Livestock and Deserts

Questions of whether or not we should all become vegetarian because the conversion rate of grain to meat is 10:1 ignore a lot in order to come to that conclusion. Sure cattle are terrible at converting grain to meat--but they're not really supposed to be converting grain to meat.
Any animal converting grain to meat is a worst-case scenario. And cattle are the worst of all. Pigs do much better at 5:1, and chickens are just over 2:1. But one role of animals--particularly ruminants, is to bring otherwise un-farmable land into the food chain. Pigs excel at bringing food waste back into the food chain, and have long been raised on slops--otherwise unusable food. Pigs have even been used to manage human sewage and bring it back into the food chain--although that's not something I would recommend. And chickens are champion foragers. Given a bit of woodland and some pasture, and they do quite nicely at feeding themselves most of the year.
But most important is the role of animals, primarily ruminants, in building soil. People like Joel Salutin at Polyface Farm have found how to maximize this aspect of animal husbandry. Intensive rotational grazing by cattle followed some days later by rotationally-grazed chickens increase the speed of soil production, add nitrogen to the soil, and provides insect control.
Sustainable farming pretty much requires animals as part of a land management plan. They are just too darned efficient, and offer compact calories, access to nutrients that are difficult to acquire any other way, and the opportunity for increased income. Sustainability, after all, includes economic sustainability.
Alan Savory did this TED talk about the role of ruminants in wild systems. It's worth a watch.

Salmon Confidential

Healthy salmon heart on left. One infected with piscine reovirus on right.
Frame-grab from Salmon Confidential

I've just finished watching the excellent new documentary Salmon Confidential (watch for free at the link) and I have to say, while enraging, I'm not surprised. This is the story of our federal government refusing to hear that there might be a problem with fish farms. It's a story of political gagging, attacks on whistle-blowers, and, ultimately, a complete failure to safeguard our food system. And what the hell else is new.
I cannot write a precis that would do the film justice, so I'm only going to encourage you to spend an hour watching the story unfold. And, if you are a BC resident as I am, make sure to raise the issue now, during the run-up to the election, and then vote for whatever candidate acknowledges that something has to be done about this.
At it's core, this film is about more than salmon; it's about enclosing the commons on the ocean, and, where it cannot be enclosed, destroying the resource and replacing it with one that can be enclosed. It is, in part, the culmination of a 250 year old war on the First Nations: destroy the food source and you destroy those dependent on it.

The Horesemeat Scandal Opportunity

This Al Jazeera report on the horsemeat scandal takes a different tack, suggesting that class had something to do with the scandal--and that it may also provide an opportunity.



"The food industry across Europe displayed a contempt for consumers. Because the food that ended up containing horse meat was consumed primarily by the poor."
And that's kind of it in a nutshell, isn't it? Not just horse meat, but food deserts, food swamps, famine, food banks, all these are issues experienced by "poor people." Not "us". Not the mythical "middle class". We don't have this problem, they do. But food insecurity is a global issue, and it's getting to the point that in order for you and I to eat, someone else is going to have to starve. And it's getting closer and closer to the point where that's not going to be someone way over there, but someone here in Canada, here in the US or the EU. Because food security is an issue best treated with democracy--real democracy, not this faked up version we've got now. When people make their own decisions and can drive public policy to support those decisions, rather than having on policy be made for reasons often antithetical to our interests, or the greater interests of society, that's when things can change.
Because, when if comes to food security issues, "the poor" are really just those of us out at the leading edge of the wave. As the edge breaks, more and more of us are going to start crashing down, suddenly finding ourselves food-poor.

From the Archives

CBC radio used to carry a programme called The National Farm Radio Forum that encouraged rural folk to form local forums and discuss various topics, conclusions from which were then broadcast across the country. Starting back in the 30s, topics included discussion about fascism, rationing, and what should be grown to support the war effort. Later, discussion would revolve around the role of women on the farm or whether they should be allowed to take off-farm jobs, and whether or not a national health plan was a good thing for farmers.

