Today, urban agriculture, “urban ag”, is not simply about delicious, local food, it’s about creating new food production and delivery systems, it’s about public health and food justice. Boston chefs, community advocates and entrepreneurs are broadening the dialog and shortening the distance between farm and table. Never mind the 100 mile diet, how about 100 blocks, or 100 steps?

Meet a few new urban farmers, giving us a window into the promises and the challenges of urban agriculture in its many forms.

Since 1992 The Food Project has been bringing young people and adults together to learn about creating new food systems through urban agriculture. Today they farm 4 acres in 7 urban communities and 36 additional suburban acres. Most recent harvests included over 200,000 pounds of produce, with nearly 50,000 pounds donated to various hunger relief organizations. The rest is primarily sold via 492 CSAs and 4 farmers’ markets in low-income neighborhoods including some located in what were previously food deserts. The documentary Planting for Peace: Bury Seeds, Not Bodies (“P4P”) shows the impact of urban agriculture and support from organizations like The Food Project.

I met the film maker, Mike Cermak at a youth growers event prior to the screening of Fresh, the award-winning film by Ana Sofia Joanes. Cermak’s documentary tells the story of urban ag’s power to change young lives, documenting La Nuestra Huerta (supported by Neighborhood of Affordable Housing in East Boston and ReVision Farm in Dorchester. P4P shows how gardens and farming are used to teach valuable skills to youth against the backdrop of urban violence. Young gardeners named the two raised beds “Hope” and “Faith” – hope that they can bring change to urban food systems and enhance lives. And faith, that they can grow, sell, reinvest and replenish the food desert and work for food justice.

One of the challenges highlighted by the experience of youth gardeners is the inflexibility in school lunch systems. The gardens, often located near schools, grow more than food. They grow life skills. And yet, the young growers are unable to sell their produce into their own schools.

On the Menu

Chefs like Steve Johnson at Rendezvous in Central Square and Marco Suarez of Ledge Kitchen & Drinks in Dorchester know that fresh is better. And local – really local – is as fresh as it gets. When produce comes to the kitchen from atop your own roof, you’re making significantly less environmental impact – no trucking, packaging, refrigeration. You’re also getting produce at its peak of ripeness, something that makes chefs swoon.

On a recent visit with Johnson, I got to see how he’s capturing water from rooftop air conditioning units to water his herb garden. Through capillary action the crates of herbs and vegetables take up the water as needed. Only rarely has he had to supplement the self-watering with additional H20. Johnson’s eyes light up when he speaks of the potential to recapture water that would otherwise be wasted. “This is one small building, imagine how much water could be captured from any one of these surrounding us?” One unit alone on his roof produces 15 gallons of water per day, it’s clean water, simply condensation from the air conditioning systems.

His Sunday menu features rooftop radishes and herbs. Rosemary is used in many ways including infusing the olive oil for the crackers served with each meal. Chiles show up in ceviche. Purslane, lovage, lavender, chervil, mint, even potatoes are grown in crates and he’s built a winter box of reclaimed cedar and windows to shelter the plants which winter-over on the roof. Johnson is not seeking to fully supply his kitchen from his garden. But, like other chefs, he gets enormous personal satisfaction from the garden and from sharing the experience with his kitchen staff, many of whom are new to the experience. They find inspiration in working with produce grown steps away from the kitchen. Look for mint to show up in Rendezvous’ inventive summer libations, too.

Johnson is humble about his “little garden” but it serves as a potent, and fragrant, reminder that even small steps can be inspiring.

From Empty Lots to Full Larders

Glynn Lloyd, City Fresh Foods’ CEO and co-founder of City Growers is committed to providing local, sustainable food for the urban community. He is also focusing his company on implementing a whole new model of food production and delivery systems. Both Lloyd and City Growers co-founder Margaret Connors know very well the challenges of growing and changing infrastructure, capturing funders’ attention, and managing a base of support.

City Growers was founded on the premise that unused space in urban areas could be developed for the purpose of renewing neighbors’ connection to their food sources. Reclaiming, remediating sites that are fallow or may have become environmental “brown fields”. City Growers successfully turns them into raised bed, organic gardens producing healthy food from space that was once wasted.

In a 1/4 acre plot behind the Sportsman’s Club in Dorchester, and on two acres in Milton, City Growers is building a model of a new food system. First, land is reclaimed, improved with raised beds of clean fresh soil before healthy gardens can be planted. Sometimes this involves negotiations with the city, or landlords, or both. Can they grow a model that provides green jobs? Can economic sustainability be built into the model? So far, one talented grower, “Farmer Tim” is sustained and other farm managers, workers and volunteers are being recruited and trained from local neighborhoods.

Delivering Change

Then, there’s the delivery models. Not only the actual physical delivery (much is done by pedal power!) of the produce, but also the management of the CSA and restaurant deliveries. Can the vagaries of Mother Nature be coaxed into meeting chefs’ regular need for inventory, and on what scale? So far several local restaurants have found delicious reasons to work with City Growers for at least some of their regular produce needs.

Big goals inspire and big challenges persist, but they remain optimistic about the value of the good agricultural practices and the promise of a new urban economy. New acreage is constantly being reviewed and added, zoning meetings go on, plantings are rotated and food — good, organic, local food — is grown by and sold to locals, finding its way into neighborhood restaurants and onto the tables of families, schools, child care and senior centers who once lived in food deserts. Standing among the newly replanted beds, with the sound of children playing nearby, you feel they are growing more than beets, arugula and lettuces. They are growing hope and a future for those kids that includes healthy, local food. They are growing a new food economy.

