By Tom Philpott

Cross-posted from Mother Jones.

Many people claim they don’t have time to cook fresh meals “from scratch.” In Tom’s Kitchen, Grist’s former food editor discusses some of the quick and easy things he gets up to in … well, his kitchen. Forgive the lame iPhone photography.

Welcome to my occasional cooking column. The idea of Tom’s Kitchen isn’t to show off my flashy cooking skills (which are actually quite modest), or rub your face in how amazing it is to cook on a small veggie farm. Rather, what I want to do is contribute to a tradition established by much more accomplished cooks than me — e.g., Deborah Madison, Mark Bittman — of showing that cooking delicious, healthful food really isn’t all that hard or time-consuming. 

When I first started cooking seriously 20 years ago, I would grab an “authentic” cookbook centered on some faraway land — say, Paula Wolfert’s classic 1973 opus Couscous: And Other Good Food from Morocco — choose some recipes, jot down a vast shopping list brimming with esoteric ingredients, and set off on a day-long adventure (and a long night of dishes). You can learn plenty from that style of cooking — I have — but really, it’s a hobbyist’s activity. It’s not going to put dinner on the table on a Tuesday night after a long day at the office (or of writing and farm work). These days, my cooking is simpler: I see what fresh ingredients are available, check out what’s in the pantry, and figure out some quick way to bring it all together in palatable fashion. It’s often influenced by techniques and pantry ingredients I picked up over the years from the likes of the great Wolfert, but there’s no attempt to be authentic or fancy or do special shopping. There’s just no time.

I think this style is a much more user-friendly way of drawing more people into cooking — a critical task when tens of millions of people have no idea how to cook and outsource their diets to the food industry.

So, for Tom’s Kitchen, what I usually do is document some dish I’ve thrown together for myself and my mates at the farm. It’s true that I have access to great fresh ingredients, but nothing I use can’t be readily found at most farmers markets or CSAs across the country. In fact, the column is ideally suited for people who get most of their fresh food from these sources or would like to — and for those who grow their own. My intention is not that you replicate my recipes precisely by shopping for each ingredient I mention. Rather, it’s that that they inspire you to try something similar with whatever good stuff you have on hand.

With no further adieu:

Pasta with Snap Peas and Fennel

(Serves six.)

Mise en place:

1 pound whole wheat pasta.* For this dish, I used a short, twirly, tubular cut called gobetti. Other cuts work, too.
Kosher salt for pasta
1-2 heads “green” (i.e., uncured) garlic
3 spring onions
Extra-virgin olive oil, for sauteing and also for dressing the finished pasta
1/2 to 1 teaspoon “radical salsa,” or a pinch or two of crushed red chili pepper
3 small heads of fennel, with fronds
1 pound snap peas
2 cups cooked chickpeas, drained (canned are fine)
1 generous bunch parsley
About a cup of freshly grated Parmesan or other hard cheese, plus a chunk for grating at table
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste.

Place a large cast-iron skillet over low heat, and add enough olive oil to cover the bottom. Peel and mince the green garlic. Separate the green and white parts of the spring onions. Mince the white part; reserve some or all of the green part for garnish. And the chopped onion whites and garlic to the pan and stir; add the radical salsa or chili flakes, and a pinch of salt. Stir again.

While that mixture is gently sauteing — be careful that it doesn’t burn by giving it an occasional stir — prep the fennel. For each bulb, trim away the stalks and the root end (reserve some of the green tops, known as fronds, for garnish). Peel and discard tough outer layer. Cut bulb length-wise, and then cut cross-wise into thin slices. Add to the skillet along with another pinch of salt; turn heat to medium, stirring often to keep fennel from scorching. 

While the fennel is sauteing, prepare pasta using the great food-science writer Harold McGee’s radical, low-water, fast method (which generates a valuable pasta pot liquor that you’ll be adding to the skillet later). 

Add the chickpeas to the pan, turn heat to low, and let saute a bit with the fennel mixture. Meanwhile, prep the snap peas. Snap off stem ends of each one; then very coarsely chop them into bite-sized pieces. By now, the fennel should be soft. Return heat under the pan to medium and add the snap peas along with another pinch of salt and saute, stirring. You want them to retain their crunch, but pick up the flavor of the aromatic veggies already in the pan. This will only take a couple of minutes.

When the snap peas are done, dump the contents of the skillet into a large bowl. 

Chop the parsley together with the onion tops and and fronds from several inches of fennel top. Add to the bowl. Now your pasta should be almost ready. Before straining it into a colander, use a metal ladle to grab a half-cup or so of the pasta water and add that to the bowl, too. Strain pasta and dump into the bowl. Now add grated cheese, a generous lashing of olive oil, and a good grind of black pepper. Gently fold to mix. Taste and see if it needs salt; add more if so. 

