When there's nothing decent on Netflix

I'm not sure why I am just discovering this resource now: live streams and then archived interviews and panels on food system issues from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley in cooperation with The Edible Schoolyard. https://edibleschoolyard.org/ee101
I must say that I find a little Alice Waters goes a long way, but the speakers are top notch and the topics timely. I'm going to watch a few of these - perhaps even some in real time this evening, or a week from tonight when they tackle regenerative agriculture - and then offer a few substantive reviews. Stay tuned.

Fair Food review

I just finished reading Fair Food by Oren B. Hesterman.   This is a pretty good read which does more than many popular titles about food system reform to stress the social equity dimension.

I was surprised that with all the interest around here there was only one copy in the Sonoma County Library system.   Maybe because this is less that a purist treatment?   Hesterman seems intent on restoring balance to the food system, not eliminating large scale production of commodity crops.  Speaking of our food system he says:

On the continuum between specialization and diversification, we have veered too far toward the specialization side.  We are similarly out of balance on the continua of centralization-decentralization, concentration-dispersion, and globalization-localization.

The book generated some interesting questions for me, and provided some useful definitions.  Good section on the Farm Bill.   There is also an extensive resource section, topically organized and annotated.   

On the related website http://www.fairfoodnetwork.org/  the resources are organized in a searchable way.   You plug in a key word or two, your state if you wish, and the area of interest.   Maybe my searching was a little lacking, but I couldn't find anything on a topic the book made me think about.   When we talk about farm to institution - why don't we mention jails and prisons?   Just think if their purchasing power were increased and turned toward the local agricultural economy wherever they are...

after much work

the product of the working group on food and environment of the Episcopal Committee on Science, Technology and Faith is finally up.

http://episcopalscience.org/resources/food-systems

A free downloadable booklet, just in time for Food Day.

the complexities of energy use in the food system

Here's a recent update on these issues from CNBC
http://www.cnbc.com/id/42572375/

Most interesting, I think, is the reminder that the greatest energy efficiency is to be found in regional food systems. Way local is better than global shipping, but regional is best.

Also, using elbow grease rather than an array of electric appliances as well as getting rid of the second fridge at home can make a real difference - or could if we all did it.

So can the shift that keeps coming up - less meat and dairy in our diets.

I'd like to know the energy use difference between local cheese from pastured cows bought on a trip I would have made anyway and tofu shipped from whoknowswhere made from soybeans from whoknowswhere.

A recent USDA report on energy and the food system can be found here:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/ERR94/ERR94.pdf

Finally a Sonoma County Food System Alliance

I went to the inaugural meeting Monday afternoon.

And as I began to type I thought about the fact that this blog is public, so while I will share some of my learnings, I won't share all of my impressions.

Joseph McIntyre is the fast moving facilitator and Dan Schurman the ED of the coordinating organization Ag Innovations Network.

The participants were heavy on the human health and environmental advocacy angles, not so much economic justice. Farm labor, small scale farmers and the Food Bank were represented, but no other dimensions of labor, like food service workers or food processors, and no restaurateurs. There was also no one from the food waste angle.

Last week when I was at the Imagine conference for ordained women of Province 8 of the Episcopal Church, I figured something out. I'm in the middle on this food system business, upholding the environment related issues to the church, and the economic justice issues to the eco-foodies who dominate the scene in my locale. I can live with this, and work with this.

We met at the Food Bank this time. What I hadn't thought about until I walked through the warehouse, was how dependent our food safety net for the poor is on nationwide sourcing. This is very scary. If there were a terrorist attack or environmental disaster that disrupted transportation; or if there were a huge spike in gasoline or diesel prices; or just a few decades down the road when peak oil is way back in our rear view mirrors, we are going to be in big trouble trying to meet the needs of the food insecure from local sourcing.

New resource for churches

I just hate when I can't find the right person to talk to so that I have an Episcopal hook on an ecumenical story. It happened again this week when I found nobody home so that I could write up the efforts of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon at their October 3 conference, Food Sovereignty for All.

But I can at least post a link to their handbook here:

http://emoregon.org/pdfs/IFFP/Food_Sovereignty_for_All_handbook.pdf

Download a copy and have a look. It's great stuff - practical advice for congregations wanting to do a food system related project, with real life examples. If you've got extra land or a big underused kitchen at your church, of if you just want to strengthen connections with and support for local agriculture, there is help with getting started in these pages. Even if a congregation has never done a community ministry project before, there should be no excuses after reading this handbook. There are also several pages of resources if a congregation wants to begin with study of the food and faith connections.

