yearofplenty

Decline of the Carnivore: American consumers are losing their appetite for meat

Almost everyone that's not selling meat agrees that it would be a good thing for Americans to eat less meat. Nutritionists tell us it would be good for our health. Environmentalists tell us it would be good for the environment and one of the most helpful ways to combat global warming. Animal welfare advocates tell us that reducing meat consumption is one of the most helpful ways we can address the horrors of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). As we're learning in our Tables of Plenty journey, most religious traditions teach that constraining the consumption of meat through fasting is helpful on the journey of spiritual formation. 

Apparently the message is starting to sink in because, as Mark Bittman reported earlier in the week, American consumers are putting less meat in their shopping carts and that trend is likely to continue into the future. (See chart taken from this Daily Livestock Report)

The rising price of meat is probably the single biggest contributor to these trends but Bittman attributes part of the decline to a shift in consumer conscience:

Some are choosing to eat less meat for all the right reasons. The Values Institute at DGWB Advertising and Communications just named the rise of “flexitarianism” — an eating style that reduces the amount of meat without “going vegetarian” — as one of its top five consumer health trends for 2012. In an Allrecipes.com survey of 1,400 members, more than one-third of home cooks said they ate less meat in 2011 than in 2010. Back in June, a survey found that 50 percent of American adults said they were aware of the Meatless Monday campaign, with 27 percent of those aware reporting that they were actively reducing their meat consumption.

The livestock industry in their report on the trend attributes the change to growing exports which reduced the amount of available meat in the market, higher costs due to the growth of the ethanol industry that diverts corn to the production of fuel and increases the costs of those inputs for animal feed, and finally they attribute the decline to "the fruition of 30-40 years of government policy." 

Bittman, along with many others, have expressed shock at the dubious nature of this last statement. One feature of the American food scene over the last 40 years are the generous farm subisidies that have fueled the industrialization of meat production. Instead of dealing with the reality that consumers are choosing to eat less meat, they are stuck on the idea of a government conspiracy against them. 

I guess I'm not surprised that the livestock industry doesn't mention changing consumer values but, as I've written in the past, the industry ignores this reality at their peril.

Cornageddon - Congress Ends Subsidies for Corn-based Ethanol

This is a long overdue. As reported by Detroit News:

The United States has ended a 30-year tax subsidy for corn-based ethanol that cost taxpayers $6 billion annually, and ended a tariff on imported Brazilian ethanol.

Congress adjourned for the year on Friday, failing to extend the tax break that's drawn a wide variety of critics on Capitol Hill, including Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Critics also have included environmentalists, frozen food producers, ranchers and others.

This will help bring down the cost of corn inputs into the food chain, help ease world hunger, and hopefully it will reduce the ethanol-crazed rush to plant food acres with corn. This is good for land and good for people. 

World Trade Organization Tells U.S. Consumers They Aren't Allowed to Know Food's Country of Origin

A recent ruling from the World Trade Organization has got me feeling like I need to initiate an "Occupy Your Grocery Store" movement. The WTO has declared that current U.S. food country-of-origin labeling laws for meat and produce are "illegal." Bloomberg News reports:

Canada and Mexico said the provisions impose unfair costs on their exports, reducing their competitiveness. Judges agreed that the policies meant beef and pork from Canada and Mexico were treated less favorably than the same U.S. products.

The article goes on the share the perspectives of farmers and industry insiders who lament that the program is "costly and cumbersome," and that the costs "far outweigh any benefits."

This may seem like an obscure, niche debate but I think it goes to the heart of the current crisis in food systems around the world. Industrialists insist that food is nothing more than a commodity that can be reduced to a product with nutritional content, a hunk of chemicals and proteins with a profit margin. In their ideal world a food item is not connected to anything--no farmer, no land, no community, no country, no watershed, no carbon footprint, no pesticide, no herbicide, no low-wage farm worker, nothing. The industrial food system is most efficient when the journey from farm to table is an undiscernable mystery, and the champions of this industry will keep pushing for more efficiency, as if it hasn't already been pushed too far.

I'm reminded of the John Muir quote from My First Summer in the Sierra where he observes: "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

The problem with the industrial vision of storyless food is that it defies the truth that it is, in fact, "hitched to everything else." It's hitched to the endangered thin-brown line of topsoil that covers the earth. It's often connected to lies and deception (See "Most honey you buy at the store isn't honey"). It's part of huge debates about water wars and environmental destruction (see California water wars). Beef often has a sordid web of connections to things like heavy metals, antibiotic residues, clandestine cloning, ammonia soaking, and even fatalities. 