For further info:
The Food Project: “The Food Project’s mission is to create a thoughtful and productive community of youth and adults from diverse backgrounds who work together to build a sustainable food system.”

Fresh: a film by Ana Sofia Joanes. Look for local screenings and follow news on the Fresh blog, including the series “Women Who Nourish Us.”

Haiti’s post-quake humanitarian disaster is directly tied to its food supply and the collapse of the rural economy.  But will the long-term recovery model in Haiti simply repeat the mistakes of the past?  Combating the dominant paradigm is an accelerating grassroots movement  – from farmers burning Monsanto seeds to edible schoolyards — seeking to create a new future for the nation; one that will restore both the food supply and the environment.

I’m currently working with a team to produce Hands That Feed .  The documentary film will explore the agricultural collapse in Haiti, its role in the post-earthquake food crisis, and the emerging grassroots development models that seek to restore Haiti’s rural economy and environment.  We stand at a critical juncture for Haiti, as well as at an unparalleled “teachable moment” for the world.  Through this work, I have continued to uncover an incredible, unfolding story of people working at the grassroots level to create a new, sustainable agriculture-based development paradigm.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, the world watched news footage that conveyed looting and wrestling for morsels of food in Haiti.  The result was an unprecedented upwelling of international compassion and support.  Yet the underlying social and political causes of the crisis are not widely covered or known, and it is easy at first glance to simply blame natural events.

But there’s of course a larger story.  The development paradigm enacted in Haiti over the last 30 years – while converting the small country into America’s 4th largest rice export market – flooded Haiti with cheap, subsidized food imports that rapidly changed the face of the largely rural, agriculture-based country.  As economic opportunity dwindled in the countryside, the population of Port-au-Prince has more than doubled since 1989.   The resulting build-up of urban slums, flimsy structures, crime, deforestation for charcoal fuel, and lack of local food supply chains, created the perfect storm when met with natural disaster.  I wrote in detail on this process, based on my work in Haiti after the earthquake, in Why Did the Haitian Earthquake Become a Food Crisis?

Then, there was the humanitarian aid mission.  Groups such as the World Food Program, the Red Cross, UNICEF, the US Military, the Israeli Defense Forces, and many others thankfully did their best to rapidly distribute much-needed food and medical supplies.  Yet the permaculture and sustainable agriculture practitioners had much to teach.  Why should the Red Cross add 20,000 plastic water bottles to Haiti’s waste stream when Port-au-Prince has a fantastic aquifer?  Admitting that refugees will likely remain in the camps a long time, why not build common areas within the compounds where people can graze their animals rather than simply depend on handouts?  Why not compost waste into soil.  And why import so much plastic and wood for shelters when their are endless stands of bamboo?

This amazing NPR video segment from two days ago captures the current status of the food supply: The Problem with Giving Free Food to Hungry People.

GiveLove.org Alternative Shelter Design

The organization Permaculture Relief has attacked a number of these issues and maintains a list of active organizations in Haiti.  GiveLove has been building sustainable refugee shelters using locally available materials.  SOIL , recently covered by Kristoff, is building and distributing inexpensive compost toilets.  Much of this work builds uponthe success of Cegrane Permaculture Refugee Camp, which housed up to 43,000 refugees in Macedonia in 1999 while maintaining regenerative systems and food supply.

Finally, there is the long-term recovery.  Haiti’s population is still 75% farmers, they have amazing year-round growing conditions, and the urban population desperately needs food.  Investing in agriculture should be a slam dunk, right?  Wrong.  The State Department and USAID are pushing the same old dogma which turned Haiti into the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere (and America’s 4th largest rice export market): Invest only in the cities; subsidize the textile industry; and let the countryside collapse, providing a flood of cheap labor for urban industry (and an epic buildup of slums).

All this despite former President Bill Clinton’s groundbreaking admission of failure and need for new policies:

“It was a mistake. I have to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti,” Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10, 2010. “The country has the best chance in my lifetime to achieve this objective: to build a modern self-sustaining state. But what it means is that we have to think about our roles in a different way, and how we will play them in this reconstruction process.”

But this time, there is a counter-movement, and that’s exactly what we seek to capture.  Andrew Jones, founder of Cegrane (see above), is responsible for developing the permaculture program within Nouvelle Vie Youth Corps, one of the primary subjects of Hands That Feed.  Nouvelle Vie is training, and paying, 30 vibrant young Haitian leaders to go out and teach a thousand Haitians sustainable agriculture skills, build intensive agriculture plots in schoolyards and refugee camps, and teach yoga-based post-trauma breathing techniques.  From this thousand, Nouvelle Vie will recruit a new batch of 100 Youth Corps members, who will then teach 10,000.  And so on, and so forth.  All the while developing Haitian self-reliance both in food supply and leadership.

Is this just “Eco-Imperialism” (a term I recently learned from a conservative blog)?  Not if you ask the Haitian government officials who are begging international donors to stop sending food.  Nor if you ask Jean Ked Neptune, a director at the Ministry of Environment, who is developing programs to employ women as worm composters in refugee camps, despite his department’s virtually absent budget.  And finally, not if you ask the homegrown MPP Peasant Movement.  With membership of 50,000, and a rising star named Chavannes Jean-Baptiste, the group recently led a demonstration of 10,000 peasants who burned early shipments of Monsanto’s “gift” of 475 tons of seeds.  These seeds contain the carcinogenic pesticides Maxim XO and Thiram, which the EPA bars for home gardening in the U.S., and requires commercial farmers to use protective gear.  How many Haitians do you think own plastic goggles, gloves, and protective jumpsuits?  Furthermore, these seeds are hybrids, which means that the traits are not passed on to the next generation through the traditional practice of seed-saving.  You need to purchase the seeds next year from Monsanto, as well as all of the special irrigation, fertilizer, and other expensive inputs required to cultivate these species – which means going into debt.  (But if your neighbors do it, you have to do it to compete – leverage-up or get out.)  These seeds are being distributed through USAID with your tax check.

