unless it fundamentally changes its bioenergy strategy, the United Nations’ top food and agriculture official has warned.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is pushing for a high-level meeting next June to lay down rules for the international bioenergy market.
At present, the bioenergy industry is regulated by domestic policies rather than international agreement.
The FAO is urging the European Union and the US to lower trade barriers against ethanol imports; establish a system for bioenergy environmental standards; and provide more microcredit to farmers in developing countries to develop local biofuels.
Writing in today’s Financial Times, Jacques Diouf, FAO director general, said: “Such measures would allow developing countries – which generally have ecosystems and climates more suited to biomass production than industrialised nations and often have ample reserves of land and labour – to use their comparative advantage.”
Mr Diouf said the objective of the proposed meeting should be to ensure that bioenergy realised its potential to fuel sustainable growth and reduce hunger.
The US, Europe and Brazil last year accounted for almost 95 per cent of the world’s biofuel production. Canada, China and India produced most of the rest, according to the International Energy Agency, the industrialised countries’ energy watchdog.
Biofuel production, mostly of corn-derived ethanol in the US and rapeseed-derived biodiesel in Europe, doubled between 2000 and 2005, according to the IEA. In 2005, however, that was still just 1 per cent of global road-transport fuel.
The energy watchdog forecast that would rise to 4 per cent by 2030.
Mr Diouf said the bioenergy sector had a “huge potential to reduce hunger and poverty” if production shifted from rich to poor countries.
At the moment, rich countries’ tariffs make it uneconomic for poor countries to grow biofuel crops.
The problem for developing countries is exacerbated by food prices being pushed up by the biofuel industry’s rising consumption of crops.
Corn prices this year reached an 11-year high of $4.30 a bushel while wheat prices last week rose to $6.96 a bushel, the highest since 1996.
The US biofuel industry last year consumed about 20 per cent of the country’s corn crop, far more than in the past.
“It is clear that the current practice of relying on food crops to produce fuel will be relatively short-lived,” Mr Diouf said.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
The Financial Times
Published: August 14 2007 17:42 Last updated: August 14 2007 17:42
The world risks deeper poverty and greater environmental damage unless it fundamentally changes its bioenergy strategy, the United Nations’ top food and agriculture official has warned.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation is pushing for a high-level meeting next June to lay down rules for the international bioenergy market.
At present, the bioenergy industry is regulated by domestic policies rather than international agreement.
The FAO is urging the European Union and the US to lower trade barriers against ethanol imports; establish a system for bioenergy environmental standards; and provide more microcredit to farmers in developing countries to develop local biofuels.
Writing in today’s Financial Times, Jacques Diouf, FAO director general, said: “Such measures would allow developing countries – which generally have ecosystems and climates more suited to biomass production than industrialised nations and often have ample reserves of land and labour – to use their comparative advantage.”
Mr Diouf said the objective of the proposed meeting should be to ensure that bioenergy realised its potential to fuel sustainable growth and reduce hunger.
The US, Europe and Brazil last year accounted for almost 95 per cent of the world’s biofuel production. Canada, China and India produced most of the rest, according to the International Energy Agency, the industrialised countries’ energy watchdog.
Biofuel production, mostly of corn-derived ethanol in the US and rapeseed-derived biodiesel in Europe, doubled between 2000 and 2005, according to the IEA. In 2005, however, that was still just 1 per cent of global road-transport fuel.
The energy watchdog forecast that would rise to 4 per cent by 2030.
Mr Diouf said the bioenergy sector had a “huge potential to reduce hunger and poverty” if production shifted from rich to poor countries.
At the moment, rich countries’ tariffs make it uneconomic for poor countries to grow biofuel crops.
The problem for developing countries is exacerbated by food prices being pushed up by the biofuel industry’s rising consumption of crops.
Corn prices this year reached an 11-year high of $4.30 a bushel while wheat prices last week rose to $6.96 a bushel, the highest since 1996.
The US biofuel industry last year consumed about 20 per cent of the country’s corn crop, far more than in the past.
“It is clear that the current practice of relying on food crops to produce fuel will be relatively short-lived,” Mr Diouf said.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Friday, August 10, 2007
Food That Travels Well
The New York Times, August 6, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor, JAMES E. McWILLIAMS
Austin, Tex.
THE term “food miles” — how far food has traveled before you buy it — has entered the enlightened lexicon. Environmental groups, especially in Europe, are pushing for labels that show how far food has traveled to get to the market, and books like Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life” contemplate the damage wrought by trucking,
shipping and flying food from distant parts of the globe.
There are many good reasons for eating local — freshness, purity, taste, community cohesion and preserving open space — but none of these benefits compares to the much-touted claim that eating local reduces fossil fuel consumption. In this respect eating local joins recycling, biking to work and driving a hybrid as a realistic way that we can, as individuals, shrink our carbon footprint and be good stewards of the environment.
On its face, the connection between lowering food miles and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions is a no-brainer. In Iowa, the typical carrot has traveled 1,600 miles from California, a potato 1,200 miles from Idaho and a chuck roast 600 miles from Colorado. Seventy-five percent of the apples sold in New York City come from the West Coast or overseas, the writer Bill McKibben says, even though the state produces far more apples than city residents consume. These examples just scratch the surface of the problem. In light of this market redundancy, the only reasonable reaction, it seems, is to count food miles the way a dieter counts calories.
But is reducing food miles necessarily good for the environment? Researchers at Lincoln University in New Zealand, no doubt responding to Europe’s push for “food miles labeling,” recently published a study challenging the premise that more food miles automatically mean greater fossil fuel consumption. Other scientific studies have undertaken similar investigations. According to this peer-reviewed research, compelling evidence suggests that there is more — or less — to food miles than meets the eye.
It all depends on how you wield the carbon calculator. Instead of measuring a product’s carbon footprint through food miles alone, the Lincoln University scientists expanded their equations to include other energy-consuming aspects of production — what economists call “factor inputs and externalities” — like water use, harvesting techniques, fertilizer outlays, renewable energy applications, means of transportation (and the kind of fuel used), the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed during photosynthesis, disposal of packaging, storage procedures and dozens of other cultivation inputs.
Incorporating these measurements into their assessments, scientists reached surprising conclusions. Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.
These life-cycle measurements are causing environmentalists worldwide to rethink the logic of food miles. New Zealand’s most prominent environmental research organization, Landcare Research-Manaaki Whenua, explains that localism “is not always the most environmentally sound solution if more emissions are generated at other stages of the product life cycle than during transport.” The British government’s 2006 Food Industry Sustainability Strategy similarly seeks to consider the environmental costs “across the life cycle of the produce,” not just in transportation.
“Eat local” advocates — a passionate cohort of which I am one — are bound to interpret these findings as a threat. We shouldn’t. Not only do life cycle analyses offer genuine opportunities for environmentally efficient food production, but they also address several problems inherent in the eat-local philosophy.
Consider the most conspicuous ones: it is impossible for most of the world to feed itself a diverse and healthy diet through exclusively local food production — food will always have to travel; asking people to move to more fertile regions is sensible but alienating and unrealistic; consumers living in developed nations will, for better or worse, always demand choices beyond what the season has to offer.
Given these problems, wouldn’t it make more sense to stop obsessing over food miles and work to strengthen comparative geographical advantages? And what if we did this while streamlining transportation services according to fuel-efficient standards? Shouldn’t we create development incentives for regional nodes of food production that can provide sustainable produce for the less sustainable parts of the nation and the world as a whole? Might it be more logical to conceptualize a hub-and-spoke system of food production and distribution, with the hubs in a food system’s naturally fertile hot spots and the spokes, which travel through the arid zones, connecting them while using hybrid engines and alternative sources of energy?
As concerned consumers and environmentalists, we must be prepared to seriously entertain these questions. We must also be prepared to accept that buying local is not necessarily beneficial for the environment. As much as this claim violates one of our most sacred assumptions, life cycle assessments offer far more valuable measurements to gauge the environmental impact of eating. While there will always be good reasons to encourage the growth of sustainable local food systems, we must also allow them to develop in tandem with what could be their equally sustainable global counterparts. We must accept the fact, in short, that distance is not the enemy of awareness.
James E. McWilliams is the author of “A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America” and a contributing writer for The Texas Observer.
Op-Ed Contributor, JAMES E. McWILLIAMS
Austin, Tex.
THE term “food miles” — how far food has traveled before you buy it — has entered the enlightened lexicon. Environmental groups, especially in Europe, are pushing for labels that show how far food has traveled to get to the market, and books like Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life” contemplate the damage wrought by trucking,
shipping and flying food from distant parts of the globe.
There are many good reasons for eating local — freshness, purity, taste, community cohesion and preserving open space — but none of these benefits compares to the much-touted claim that eating local reduces fossil fuel consumption. In this respect eating local joins recycling, biking to work and driving a hybrid as a realistic way that we can, as individuals, shrink our carbon footprint and be good stewards of the environment.
On its face, the connection between lowering food miles and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions is a no-brainer. In Iowa, the typical carrot has traveled 1,600 miles from California, a potato 1,200 miles from Idaho and a chuck roast 600 miles from Colorado. Seventy-five percent of the apples sold in New York City come from the West Coast or overseas, the writer Bill McKibben says, even though the state produces far more apples than city residents consume. These examples just scratch the surface of the problem. In light of this market redundancy, the only reasonable reaction, it seems, is to count food miles the way a dieter counts calories.
But is reducing food miles necessarily good for the environment? Researchers at Lincoln University in New Zealand, no doubt responding to Europe’s push for “food miles labeling,” recently published a study challenging the premise that more food miles automatically mean greater fossil fuel consumption. Other scientific studies have undertaken similar investigations. According to this peer-reviewed research, compelling evidence suggests that there is more — or less — to food miles than meets the eye.
It all depends on how you wield the carbon calculator. Instead of measuring a product’s carbon footprint through food miles alone, the Lincoln University scientists expanded their equations to include other energy-consuming aspects of production — what economists call “factor inputs and externalities” — like water use, harvesting techniques, fertilizer outlays, renewable energy applications, means of transportation (and the kind of fuel used), the amount of carbon dioxide absorbed during photosynthesis, disposal of packaging, storage procedures and dozens of other cultivation inputs.
