Another wonderful installment in Maira Kalman’s “pursuit of happiness” series. Slow down, you move too fast… and be happy.

(But I still agree with Mr. Clemens: young people should not be pessimists.)

I’m a girl. I went to college. I gained 15 pounds. So obviously I’ve thought a lot about the nagging problem of losing weight.

I heard it all in college. Bulimia of course, microwaving onion rings and pairing them with diet coke for a meal, slim fasts, fruit only diets, eating Kashi microwavable meals exclusively, and straight-up anorexia. But things like that don’t work, or only work for a short period of time before you become completely miserable, go out to dinner with friends, or your body rebels and asks you to eat like a normal person.

But I think I’ve finally found the answer. And that answer is simply this:

Knowledge. Women tend to want to put their trust in whatever might be the silver pill without really questioning the reason. We read Self magazine and think that maybe all those little nuggets about this and that vitamin and weight loss tips will add up to something meaningful. But those are written by women like us, who are also seeking the answers.

What really changed my perspective was knowledge  about our food system, about how marketers and food designers know how to mess with our minds, how our relationship with food has been perverted and warped into an unsustainable lifestyle. How many times have I said to myself, “Today, I will eat perfectly,” only to fail as soon as a bowl of chips was put in front of me. I knew chips were bad, but not really why. Why could I not resist their siren call? Why did they make me feel so unhappy and dissatisfied after?

Reading these four books answered those questions, and have given me a new perspective on food that will carry me forward throughout my life. It’s broken a cycle of promising myself I’ll do better and then failing. It’s given me confidence and, dare I say it, happiness.

Start your knowledge feast with Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser: This book, which I read in high school, was the first thing that turned me away from fast food. It exposes the dark underbelly of the sloppy and dangerous slaughter of cows, processes that lead to foodborn illnesses. Schlosser paints a picture of the connection between Big Macs and obesity, special interests and salmonella outbreaks. This was the book that made me turn to my mom one day and say, “I want to start eating organic foods. Can we get our groceries at Whole Foods?” Though I would slip occasionally over the years and grab a pizza slice, it was an important first read.

Tuck into The Omnivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan: Pollan builds on the foundation established by Schlosser by examining how almost every processed food you buy in the store is made up of low quality corn. It shows the connection between the large profits of companies like Monsanto and the bankruptcy of farmers. And it shows how much more delicious and healthful a meal of local food grown sustainably can be. In short, it makes a serious case for putting more thought into your food.

Take a break from Michael Pollan for a moment and read The End of Overeating by David Kessler:  a well researched and even entertaining treatise on how food companies are more profitable when Americans get fatter. He explains in detail the devious ways the Cheesecake Factory and Friday’s build food designed to slip down your throat so fast you can eat 2000 calories before the waitress refills your coke. He explores the mechanisms that drive and downward spiral of using foods to make ourselves happy instead of fueling our bodies. It will make you rethink popping into a Dunkin’ Donuts for your next lunch.

Top it all off with In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan’s sequel to Dilemma that paints, in broad brush strokes, how we can recapture the healthful eating of our ancestors. It cracks open the paradox of the French, who seem to eat so badly, and yet stay so skinny. It gives you a chart for navigating the grocery store and avoiding the deceptive claims splayed across the front of sugary cereals. (Part of a balanced breakfast! Calcium fortified for healthy bones!)

After I read these books, commercials that used to make me drool now make me recoil in disgust. It’s like an x-ray has been held up to pictures of french fries so that I can see the chemicals (did you know McDonald’s uses BUTANE in their cooking oil?) fat, synthetic flavors, and corn.

This Thanksgiving…yeah, I ate more than I do on a normal day. But instead of going back for seconds – which I used to do even though I knew I didn’t need them - I sat back and talked with the people around me. I savored my food and then finished eating. I didn’t feel sick or disgusting, just happily full! And I enjoyed the whole, healthful, non-processed food on my plate that much more.

making your own food. Instead of just watching other people make the food on television.
We think probably we should all learn how to make other things as well.

Such as buttons
Or
OUR future. We’ll have to learn to make that as well.

I was pleased to open up my copy of Sojourners this month and see an interview with one of my heroes, Joel Salain, founder of Polyface Farms.  Some sweet excerpts:

Jeannie Choi: What’s the vision behind Polyface farm?

Joel Salatin: Healing—healing in all dimensions. We want to develop emotionally, environmentally, and economically enhancing agricultural prototypes throughout the world. We want to heal the relationships of the people involved with the farm and our business and our family. We want to heal the land, soil, air, water, and, ultimately, the food system.

From what disease is our current food system suffering?

Well, when is the last time a farmer went and asked for money from a banker and the banker said, “Well, that’s all well and good. I’m glad you’re going to be able to grow a corn crop. But what is that going to do to the earthworms? Or to the topsoil? Is that going to go down the Mississippi and add to the Rhode Island-sized dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that’s been created because of erosion and run-off chemicals?”

We don’t measure those kinds of things, and yet each of us intuitively understands that those immeasurable or non-quantifiable parts in a business plan are actually the most precious resources we have.

How can we revolutionize the food industry?

Healing the food system would fundamentally flip-flop the political and economic powers of our culture. Wendell Berry says that what’s wrong with us creates more gross national product than what’s right with us. It’s a fantastic observation. Right now, our culture thrives on things being sick. Dead soil brings more people to chemical companies because they need chemical fertilizers, which makes people sick. When people are sick, obviously the medical establishment thrives. If a neighborhood or community’s food system is sick, then of course you need to import food from a foreign country, which stimulates global trade. So when you start talking about healing the food system, we need a fundamental realignment of all the power and money in our culture, and that’s why there is a tremendous amount of inertia against healing the system.

So what can we do? If you want to dream out of the box for a minute, here’s an idea: If every American for one week refused to eat at a fast-food joint, it would bring concentrated animal feeding operations to their knees. What can one person do? We have a sick, evil system, and a healing system, and the question is, which one are you going to feed? Have you gone down to the farmers market or patronized local livestock farms? Or have you had candy bars and cokes? Whichever one you’ve fed is going to get bigger, and the one you’ve starved is going to get smaller.

How does your faith inform your work?

It makes me want to farm like Jesus would if he were here right now, in charge of this place. God actually loved us and provided a salvation experience for us that shapes the way we should, with the same grace and appreciation and respect, honor the creation that God made. It’s in respecting and honoring the “pig-ness” of the pig that we create our ethical and moral background for respecting and honoring the “Tony-ness” of Tony and the “Mary-ness” of Mary. And so it’s how we respect and honor the “least of these” that creates a theological and philosophical framework for how we respect and honor the creation that God made. It’s in respecting and honoring the “pig-ness” of the pig that we create our ethical and moral background for respecting and honoring the “Tony-ness” of Tony and the “Mary-ness” of Mary. And so it’s how we respect and honor the “least of these” that creates a theological and philosophical framework for how we respect and honor the greatest of these.