This harkens back to when the U.S. Pork lobby asked the State Department in the late-1970’s to pressure the Haitian government to order the slaughter of the creole pig, the ubiquitous and locally-adapted Haitian icon which provided both a source of meat and “savings”.  Now Haitians import their meat.

Courtesy Noramise.org

Let’s not have a repeat performance.  Haiti is full of locally-adapted species, agricultural labor, rich land, and hungry people.  Agro-ecological methods are now very highly developed, producing huge yields while restoring eroded soils.  The problem is, they are labor and knowledge-intensive, not capital and chemical intensive, so they don’t make anyone any money.  Even a moderate investment in restoring Haitian agriculture through sustainable methods and domestic skills could easily feed the nation, while making Haiti independent from aid and more protected against future natural disaster.  Let Haiti learn from the past, and the world learn from Haiti.

To help us highlight these groups and this movement, we really need support.  Please check out Hands That Feed, make even a small donation, and forward the link to anyone interested in Haiti, international development, and/or sustainable agriculture.

While culinary schools enroll more women, they’re disproportionately enrolled in pastry and baking curricula. The meat cutters’ union remains largely male and the “rock star butchers” trend often revolves around hulking men with serious ink.

But I met Marissa Guggiana, the soft-spoken “charcuterie curator” at the inaugural Slow Food Nation event. The founder of Sonoma Direct, she aims to bring her grandfather’s ideals, and sausage, to the masses including better, grass-fed meat.

I’ve been gathering stories as if I were gathering seashells while walking on the beach. Only my finds are connections, and stories, they’re women and men with skills, like making steaks from a cow. My pockets are full of hunters, butchers, and cooks with bloody hands. You may keep your pretty shells, I’m happy.

An avid participant in this butchery renaissance, I’ve attended demos and talked to butchers in many places. At two local pig butchering demos I noted the male-female ratio was nearly even. At the IACP Meat Revival demo in Portland, a capacity class of both men and women watched a side-by-side butchering demo of French and American styles.

Emboldened by some Oregon Pinot Noir and the presence of the female farmer who supplied the pigs, I had to ask: “Where ARE the women butchers?” To my delight, not one, but two, women raised their hands, Tray Satterfield and Camas Davis. When Tray spoke of her life-changing career move from finance to butchering she noted that she “had to work dog-years to be taken seriously by the guys doing this.”  She quickly added that she was willing to do it, because she knew this was what she was meant to do.

This called to mind the old saw about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. You know, Ginger did everything Fred did, only she did it in heels. And backwards.

Kari Underly learned the butchering trade at her father’s shop. Seeing what he did with the carcasses and learning the skills from him, she naturally followed his path. Beyond her father’s shop, she faced challenges. Butchers refuse to take her as an apprentice, others told her she’d “never cut meat in a big store.” Only last year a large chain in Baltimore was forced to pay damages and to hire women who were routinely denied well-paid meat cutters’ jobs on the basis of gender.

Underly candidly admits her decision to become a butcher was driven by economics. Working her way through school, she knew she could make more as a meat cutter than working behind the deli counter. With so much processing done in large plants, there are fewer butchers around to take on apprentices. Kari’s experience showed her how critical training opportunities are. She’d love to see the trade get more recognition for the art that it is, “It’s honest, and it’s good – it’s a good job.”

Jessica Applestone, co-founder of Fleisher’s along with her husband Joshua, finds their apprenticeships are nearly always booked a few months out or more. “They have taken off beyond our wildest dreams.” The classes are quite diverse, including a mix of men and women. Some take the courses for their own education, others are preparing to launch shops or restaurants of their own. “We get big burly guys and tiny women 5’ tall. Pig farmers, food stylists, paralegal, chefs, and home cooks. Right at this moment the shop’s full of women!”

While more women are breaking in she says it is still a male-dominated profession. Some of this might be due to subtle sexism. “I know people look past me to my husband even though I may know the answer…so, many times I think the public is to blame, too.” In general, she says their shop is very open and it helps that Joshua was raised by a feminist. There’s a camaraderie common to restaurants, even it comes with some coarse jokes.

Butchery is understanding the anatomy and using muscle, gravity, and knife skills. It’s tearing something at the seams, finding that space between the muscles and joints. These are not gender-specific skills. In fact, she finds women are often better at these skills than men. Using the rock-climbing example she says “a man might simply muscle his way up a rock wall, while a woman might use more finesse to work their way up. Both will get there.”

“I like touching meat.” Chichi Wang, Serious Eats Nasty Bits columnist, was sort of nervous at first remembering how sobering it was to don the metal gear and how scary to think of a knife going right into you. It happened to her instructor. She believes butchery “does require some brute force”. While you can use a hand saw to get through a hind quarter, “at 5’3” 100 lbs it is just going to take me longer. The guys would say ‘move like you’re punching someone’ or ‘use your back’. They kept thinking the motion was wrong, but really it’s just strength.”

She started lifting weights and found the work got easier.

“It’s really satisfying to pop joints out of place. I like the sound and the satisfaction if you hit the right tendon or sinew, the tip of the knife is an extension of your hand. It’s really satisfying to tunnel into the animal with your own sense of feel.”