Incorporating these measurements into their assessments, scientists reached surprising conclusions. Most notably, they found that lamb raised on New Zealand’s clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard. Similar figures were found for dairy products and fruit.
These life-cycle measurements are causing environmentalists worldwide to rethink the logic of food miles. New Zealand’s most prominent environmental research organization, Landcare Research-Manaaki Whenua, explains that localism “is not always the most environmentally sound solution if more emissions are generated at other stages of the product life cycle than during transport.” The British government’s 2006 Food Industry Sustainability Strategy similarly seeks to consider the environmental costs “across the life cycle of the produce,” not just in transportation.
“Eat local” advocates — a passionate cohort of which I am one — are bound to interpret these findings as a threat. We shouldn’t. Not only do life cycle analyses offer genuine opportunities for environmentally efficient food production, but they also address several problems inherent in the eat-local philosophy.
Consider the most conspicuous ones: it is impossible for most of the world to feed itself a diverse and healthy diet through exclusively local food production — food will always have to travel; asking people to move to more fertile regions is sensible but alienating and unrealistic; consumers living in developed nations will, for better or worse, always demand choices beyond what the season has to offer.
Given these problems, wouldn’t it make more sense to stop obsessing over food miles and work to strengthen comparative geographical advantages? And what if we did this while streamlining transportation services according to fuel-efficient standards? Shouldn’t we create development incentives for regional nodes of food production that can provide sustainable produce for the less sustainable parts of the nation and the world as a whole? Might it be more logical to conceptualize a hub-and-spoke system of food production and distribution, with the hubs in a food system’s naturally fertile hot spots and the spokes, which travel through the arid zones, connecting them while using hybrid engines and alternative sources of energy?
As concerned consumers and environmentalists, we must be prepared to seriously entertain these questions. We must also be prepared to accept that buying local is not necessarily beneficial for the environment. As much as this claim violates one of our most sacred assumptions, life cycle assessments offer far more valuable measurements to gauge the environmental impact of eating. While there will always be good reasons to encourage the growth of sustainable local food systems, we must also allow them to develop in tandem with what could be their equally sustainable global counterparts. We must accept the fact, in short, that distance is not the enemy of awareness.
James E. McWilliams is the author of “A Revolution in Eating: How the Quest for Food Shaped America” and a contributing writer for The Texas Observer.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Two Very Different Paths From Farm to Table
Bifurcated Safety System Means Some Foods Get Less Scrutiny
By Renae MerleWashington Post Staff WriterSaturday, August 4, 2007; D01
Customers dining on surf and turf at a local restaurant may find themselves feasting on steak and a handful of breaded shrimp that took wildly disparate paths through a disjointed American food-safety system.
The steak came from a cow that was examined by a government inspector before and after it was slaughtered. The shrimp most likely were not inspected. The steak probably came from an American producer. The shrimp likely came from overseas, perhaps from one of several Asian countries that have been criticized for sloppy practices in raising seafood.
The disparity is a function of America's 100-year-old food-safety system, under which the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration divvy up the food pyramid. The USDA regulates meat, a practice that dates to 1906, after the Upton Sinclair novel "The Jungle" had alerted Americans to unsanitary conditions in the nation's slaughterhouses. The FDA oversees the safety of most other foods, including seafood, fruits and vegetables.
Neither agency's inspection system is perfect, but the one that covers beef is more likely to catch problems than the one covering seafood, according to consumer groups and people who have worked in food safety.
The split system has resulted in a patchwork process for ensuring that meat, seafood and produce consumed in the United States is safe. In a report this year, the Government Accountability Office called federal oversight of the food safety system "fragmented" and put it on a list of "high-risk" programs.
Reports of unsafe food from China have spurred a reexamination of the system, which some say has not caught up with recent increases in food imports, which have doubled in value in the past decade. "Our overall food-safety system needs comprehensive reform. People are losing confidence," said Rep. Rosa DaLauro (D-Conn.), a frequent critic of the FDA's oversight of seafood and produce.
But FDA Commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach, in a letter to employees last month after the agency was criticized during a congressional hearing, said, "Although food safety problems still occur in this country, it does not automatically follow that the FDA is asleep at the switch."
Changing the system would require upending huge bureaucracies and long-standing traditions, as well as tackling industry concerns. Congress is considering a piece of legislation that would establish a single food-safety agency and another that would, for the first time, allow the FDA to charge importers a fee.
An import safety panel appointed by President Bush is expected to issue recommendations in September, and the subject has come up in high-level talks between the United States and China.
"There is something in between FDA and USDA that is really the right answer," said Mike Taylor, a former administrator for the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service and a research professor of public health at George Washington University. "We have to make it a system that enforces private industry's responsibility to manage supply chain."
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) has advocated a single food agency as a way to create efficiency. "It could be that USDA is not the best model. Let science dictate that decision, not tradition or politics," Durbin said.
The USDA system relies on an army of 7,600 inspectors who do a what the agency calls a "carcass-by-carcass" inspection at slaughterhouses throughout the country. The agency also limits imports of meat -- beef, chicken, lamb and pork -- to 37 countries that have comparable food safety systems and are certified by the agency. Of the imported meat, about 10 percent is subject to further testing when it reaches U.S. shores, according to the USDA.
But some critics see inefficiency in the USDA system. At poultry plants, USDA inspectors watch chickens pass by on the slaughter line every two or three seconds, hardly enough time to give them serious examination, Taylor said. "You can visually examine chickens all day and not see the salmonella," he said.
The carcass-by-carcass inspection system is mandated by law and is an important part of the food safety system, said USDA spokesman Stephen Cohen. The agency also began taking samples for testing to augment the visual inspections in the 1990s, he said. "The agency has not stayed stagnant," Cohen said. "We're much more prevention-oriented."
Some question whether the USDA can serve both as overseer of the meat industry and as its cheerleader. Last year, the USDA's inspector general found that the department had overruled a recommendation by field scientists to test an animal that was suspected of having mad cow disease, a degenerative nerve disorder, because it feared that a positive finding would undermine confidence in the agency's testing procedures. At the time, the USDA had said it had taken steps to better enforce its rules.
"The job of [the USDA] is to make the foods we regulate the safest they can be. A safe product markets itself," Cohen said.
But the USDA's system is more extensive than that of the FDA. The FDA has about 700 inspectors and lab technicians, less than one-tenth the workforce of USDA. Its food safety budget, about $450 million, is dwarfed by the USDA's $850 million in spending, according to Consumers Union. And it does not approve countries before they are allowed to export products to the United States. It inspects about 1 percent of the imports that fall under its purview and doesn't limit which of 300 ports and land crossings importers can use.
Part of the problem is that the FDA's responsibilities have grown faster than the agency has, said Bill Hubbard, who retired from the FDA last year after 26 years. While the number of FDA inspectors has fallen, the value of imported food under its control has risen sharply. About 80 percent of the seafood consumed in the United States is imported, according to a report by Public Citizen, a consumers' rights group. When the FDA was established, it oversaw the import of such staples as flour and molasses, in which problems were usually easy to spot, Hubbard said. "The FDA foods were not considered dangerous," he said.
There has been a failed attempt to strengthen the system. In 1999, the FDA faced an explosion in imports of such inexpensive ingredients as wheat gluten and ascorbic acid that kept food prices down but also raised safety concerns within the agency, Hubbard said. The agency proposed requiring firms or countries with repeated safety problems to be suspended from exporting to the United States until they came up with a safety plan, he said.
The proposal, known as "USDA light" in FDA circles, never gained traction.
"At the time, the industry felt it could end up having a negative impact on them," Hubbard said. "I thought we would at least get a hearing on it, but it didn't go so far."
FDA officials acknowledge some weaknesses and have been working on a food safety plan for months. "We would never have enough inspectors to test every product that came into the United States every day," said David Acheson, assistant commissioner for food protection at the FDA. "Simply doubling the number of inspectors is not the answer."
And von Eschenbach, the FDA commissioner, rejects one of the most popular alternatives on Capitol Hill: creating a single food agency. The agency learned from last year's E. coli outbreak linked to tainted spinach and this year's problems with tainted pet food, he said. "There is an extraordinary uniqueness about FDA" because of its science-based approach to such issues, von Eschenbach said recently. "We need to maintain that uniqueness."
Industry officials say they favor changes that would bolster consumer confidence, but they are resistant to drastic change. Creating a single agency could be a bureaucratic nightmare that would take time away from inspections, they say.
John Connelly, president of the National Fisheries Institute, said that the FDA needs more inspectors but that there should be a balance so the system is not unnecessarily bogged down. "We think that the U.S. has a very good food-safety system and would argue with premise that the system is broken," he said.
Instead, industry insiders say, the agencies should focus on establishing a "trace-back" system that would make it easier to identify the sources of problematic foods and streamline the recall process. "Our members tend to find out about these from the news media," said Tim Hammonds, president of the Food Marketing Institute. "If they were to give retailers a heads-up, we could be much faster at getting things removed from the shelves."
By Renae MerleWashington Post Staff WriterSaturday, August 4, 2007; D01
Customers dining on surf and turf at a local restaurant may find themselves feasting on steak and a handful of breaded shrimp that took wildly disparate paths through a disjointed American food-safety system.
The steak came from a cow that was examined by a government inspector before and after it was slaughtered. The shrimp most likely were not inspected. The steak probably came from an American producer. The shrimp likely came from overseas, perhaps from one of several Asian countries that have been criticized for sloppy practices in raising seafood.
The disparity is a function of America's 100-year-old food-safety system, under which the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration divvy up the food pyramid. The USDA regulates meat, a practice that dates to 1906, after the Upton Sinclair novel "The Jungle" had alerted Americans to unsanitary conditions in the nation's slaughterhouses. The FDA oversees the safety of most other foods, including seafood, fruits and vegetables.
Neither agency's inspection system is perfect, but the one that covers beef is more likely to catch problems than the one covering seafood, according to consumer groups and people who have worked in food safety.