More on Pink Slime

Food Safety News has a terrific article on the debates which were going on at the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service during the explosion over the inclusion of "lean finely textured beef," or "pink slime" as it was more commonly known, in ground beef. From the article:

When consumer outrage over LFTB went viral last spring many federal food safety officials had never heard of the product.
“Do you know anything about this?” wrote one FSIS meat inspector to a colleague March 3, in response to a consumer inquiry. “I checked USDA’s homepage and there is nothing about it there.”
On March 6, after reading The Daily’s story on USDA’s use of LFTB in the national school lunch program, Bettina Siegel, a mother of two who writes a blog about school food, launched a petition on Change.org to ban the product from the program. The next day, ABC World News was on the story, reporting that 70 percent of U.S. ground beef contained LFTB. Within a matter of days, Siegel’s petition had over 250,000 signatures, and had garnered national attention.
Some FSIS officials were frustrated that they didn’t find out about the widely used product from the agency.
“The thing that gets me is why do we learn about products like this through the news media and not from the agency?” wrote another meat inspector March 12.
An agency veterinarian in New York said, “I was totally unaware of the process, but I am glad that I have access to the resources to learn about it and then pass along my knowledge to family and friends.”
School administrators also seemed to be unaware that LFTB was in products being served to students, according to the emails.
“This is disgusting,” wrote John Overcash, the Food Service Director for Littleton Public Schools in Massachusetts, referring to Siegel’s Change.org petition. “The article did mention that McDonalds has stopped using ground beef that contains pink slime. Be interested to know if the ground beef produced at a grocery store could or does contain this pink slime. I don’t buy commercially premade burgers or the tubes of ground beef often sold in grocery stores any way.”
Sarah Klein, a food safety attorney at the Center for Science in the Public Interest told Food Safety News she believes the LFTB fiasco raised transparency concerns.
“The troubling part of the entire pink slime fiasco– which we believe is unsavory, but generally not unsafe– is that no one outside the industry seemed to know what was going into burgers; not the consumers who were buying them or the agency that regulates them,” said Klein in an email. “That’s the truly unsavory part of this, and the part that is worrisome for public health. If the agency who is tasked with overseeing the safety of beef products doesn’t know what’s going in to those products, how can consumers have confidence in their food?”

" If the agency who is tasked with overseeing the safety of beef products doesn't know what's going  in to those products, how can consumers have confidence in their food?" Doesn't that just sum up the industrial food system?

Broken, Corrupt, or Just Useless: Canada's Food Inspection

This weekend the Toronto Star ran an article on the life and death of a thoroughbred horse once owned and raced by Frank Stronach. The horse ended its days as meat, destined for Europe. the problem is, it wasn’t supposed to:

According to Canada’s Food and Drugs Act, horses should not be sold for food if they have been given nitrofurazone at any point in their lives. Backstreet Bully had been given many other drugs that could also pose a serious risk to humans.

“Racehorses are walking pharmacies,” said Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a veterinarian at Tufts University in Massachusetts who has studied the issue extensively. “Do you really want to be eating a piece of meat that has the rabies vaccine in it?”

The Star found a host of problems in Canada’s food protection system related to horses. From one document to the next, the Star discovered confusion over which drugs are considered safe, how quickly a toxic drug leaves a horse’s body, and whether any trust can be placed in the system that regulates horses sold for meat.

The problem is that the horse, Backstreet Bully, had had its "passport" falsified, stating that the owner had owned the horse for at least the last six months, and swore that it had not been treated with any banned substances (substances banned from horses destined for the human food chain, not for veterinary purposes). When in actual fact, the horse had been owned for less than 24 hours, had been treated with banned drugs, and was not intended for the food chain.

“You can’t kill that horse,” Stacie Clark, who works for the Stronach farm, recalled pleading with an abattoir official. It wasn’t just small amounts of these drugs that had once been given to the horse: 21 doses of nitrofurazone, which has been linked to cancer in humans, and at least 23 doses of bute, a drug linked to bone marrow disease [in humans].
[...]
When Clark, from Stronach’s Adena Springs farm in Aurora, made her rescue attempt, she was already too late. Backstreet Bully was dead, shot in the head while imprisoned in a cramped abattoir stall. Canadian officials have refused to tell the Star if the horse’s meat entered the food chain.

The officials from CFIA have probably refused to say whether  the horse-meat entered the food chain because they likely have no idea. This horse was tracked because it had a halter with it that had its name stamped on it. "“The only mistake I made was the halter shouldn’t have went with that horse. That’s where it all leaked out,” Priest told the Star."