Serve immediately, passing a chunk of hard cheese and a grater at table. 

* A lot of people think whole-wheat pasta sucks. I think they’re wrong. I’ve lost interest in eating refined white flour, and turned to whole-wheat pasta several years ago. It has grown on me, and now I actually prefer its full, nutty flavor. My go-to brand is Bionaturae.

By Tom Philpott

Photo: Randy Bayne

Cross-posted from Mother Jones.

Back in 1975, a young, newly elected California governor named Jerry Brown signed into law a historic bill recognizing the right of his state’s farmworkers to unionize. Nicknamed “Governor Moonbeam” for his new-age tendencies, Brown might have been a bit spacey, but he didn’t waver in standing up to his state’s powerful agribusiness interests.

In the decades since, the protections offered by that law have eroded. Farmworkers say field bosses use intimidation to keep people from voting to form unions. The United Farm Workers have been pushing for years for new protections that would make it easier for workers to cast their votes without being under the noses of the bosses. Advocates have managed to push such a bill through the California legislature four times in recent years. And each time, Arnold Schwarzenegger — unapologetically carrying water for the state’s powerful agribusiness lobby — vetoed it.

Now The Arnold is gone, and that ’70s-era governor is back, again deciding the fate of legislation that would improve the lot of the thousands of people who work in California’s fields. But this time, Jerry Brown came down on the side of the bosses. On Tuesday, he vetoed the the Fair Treatment for Farm Workers Act.

He had signed the original 1975 act at a press conference with much fanfare. Jerry Brown 2.0 rejected the 2011 bill hidden away in his office, accompanying the veto with a weasely memo [PDF]. In that sad document, the onetime firebrand wrings his hands over the possibility of “drastic changes” to the state’s farm-labor law.

According to LA Times, what Brown is really up to is an Obamaesque lurch to the center. Reporters Patrick McGreevy and Anthony York write:

The governor’s veto — on the heels of a budget deal struck with Democrats alone — helps keep him in the political center. Brown has often referred to such centrism as “the canoe theory” of governing: paddling a little on the left, a little on the right and staying in the middle.

So the governor paddled right for the agribusiness lobby over whether the state should expand the right to organize. Now he has the perfect opportunity to swing left for farmworkers by banning methyl iodide, a fumigant so reliably carcinogenic that scientists use it to introduce cancers cells in lab tissue.

Pesticide Action Network (PAN) reports that back in March, Brown agreed to reconsider his predecessor’s decision to green-light methyl iodide (which marked the Governator’s final gift to the agribusiness lobby, made just before he exited office). But so far, Brown has done nothing to stop application of the deadly pesticide, and already, two farms have used it, PAN says. The group is urging people to call Brown’s office to demand that he ban it.

I should emphasize that this is a national issue, not just a California one. The farmworkers affected by the state’s laws toil within its borders, but their produce feeds the entire nation. When California’s industrial-scale farmers intimidate workers or expose them to deadly pesticides, they’re doing it in your name, too.

By Tom Philpott

The meat industry routinely abuses workers and animals. Cross-posted from Mother Jones.

As a long-time student of the meat industry, I read Ted Genoways’ extraordinary article on conditions at the “head table” of a factory-scale pig-processing plant with delight. As a human being, my reaction was revulsion.

In a single long piece, Genoways lays out the crude history of U.S. meat over the past 80 years. We get the unionization of the kill floor in the wake of Sinclair’s The Jungle, the post-war emergence of meatpacking as a proper middle-class job, the fierce anti-union backlash of the ’70s, followed by corporatization, scaling up, plunging wages, and then, well, all manner of hell breaking loose, graphically documented by Genoways. All I can add to the story is to emphasize how forces in the broader economy turned the meat industry into one that profits not by putting out an excellent product, but rather by relentlessly slashing costs.

In his story, Genoways reports that Quality Pork Processors sped up its kill line by 50 percent between 1989 and 2006, while the plant’s workforce “barely increased.” The strange malady acquired by those workers in Austin, Minn., makes for an eye-popping story, but the rough conditions they worked under aren’t the exception — they’re industry standard. By 2005, things had gotten so dire for meatpacking workers that Human Rights Watch — typically on the lookout for atrocities in war zones — saw fit to issue a scathing report on their plight. The report’s title says it all: “Blood, Sweat, and Fear.”

What drives such routine worker abuse? What would make a company steadily increase pressure on its workers to the point of endangering them, even as wages flatline?

The surface answer is, of course, because they can. After the unions evaporated, the meatpacking workforce became extremely vulnerable. By the ’90s, meatpacking had become such an awful job that native-born Americans abandoned the industry as quickly as they could. Undocumented workers from Mexico and points south, fleeing agrarian decline in those regions, filled the void. Unprotected by unions, one brush with authority away from deportation, undocumented workers are easy targets for the predatory practices of powerful employers, as Genoways demonstrates.