The split system has resulted in a patchwork process for ensuring that meat, seafood and produce consumed in the United States is safe. In a report this year, the Government Accountability Office called federal oversight of the food safety system "fragmented" and put it on a list of "high-risk" programs.
Reports of unsafe food from China have spurred a reexamination of the system, which some say has not caught up with recent increases in food imports, which have doubled in value in the past decade. "Our overall food-safety system needs comprehensive reform. People are losing confidence," said Rep. Rosa DaLauro (D-Conn.), a frequent critic of the FDA's oversight of seafood and produce.
But FDA Commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach, in a letter to employees last month after the agency was criticized during a congressional hearing, said, "Although food safety problems still occur in this country, it does not automatically follow that the FDA is asleep at the switch."
Changing the system would require upending huge bureaucracies and long-standing traditions, as well as tackling industry concerns. Congress is considering a piece of legislation that would establish a single food-safety agency and another that would, for the first time, allow the FDA to charge importers a fee.
An import safety panel appointed by President Bush is expected to issue recommendations in September, and the subject has come up in high-level talks between the United States and China.
"There is something in between FDA and USDA that is really the right answer," said Mike Taylor, a former administrator for the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service and a research professor of public health at George Washington University. "We have to make it a system that enforces private industry's responsibility to manage supply chain."
Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) has advocated a single food agency as a way to create efficiency. "It could be that USDA is not the best model. Let science dictate that decision, not tradition or politics," Durbin said.
The USDA system relies on an army of 7,600 inspectors who do a what the agency calls a "carcass-by-carcass" inspection at slaughterhouses throughout the country. The agency also limits imports of meat -- beef, chicken, lamb and pork -- to 37 countries that have comparable food safety systems and are certified by the agency. Of the imported meat, about 10 percent is subject to further testing when it reaches U.S. shores, according to the USDA.
But some critics see inefficiency in the USDA system. At poultry plants, USDA inspectors watch chickens pass by on the slaughter line every two or three seconds, hardly enough time to give them serious examination, Taylor said. "You can visually examine chickens all day and not see the salmonella," he said.
The carcass-by-carcass inspection system is mandated by law and is an important part of the food safety system, said USDA spokesman Stephen Cohen. The agency also began taking samples for testing to augment the visual inspections in the 1990s, he said. "The agency has not stayed stagnant," Cohen said. "We're much more prevention-oriented."
Some question whether the USDA can serve both as overseer of the meat industry and as its cheerleader. Last year, the USDA's inspector general found that the department had overruled a recommendation by field scientists to test an animal that was suspected of having mad cow disease, a degenerative nerve disorder, because it feared that a positive finding would undermine confidence in the agency's testing procedures. At the time, the USDA had said it had taken steps to better enforce its rules.
"The job of [the USDA] is to make the foods we regulate the safest they can be. A safe product markets itself," Cohen said.
But the USDA's system is more extensive than that of the FDA. The FDA has about 700 inspectors and lab technicians, less than one-tenth the workforce of USDA. Its food safety budget, about $450 million, is dwarfed by the USDA's $850 million in spending, according to Consumers Union. And it does not approve countries before they are allowed to export products to the United States. It inspects about 1 percent of the imports that fall under its purview and doesn't limit which of 300 ports and land crossings importers can use.
Part of the problem is that the FDA's responsibilities have grown faster than the agency has, said Bill Hubbard, who retired from the FDA last year after 26 years. While the number of FDA inspectors has fallen, the value of imported food under its control has risen sharply. About 80 percent of the seafood consumed in the United States is imported, according to a report by Public Citizen, a consumers' rights group. When the FDA was established, it oversaw the import of such staples as flour and molasses, in which problems were usually easy to spot, Hubbard said. "The FDA foods were not considered dangerous," he said.
There has been a failed attempt to strengthen the system. In 1999, the FDA faced an explosion in imports of such inexpensive ingredients as wheat gluten and ascorbic acid that kept food prices down but also raised safety concerns within the agency, Hubbard said. The agency proposed requiring firms or countries with repeated safety problems to be suspended from exporting to the United States until they came up with a safety plan, he said.
The proposal, known as "USDA light" in FDA circles, never gained traction.
"At the time, the industry felt it could end up having a negative impact on them," Hubbard said. "I thought we would at least get a hearing on it, but it didn't go so far."
FDA officials acknowledge some weaknesses and have been working on a food safety plan for months. "We would never have enough inspectors to test every product that came into the United States every day," said David Acheson, assistant commissioner for food protection at the FDA. "Simply doubling the number of inspectors is not the answer."
And von Eschenbach, the FDA commissioner, rejects one of the most popular alternatives on Capitol Hill: creating a single food agency. The agency learned from last year's E. coli outbreak linked to tainted spinach and this year's problems with tainted pet food, he said. "There is an extraordinary uniqueness about FDA" because of its science-based approach to such issues, von Eschenbach said recently. "We need to maintain that uniqueness."
Industry officials say they favor changes that would bolster consumer confidence, but they are resistant to drastic change. Creating a single agency could be a bureaucratic nightmare that would take time away from inspections, they say.
John Connelly, president of the National Fisheries Institute, said that the FDA needs more inspectors but that there should be a balance so the system is not unnecessarily bogged down. "We think that the U.S. has a very good food-safety system and would argue with premise that the system is broken," he said.
Instead, industry insiders say, the agencies should focus on establishing a "trace-back" system that would make it easier to identify the sources of problematic foods and streamline the recall process. "Our members tend to find out about these from the news media," said Tim Hammonds, president of the Food Marketing Institute. "If they were to give retailers a heads-up, we could be much faster at getting things removed from the shelves."
Monday, July 30, 2007
Green thumbs reap savings from their front yards
By ELLEN SIMON, Associated Press, July 29, 2007
NEW YORK — A dedicated group of vegetable gardeners is ripping out their front lawns and planting dinner.
Their front-yard kitchen gardens, with everything from vegetables to herbs and salad greens, are a source of food, a topic of conversation with the neighbors and a political statement.
It's also a way for many to save money on grocery bills.
Nat Zappia, 32, a graduate student, turned the front yard of the home he and his wife rent in Santa Monica, Calif., into a vegetable garden, with his landlord's permission.
He estimates it supplies 35 to 40 percent of the food they eat.
The gardens don't cost much to plant.
Zappia estimates he spent about $100 on the garden and says he and his wife save about $200 to $300 a year on their food costs.
Bob Waldrop of Oklahoma City said his garden's organic fruit allowed him to eat in a way he could never afford if he bought everything at the grocery store.
"It's like money growing in your yard," he said.
He planted his corner lot almost entirely with fruit trees, berry bushes and vegetables.
Leigh Anders, who tore up about half her front lawn four years ago and planted vegetables, said her garden sends a message that anyone can grow at least some of their food.
That task should shift from agribusiness back to individuals and their communities, said Anders, of Viroqua, Wisc.
"This movement can start with simply one tomato plant growing in one's yard," she said.
Front-yard vegetable gardens are a growing outlet for people whose backyards are too shady or too small, as well as those who want to spread their beliefs one tomato at a time.
The topic has gotten more buzz nationally as bloggers chronicle their experiences and environmentalists have scrutinized the effects of chemicals and water used to grow lawns.
A book called Food Not Lawns, published last year, inspired several offshoot groups.
Other gardeners were inspired by books such as Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture and The Year I Ate My Yard.
Fritz Haeg, an artist and architect, has done yards in Kansas, California and New Jersey as part of a project called "Edible Estates." Haeg, who is working on a book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, says he's been overwhelmed by the response.
Some neighbors are less than thrilled. Some municipal codes limit the percentage of a yard that can be planted with anything other than trees and grass.
"Especially in the first three years, I got a lot of code violations," said Waldrop of Oklahoma City.
"Now that the plantings have matured, it's pretty," he said. "It wasn't so pretty the first couple years."
Shannon McBride, 47, of Huntsville, Alabama, kept grass borders around her front-yard vegetable beds. "We promised our neighbor we wouldn't grow corn, because that looks kind of tacky," she said.
The neighbor also thought tomatoes looked "untidy," so McBride and her husband are growing bell peppers, carrots, chives, herbs, two kinds of beans, beets, okra, lettuce and cucumbers.
"I'm always asked, 'What will it look like in the winter?'" said Rosalind Creasy, a landscape designer who has been writing about edible landscaping for 25 years. "If you design it well and it has an herb garden, it will look fine. One of the dumbest things I see is dead lawns in the winter. They're brown for six months of the year. How beautiful is that?"
NEW YORK — A dedicated group of vegetable gardeners is ripping out their front lawns and planting dinner.
Their front-yard kitchen gardens, with everything from vegetables to herbs and salad greens, are a source of food, a topic of conversation with the neighbors and a political statement.
It's also a way for many to save money on grocery bills.
Nat Zappia, 32, a graduate student, turned the front yard of the home he and his wife rent in Santa Monica, Calif., into a vegetable garden, with his landlord's permission.
He estimates it supplies 35 to 40 percent of the food they eat.
The gardens don't cost much to plant.
Zappia estimates he spent about $100 on the garden and says he and his wife save about $200 to $300 a year on their food costs.
Bob Waldrop of Oklahoma City said his garden's organic fruit allowed him to eat in a way he could never afford if he bought everything at the grocery store.
"It's like money growing in your yard," he said.
He planted his corner lot almost entirely with fruit trees, berry bushes and vegetables.
Leigh Anders, who tore up about half her front lawn four years ago and planted vegetables, said her garden sends a message that anyone can grow at least some of their food.
That task should shift from agribusiness back to individuals and their communities, said Anders, of Viroqua, Wisc.
"This movement can start with simply one tomato plant growing in one's yard," she said.
Front-yard vegetable gardens are a growing outlet for people whose backyards are too shady or too small, as well as those who want to spread their beliefs one tomato at a time.
The topic has gotten more buzz nationally as bloggers chronicle their experiences and environmentalists have scrutinized the effects of chemicals and water used to grow lawns.
A book called Food Not Lawns, published last year, inspired several offshoot groups.
