Global Food Supply Near the Breaking Point

The world is now eating more food than farmers grow, pushing global grain stocks to their lowest level in 30 years.

Rising population, water shortages, climate change, and the growing costs of fossil fuel-based fertilizers point to a calamitous shortfall in the world’s grain supplies in the near future, according to Canada’s National Farmers Union (NFU).

Thirty years ago, the oceans were teeming with fish, but today more people rely on farmers to produce their food than ever before, says Stewart Wells, NFU’s president.

In five of the last six years, global population ate significantly more grains than farmers produced.

And with the world’s farmers unable to increase food production, policymakers must address the “massive challenges to the ability of humanity to continue to feed its growing numbers…. How can the number of hungry not explode when one, two and possibly three billion more people are added to the global population? ….

Slow Food

Slow Food is a non-profit, eco-gastronomic member-supported organization that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.

http://www.slowfood.com/

Visit this website a find out more about them and their activities like slow food events, taste workshops, educational campaigns etc.

Mouth Revolution

Check out this website for information and a funny video. http://www.mouthrevolution.com/

All about making sure the food we eat is good, real food.

Reform the Darn Farm Bill

I thought they already dealt with the monster FARM BILL (which comes up for renewal every 5 years) but apparently it’s still out there. This is a super-key piece of legislation that hugely effects both the environment and public health. The food industry is a monster (one of the biggest marketers to kids) and they continually get exactly what they want out of this bill… anyhoo check out Oxfam’s campaign about reforming the bill.

Cell Phone Seafood Help

Still not sure which is more eco-savvy, farmed or wild salmon? Snd a txt msg.

The marine conservation group Blue Ocean Institute has launched a cell phone-based service to send you text messages with the information you need to make smart seafood choices.

Next time you’re at the seafood counter or in a restaurant and can’t recall whether farmed catfish is managed in an environmentally sustainable fashion, send a text message and within seconds you’ll have the Institute’s take on it.

The group also is launching FishPhone ( http://fishphone.org ), a Web site formatted for Web-enabled cell phones and PDAs.

To use the texting service, send a message to 30644. In the message, type FISH, followed by the name of the seafood in question, such as tuna. The service covers more than 90 species, and suggests alternatives to options that pose environmental concerns.

Aside from any standard text message fees by your cell phone service provider, the service is free.

Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

UN envoy warns of ‘blood bath’ in Darfur

U.S. special envoy to Sudan, Andrew Natsios, spoke on Wednesday February 14th of the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Darfur. He said he feared a “blood bath” if aid groups were forced out of the region. His remarks came a day before the UN Security Council met to discuss deploying a mission to neighbouring Eastern Chad. Simmering ethnic tensions have worsened as the Darfur conflict has spread across the border. In a further development, UN Secretary General Na Ki-moon expressed his disappointment that the Sudanese government had failed to provide visas to a UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission, thereby preventing their planned visit to Darfur. The team has instead traveled to Chad to interview refugees who have fled across the border.

Amidst this increasingly alarming security situation about 4 million people in Darfur depend on humanitarian aid to survive. War Child Canada is one of only two Canadian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) still operational, and directly implementing their own projects, in West Darfur.

War Child Canada, partnering with the Sudan office of the St. Vincent de Paul Society, runs four psychosocial support and vocational training centres for displaced children and youth – one in each of the Ardamata, Dorti, Krinding and Riyad Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps located on the outskirts of El Geneina, West Darfur.

Besides providing a safe space in the midst of incredible violence, the centres provide awareness-raising sessions on Gender Based Violence (GBV) and HIV/AIDS; literacy and numeracy education; vocational training in masonry and food preservation; and recreational activities including volleyball and soccer. Such programming helps to improve the overall well-being of children and youth, alleviate poverty, and deter young males from joining rebel armies and militias.

Word of the program has spread and its popularity has soared causing an influx of younger children and youth to the centres. The War Child Canada Humanitarian Relief Project collaborates closely with other NGOs and UN agencies in the area.

Highlights and Notable Achievements

The project is strongly supported by the camp sheiks and community representatives.

There is a very high demand for skills training and an equally high degree of success in obtaining employment following War Child vocational training.

Skills training, literacy classes and recreational activities are reaching equal numbers of young men and young women. The program is having an important gender-impact by (a) specifically targeting girls and young women for participation, (b) providing Sexual Gender Based Violence (SGBV) awareness sessions, and© teaching female youth about their rights. Consequently, female participants have told us that more equitable gender relations in the centres are now positively changing male-female community interactions.

The recreational activities, as well as additional events carried out in the centres, are having an important psychosocial impact on youth.

War Child Canada is one of only a very few Canadian NGOs actually present in West Darfur and directly implementing their own projects.

World Food Day 2007: Food as a Human Right

ROME, Italy, October 16, 2007 (ENS) – “If our planet produces enough food to feed its entire population, why do 854 million people still go to sleep on an empty stomach?” demanded Dr. Jacques Diouf today. Speaking at the World Food Day ceremony on this year’s theme The Right to Food, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization director-general said, “A right is not a right if it cannot be claimed.”

Although enough food is produced globally to satisfy all the hungry people, food supplies are under greater pressure today than ever before. Prices of staples such as wheat and milk are rising mainly due to climate change weather fluctuations that affect harvests, the switch to biofuels, and increasing demand from new and emerging markets.

Despite the fact that the right to food was included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948, commitment to enforce the right has been only very gradual. Diouf said that while “national commitments to implement the right to food would have been unthinkable only 10 years ago, such commitments are already bearing fruit. In Brazil, for example, the right is now firmly entrenched and hunger is in retreat.”

In a message issued in honor of World Food Day, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, “The right to food is a human right. Yet, 854 million people in the world suffer from chronic hunger, and the figure has been increasing since the beginning of the new Millennium. In a world of plenty, this situation is unacceptable.”

“We must make the voice of these 854 million people heard. We must work to uphold their fundamental human right. We must recognize the role of human rights in eradicating hunger and poverty, and the connection between development, human rights and security.”

The Food and Agriculture Organization has been working with governments and nongovernmental organizations alike to promote a set of guidelines and a framework aimed at helping policymakers and others realize the right to food.

At the World Food Day ceremony held at FAO headquarters in Rome, Tanzanian President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete said, “40,000 children die every day throughout the world due to malnutrition and related diseases. These are the people who are being denied the right to food. These are the people who are the subject of this year’s World Food Day.”

Anita Rosario and her family were rescued by canoe from their home in Mozambique from the rising waters of the Zambezi River. They are now in a camp, reliant on UN food aid. The ultimate solution lies in improving agriculture, especially in Africa, said Kikwete.

German President Horst Köhler told the audience, “Hunger is not an inescapable destiny, but can be eliminated by wise policies.”

Calling on governments of developing countries make food security a priority, he said, “All people have a right to healthy food, produced in a sustainable manner appropriate to their culture. Democratic participation by the people is the best guarantee that governments will genuinely understand people’s basic needs and will take these into account.”

He noted that people should have an adequate supply of food from their own fields and the surrounding region, which requires a type of agriculture based on “ownership” in developing countries and on functioning local structures and know-how.

In a message from the Vatican read during the ceremony, Pope Benedict XVI said that food is a universal right for humankind, without distinction or discrimination. He urged all members of society to ensure the right to food, the non-fulfillment of which is a violation of human dignity.

Paolo de Castro, Italy’s minister for agricultural, food and forestry policies, underlined the importance of the right to food guidelines as the most effective means of moving governments as well as civil society towards achieving global food security.

