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the Union of Concerned Scientists does a lot of good work on food/environmental policy. they just released a report about CAFOs that looks excellent at a glance. more generally, the Sustainable Food section of their web site looks like it has some great resources that overlap with a lot of the issues discussed in OD.

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

those 7 words are Michael Pollan's new Eater's Manifesto.

NPR's Steve Inskeep did a 15 minute interview w/ him recently. worth a listen. (not sure when i'll get to the book, but i will read it...)

finished the book last week... i want to write some wrap-up thoughts soon, but before leaving town for a week i wanted to offer 2 final quotations...

first, some thoughts after hunting and killing a pig for his meal:

So which view of me the hunter is the right one, the shame at the photograph or the joy of the man in it, the outside gaze or the inside one? The moralist is eater to decide the is question once and for all, to join Cotton Mather in his noble quest for a more complete transcendence. The hunter-- or at least the grown-up hunter, the uneasy hunter-- recognizes the truths disclosed in both views, which is why his joy is tempered by shame, his appetite shadowed by disgust.

The fact that you cannot come out of hunting feeling unambiguously good about it is perhaps what should commend the practice to us. You certainly don't come out of it eager to protest your innocence. If I've learned anything about hunting and eating met it's that it's even messier than the moralist thinks. Having killed a ping and looked at myself in that picture and now looking for4ard (if that's the word) to eating that pig, I have to say there is a part of me that envies the moral clarity of the vegetarian, the blamelessness of the tofu eater. Yet part of me pities him, too. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris. Ortega suggests that there is an immorality in failing to look clearly at reality, or in believing that the sheer forces of human will can somehow overcome it. "The preoccupation with what should be is estimable only when the respect for what is has been exhausted."

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lastly, some thoughts on "the perfect meal"--one that Pollan has for the most part hunted, foraged, and gathered himself:

Perhaps the perfect meal is one that's been fully paid for, that leave no debt outstanding. This is almost impossible ever to do, which is why I said there was nothing very realistic or applicable about this meal. But as a sometimes thing, as a kind of ritual, a meal that is eaten in full consciousness of what it took to make it is worth preparing every now and again, if only as a way to remind us of the true costs of the things we take for granted. The reason I didn't open a can of stock was because stock doesn't come from a can; it comes from the bones of animals. And the yeast that leavens our bread comes not from a packet but from the air we breathe. The meal was more ritual than realistic because it dwelled on such things, reminding us how very much nature offers to the omnivore, the forests as much as the fields, the oceans as much as the meadows. If I had to give this dinner a name, it would have to be the Omnivore's Thanksgiving.

i've been posting mostly negative/critical quotes, which isn't fair... i'm trying to keep track of some general "guiding principles" tidbits, and will make a "positive" post about that after i finish.

here's a little gem following up my post about "$$$ costs". it's an idea i find affirming and fascinating, especially as it informs my own work...

Late in our conversation, Joel asked Bev and me if we'd seen a recent column by Allan Nation in Stockman Grass Farmer about "artisanal economics." Drawing on the theories of Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, Nation had distinguished between industrial and artisanal enterprises to demonstrate why attempts to blend the two modes seldom succeed. Industrial farmers are in the business of selling commodities, he explained, a business where the only viable competitive strategy is to be the least-cost producer. The classic way any industrial producer lowers the costs of his product is by substituting capital--new technologies and fossil-fuel energy--for skilled labor and then stepping up production, exploiting the economies of scale to compensate for shrinking profit margins. In a commodity business a producer must sell ever more cheaply and grow ever bigger or be crushed by a competitor who does.

Nation contrasted this industrial model with its polar opposite, what he calls "artisanal production, " where the competitive strategy is based on selling something special rather than being the least-cost producers of a commodity. Stressing that "productivity and profits are two entirely different concepts, " Nation suggest that even a small producer can be profitable so long as he's selling an exceptional product and keeping his expenses down. Yet this artisanal model works only so long as it doesn't attempt to imitate the industrial model in any respect. It must not try to replace skilled labor with capital; it must not grow for the sake of growth; it should not strive for uniformity in its products but rather make a virtue of variation and seasonality; it shouldn't invest capital to reach national markets but rather should focus on local markets, relying on reputation and work of mouth rather than on advertising; and lastly it should rely as much as possible on free solar energy rather than costly fossil fuels.

a gem of a quote. i find myself coming back to this very point in lots of contexts recently... the cause for so many ills in our society: we focus solely on $$$ costs, to the exclusion of all others.