Other gardeners were inspired by books such as Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture and The Year I Ate My Yard.
Fritz Haeg, an artist and architect, has done yards in Kansas, California and New Jersey as part of a project called "Edible Estates." Haeg, who is working on a book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, says he's been overwhelmed by the response.
Some neighbors are less than thrilled. Some municipal codes limit the percentage of a yard that can be planted with anything other than trees and grass.
"Especially in the first three years, I got a lot of code violations," said Waldrop of Oklahoma City.
"Now that the plantings have matured, it's pretty," he said. "It wasn't so pretty the first couple years."
Shannon McBride, 47, of Huntsville, Alabama, kept grass borders around her front-yard vegetable beds. "We promised our neighbor we wouldn't grow corn, because that looks kind of tacky," she said.
The neighbor also thought tomatoes looked "untidy," so McBride and her husband are growing bell peppers, carrots, chives, herbs, two kinds of beans, beets, okra, lettuce and cucumbers.
"I'm always asked, 'What will it look like in the winter?'" said Rosalind Creasy, a landscape designer who has been writing about edible landscaping for 25 years. "If you design it well and it has an herb garden, it will look fine. One of the dumbest things I see is dead lawns in the winter. They're brown for six months of the year. How beautiful is that?"
Without U.S. Rules, Biotech Food Lacks Investors
New York Times, July 30, 2007
By ANDREW POLLACK
This little piggy’s manure causes less pollution. This little piggy produces extra milk for her babies. And this little piggy makes fatty acids normally found in fish, so that eating its bacon might actually be good for you.
The three pigs, all now living in experimental farmyards, are among the genetically engineered animals whose meat might one day turn up on American dinner plates. Bioengineers have also developed salmon that grow to market weight in about half the typical time, disease-resistant cows and catfish needing fewer antibiotics, and goats whose milk might help ward off infections in children who drink it.
Only now, though, do federal officials seem to be getting serious about drafting rules that would determine whether and how such meat, milk and filets can safely enter the nation’s food supply.
Some scientists and biotechnology executives say that by having the Food and Drug Administration spell out the rules of the game, big investors would finally be willing to put up money to create a market in so-called transgenic livestock.
“Right now, it’s very hard to get any corporate investment,” said James D. Murray, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who developed the goats with the infection-fighting milk. “What studies do you need to do? What are they looking for?” he said, referring to government regulators. “That stuff’s not there.”
But some experts caution that even if the F.D.A. clears the regulatory path in coming months, investors and agribusiness companies might still shy away. Many fear that consumers would shun foods from transgenic animals, sometimes referred to as genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.’s.
“The companies we have spoken to have gone organic, and they are very concerned, at least up to the present time, of having G.M.O. associated with their name,” said Cecil W. Forsberg, a professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, who helped developed the “Enviropig” with the cleaner manure. Smithfield Foods, for one, the world’s largest hog producer and pork processor, says it is doing no research on genetically engineered animals.
Critics say changing the genes of animals could lead to potentially harmful changes in the composition of milk or meat, like the introduction of a protein that could cause allergic reactions. They say there could also be risks to the environment if, for example, extra-large salmon were to escape into oceans and out-compete wild salmon for food or mates. Some also say that some of the processes used to create transgenic livestock can harm the animals themselves.
The federal guidelines would come after more than 15 years of talks and false starts at the F.D.A., a delay irking not only developers of the transgenic animals but also critics of biotechnology.
“The fact that the agency has sat there for years staring this problem in the face and really hasn’t come up with a clear way to regulate this is abdicating its responsibilities,” said Joseph Mendelson, the legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a Washington advocacy group.
Even now, the F.D.A. will not say when the rules will be ready.
“We want to get it out, but we also want to get it right,” said Julie Zawisza, a spokeswoman for the agency, which declined to make any other officials available for comment.
Some industry executives and former and current government officials say one reason for the delay was that some government officials, in part because of a preference for fewer regulations, wanted less stringent rules than the F.D.A. is considering.
Meanwhile, the biotechnology industry is actually pushing for the tougher standards.
“Our overarching goal is to have public confidence in our products,” said Barbara Glenn, the managing director for animal issues at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group. “We won’t have that unless we have a very strong review process.”
The F.D.A. is turning to transgenic animals after having tentatively declared in December that milk and meat from livestock that is cloned — but not otherwise genetically manipulated — was safe for people to eat.
The F.D.A. considers clones to be less biologically radical than genetically engineered animals — which instead of being mere replicas of naturally occurring animals are given foreign DNA, usually from another species.
Larisa Rudenko, a senior biotechnology adviser in the F.D.A.’s veterinary drug division, said in a May presentation at the biotechnology industry’s annual convention that each new type of genetically engineered animal would require approval for use in the food supply. That will be done, she said, under the umbrella of existing rules for drugs used in treating animal diseases.
While the implanted gene is somewhat like a drug, the existing rules would have to be stretched to fit.
But industry executives and some former agency officials said it was unlikely that Congress would enact totally new laws for transgenic animals. And using the drug laws, they say, would provide tighter control than an alternative approach of using the rules governing food additives. Agency officials have said that the veterinary drug rules would be used, and they have already been overseeing some experimental work on that basis. But they continued to debate the issue, and the policy has never been made official.
The regulatory guidelines would indicate how the drug rules would be interpreted for transgenic animals, and what types of data would be needed to prove safety and efficacy. But there are open questions about how the drug rules would actually translate. While a chemical drug must be shown to be consistent and stable, for instance, it is unclear how that standard would apply to a gene passed from generation to generation. Some critics say that while the drug rules do provide fairly strict regulation of food safety, there are drawbacks to adapting that approach. Because applications for approval of drugs are confidential, for instance, there would be no opportunity for public comment before the agency acted.
“In order to create confidence in a new technology, you really don’t want behind-closed-door proceedings,” said Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Another worry is that the F.D.A. might not have enough expertise or authority to conduct a vigorous review of the environmental impact of transgenic animals. The F.D.A. has dismissed this concern, however, saying it has sufficient expertise and can consult with other agencies.
The biotechnology regulatory branch of the Department of Agriculture created an animal division last December to figure out what its role should be.
Genetically engineered animals are often created by injecting the gene of interest into a single-cell embryo. A more recent technique that is more efficient is to put the gene into a skin cell and create an embryo from that cell by cloning.
In both cases, the embryo with the foreign gene is then implanted into the womb of a surrogate mother. After some transgenic animals are born, additional ones can be made by conventional breeding, because the foreign gene generally will be passed on to some of the offspring, as would any other gene.
The fast-growing salmon is the transgenic animal that has been swimming upstream the longest at the F.D.A. Its developer, Aqua Bounty Technologies of Waltham, Mass., has been working to win agency approval for about 10 years. Aqua Bounty’s fish are Atlantic salmon that have been given a growth-hormone gene from the Chinook salmon. They have also been equipped with a genetic on-switch from a fish called the ocean pout, a distant cousin of the salmon.
Normally, salmon produce growth hormone only in warmer months, but the pout gene’s on-switch keeps the hormone flowing year round. That enables the Aqua Bounty fish to grow faster, reaching their market weight in about 18 months instead of 30.
Elliot Entis, Aqua Bounty’s chief executive, said the company had already given the F.D.A. studies showing that the fish were healthy and that the implanted gene remained stable over generations.
He said the company also had tests done to show that its fish contained the same level of fats, proteins and other nutrients as other farmed salmon and would not set off unexpected allergic reactions in people who eat them. The fish also taste the same as other farmed Atlantic salmon,
Mr. Entis said.
“Nobody has ever analyzed salmon as closely as we have had done,” he said. But the F.D.A. is asking for more data on safety and potential environmental effects on wild salmon.
Industry executives say the Enviropigs would be the next candidate for F.D.A. approval. The pigs contain a bacterial gene that allows them to produce an enzyme that helps them more fully digest a vital nutrient, phosphorus, in their feed. That means less phosphorus in the manure, which in turn could mean less phosphorus running off into lakes and oceans, where it can cause algal blooms and fish kills.
MaRS Landing, a technology promoting organization in Ontario, is trying to find a corporate partner for the pig, said John Kelly, the agency’s executive director.
Less far along in the approval pipeline are pigs that contain a gene from the roundworm allowing them to produce omega-3 fatty acids, a nutrient normally found in fish that is good for the heart. That, in theory, could make eating pork or bacon healthier, although that has yet to be tested.
Jing X. Kang, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who helped direct the project, said the researchers were looking for corporate backers while also trying to raise the level of omega-3 in the meat.
Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, a consumer advocacy group in Washington, said regulations might not assuage consumers, many of whom object to the genetic engineering of animals on humane or ethical grounds, more than on safety concerns.
“The fact that the F.D.A. has a powerful regulatory process for reviewing genetically engineered animals, far greater than they apply to genetically engineered crops, may not make any difference at all,” Ms. Foreman said. “Because that’s not what it’s all about.”
By ANDREW POLLACK
This little piggy’s manure causes less pollution. This little piggy produces extra milk for her babies. And this little piggy makes fatty acids normally found in fish, so that eating its bacon might actually be good for you.
The three pigs, all now living in experimental farmyards, are among the genetically engineered animals whose meat might one day turn up on American dinner plates. Bioengineers have also developed salmon that grow to market weight in about half the typical time, disease-resistant cows and catfish needing fewer antibiotics, and goats whose milk might help ward off infections in children who drink it.
Only now, though, do federal officials seem to be getting serious about drafting rules that would determine whether and how such meat, milk and filets can safely enter the nation’s food supply.
Some scientists and biotechnology executives say that by having the Food and Drug Administration spell out the rules of the game, big investors would finally be willing to put up money to create a market in so-called transgenic livestock.
“Right now, it’s very hard to get any corporate investment,” said James D. Murray, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who developed the goats with the infection-fighting milk. “What studies do you need to do? What are they looking for?” he said, referring to government regulators. “That stuff’s not there.”
But some experts caution that even if the F.D.A. clears the regulatory path in coming months, investors and agribusiness companies might still shy away. Many fear that consumers would shun foods from transgenic animals, sometimes referred to as genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.’s.