TIME to get on the foodcentric bandwagon

The cover article in Time magazine (August 31) seems to be an attempt to cash in on the popularity of food system news. You probably don't need to read it, but here is the link anyway:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1917458,00.html

There's a lack of clarity here about the difference between sustainable and organic. The comparison of feedlot and open range beef on page 5 ignores the fact that both produce gaseous wastes, not just the solid stuff. And there's a general superficiality to this piece.

What I found really amusing, though, were all the links to other food and agriculture stories, video clips and photo galleries. Suggestions and live links kept cropping up that had no relationship to the paragraph that preceded them. A kind of topical randomness. Do they do this in case you are bored by the article, and need a break? I was amused, though, by the photos of the Oakland urban farmer and her little goats, and by the video of the organic garden center in Austin, TX. If you haven't seen the Hungry Planet photos, there is also a link to some of them.

Go ahead and eat those Reese's pieces

because Hershey's does not buy peanut butter or paste from the source of the salmonella outbreak.

But as the New York Times says in their headline, this food safety story reminds us how complex the supply system is for prepared foods. Some other confectioner may make the peanut butter cups in your chocolate doodad ice cream - and they may buy from the Georgia firm.

Oh - and how about those dog treats that contain p.b.? I'm aware that even as I buy less and less prepared food for myself, my girls get the kitty equivalent of industrial food.

Michael Pollan's open letter

Now that my baseball season is over I continue to catch up on my food reading.

First, a pet peeve vindicated. Both Marian Nestle and Michael Pollan refer to "healthful" food. Of course, I want my tomato plants to be robust, and my chicken - if I ate it - not to be diseased - but when we speak of the effect of food on our bodies it is healthful food we desire and "healthful" we should use, not "healthy".

I'd heard of Michael Pollan's modest proposal in his open letter to the Farmer-in-Chief elect, to turn the South Lawn of the White House into an organic garden. But I hadn't realized the letter, which appeared in last Sunday's New York Times magazine, was so thorough.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

He begins with the thought that little has been said about food during the campaign (my observation, too, in these notes) but that three issues that keep coming up all have food policy dimensions: energy independence, climate change, and health care.

He also points out the international dimensions of food policy which sorely need attention, and food's interrelationship with national security.

"While there are alternatives to oil, there are no alternatives to food."

Pollan's basic proposal is to resolarize our food system.

Will we be able to produce enough food this way? The only way to find out, he figures, is to try. He points out some of the upside, and also identifies the challenging bit - the people needed to farm when sun energy, not fossil fuels, are the basis.

There are several little things he suggests that intrigue me. His idea of real estate developers needing to complete a "food system impact statement" is probably something we have needed for a couple of generations. Fortunately I live in a part of the world where there is now some attempt to confine sprawl and preserve ag lands - but not enough.

I also loved his idea for a second bar code on food products, which could be scanned by consumer devices, not just store equipment, and would tell the story of that food item's production and journey. This is way beyond COOL.

Perhaps dearest to my heart is push for decentralizing our food system in this country. "Whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience."

More on less

I caught the tag end of an interesting interview with Professor David Pimentel (Cornell) on Living on Earth yesterday.

While driving home from the garden I learned that a 12 oz can of diet soda, which contributes 1 calorie of food energy to one's body, requires 2200 calories of energy to get to you. Specifically, it takes 600 calories to produce, and 1600 calories to put it in the aluminum can.

Pimentel and his colleagues have been coming up with figures like this for a number of the foods on our plates. He suggests that we could reduce the amount of oil that goes into our food system - about 500 gallons per person per year - and thus reduce what our food system contributes to greenhouse gases - by changing our habits. 50% - think about it. That may be the biggest prediction of possible change I've heard yet.

But think about it - while we can make changes as individuals, we also need to somehow make these changes in concert - by exerting real pressure on agribusiness and industrial food production and marketing. Just because I stop buying diet sodas doesn't mean they don't still take up half an aisle in most markets I visit. Just because I buy my pears from the grower doesn't mean the specials on pears shipped from hundreds of miles away that never ripen quite right will stop.