The ninety-nine-cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of the meal's true cost--to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc, costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves.

the book is divided into 3 sections, based on "the three principal food chains that sustain us today: the industrial, the organic, and the hunter-gatherer." my previous quotes above were from the first section of the book, the "industrial". i'm in the second now: "pastoral".

he starts out by taking a look at a "sustainable" farm -- a fascinating and diverse place in Virginia that turns out lots and lots of beef, pork, chicken, turkey, eggs -- and does it in a way that actually enhances its own ecology. the farm's owner is militant about sustainability vs "organic":

If i said I was organic, people would fuss at me for getting feed corn from a neighbor who might be using atrazine. Well, I would much rather use my money to keep my neighborhood productive and healthy than export my dollars five hundred miles away to get "pure product" that's really coated in diesel fuel. There are a whole lot more variables in making the right decision than does the chicken feed have chemicals or not.

from there we're back to the supermarket, my favorite place, and we get into a discussion of "industrial organic"... all those little write-ups on the side of food packages describing how heavenly the farm is for the animals; the compelling farm histories lining the aisles at Whole Foods; the mass marketing and packaging of the "organic" label... it's its own literary genre, Pollan says, "Supermarket Pastoral". (what would Rosalind think of that, jag?)

Yet the organic label itself -- like every other such label in the supermarket -- is really just an imperfect substitute for direct observation of how a food is produced, a concession to the reality that most people in an industrial society haven't the time or the inclination to follow their food back to the farm, a farm which today is apt to be, on average, fifteen hundred miles away. So to bridge that space we rely on certifiers and label writers and, to a considerable extent, our imagination of what the farms that are producing our food really look like. The organic label may conjure an image of a simpler agriculture, but its very existence is an industrial artifact. The question is, what about the farms themselves? How well do they match the stories told about them?

ties in with all of our media literacy discussions... (this is the kind of stuff i want to study. i want Murray Jay Siskind's job.)

Supermarket Pastoral is a most seductive literary form, beguiling enough to survive in the face of a great many discomfiting facts. I suspect that's because it gratifies some of our deepest, oldest longings, not merely for safe food, but for a connection to the earth and to the handful of domesticated creatures we've long depended on. Whole Foods understands all this better than we do. One of the company's marketing consultants explained to me that the Whole Foods shopper feels that by buying organic he is "engaging in authentic experiences" and imaginatively enacting a "return to a utopian past with the positive aspects of modernity intact."

yeah! and we're off to look at the history of the organic movement in the US, and how some of the industrial organic farms actually work.

great stuff. more coming soon...

i'd slowed down for a while, but am glad to be moving through this book again. yes, RED, it's yours when i'm done (though i've already been recommending it to a lot of folks...).

anyway, the book's really quotable, so i'm going to try to keep a steady stream of these coming (the last one below is the gem, but the others are fun and build up to it)...

The ingredients listed in the flyer suggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leaches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid as a preservative.
...
According to the handout, McNuggets also contain several completely synthetic ingredients, quasiedible substances that ultimately come not from a corn or soybean field but from a petroleum refinery or chemical plant. These chemicals are what make modern processed foods possible, by keeping the organic materials in them from going bad or looking strange after months in the freezer or on the road.

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That perhaps is what the industrial food chain does best: obscure the histories of the foods it produces by processing them to such an extent that they appear as pure products of culture rather than nature -- things made from plants and animals.... Where does it come from? It comes from McDonald's.

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...all life on earth can be viewed as a competition for the energy captured by plants and stored in carbohydrates, energy we measure in calories. There is a limit to how many of those calories the world's arable land can produce each year, and an industrial meal of meat and processed food consumes -- and wastes -- an unconscionable amount of that energy. To eat corn directly (as Mexicans and many Africans do) is to consume all the energy in that corn, but when you feed that corn to a steer or a chicken, 90 percent of its energy is lost -- to bones or feathers or fur, to living and metabolizing as a steer or chicken. This is why vegetarians advocate eating "low on the food chain"; every step up the chain reduces the amount of food energy by a factor of ten...

Can I have it when you're done?
I am eating buckwheat this morning with my wife. But on route to California for our wedding, I ate a McGriddle in the airport. That is one of the only (if not the only) fast food experiences I've had since reading Fast Food Nation. The frightening part is that I was able to suspend all that I learned about the industry and enjoy the delicious taste of whatever it was I ate. Hopefully the buckwheat is scouring any remnants of that meal from my innerds as I write this.

RED
Big Shot
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