“The companies we have spoken to have gone organic, and they are very concerned, at least up to the present time, of having G.M.O. associated with their name,” said Cecil W. Forsberg, a professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, who helped developed the “Enviropig” with the cleaner manure. Smithfield Foods, for one, the world’s largest hog producer and pork processor, says it is doing no research on genetically engineered animals.
Critics say changing the genes of animals could lead to potentially harmful changes in the composition of milk or meat, like the introduction of a protein that could cause allergic reactions. They say there could also be risks to the environment if, for example, extra-large salmon were to escape into oceans and out-compete wild salmon for food or mates. Some also say that some of the processes used to create transgenic livestock can harm the animals themselves.
The federal guidelines would come after more than 15 years of talks and false starts at the F.D.A., a delay irking not only developers of the transgenic animals but also critics of biotechnology.
“The fact that the agency has sat there for years staring this problem in the face and really hasn’t come up with a clear way to regulate this is abdicating its responsibilities,” said Joseph Mendelson, the legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a Washington advocacy group.
Even now, the F.D.A. will not say when the rules will be ready.
“We want to get it out, but we also want to get it right,” said Julie Zawisza, a spokeswoman for the agency, which declined to make any other officials available for comment.
Some industry executives and former and current government officials say one reason for the delay was that some government officials, in part because of a preference for fewer regulations, wanted less stringent rules than the F.D.A. is considering.
Meanwhile, the biotechnology industry is actually pushing for the tougher standards.
“Our overarching goal is to have public confidence in our products,” said Barbara Glenn, the managing director for animal issues at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group. “We won’t have that unless we have a very strong review process.”
The F.D.A. is turning to transgenic animals after having tentatively declared in December that milk and meat from livestock that is cloned — but not otherwise genetically manipulated — was safe for people to eat.
The F.D.A. considers clones to be less biologically radical than genetically engineered animals — which instead of being mere replicas of naturally occurring animals are given foreign DNA, usually from another species.
Larisa Rudenko, a senior biotechnology adviser in the F.D.A.’s veterinary drug division, said in a May presentation at the biotechnology industry’s annual convention that each new type of genetically engineered animal would require approval for use in the food supply. That will be done, she said, under the umbrella of existing rules for drugs used in treating animal diseases.
While the implanted gene is somewhat like a drug, the existing rules would have to be stretched to fit.
But industry executives and some former agency officials said it was unlikely that Congress would enact totally new laws for transgenic animals. And using the drug laws, they say, would provide tighter control than an alternative approach of using the rules governing food additives. Agency officials have said that the veterinary drug rules would be used, and they have already been overseeing some experimental work on that basis. But they continued to debate the issue, and the policy has never been made official.
The regulatory guidelines would indicate how the drug rules would be interpreted for transgenic animals, and what types of data would be needed to prove safety and efficacy. But there are open questions about how the drug rules would actually translate. While a chemical drug must be shown to be consistent and stable, for instance, it is unclear how that standard would apply to a gene passed from generation to generation. Some critics say that while the drug rules do provide fairly strict regulation of food safety, there are drawbacks to adapting that approach. Because applications for approval of drugs are confidential, for instance, there would be no opportunity for public comment before the agency acted.
“In order to create confidence in a new technology, you really don’t want behind-closed-door proceedings,” said Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Another worry is that the F.D.A. might not have enough expertise or authority to conduct a vigorous review of the environmental impact of transgenic animals. The F.D.A. has dismissed this concern, however, saying it has sufficient expertise and can consult with other agencies.
The biotechnology regulatory branch of the Department of Agriculture created an animal division last December to figure out what its role should be.
Genetically engineered animals are often created by injecting the gene of interest into a single-cell embryo. A more recent technique that is more efficient is to put the gene into a skin cell and create an embryo from that cell by cloning.
In both cases, the embryo with the foreign gene is then implanted into the womb of a surrogate mother. After some transgenic animals are born, additional ones can be made by conventional breeding, because the foreign gene generally will be passed on to some of the offspring, as would any other gene.
The fast-growing salmon is the transgenic animal that has been swimming upstream the longest at the F.D.A. Its developer, Aqua Bounty Technologies of Waltham, Mass., has been working to win agency approval for about 10 years. Aqua Bounty’s fish are Atlantic salmon that have been given a growth-hormone gene from the Chinook salmon. They have also been equipped with a genetic on-switch from a fish called the ocean pout, a distant cousin of the salmon.
Normally, salmon produce growth hormone only in warmer months, but the pout gene’s on-switch keeps the hormone flowing year round. That enables the Aqua Bounty fish to grow faster, reaching their market weight in about 18 months instead of 30.
Elliot Entis, Aqua Bounty’s chief executive, said the company had already given the F.D.A. studies showing that the fish were healthy and that the implanted gene remained stable over generations.
He said the company also had tests done to show that its fish contained the same level of fats, proteins and other nutrients as other farmed salmon and would not set off unexpected allergic reactions in people who eat them. The fish also taste the same as other farmed Atlantic salmon,
Mr. Entis said.
“Nobody has ever analyzed salmon as closely as we have had done,” he said. But the F.D.A. is asking for more data on safety and potential environmental effects on wild salmon.
Industry executives say the Enviropigs would be the next candidate for F.D.A. approval. The pigs contain a bacterial gene that allows them to produce an enzyme that helps them more fully digest a vital nutrient, phosphorus, in their feed. That means less phosphorus in the manure, which in turn could mean less phosphorus running off into lakes and oceans, where it can cause algal blooms and fish kills.
MaRS Landing, a technology promoting organization in Ontario, is trying to find a corporate partner for the pig, said John Kelly, the agency’s executive director.
Less far along in the approval pipeline are pigs that contain a gene from the roundworm allowing them to produce omega-3 fatty acids, a nutrient normally found in fish that is good for the heart. That, in theory, could make eating pork or bacon healthier, although that has yet to be tested.
Jing X. Kang, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who helped direct the project, said the researchers were looking for corporate backers while also trying to raise the level of omega-3 in the meat.
Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, a consumer advocacy group in Washington, said regulations might not assuage consumers, many of whom object to the genetic engineering of animals on humane or ethical grounds, more than on safety concerns.
“The fact that the F.D.A. has a powerful regulatory process for reviewing genetically engineered animals, far greater than they apply to genetically engineered crops, may not make any difference at all,” Ms. Foreman said. “Because that’s not what it’s all about.”
Friday, July 27, 2007
Food in Botulism Recall Still Being Sold
By ANDREW BRIDGES, Associated Press, July 27, 2007
Stores nationwide are continuing to sell recalled canned chili, stew, hash and other foods potentially contaminated with poisonous bacteria even after repeated warnings the products could kill.
Thousands of cans are being removed from store shelves as quickly as investigators find them, more than a week after Castleberry's Food Co. began recalling more than 90 potentially contaminated products over fears of botulism contamination.
The recall now covers two years' production at the company's Augusta, Ga., plant — a tally that spirals into the tens of millions of cans.
Spot checks by the Food and Drug Administration and state officials continue to turn up recalled
products for sale in convenience stores, gas stations and family run groceries, from Florida to Alaska. The FDA alone has found them in roughly 250 of the more than 3,700 stores visited in nationwide checks, according to figures the agency provided to The Associated Press.
In states like North Carolina, more than one in three stores checked by state officials in recent days were still offering recalled products for sale. Officials there pulled 5,500 cans and pledged to keep searching.
"We're not going to quit. These numbers are too high," said Joe Reardon, who oversees food protection for the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
Four people have been sickened and hospitalized because of the contaminated food, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Officials fear the tally will grow.
"Frankly, the fact we have had only four illnesses in this situation has people saying, 'Well, what is the big deal?' The deal is this is something that can land you in the ICU, not being able to breathe, for weeks," said Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's lead food safety expert.
FDA investigators believe Castleberry's failed to properly cook some or all the products, allowing the Clostridium botulinum bacteria to survive the canning process. In the oxygen-free and moist environment of the sealed cans, the bacteria thrive and produce a toxin that causes botulism, a muscle-paralyzing disease.
"The longer this stuff stays in the can, the worse it gets," Acheson said.
The bacteria also produce gases that can cause contaminated cans to swell and burst. Already, cans being held in a company warehouse have begun to break open. Health officials say the extremely potent toxin can infect people if it is inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through the eye or breaks in the skin.
Health experts consider botulism a severe health threat but worry that word of the recall has not reached all consumers or retailers, especially mom-and-pop operations.
"It has been a problem getting the message out. We're having a problem reaching the smaller stores," said Lynae Granzow, an epidemiologist with the Indiana Department of Health.
In Massachusetts, health inspectors found recalled products in fewer than 50 small stores, mostly in the Boston area, state Department of Public Health spokeswoman Donna Rheaume said. Spot checks in Alaska, Florida, Kentucky, Montana, New York, Indiana and elsewhere also have found them on shelves.
Castleberry's has hired a company to collect the recalled products from stores. It has posted a complete list of the recalled products, including some dog foods, on its Web site — http://www.castleberrys.com/
People who have any of the recalled products at home should double-bag and throw them away, the FDA recommends.
Castleberry's is owned by Bumble Bee Seafoods LLC, based in San Diego.
___
On the Net:
FDA botulism information: http://tinyurl.com/324exf
Stores nationwide are continuing to sell recalled canned chili, stew, hash and other foods potentially contaminated with poisonous bacteria even after repeated warnings the products could kill.
Thousands of cans are being removed from store shelves as quickly as investigators find them, more than a week after Castleberry's Food Co. began recalling more than 90 potentially contaminated products over fears of botulism contamination.
The recall now covers two years' production at the company's Augusta, Ga., plant — a tally that spirals into the tens of millions of cans.
Spot checks by the Food and Drug Administration and state officials continue to turn up recalled
products for sale in convenience stores, gas stations and family run groceries, from Florida to Alaska. The FDA alone has found them in roughly 250 of the more than 3,700 stores visited in nationwide checks, according to figures the agency provided to The Associated Press.