Camas Davis, on the other hand, talks about how much butchery can literally be done with bare hands. The founder of PDX Meat Collective grew up fishing and hunting before becoming a magazine editor. While working for Saveur, she met an old-school Italian butcher who left an impression on her. She was intrigued by him and the artisan nature of his business. When she later lost her job at Portland Monthly, she took the opportunity to return to working with meat, apprenticing with Dominique Chapolard in Gascony.

Education is key to what Davis is doing at PDX Meat. “There’s a lot of interest in knowing more about where your food comes from.” Her classes are about evenly split male-female. “I’m so surprised that we keep selling out. So many people want to learn more.” She hopes to create a culture of people wanting better meat from known sources. “Picking up a knife, putting it into an animal changes you, changes your respect for it. You’re less willing to waste what you’ve paid for.”

Dave Budworth, butcher at Avedano’s says “it’s different for everyone. It is like an art form. Like painting, you learn the fundamentals but then you leave your thumbprint on it.”

Watching a good butcher at work I often think of ballet. There’s such grace and elegance in the movements, but strength and discipline behind it. Come to think of it ballerinas spend more time facing the audience than Ginger did. Now just imagine a carcass in front of her.

# # #

Fleisher’s – Grass-fed & Organic Meats – 845-338-6666

Avedano’s – San Francisco 415-285-MEAT

Range Partners – http://www.rangepartners.com/ 312-850-2044

Sonoma Direct – Marissa Guggiana – http://www.sonomadirect.com 877-5-SONOMA

PDX Meat – Portland Meat Collective, Camas Davis. PDXMeat.com

- posted by Joshua

Like any Top 5 list, this is rough and biased; it is meant to stimulate conversation and to put perspective on the junctures at which we stand today.

The Canal at Bassorah, Sumeria

1. Neolithic Revolution

The last ice age ended 13,000 years ago, leaving behind a warmer environment full of the flora and fauna we know today and starting the Neolithic Period. This environmental shift fueled a 13,000-year explosion of population, technology, and culture. One plant that prospered in the newly warmed climate was wheat. Around 10,000 BC, in Mesopotamia, humankind began mastering cultivation of this plant for bread and ale, and the Egyptians later developed yeasted breads. The surplus calories of the Neolithic Revolution give birth to civilization, and bread and ale become the gastronomic backbone of the West.

2. Fall of Rome

Is it possible that Rome fell because of food? It would appear that “Roman Bread” – the West’s first experiment in a social welfare system – was more economically disastrous than the decadence of the rich. Julius Caesar got the government dole of bread down to “just” 150,000 plebians, about one sixth of the population. Yet after another 50 years, that number had doubled – a third of the population was on the dole! The grain was largely shipped in from government-owned fields in North Africa.

The Romans also had an insatiable desire for Asian products, especially black pepper, which was elemental to Roman foods. Pepper, spices, porcelain, silk, and other items were already contributing to a massive trade deficit (the only thing the Romans had to offer in return was silver and gold) even before the Silk Road was opened to China and the trade winds to India were discovered in the 1st century AD. Roman currency devalued so much that three centuries later, the cost of wheat had increased by over 300,000 times! Roman money eventually collapsed, causing the society to fall back on a barter economy. Yet currency is necessary to support long-distance, complex food supply chains. Roman cities began depopulating, leaving them open to barbarian attacks, which led to further depopulation.

Europe was consequently de-urbanized, and we entered 600 years nearly devoid of technological, philosophical, or cultural innovation.

As a side note, when the barbarians first amassed in the early 400’s at Rome’s gate, what did they demand? Subsidies, land, titles. . . and 3,000 pounds of black pepper!

3. Ploughs and Rotating Beans

In the 6th century, the Northeastern Slavs developed the moldboard plow (the Chinese had already been using them for a thousand years) and introduced the technology to Europe. The plow dramatically increased yields and allowed new land to be brought into cultivation (deforesting Europe). About the same time, Medieval Europe discovered triple crop rotation: grains, beans, and letting fallow. The realization that beans invigorate the soil also spelled increased protein intake and nutrition for Europe. These two discoveries allowed the European population to multiply, and the growth arguably provided the demographic push for the Crusades.

4. The New World

Europeans returned from the Crusades with an invigorated taste for Asian spices, and the Italian traders monopolized this trade during the Renaissance. Determined to break the monopoly, the Spanish, then the Portuguese and the Dutch, sought overseas routes to Asia. These missions were so costly and risky that the richest financiers still had to pool assets and risk together, giving birth to the first corporations.

Colombus did not find black pepper in the Americas, but his discovery brought chillies, peppers, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, cocoa, and many other foods which revolutionized cuisine throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. They also revolutionized the food supply, as corn and potatoes, for example, grow on rougher, rockier soils than wheat.

500 Years of Population Growth

5. Scientific Agriculture

For 10,000 years, human consciousness was fed by the sun. In the early 20th century, we broke free of that fiery ball and discovered how to fuel ourselves by burning dead dinosaurs. The Haber Process was first developed by Fritz Haber in the summer of 1909, using large amounts of energy to break triple bonds and produce nitrates from the air. Haber and Carl Bosch (who brought the technology to industrial scale) were later awarded the Nobel prize. Artificial fertilizers have brought the global food supply to unprecedented levels, and consequently, our population. Subsequent developments and deployments in biotechnology, fertilizer systems, pesticides, and hybrid seeds, known as the “Green Revolution“, further multiplied yields in Mexico, India, and Southeast Asia. Global population is now more than triple what it was 100 years ago.