Our culture simply views our plants and animals as so many inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly hubris can imagine to manipulate it. I would suggest that a culture that views its life in that respect will be a culture that views its citizens and the citizens of other cultures in the same manipulative and arrogant way.

For the entire interview article, go here. And for an expanded audio interview with Salatin, go here.

His books are well worth reading (Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal is illuminating and outraging), as are these other articles about Polyface Farms.

Finally, I leave you with a video of Salatin and Chipotle founder Steve Ells, a food activist superstar in his own right.

As you rest up this Thanksgiving weekend, check out this NYTimes Opinion piece, “And the Pursuit of Happiness – Back to the Land” by Maira Kalman.  It is a fun read in support of slow, organic foods and shows pictures from Alice Waters’ restaurant, Chez Panisse, Waters’ program, Edible Schoolyard, Michael Pollan, mentions Wendell Berry, and the first Edible Schoolyard in New York City:

How Alice Waters cooks her eggs!

The cooked egg on toast

I wish I could eat at Alice Waters’ house – not only for the food, but look at those divine plates!

As you read this piece, I hope it will give you a fun opportunity to think about where your food comes from, the current food system and a slower, better alternative.

One of the most charming of American tall tales is the story of Johnny Appleseed. Many versions exist, but one of the nicest is Steven Kellogg’s picturebook. [Johnny Appleseed: A tall tale retold and illustrated by Steven Kellogg. Morrow Junior Books, 1988] Kellogg’s colourful illustrations bring the story of John Chapman to life. There really was a Johnny Appleseed. He was born in Massachusetts on September 26, 1774. He left home as a young man and finally found his way west to Ohio, still a wilderness frontier. There, he began his life’s work, planting apple orchards.

Johnny cleverly realized that as settlers arrived on the frontier and began to build homesteads, there would be a market for apple trees. Indeed, a law required settlers to plant fruit trees on their property as part of their commitment to the new land. Once Ohio began to become “crowded”, Johnny moved on to the wilds of Indiana, where he continued to clear land and plant orchards. Johnny never settled down himself, but led a rough, outdoors life. Gradually, stories and legends about his adventures and deeds also took root. When Johnny Appleseed died, in 1845, he left a significant estate, some 22 parcels of land, planted with orchards.

As his name suggests, Johnny Appleseed planted, not grafted apple trees as nurserymen do now, but apple seeds. Apple trees don’t grow true to seed. That is an apple tree grown from seed can be quite unlike its parent. As Michael Pollan points out in his book The Botany of Desire, by spreading apple seeds across the frontier, John Chapman gave the apple the gift of diversity. He made it possible for all sorts of apples to grow, and those trees best suited to the climate of America were then propagated by farmers. Most of the trees that John grew wouldn’t have had the plump, juicy fruit we munch on now. Rather, many would have been small, bitter apples, not good eating, but fine for making cider. As Pollan notes, what John Chapman really brought to pioneer settlers was the gift of alcohol.

At one time, cider was a very popular drink in America. Even children drank cider, as it was sometimes safer than the water, which might be polluted. Cider could be cheaply produced by anyone with enough space to grow a few apple trees. Prohibition and the temperance movement changed all that. While beer and spirits rebounded after the end of prohibition, cider never regained its earlier popularity in America.

The first time I drank cider was in England, where it remains popular and is readily available. Indeed, my old grannie introduced me to cider as it was her preferred drink. Cider is probably the easiest alcoholic beverage for a new drinker to enjoy. It has a pleasant, mild flavour and an alcohol content similar to or a bit higher than beer. Today, cider is fairly easy to come by in Ontario, but in spite of the fact that there are lots of apples grown here, the cider is usually an import from England. Strongbow is quite common, although there are a couple of other brands available.

The only Canadian brand regularly available is Growers, which is produced in British Columbia. It is made with Granny Smith apples, which is a bit ironic as Granny Smith is an Australian apple. Growers is a very sweet, sparkling cider and is quite like drinking pop, apart from the 7% alcohol content.

There is a bit of a cider renaissance underway, and perhaps more varieties of cider will be available in the future. One that is produced not too far from here is Waupoos Premium Cider. It is more like the British ciders than Growers is. Waupoos is produced in Prince Edward County, near Picton, Ontario. For more on cider, visit The Palate Jack.

♥

I’m currently reading Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and will be moving shortly onto his new In Defense of Food.   I also found a great interview of him on Democracy Now on health eating and what industrial Food is shoveling up: http://tr.im/FTLL.  AND, do check out the movie, Food, Inc., where he and others shed big lights on where our food really comes from. 

Thanks Michael!

Sign outside of Cibola Farms, Culpepper, VA

Two weekends ago, I had the good fortune of attending a screening of Fresh in Oakton, VA. This film starts by discussing the detrimental effects of industrial farming to the Earth and to our health, including food contamination, environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, and morbid obesity. Then it takes a positive turn by showing examples of people who are pioneering innovative sustainable farming methods. The screening was followed by a panel of speakers that included one of the pioneers from the film, Joel Salatin.

Salatin, a self-described “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist farmer,” is the owner of Polyface Farms in Swoope, VA , who was made famous by Michael Pollan’s book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Salatin has developed innovative methods of farm management that utilize the natural interactions of farm animals with the land and with one another. By avoiding chemical pesticides, industrial feed, animal crowding and nutrient depletion in the soil, his animals are far healthier and provide greater nutrition to people eating them, than those raised in industrial conditions. In following these practices, Salatin saves quite a bit of money by not having to purchase pesticides, chemical fertilizers, feed and antibiotics. As a result, he yields a much, much higher profit per acre used than farmers using less natural means.

Buffalo grazing in the fields at Cibola Farms

Impressed by the movie and Salatin’s presentation, I have signed up to receive delivery of his free-range, grass-fed poultry as I have not been able to find good local chicken since my favorite farmers market meat supplier, Cibola Farms, stopped offering poultry. I feel very fortunate to be within delivery range of Polyface Farm. As a matter of fact, one of the great advantages of living in the DC Metro area is close proximity to a huge range of farms.

Inspired by Fresh and other information I have been gathering about my local farms, yesterday my family and I decided to take a road trip to the Cibola Farms ranch in Culpepper, VA where they raise the free-range buffalo and pork that we still purchase regularly at our local farmers market.

Upon arriving, there was a notable lack of livestock scent to the area. As I walked around, I realized that this was because the animals had huge tracts of land around which they could move. There were herds of buffalo, and few dairy cows, several chickens, ducks, geese and turkeys, pigs, honey bees, and a very gregarious farm cat.