In states like North Carolina, more than one in three stores checked by state officials in recent days were still offering recalled products for sale. Officials there pulled 5,500 cans and pledged to keep searching.
"We're not going to quit. These numbers are too high," said Joe Reardon, who oversees food protection for the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
Four people have been sickened and hospitalized because of the contaminated food, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Officials fear the tally will grow.
"Frankly, the fact we have had only four illnesses in this situation has people saying, 'Well, what is the big deal?' The deal is this is something that can land you in the ICU, not being able to breathe, for weeks," said Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's lead food safety expert.
FDA investigators believe Castleberry's failed to properly cook some or all the products, allowing the Clostridium botulinum bacteria to survive the canning process. In the oxygen-free and moist environment of the sealed cans, the bacteria thrive and produce a toxin that causes botulism, a muscle-paralyzing disease.
"The longer this stuff stays in the can, the worse it gets," Acheson said.
The bacteria also produce gases that can cause contaminated cans to swell and burst. Already, cans being held in a company warehouse have begun to break open. Health officials say the extremely potent toxin can infect people if it is inhaled, swallowed or absorbed through the eye or breaks in the skin.
Health experts consider botulism a severe health threat but worry that word of the recall has not reached all consumers or retailers, especially mom-and-pop operations.
"It has been a problem getting the message out. We're having a problem reaching the smaller stores," said Lynae Granzow, an epidemiologist with the Indiana Department of Health.
In Massachusetts, health inspectors found recalled products in fewer than 50 small stores, mostly in the Boston area, state Department of Public Health spokeswoman Donna Rheaume said. Spot checks in Alaska, Florida, Kentucky, Montana, New York, Indiana and elsewhere also have found them on shelves.
Castleberry's has hired a company to collect the recalled products from stores. It has posted a complete list of the recalled products, including some dog foods, on its Web site — http://www.castleberrys.com/
People who have any of the recalled products at home should double-bag and throw them away, the FDA recommends.
Castleberry's is owned by Bumble Bee Seafoods LLC, based in San Diego.
___
On the Net:
FDA botulism information: http://tinyurl.com/324exf
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Farm Subsidies Seem Immune to an Overhaul
New York Times, July 26, 2007
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
WASHINGTON, July 25 — For the many critics of farm subsidies, including President Bush and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, this seemed like the ideal year for Congress to tackle the federal payments long criticized as enriching big farm interests, violating trade agreements and neglecting small family farms.
Many crop prices are at or near record highs. Concern over the country’s dependence on foreign oil has sent demand for corn-based ethanol soaring. European wheat fields have been battered by too much rain. And market analysts are projecting continued boom years for American farmers into the foreseeable future.
But as the latest farm bill heads to the House floor on Thursday, farm-state lawmakers seem likely to prevail in keeping the old subsidies largely in place, drawing a veto threat on Wednesday from the White House.
“The bill put forth by the committee misses a major opportunity,” Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said Wednesday. “The time really is right for reform in farm policy.”
Faced with fierce opposition from the House Agriculture Committee, Ms. Pelosi and other Democratic leaders lowered their sights and are now backing the committee’s bill, in part to protect freshman lawmakers from rural areas who may be vulnerable in the 2008 elections.
Instead, Ms. Pelosi helped to secure more modest changes, pushing the committee to provide $1.8 billion for programs that aid fruit and vegetable growers, generating support from lawmakers in states like Florida and California, Ms. Pelosi’s home, and deflating some traditional opposition to the farm bill.
At the same time, she pronounced the bill a “good first step to reform” by ending subsidies for the richest farmers — those earning more than $1 million a year — and closing a loophole that let some farmers exceed subsidy limits by owning partnerships in multiple farms.
The bill also requires country-of-origin labeling for meat, a requirement favored by consumer advocates and small ranchers.
“This bill represents reform,” said Representative Collin C. Peterson, Democrat of Minnesota and chairman of the Agriculture Committee. “We have made changes that nobody thought that we could ever do.”
A group of dissident lawmakers led by Representatives Ron Kind, Democrat of Wisconsin, and Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, is still pushing a plan to curtail the subsidies sharply.
But they have been largely outmuscled by the Agriculture Committee. It 46 members are slightly more than 10 percent of the House but their districts received more than 40 percent of all farm subsidies from 2003 to 2005, according to a database compiled by the Environmental Working Group, which opposes the subsidies.
Critics in Congress include fiscal conservatives who deride the payments as wasteful government spending and liberals who call them corporate welfare for agribusiness. All say the measure will simply perpetuate the overly generous subsidy system, at a point when American farmers are well-positioned to weather changes.
“When farm prosperity is as good as it is right now, this is the time to reform,” said Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and a member of the dissident group. “If we can’t reform these farm programs at this moment in our history, we will never be able to do it.”
The group has proposed an amendment to the farm bill that would cut subsidies and increase spending on environmental conservation, rural development and nutrition programs, including food banks. It would end subsidies to farmers earning more than $250,000 a year, similar to the $200,000 cap proposed by the Bush administration. It would also substantially limit payments that farmers receive under guaranteed loan programs.
The effort by Mr. Kind has exposed divisions among House Democrats, some of whom argue that he could cost the party its new majority. The fear is that freshmen Democrats from rural swing districts could lose their seats if voters blamed them for lower farm subsidies. Mr. Kind rejected such assertions. “The vast majority of our new members benefit from our proposal,” he said.
The White House, in a statement Wednesday, said that Mr. Bush would veto the farm bill in its current form because it was too expensive and would require raising taxes while fixing the subsidies.
“I find it unacceptable to raise taxes to pay for a farm bill that contains virtually no reform,” Mr. Johanns, the agriculture secretary, said in a conference call with reporters.
While the administration and Congressional critics of the bill are pushing for some of the same changes, the White House would extend and even increase so-called direct payments to farmers of corn, soybeans, cotton and other major crops that the dissidents in Congress hope to largely eliminate.
These payments, totaling more than $5 billion a year, are made even when farmers are earning sizable profits. Critics say they should be replaced with crop insurance and other revenue protections that pay only if farmers actually lose money.
The White House, however, favors these direct payments in part because they are based on past crop production, not on current crops or prices, meaning they have no impact on market conditions and do not violate world trade agreements.
The strategic maneuvering by the administration, and some unusual alliances on Capitol Hill, reflect the curious politics of farm policies, cutting across party lines and mirroring regional interests more than partisan loyalties.
The keen interest in the bill, even among urban lawmakers from districts without a corn or barley field, underscores the vast scope of the farm bill, which includes not just agriculture policies but nutrition programs like food stamps, and an array of energy, land conservation and other programs.
For instance, Democrats proposed a tax increase to pay for the part of the farm bill that would increase antihunger efforts by $4 billion.
The proposal would generate about $7 billion over five years by imposing taxes on some foreign corporations operating in the United States that do not pay taxes on certain rents, royalties and interest payments as a result of international treaties. Democrats said they were simply closing a loophole.
Republicans on the Agriculture Committee, who had been questioning where the money would
come from, immediately began to revolt, saying they would vote against the bill.
Other Republicans, who had no intention of supporting the farm bill, seized the chance to excoriate the Democrats on the tax increase. They included the minority leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio.
“When you throw in the tax increase, he’d probably vote against it twice if he could,” said a Boehner spokesman, Brian Kennedy.
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
WASHINGTON, July 25 — For the many critics of farm subsidies, including President Bush and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, this seemed like the ideal year for Congress to tackle the federal payments long criticized as enriching big farm interests, violating trade agreements and neglecting small family farms.
Many crop prices are at or near record highs. Concern over the country’s dependence on foreign oil has sent demand for corn-based ethanol soaring. European wheat fields have been battered by too much rain. And market analysts are projecting continued boom years for American farmers into the foreseeable future.
But as the latest farm bill heads to the House floor on Thursday, farm-state lawmakers seem likely to prevail in keeping the old subsidies largely in place, drawing a veto threat on Wednesday from the White House.
“The bill put forth by the committee misses a major opportunity,” Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said Wednesday. “The time really is right for reform in farm policy.”
Faced with fierce opposition from the House Agriculture Committee, Ms. Pelosi and other Democratic leaders lowered their sights and are now backing the committee’s bill, in part to protect freshman lawmakers from rural areas who may be vulnerable in the 2008 elections.
Instead, Ms. Pelosi helped to secure more modest changes, pushing the committee to provide $1.8 billion for programs that aid fruit and vegetable growers, generating support from lawmakers in states like Florida and California, Ms. Pelosi’s home, and deflating some traditional opposition to the farm bill.
At the same time, she pronounced the bill a “good first step to reform” by ending subsidies for the richest farmers — those earning more than $1 million a year — and closing a loophole that let some farmers exceed subsidy limits by owning partnerships in multiple farms.
The bill also requires country-of-origin labeling for meat, a requirement favored by consumer advocates and small ranchers.
“This bill represents reform,” said Representative Collin C. Peterson, Democrat of Minnesota and chairman of the Agriculture Committee. “We have made changes that nobody thought that we could ever do.”
A group of dissident lawmakers led by Representatives Ron Kind, Democrat of Wisconsin, and Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, is still pushing a plan to curtail the subsidies sharply.
But they have been largely outmuscled by the Agriculture Committee. It 46 members are slightly more than 10 percent of the House but their districts received more than 40 percent of all farm subsidies from 2003 to 2005, according to a database compiled by the Environmental Working Group, which opposes the subsidies.
Critics in Congress include fiscal conservatives who deride the payments as wasteful government spending and liberals who call them corporate welfare for agribusiness. All say the measure will simply perpetuate the overly generous subsidy system, at a point when American farmers are well-positioned to weather changes.
“When farm prosperity is as good as it is right now, this is the time to reform,” said Representative Paul D. Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin and a member of the dissident group. “If we can’t reform these farm programs at this moment in our history, we will never be able to do it.”
The group has proposed an amendment to the farm bill that would cut subsidies and increase spending on environmental conservation, rural development and nutrition programs, including food banks. It would end subsidies to farmers earning more than $250,000 a year, similar to the $200,000 cap proposed by the Bush administration. It would also substantially limit payments that farmers receive under guaranteed loan programs.