In the past 100 years, we have experienced world-changing innovations in a variety of sectors – the nuclear bomb, the computer, space travel. Yet for the majority of history, the innovations of truly continental magnitude were almost always in food. Man was tied to the land, and any increase, even temporary, in the proportion of calories to population, enabled forward leaps in civilizational development and power.

6. Post-Modern Eco-Agriculture?

We now have a global food supply and global food challenges. Driven by increased population, wealth and meat consumption, the UN expects mankind’s food demands to double by 2030. Yet global environmental constraints and regulation are impending. What combination of social and scientific models will arise to meet these wholly new scenarios?

Historical data was drawn from the following sources:
Food in History, by Reay Tannahill
Spice: The History of a Temptation, by Jack Turner
A History of Food, by Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat

Governments have become more active across the entire economy and this is no less true in food and agriculture. However, what is often portrayed as a choice between free market and regulation often seems misguided.  It is not really a question of whether to regulate or not but rather what goals we are trying to achieve and what are the right tools to help achieve them.  

One area where we seem to be still trying to define the goal and then find the right role for regulation is agriculture and climate change. Climate Change will have a large effect on ecosystems and thus agriculture. While there was broad acknowledgment at Copenhagen that agriculture needs to be addressed in any climate regime the how was not clear.   For an alternative view see this commentary posted on the Civil Eats blog shortly after Copenhagen.

Related to this is the effort to create markets which would facilitate payments for ecosystems services (PES) that might be recognized under a climate change regulatory regime. Thus, these could be used to direct agriculture production to certain methods. A good introduction to this topic, with a focus on West Africa, is found in this background report on Katoomba Group’s Ecosystem Marketplace.

Another topic where the regulatory approach is up for debate relates to nutrition. Often this is a debate about the best way to try to tackle the obesity problem. Some have argued for taxes on junk foods and it appears that Romania is the first country to try this. a href=”http://www.foodpolitics.com/2010/01/new-york-citys-new-health-initiative-salt/”>Others advocate regulatory targets backed up by fines or other penalties. New York City has been in the forefront here first tackling trans fats, calories, soda, and now salt. General food labeling is another possibility although the idea of traffic lights seems to have died in the EU.

A third area where the role of regulation is often a subject of discussion is the effort to develop more local food production. In the US, Whole Foods Markets is trying to get USDA approval for mobile slaughterhouses that would provide some of the infrastructure necessary to expand local food production. For some discussion of this effort and the concerns that it merely replaces market power of big processors with big retailers see here.

The US based Wallace Center sponsored a report in 2009 on local food businesses. This case study based report contains a wealth of information on the facilitating conditions and regulations that contributed to the success of certain local food businesses. Most interesting is that this report is not just US focused but actually spans the globe with its case studies.

To tie together these last two areas, researchers at MIT released a report in 2009 arguing that increasing local food production is key to helping address the obesity problem in the US. The main thesis is that the decrease in local food production (only 1-2% of food consumed in the US is produced locally according to the report) has led to a situation where energy dense, high calorie products are cheap and readily available while more nutritious foods are expensive or difficult to acquire or both. The research can be found at http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/foodshed.html 

What ties these all together for me is the effort to find the right role for regulation of markets. For all markets require regulation – it is merely a decision about what kind and how. Regulation provides the rules within which the market players operate and as such what is really required is a discussion about the value choices of society. We must determine what we consider important and then it should be a decision about the most efficient, effective, and fair way to get there. Regulation is only a tool to help.

Last week, as we celebrated World Environment Day in the Ecuadorian Amazon, I thought about Mike Cadoux’s recent post, “The Earth Will Be Okay,” in particular the five mass extinctions the planet has already experienced and what a sixth might mean. Like a lot of people who work in conservation, I admit getting wrapped up in the urgency of the climate crisis and overlooking the perspective that massive planetary change has happened before over a much longer timeline. From a scientific standpoint, it’s true that humans are just a blip.

But the view that humans are destructive but dispensable and that the earth will ultimately triumph over its troublesome inhabitants strikes me as a major part of the reason we are facing what is possibly a radical reduction of our own species. What are we talking about when we get beyond the statistics of glacial melting, loss of productive farm land, or sea levels rising and inundating thousands of miles of densely populated coasts?

We’re talking about hundreds of millions of people suffering and dying. Not in the United States or in Europe. Probably not in Australia or New Zealand. But in places like Bangladesh. A one meter increase in sea level will submerge 20 percent of the land and displace 35 million people, many of whom will die in the flooding. How many people there can afford to take the attitude that humans are just a blip?

Dr. Atiq Rahman, Bangladeshi environmental scientist and lead author on the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change, doesn’t refer to what’s happening to his country as a crisis, but a “catastrophe”. It’s not “climate change,” but “irreversible climate destabilization.” Cyclones that occurred every ten years now occur every two or three. Thousands of cyclone refugees camp on man-made island embankments in the sea. Surrounded by water, they have not a drop to drink: freshwater wells have been salinated by seawater from the storm surge.

The water problem may pale in comparison to that of agriculture. Suffering for years from extreme famine, in the last few decades Bangladesh has managed to supply almost all of its own food thanks to improvements in rice production. That vast improvement in people’s lives is threatened because of increased flooding from climate change.