The problem lies in the relationship between the EU and Canada;  The EU accepts Canadian horse-meat because the documentation says that it has been drug-free. Canada has no real idea if the meat is drug-free, because they rely on the seller's attestation. To quote the article:

Dr. Martin Appelt, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency’s national veterinary program manager, acknowledged the government relies on an honour system and hopes that the documents are “a reflection of the truth.”

But it’s far from a foolproof system: last year, tainted horse meat from Canada, bound for Belgium, was found to contain traces of two controversial drugs, bute and clenbuterol, the latter on the list of drugs in Canada that are never to be given to animals sold for human food.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency began testing horse meat for bute in 2002. In detecting prohibited veterinary drug residues in meat, there is an overall compliance rate of 96 to 98 per cent, according to an agency spokesperson. Testing is random though a horse or its carcass will be tested if there are red flags or concerns.

The European Union takes a tough stance on many veterinary drugs in human food, including bute and nitrofurazone, for its homegrown horses. Yet the EU will accept Canadian-processed horse meat if the animals’ documents say they were drug free for six months at the time of slaughter.

 This is what relying on business to do the right thing leads to. It is the reason we need strong, enforced, regulations. Particularly around food--the one place we really don't have appropriate regulation. We have regulation to protect corporate profits (the latest outrage comes from the US and involves Monsanto (thanks to BCFSG) but the same thinking is part of the Harper government), we have regulation to destroy small and mid-size farmers (or lack of regulation, like the dismantling of the Wheat Board), we have the Alberta provincial government refusing to licence an abattoir that promised to inspect every animal that came through for BSE (because it would throw doubt on just how well the big processors were doing the same thing--very poorly, which is why I generally refuse to eat beef). But we don't have a comprehensive food inspection system that promotes and displays transparency and honesty. At least that's how it looks from where I'm sitting.

Friday Food Security Link-straveganza

Been a busy couple of weeks--from friends in hospital to a broken tooth and trying to deal with taking four courses and agreeing to cover the volunteer coordinator at the Rainbow Kitchen for a day , I'm pretty much in full flight from reality this week.
So, as a reality check, about how many calories are you supposed to be eating in a given day?  I'm not going to mention the food pyramid--Marion Nestle's book Food Politics pretty much disabused me of thinking it has any real-world validity. What I'm talking about is the actual volume. We have a strong tendency to underestimate the caloric value of foods--as well as the volumes on our plates--so it might be worth reviewing. Thankfully I don't have to do anything other than embed this lovely short film on that exact topic (Thanks to the lovely people over at the BC Food Security Gateway for pointing me towards this in the first place).


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The topic of honey laundering raised its evil little head again this week. So, also thanks to the BC Food Security Gateway, I headed over to the USP Food Fraud Database to check what adulterants are most often found in honey. There were 125 hits; one for using honey in adulterating saffron and 124 where honey had been adulterated with corn syrup, inverted syrups, high-fructose corn syrup, sugar syrups from corn, sugar cane, sugar beet, and maple syrup. That's on top of the current technique of heating honey and running it through ultra-fine filters to remove any trace of pollen from it. That way it cannot be traced to its country of origin and can be sold around the world to adulterate local honey.
When it comes to adulterating other foods, The Salt blog over at NPR is a good place to start reading. From losing your extra-virginity:

Extra-virgin olive oil is a ubiquitous ingredient in Italian recipes, religious rituals and beauty products. But many of the bottles labeled "extra-virgin olive oil" on supermarket shelves have been adulterated and shouldn't be classified as extra-virgin, says New Yorker contributor Tom Mueller.
Mueller's new book, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, chronicles how resellers have added lower-priced, lower-grade oils and artificial coloring to extra-virgin olive oil, before passing the new adulterated substance along the supply chain. (One olive oil producer told Mueller that 50 percent of the olive oil sold in the United States is, in some ways, adulterated.)
The term "extra-virgin olive oil" means the olive oil has been made from crushed olives and is not refined in any way by chemical solvents or high heat.
"The legal definition simply says it has to pass certain chemical tests, and in a sensory way it has to taste and smell vaguely of fresh olives, because it's a fruit, and have no faults," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "But many of the extra-virgin olive oils on our shelves today in America don't clear [the legal definition]."

to the ongoing

Raw, sliced horse meat, served in Japan as Basashi

  Via Wikipedia

 horsemeat-as-beef issue:

How did the Romanian horse meat wind up in the British spaghetti sauce? Follow its path, and you'll get a quick tutorial in the complexities of the global food trade.
Since horse meat first turned up in Irish burgers four weeks ago, the saga of horse masquerading as cow has become a pan-European scandal. Horse meat has turned up in beef tortellini in Germany; cottage pies sold at schools in Lancashire, England; and frozen lasagna in Norway, England and other countries.
Investigators seeking the source of the horseflesh say it may have come from two slaughterhouses in Romania, with perhaps a detour in Poland, before wending its way through at least six other European countries. Along the way, there were plenty of opportunities for it to have been mislabeled, repackaged or misrepresented.
Here's The Associated Press's tale of the trail:

"At least some of the horse meat originated at abattoirs in Romania, and was sent through a Cyprus-registered trader to a warehouse in the Netherlands. A French meat wholesaler, Spanghero, bought the meat from the trader, then resold it to the French frozen food processor Comigel. The resulting food was marketed in Britain and other countries under the Sweden-based Findus label as lasagna and other products containing ground beef."

 to the "hucksters [who] sometimes use Sudan red dye to amp up paprika, which in its natural state is often a demure reddish brown. Sudan red is a potent carcinogen, banned for use in food worldwide," and why

via Wikipedia

 Illinois is worried about the use of lion meat, all in all, The Salt is a pretty good source for food news.

I've talked before about Will Allen and Growing Power, the intensive farming operation centred in Milwaukee, WI that produces food year round. It's a well-thought-out integrated system that uses waste water from a tilapia pond to water plants, heat from composting material to heat the greenhouses and tilapia pond, and other such innovations. Well, from the look of things, someone else has noticed and gone large-scale commercial with many of the ideas found at Growing Power.

Farmed Here is doing much the same thing. From HuffPo:

Occupying 90,000 square feet of a formerly abandoned suburban Chicago warehouse, FarmedHere is not only the first indoor vertical farm of its kind in the nation -- it's also the largest.
Celebrating its grand opening in Bedford Park, Ill., on Friday, FarmedHere utilizes a soil-free, aquaponic process to grow organic greens that are both tastier and more sustainable than traditional farming.
Here's how it works: Plants are grown in beds stacked as much as six high by using a mineral-rich water solution which is derived from tanks of hormone-free tilapia offering up nutrients to the plants in a controlled environment that ensures optimal growing.

And, finally, Bill Gates is taking up the cause of global food security. From an article he wrote for Mashable:

The global population is on track to reach 9 billion by 2050. What are all those people going to eat? With billions of people adding more animal protein to their diets — meat consumption is expected to double by 2050 — it seems clear that arable land for raising livestock won’t be able to keep up.
That’s one reason why I’m excited about innovations taking place now in food production, which especially interests me as someone who worries about the poor getting enough to eat. 
[...]
I tasted Beyond Meat’s chicken alternative, for example, and honestly couldn’t tell it from real chicken. Beyond Eggs, an egg alternative from Hampton Creek Foods, does away with the high cholesterol content of real eggs. Lyrical has drastically reduced fat in its non-dairy cheeses. Even things like salt are getting a makeover: Nu-Tek has found a way to make potassium chloride taste like salt (and nothing but salt) with only a fraction of the sodium.
All this innovation could be great news for people concerned about health problems related to overconsumption of fat, salt and cholesterol. It’s important too in light of the environmental impacts of large-scale meat and dairy production, with livestock estimated to produce nearly 51% of the world’s greenhouse gases.

 Well, we survived the Mulroney/Reagan/Thatcher years, hopefully we'll survive this as well. Gates impresses me (particularly after reading his book back in the 80s) as a guy with loads of money, loads of influence, a disproportionate belief in the benefits of technology, and opinions based on talking to the first three people he meets. He's thrilled by the idea of turning plants into mock-meat with no consideration of the energy imbalance this requires. He repeats the common wisdom that the feed to meat conversion ratio is 10:1--Simon Fairlie, in Meat: A Benign Extravagance, points out that while that's reasonably true for cattle, the conversion ratio is much better for pigs and is great for poultry, and that ruminants are the best way to bring otherwise unusable land into the food chain. This also ignores the fact that animals are the simplest, most effective way of building soil. This kind of technological imperative thinking generally brings disaster, as it forgets that we are messing about with an interconnected system, and as such we need to be a lot more careful about changing parts of it.