A happy, friendly dairy cow at Cibola Farms

This bucolic lifestyle was in stark contrast to the images of factory farms I had seen in Fresh, and Food, Inc., another movie about industrial farming. The Cibola animals looked relaxed, happy and well taken care of. They were grazing on grass, weeds and insects that exist naturally within the farm’s eco-system.

If you eat meat, it is worth considering where your meat comes from. Ultimately, we take in what our food sources take in, regardless of whether they are plants of animals. By making a conscious choice in the purchase of our food, we have an opportunity to help support more sustainable farming practices.

Even if you don’t live in the Greater DC Metro area, there are many places throughout the country where you can purchase locally grown, healthy food. A great place to start is the USDA’s website, which has a search page where you can locate a farmers market near you.

This article, which I authored, originally appeared on the Etsy Earth blog.

As you guys know, I watched “Food, Inc.” the other night. Actually, I have watched it twice now because I wanted to make sure I absorbed as much as I could. I think if I watched it again, I’d likely pick up something else I missed the first two times.

Anyway, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the movie, “Food, Inc.” is a film that explores the relationship between our food supply and the big corporations that control it all. It also tells the stories of farmers who are forced to borrow money and not make much in return. And a woman fighting for stricter government standards after her son died from E Coli.

There’s so much more to it than that but I thought it would be better for me to stop there and just share my thoughts with you:

First, I became a vegan for health reasons as I’ve mentioned several times. But this movie was really the first time I had watched something that showed animals being led to their deaths. I was horrified.

What really got me was the assembly line of baby chickens. This happened in the first five minutes of the movie and I cried. There were a few more instances like this in the film but it wasn’t the primary focus, in case you were afraid to watch it for that reason.

Here are some things I learned from the film that I didn’t know before:

• Even if you don’t eat fast food, you are still eating meat from one of the “big” companies (4 companies control 80% of the beef in America)
• The average American eats 200 lbs of meat per year!
• There are only 13 slaughterhouses in the U.S., where all of the meat here comes from.
• Cows are meant to eat grass but they are fed corn because it is cheap and makes them fatter quicker.
• The FDA has reduced it’s number of inspections over the years, big time!

I really enjoyed the commentary by Michael Pollan. I have not yet read his books but he came to visit my workplace a year or so ago and I got the chance to hear him speak. The man knows a lot about food!

I also had an “Oh, great!” moment when I saw the farmer from McLean County, KY. I didn’t even know the place existed but I looked it up and it’s more Western KY, like where Josh’s grandma lives.

Anyway, that guy seemed to care more about making money than anything. It was sad. Especially considering it’s in my state.

I also found it disappointing that the big companies all declined to be interviewed for the film. I would have liked to hear their side of the story but I guess if they won’t even comment, then I just have to assume what they are reporting on in this film is true. They obviously have something to hide.

I already don’t eat meat but one thing I could stand to do more of is shop at Farmer’s Markets. The “season” is coming to a close soon for most markets but I found one here in Louisville that is open until mid-December so I thought I would try to get out there before it closes.

I also remembered a market that I’d been too with my parents a few times which has a lot of local goods, so I think I will make a trip out there as well.

Next summer, when all the markets are back open, I hope to get all of my produce from there!

It will be a gradual process but I hope to also convert some of my purchases to organic. I’d been hesitant in the past due to cost, but since I avoid meat and dairy products in order not to consume hormones or antibiotics, why not hold my the food I do eat to the same standards?

I really enjoyed the film and it really made me think and realize that while I care a lot about being healthy and vegan, I need to be more conscious of where all of my food is coming from and what is in it.

“You can change the world with every bite.”

Have you seen this movie? What did you think?

There is so much more to it than the little bit I covered here. I hope you will rent it and see for yourself. Have a great day!

I am so excited to see this film with my floor on December 5th! Expect a review post afterwards…

The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-eye View of the World by Michael Pollan. Random House, 2001.

In recent years, Michael Pollan has spent a considerable amount of time at the top of the best-seller list with his books The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. There’s even an Omnivore’s Dilemma for Kids. My interest in his earlier book was piqued by a recent PBS special based on The Botany of Desire. I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it if you have a chance to view it.

The idea behind The Botany of Desire is simply this: perhaps we are not, as we think, controlling plants for our own purposes but rather they are using our tastes to forward their own agenda, which is to extend their own range and numbers. Pollan looks at four different plants that owe much of their success to their ability to satisfy a human desire. Apples fulfill a wish for sweetness, tulips for beauty, marijuana for intoxication and potatoes satisfy the desire to have control over a food source.

Each of the four sections is interesting. Pollan is an amiable guide and the book is an entertaining read. My favorite, however, was the concluding essay on the potato. His description of what goes into growing a potato on a typical Idaho potato farm is an eye-opener. More than that, a shocker. It’s more like a chemical factory process than something you would connect with a garden. The regimen of pesticides and fertilizers that are applied relentlessly across the season is mindboggling. Part of the driving force behind this method of farming is another corporation, McDonald’s, who require a particular type of potato, the Russet Burbank, to produce the perfect fry, thus promoting a monoculture of Burbanks.

From this discussion Pollan seques into a discussion of the New Leaf potato, a genetically-modified vegetable that has Basillus thuringiensis (Bt) a common bacterium found in the soil introduced into its genetic makeup. The Bt makes the potato resistant to the scourge of potato plants, the Colorado Potato Beetle. How fields and fields, countless acres, of this genetically-modified plant would affect pollinators like bees or the resistance of non-Bt plants or weeds, or even the long-term health of people eating it is not well understood. Ultimately, there is agreement that the attacking beetles would become resistant to the modified plant, perhaps in 30 years. Then what? Monsanto, the developer of the plant doesn’t know. They say: We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. Trust us!. Pollan also briefly discusses another wonder from the giant corporation, the terminator seed, a seed that has been modified not to reproduce. I suppose it’s overly dramatic to call such an invention the incarnation of evil, but really, what kind of greed does it take to even conceive of such a thing?

No discussion of potatoes could fail to look at the Irish Potato Famine. The Irish were among the first Europeans to embrace the plant, introduced from the Americas by the Spanish. The potato played a vital role in allowing the population of Ireland to climb from three million to eight million in less than a century. Young men could marry earlier and support larger families. As the supply of labour increased, wages fell, keeping the Irish impoverished. When the blight that destroyed the potato crop hit in 1846, and again in 1846 and ‘48 one in every eight persons died, and thousands emigrated to America. Ireland’s population was halved within a decade.

The argument for commercial farms and genetically-modified crops rests in part on the view that the world’s population cannot be fed by any other means. It seems that we are perhaps heading in the same direction as the 19th-century Irish. Our population has grown too large to be supported by conventional farming methods. When the cheap oil that fuels it all collapses, what then?