Fellow blogger Mike Cadoux makes the excellent point that for selfish reasons, we need to save our own species, which will thereby help save life on earth. I would argue, though, that selfishness, or more accurately self-centeredness and isolation, are part of the problem. Think about all the ways the U.S. economy and American culture help separate us from the sources of our food, from the sources of our energy, and from each other.  Industrialization and its by-products—the way our cities and suburbs are planned, the conversion of small-scale family farms into large-scale agri-businesses, our suicidal reliance on fossil fuels—have created a society that is so compartmentalized that we have no sense of how many resources we are depleting from the planet. On top of that, we are almost unable to relate to the experience of people who live in less wealthy countries.

Fortunately, we are starting to see changes that will help us re-integrate into the cycle of resource use and replenishment. The sustainble food movement that this blog is intended to help promote is one encouraging sign. New programs through which homeowners can produce and sell renewable energy back to power companies is another. There are many other examples.

But what lies beyond this, if we want to survive, is compassion for other people, our own species. Empathy for their experience, not pity for what they are suffering. A profound acknowledgement that if a family’s land is inundated in Bangladesh, my ship is sinking too. A commitment that, as a fellow human being, I have a responsibility to do what I can to prevent the suffering or death of a member of our species, even if my life and livelihood are not imminently threatened.

Last month, the ongoing debate about the risk—or reward—of raw milk reached a boiling point in Massachusetts, and advocates and dissenters alike took to the Boston Common on a Monday morning to duke it out over a “drink-in.”

That’s right. There was a real, live cow milked on the premises, and the unpasteurized white stuff (“moo-shine,” if you will) was doled out to enthusiasts who wanted to prove its harmlessness—and first-timers who just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

The event came in response to a recent state proposal to crack down on raw milk buying clubs, which function a bit like CSAs. Raw milk sales are state-regulated, and in Massachusetts the only way to get your hands on a bottle is to buy it directly from one of the 27 state-certified raw milk dairy farms. The buying clubs make the milk more accessible: Most urban dwellers would have to drive a good hour or two to get to one of the farms, so communities of thirsty people have formed “clubs.” On the weekly milk day, one designated member drives out to the farm in a refrigerated vehicle to pick up everyone’s share and drops it off at the home of a member who’s volunteered refrigerator space. Members come pick up the delivery at their leisure.

The problem came when the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources started threatening a Prohibition of sorts; second-party purchases of raw milk from farms didn’t comply with the state regulations, it said, particularly because many of them were advertising the service online in the same way that a commercial business might try to drum up sales.

Obviously, the threats were terrifying for the farmers, several of whom were quoted in local papers as saying that, without buying club sales (which, in some cases, account for half of their overall revenue), they’d surely go under. And supporters of the clubs—and raw milk in general—considered it an ironic attack on their civil liberties. From an article in the Boston Globe: “I can designate an agent to pick up OxyContin from CVS,’’ said Harvey Schwartz, of Ipswich, who says he belongs to a buying club. “But I can be prosecuted for picking up milk? Now that doesn’t make sense.’’

At the moment, the MDAR is thinking over arguments made my raw-milk supporters and will decide how to proceed in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, I was hoping to open up the topic for discussion here, since both parties seem to have very strong feelings on the matter. Advocates argue that raw milk has a lot going for it: It tastes better, supports local farmers, and is packed with nutrients that are destroyed during pasteurization. Some people even swear it’s a panacea against allergies and other chronic health problems.

On the other hand, adversaries warn that pasteurization exists for a reason—namely that it kills harmful bacteria that can cause grave illness and even death. It may not be the freshest, cleanest, best-tasting stuff out there—but at least it’s safe.

That’s my understanding, anyway. Personally, I’m a huge supporter of raw milk—the flavor, the farmers, the citizen’s right to make informed decisions—though I acknowledge that it comes with risks.

I don’t belong to a buying club; I’m just not sure I could drink that much milk. But I have frequently purchased milk from Mermaid Farm on Martha’s Vineyard, where Allen Healy keeps a small herd of cows that graze in his Chilmark pastures and get milked twice a day. I’ve met him several times and watched him milk the cows.

Without knowing exactly where in the milking process things can go wrong and cause illness, I trust that Healy’s milking methods are extremely careful and clean, and that ranks pretty high with me. Many people have told me that I’m foolish to think that way; that’s possible. But the way I figure, commercial pasteurized milk—and, for that matter, lots of other mass-market processed foods—isn’t risk-free either. (Remember spinach? Lettuce? Peanut butter? Beef? Chicken? The list goes on…)

In her book, Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages, Anne Mendelson devotes a small chapter to the topic that I’ve come to consider very reasonable.

“Even under the strictest supervision, raw milk can’t be guaranteed to be uniformly and absolutely free from pathogens. But neither can pasteurized milk. Any fair-minded person will recognize that pasteurization is a generally effective public-health measure that hugely reduces bacterial populations in milk. But occasional cases of recontamination after pasteurization not only occur but seem to be on the increase…”

I’d be interested to hear other takes on the subject. In the meantime, consider my vote cast for the good stuff—“real milk,” as many supporters call it. Check out the site www.realmilk.com for a state-by-state directory of raw milk dairies.

In short, my answer is no. Debates over Genetically Modified (GM or GE or GMO as you prefer) food remind me all too much of debates over religion or other moral questions. Too often the discussion is driven from an assumed right answer and arguments crafted accordingly. There is no real debate but instead two sides talking past each other.

The fact is that GM is already here in a large way. One only needs to see some statistics from the 2009 review by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agribiotech Applications to get a snapshot of current use (e.g. more than half of the world’s population lives in the 25 countries that have planted 134 million hectares, almost 10% of total agriculture land, with GM crops in 2009).