The effort by Mr. Kind has exposed divisions among House Democrats, some of whom argue that he could cost the party its new majority. The fear is that freshmen Democrats from rural swing districts could lose their seats if voters blamed them for lower farm subsidies. Mr. Kind rejected such assertions. “The vast majority of our new members benefit from our proposal,” he said.
The White House, in a statement Wednesday, said that Mr. Bush would veto the farm bill in its current form because it was too expensive and would require raising taxes while fixing the subsidies.
“I find it unacceptable to raise taxes to pay for a farm bill that contains virtually no reform,” Mr. Johanns, the agriculture secretary, said in a conference call with reporters.
While the administration and Congressional critics of the bill are pushing for some of the same changes, the White House would extend and even increase so-called direct payments to farmers of corn, soybeans, cotton and other major crops that the dissidents in Congress hope to largely eliminate.
These payments, totaling more than $5 billion a year, are made even when farmers are earning sizable profits. Critics say they should be replaced with crop insurance and other revenue protections that pay only if farmers actually lose money.
The White House, however, favors these direct payments in part because they are based on past crop production, not on current crops or prices, meaning they have no impact on market conditions and do not violate world trade agreements.
The strategic maneuvering by the administration, and some unusual alliances on Capitol Hill, reflect the curious politics of farm policies, cutting across party lines and mirroring regional interests more than partisan loyalties.
The keen interest in the bill, even among urban lawmakers from districts without a corn or barley field, underscores the vast scope of the farm bill, which includes not just agriculture policies but nutrition programs like food stamps, and an array of energy, land conservation and other programs.
For instance, Democrats proposed a tax increase to pay for the part of the farm bill that would increase antihunger efforts by $4 billion.
The proposal would generate about $7 billion over five years by imposing taxes on some foreign corporations operating in the United States that do not pay taxes on certain rents, royalties and interest payments as a result of international treaties. Democrats said they were simply closing a loophole.
Republicans on the Agriculture Committee, who had been questioning where the money would
come from, immediately began to revolt, saying they would vote against the bill.
Other Republicans, who had no intention of supporting the farm bill, seized the chance to excoriate the Democrats on the tax increase. They included the minority leader, Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio.
“When you throw in the tax increase, he’d probably vote against it twice if he could,” said a Boehner spokesman, Brian Kennedy.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
The Localvore's Dilemma
Sometimes buying local food helps in the battle against climate change. Sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes, it's just too confusing to decide.
By Drake Bennett The Boston Globe, July 22, 2007
AT VARIOUS POINTS in the coming months, a few hundred of Vermont's most ethical eaters will take the "Localvore Challenge." The actual dates of the challenge vary from town to town, but the idea is that, for a single meal, or a day, or an entire week, participants will eat only food that was grown or raised within 100 miles of where they live.
Vermont's localvores (also known as "locavores" or "locatarians") and their counterparts around the country are part of a burgeoning movement. In recent years, as large companies with globe-straddling supply networks have come to dominate organic agriculture, "local" has emerged as the new watchword of conscientious consumption. Over the past year and a half, the interest in local food has been fueled by best-selling memoirs and manifestos about local eating and dietary self-sufficiency, such as Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," Bill McKibben's "Deep Economy," and Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma."
The case for local food is several-fold: It tastes better, its proponents argue, and preserves species biodiversity. It shores up small-scale economies and communities in the face of globalization and cultural homogenization. It even, some of its advocates claim, protects against terrorism: a decentralized food system could limit the impact of a virus or other bio-agent introduced into the food supply.
One of the arguments most often heard, however, is about energy. And at a time of rising concern about climate change, the great distances that most of our food travels are a potent symbol of the system's profligacy and cost in greenhouse gases. For local-food activists, "food miles" have become a favored measure of environmental impact. Food activists in the US and especially in Western Europe have pushed to put the term on menus and grocery-store labels.
"[T]he typical item of food on an American's plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there," Michael Pollan writes in "The Omnivore's Dilemma," "and is frequently better traveled and more worldly than its eater."
But a gathering body of evidence suggests that local food can sometimes consume more energy -- and produce more greenhouse gases -- than food imported from great distances. Moving food by train or ship is quite efficient, pound for pound, and transportation can often be a relatively small part of the total energy "footprint" of food compared with growing, packaging, or, for that matter, cooking it. A head of lettuce grown in Vermont may have less of an energy impact than one shipped up from Chile. But grow that Vermont lettuce late in the season in a heated greenhouse and its energy impact leapfrogs the imported option. So while local food may have its benefits, helping with climate change is not always one of them.
"All things being equal, it's better if food only travels 10 miles," says Peter Tyedmers, an ecological economist at Nova Scotia's Dalhousie University. "Sometimes all things are equal; many times they aren't."
The new research is part of an ambitious attempt to understand how food -- and the massive, almost impossibly complex system that produces and moves it across the globe -- affects the environment. For several years in Europe, and increasingly here in the US as well, food analysts have started to adopt a methodology called Life Cycle Assessment -- a comprehensive accounting of all of the resources that go into the food network, from fertilizer and fuel to the concrete and steel used to build a packing plant and the electricity used to keep it cool.
These researchers laud the public interest in food and its environmental impact, but their work, they say, shows that "local" is not the best way to think about food and energy, or the best basis for food-buying decisions. Some of these researchers are trying to devise more accurate ways of telling consumers the climate impact of their food choices. But they are discovering that the task can be tricky. The key, they argue, is to find a way to label foods that is both accurate and simple enough for consumers to accept.
Their work also highlights a more fundamental challenge for local-food enthusiasts. Michael Pollan states this challenge starkly: "Local means local in season," he says. In places like Boston, it means not only summers of fresh berries and arugula but January diets heavy on root vegetables and canned tomatoes. Can such a movement ever find mainstream acceptance?
The American food-supply network can do certain tasks very well, and one of them is to efficiently ship things over very large distances. The costs in energy can be high: air shipping is by far the most fuel-intensive, and is the fastest growing sector of food transport. However, it still only accounts for a small minority of the food shipments into and throughout the country.
Judged by unit of weight, ship and rail transport in particular are highly energy efficient. Financial considerations force shippers to pack as much as they can into their cargo containers, whether they're being carried by ship, rail, or truck, and to ensure that they rarely make a return trip empty. And because of their size, container ships and trains enjoy impressive economies of scale. The marginal extra energy it takes to transport a single bunch of bananas packed in with 60,000 tons of other cargo on a container ship is more than an order of magnitude less than that required to move them with a couple hundred pounds of cargo in a car or small truck.
"Local food systems are often built around small-scale logistics," says Chris Foster, a research fellow at England's Manchester Business School and co-author of a December 2006 study on the environmental impacts of food production and consumption commissioned for Britain's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. "You begin to make more trips in cars. More food is shifted around in small trucks and vans, which are relatively energy-inefficient ways of moving."
The difference can be dramatic, according to Rich Pirog, a food-systems researcher at Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. A bag of potatoes shipped from Idaho to Boston by rail, he estimates, is likely to require less energy in transit than the same bag of potatoes driven from Maine to Boston in a farmer's truck. In recent decades, the national food-distribution system has shifted from rail to trucking, so fuel use has risen, but that still doesn't necessarily make local the best energy option.
A study Pirog did of Iowa's food supply in 2001 suggested that a transition to a more localized food system, at least in Iowa's case, would cut fuel use over today's international system. But the same study found that a multi-state regional system would be better still. The trucks transporting food in that model would be bigger and more efficient per unit of food than in the local model, while not traveling as far as in a national model.
How food travels, in other words, matters as much as how far it travels, and what happens on the farm or in the kitchen can leave a much bigger energy footprint than what happens between them.
"Often it's those activities and behaviors at the two ends of the production system that tend to dominate," says Peter Tyedmers. Food analysts point out that, per pound of food, the grocery shopper's drive home from the store or farmer's market can often use more energy than the entire rest of the supply chain.
Life Cycle Assessment -- in essence an exhaustive itemization of a product's every environmental impact -- was originally developed by engineers and chemists in the late 1960s for durable goods like cars and household appliances. Only in recent years has it started to be applied to food. Most of the food research has been done in Europe, where energy costs are higher than in the US and climate change has been a less contentious issue.
A few LCA studies -- of tomatoes in Sweden, of apples and lettuce in Great Britain -- suggest that in certain situations and certain seasons, the imported option is more energy-efficient than the local one.
During the European winter, it takes far less energy to grow produce outdoors in a warm climate like Spain or North Africa or New Zealand than in a heated greenhouse in Sweden or England. The energy that goes into heating that greenhouse, the studies found, or to storing locally grown fruit at a temperature cold enough to keep it for any length of time beyond the end of the growing season, can easily outweigh the energy required to ship produce from a warmer country.
One of few comprehensive studies done in North America compared the energy used to bring consumers British Canadian farmed salmon and Alaskan wild salmon, according to Tyedmers, who led the work. The results have yet to be published, but Tyedners says that he found that everything from the method of fishing to the source of a region's electricity to the form in which the fish was transported ended up being more important factors than shipping distance.
And for cattle, the greatest climate impact comes not from hauling cows and milk and steaks around the country, but from cow burps. Cows are impressive emitters of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide (contrary to popular belief, most of it comes out the front of the cow, not the rear). A cow with a bit of indigestion can contribute as much to global warming in a day as the average SUV.
But if "food miles" are such a crude measure, what's an environmentally concerned grocery shopper to look to? Some food activists are targeting the ends of the food production process -- farmers both in the US and Europe are looking at ways to heat greenhouses with renewable energy, or to avoid heating them at all even during winter, and both the British government and Ben & Jerry's recently announced efforts to modify cow feed to reduce methane production. Others are working to wring inefficiencies out of the local food-distribution system by getting farmers to consolidate their produce into larger trucks making fewer trips.
More broadly, though, some food analysts are trying to introduce LCA thinking to consumers. The Swedish government, as well as the British retailer Tesco, has announced plans to affix products with "carbon labels" that announce just how much carbon was emitted in production and distribution. Here in the US, Bon Appetit Management Company, a corporate caterer that serves Yahoo!, MIT and others, plans to introduce a similar measure next spring.