My favorite part of the book is the conclusion, in which Pollan talks about his own garden, the neat, orderly rows of the spring season, the wild abandon of the late summer. He speaks of the pleasure of digging up potatoes with a rapture that leaves me longing to get out in the dirt. It’s been a few years since I grew potatoes. Hmm. Next year…potatoes.

Here’s a great opinion piece by a former student comparing the pitfalls of American society with the horrendous Lunchables being peddled to our youth.

As he says, in the words of the great Michael Pollan:”Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”

Thanks to the PBS series of the same name, this book is getting a second life. I found it fascinating when I read it several years back (before my conversion) and reviewing these reading selections I realize it still holds the same attraction for me, although now I tend to read it through the prism of God’s creation – something I tended to lack as a point of view before. Many of the stories here also have a theme of the corrupting influence of man’s stewardship of God’s creation – one thinks of the tulip bubble or the use of cannabis.

A few posts back I introduced Fr. Robert Barron’s explanation of the etymology of the word “sin,” how it was related to scattering and the product of sin,” over-and-againstness, separation, suspicion, mutual hatred, blaming” were all signs of the presence of that scattering power of sin. The current economic collapse we are experiencing and some of these stories (think of the story of the potato) seem to illustrate that better than the usual.

The potato (you’ll have to see the video or catch the PBS special) was first rejected by Europeans because it was a member of the nightshade family and was thought to cause leprosy — and it came from America. three strikes that made it fit to eat, only by the Irish( then considered European miscreants. The Irish soon found that the combination of protein and vitamins B & C made the potato a worthy, versatile staple.

Their dependence grew so strong, that when a fungus eradicated their crops in the late 1840s, it also decimated the human population by millions. We seem to have punished the potato with our own genetic engineering techniques: a modern potato like The New Leaf variety (the potato favored by MacDonald’s for its fries) has the ability to kill beetles with toxins from its own leaf. But consumers, fearing the unintended consequences of man’s messing with nature, rose to protest its introduction into the modern food chain.

Here are my reading selections, random stuff I pick up,  from the book:

Coevolutionary Relationship
Matters between me and the spud I was planting, I realized, really aren’t much different: we, too, are partners in a coevolutionary relationship, as indeed we have been since the birth of agriculture more than ten thousand years ago. Like the apple blossom, whose form and scent have been selected by bees over countless generations, the size and taste of the potato have been selected over countless generations by us — by Incas and Irishmen , even by people like me ordering French fries at McDonald’s. Bees and humans alike have their criteria for selection: symmetry and sweetness for the bee; heft and nutritional value in the case of the potato-eating human. The fact that one of us has evolved to become intermittently aware of its desires makes no difference whatsoever to the flower or the potato taking part in this arrangement. All those plants care about is what ever being cares about on the most basic genetic level: making more copies of itself. Through trial and error these plant species have found that the best way to do that is to induce animals — bees or people, it hardly matters — to spread their genes. How? By playing on the animals’ desires, conscious and otherwise. The flowers and spuds that manage to do this most effectively are the ones that get to be fruitful and multiply.

Domestication
We automatically think of domestication as something we do to another species, but it makes just as much sense to think of it as something certain plants and animals have done to us, a clever evolutionary strategy for advancing their own interests. The species that have spent the last ten thousand years or so figuring out how best to feed, heal, clothe, intoxicate and otherwise delight us have made themselves some of nature’s greatest success stories….Domesticated species don’t command our respect the way their wild cousins often do. Evolution may reward interdependence, but our thinking selves continue to prize self-reliance. The wolf is somehow more impressive to us than the dog. Yet there are fifty million dogs in America today and only ten thousand wolves. So what does the dog know about getting along in this world that its wild ancestor doesn’t? The big thing the dog knows about — the subject it has mastered in the ten thousand years it has been evolving at our side — is us: our needs and desires, our emotions and values, all of which it has folded into its genes as part of a sophisticated strategy for survival. If you could read the genome of the dog like a book, you would learn a great deal about who we are and what makes us tick.

Sweetness
…sweetness has proved to be a force in evolution. By encasing their seeds in sugary and nutritious flesh, fruiting plants such as the apple hit on an ingenious way of exploiting the mammalian sweet tooth: in exchange for fructose, the animals provide the seeds with transportation, allowing the plant to expand its range. As parties to this grand coevolutionary bargain, animals with the strongest predilection for sweetness and plants offering the biggest, sweetest fruits prospered together and multiplied, evolving into the species we see, and are, today. As a precaution, the plants took certain steps to protect their seeds from the avidity of their partners: they held off on developing sweetness and color until the seeds had matured complexly (before then fruits tend to be inconspicuously green and unpalatable), and in some cases (like the apple’s), the plants developed poisons in their seeds to ensure that only the sweet flesh is consumed. Desire then is built into the very nature an purpose of fruit, and so, quite often, is a kind of taboo. The vegetable kingdom’s lack of glamour by comparison (whoever heard of a forbidden vegetable?) can be laid to the fact that a vegetable’s reproductive strategy doesn’t turn on turning animals on.

Flowers and Beauty
Most of humankind for most of its history have been in the same irrational boat as the seventeenth century Dutch — crazy for flowers. So what is this tropism all about, for us, and for the flowers. How did these organs of plant sex manage to get themselves cross-wired with human ideas of value and status and Eros? And what might our ancient attraction for flowers have to teach us about the deeper mysteries of beauty — what one poet has called “this grace wholly gratuitous”? Is that what it is? Or does beauty have a purpose?.. Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression. It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person’s mind, that mind’s connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.

Flowers and Natural Selection
Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices — visual , olfactory, and tactile — to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals. In order to achieve their objectives, many flowers rely not just on simple chemical signals but on signs, sometimes even on a kind of symbolism. Some plant species go so far as to impersonate other creatures or things in order to secure pollination or, in the case of carnivorous plants, a meal. To entice flies into its inner sanctum (there to be digested by waiting enzymes), the pitcher plant has developed a weirdly striated maroon-and-white flower that is not all attractive unless you happen to be attracted to decaying meat. (The flower’s rancid scent reinforces this effect.)

Flowers Avoid Self-Pollination
Though many flowers, like the lilies, possess both male and female organs, they go to great lengths to avoid pollinating themselves. That would defeat the floral point, which is the mixing of genes that cross-pollination ensures. A flower can avoid self-pollination chemically (by making its ovule and pollen grain incompatible), architecturally (by arranging stamen and pistil in the flower so as to avoid contact), or temporally (by staggering the times when their stamens produce pollen and their pistils are receptive.