So the debate is not about if but about how far to go GM. This is also where the value choices come in as we face resource constraints and a large part of the argument for GM is based on the belief that it provides the best method for increasing yields in an environmentally friendly way. This is not an argument being made only by large corporates but is an argument at the very center of the discussions about food security. 

For example, the Gates Foundation plans for a new Green Revolution in Africa are based in part on the use of technology and have concerned some. Gates addressed this in his speech at the 2009 World Food Prize when he said:

The global effort to help small farmers is endangered by an ideological wedge that threatens to split the movement in two. On one side is a technological approach that increases productivity. On the other side is an environmental approach that promotes sustainability. Productivity or sustainability – they say you have to choose. I believe it’s a false choice, and it’s dangerous for the field. It will block important advances. It can breed hostility among people who need to work together. And it makes it hard to launch a comprehensive program to help poor farmers. We certainly need both productivity and sustainability, and I believe we can have both.

 Other advocates of a “both-and” instead of an “either-or” approach include UC Davis plant pathology professor Pamela Ronald who hosts a blog based on the book she wrote with her organic farming husband. For her view see here (http://scienceblogs.com/tomorrowstable/2009/11/appropriate_technology_for_sus.php)  On the other side are those who passionately and cogently argue that GM can never be sustainable and a new Green Revolution will do more harm than good in the end. For an example, take a look at this article from Civil Eats)

 The UN sponsored World Summit on Food Security in Rome in November 2009, which many labelled a disappointment for merely reconfirming commitment to the Millenium Development Goals on food security instead of calling for a new effort to eliminate hunger by 2025, did take a stand with the following text in paragraph 26 of the final declaration

We will seek to mobilize the resources needed to increase productivity, including the review, approval and adoption of biotechnology and other new technologies and innovations that are safe, effective and environmentally sustainable.

  A corresponding NGO forum denounced this position in its own declaration  noting that:

We will defend and develop our agricultural, fisheries and animal biodiversity in the face of the aggressive commodification of nature, food and knowledge that is being facilitated by the ‘new Green Revolutions’. We call for a global moratorium on GMO. Governments must protect and properly regualte domestic food markets.

 I honestly do not see how to square these circles. Nor do I see the need to, at least in their extreme forms. Technology is a tool. It can be used for many purposes and needs to be used in a safe manner. For example, GM crops may have a role to play in dealing with water constraints. I do appreciate the fact that there are no-GM zones in the world and find this sensible risk management. The genie is already out of the bottle so while I think we should be vigilant and look for side effects we also should be realistic and find areas where the technology does give us value (e.g. drought resistance).

 Whatever side you favor, the main issue of feeding more people with changing diets in the face of environmental constraints and climate change is not going away soon. So most of all I would like to see the emotion go out of the debate and issues settled on facts. Two examples of this are the McKinsey paper on costs to mitigate regional water scarcity, and the Union of Concerned Scientists paper on GM crop operational yields vis-à-vis other methods.

Both provide facts that can inform debate.  Let’s hope we see more of this in future.

Why did the Haitian earthquake become a food crisis?  I spent the last nine days in Haiti with New Horizons for Haiti working with refugees in Haiti and personally trying to better understand the answer to this question.

First, by “food crisis”, I do not mean that there is no food available.  In fact, upon arrival in Port-au-Prince, I was shocked to see the amount of food for sale on the streets.  By “food crisis”, I mean that people cannot afford to acquire that food, and/or their family farms do not produce enough to support themselves.  In this sense, there has been an ongoing crisis in Haiti.  This crisis became acute with the additional impact of the earthquake.

The situation is shocking considering Haiti’s history.  Haiti was the richest colony in the Western hemisphere in the 18^th century and produced one-quarter of France’s annual wealth in that period.  Haiti was the only nation in history to achieve independence through a successful slave revolt.  And in the 19^th century, Haiti was far more powerful than its neighbor, the Dominican Republic.  The former invaded the latter three times and even annexed the DR for 22 years.

I am not a Haiti-specialist.  My area is international development.  Yet based on my research and experience in Haiti I propose that there are seven critical reasons (not necessarily listed in order) that Haiti’s food productivity declined and the earthquake became an acute food crisis:

1. Ecological Destruction: Haiti went from 60% forestation in 1925 to 2% forestation today.  This is why the country experienced widespread and deadly flooding in 2008 and 2004.  Haiti’s remarkable deforestation has
   

   Aerial View of Deforestation at Haiti-Dominican Republic Border

   also eroded topsoils (decreasing agricultural productivity) and is destroying the country’s aquifers.

2. American Food Imports (aka “Miami Rice”): Haiti is America’s fourth largest market in the world for rice – yes, tiny little Haiti.  Most of it comes from American Rice Inc, based in Houston Texas.  The Haitians call it “Miami Rice” because of its port of embarkation.  American commodity food production is heavily subsidized.  Haitian farming is not.  After Haiti dropped food import quotas and tariffs in the 1980’s, they went from food self-sufficient to food-dependent.  Since 75% of Haitians are professional farmers, the collapse of this industry has widespread effects.
3. International Financial Institutions: Haiti has historically been a major debtor to the IMF and World Bank.  These institutions pressured Haiti to drop protections on food imports and to purchase their grains from their more “efficient” neighbor, with the results described above.
4. The “Development” Paradigm: Development policy-makers, both in Haiti, America, and internationally, have been captivated by a certain paradigm regarding “development” and “modernity” for the last thirty years.  I describe this thoroughly in “3 Reasons Comparative Advantage Doesn’t Apply to Agriculture”.  It helps explain, beyond corruption, why the Haitian government would assent to points #1 and #2 above.  Here’s a summary quote from that piece: “Across the table, Third World policy-makers were transfixed by the paradigm.  Since we essentially define “under-development” as having a large percentage of a nation’s population engaged in farming, policy-makers sought to “develop” and thus urbanize/industrialize their countries.  They therefore accepted cheap American food imports in return for liberalized exports of textiles, electronics, and other manufactured products. “
5. Urbanization: With the agricultural sector collapsing, and development dollars all flowing to Port-au-Prince,
   