Rich Pirog sees this as a start. Ultimately, he envisions a series of labels: In addition to nutrition information, a box of cereal or a bunch of green beans would bear stickers relaying their carbon emissions along with their fair-trade credentials. The risk in such a scheme, however, is that consumers, given too much information, absorb none of it.
For their part, some localvores are suspicious of such labeling proposals. "To me the whole idea of calculating out the carbon impact way overcomplicates something that should be pretty simple," says Robin McDermott, co-founder of the Mad River Valley Locavores. Even if it turned out that an imported bunch of tomatoes were somehow more environmentally friendly than a local one, she says, she'd still go with local. "There's the taste," she says, "and you're supporting local farmers."
Michael Pollan hastens to point out that eating locally is only part of a larger food ethic. The problem isn't merely, he argues, that we ship our lettuce across the country; the problem is that people living in New England, a place naturally unfriendly to large-scale lettuce production, feel entitled to eat lettuce in February. Before World War II, he points out, Americans ate locally and in season because they had no choice.
"It's a new idea," he says, "this expectation that we can have a salad all year round."
Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.
By Drake Bennett The Boston Globe, July 22, 2007
AT VARIOUS POINTS in the coming months, a few hundred of Vermont's most ethical eaters will take the "Localvore Challenge." The actual dates of the challenge vary from town to town, but the idea is that, for a single meal, or a day, or an entire week, participants will eat only food that was grown or raised within 100 miles of where they live.
Vermont's localvores (also known as "locavores" or "locatarians") and their counterparts around the country are part of a burgeoning movement. In recent years, as large companies with globe-straddling supply networks have come to dominate organic agriculture, "local" has emerged as the new watchword of conscientious consumption. Over the past year and a half, the interest in local food has been fueled by best-selling memoirs and manifestos about local eating and dietary self-sufficiency, such as Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle," Bill McKibben's "Deep Economy," and Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma."
The case for local food is several-fold: It tastes better, its proponents argue, and preserves species biodiversity. It shores up small-scale economies and communities in the face of globalization and cultural homogenization. It even, some of its advocates claim, protects against terrorism: a decentralized food system could limit the impact of a virus or other bio-agent introduced into the food supply.
One of the arguments most often heard, however, is about energy. And at a time of rising concern about climate change, the great distances that most of our food travels are a potent symbol of the system's profligacy and cost in greenhouse gases. For local-food activists, "food miles" have become a favored measure of environmental impact. Food activists in the US and especially in Western Europe have pushed to put the term on menus and grocery-store labels.
"[T]he typical item of food on an American's plate travels some fifteen hundred miles to get there," Michael Pollan writes in "The Omnivore's Dilemma," "and is frequently better traveled and more worldly than its eater."
But a gathering body of evidence suggests that local food can sometimes consume more energy -- and produce more greenhouse gases -- than food imported from great distances. Moving food by train or ship is quite efficient, pound for pound, and transportation can often be a relatively small part of the total energy "footprint" of food compared with growing, packaging, or, for that matter, cooking it. A head of lettuce grown in Vermont may have less of an energy impact than one shipped up from Chile. But grow that Vermont lettuce late in the season in a heated greenhouse and its energy impact leapfrogs the imported option. So while local food may have its benefits, helping with climate change is not always one of them.
"All things being equal, it's better if food only travels 10 miles," says Peter Tyedmers, an ecological economist at Nova Scotia's Dalhousie University. "Sometimes all things are equal; many times they aren't."
The new research is part of an ambitious attempt to understand how food -- and the massive, almost impossibly complex system that produces and moves it across the globe -- affects the environment. For several years in Europe, and increasingly here in the US as well, food analysts have started to adopt a methodology called Life Cycle Assessment -- a comprehensive accounting of all of the resources that go into the food network, from fertilizer and fuel to the concrete and steel used to build a packing plant and the electricity used to keep it cool.
These researchers laud the public interest in food and its environmental impact, but their work, they say, shows that "local" is not the best way to think about food and energy, or the best basis for food-buying decisions. Some of these researchers are trying to devise more accurate ways of telling consumers the climate impact of their food choices. But they are discovering that the task can be tricky. The key, they argue, is to find a way to label foods that is both accurate and simple enough for consumers to accept.
Their work also highlights a more fundamental challenge for local-food enthusiasts. Michael Pollan states this challenge starkly: "Local means local in season," he says. In places like Boston, it means not only summers of fresh berries and arugula but January diets heavy on root vegetables and canned tomatoes. Can such a movement ever find mainstream acceptance?
The American food-supply network can do certain tasks very well, and one of them is to efficiently ship things over very large distances. The costs in energy can be high: air shipping is by far the most fuel-intensive, and is the fastest growing sector of food transport. However, it still only accounts for a small minority of the food shipments into and throughout the country.
Judged by unit of weight, ship and rail transport in particular are highly energy efficient. Financial considerations force shippers to pack as much as they can into their cargo containers, whether they're being carried by ship, rail, or truck, and to ensure that they rarely make a return trip empty. And because of their size, container ships and trains enjoy impressive economies of scale. The marginal extra energy it takes to transport a single bunch of bananas packed in with 60,000 tons of other cargo on a container ship is more than an order of magnitude less than that required to move them with a couple hundred pounds of cargo in a car or small truck.
"Local food systems are often built around small-scale logistics," says Chris Foster, a research fellow at England's Manchester Business School and co-author of a December 2006 study on the environmental impacts of food production and consumption commissioned for Britain's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. "You begin to make more trips in cars. More food is shifted around in small trucks and vans, which are relatively energy-inefficient ways of moving."
The difference can be dramatic, according to Rich Pirog, a food-systems researcher at Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. A bag of potatoes shipped from Idaho to Boston by rail, he estimates, is likely to require less energy in transit than the same bag of potatoes driven from Maine to Boston in a farmer's truck. In recent decades, the national food-distribution system has shifted from rail to trucking, so fuel use has risen, but that still doesn't necessarily make local the best energy option.
A study Pirog did of Iowa's food supply in 2001 suggested that a transition to a more localized food system, at least in Iowa's case, would cut fuel use over today's international system. But the same study found that a multi-state regional system would be better still. The trucks transporting food in that model would be bigger and more efficient per unit of food than in the local model, while not traveling as far as in a national model.
How food travels, in other words, matters as much as how far it travels, and what happens on the farm or in the kitchen can leave a much bigger energy footprint than what happens between them.
"Often it's those activities and behaviors at the two ends of the production system that tend to dominate," says Peter Tyedmers. Food analysts point out that, per pound of food, the grocery shopper's drive home from the store or farmer's market can often use more energy than the entire rest of the supply chain.
Life Cycle Assessment -- in essence an exhaustive itemization of a product's every environmental impact -- was originally developed by engineers and chemists in the late 1960s for durable goods like cars and household appliances. Only in recent years has it started to be applied to food. Most of the food research has been done in Europe, where energy costs are higher than in the US and climate change has been a less contentious issue.
A few LCA studies -- of tomatoes in Sweden, of apples and lettuce in Great Britain -- suggest that in certain situations and certain seasons, the imported option is more energy-efficient than the local one.
During the European winter, it takes far less energy to grow produce outdoors in a warm climate like Spain or North Africa or New Zealand than in a heated greenhouse in Sweden or England. The energy that goes into heating that greenhouse, the studies found, or to storing locally grown fruit at a temperature cold enough to keep it for any length of time beyond the end of the growing season, can easily outweigh the energy required to ship produce from a warmer country.
One of few comprehensive studies done in North America compared the energy used to bring consumers British Canadian farmed salmon and Alaskan wild salmon, according to Tyedmers, who led the work. The results have yet to be published, but Tyedners says that he found that everything from the method of fishing to the source of a region's electricity to the form in which the fish was transported ended up being more important factors than shipping distance.
And for cattle, the greatest climate impact comes not from hauling cows and milk and steaks around the country, but from cow burps. Cows are impressive emitters of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide (contrary to popular belief, most of it comes out the front of the cow, not the rear). A cow with a bit of indigestion can contribute as much to global warming in a day as the average SUV.
But if "food miles" are such a crude measure, what's an environmentally concerned grocery shopper to look to? Some food activists are targeting the ends of the food production process -- farmers both in the US and Europe are looking at ways to heat greenhouses with renewable energy, or to avoid heating them at all even during winter, and both the British government and Ben & Jerry's recently announced efforts to modify cow feed to reduce methane production. Others are working to wring inefficiencies out of the local food-distribution system by getting farmers to consolidate their produce into larger trucks making fewer trips.
More broadly, though, some food analysts are trying to introduce LCA thinking to consumers. The Swedish government, as well as the British retailer Tesco, has announced plans to affix products with "carbon labels" that announce just how much carbon was emitted in production and distribution. Here in the US, Bon Appetit Management Company, a corporate caterer that serves Yahoo!, MIT and others, plans to introduce a similar measure next spring.
Rich Pirog sees this as a start. Ultimately, he envisions a series of labels: In addition to nutrition information, a box of cereal or a bunch of green beans would bear stickers relaying their carbon emissions along with their fair-trade credentials. The risk in such a scheme, however, is that consumers, given too much information, absorb none of it.
For their part, some localvores are suspicious of such labeling proposals. "To me the whole idea of calculating out the carbon impact way overcomplicates something that should be pretty simple," says Robin McDermott, co-founder of the Mad River Valley Locavores. Even if it turned out that an imported bunch of tomatoes were somehow more environmentally friendly than a local one, she says, she'd still go with local. "There's the taste," she says, "and you're supporting local farmers."
Michael Pollan hastens to point out that eating locally is only part of a larger food ethic. The problem isn't merely, he argues, that we ship our lettuce across the country; the problem is that people living in New England, a place naturally unfriendly to large-scale lettuce production, feel entitled to eat lettuce in February. Before World War II, he points out, Americans ate locally and in season because they had no choice.
"It's a new idea," he says, "this expectation that we can have a salad all year round."
Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett@globe.com.
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