Food is more "hitched" than most things which is why the move to further separate consumers from the origin of foods is so disturbing. 

Wendell Berry sums up the current conundrum of consumers when he writes about our troubling ignorance about the ways our consumer items are "hitched":

...the first thought may be a recognition of one’s ignorance and vulnerability as a consumer in the total economy. As such a consumer, one does not know the history of the products that one uses. Where, exactly, did they come from? Who produced them? What toxins were used in their production? What were the human and ecological costs of producing them and then of disposing of them? One sees that such questions cannot be answered easily, and perhaps not at all. Though one is shopping amid an astonishing variety of products, one is denied certain significant choices. In such a state of economic ignorance it is not possible to choose products that were produced locally or with reasonable kindness toward people and toward nature. Nor is it possible for such consumers to influence production for the better. Consumers who feel a prompting toward land stewardship find that in this economy they can have no stewardly practice. To be a consumer in the total economy, one must agree to be totally ignorant, totally passive, and totally dependent on distant supplies and self-interested suppliers.

Berry concludes, and I tend to agree, that the best way to respond to this situation is to nurture "prosperous local economies." According to Berry, "Without prosperous local economies, the people have no power and the land no voice." In other words, buying from local farmers and producers is the best way to know the story of the items we buy. Instead of relying on a beauracracy of labeling rules, he says we need to take things into our own hands and develop relationships with people. If enough consumers start moving in this direction, demanding meaningful knowledge about the items we buy, then maybe industry representative will take note and respond.

Supporting local farmers like Rocky Ridge Ranch that was featured in the Spokesman Review this weekend is a great way to take a step in this direction. The Spokane Public Market and the Millwood Winter Farmers' Market, 3-6pm on Wednesdays at the Crossing Youth Center are other options worth considering. Consider making local farmers and producers a part of this year' Christmas shopping plans. 

The Rise of Foodie Class Warfare

I am working with another publication to publish an article with a similar theme so I'm pulling the plug on this post until that one is published. Sorry about that. Stay tuned

Shepherd's Grain Wheat Co-op Still Stirring National Food Conversations

I write about Fred Fleming and the Shepherd's Grain wheat co-op in Year of Plenty. I wish I could claim to have made them famous but the truth is that national media outlets have been doing stories on them for years. When they are interested sustainable wheat farming, Shepherd's Grain and their no-till farming methods have been a go-to source of information. They have even been featured on CNN. 

The latest story comes from Helene York and the Atlantic Monthly. She is intrigued by SG's partnership with ADM, a company usually touted as the arch-enemy in conversations about sustainable food. York sounds a little conflicted as she writes:

I came away from my weekend with some complicated questions. Can locally baked bread be called "artisanal" if the wheat is from cooperatively farmed wheat fields that end up processed by ADM? What if the opposite were true: if the wheat were milled in an employee-run facility but came from the commodity markets? 

Perhaps the lesson is that there's no one path that can suit every region, especially now, with consolidation having left producers with only a few scalable choices. ADM may have bought up most large-scale mills over the last century, giving groups like Shepherd's Grain nowhere else to turn. But if a plant manager takes a political and operational risk, and makes it possible for a co-op that grows wheat responsibly to survive, is that bad? 

Re-regionalizing our food system will surely mean creating new alliances, some with small entities wishing to grow bigger, some with large entities whose ways we often (rightly) criticize. Perhaps the most sustainable solutions will be those forged by individuals who need each other's support and resources, at interim steps along the way, regardless of the size of the entities they represent. 

I wrote in a previous post about the nature of this unusual partnership between an "artisanal" co-op and a mega-corporation. My post was sparked by a conversation with Fred Fleming and his words, "Hello, my name is Fred and I'm a recovering conventional farmer." I wrote:

I had a chat with Fred about the Inlander editorial that was critical of their efforts. My response is here. Paul Haeder’s basic gripe is that they use Round Up to control weeds and that they invited a rep from ADM to a farming summit who had never been to an actual wheat field. Hint Hint Hint - Shepherd’s Grian is in bed with ADM, the agricultural death star, the evil industrial food complex. What Paul didn’t understand in his critique is that it’s not ADM that has Shepherd’s Grain in its tractor beam, it’s Shepherd’s Grain that is drawing in and converting ADM.

According to Fred, the Spokane ADM mill on Trent that processes almost all the flour in our region, is the only ADM mill in the country that allows a grower like Shepherd’s Grain to process their flour separately. Fred explained that this unusual arrangement has captured the imagination of ADM’s management and as a result Spokane’s mill is seen as a kind of model of the future. In a world where everything is rapidly commodifying, in Spokane, flour is decommodifying and consumers like that and that makes corporate offices of multi-national corporations take notice. It’s actually quite remarkable and it’s all happening right here in Spokane.

In order to innovate more sustainable food practices, it’s going to take folks like me and you stepping forward and saying, “Hello, I’m a recovering conventional consumer.” But it’s also going to take farmers like Fred because consumer demand only goes so far.

Picture: Palouse wheat fields as seen from Steptoe Butte.

"Peak Herbicide" - What Happens When Weeds Acquire Weed-killer Resistant GM Traits?

New Scientist is reporting that oil-seed rape (aka canola) has escaped cultivated land and become a tenacious weed. The battle against weeds is an age-old story, but this new problem comes with a twist. These "feral" canola plants have acquired a resistance to two of the most common herbicides - glysophosphate (Roundup) and glufosinate (Liberty Link). 

Several scenarios could explain how this happened, says Schafer, who conducted the project with her superviser, Cynthia Sagers. "It could have happened if one farmer planted glyphosate-resistant canola, and his neighbour planted glufosinate-resistant canola, for example." Canola plants escaped as weeds from one field could have been fertilised by pollen from the other, leading to a doubly resistant weed.

In case you're not familiar with how modern GM crops work let me explain. Modern crops have been genetically designed to resist the effects of certain herbicides so farmers can blanket their crops with herbicides that kill the weeds but not the crop. Seeds and herbicides are sold in tandem which is more expensive for the farmer, but the ability to kill off all the weeds leads to higher yields.

The scientists say this is not cause to freak out yet, but:

...there's a risk that genes for weedkiller resistance will spread to wild relatives. In 2002, two separate teams showed in controlled studies that wild sunflower and sugar beet could swap genes with genetically modified relatives and become fitter in the process. The latest findings in canola confirm that this is happening. 

The emerging resistance of weeds to herbicides is a ticking time bomb in American agriculture as reported earlier in July by St. Louis Today:

The problem, farmers and weed scientists say, is getting worse: Weeds are becoming increasingly resistant to Monsanto's Roundup, sold generically as glyphosate, forcing farmers to use other herbicides or "multiple modes of action." But during this season especially farmers are finding that these other modes of action aren't working either — and there appears to be little relief on the horizon. In Missouri, herbicide dealers have sold out of Cobra, one of the herbicides most widely used in tandem with glyphosate.

"Are they running out of options?" asked Aaron Hager, a weed scientist with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "The simple answer is yes."

One way to describe the cycle is that we've reached "peak herbicide." If we soak our land in these chemicals over an extended period of time, weeds will eventually find a way around our toxic firewall and there will be diminishing returns. The answer right now is to add more chemicals, and to resurrect older more toxic varieties to use in combination with their modern replacements. This also means that farmer costs are going through the roof and food and other commodities are going to continue to get more expensive. 

Some voices are decrying the "fear mongers" who are questioning GM crops developments. A recent article reflects this:

"Fear mongering is easy to do," said Dr. Frank Shotkoski, Director of the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project II (ABSPII) based in Cornell University, describing a sustained campaign against crops that have been genetically altered to bring resistance to insects and environmental stress.

"We are reaching a phase when the campaign against agricultural biotechnology is at a high peak," he said.

The key line in the article for me is this one:

"Not a single food safety issue has been verified, there is no evidence of a safety issue in the 15 years and so many million hectares of Bt crops planted," said Dr. Randy A. Hautea, Global Coordinator for ISAAA.

If a consequence of GM crops is a huge spike in the use of more toxic chemicals, isn't that a safety issue? It's take us 15 years to get to that point, but isn't it likely that this will endanger ag workers and degrade land? And isn't it possible that we won't be able to "verify" these consequences until it's too late? Before we hand over the fate of our entire food system GM crops and their chemical antecedents, I'd like to see a lot more research into the consequences to the health of people, land, and economies. I'm not anti-science but for now count me among the fear mongers.

UN Economic Report: Double Worldwide Agricultural Output With Small-Scale, Sustainable Agriculture

The United Nations has released their World and Economic Social Survey for 2011 and on cue from my blog post a few days ago about the need for and emphasis on food self-sufficiency to address global food crises, the report states:

...the main policy focus on the supply side should be promotion and development of sustainable agriculture, with an emphasis on small farm holders in developing countries, since it is in this area that most gains in terms of both productivity increases and rural poverty reduction can be achieved. In developing countries, most food is still locally produced and consumed, placing smallscale farming at the heart of food production systems.

The report summarizes the challenges facing current food systems.