The Love of Their (Flower’s) Lives
For many flowers the great love of their lives now is humankind. Those daylilies leaning expectantly forward? Their faces are in fact turned toward us, whose favor now ensures their success better than any bug’s can. That peony with the salacious pubic stamens? Blame the Chinese for than one: for thousands of years their poets, discerning manifestations of yin and yang in the garden, likened peony blossoms to a woman’s sexual organs (and a bee or butterfly to a man’s); over time Chinese peonies evolved, by means of artificial selection, to gratify that conceit. Even the perfume of certain Chinese tree peonies is womanly, a scent of flowers tinged with briny sweat; the flowers smell less like perfume of the bottle than a scent that’s spent time on human skin. It may still attract the bees, but by now it’s our brain stems the scent is meant to fire.

Beauty and Health
Evolutionary biologists believe that in many creatures beauty is a reliable indicator of health, and therefore a perfectly sensible way to choose one mate over another. Gorgeous plumage, lustrous hair, symmetrical features are “certificates of health” as one scientist puts it, advertisements that a creature carries genes for resistance to parasites and in not other wise under stress. Among birds, the species most susceptible to parasites are the ones with the most extravagant plumage — probably because these are the ones that most need to advertise their fitness. A fabulous tail is a metabolic extravagance only the healthy can afford. In the same way a fabulous car is a financial extravagance only the successful can afford. In our own species, too, ideals of beauty often correlate with health: when lack of food was what usually killed people, people judged body fat to be a thing of beauty. though the current preference for sickly-pale, rail-thin models suggests that culture can override evolutionary imperatives.

The Canonical Flowers
What sets these canonical flowers [rose, peony, orchid, lily, tulip] apart from the run of charming daisies and pinks and carnations, not to mention the legions of pretty wildflowers? Perhaps more than anything else, it’s their multifariousness. Some perfectly good flowers simply are what they are are, singular and, if not completely fixed in their identity, capable of ringing only a few simple changes on it; hue, say, or petal count. Prod it all you want, select and cross and reengineer it, but there’s only so much a coneflower or a lotus is ever going to do. Fashion is apt to puck up such a flower for a time and then drop it — think of the pink or gillyflower, in Shakespeare’s day or the hyacinth in Queen Victoria’s — since it won’t let itself be remade in some new image once its first one is passé. By contrast the rose, orchid, and the tulip are capable of prodigies, reinventing themselves again and again to suit every change in the aesthetic or political weather.

Natural vs. Artificial Selection
From the chance mutations thrown out by a flower, nature preserves the rare ones that confer some advantage — brighter color, more perfect symmetry, whatever. For millions of years such features were selected, in effect, by the tulip’s pollinators — that is, insects — until the Turks came along and began to cast their own votes. The Turks did not learn to make deliberate crosses till the 1600’s; the novel tulips they prized were said simply to have “occurred”. Darwin called such a process artificial, as opposed to natural selection, but from the flower’s point of view, this is a distinction without a  difference: individual plants in which a trait desired by either bees or Turks occurred wound up with ore offspring. Though we self-importantly regard domestication as something people have done to plants, it is at the same time a strategy by which the plants have exploited in us and our desires — even our most idiosyncratic notions of beauty — to advance their interests….Mutations that nature would have rejected out of hand in the wild sometimes probe to be brilliant adaptations in an environment that’s been shaped by human desire.

Flowers, the Crucible of Beauty?
Human desire entered into the natural history of the flower and the flower did what it has always done: made itself still more beautiful in the eyes of this animal, folding into its very being even the most improbable of our notions and tropes….we gazed even further into the blossom of a flower and found something more: the crucible of beauty, if not art, and maybe even a glimpse into the meaning of life…the heart of nature’s double nature — that is, the contending energies of creation and dissolution, the spiraling toward complex form and the tidal pull away from it. Apollo and Dionysus were  names the Greeks gave to these to these two faces of nature, and nowhere in nature is their contest as plain or as poignant as it is in the beauty of a flower and its rapid passing. There, the achievement of order against all odds and its blithe abandonment. There, the perfection of art and the blind flux of nature. There, both transcendence and necessity.

Lessons of Coevolution
One of the great lessons of coevolution is that the all-out victory of one species over another is often Pyrrhic. That’s because a powerful, death-dealing toxin can exert such a strong selective pressure for resistance in its target population that it is quickly rendered ineffective; a better strategy may be to repel, disable, or confound….some plant toxins such as nicotine, paralyze or convulse the muscles of pests who ingest them. Others such as caffeine, unhinge an insect’s nervous system and kill its appetite. Toxins in datura (and henbane and a great many other hallucinogens) drive a plant’s predators mad, stuffing their brains with visions distracting or horrible enough to take the creatures’ mind off lunch….compounds such as flavonoids change the taste of plant flesh on the tongues of certain animals, rendering the sweetest fruit sour or the sourest flesh sweet, depending on the plant’s designs. Photosensitizers present in species such as the wild parsnip cause the animals that eat it to burn in the sun; chromosomes exposed to these compounds spontaneously mutate when exposed to ultraviolet light. A molecule present in the sap of a certain tree prevents caterpillars that sample its leaves from ever growing into butterflies.

Catnip
Catnip contains a chemical compound, called “nepetalactone” which mimics the pheromone cats produce in their urine during courtship. This chemical key just happens to fit an aphrodisiac lock in a cat’s brain and apparently no other.

Types of Marijuana
Cannabis Sativa, an equatorial species poorly adapted to life in the northern latitudes. Sativa can’t withstand frost, and… usually won’t set flowers (sinsemilla) north of the thirtieth parallel…American hippies traveling the “hashish trail” through Afghanistan returned with seeds of Cannabis indica, a stout, frost-tolerant species that had been grown for centuries by hashish producers in the mountains of central Asia…it rarely grows taller than four or five feet (as compared to fifteen for the stateliest sativa) and its purplish green leaves are shorter and rounder than the long, slender fingers of sativa. Indica also proved to be exceptionally potent, although many people will tell you that its smoke is harsher and its high more physically debilitating than that of sativa.

Marijuana’s Genetic Revolution
Marijuana’s genetic revolution recalls an earlier horticultural watershed: the introduction of the China rose (R. chinensis) to Europe in 1789, an event that made it possible for the first time to breed roses that would flower more than one  a season…for both the rose and marijuana, human mobility coupled with human desire — for a rose that would rebloom in august; for sinsemilla that would grow in the north –  led to the reunification of two distinct evolutionary lines of a plant that had diverged thousands of years before… the smoother taste and “clear, bell-like high “ associated with the best equatorial sativa.. Could be combined with the superior potency and hardiness of an indica… the result.. “a great revolution” in cannabis genetics…

Cannabis Genetics
By judiciously manipulating the five main environmental factors under their control — water, nutrients, light, carbon dioxide levels and heat — as well as the genetics of the plant, growers found that the marijuana plant, this remarkably obliging weed, could be made to perform wonders….cannabis genetics improved to the point where it was no longer unusual to find sinsemilla with concentrations of the THC, marijuana’s principal psychoactive compound, as high as 15 percent…(THC in ordinary marijuana ranged from 2 to 3 percent…for sinsemilla 5 to 8 percent)…nowadays THC levels of 20 percent are not unheard of.