“Demographics, climate change and commodity prices appear to be working against us right now, threatening to swirl up into a perfect storm of overwhelming need. But there is hope to end hunger, and science and education are on our side,” said World Food Programme Executive Director Josette Sheeran of the United States, who also addressed the World Food Day ceremony.

Lennart BÃ¥ge, head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development, a specialized agency of the United Nations, said, “Three quarters of the world’s one billion extremely poor people live in rural areas, many already suffer from hunger and malnutrition, but new and growing challenges such as climate change are making them all the more vulnerable. This is why now, more than ever, the world has a pressing moral obligation to invest in agricultural development to combat hunger and restore dignity to the poor.”

Eleven years after the 1996 World Food Summit, the number of undernourished people in the world remains unacceptably high, with 820 million in developing countries, 25 million in countries in transition and nine million in industrialized countries. As a result, promoting the right to food is not just a moral imperative or even an investment with huge economic returns, it is a basic human right, the Food and Agriculture Organization insists.

For the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, IFOAM, the Right to Food also means that life cannot be patented. “Patents on life support the monopoly control of genetic resources by few, thereby extensively undermining peoples’ right and access to food,” the organization said in a statement today.

IFOAM believes that “the Earth’s gene pool cannot be claimed as commercially negotiable genetic information or intellectual property by governments, commercial enterprises, other institutions or individuals.”

IFOAM Executive Director Angela Caudle said, “Since food is directly connected to communities and cultures, the right to food is also connected to community and rural development. There needs to be space for development that is not created by donating chemical fertilizers, but rather supports the regeneration and improvement of indigenous and local knowledge.”

World Food Day is commemorated annually in 150 countries.

Highlights of this year’s events include a worldwide candlelight vigil starting October 22 in the southwest Pacific and moving around the globe to draw attention to the problem of world hunger; musical events in Cairo, Rome, Bamako and other cities; sporting events such as the Run for Food race in Rome and Turin and professional soccer games dedicated to increasing awareness of World Food Day by Spain’s professional soccer league.

On the occasion of World Food Day 2007, universities in Italy, Ireland and Iran are establishing institutes or launching university courses on the right to food.

In Des Moines, Iowa, the four day long World Food Prize Award Ceremony and Symposium opens today on the theme Biofuels and Biofood – Global Challenges.

Dr. Philip Nelson, Purdue university researcher, will receive the 2007 Prize worth $250,000. Announced in June, this year’s prize honors Dr. Nelson for his innovative technologies which have revolutionized the food industry, particularly in the area of large-scale storage and transportation of fresh fruit and vegetables using bulk aseptic food processing. http://www.worldfoodprize.org/

For a list of World Food Day events, visit: http://www.worldfooddayusa.org/CMS/2950/17742.aspx

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2007. All rights reserved.

Farm bill reform petition, please sign

Farm Bill Reform Depends on Your Action Today

Act TodayThe 2007 Farm Bill is headed for the Senate floor. Write to your Senators today, and urge them to vote for the Dorgan-Grassley amendment that closes the loopholes in farm programs and brings an end to million-dollar subsidy payments.

How your Senators vote in the upcoming debate will be pivotal in the fight to end unlimited payments and make the 2007 Farm Bill work for all Americans, not just a select few. Your action will help us win a farm bill that stops over-subsidizing the nation’s largest farms and starts investing in our future through investments in rural economic development, conservation, and beginning farmer programs.

TASF 2ND Annual Coat & Food Drive

The Tupac Shakur Amaru Shakur Foundation

Presents

The Second Annual Winter Coat & Can Food Drive

November 15 – December 15, 2007

You may donate your “slightly worn or new winter coats” and can food items to the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts located @ 5616 Memorial Drive – Stone Mountain, GA 30083.

All donations will benefit: Foster Kid Families – DeKalb County , “Our House” – Home for women recovering from substance abuse – DeKalb County, “A home for un-wed teen mothers” – DeKalb County and The Women’s Resource Center – for Women & Children who are victims of domestic violence – DeKalb County.

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Join us Saturday, December 8, 2007 @ 5 PM For the Pac’s Kids Christmas Show entitled ” A Christmas Collage”

This is our Christmas Holiday Mixer where we will be collecting winter coats and can goods starting at 12 Noon all day long

For more information please contact Carlos Coleman 404-298-4222 or Angela Patrick 678-754-1997 Please help us be a blessing to those in need this “Holiday Season”

Free rice

Well probably most of you have seen it, i found it trough stumble! but its cool enough to see it again…

http://www.freerice.com/

By playing a word game you are donating rice trough the United Nations…so check it out

Urban Harvesting - Collect And Distribute Local Foods

The idea is simple and based upon the problem that most of the fruit that makes it into our grocery stores is transported great distances (1,000+ miles on average). All this energy, while a large percentage of fruit in people’s backyard simply goes to waste because most homeowners lack the time and interest to properly share or store this food.

Food Policy...why a Big Mac is cheaper than Salad

Federal Subsidies for bad food choices….see the link below to get the data.

http://agonist.org/ian_welsh/20071101/why_eating_healthy_costs_more_than_eating_unhealthily

Sierra Leone: World's Poorest Country

Freetown, Sierra Leone - Another of Sunkari Conteh’s children is sick. The last time one of her children fell ill, it died.

Almost three years old, her daughter succumbed to diarrhoea because Conteh couldn’t afford to pay a Le 90,000 medical consultation fee.

“I pleaded with the doctor to wait while my husband gathered the money,” she said. “The doctor refused. I cried and yelled at him, but he didn’t listen.”

As she cried again this past Saturday, Conteh recalled that she was able to take her baby to a pharmacy, but after a few days, her daughter died anyway. “I don’t even like to think about it, it’s terrible, it’s pathetic.”

Now Conteh is worried another of her children may suffer the same fate. Once again, she can’t afford the fees to vaccinate her youngest child.

The Kroo Bay mother has four children and provides for them by selling oranges in the streets of her community. Her husband is unemployed.

Conteh is like thousands of Sierra Leonean mothers struggling to survive in what last week the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) announced is now the poorest country in the world.

Sierra Leone has taken Niger’s spot at the very bottom of the UN’s human development index. According to the UN global report, launched in Freetown last Friday, this country is now ranked 177th out of 177 countries.

But the international 2005 findings are bleaker than a 2006 national report, which was also launched Friday. The UNDP claimed Sierra Leone fell to the lowest place because there is insufficient information about the country.

“I believe the situation would have been much better if there was adequate data to show for development in the country,” said Bernard Mokam, the UNDP’s country director.

But Saidu Turay, the Public Relations Officer for Freetown’s Kroo Bay slum, wasn’t surprised when he heard the report on the radio.

“Once these reports come up we feel sad,” he said.”It’s a clear manifestation that nothing has been done since the time of the last report. The health care system is very, very poor.”

Turay said just last Friday a baby died in his community because there was no treatment. As he discussed the report from the doorway of the one-bedroom Kroo Bay shack he shares with several members of his family, a woman entered his compound shouting and crying – she’d just heard that she, too, had lost a family member to sickness.

“If Sierra Leone is rated as the least developed country, then Kroo Bay will be rated as the worst developed slum in the country,” said Turay.

He said the Kroo Bay community suffers from high maternal and infant mortality, high unemployment, low rate of children in school, lack of housing, lack of proper medical facilities, high crime, child labour, trafficking and prostitution, sexual abuse, teenage pregnancy and many other problems.

Turay rolled his eyes. “Etcetera, etcetera – these are the things that affect us in the community and these are the things the UN looked at when they were doing their study.”

Turay said in the last three months, three Kroo Bay women have died during childbirth because they couldn’t afford to go to hospital or have a caesarean section.

Conteh, too, said she delivered her five children with a traditional birth attendant in Kroo Bay.