The recent food crises have revealed deep structural problems in the global food system and the need to increase resources and foster innovation in agriculture so as to accelerate food production. Food production will have to increase between 70 and 100 per cent by 2050 to feed a growing population. With current agricultural technology, practices and land-use patterns, this cannot be achieved without further contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and land degradation. The consequent environmental damage will undermine food productivity growth.

The survey also highlights the problem of "undernourished" populations in the world which it defines as "caloric intake is below the minimum dietary energy requirement, which is the amount of energy needed for light activity and a minimum acceptable weight for attained height. It varies by country and over time depending on the gender and age structure of the population."

The following chart was, for me, the most telling indicator that something has gone amiss:

Notice that undernourished populations were steadily on the decline as the Green Revolution took hold in the 70's and 80's driven by industrial farming techniques but since 1997 these populations have dramatically risen. The economic crisis and the rise in commodity prices/market volatility in 2008 and 2009 sent that number above 1 billion for the first time in recent history. Gains from industrial agriculture with its emphasis on intensive land use, mono-crops, and chemical inputs have not only stalled, but they seem to be failing the world's most vulnerable.

The UN survey argues that there is a need for a new green revolution in food that is more green than the last one - more ecologically sustainable, more small-scale, more economically stable, and less dependent on fossil fuels.

The report is full of interesting charts and information on economic development. This chart on energy consumption also caught my eye.

Africa Staring Down Worst Drought in 60 Years

I was startled when I read that statement in a yestereday's NY Times because I'm remembering some pretty horrible incidents of drought and famine in Africa over the last 60 years. 

Last week U.N. agencies monitoring a severe drought in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti increased the volume on existing warnings over food shortages in the region, a consequence, they say, of an unprecedented dry spell, instability and higher global food prices.

The potential human cost of this combination of drought, conflict, and poverty are hard to fathom:

UNICEF estimates that about 25 percent of people in Kenya's far north are now suffering from acute malnutrition, including more than 37 percent of those living in the Lake Turkana area. Throughout the Horn of Africa the aid group warns that "millions of children and women are at risk from death and disease unless a rapid and speedy response is put into action."

I predict that in the next 6 months the issue of worldwide drought, crop failure, and famine will likely dominate the news cycle and will potentially change the landscape of the food movement conversation. Go here for a previous post on these emerging dynamics. It could go two directions. It might lead to further insistence on genetically modified crops and entrenchment of global commodities as the "only" way to respond to world food needs. The industrial food complex will double down on the refrain, "How are we going to feed the world without this technology?" 

I hope the crisis sparks the conversation in a different direction though. The other option is for the world's policy makers to recognize that locally-developed sustainable agriculture is a viable, and maybe the best option for addressing food insecurity among the world's poor. It's more complicated than the big bucks and bushels approach of food aid but is necessary to address long-term solutions. 

In the book "Enough: Why the World's Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty", Wall Street Journalist writers Thurow and Kilman highlight the nature of the problem:

For decades, the world has grown enough food to nourish everyone adequately....In the modern world, like never before, famine is by and large preventable. When it occurs, it represents civilizations collective failure.

They go on to identify a major policy shift in world food-aid circles that has led to some of the problems we are seeing today. Instead of helping developing countries nurture their own local food systems to make them self-sufficient there was a move in the 1980's to make countries dependent on imports from wealthy nations.

John Block, Reagan's agricultural secretary as the U.S. farm economy struggled under the weight of price-depressing gluts, put it bluntly: '[The] idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era.... They could better ensure their food security by relying on U.S. agriculturals products, which are available, in most cases, at lower costs.'

...In the view of the World Bank and other development organizations, food self-reliance became more important than food self-sufficiency: It made more sense for the poorest countries to develop businesses to earn the money needed to import food rather than grow their own. 

Instead of helping poor farmers develop local and sustainable agricultural systems, they were encouraged to get out of agriculture, go to the city and move into the manufacturing sector where their low-wages could be put to "good use" in the world economy. 

This arrangement worked OK as long as their was a glut of grain commodities and low food prices. We are now finding out how that all works when stores of grain are low (because of recent crop failures and biofuel competition), and food prices are high. It's not a pretty picture. 

They also describe a shift in the crops that farmers do grow in developing countries. They have been encouraged to move into cash crops that can be put into the commodities markets and sold, instead of aiming toward crops that lend their communities to self-sufficiency. This has put these farmers at the mercy of world commodities markets whose prices rise and fall without a care to issues of hunger and self-sufficiency.