Indoor Growing of Cannabis
Indoors… the gardener is mother nature but even better. ..growers discovered they could speed photosynthesis by supplying plants with all of the nutrients, carbon dioxide, and light they could handle — vast amounts, as it turned out (Cannabis is, after all a weed.) Gardeners found that their plants could absorb hundreds of thousands of lumens — a blinding amount of light — twenty four hours a day. Later on by abruptly slashing their diet of light to twelve hours daily (and changing from metal halide to sodium lights, the frequency which more closely mimics the autumn sun), growers could shock their plants into flowering before they were eight weeks old. With the right equipment, an indoor grower could create a utopia for his plants, an artificial habitat more perfect that any in nature…

Female Marijuana Plants
As long as the female marijuana plant remains unpollinated, it will continue to produce new calyxes, steadily adding to the length of its flower. in this state of perpetual sexual frustration, the plant also continues to produce large quantities of THC-rich resin. But even a few grains of pollen to reach the plant’s flowers, and the process abruptly stops: bud and resin production shuts down, the plant commences producing seeds and the sinsemilla is ruined

A Regimen of Encouragement For Cannabis
The grower had chosen this particular town because it is home to a candy factory, a bakery, and a chemical plant. Marijuana plants, and indicas in particular, emit a strong, acrid odor; he was counting on the cacophony of smells produced by these three neighbors to cover the telltale stink of his plants…he flung open a tightly sealed door and I was hit squarely in the face first by a blast of white, white light, and then by a stink so powerful tit felt like a punch. Sweaty, vegetal, and sulfurous, the place might have been a locker room in the Amazon…I stepped into a windowless chamber not much bigger than a walk-in closet, crammed with electrical equipment, snaked with cables and plastic tubing, and completely sealed off for the world. More than half the room was taken up by the gardener’s Sea of Green: a six foot square table invisible beneath a jungle of dark, serrated leaves oscillating gently in an artificial breeze. There were perhaps a hundred clones here, each barely a foot tall, yet already sending forth a thick finger of hairy calyxes casting about vainly for a few grains of airborne pollen. A network of narrow plastic pipes supplied the plant with water, a tank of CO₂ sweetened their air, a ceramic heather warmed their roots at night, and four 600-watt sodium fixtures bathed them in a blaze of light for twelve hours of each y. The other twelve, they were sealed in perfect darkness. The briefest lapse of light would ruin the whole crop…in exchange for a regimen of encouragement the likes few plants have ever known, these hundred eager demonic dwarves would oblige their gardener with three pound of dried buds before the month was out — some $13,000 worth of flowers.

One Culture’s Panacea Is Another’s Panapathogen
But the reason cultures give for promoting one plant and forbidding another are remarkably fluid in both time and space one culture’s panacea is another’s panapathogen (root of all evil).Think of the traditional role of alcohol in the Christian West as opposed to the Islamic East…Tobacco smoking and coffee drinking  were taboo in the West before the Industrial Revoliution. The German historian Wolfgang Shivelbusch, suggests that the two drugs became socially acceptable because they aided in industrialization’s “reorientation of the human organism to the primacy of mental labor.”

A Natural History of Religion
A natural history of religion would show that the human experience of the divine has deep roots in psychoactive plants and fungi. Karl Marx may have gotten it backward when he called religion the opiate of the people…somewhere in that volume we would surely find a chapter on the place of the opium poppy and cannabis in the romantic imagination…It’s well known that many English romantic poets used opium, and several of the French romantics experimented with hashish soon after Napoleon’s troops brought it back with them from Egypt… Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notion of the imagination as a mental faculty that “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate,” an idea whose reverberations to Western culture haven’t yet been stilled, simply cannot be understood without reference to the change in consciousness wrought by opium….Not just poetry but modernism, surrealism, cubism, and jazz have all been nourished by Coleridge’s idea of the transforming imagination….Lenson writes “We have to face the fact that some of our canonical poets and theorists, when apparently talking about imagination, are really talking about getting high.”

Meme
A meme is simply a unit of memorable cultural information. It can be sas small as a tune or a metaphor, as big as philosophy or religious concept. Hell is a meme, so are Pythagorean theorem,  A Hard Day’s Night, the wheel, Hamlet, pragmatism, harmony….Dwarkin’s theory is that memes are to cultural evolution what genes are to biological evolution…Memes are culture’s building blocks, passed down from brain to brain in a Darwinian process that leads by trial and error, to cultural innovation and progress. The memes that prove themselves best adapted to their “environment” — that is the ones most likely to survive and replicate and become widely regarded as good, true, or beautiful. Culture at any given moment is a meme pool in which we all swim  — or rather that swims through us.

Cannabis “High” is a Creation of the Mind?
Andrew Weil contends that cannabis does not itself create but merely triggers the mental state we identify as “being high.” The very same mental state can be triggered in other ways, such as meditation or breathing exercises. Weil believes that it is an error of modern materialist thinking to believe that the high smokes experience is somehow a product of he plant itself (or THC), rather than a creation of the mind — prompted perhaps but sui generis.

The Cannabinoid Network
On the assumption that the human brain would not have evolved a special structure for the express purpose of getting it high on marijuana, researchers hypothesized that the brain must manufacture its own THC like chemical for some as yet unknown purpose. The scientific paradigm at work here was the endorphin system, which is tripped by opiates from plants as well as endorphins produced in the brain….Raphael Mechoulam found…the brain’s own endogenous cannabinoid. He named it “anandamide’” form the Sanskrit “inner bliss”…the effects of the cannabinoid network: pain relief, loss of short term memory, sedation, and mild cognitive impairment …”All of which is exactly what Adam and Eve went after being thrown out of Eden. You couldn’t design a more perfect drug for getting Eve through the pain of childbirth or helping Adam endure a life of physical toil. …cannabinoid receptors had been found in the uterus, of all places, and speculated that anandamide may not only dull the pain of childbirth but help woman forget it later. The sensation of pain is curiously one of the hardest to summon from memory…

High With Carl Sagan
“There is a myth about such highs, the user has the illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny until morning. I am convinced this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved while high are real insights; the main problem is putting those insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day…If I find in the morning a message from myself the night before informing me that there is a world around us which we barely sense, or that we can become one with the universe, or even that certain politicians are desperately frightened men, I may tend to disbelieve; but when I’m high, I know about this disbelief.”
Marijuana Reconsidered, Lester Grinspoon

The Importance of Forgetting
What a curious thing ..for the brain to do, manufacture chemicals that interfere with it own ability to make memories…forgetting is a mental operation, not a breakdown of one….think how quickly the sheer volume and multiplicity of sensory information we receive every waking minute would overwhelm our consciousness if we couldn’t quickly forget a great deal more of it than we remember…oru mental health depends on a mechanism for editing the moment-by-moment ocean of sensory data flowing into our consciousness down to a manageable trickle of the noticed and remembered. The cannabinoid network appears to be part of that mechanism, vigilantly sifting the vast chaff of sense impression from the kernels of perceptions we need to remember if we’re to get though the day and get on with what needs to be done. Much depends on forgetting.

