Honest Meat

From Monopoly to Many- How Do We Do It?

"They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization."  Declaration of the Occupy Wall Street General Assembly, Sept. 30th.

This is the declaration that the Occupy Wall Street activists have made regarding our food system. It is just one of the many gross inequities they see perpetuated by our corporate dominated so-called democracy. Of those that know about the occupations taking place all over the country, the majority  agree or sympathize with the cause, while a few think the protestors are just out-of-work complainers. (Funny how in Libya we call them "Freedom Fighters" and in our country we call them lazy whiners. Mmmm....). Anyways, how can you turn a complaint into a solution? Let's get busy talking....just keep the conversation civil. I don't want to hear any platitudes like "Life isn't fair", ok?

Here are my humble ideas, built upon a bit o' input from my blog readers. I start at the personal level (self) and then expand out from there into different spheres of influence. This is by no means rocket science, but rather a little food for thought-

The Personal

• Buy Organic and/or low input foods (avoid potential poisons)
• Buy High-Welfare animal products (avoid negligent, cramped, & unsafe animal production)
• Buy Local & Small (avoid monopolies, avoid food miles which produce air pollution & contribute to climate change)
• Buy Family-Farmed (avoid monopolies, huge corporations, anonymous shareholder farming)
• Buy from Independent Grocers & Restaurants, especially those that purchase local & organic ingredients (build local economies, avoid monopolies, avoid potential poisons)
• Don't use poisons in your own yards & gardens (avoid potential poisons)
• Invest your money in local, organic farms (build local economies, decrease opportunities for monopolization, keep the potential poisons out of your back yard)

The Neighborhood/Community

• Organize a farmers market, food buying club, CSA drop site, or food cooperative in your neighborhood or town (build local economies, avoid food monopolies)
• Get your local schools, parks, and towns to stop using pesticides in their landscaping, road maintenance, etc. (avoid potential poisons, avoid the monopolies that are producing the poisons)
• Share extra food from your garden with your neighbors, especially the poor (build resilient, local economies, avoid corporate food monopolies, spread health & wellness)
• Teach others in your community (local schools, churches, clubs, Scouts, etc.) how to produce food without poisions (avoid potential poisions, build local self-reliance)
• Build a diverse group of community stakeholders to form a Food Policy Council, a tool for implementing local-level change for a more sustainable, diverse food system that better meets local food security needs (build local food system, avoid monopolization of our food supply)

The Political

• Support the states and townships that have passed laws to disallow corporate ownership of farms and farmland (this does not preclude family corporations such as LLCs). Encourage your county, township, or state to do the same.
• Lend your voice to changing the rules how GIPSA (Grain Inspection, Packers & Stockyard Administration of the USDA) regulates the meat packers which will help break up the huge meat packing monopolies that put a stranglehold on family-farmers across the country. Read here for more detail.
• Support the restrictions on pesticide use and the banning of the pesticide Bad Actors (which are those that are known or probable carcinogens & aquatic toxins, according to peer-reviewed science). Use the Precautionary Principle as a basis for pesticide science instead of "innocent until proven guilty", as is the current model.
• Support laws that limit the revolving-door between corporations and goverment agencies (like former Monsanto VP now heading the FDA!). This might limit corporate power in our so-called Democratic process.
• Support the Dept. of Justice investigations into meat packer and seed company monopolies. Encourage the DOJ to do their job and break up the monopolies. Don't buy from those monopolies (Monsanto, Syngenta, Dupont, Cargill, ADM, Bunge, Smithfield, Tyson, Dean Foods, Walmart, etc.) and instead support the myriad of local and regional businesses that supply our farm inputs and purchase farm commodities.
• Support a complete overhaul of the Farm Bill, reducing payments to large corporate agribusiness and instead building a system that supports the proliferation of more sustainable family farms!

 

Now what do YOU think? Anything to add or delete, in your opinion?

Saving Land for Food Production: Movie & discussion in Santa Cruz

Bacterial Beasts in the Making

Since there has been a lot of talk recently about limiting the use of antibiotics in animal production, I thought I would focus on the interesting and controversial subject of MRSA.  It's funny because I just realized I wrote about this subject about one year ago, but this time I did a little more digging.

Honestly, the image above was about the least stomach curdling I could find on Google images. Go ahead, type in "MRSA" and see all the beauties that pop up.  MRSA is a horrendous infection that I hope none of you kind readers ever have to experience.  It kills over 18,000 Americans a year, a rate higher than AIDS.

MRSA stands for methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureaus.  Staphylococcus usually starts as a skin infection but can proceed to infect internal organs and even cause death.  There are several strains of MRSA and indeed new ones are being found all the time.  Most MRSA is hospital-acquired, meaning that patients become infected with MRSA inside a medical facility.  Methicillin is a type of penicillin, but this staph is also usually resistant to oxacillin, amoxicillin, and sometimes other antibiotics such as tetracycline.  Now what does MRSA have to do with antibiotic use in animal agriculture?