   Courtesy LATimes

   millions of Haitians have migrated to the city in search of work.  Most can’t find any, or can only find marginal employment, and they live in giant shantytowns surrounding the city.  This is a global megatrend.  But in mountainous Haiti, many of these slums are built up the surrounding hillsides, creating ripe conditions for a high-impact natural disaster.

6. Overburdened Infrastructure: These millions of migrants overburdened Port-au-Prince’s infrastructure.  Without heat, gas, or electricity, they burn charcoal for cooking fuel, which is chopped down in the countryside (see point #1).  These communities are also sprawling and hard-to-navigate.
7. Extinction of the Creole Pig: Haiti’s national icon was the Creole Pig, a species unique to Haiti and evolved from Columbus’ swine.  The Creole Pig was well-adapted to the local environment.  It rarely became ill and required few external inputs.  It was also the Haitian “bank”, as families would wait to slaughter the pig for a wedding or to build a house.  In the late-1970’s and early-1980’s, the U.S. Government pressured the Haitian Government to exterminate all Creole Pigs for fear that a regional swine flue epidemic might impact the U.S. pig industry.  The Haitian rural economy has never fully recovered.

This combination of an extremely dense population center in Port-au-Prince, a lack of local food supply chains, and precarious shantytowns built up hillsides, was the perfect storm that turned the Haitian earthquake into unforgettable scenes of hunger and privation for lack of food.  America has rallied to provide relief, including massive supplies of food aid.  Yet in the long-term, will we repeat the development mistakes of the past, or will we work to help revive sustainable rural industry in Haiti and facilitate their domestic food security?

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Just as tomatoes have spent the last few hundred years slowly having the flavor slowly bred out of them in favor of more convenient attributes like uniformity in size and color and resistance to the rigors of transcontinental shipping, wheat has undergone a similar process. Unlike tomatoes, which, discounting any Native American influence, have been bred for for a mere few hundred years, wheat, a staple grain since the earliest civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia, has had a 10,000 year breeding program. Modern wheat is designed for high yields, and to produce flours with consistently high protein contents. In the meantime, flavor has fallen by the wayside.

At least that’s what the well-meaning folks of the Northeast Organic Wheat Project (part of the Northeast Organic Farming Association) contend. This past monday, I attended a discussion and tasting sponsored by this group at the French Culinary Institute. As I wrote to Ed Levine or Serious Eats the next day:

That wheat event yesterday may have been the most boring event I’ve ever been to! Four hours talking about the subtleties of growing wheat!”

I don’t mean that as an insult to the organizers of the event—they were doing the best with what they had to work with—but if farmers are really going to start taking the place of chefs as the food media’s next set of rock-star celebrities, then tomatoes will be their rock and roll, wheat their Peter, Paul and Mary‐there’s a place for it, but it’s hardly an exciting one.

The problem became clear when we moved into the most interesting part of the event: the tasting. We tasted three breads made from three different locally grown, relatively modern heirloom wheat varieties (Arapahoe, Glenn, and Red Fife), baked by one of the instructors at the French Culinary Institute. While nobody could say that the breads all tasted the same, I’d have a tough time telling you whether it was the wheats themselves that made the breads taste different, or if it was other factors, like hydration, or fermentation. Immediately after the tasting, in a delightfully subversive moment, Jim Lahey of Sullivan Street Bakery fame got up to address the crowd and started with, “You could give me dog-shit wheat, and I could still make it taste great.”

His point? Great bread is not about the wheat that goes into it. A skilled baker will know by touch how to handle wheats that you give him—whether they need more or less water, longer or shorter autolysis, a stronger fermentation. The flavors of bread come partly from the wheat, but overwhelmingly more so from the way the wheat is handled. As proof he offered a loaf he himself had baked from Warthog, yet another heirloom variety. It handily blew the previous three samples out of the water.

He finished by claiming—and I paraphrase&mdashthat he supports the project because of its noble goals to support local farmers and create a locally sustainable food system, but the bread at Sullican Street is made with flour from ConAgra, and it still tastes damn good.

To be fair, I had to leave the conference shortly after the first tasting session to make another meeting, and so missed the second tasting session of flatbreads and pasta (though I managed to sneak a bit from the kitchen on my way out), so it is possible that I had I stayed, I would have tasted something that could have changed my mind, but I’m inclined to agree with Lahey.

I’m strongly in favor of supporting local farms and re-diversifying our food system, but we need to be sensible about it. The consumer still rules, and in order for the concept of replanting an heirloom vegetable to take off, it requires consumer support. An heirloom tomato or carrot that really tastes shockingly different from a commercial cultivar is one thing, but I find it hard to believe that anybody in their right mind other than a professional baker or some obsessive fringe nutso is going to go to a supermarket looking to buy a particular strain of wheat just because it’s the one that Sarah used to bake Abraham’s bread. Particularly because these wheats are so different from modern wheats that recipes calling for regular a/p flour won’t even work with them.

The vast majority of us are not bakers, and wouldn’t know what to do with these wheats even if we could get our hands on them.