Transcendence
Nietzche is describing a kind of transcendence — a mental state of complete and utter absorption well known to artists, athletes, gamblers, musicians, dancers, soldiers in battle, mystics, meditators, and the devout during prayer. ..It is a state that depends on its effect on losing oneself in the moment, usually by training a powerful, depthless concentration on One Big Thing (Or, in the Eastern tradition, One Big Nothing). If you imagine consciousness as a kind of lens through which we perceive the world, the drastic constricting of its field of vision seems to heighten the vividness of whatever remains in the circle of perception, while everything’s (including our awareness of the lens itself) simply falls away…Some of our greatest happinesses arrive in such moments, during which we feel we’ve sprung free from the tyranny of time — clock time, of course, but also historical and psychological time, and sometimes even mortality…in the Eastern tradition: “Awaken to this present instant,” a Zen master has written, “we realize the infinite is the finite of each instant.” We can’t get there from here without first forgetting.

School Lunches: Are we raising fast foodies?

In addition to my passion for education,  I also fancy myself to be a bit of a cook. I read cookbooks, cooking website, the Dining/Wine section of the NY Times, and cooking magazines. If it’s about food, I enjoy reading it!

While perusing a copy of Vegetarian Times, I came across an interview with author Michael Pollan, who recently released a young readers’ edition of his best-selling book The Ominvore’s Dilemma. The excerpt below conjured up images of my sixth grade students in the cafeteria. They have a thirty minute lunch period, and they wait in line to receive lunch “components” in cardboard trays sealed with plastic wrap. These trays arrive at school frozen in the morning, and they are heated by the school. The children must eat very quickly, and they are always still finishing lunch when I arrive to get them for class.

Q When it comes to educating children about their food choices, what roles do schools and parents play?

A School cafeterias serve chicken “McNuggets” and give kids 10 minutes to eat, educating them to be the next generation of fast-food eaters. We need to give kids good food and enough time to eat it, teach them where food comes from, and provide them with opportunities to grow the food in school gardens and cook it in school kitchens. Knowing how to cook is an essential skill. Parents can also get their kids involved in cooking. They need to take back control of their kids’ diets, which has been ceded to food marketers. [Parents] need to be the gatekeepers.

I was sent an interesting link from Huffington Post yesterday.  In her article, Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein brings to light the UN “fat map” in response to the growing hunger taking over the world.  Her article makes many good points and is worth reading, especially as those of us in the U.S. prepare to gorge ourselves on Thanksgiving Day.

While the U.S. and Australia look like they are going to explode, their land mass hides the bloated size of Europe, Japan, and several Middle East countries.

I have read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, I have seen Food, Inc., Blue Gold, and King Corn, and I recommend that all of us who live in these lands of affluence do the same.  If not for our own health, for the sake of others.  To be sure, the book and documentaries are not fool-proof, but they are vital to our understanding of our food systems and their ramifications.  Hopefully they will also get people to thinking about where they fit into this globalized world of ours.

I think when people consider buying non-processed and non-industrial food, they will see their financial position is further down the ol’ totem pole than they thought.

But what I find most interesting about the Princess’ article is the princess herself.  She resides in Dubai, one of the most unsustainable habitats on this planet.  From indoor ski slopes, to multi-million dollar islands, to a hidden slave population that keeps building it ever higher, Dubai consumes and pollutes in its effort to become “a Shangri-La in the Middle East” says Johann Hari in his long but eye-opening article in The Independent.

Dubai is not just a city living beyond its financial means; it is living beyond its ecological means. You stand on a manicured Dubai lawn and watch the sprinklers spray water all around you. You see tourists flocking to swim with dolphins. You wander into a mountain-sized freezer where they have built a ski slope with real snow. And a voice at the back of your head squeaks: this is the desert. This is the most water-stressed place on the planet. How can this be happening? How is it possible? The very earth is trying to repel Dubai, to dry it up and blow it away. The new Tiger Woods Gold Course needs four million gallons of water to be pumped on to its grounds every day, or it would simply shrivel and disappear on the winds.

So how does a princess, a recipient of the wealth being dumped into Dubai, tell the world it needs to cut its calorie consumption and expect to be taken seriously?

She doesn’t, and neither do the politicians driveling on in speech after speech about the moral imperative we have to feed the starving people of the world.  With massive conglomerate corporations lining the pockets of politicians, nothing will change.

After watching the documentaries and doing a little research into the subsidies given to farmers who dump food into world markets and destroy local economies exacerbating the hunger crisis, you might feel a little overwhelmed and think the problem is too big for us.

May I suggest another movie?

-mike

Here’s a movie that pisses you off.  The food we eat is killing us and our farmers don’t have a chance.  We meet a woman, Barbara Kowalcyk, who’s been lobbying for more than five years after her two year old son died from eating bad burgers.  We go into factory-farms and learn cows are pumped with chemicals, chickens are too heavy to walk, and corn is in everything.  It’s stuff you may have already known, especially if you read Michael Pollan, but after seeing Food, Inc. you won’t walk through a supermarket quite the same way again.

Un po’ stuzzicati dal Wopper a sette strati di Burger King, un po’ per fare contrasto con i tanti discorsi vegetariani che facciamo durante le puntate, questa settimana abbiamo preparato un hambaagaa giapponese assieme alle crocché di cavoletto di bruxelles (sempre sia lodata). Mentre cucinavamo si è parlato di:

• Food, inc. [nyt, youtube]
• I cibi biologici sono veramente migliori?
• Quando uno chef non può assaggiare (questa parte, per un problema tecnico, è sparita dal podcast, ce ne scusiamo)
• Pipistrelli e sesso orale

La playlist della serata:

• I am happy – Soerba
• Homesick – Kings of Convenience
• Thriller 8bit tribute mix – Saitone
• Mrs. Robinson – Pomplamoose
• The Brits are playing at my house – The Beatles vs LCD Soundsystem vs The Kinks

Per gli amici del podcast: ora abbiamo una pagina su iTunes. L’icona qui a lato vi porterà direttamente là. L’abbonamento è gratuito e ogni settimana scaricherete automaticamente la nuova puntata. Per tutti gli altri permane il metodo tradizionale.