Le'ts hope in the coming months as this impending human disaster unfolds in Africa and other places around the world we'll be hearing the words "agricultural self-sufficiency" as the center-piece of addressing the crisis.

Fortunately there are some indications massive food corporations like Nestle and Unilever recognize there is a problem as reported in this Fast Company article:

Your local grocery store may be stocked with foods from around the world, but make no mistake: Our food system is starting to fail. Resource constraints, unpredictable weather, increases in food-borne illnesses, and malnutrition (925 million people are malnourished while one billion are chronically obese) are all making the major food corporations rethink the way they do business.

 

Fun with USDA Food Atlas: Mapping Food Deserts, Food Insecurity, Local Food Access, and More

The Food Desert mapping tool at the USDA has received a lot of attention lately, but I'm more impressed with the USDA Food Atlas that offers a whole variety of ways to map America's food landscape.

Here are some screen grabs of my favorites. (Note that the maps have keys indicating precise numbers but the gist of the color scheme is that the darker the color the higher the number or the greater the concentration.)

Fast Food Expenditures Per Capita: Dark Red = $700 to $1,043

Pounds of Beef & Poultry Consumed at Home Per/Capita/Year: (Dark blue indicates 81-120 lbs/year)

 

Gross Direct Farm Sales Per Capita 2007 (dark blue indicates more than $50/capita in 2007. Maybe more significantly the lightest color indicates less than $5 per capita)

 

Percent of High Schoolers physically active (dark red indicates 47-49%, lightest color indicates less than 38%)

Food Scarcity Spells Trouble for World's Poor

I wrote a post a few months ago about the role of bread prices in the Egyptian uprising. Foreign Policy has a new article on how rising food prices and increasing food scarcity around the world could mean there is more severe political unrest on the horizon. There are indications that the world's food economies are entering unprecedented territory. Lester Brown at Foreign Policy sums up these new dynamics:

Welcome to the new food economics of 2011: Prices are climbing, but the impact is not at all being felt equally. For Americans, who spend less than one-tenth of their income in the supermarket, the soaring food prices we've seen so far this year are an annoyance, not a calamity. But for the planet's poorest 2 billion people, who spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food, these soaring prices may mean going from two meals a day to one. Those who are barely hanging on to the lower rungs of the global economic ladder risk losing their grip entirely. This can contribute -- and it has -- to revolutions and upheaval.

Food crises and famine are familiar patterns in modern history but the drivers of the current crunch are more complex.

Historically, price spikes tended to be almost exclusively driven by unusual weather -- a monsoon failure in India, a drought in the former Soviet Union, a heat wave in the U.S. Midwest. Such events were always disruptive, but thankfully infrequent. Unfortunately, today's price hikes are driven by trends that are both elevating demand and making it more difficult to increase production: among them, a rapidly expanding population, crop-withering temperature increases, and irrigation wells running dry.

To make matters worse the U.S., whose stockpiles of grains have traditionally been a cushion for supply shocks, has depleted its storehouses and is less able to absorb world demand. 

As the article reports, this new world food landscape has countries that rely heavily on grain imports scurrying to secure supplies. Countries like South Korea are moving to create direct relationships with US farmers. Don't be surprised if you start to see large silos adorned with Korean lettering pop up around the grain-rich Palouse region. This has alread happened with hay supplies in central Washington. It's hard to miss the huge hay barns alongside I-90 near Ellensberg that are marked with Japanese lettering.

The author of the Foreign Policy article warns of an impending food armageddon marked by food nationalism and driven by climate change. It is a forboding message and one worth paying attention to, but the most important observation he makes is that the world's poor are on the hook for the worst of this impending crisis.

I saw this first hand at our last food distribution with Second Harvest here in the west valley of Spokane. It was a smaller-than-usual delivery of food, mostly because the stockpiles in the Second Harvest warehouse are depleted right now. I asked them about the current dynamics of food donations and they explained that with food prices and demand so high right now the large food companies are selling off more of their supplies, leaving less excess in the supply chain for food banks. This dynamic is a microcosm of what happens around the world. There is less excess in the system for impoverished peoples in regions with depleted land. 

These are challenging days ahead and it's easy to get overwhelmed but there are actions that can be taken to help those who are going to be hurt the most. It's a good time to get involved with and make a donation to organizations like Bread for the World where they advocate for the poor and hungry in important food-related legislation. Local food banks are going to need all the help they can get in the coming months as transportation costs increase. One of my favorite international aid organizations is Plant With Purpose, where they empower people in poverty to practice sustainable agriculture in their communities to help them become more self-reliant and less vulnerable to world food shocks.

It's also a good time to grow your own food.