“I don’t have the money. Life is extremely difficult, I am right now suffering from malaria, but I don’t have the money to go to hospital,” she said.

Turay said this is common in Kroo Bay: “If you don’t have the money to buy the required drugs, the person dies.”

With a growing population of more than 8,000 people, Kroo Bay is one of many Freetown slums long neglected by development projects and the government.

Turay said it is extreme poverty like Kroo Bay’s that accounts for the country’s poor performance on the human development index.

On Friday, Vice President Sam Sumana said his government is re-preparing a poverty reduction strategy paper from the last government, which he said “will stand as a stepping stone towards development.”

He also said the new government is committed to combating the problems raised in the report.

Turay said the APC government should be aware of the problems after years in opposition. He doubts anything will change.

“During the electioneering process you saw a lot of politicians coming down to the slums and making all kinds of promises because they wanted our votes,” he said. “But once the election is over you hardly see any of them, even to say thank you for the votes. They give us sugar-coated vibes and then leave our problems to be solved by ourselves.”

Turay said if it wasn’t for international nongovernmental organisations like Concern, Save the Children and the YMCA – who Saturday launched a new community centre and training project in Kroo Bay – his community would be completely neglected. “The government forgets about the existence of the slums, even though we are in the heart of the city.”

The theme of this year’s global and national UNDP reports was the massive impact climate change is having on the people of the developing world, including Sierra Leone.

“Our coastal land areas such as Bonthe Island, Banana Island, Rokupre and other villages directly depending on agriculture will be inundated,” said Joseph Rahall, the coordinator of Green Scenery, a local civil society organisation. “This will cause mass displacement of people, causing security threats and our security is not in place to solve such problems.The criss-crossing of people will create conflict and we don’t want to go back to war.”

Turay, too, said he is worried about climate change.

He said Kroo Bay is rapidly expanding and most new homes are being built on top of rubbish, at the water’s edge. “If the water rises, we’re in trouble,” he said.

A greater worry in Kroo Bay is the annual rising of water during rainy season. For more than five months every year the people of Turay’s community and others like it are continuously flooded with water and debris from the hills around Freetown.

“On the issue of flooding, we are scared, we are always prepared for the worst to happen next year,” he said. “This year was the worst ever.”

Turay said this is one impact of climate change that could easily be tackled by this government.

“You see the trees being cut down in the hills,” he said, noting that deforestation causes erosion, which causes the flooding. “Climate change also affects us greatly and it is on the increase because I don’t see much being done about deforestation. It is a man-made problem.”

Along with destruction, the annual flooding also leaves the drainage areas of Kroo Bay clogged with garbage from the hills. The stench of sewage, stagnant water and mounds of garbage permeates the air throughout the community.

Turay said this build-up can be traced back to his community’s health problems – poor drainage and stagnant water are breeding grounds for mosquitoes and Turay said malaria is a growing problem in Kroo Bay.

However, Turay said for Kroo Bay residents, day to day food security is a more constant worry than health problems.

“We are poor and we can’t afford the price of food, especially when the price of rice keeps sky-rocketing and there are no mechanisms to control the price. People find it very difficult to survive here. We find it difficult to sleep at night because we are thinking about how we will survive the next day.”

By Mariama Kandeh and Danny Glenwright

Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts

LILONGWE, Malawi — Malawi hovered for years at the brink of famine. After a disastrous corn harvest in 2005, almost five million of its 13 million people needed emergency food aid.

But this year, a nation that has perennially extended a begging bowl to the world is instead feeding its hungry neighbors. It is selling more corn to the World Food Program of the United Nations than any other country in southern Africa and is exporting hundreds of thousands of tons of corn to Zimbabwe.

In Malawi itself, the prevalence of acute child hunger has fallen sharply. In October, the United Nations Children’s Fund sent three tons of powdered milk, stockpiled here to treat severely malnourished children, to Uganda instead. “We will not be able to use it!” Juan Ortiz-Iruri, Unicef’s deputy representative in Malawi, said jubilantly.

Farmers explain Malawi’s extraordinary turnaround — one with broad implications for hunger-fighting methods across Africa — with one word: fertilizer.

Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers. But after the 2005 harvest, the worst in a decade, Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawi’s newly elected president, decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached.

Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain. Malawi’s soil, like that across sub-Saharan Africa, is gravely depleted, and many, if not most, of its farmers are too poor to afford fertilizer at market prices.

“As long as I’m president, I don’t want to be going to other capitals begging for food,” Mr. Mutharika declared. Patrick Kabambe, the senior civil servant in the Agriculture Ministry, said the president told his advisers, “Our people are poor because they lack the resources to use the soil and the water we have.”

The country’s successful use of subsidies is contributing to a broader reappraisal of the crucial role of agriculture in alleviating poverty in Africa and the pivotal importance of public investments in the basics of a farm economy: fertilizer, improved seed, farmer education, credit and agricultural research.

Malawi, an overwhelmingly rural nation about the size of Pennsylvania, is an extreme example of what happens when those things are missing. As its population has grown and inherited landholdings have shrunk, impoverished farmers have planted every inch of ground. Desperate to feed their families, they could not afford to let their land lie fallow or to fertilize it. Over time, their depleted plots yielded less food and the farmers fell deeper into poverty.

Malawi’s leaders have long favored fertilizer subsidies, but they reluctantly acceded to donor prescriptions, often shaped by foreign-aid fashions in Washington, that featured a faith in private markets and an antipathy to government intervention.

In the 1980s and again in the 1990s, the World Bank pushed Malawi to eliminate fertilizer subsidies entirely. Its theory both times was that Malawi’s farmers should shift to growing cash crops for export and use the foreign exchange earnings to import food, according to Jane Harrigan, an economist at the University of London.

In a withering evaluation of the World Bank’s record on African agriculture, the bank’s own internal watchdog concluded in October not only that the removal of subsidies had led to exorbitant fertilizer prices in African countries, but that the bank itself had often failed to recognize that improving Africa’s declining soil quality was essential to lifting food production.

“The donors took away the role of the government and the disasters mounted,” said Jeffrey Sachs, a Columbia University economist who lobbied Britain and the World Bank on behalf of Malawi’s fertilizer program and who has championed the idea that wealthy countries should invest in fertilizer and seed for Africa’s farmers.

Here in Malawi, deep fertilizer subsidies and lesser ones for seed, abetted by good rains, helped farmers produce record-breaking corn harvests in 2006 and 2007, according to government crop estimates. Corn production leapt to 2.7 million metric tons in 2006 and 3.4 million in 2007 from 1.2 million in 2005, the government reported.

“The rest of the world is fed because of the use of good seed and inorganic fertilizer, full stop,” said Stephen Carr, who has lived in Malawi since 1989, when he retired as the World Bank’s principal agriculturalist in sub-Saharan Africa. “This technology has not been used in most of Africa. The only way you can help farmers gain access to it is to give it away free or subsidize it heavily.”

Confusing Greenwash: Tyson

“Chicken Raised Without Antibiotics that impact antibiotic resistance in humans.”

Right now there is a blonde examining his supermarket chicken trying to figure out what this phrase means. The USDA approved Tyson’s “grown without antibiotics” label erroneously, and now the chicken giant has developing new wording to confuse people.

Pressured by documentation and a growing public fear, the chicken and beef industries have started to switch their reliance on antibiotics to ionophores to address the issues of intestinal disease on their farms. The ionophore used by Tyson acts to disrupt the polarity of a cell and the flow of Potassium needed for the survival of microbes.

The exact ionophore that Tyson uses in their feed has not been disclosed publicly, and so the truthfulness of their statement cannot be verified.

GMO's found dangerous to humans

Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

Sources:

Independent/UK, May 22, 2005 Title: Revealed: “Health Fears Over Secret Study in GM Food” Author: Geoffrey Lean

Organic Consumers Association website, June 2,2005 Title: “Monsanto’s GE Corn Experiments on Rats Continue to Generate Global Controversy” Authors: GM Free Cymru

Independent/UK, January 8, 2006 Title: GM: New Study Shows Unborn Babies Could Be Harmed” Author: Geoffrey Lean

Le Monde and Truthout, February 9, 2006 Title: “New Suspicions About GMOs” Author: Herve Kempf

Faculty Evaluator: Michael Ezra Student Researchers: Destiny Stone and Lani Ready

Several recent studies confirm fears that genetically modified (GM) foods damage human health. These studies were released as the World Trade Organization (WTO) moved toward upholding the ruling that the European Union has violated international trade rules by stopping importation of GM foods.

• Research by the Russian Academy of Sciences released in December 2005 found that more than half of the offspring of rats fed GM soy died within the first three weeks of life, six times as many as those born to mothers fed on non-modified soy. Six times as many offspring fed GM soy were also severely underweight.
• In November 2005, a private research institute in Australia, CSIRO Plant Industry, put a halt to further development of a GM pea cultivator when it was found to cause an immune response in laboratory mice.1
• In the summer of 2005, an Italian research team led by a cellular biologist at the University of Urbino published confirmation that absorption of GM soy by mice causes development of misshapen liver cells, as well as other cellular anomalies.
• In May of 2005 the review of a highly confidential and controversial Monsanto report on test results of corn modified with Monsanto MON863 was published in The Independent/UK.

Dr. Arpad Pusztai (see Censored 2001, Story #7), one of the few genuinely independent scientists specializing in plant genetics and animal feeding studies, was asked by the German authorities in the autumn of 2004 to examine Monsanto’s 1,139-page report on the feeding of MON863 to laboratory rats over a ninety-day period.

The study found “statistically significant” differences in kidney weights and certain blood parameters in the rats fed the GM corn as compared with the control groups. A number of scientists across Europe who saw the study (and heavily-censored summaries of it) expressed concerns about the health and safety implications if MON863 should ever enter the food chain. There was particular concern in France, where Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini of the University of Caen has been trying (without success) for almost eighteen months to obtain full disclosure of all documents relating to the MON863 study.

Dr. Pusztai was forced by the German authorities to sign a “declaration of secrecy” before he was allowed to see the Monsanto rat feeding study, on the grounds that the document is classified as “CBI” or “confidential business interest.” While Pusztai is still bound by the declaration of secrecy, Monsanto recently declared that it does not object to the widespread dissemination of the “Pusztai Report.”2

Monsanto GM soy and corn are widely consumed by Americans at a time when the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization has concluded, “In several cases, GMOs have been put on the market when safety issues are not clear.”

As GMO research is not encouraged by U.S. or European governments, the vast majority of toxicological studies are conducted by those companies producing and promoting consumption of GMOs. With motive and authenticity of results suspect in corporate testing, independent scientific research into the effects of GM foods is attracting increasing attention.

Comment: In May 2006 the WTO upheld a ruling that European countries broke international trade rules by stopping importation of GM foods. The WTO verdict found that the EU has had an effective ban on biotech foods since 1998 and sided with the U.S., Canada, and Argentina in a decision that the moratorium was illegal under WTO rules.3

Notes 1. “GM peas cause immune response–A gap in the approval process?” http://www.GMO-Compass.org, January 3, 2006. 2. Arpad Pusztai, “Mon863-Pusztai Report,” http://www.GMWatch.org, September 12, 2004. 3. Bradley S. Clapper, “WTO Faults EU for Blocking Modified Food,” Associated Press, May 11, 2006.

Fashion/Compassion - Ad/dressing the soul

For a few years I was an creative executive at Donna Karan International. Since then I have become acutely concerned with the role of the fashion and design industries in our world today. The following is a reflection on some of those issues”

Fashion is all about innovation. The history of fashion is the history of change, and over time the cycle has accelerated. Yearly changes have become seasonal and within each season are now three or four deliveries, bringing the impetus for wardrobe renewals to every few weeks. Granted it is only the most fashion obsessed and financially secure of us who can hew to this accelerated clip, to actually purchase the merchandise and reinvent ourselves at this rate. The rest of us with more reasonable pocketbook resources who are fascinated by the rag trade can follow the developments in magazines, blogs, television spots etc. And of course as a man I am necessarily relegated to sideline vicariousness, appreciating and admiring the developments in women’s wear, which overwhelmingly dominate the market and the creative field. For guys the width of a lapel, or the width of a trouser or the width of a tie are as seismic a shift as our wardrobe seems goes through. Women get to explore a vastly broader range of color, shape, texture, fabric etc, just as they are freer to reexamine historical and cultural associations, revisit old styles to make them new again. And newness again is the order of the day, everyday.

It makes one wonder then what could possibly come next, what after the great philosophical accomplishments of the modern world, where art, the natural handmaiden to fashion, had developed into pure non-objectivity, to pure conceptualism, to historical/anti-historical post-modernism – where nothing had to actually look like anything else, where paintings became objects, where light became art, where absence became form and so on – what could possibly come next? We have seen the obliteration of history and decoration through our best minimalists, Armani, Sander, Halston, we have seen reinterpreted historicism from Europe by Mssrs. Galliano and McQueen and we have seen pure visionary insurrection from Commes De Garcon, Hussein Chalayan, Martin Margiela etc. The Germans have brought us pure utilitarianism, and we Americans have elevated sportswear to meet the unpretentious ideals that our society (once) held dear, just as from our streets has bubbled up anti-style – reactions to a market driven consumer based fashion –thrift shop couture, the “pretty ugly”, a studied disregard for everything.

So then what next? Well a trip to the costume institute at the Metropolitan Museum laid bare for me the next imperative. Let it be said, I am a Met junkie. As a native New Yorker perhaps my prejudices come forth but I believe it is the greatest museum in the world. No other institution of its kind combines the breadth and depth of the entire world’s cultural output in the way that it does. There Davinci sits comfortably with Donna Karan, Breughel with Bill Blass, suits of armor with Giorgio Armani. The most recent exhibit at the museum’s Costume Institute, “blog.mode: addressing fashion” is clearly one of those transitional exhibitions between whatever blockbuster ended and whatever comes next. The result is a wonderful assortment of pieces selected from the Institute’s permanent collection. The word blog is tossed in to make it seem au courant as do the cluster of computer terminals in which visitors can record their reactions to the show.

The show is bookended by history. Starting with early American and European gowns, replete with bustles and voluminous skirts, balloon sleeves, corset tops and Georgian décolletage. It ends with exquisite McQueen and Galliano historical pieces as well. They feel remarkably new as they unapologetically embrace history in order to explore it.

It’s a fashion endgame that nevertheless opens another door – a revolving one however? The cycle could go on endlessly and I believe one can innovate endlessly within a form, that there is to Xeno’s axiom, infinite space between things, always a half step to be taken and a half step of that step too. So if history doesn’t matter, if dressing like Marie Antoinette can be as relevant today as it was three hundred years ago, if we can reference a roman sandal, or Greek draperies, an ipod, or even directly reference nature as in the work of… then what territory can we now explore? The answer I think is to move beyond the sources of our inspiration. We can make anything look like anything after all, and all things, nature, history and culture are at our disposal to interpret as we like. The time has come to expand the reach of fashion, or no, to expand its relevance beyond how we look and how we express the lives we live. We must now look into our souls, into the seat of compassion, and dress ourselves accordingly.

The great promise of modernity was to liberate the human condition from the drudgery of manual labor, to conquer disease and hunger, to eradicate poverty and the economic disparities of class and to protect ourselves as much as we could against the caprice of nature. Surely the material and technological accomplishments of this world have achieved quite a bit of this – even if it is not yet universally enjoyed the potential is nevertheless still there. The fashion industry has already begun exploring new and innovative methods materials, laser cutting, fabric fusing, digital sintering among them. It has turned to technology, the hero of the twentieth century, and of the current one as well, for answers to its persistent question – what next? Stylistically we will have to see, next year’s genius is on the horizon, still in art school, still playing on his mother’s sewing machine in the basement, and we wait for him to stun us with another beautiful idea, another unexpected, inspired revelation. Technology aside however can we meet the challenges now of our newest philosophical developments, mainly our newfound concern for our planet and all its inhabitants?

I go back to the Met. Perhaps one of the most impressive pieces in the show was a red gown by John Galliano. It was a stunning sexy piece, placed high on a pedestal at the entrance to the show. Constructed of a mosaic of crocodile skin on a lace framework. What an accomplishment and what a terrific failure. The fashion industry of late has begun to congratulate itself on its newfound compassion and concern for “wellness”. Through its stewardship the consciousness of breast cancer has been raised to new heights, cosmetics companies are compelled to test and develop products in a “cruelty free” environment, organic materials and processes are now a mark of quality. Yoga, meditation and other wellness modalities have also been elevated to high status and been translated to marketing approaches as well. But what, we might ask, does that crocodile think of all this, or the bullfrog, the sable, the cow, the peccary, the stingray/shagreen, the lamb?

I need a new pair of black dress shoes but in all honesty I have been holding off. Some years ago I stopped eating meat. It wasn’t easy to do and to this day the smell of bacon is a bitter tease and the thought of a juicy rare steak sets my stomach grumbling. Not all appetites should be indulged however and my own yoga practice has been an exercise in the show discovery and control of the mind. But this is not another rant from an angry vegetarian. In fact the yogi’s abstention from meat comes from the yogic concept of Ahimsa, or non-harming. It basically is the precept of compassion. So the impulse to not have to kill or cause an animal to suffer to eat or clothes ourselves is the same impulse to extend compassion to all people and things. In short – splashing red paint on someone’s fur coat is not a nice thing to do. For a vegetarian it is a hypocritical act, an Orwellian parlor game. Another yogic imperative is to not judge. Whatever karma I might accumulate from living free of meat does not negate the good karma a carnivorous neonatal intensive care nurse might have, or a hot dog loving fire fighter, or a McNugget chomping neurosurgeon. None are better than others.

My teacher always said, “Try.” Try to live a vegetarian life. And the Buddha believed the only real sin was laziness – to think that all of this wasn’t worth it, that life, compassion, joy was not worth the effort. Why then doesn’t the fashion industry try to do better? Like I said, stylistically the field is wide open. I’m a design and style addict as much as the next guy. The next great idea spurs me on to discover my own, and to take great joy in the incredible human capacity for invention and the infinite expression of ourselves. People knock the fashion world as superficial and capricious. Yes it moves at a rapid rate but so do all our neurological impulse, ideas are born and die in an instant. Fashion is like fireworks, and who hates fireworks? There is no valid criticism for an honest idea and a little hard work. Try, my teacher said. If you fail, try again.

I still need dress shoes and as anyone can tell you for a man a good pair of shoes is a sartorial imperative, the figurative and literal foundation of the presentation of himself. I don’t think I want my shoes to have once been part of a cow’s leg or back or shoulder. I don’t think they need to be.

What a world we have created, what a triumph of human creativity and power and intelligence. At this moment in the developed world there is no real need to participate in the suffering and death of millions of sentient beings to satisfy our hunger, or worse, our desire to look good. Fashion moves at a rapid clip. Humanity often at a snails pace. I have faith though that it will happen and I am waiting here, barefoot.

Is Unhealthy the New Healthy?

By Jill Ettinger

In the current issue of Conde Nast’s Portfolio, Joe Keohane takes a look at the gluttony pushers at CKE restaurants, the parent company of Carl’s Jr. and Hardees. The two fast food chains are ruthlessly appealing to their male-dominated audience with indulgent sandwiches, like the “Monster Thickburger.” At a time when McDonald’s is at least pretending to slim down, by adding salads and seemingly healthier items to their menus, CKE is hurling itself in the opposite direction, hailing meat as a condiment, topping burgers with more burgers, bacon, steak, eggs and even pastrami. Some sandwiches contain more than half of a day’s recommended caloric intake and over 100 grams of fat. And customers are gobbling them up, even though they can barely fit them in their mouths. Advertisements urge men to “be men” by eating fat-laden heart attack-inducing burgers because apparently women love greasy, fast food. At least according to some of the risqué ads CKE is using to bring fat into fashion. One includes Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and a burger, with the tagline, “Because guys don’t like the same thing night after night.” That is, of course, except for heaps of char-grilled meat.
This Wall Street Journal article appeared last week on the “death” of the Hydrox cookie. What? While the U.S. economy is teetering on a recession, the reputable WSJ would rather ask Americans to ponder more pressing issues like the Oreo’s lesser-known cousin’s chocolatey biscuit flavor nuances and mysterious creamy center’s texture in another case of marketing propaganda a la advertorial commentary. But it turns out people really do care. About a cookie. There’s a dedicated fansite for Hydrox lovers where they gather, reflecting on fond memories of its milk dunkability, or announce Hydrox “sightings” and sleuthing through current cookie recipes hoping to find their crunchy favorite reincarnated as a Paul Newman’s or a Famous Amos. Lamenting over the loss of a cookie? Are these people serious?
There’s also cupcake fever that’s afflicting hipsters nationwide. Donuts and candy bars? Those are for square, old, cubicle working people, and cops. If you’re young and cool, stay young and cool by getting fat and lazy. This is the bane of our cursed X generation, and it even comes with a little pleated paper wrapper bottom so you don’t lose any precious crumbs. Bakeries specializing ONLY in cupcakes are all the rage, popping up around the country. Sheet cake? Bundt cake? Bah! There are even vegan and gluten-free iced varieties feigning healthy – long gone are the days of the oat bran or blueberry muffin. The half-healthy scone is lucky to find work as a door stop or paper weight. And croissants? Why folks would sooner eat a bagel. The people have spoken, they want frosting. And sprinkles.
It seems that even the FTC is trying to stop the spread of healthy food, by launching yet another complaint against Whole Foods’ recent buy-out of competing chain, Wild Oats. The FTC is seeking an injunction to prevent the big box organic supermarket from closing any more of the less successful Wild Oats locations or converting them into the more profitable Whole Foods layouts, citing that Whole Foods would have a monopoly on the measly organic food market.
Is anyone trying to stop the Wendy’s “Baconator” commercials from airing?
Maybe it is time for Americans to admit they love being fat. Fad diets have been off by one letter. Sure, there will always be a fringe group of “health nuts” that enjoy things like mobility, regular heart rates, healthy sugar metabolism and slews of other “normal” body functions. But it’s 2008. We put a man on the moon almost 40 years ago. Now, let’s see if we can put that big ball of cheese IN a man.

the oil we eat....great Harpers Article

The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq BY Richard Manning PUBLISHED February 2004

The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.—Balzac

The journalist’s rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We’ll follow the energy.

We learn as children that there is no free lunch, that you don’t get something from nothing, that what goes up must come down, and so on. The scientific version of these verities is only slightly more complex. As James Prescott Joule discovered in the nineteenth century, there is only so much energy. You can change it from motion to heat, from heat to light, but there will never be more of it and there will never be less of it. The conservation of energy is not an option, it is a fact. This is the first law of thermodynamics.

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from the rules. All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen. The results of taking away our plant energy may not be as sudden as cutting off oxygen, but they are as sure.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity.” There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both conclude that we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.

Energy cannot be created or canceled, but it can be concentrated. This is the larger and profoundly explanatory context of a national-security memo George Kennan wrote in 1948 as the head of a State Department planning committee, ostensibly about Asian policy but really about how the United States was to deal with its newfound role as the dominant force on Earth. “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 percent of its population,” Kennan wrote. “In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”“The day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”

If you follow the energy, eventually you will end up in a field somewhere. Humans engage in a dizzying array of artifice and industry. Nonetheless, more than two thirds of humanity’s cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of true wealth—sun energy—to be found on the planet.

As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature’s offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts—the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.

Domestication was also a radical change in the distribution of wealth within the plant world. Plants can spend their solar income in several ways. The dominant and prudent strategy is to allocate most of it to building roots, stem, bark—a conservative portfolio of investments that allows the plant to better gather energy and survive the downturn years. Further, by living in diverse stands (a given chunk of native prairie contains maybe 200 species of plants), these perennials provide services for one another, such as retaining water, protecting one another from wind, and fixing free nitrogen from the air to use as fertilizer. Diversity allows a system to “sponsor its own fertility,” to use visionary agronomist Wes Jackson’s phrase. This is the plant world’s norm.

There is a very narrow group of annuals, however, that grow in patches of a single species and store almost all of their income as seed, a tight bundle of carbohydrates easily exploited by seed eaters such as ourselves. Under normal circumstances, this eggs-in-one-basket strategy is a dumb idea for a plant. But not during catastrophes such as floods, fires, and volcanic eruptions. Such catastrophes strip established plant communities and create opportunities for wind-scattered entrepreneurial seed bearers. It is no accident that no matter where agriculture sprouted on the globe, it always happened near rivers. You might assume, as many have, that this is because the plants needed the water or nutrients. Mostly this is not true. They needed the power of flooding, which scoured landscapes and stripped out competitors. Nor is it an accident, I think, that agriculture arose independently and simultaneously around the globe just as the last ice age ended, a time of enormous upheaval when glacial melt let loose sea-size lakes to create tidal waves of erosion. It was a time of catastrophe.

Corn, rice, and wheat are especially adapted to catastrophe. It is their niche. In the natural scheme of things, a catastrophe would create a blank slate, bare soil, that was good for them. Then, under normal circumstances, succession would quickly close that niche. The annuals would colonize. Their roots would stabilize the soil, accumulate organic matter, provide cover. Eventually the catastrophic niche would close. Farming is the process of ripping that niche open again and again. It is an annual artificial catastrophe, and it requires the equivalent of three or four tons of TNT per acre for a modern American farm. Iowa’s fields require the energy of 4,000 Nagasaki bombs every year.

Iowa is almost all fields now. Little prairie remains, and if you can find what Iowans call a “postage stamp” remnant of some, it most likely will abut a cornfield. This allows an observation. Walk from the prairie to the field, and you probably will step down about six feet, as if the land had been stolen from beneath you. Settlers’ accounts of the prairie conquest mention a sound, a series of pops, like pistol shots, the sound of stout grass roots breaking before a moldboard plow. A robbery was in progress.

When we say the soil is rich, it is not a metaphor. It is as rich in energy as an oil well. A prairie converts that energy to flowers and roots and stems, which in turn pass back into the ground as dead organic matter. The layers of topsoil build up into a rich repository of energy, a bank. A farm field appropriates that energy, puts it into seeds we can eat. Much of the energy moves from the earth to the rings of fat around our necks and waists. And much of the energy is simply wasted, a trail of dollars billowing from the burglar’s satchel.

I’ve already mentioned that we humans take 40 percent of the globe’s primary productivity every year. You might have assumed we and our livestock eat our way through that volume, but this is not the case. Part of that total—almost a third of it—is the potential plant mass lost when forests are cleared for farming or when tropical rain forests are cut for grazing or when plows destroy the deep mat of prairie roots that held the whole business together, triggering erosion. The Dust Bowl was no accident of nature. A functioning grassland prairie produces more biomass each year than does even the most technologically advanced wheat field. The problem is, it’s mostly a form of grass and grass roots that humans can’t eat. So we replace the prairie with our own preferred grass, wheat. Never mind that we feed most of our grain to livestock, and that livestock is perfectly content to eat native grass. And never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef farming raises in the same area today. Our ancestors found it preferable to pluck the energy from the ground and when it ran out move on.

Today we do the same, only now when the vault is empty we fill it again with new energy in the form of oil-rich fertilizers. Oil is annual primary productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. On average, it takes 5.5 gallons of fossil energy to restore a year’s worth of lost fertility to an acre of eroded land—in 1997 we burned through more than 400 years’ worth of ancient fossilized productivity, most of it from someplace else. Even as the earth beneath Iowa shrinks, it is being globalized.

Six thousand years before sodbusters broke up Iowa, their Caucasian blood ancestors broke up the Hungarian plain, an area just northwest of the Caucasus Mountains. Archaeologists call this tribe the LBK, short for linearbandkeramik, the German word that describes the distinctive pottery remnants that mark their occupation of Europe. Anthropologists call them the wheat-beef people, a name that better connects those ancients along the Danube to my fellow Montanans on the Upper Missouri River. These proto-Europeans had a full set of domesticated plants and animals, but wheat and beef dominated. All the domesticates came from an area along what is now the Iraq-Syria-Turkey border at the edges of the Zagros Mountains. This is the center of domestication for the Western world’s main crops and livestock, ground zero of catastrophic agriculture.

Two other types of catastrophic agriculture evolved at roughly the same time, one centered on rice in what is now China and India and one centered on corn and potatoes in Central and South America. Rice, though, is tropical and its expansion depends on water, so it developed only in floodplains, estuaries, and swamps. Corn agriculture was every bit as voracious as wheat; the Aztecs could be as brutal and imperialistic as Romans or Brits, but the corn cultures collapsed with the onslaught of Spanish conquest. Corn itself simply joined the wheat-beef people’s coalition. Wheat was the empire builder; its bare botanical facts dictated the motion and violence that we know as imperialism.

The wheat-beef people swept across the western European plains in less than 300 years, a conquest some archaeologists refer to as a “blitzkrieg.” A different race of humans, the Cro-Magnons—hunter-gatherers, not farmers—lived on those plains at the time. Their cave art at places such as Lascaux testifies to their sophistication and profound connection to wildlife. They probably did most of their hunting and gathering in uplands and river bottoms, places the wheat farmers didn’t need, suggesting the possibility of coexistence. That’s not what happened, however. Both genetic and linguistic evidence say that the farmers killed the hunters. The Basque people are probably the lone remnant descendants of Cro-Magnons, the only trace.

Hunter-gatherer archaeological sites of the period contain spear points that originally belonged to the farmers, and we can guess they weren’t trade goods. One group of anthropologists concludes, “The evidence from the western extension of the LBK leaves little room for any other conclusion but that LBK-Mesolithic interactions were at best chilly and at worst hostile.” The world’s surviving Blackfeet, Assiniboine Sioux, Inca, and Maori probably have the best idea of the nature of these interactions.

Wheat is temperate and prefers plowed-up grasslands. The globe has a limited stock of temperate grasslands, just as it has a limited stock of all other biomes. On average, about 10 percent of all other biomes remain in something like their native state today. Only 1 percent of temperate grasslands remains undestroyed. Wheat takes what it needs.