 

Is it time for a prolonged discussion about where our meat comes from? Photo of an Irish beef cow by Thomas Urell

I eat too much meat. I’ve known this since I started really looking at the foods I was eating, reading about where it all comes from and cooking for myself. Writers like Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser have helped me understand what I could have only imagined before: as a culture, our meat consumption is not only nutritionally excessive, but has created an unsustainable food system as well, this latter taking a serious toll on our environment. And then there’s the horrible way the animals are treated.

Now, I think more. I have started paying closer attention to the quality and total amount of meat that I eat, in a single serving and over the course of my week. Taking cues from chef/philosophers like Mark Bittman and Alice Waters, I no longer want to cook meat at every meal and can even forgo ordering meat in restaurants on occasion (gasp).

But I do still eat it. And—confession(?)—I usually love it. I’m excited about offal, love roasting big cuts and whole chickens and will spend all day skimming a perfect stock. When I have the opportunity, I engage with the origin of my food, learning where it comes from and even meeting the animals. I try only to buy meat that I have confidence in, such as grass-fed beef. The same goes for sustainable fish, but sometimes halibut can be so tempting.

Which all leads me here. On Friday of last week, Jonathan Safran Foer spoke to WBUR’s Tom Ashbrook of “On Point” about his new book, Eating Animals, which is making a lot of noise. I have not read the book, but Safran Foer’s argument is an ethical one and seems to be sound. He is looking at the conditions of meat farming and the stark environmental implications of it, which leads to another ethical question about what we leave behind for future generations. (For a quick introduction to “Eating Animals,” check out these writings by Safran Foer: a particularly provocative piece in the Wall Street Journal from last month asks why we don’t eat dog and an excerpt in the New York Times Magazine that showcases Foer’s brilliant storytelling.)

One of the callers to Friday’s show raised a common question: unable to afford feeding her family with grass-fed, free-range or organic meat, she was forced to buy conventional meat at the grocery store. To her mind, her financial situation left no choice. Foer responded by saying that she did, in fact, have another option–not to buy meat at all.

Total abstinence may well be the best option in the opinion of some, but it raises a further question: do average consumers have a right to eat meat as often as they do? Or should it be a luxury, enjoyed only as often as one could afford conscientiously-grown, free-range and organic meat?

At the end of the day, Foer has stopped eating meat and thinks we should all do the same. For me, it is important that the discussion continue and more people become actively engaged by thinking and talking about the origins and ramifications of their meat-eating. In the mean time, I will continue to eat less, and better quality, meat.

What’s your take? Have you read Foer’s book and will it change your mind about eating meat?

“Challenged to name the human factors that contribute to global climate change, we typically picture industrial smokestacks or oil-thirsty planes and automobiles, not Pop Tarts or pork chops,” exclaimed Anna Lappe, who’s first book is entitled Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. Yet the global system for producing and distributing food accounts for roughly one-third of the human caused global warming effect. Additionally, one-third of the world’s arable land is dedicated to feed crop production.

According to a recently published United Nation’s seminal report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, the livestock sector alone is responsible for eighteen percent of the world’s total global warming effect – more than the emissions produced by every plane, train, car, truck and mode of mechanical transportation on the planet, which accounts for 13% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

Besides the familiar carbon dioxide (CO₂) gas which accounts for 77% of the total human caused global warming effect, methane and nitrous oxide make up the rest (13.5%) of the main green house gases emitted from human activities. Thirty-seven percent of the methane (CH₄) emitted anthropogenically is due to livestock production. With 23 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide, methane is much more harmful to the atmosphere and contributes more to climate change. Furthermore, sixty-five percent of the anthropogenic nitrous oxide is emitted from the livestock sector, which has a GWP 296 times that of CO_2. Cumulatively, this shows the large impact that our livestock and food have upon the ecosystem in which we live. For livestock, like automobiles, are a human invention and convenience, not part of pre-human times, and a molecule of carbon dioxide or methane emitted by livestock is no more natural than one from an auto tailpipe.

However, asked what we can do as individuals to help solve the climate change crisis, most of us could recite these eco-mantras from memory: Change our light bulbs! Drive less! Chose energy-efficient appliances! Recycle! Asked what we can do as a nation, most of us would probably mention promoting renewable energy and ending our addiction on fossil fuels. Few among us would mention changing the way we produce our food or the dietary choices we make. Unfortunately, the dominant storyline about climate change – its biggest drivers and the key solution – diverts us from understanding how other sectors, particularly the food sector, are critical parts of the problem, but even more importantly can be vital strategies for solutions.

When asked as to what the problems of the food industry might be, most might give you a puzzled look and become curious as to what problems someone would be talking about. My food doesn’t cause harm, does it? Specifically, a recent study done by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, Japan showed that a kilogram of beef is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution than driving for 3 hours while leaving all the lights on back home.

Despite the veil, many drawbacks come from our plate such as: water pollution, eutrophication, coral reef degradation, antibiotic resistance, wastes resulting from antibiotics, hormones, fertilizers and tanneries, deforestation, land degradation, desertification, air pollution, water shortages, contamination, biodiversity loss, and climate change.

While a long list, such reasons emanate from the very food we eat and thus should be caused for concern. Furthermore, renowned author and professor at California Berkeley, Michael Pollan has suggestions in regards to altering the food we eat such as eating seasonally, locally produced fruits, vegetables, and berries as well as not buying bottled water. Although the above problems may seem large scale, by changing our eating habits, we can reduce GHG emissions one bite at a time.

Tyler Hess. Louisville, KY. USA.

 Michael Pollan’s site

I have been thinking a lot about the food I eat (and feed my family) and the products I put on my skin (and share with my family).

These two areas connect and inter-connect in my mind quite often.  There have been many changes I have made over the years to bring in food and products that contribute to a sustainable way of life.  This is a BIG job…and I must say, I still have much to learn.

I came across this article by Michale Pollan today. 

Farmer in Chief

October 12, 2008

This quote stood out to me:  

“The sun-food agenda must include programs to train a new generation of farmers and then help put them on the land.” -Michael Pollan

The hope that stays in my heart, knowing that the sun is there, warming and life giving, allows me to keep learning about growing my own food, purchasing food that is nurtured by sustainable farming techniques, and to take the time to connect locally when I can.

This article goes very deeply into the way we grow our food in the US.  It gives me pause, and causes me to think about how I can, as one person, contribute to the changes necessary to support sustainability.  Sharing with others is a start.

What have you read lately that got you thinking?

30 Days of Blogging