I also have been thinking - the diet soda example inspired me - that the American way of reducing diets probably increases the energy expenditure per calorie. Whether it's the prepared meals of some plans, or the pressure to eat out of season foods because they are diet foods, or the meat laden high protein diets - these strategies that reduce calorie consumption have got to increase planetary cost per food calorie.

And then there's the question of how we make the case for reform in our congregations. Shunning meat a few days a week and eating seasonally just isn't as sexy as buying a prius or maybe even changing the light bulbs. Maybe because it isn't a technological solution, but a set of choices must closer to our hearts, technically and metaphorically. People get emotional about their cars, not so much about their light bulbs - but less emotional about both, I'm thinking, than their mother's meatloaf (pro or con), their glass of milk or macaroni and cheese, their right to eat the foods they like most every week of the year. So - continuing to muse - shouldn't we in the religion business be able to touch those emotions somehow, to reshape attitudes and practices around our participation in our food systems?

Some things to do:

Work toward cutting the total amount of meat, dairy and eggs in our diets by 2/3. That's 2/3 of the average American consumption now. (And, yes, I recognize that there is room for some cuts in even my diet, without going totally vegan, by reducing my consumption of cheese and ice cream.)

And cut the amount of waste in our food purchases - both in overbuying and in reducing the number of shopping trips powered by fossil fuels.

Next I want to know if in Pimentel's team's interdisciplinary work they have compared the energy costs of methods of food preservation. As I've suggested before, I think freezing is probably the most energy greedy, but need to do some more searching for data.

You can read or listen to the interview which inspired this post here:
http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=08-P13-00037&segmentID=5

A guide for policy makers

is the subtitle of the item I've just added to the sites list on the right.

It's a report from the Robert Wood Johnson foundation, short and attractive, but full of the kind of ideas we need to put in the hands of our elected officials, because it encourages systemic thinking about food access.

I'm struck by the note about providing food processing/kitchen space in economically distressed areas. I know there are a million health code issues, but it does seem there ought to be something we could do communally to enable folks to process gleaned and community garden produce for their home use.

I am now mulling over the possibility of having a tomato canning night in the church kitchen adjacent to our community garden. Why not share equipment and make a party out of it? Some equipment is costly, and home kitchens in affordable housing get smaller and smaller - assuming, I guess, that folks only use the microwave and coffee maker. And canning alone is no fun. I can invoke my parents and grandparents - communion of saints canning parties? - but it would be much better to have useful company. And it would also be a way of handing on skills - which are in short supply among younger folks.

Is this something other congregations could consider? Newer church buildings often have pretty lame kitchens (microwaves and coffee makers again), but older ones often have sizable ones that are underused. My thoughts are running away with me: what about the big kitchen at St. John's, Lakeport and all those Lake County pears?

Early Rains and eating locally

Winter is arriving early here this year. Not winter as in cold, but winter as in rain. We have had 10% or our annual rainfall already, and it's only the middle of October. Not that we didn't need it, having had such a dry spring, but it does put an end to the summer garden in a way that is equal to but different from those areas where frost does the work.

Between the weather and the busyness of church schedules in fall, I've done most of the fall chores at the community garden with good help from others. Over the next week, I will mulch and sew some cover crops.

There are lots of tomatoes in several forms put by, but tonight I will be approaching the last fresh one, and using the last of the fresh zucchini and string beans, in a vegetable stew with polenta. Only the pumpkins will be left as fresh garden produce, until I harvest the first of the winter chard from my backyard in a week or two.

This has got me thinking about the challenges to eating locally, and fresh when possible, in the winter. Even in this benign climate, even with some garden space and year round farm markets, even with my own preservation efforts, it isn't easy to eat local in the winter. As I mentioned below, I do give in to frozen vegetables once in a while. And I will be buying fresh cranberries that are from Massachusetts (best flavor, flavors of home) if I can get them. Our food system and food habits have moved so far from do-it-yourself local food that even those of us with commitment and resources find it hard to change our habits.

The shift from encouraging home and community gardens to addressing food insecurity with subsidized commodities toward the end of the Great Depression is just one movement whose impact is still with us. We have organized around Big Food, the pal of Big Oil, and undoing the work is daunting.

The article in Wednesday's NY Times, "Local Carrots With a Side of Red Tape" seemed depressingly typical of the challenges we face. If individuals find it hard to undo our ways with food, how much harder on a larger scale, like getting carrots farmed in NY state to NYC school children.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/dining/17carr.html?ex=1350360000&en=27ef27fc0052e905&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss