Industrial agriculture

Example #2,724: Ronald Bailey, "The Food Miles Mistake," in Reason Magazine. As readers of this site know, we've weighed in numerous times of the Food Miles issue. Among the great many cases of public environmental debate that require a move beyond superficial parlor talk, the agriculture-energy connection has been an area of particular interest here. (image from the BBC) In this recent article, from last November, Bailey uses flawed assumptions, undeveloped concepts, and weak historical awareness to guide a column. "Thank you for the disingenuous article," writes one reader, which I…
Two outstanding and influential thinkers and writers, Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, contributed an op-ed to the Times yesterday. More or less, here's the gist: [W]e...need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities. They argue that a farm bill needs to envision decades, not years, in its scope, so as to accommodate and accept the ecological dynamics of agricultural landscapes. They…
That's what Local Foodie big shots did over at Grist. Sustainable food and ag folks (I'm not sure why this was a separate category) pitched in here. They did so because food policy and agricultural policy (perhaps the same thing, as Michael Pollan has argued) are at once issues of health, energy, and climate change. To wit, Pollan would tell Obama to appoint "a Food Policy Czar in the White House. Why? Because, as I've written recently, progress on the all-important issues of energy independence, climate change, and health care costs depends on reform of the food system--and, crucially, an…
I lectured today on technology and progress in my big-lecture class (the main thrust being: in what way is technology progress, and who says so, and why). Just before I'd watched a documentary, Our Daily Bread (and here), about the modern industrial agriculture process. It pairs very well with another documentary, Manufactured Landscapes, and in that way ties into the recent thread of "landcsape" images at the site (the West, fences, and bombs). In discussing technology and progress, the lecture was built with commentary on mechanization and the values of technical rationality. That got…
In the essay I wrote for the HSS Newsletter about blogging (here) I noted in passing that one virtue of the blog space was that it provided a place to store notes. It is an electronic version of note cards. This post is one example, a placeholder that I'll come back to. Let's hope. Pollan's Farmer-in-Chief essay in the New York Times Magazine two weeks ago brought together many of the points he's made in the past few years about the role of food and agricultural policy for environmental, political, and health outcomes. His overarching point: [M]ost of the problems our food system faces…
Slate has a column called "The Green Lantern: Illuminating answers to environmental questions." This response to a question about CSAs (Community Supported Agriculture) was nicely done. CSAs are one of the many things Michael Pollan touched on in his recent, already widely read, already widely cited essay, Farmer-in-Chief (which, yes, I need to post about too--but there's a lot in there, and I haven't done so yet, though I'll get back to Pollan below.) (From the "Best of What's Around" CSA outside Charlottesville) So some guy writes to Slate and asks this: Every week, I get a box of…
I caught sight of an interesting article in the Washington Post a few weeks ago by Jane Black called "The Churning Point." It's about local farming in Maryland and the opportunities for dairy farmers to produce goods from their milk on premises--a creamery, that is. Once the milk is converted to cream or, say, cheese, it is then a processed product. Is that local farm then a farm or a processing (pseudo-industrial) facility? Does the environmental law protecting that land promote this processing or restrict it? Which is better, the farmland or the cream? The case isn't clear cut.…
And yet it continues. I'm so naïve. I was astonished several months ago to note that the same food miles and local food conversation was going on and on. But here it is again. The same one. Anew. Again. More. the. Same. (from a study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, 2001-2002) Another Food Miles article, another bad article. This one from Jane Black writing at Slate (though she's a food writer for the Washington Post). She carries forward the single variable case to skim the surface of the issue. Fine, journalists skim surfaces, it's what they do. But if it's…
I don't make it a point to keep up with the goings on at Lower Blakemere Farm, Blakemere, Herefordshire (UK). But they have a very well-developed series of podcasts that let me do so anyhow. Here then, with a great name: Wiggly Wigglers. Criminy, there's a lot -- they're up to #144. Fun to listen to folks ways away talk local food. Check out their blog too.
MIT Press publishes a series called Urban and Industrial Environments. Several of the "author-meets-blogger" books were from that series. The main editor is Robert Gottlieb of Occidental College out in California. I was just made aware of a blog for his Urban & Environmental Policy Institute there, where one can find notices of new books, discussions of current issues in environmental justice, and, you guessed it, matters of urban and environmental policy more broadly speaking. In addition to the well-stocked and premier Urban and Industrial Environments list, Gottlieb also edits a…
"But it's delicious." Here's a link worthy of linking to, eminently linkable: "Carnivores, Capitalists, and the Meat We Eat", by Jon Mooallem, in The Believer some time back (October 2005). It's all about popular meat writing. I take that to be about environmental ethics too, about how humans live in and treat the non-human world. He starts by quoting Whitman. I paste it here for us: This is the meal equally set--this the meat for natural hunger; It is for the wicked just the same as the righteous--I make appointments with all... --"Song of Myself" It's my understanding that Mooallem…
Keep up with the matter at Recall.gov. While not a fun sport, it is an active one. They list product recalls in seven categories: 1. Consumer Products (in general). 2. Motor vehicles. 3. Boats. 4. Food. 5. Medicine. 6. Cosmetics. 7. Environmental products. Oh boy. Go grab a burger with a slice of tomato, put your Swiftlik safety raft on, take a swig of that Nestle Purified Water, keep a bottle of your oldest antipsychotic drugs on hand, send an HP fax to your friend to tell them all about it, and call it a day well recalled.
Resolved: a host of academic, journalistic, and community-based work has increased its focus in recent years on the matter of local food. In no way could I summarize the breadth of that work. But I am frequently surprised to find the same conversations going on, over and over again. For example, just this week there was yet another article asking if fewer food miles are really better. I was astounded that the author wrote the story--in which he assumed that carbon emissions were the measure of a food system's environmental value--and that the Salon editors gave it the go-ahead, because it…
Summarizing some points on local food, community supported agriculture (CSAs), and energy, here's a Youtube catch. By virtue of its length (3 minutes) and forum (You Tube), it necessarily glosses over the structural issues that make food issues as complex as they are (things like economic opportunities, class and race-based contexts, trade policy, energy policy, and...wait for it...consumption patterns), but still, a good synopsis of some basic matters.
Oh boy. Pollan's new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, gets eviscerated in this review by James McWilliams at the Texas Observer (Laura Shapiro at Slate isn't a fan either, though offers some hope in her review; an issue of the journal Gastronomica last summer also called out Pollan on some features of his approach and message). I haven't read the new book, so this link is neither an endorsement of McWilliams's review nor of Pollan's text. But, wow, the review is a fun read. The opening line to Pollan's new book is this: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." McWilliams's…
This post was written by guest blogger Wyatt Galusky.* The future of meat? (image source) So, it's come to this. PETA has just announced a $1 million reward for the first group to make in vitro meat edible and tasty. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have decided that, in lieu of turning the whole world veg, they will promote research into suffering and death-free means of satisfying people's "meat addictions." (Talk of the Nation: Science Friday weighed in on this too.) I mentioned in vitro meat in a guest blog post here way back when. As a brief primer, this kind of meat…
"We Americans increased our travel -- just for shopping -- by over 90 billion miles from 1990 to 2001. That's billion with a 'B.' It's safe to say that most of those new miles were not spent seeking out local food." A. Flaccavento So it is that the localism movement is in full flush. No news flash there. Along with such popular movements come determined counter-arguments. With local food, one of those counter claims deals with Food Miles (as discussed before here and here and here). Anthony Flaccavento, director of Appalachian Sustainable Development, wrote an op-ed in the Washington…
Watch to see if Cuke Skywalker joins (the genetically modified) Darth Tater to rule the grocery store. And don't blame us for the humor. Just the messengers, folks. Be warned, spoiler below the fold... Omigod-omigod-omigod...Darth Tater is Cuke's father!! What? What? Too much?
We at The World's Fair are proud to bring on the Grand Hotel Regina as our alternative sponsor for the month. It isn't just that we see a natural fit between the two of us -- they, in complete harmony with majestic Eiger and Jungfrau vistas; we, in complete unanimity with our distaste for the moral degradation of Dow Chemical. The thing is, if you talk to Alfred Krebs, the owner-manager of the Grand Hotel Regina, you don't end up with a megaton of carcinogenic chemicals in your watershed. Nor, as Alfred would be the first to tell you, could you get the same fine array of tennis courts,…
Barbara Kingsolver contributed an op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday about dirty work. She argues there, as she does in her other writings and as scores of other agrarian-minded thinkers and practitioners have argued, that personal and civic virtue can be found from getting your hands dirty, from literally working to grow your food and be connected to the land as a consequence. In this, she argues against the grain of common sentiment: "My generation has absorbed an implicit hierarchy of values in which working the soil is poor people's toil." I was at first put off by the piece,…