Category — food and sustainability

This guy is a rockstar. Everything he says resonates.

What inspires you to do your work? “Problem solving… Creating interesting, innovative, and efficient solutions”

“I think we miss opportunities to connect food advocacy and other fields of interest because the nature of the work (and the method of funding) breeds specialization rather than integration.”

“I don’t know one initiative in any field of interest that has been able to create sustainable, game-changing outcomes within 12 months… But in the food movement, we overpromise and underfund, then get mad when we don’t change the world after a year.”

“Investing in communities to create things. Be a part of the creation movement.”

And yet another reason to move to Detroit:

“In two weeks Detroit will launch its Green Grocer Project, which is a grocery expansion and attraction program to help with operations, financing and giving them a direct liaison housed in the City for anything they need. To create a space in the city for a grocer at any level to get involved and give them a contact for anything they need: bookkeeping, accounting, store design, product handling, you name it.… the Mayor will make an announcement on May 17th and it’ll be like watching my baby be born.”

I love airports and airplanes. I love the feeling of being between places, in transition. And I love the anonymity — it’s the best of places for watching people, and also for meeting folks you might not otherwise meet on the street.

Yesterday, when I squeezed into Seat 14F (a window seat), it just so happened that the man already occupying the middle seat was a farmer. I noticed this, not because of any hint from his dress or demeanor, but because when he kindly got up to let me in,  I noticed his bag — a freebie from some sort of national ag association.

So I asked him about it and he told me that he was a farmer who grew sugar. “Beets?” I asked, and his face lit up. “You must know farming then?” he said. “Well, kinda,” I shrugged, and told him where I worked, and about my brief farming experience.

We talked the rest of the flight — about his clever daughters and about how my parents met and about the time he took his son to the Rose Bowl. I found out that in addition to farming part-time with his son, my new friend was a crop insurance agent and a representative of the Michigan Bean Commission. He traveled around the world to trade shows and meetings marketing Michigan dry beans: azukis, great northern, black beans, to name a few. He had been recently to Cancun and Barcelona and was soon off to Paris.

Apparently, Saginaw is the capitol of dry beans and sugar beets in Michigan. Sugar beets, in case you didn’t know, make sugar — the regular white grainy kind you pour into your coffee or sprinkle on your cereal (do people still do that?). Saginaw Valley, where lots of these beets are grown, lies between the thumb and forefinger of the Michigan glove, about two hours by car from the metro Detroit airport. My friend explained that people grew sugar beets there because the processing plants were nearby in the thumb. This awesome article from MSU tells more about the history of sugar beet production and processing in the state.

Beyond beets, I also learned a little bit about crop insurance. My friend had been in DC to chat with folks at the USDA and on the Hill about the crop insurance business and the proposed cuts to crop insurance in Obama’s 2011 budget. It was fascinating to hear his perspective — “Why should the government penalize me for making a profit?” — and compare it to the perspective I share with the Obama administration and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition where I work:

From Obama’s 2011 budget proposal: “Crop-insurance companies currently benefit from huge windfall profits due to the structure and terms of the Government’s contract with the companies.” The Wall Street Journal reports that “a USDA study showed that a reasonable rate of return on equity for private crop-insurance companies is 12.8%, but the average now is 16.8%. USDA data show government payments to crop insurers have more than doubled in recent years, jumping from $1.8 billion in 2006 to $3.8 billion in 2009 while the total number of policies held by farmers has declined.”

Add to this the fact that my friend explained that until recently, when a former employee set up shop and became competition, he was the only insurer in his local area. I felt less sympathetic then to his side of the story, but it made me remember once again that in the end, farmers are businessmen and to him, these cuts might mean that he won’t be able to pay for his adventurous daughter to study abroad in Paris or to help his son buy land to start his own farm. And there’s the rub of government — how do you distribute resources equitably? How do you re-distribute when something’s not working — it seems much easier to give than to take something away.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on life cycle assessment or energy use in food production (yet!); this is just a way to dip my toe into obviously complicated issues that I find fascinating… Also all this discussion really is a really really long lead-in to talk about the School of Natural Resources and the Environment at University of Michigan, where I’ve been accepted! Hooray!

Numbers can lie, but sometimes they can be gosh-darn illuminating.

Here’s some data that hammers home the extent to which our food system here in the US has morphed into something that just plain doesn’t make sense.

It seems that we consume about 10.3 Quads of energy per year to produce, process, package, transport, sell, store and prepare our food. For all that, what do we get? 1.4 Quads of actual food energy.

Graphic from the University of Michigan that I also used in a presentation that I gave at the Fullerton Public Library back in October.

Interestingly, this 10.3 Quads used to produce our food is about 10% of the total energy consumed annually in the US. But what, you may ask, is a Quad? According to the illustrious Wikipedia, it’s:

• 8,007,000,000 Gallons (US) of gasoline or…  about 530 million 15-gallon fill-ups at the station?
• 293,071,000,000 Kilowatt-hours (kWh) or… powering 1 million 100 watt lightbulbs for 334 years

Yeah, I know that still doesn’t help much, sorry. I tried.

But really, the sheer amount is irrelevant. It’s the ratio that matters. This means that for every SEVEN units of fossil energy we’re putting in, we’re getting out only ONE unit of food energy. Huh?!

I’ve heard stats that “in the past” (e.g. pre-industrialized ag) one unit of fossil fuel energy would produce TWO units of food. Nothing at my fingertips to corroborate that, but it makes some sense if we can agree that food was grown with fewer industrial inputs (requiring fossil fuels), traveled shorter distances, was less processed, and used less packaging.

Some quick searching confirmed my expectation that organic production seems to require much less energy for many farm products than its conventional counterpart. This 22-year study by the Rodale Institute and partners showed that organic farming of corn and soybeans used an average of 30% less fossil energy, even when yield was accounted for (in fact, yield over the period of the experiment was the same for organic and conventional because soil fertility declined on the conventional plots).

But as we can see from the chart above, production is only about 20% of the story. After we’ve grown the food, we’ve still got to send it somewhere and wash it and pack it and maybe grind it up into something totally different and send it somewhere else and then cook it. It makes sense that organic production would use fewer fossil fuels when you consider that it restricts the use of pesticides and fertilizers, but in some cases, I’d imagine that when you look at the full product, some organic foods have a higher total energy cost than their conventionally available counterparts because they are transported further distances and in smaller (less efficient) batches.

This study by the UK’s Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food has a fascinating breakdown of energy use for organic versus conventional products per unit of output. The chart also breaks down the energy costs into categories: distribution, collection transport, fertilizers, etc. When all is taken into account, the organic crops they studied still used less energy for the most part, except for carrots.

However, the full report shows that the model they used assumes that produce is imported only as far away as Southern Europe and does not account for the large amount of imported organic produce from even further afield.

Isn’t the devil always in the details?

Anyway, it’s complex. It makes me wonder if we’ll ever get to the point where right under the nutrition facts, our labels will include a little line for joules of energy and kg of GhGs. Pepsico has really already gotten this started by labeling its Tropicana juices with the carbon footprint.

But seriously, will some text that tells me this orange juice costs 1.7 kg of carbon really ever mean anything to me? We talk about consumer literacy, but this is a case in which I tend to think that change needs to come at the system level, not at the level of individual consumers. It’s just too much to ask of a person to weigh all those choices: nutrition, price, environment, social… for every product, every time you’re purchasing food.

Fascinating stuff, and all things I could pursue if I decide to go the University of Michigan for their MS program in Sustainable Systems at the School of Natural Resources and the Environment. That graph up top came out of a study by Dr. Greg Keoleian who teaches in the program and is a guru of life cycle assessment, not only based on environmental indicators, but also incorporating social indicators for a variety of products. Plus, I could apply in my first year for the joint-MBA program in the Erb Institute to learn about how to bring these metrics into the business of food.

Pretty different from Community Development at Davis: more technical, more science-y, perhaps more of a birds’ eye view of sustainability (though there are also folks in the school who focus on Behavior, Education and Communication so I could bridge the two).

I like that I would learn tangible skills (life cycle assessment) in the U-Mich program but on the other hand, I know that I want to be a practitioner at the community level — in a small company or nonprofit — and not a researcher or a sustainability manager at Pepsico (at least I think) so it’s hard to say.

Other things influencing my thinking:

• plus: U-Mich has already committed to giving me some financial assistance,
• plus: I’ve never lived in the middle of the country and there’s so much interesting stuff going on in Michigan food-wise (especially Detroit!),
• huge, potentially deal-breaking MINUS: Boyfriend Jaime did not get in there.

I heard just this morning that I’ve been accepted into the Community Development Graduate Group at UC Davis. I’m thrilled because the more I meet folks here in DC and the more I hear about exciting projects going on all over the country, the more I crave action — the hands-on work on the ground that I’ll be able to do in that program.

When I visited Davis back in September, I had a wonderful time meeting with professors and students; now I’ve some other folks from food and ag organizations in the nearby area — Community Alliance for Family Farmers, Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association, and California FarmLink and it seems like there would be a lot of potential for interesting projects with each of them.

Other things that make Davis awesome:

• I’d get to work with Professor Ryan Galt who recently got a grant to work on an project studying production and consumption in CSAs in the region.
• The Agricultural Sustainability Institute. While they don’t specifically have a program for working with grad students yet, it seems like there’s an opportunity to get involved in helping to define role(s) for graduate student involvement.
• The new undergraduate major in sustainable agriculture, which I might be able to participate in as a TA.
• The Center for Regional Change and particularly the community and regional mapping laboratory…

Which brings me to the post title… while stumbling around the Davis website, I came upon this moving, beautifully executed project by Tracy Perkins, a graduate of the Community Development Program. It’s called “25 Stories from the Central Valley” and it’s a multimedia project about the effects of agricultural pollution on local communities. The main event is a series of 25 photographs and captions that make up an online “exhibit” taking you through the human suffering that results from environmental abuses in the Central Valley. You have to visit the site to get the full effect, but I found this caption particularly moving:

“Josefina Miranda shows her daughter how she protects herself when she works in the fields. When Miranda was four months pregnant with an earlier child, she and her co-workers were put to work in a field still wet with pesticides. By the time they left, her clothes were so soaked that she could wring the pesticides out of them.  She miscarried the next day.”

So much to learn and do in California, and then it’s so close to my heart’s home in San Francisco and not too far from my parents.

I only worry about getting involved in a food system that may have a less than glorious future given the already frightening, and increasingly dire problem of water scarcity. Perhaps there’s hope, but on the other hand, maybe I should try Michigan!

This poster was made by Veritable Vegetable for the Wild Farm Alliance.

It’s a spoof on food safety regulations that make it very difficult for growers to maintain ecologically sound growing practices (like buffers and vegetation that might provide habitat) and nudge them towards less desirable habits — like using fences, traps and poison to keep wildlife away — that undermine biodiversity and may not actually have the desired effect on food safety.

If you can’t read the tiny print. The top three read left to right: “Toxic Pesticides, Toxic Fertilizer, Fueled by Fossil Fuels” “Unknown Food Value” and “Unknown Pathogens”

The blue part says “Please grow only between the red and yellow flags. The food is patrolled for the safety of YOUR food system.”

To read a great article on alternative strategies to improve food safety while maintaining biodiversity and supporting small farms with good stewardship practices, check out this awesome report by Food and Water Watch.

If you care about the issue and want to act, consider calling your senator and asking s/he to support Senator Stabenow’s Food Safety Training bill that would help deliver training and technical assistance to small farms to help them provide safer food.

Funny how much the poster reminds me so much of these (real) signs in Singapore. But I’ll have to leave those thoughts for another post!

I’ve realized lately that I’m becoming less and less able to process lactose. I’ve decided that rather give in completely to the monster that is my digestive system, I will fight this wretched condition and continue to eat cheese and ice cream and yogurt and milk chocolate.

But there’s a limit to my masochism, and in the morning, when I’m just waking up and drinking my cup a’ joe, I tend to use soy milk.

In this hippified town, there are about 100 options for a person like me who wants to purchase a smooth, nutty, frothy delicious box of soy goodness. I prefer plain, unsweetened, unflavored versions, which limits my options somewhat, but still, I have choices and really no way to differentiate other than price and the prettiness of the packaging.

So I was delighted to come across Cornucopia Institute’s Organic Soy Scorecard. Cornucopia came up with a rubric to determine the “goodness” of various soy brands based on criteria like the business structure of the company (family business=good, investor owned corp=bad), percentage of organic soybeans purchased, transparency of purchasing information, etc.

Unfortunately, my last purchase, on sale at the local market, came out with a “zero bean” rating — which means it was a poor choice. Next time, I’m going to go for Eden. It came out number one, it’s offered at my local coop, it’s only slightly more expensive, and it tastes so much more delicious (it’s a toasty brown and tastes like a handful of nuts mixed in cream). Mmmmm.

…and thy progressive foodiness!

I was already pretty impressed when my adopted city’s Board of Supervisors voted in favor of mandatory composting last month. And now, an executive order by Mayor Newsom is making a big statement in favor of small, local, sustainable farming.

“[Newsom is] ordering all departments to survey the land under their control in order to create an inventory of land that can support community gardens. All city-purchased food for city meetings, schools, jails or homeless shelters must be grown locally with sustainable farming practices. Food vendors with city permits must also meet these requirements.” — from Tilde Herrera at Greenbiz.com

Wowsers! What a coup for food advocacy organizations and local Bay Area producers, and how tremendously apt for the region that gave rise to the term “locavore.”

I wonder how they are going to define “local” for these purposes, and what percentage of the food will have to adhere to this definition? This kind of policy is really only feasible in a place like SF, where fresh food is available year-round. But what about harder-to-procure stuff like grains and spices?

I assume this decision is also going to create more demand for services like this cool online startup to help city departments and food vendors to handle procurement more efficiently than juggling daily phone calls with dozens of small providers.

Whoa. What a crazy graphic.

How does the size of a farm and the depth of community involvement relate to the quality of food produced and/or the quality of external products like land stewardship?

Just read this on a great blog:

“Locavorism isn’t about free-range, its about getting closer to the source; shaking the hand that feeds you and thereby knowing, even seeing, where your food comes from. The reason there are no worthy studies [showing more disease in free range pigs] is because grass-fed farmers often run size-manageable and responsible operations. They don’t cut corners precisely because they are held accountable by the community.”

It might be beside the point of the rest of Paula Crossfield’s article, but this benefit of locavorism surfaces again and again. Local is better because you can see the farm and the farmer and that makes them more accountable. This seems to make so much sense. But the social scientist in me (yes, one of my more loathed parts, but a deep-seated one nonetheless) wonders what kind of research has been done to detail the relationship between size of farm, depth of community involvement, and the extent to which farmers “cut corners.” In fact, this could really be applied to any kind of organization or business — how does scale and community ties affect some relatively objective measure of “quality?”

It seems like a very difficult thing to study given the observer effect — people changing as a result of their actions being observed — but I’ll bet someone’s tried. I’m going to ask some sociologists for help thinking about this one.