The supply of temperate grasslands lies in what are today the United States, Canada, the South American pampas, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Europe, and the Asiatic extension of the European plain into the sub-Siberian steppes. This area largely describes the First World, the developed world. Temperate grasslands make up not only the habitat of wheat and beef but also the globe’s islands of Caucasians, of European surnames and languages. In 2000 the countries of the temperate grasslands, the neo-Europes, accounted for about 80 percent of all wheat exports in the world, and about 86 percent of all corn. That is to say, the neo-Europes drive the world’s agriculture. The dominance does not stop with grain. These countries, plus the mothership—Europe—accounted for three fourths of all agricultural exports of all crops in the world in 1999.

Plato wrote of his country’s farmlands:

What now remains of the formerly rich land is like the skeleton of a sick man. . . . Formerly, many of the mountains were arable. The plains that were full of rich soil are now marshes. Hills that were once covered with forests and produced abundant pasture now produce only food for bees. Once the land was enriched by yearly rains, which were not lost, as they are now, by flowing from the bare land into the sea. The soil was deep, it absorbed and kept the water in loamy soil, and the water that soaked into the hills fed springs and running streams everywhere. Now the abandoned shrines at spots where formerly there were springs attest that our description of the land is true.

Plato’s lament is rooted in wheat agriculture, which depleted his country’s soil and subsequently caused the series of declines that pushed centers of civilization to Rome, Turkey, and western Europe. By the fifth century, though, wheat’s strategy of depleting and moving on ran up against the Atlantic Ocean. Fenced-in wheat agriculture is like rice agriculture. It balances its equations with famine. In the millennium between 500 and 1500, Britain suffered a major “corrective” famine about every ten years; there were seventy-five in France during the same period. The incidence, however, dropped sharply when colonization brought an influx of new food to Europe.

The new lands had an even greater effect on the colonists themselves. Thomas Jefferson, after enduring a lecture on the rustic nature by his hosts at a dinner party in Paris, pointed out that all of the Americans present were a good head taller than all of the French. Indeed, colonists in all of the neo-Europes enjoyed greater stature and longevity, as well as a lower infant-mortality rate—all indicators of the better nutrition afforded by the onetime spend down of the accumulated capital of virgin soil.

The precolonial famines of Europe raised the question: What would happen when the planet’s supply of arable land ran out? We have a clear answer. In about 1960 expansion hit its limits and the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. There was nothing left to plow. What happened was grain yields tripled.

The accepted term for this strange turn of events is the green revolution, though it would be more properly labeled the amber revolution, because it applied exclusively to grain—wheat, rice, and corn. Plant breeders tinkered with the architecture of these three grains so that they could be hypercharged with irrigation water and chemical fertilizers, especially nitrogen. This innovation meshed nicely with the increased “efficiency” of the industrialized factory-farm system. With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.

For openers, it disrupted long-standing patterns of rural life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world’s most severe poverty. The experience in population control in the developing world is by now clear: It is not that people make more people so much as it is that they make more poor people. In the forty-year period beginning about 1960, the world’s population doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3 billion to the world’s poorest classes, the most fecund classes. The way in which the green revolution raised that grain contributed hugely to the population boom, and it is the weight of the population that leaves humanity in its present untenable position.

Discussion of these, the most poor, however, is largely irrelevant to the American situation. We say we have poor people here, but almost no one in this country lives on less than one dollar a day, the global benchmark for poverty. It marks off a class of about 1.3 billion people, the hard core of the larger group of 2 billion chronically malnourished people—that is, one third of humanity. We may forget about them, as most Americans do.

More relevant here are the methods of the green revolution, which added orders of magnitude to the devastation. By mining the iron for tractors, drilling the new oil to fuel them and to make nitrogen fertilizers, and by taking the water that rain and rivers had meant for other lands, farming had extended its boundaries, its dominion, to lands that were not farmable. At the same time, it extended its boundaries across time, tapping fossil energy, stripping past assets.

The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There’s a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1. And this understates the problem, because at the same time that there is more oil in our food there is less oil in our oil. A couple of generations ago we spent a lot less energy drilling, pumping, and distributing than we do now. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today each barrel invested in the process returns only ten, a calculation that no doubt fails to include the fuel burned by the Hummers and Blackhawks we use to maintain access to the oil in Iraq.

David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.

Fertilizer makes a pretty fine bomb right off the shelf, a chemistry lesson Timothy McVeigh taught at Oklahoma City’s Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995—not a small matter, in that the green revolution has made nitrogen fertilizers ubiquitous in some of the more violent and desperate corners of the world. Still, there is more to contemplate in nitrogen’s less sensational chemistry.

The chemophobia of modern times excludes fear of the simple elements of chemistry’s periodic table. We circulate petitions, hold hearings, launch websites, and buy and sell legislators in regard to polysyllabic organic compounds—polychlorinated biphenyls, polyvinyls, DDT, 2-4d, that sort of thing—not simple carbon or nitrogen. Not that agriculture’s use of the more ornate chemistry is benign—an infant born in a rural, wheat-producing county in the United States has about twice the chance of suffering birth defects as one born in a rural place that doesn’t produce wheat, an effect researchers blame on chlorophenoxy herbicides. Focusing on pesticide pollution, though, misses the worst of the pollutants. Forget the polysyllabic organics. It is nitrogen—the wellspring of fertility relied upon by every Eden-obsessed backyard gardener and suburban groundskeeper—that we should fear most.

Those who model our planet as an organism do so on the basis that the earth appears to breathe—it thrives by converting a short list of basic elements from one compound into the next, just as our own bodies cycle oxygen into carbon dioxide and plants cycle carbon dioxide into oxygen. In fact, two of the planet’s most fundamental humors are oxygen and carbon dioxide. Another is nitrogen.

Nitrogen can be released from its “fixed” state as a solid in the soil by natural processes that allow it to circulate freely in the atmosphere. This also can be done artificially. Indeed, humans now contribute more nitrogen to the nitrogen cycle than the planet itself does. That is, humans have doubled the amount of nitrogen in play.

This has led to an imbalance. It is easier to create nitrogen fertilizer than it is to apply it evenly to fields. When farmers dump nitrogen on a crop, much is wasted. It runs into the water and soil, where it either reacts chemically with its surroundings to form new compounds or flows off to fertilize something else, somewhere else.

That chemical reaction, called acidification, is noxious and contributes significantly to acid rain. One of the compounds produced by acidification is nitrous oxide, which aggravates the greenhouse effect. Green growing things normally offset global warming by sucking up carbon dioxide, but nitrogen on farm fields plus methane from decomposing vegetation make every farmed acre, like every acre of Los Angeles freeway, a net contributor to global warming. Fertilization is equally worrisome. Rainfall and irrigation water inevitably washes the nitrogen from fields to creeks and streams, which flows into rivers, which floods into the ocean. This explains why the Mississippi River, which drains the nation’s Corn Belt, is an environmental catastrophe. The nitrogen fertilizes artificially large blooms of algae that in growing suck all the oxygen from the water, a condition biologists call anoxia, which means “oxygen-depleted.” Here there’s no need to calculate long-term effects, because life in such places has no long term: everything dies immediately. The Mississippi River’s heavily fertilized effluvia has created a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey.

America’s biggest crop, grain corn, is completely unpalatable. It is raw material for an industry that manufactures food substitutes. Likewise, you can’t eat unprocessed wheat. You certainly can’t eat hay. You can eat unprocessed soybeans, but mostly we don’t. These four crops cover 82 percent of American cropland. Agriculture in this country is not about food; it’s about commodities that require the outlay of still more energy to become food.

About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled “processed,” meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America’s poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed food.

It began with the industrialization of Victorian England. The empire was then flush with sugar from plantations in the colonies. Meantime the cities were flush with factory workers. There was no good way to feed them. And thus was born the afternoon tea break, the tea consisting primarily of warm water and sugar. If the workers were well off, they could also afford bread with heavily sugared jam—sugar-powered industrialization. There was a 500 percent increase in per capita sugar consumption in Britain between 1860 and 1890, around the time when the life expectancy of a male factory worker was seventeen years. By the end of the century the average Brit was getting about one sixth of his total nutrition from sugar, exactly the same percentage Americans get today—double what nutritionists recommend.

There is another energy matter to consider here, though. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap. It appears, however, that the corn cycle is about to come full circle. If a bipartisan coalition of farm-state lawmakers has their way—and it appears they will—we will soon buy gasoline containing twice as much fuel alcohol as it does now. Fuel alcohol already ranks second as a use for processed corn in the United States, just behind corn sweeteners. According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest. The USDA calls this a bargain, because gasohol is a “clean fuel.” This claim to cleanness is in dispute at the tailpipe level, and it certainly ignores the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide pollution, and the haze of global gases gathering over every farm field. Nor does this claim cover clean conscience; some still might be unsettled knowing that our SUVs’ demands for fuel compete with the poor’s demand for grain.

Green eaters, especially vegetarians, advocate eating low on the food chain, a simple matter of energy flow. Eating a carrot gives the diner all that carrot’s energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other inedibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten. As a rough rule of thumb, that factor of ten applies to each level up the food chain, which is why some fish, such as tuna, can be a horror in all of this. Tuna is a secondary predator, meaning it not only doesn’t eat plants but eats other fish that themselves eat other fish, adding a zero to the multiplier each notch up, easily a hundred times, more like a thousand times less efficient than eating a plant.

This is fine as far as it goes, but the vegetarian’s case can break down on some details. On the moral issues, vegetarians claim their habits are kinder to animals, though it is difficult to see how wiping out 99 percent of wildlife’s habitat, as farming has done in Iowa, is a kindness. In rural Michigan, for example, the potato farmers have a peculiar tactic for dealing with the predations of whitetail deer. They gut-shoot them with small-bore rifles, in hopes the deer will limp off to the woods and die where they won’t stink up the potato fields.

Animal rights aside, vegetarians can lose the edge in the energy argument by eating processed food, with its ten calories of fossil energy for every calorie of food energy produced. The question, then, is: Does eating processed food such as soy burger or soy milk cancel the energy benefits of vegetarianism, which is to say, can I eat my lamb chops in peace? Maybe. If I’ve done my due diligence, I will have found out that the particular lamb I am eating was both local and grass-fed, two factors that of course greatly reduce the embedded energy in a meal. I know of ranches here in Montana, for instance, where sheep eat native grass under closely controlled circumstances—no farming, no plows, no corn, no nitrogen. Assets have not been stripped. I can’t eat the grass directly. This can go on. There are little niches like this in the system. Each person’s individual charge is to find such niches.

Chances are, though, any meat eater will come out on the short end of this argument, especially in the United States. Take the case of beef. Cattle are grazers, so in theory could live like the grass-fed lamb. Some cattle cultures—those of South America and Mexico, for example—have perfected wonderful cuisines based on grass-fed beef. This is not our habit in the United States, and it is simply a matter of habit. Eighty percent of the grain the United States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight percent of all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain, mostly corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. The cattle spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in #@%@, being stuffed with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort of confinement invariably engenders. The manure is rich in nitrogen and once provided a farm’s fertilizer. The feedlots, however, are now far removed from farm fields, so it is simply not “efficient” to haul it to cornfields. It is waste. It exhales methane, a global-warming gas. It pollutes streams. It takes thirty-five calories of fossil fuel to make a calorie of beef this way; sixty-eight to make one calorie of pork.

Still, these livestock do something we can’t. They convert grain’s carbohydrates to high-quality protein. All well and good, except that per capita protein production in the United States is about double what an average adult needs per day. Excess cannot be stored as protein in the human body but is simply converted to fat. This is the end result of a factory-farm system that appears as a living, continental-scale monument to Rube Goldberg, a black-mass remake of the loaves-and-fishes miracle. Prairie’s productivity is lost for grain, grain’s productivity is lost in livestock, livestock’s protein is lost to human fat—all federally subsidized for about $15 billion a year, two thirds of which goes directly to only two crops, corn and wheat.

This explains why the energy expert David Pimentel is so worried that the rest of the world will adopt America’s methods. He should be, because the rest of the world is. Mexico now feeds 45 percent of its grain to livestock, up from 5 percent in 1960. Egypt went from 3 percent to 31 percent in the same period, and China, with a sixth of the world’s population, has gone from 8 percent to 26 percent. All of these places have poor people who could use the grain, but they can’t afford it.

I live among elk and have learned to respect them. One moonlit night during the dead of last winter, I looked out my bedroom window to see about twenty of them grazing a plot of grass the size of a living room. Just that small patch among acres of other species of native prairie grass. Why that species and only that species of grass that night in the worst of winter when the threat to their survival was the greatest? What magic nutrient did this species alone contain? What does a wild animal know that we don’t? I think we need this knowledge.

Food is politics. That being the case, I voted twice in 2002. The day after Election Day, in a truly dismal mood, I climbed the mountain behind my house and found a small herd of elk grazing native grasses in the morning sunlight. My respect for these creatures over the years has become great enough that on that morning I did not hesitate but went straight to my job, which was to rack a shell and drop one cow elk, my household’s annual protein supply. I voted with my weapon of choice—an act not all that uncommon in this world, largely, I think, as a result of the way we grow food. I can see why it is catching on. Such a vote has a certain satisfying heft and finality about it. My particular bit of violence, though, is more satisfying, I think, than the rest of the globe’s ordinary political mayhem. I used a rifle to opt out of an insane system. I killed, but then so did you when you bought that package of burger, even when you bought that package of tofu burger. I killed, then the rest of those elk went on, as did the grasses, the birds, the trees, the coyotes, mountain lions, and bugs, the fundamental productivity of an intact natural system, all of it went on.

Are foodies killing us?

 

 

This is a picture of some radishes I saw at a market in New Delhi, India last year.

They look delicious, weird - like something out of a David Lynch movie - and their abundance would warm the hearts and pans of all foodies.

But is fawning appreciation of abundance in food culture actually killing us? Is the explosion of popular interest in food, supported in part by thoughtful, conscious 'early adopter' foodies actually making us all fat?

An article in a journal recently published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services makes a compelling case that Eating is an Automatic Behavior.

Rather than being naturally abstemious and stopping eating when we've had enough, the article draws attention to recent scientific studies that suggest that

People served larger portions simply eat more food.

The natural trajectory is for eating to continue. So much so that in a clever experiment carried out by the Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab

researchers secretly refilled bowls of soup while people ate from them and found that people ate 73% more soup when this occurred.

If eating is an automatic behavior, influenced more by how much we eat rather than what's on offer, should those who worry about the 'obesity epidemic' be arguing for reducing cues that encourage eating in general and stop having a go at convenience foods - or fat people?

Should health Czars and mini-Czarinas cruising the heaving aisles of Whole Foods Market be cast as villains rather than idols?

At the moment, English and American culture is full of food.

Thousands of hours of TV are devoted to the stuff. Farmers across the world are failing to meet demand. Of the two Gordons, Gordon Ramsey commands more column inches. And magazines are full of alluring and complex dishes involving hand-reared authentic lamb and cheese produced in a particular Dingley Dell.

For sure it matters what we eat.

But for starters, take statistics on obesity.

For entrees, weigh it up against the overpowering number of foodie fads.

And what might be on the menu for afters...more illness and more dead people?