But there are deeper forces than naked power on display. Corporate profit strategy shifted in the wake of the 1970s — era stagflation crisis — in a way that transformed not just meatpacking but also the broader business landscape. Companies could no longer assume they had the power to raise prices to burnish the bottom line. Wage inflation, and the fear of it, convinced them that holding prices down was the better idea. Profit would be eked out by selling ever greater volumes of stuff — and by holding costs, including labor costs, to a bare minimum.

As Barry C. Lynn showed in a luminous 2006 Harper’s essay – later expanded into the book Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction — the new profit regime required a new antirust regime. U.S. antitrust authorities still operated under Progressive-era policies that had them looking for instances of anti-competitive behavior. There are two ways companies wield improper market power. The first is monopoly: they use their market heft to impose artificially high prices on consumers, like, say, OPEC sometimes does with oil. The second is called monopsony. That’s when dominant companies use their weight to squeeze their suppliers — everything from their own workforces to the companies that sell them inputs — into giving them better terms.

In the ’80s under Reagan, the authorities essentially stopped prosecuting monopsony and focused only on monopoly, Lynn shows. It was a convenient change for Big Business, because gouging consumers on price was now passé; the path to profit growth lay in gouging suppliers on cost. The goal was to get as big as possible and sell products as cheaply as possible, keeping volume high and the the antitrust cops at bay; and impose relentless pressure on cost. The strategy sparked a massive wave of consolidation, as companies bought each other out, scaled up, and/or merged in a rush to grab market share.

The food industry is probably the example par excellence of the post-Reagan monopsony economy. Lynn shows that Walmart’s move into groceries, starting in the early ’90s, accelerated the industry’s already-rapid consolidation. In order to remain profitable despite Walmart’s constant demand for more product at ever-lower prices, food companies had to get bigger and bigger — and constantly hunt for opportunities to slash their expenses.

The meat-processing giants led the way. A 2007 report [PDF] from University of Missouri researchers Mary Hendrickson and William Heffernan tells the story. In 1989, the four largest hog processors slaughtered 34 percent of the hogs raised in the United States. By 2005, that ratio had risen to 64 percent. The same trend held sway in beef and chicken — and has only intensified since. Today, just four giant companies — Tyson, Cargill, JBS, and Smithfield — process more than half of the beef, chicken, and pork consumed in the United States.

Yet more consolidation may be afoot. Smithfield, by far the globe’s largest pork producer, is actively looking to get even bigger. According to Bloomberg, among its potential buyout targets are Sara Lee, which has become a major player in the processed meat sector; and even Tyson, the largest overall U.S. meat producer. A combined Smithfield/Tyson would own dominant positions in pork, beef, and chicken.

As these companies lurch along, forever looking to get bigger and cut corners to maintain profitability, society pays a steep price for all the cheap meat they churn out. Genoways nailed how workers fare under our cheap-meat regime. Abuse of animals is routine. Entire ecosystems get trashed, as is the case of the Chesapeake Bay — once one of the globe’s most productive fisheries, brought to near-ruin by runoff from a stunning concentration of factory chicken farms. Family farmers are literally turned into serfs as they scale up to meet the industry’s demands. And we all face the menace of the antibiotic-resistant pathogens now brewing up on animal factory farms, which now consume 80 percent of an
tibiotics used in the United States (both to make livestock grow faster and keep them alive in cramped, filthy conditions).

Meanwhile, the industry can be expected to vigorously fight any attempt to curtail its abusive practices. Market power extends to the political sphere — the meat lobby is one of those powerful D.C. players that — like oil and banking — has the cash to maintain friendships on both sides of the political aisle. As Monica Potts recently reported on Grist, the meat lobby has financed a push to stop Obama’s USDA from implementing new rules that would force the big processors to deal more fairly with farmers. The rules, mandated by the 2008 farm bill, stand in danger of being nixed. Advocates are encouraging consumers to call the White House to urge President Obama to stand strong against the pressure.

Meat-industry abuse: not just for workers

As I tried to tease out above, the meat industry’s business model hinges on cutting costs. And relentless cost-cutting pressure translates to relentless pressure to cut corners down the production chain, from the slaughterhouse kill floor to the factory-farm pen. Workers pay the price for the mountains of cheap meat the industry pays out.