The Decline and Fall of Food Audio Documentary

With thanks to Danielle Nierenberg who originally found this. A short audio documentary from the Scientific American website.

Duke University evolutionary biologist Greg Wray and Director of the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, Kelly Brownell, help explain the tragic downfall of food. From the North Carolina State Fair, to the diet food aisle in your local grocery store, this audio piece tells the story of calories—how they went from being our most valuable, most sought out obsession, to being a dirty word.

Garilic Smuggling in the EU

The BBC is reporting that 2 British nationals are being held in a case of garlic smuggling:

Swedish state prosecutors claim to have cracked one of Europe's more seemingly strange, if lucrative, smuggling rings.
They say two British men are believed to have made millions of euros smuggling Chinese garlic from Norway into Sweden.
The EU imposes a 9.6% duty on imported foreign garlic.
The supplies are said to have been shipped to Norway - a non-EU state where no garlic import tax is applied - and then smuggled into neighbouring Sweden and the rest of the EU by lorry, thus avoiding EU import duties.
It's not the first time garlic smuggling has made the headlines.
In December 2012, a man from west London was sentenced to six years in jail for smuggling garlic from China into the UK.

Friday Food Security Link-straveganza

via Wikimedia Commons

Another week vanished, another Friday, and another mass of stories and comments that all fit into an overall narrative about the food system--a narrative I'm having a hard time detailing, but one that is clearly scary.

Samuel Palmer - At Hailsham, Sussex- a Storm Approaching

As to that, the Guardian website is hosting a narrated slide-show about the current state of British farming. In a word: bleak. Farmers are actually, literally, on the breadlines. Harvests have been reduced, of poor quality, or simply non-existent. Lamb prices have crashed, pasturage is so poor that sheep are not getting pregnant, and disease is causing stillbirths and spontaneous abortions. British self-sufficiency in agriculture has declined from 70% to 50%. Here on Vancouver Island, it's declined to 10%. So far the ferries haven't stopped for more than about twelve hours, so panic has been avoided. But as the power of storms increase with the rise in global temperatures, this too will change.

via Wikimedia Commons

Damian Carrington, at the Guardian, writes about how the EU was stymied this week in trying to put a short-term ban on neonicotinoids--which have been implicated in colony collapse disorder. Germany and the UK were the primary opponents:

The chemical companies that dominate the billion-dollar neonicotinoid market, Bayer and Syngenta, were relieved. Syngenta chief operating officer, John Atkin, said: "We are pleased member states did not support the EC's shamefully political proposal. Restricting the use of this vital crop protection technology will do nothing to help improve bee health."

A spokeswoman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs defended the UK's abstention: "Bee health is extremely important but decisions must be based on sound scientific evidence and rushing this through could have serious unintended consequences both for bees and for food production. We are not opposing the EU's proposals. But as we do not have the evidence yet it is impossible for us to vote either way."

But Prof Dave Goulson, at the University of Stirling and who led one of the key studies showing that neonicotinoids harm bumblebees, told the Guardian: "The independent experts at EFSA spent six months studying all the evidence before concluding there was an unacceptable risk to bees. EFSA and almost everybody else – apart from the manufacturers – agree this class of pesticides were not adequately evaluated in the first place. Yet politicians choose to ignore all of this."

Yet all is not quite lost. Aljazeera is reporting:

At the end of another year of painful austerity and mouting debts, Greece's battered economy is seeing over 1,000 workers lose their jobs every day.
On the surface, many cities still looks prosperous, but the nation's deep crisis is clearly reflected in the windows of hundreds of empty shops.
More than one million Greeks are unemployed, which is one-quarter of the workforce, and the country is facing a youth unemployment rate of 58 percent.
But while many are struggling to survive in this harsh financial climate, others are returning to the land from the towns and cities that onced promised so much.
Up until a month ago, Kostas Bozas was a city banker. Now he is unemployed and has moved to his father's house in a village outside Thessaloniki, going back to his roots in search of a future.
"I come a from a steady job, and now at the age of 50 it's the right opportunity to become a farmer ... my father will teach me the things he knows from his father."
Thousands have taken the road back to farming in recent years - while the rest of the economy is in free fall, the farming sector is actually adding jobs.