Sometimes a Great Notion (will get you published in the New York Times)

I have this book called "Food Markets of the World" by Nelli Sheffer and Mimi Sheraton.  It is primarily a coffee table photography book, with vibrant photos of everyday food markets around Asia, Europe, Latin American, The Middle East, Africa, and the United States.  This book reminds me the main fact that James McWilliams forgets in his latest NYT post, that the people of the world get most of their food from local sources.  With over 1/3 of the world's population employed in agriculture, and upwards of 70% in many parts of India, Asia, and Africa, much of the world is involved in what McWilliams calls an 'elitist' movement of local food production and consumption.  Although the average morsel of food in the U.S. may travel 1,500 miles, that is not the case in the rest of the world.  If McWilliams is just talking about the United States, he should say that, instead of painting a highly inaccurate global picture.  The majority of the world's population either grow their own food (subsistence style), grow food for commercial markets, or consume food that others nearby have grown for them.

Farmers markets and local food movements are nothing new.  In fact, if you traveled the world, in big cities and small, you would find that most of the fresh fruits, vegetables, spices, grains, and seafood are sold in food markets that are composed of many small vendors- essentially farmers markets (or some vendors are middleman, but they are small-scale nonetheless).  Most food consumed is local due to lack of distribution infrastructure, refrigeration, and other storage and processing technology.  If McWilliams did his homework, he would know this.  But, as he states several times in his opinion piece below, all his ideas are theoretical notions- "Of course, this is only a possibility.  I have no numbers to draw on."  Scientists are rarely given primo media space to talk about their unsupported notions.  Why then does the New York Times give McWilliams space for several fluff pieces that lack quantifiable data? I guess controversy sells more newspapers and when papers get desperate, they turn to weak forms of intellectualism.

Here is the guest post below by McWilliams and my commentary side-by-side in bold.

Surf or Turf? Part One

I have always had an intimate connection to the water, from my love of swimming in clean, fresh-water rivers and lakes to my long-term fascination with the intertidal zones of the rocky West coast.  I even wanted to be a marine biologist for a time, intent on understanding the lives of sea cucumbers, gumboot chitons, and anything else strange and squishy found in tidepools (sadly, a high-school teacher talked me out of this career, saying that there were "no jobs" in this field).  I have a tattoo on my back of a salmon, reminding me of my childhood in the Pacific Northwest, standing mouth-wide-open watching the giant adult salmon trying valiantly to propel their bodies over the locks on the Columbia River's numerous dams. I always remember these salmon looking like small dolphins to me because they were longer than I was tall- now you are lucky to see a 24 incher through the fish viewing windows at the dam.

I have friends who fish and sell seafood for a living.  I believe strongly in preserving the way of life of fisherfolk and the culture of the remaining fishing towns and tribes.  What I don't know is whether or not we humans can eat seafood anymore.  Should we instead be paying for these people and communities to perhaps do something else for a living, perhaps doing restoration, monitoring, and scientific studies?

I have a copy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch guide that goes with me everywhere.  I attend the "Cooking for Solutions" gala event every year and hear chefs and fishmongers talking about their line-caught this or wild-version of that.  However, is ANY of this sustainable?  Should we pass up the "surf" and instead eat the "turf"?

Photo by Alexandra Morton via Watershed Watch

I was jarred into thinking about this last night as I was watching an excellent PBS show called Jean-Michel Cousteau Ocean Adventures that focused on Orca whales.  A segment of the show focused on the impacts of fish farms, particularly on wild salmon.  These fish farms are breeding grounds for all kinds of diseases, parasites, and pests, including the sea lice.  In the show they took samples of baby salmon at the mouths of rivers where they emptied into the ocean. Up to 60% of the wild salmon fry had sea lice on them, picked up as they passed by the fish farms that like to locate near river mouths. A fry with sea lice is a dead fish, eventually. They just don't have the defenses to sea lice before they have fully scaled out. To top off this potentially devastating problem, fish farms are now lacing their feed with a drug called "Slice" that somehow keeps the sea lice off the farmed fish.  The effects of this drug on other crustaceans in the ocean (lobster, crabs, etc.) is unknown but could create devastating reverberations in the food chain.  Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg for the problems in our seafood supply.  But if only 40% of the salmon fry don't have sea lice and maybe 5% of them make it to adulthood to reproduce, should we even be eating the so-called "sustainable" wild salmon?  What if everybody who nows eats farmed salmon switched to eating wild salmon- how long would it take to remove every last wild salmon from the ocean?

The ocean needs a break, and I for one am going to be part of that respite.  Sorry to my fisherfolk friends, but our family is abstaining from seafood consumption until science can prove otherwise that things are truly o.k.  So next time I am asked "Surf or Turf?" by my waiter, I shall stick to the "turf".  Next post, I will try to pull together some actual data to see if we could all move to a land-based diet. Thoughts?

Alternate Reality

In a few days a new documentary will be stirring up the screens and sensibilities of HBO watchers, curiously named "Death on a Factory Farm".  It is not about farmers committing suicide as they go bankrupt across the country, it is about animal abuse.  Even though I have not seen it, it's premise is based on video footage and testimony by an undercover vegan activist who worked several weeks at a hog factory in Ohio.  Ultimately the case ends up in court due to what are termed "animal welfare violations" in the hog factory, and both the farmer, his son, and an employee are put through an arduous trial.  Part of the problem is that there are no nationwide animal welfare standards for farms or slaughterhouses, other than the fact that animals have to be alive and standing prior to being slaughtered.  But before we start creating a ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL animal welfare standard, let's think about this issue a little deeper.