Animals pay, too. They are treated as industrial commodities — like identical machine parts being churned out by a factory — not living beings that have evolved over millennia to thrive or suffer under specific conditions. Systematically objectified, factory-farm animals are subject to routine abuse. If you worked as a quality-control inspector on an assembly line, you’d think nothing slamming a defective widget into the waste bin. Widgets feel no pain. As a matter of course, animals get the same treatment, as this — the latest in a string of appalling recent undercover videos — demonstrates:

Now, unlike other recent cases of abuse exposure, this one isn’t likely to result in the responsible company declaring the workers involved “bad apples” and firing them. Most of what you see in the video is entirely routine and industry-standard — like the practice of cutting off the tail of piglets with a pair of shears and no anesthetics. “Tail docking,” as the practice is known, is necessary on factory hog farms, because distressed hogs tend to try to chew each others’ tails off. The same isn’t true of hogs that live outside. Note also the practice of tossing piglets roughly across rooms — which a plant manager is caught onscreen training workers to do, based on the theory that piglets are “bouncy.”

What’s happening here isn’t just a moral abomination. Public health, too, is threatened by abusing animals to the point the point they have open wounds and then hoping daily lashings of antibiotics will keep infections at a manageable level. I can’t imagine a better strategy for incubating antibiotic-resistant pathogens. According to Mercy for Animals, the group that planted the undercover investigator at the facility, documented these conditions:

• Mother pigs — physically taxed from constant birthing — suffering from distended, inflamed, bleeding, and usually fatal uterine prolapses
• Large, open, pus-filled wounds and pressure sores
• Sick and injured pigs left to languish and slowly die without proper veterinary care

Rather than change practices in response to public outrage over these exposures, the meat industry has floated legislation in several states to ban the practice of sneaking cameras onto factory farms. It’s an industry that can’t bear scrutiny.

By Tom Philpott

Know your farmer, know your food? Oh no, you don’t, says Virginia Foxx. Photo: Rep. Virginia FoxxCross-posted from Mother Jones.

In my post on the House Republicans’ recent assault on progressive ag policy, I mentioned the move to shut down the USDA’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative. The sponsor of the amendment that did the dirty deed is Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.) — who, it turns out, represents my district in Congress. This is the sort of thing she gets up to when she’s not defending children from the scourge of gay marriage, or lashing out at undocumented workers (who, incidentally, form the backbone of our area’s Christmas tree and nursery industries).

As I mentioned in my previous post, Know Your Farmer is essentially a website. It gathers up and spotlights a hodgepodge of existing programs, funded by the 2008 Farm Bill, that direct modest amounts of money to rebuilding local and regional food systems and supporting new farmers.

That’s actually a significant service. The USDA’s own site is infamously unwieldy and impossible to navigate. Without Know Your Farmer, the few progressive federal ag programs we have — for example, ones that help make farmers markets accessible to low-income mothers, or help small farmers launch profitable food businesses — would likely wither on the vine.

But Know Your Farmer isn’t just a website. It’s also the USDA’s most high-profile acknowledgement since the post-war rise of industrial agriculture that alternative food systems exist, matter, and deserve support. For decades, the USDA’s approach to agriculture could be encapsulated in the famous mantra of Ezra Taft Benson, Eisenhower’s USDA chief: “Get big or get out.” That attitude still dominates our farm policy, but Know Your Farmer shows that a rogue faction now operates within the agency, one that acknowledges that the scaling up and corporate domination of U.S. agriculture hasn’t redounded to the public good. 

Overall, Obama’s ag policy has been wildly inconsistent, and has more often than not tilted toward the interests of Big Ag. But Know Your Farmer stands as his acknowledgement that the sustainable-food movement has earned a seat, even if not a particularly powerful one, at the ag-policy table after decades of grassroots policy work.

For Big Ag and the politicians who do its bidding, that’s apparently an unacceptable situation. Last year, three agribiz-aligned senators lashed out at Know Your Farmer in an angry letter to USDA chief Tom Vilsack. The initiative ”involves subsidizing the so-called locavore niche market,” the lawmakers complained, decorously neglecting to mention that Big Ag gets many times the support in the form of crops subsidies and various ethanol goodies. 

And now we get a full-frontal attack from the House, in the form of the dreaded Rep. Foxx’s amendment to shut down Know Your Farmer. Like her stances on gay marriage and immigration, Foxx’s jihad against Know Your Farmer is absurd. She mounted her attack based on budget concerns; but the initiative has no budget of its own. As the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition dryly put it recently, “The practical impact of the Foxx amendment is unclear. The Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative is not a program per se and does not have its own budget. Hence it is difficult to know how USDA would interpret the restriction.”

I suspect Foxx’s move wasn’t really about saving money, since you don’t save much by shutting down a website; but rather about sending a message: The USDA belongs to the companies that dominate U.S. food and ag, not to the communities working on the ground to create alternatives. There’s more at stake here than just a website. The Know Your Farmer flap is really about whether our political system is capable of conducting even moderately progressive food and farm policy.

By Tom Philpott

Photo: JulussuglaCross-posted from Mother Jones.

I’ve complained once or twice in the past that U.S. farm policy, even under Obama, favors corporate-led, highly dysfunctional agriculture. That’s true on balance, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. If you dig into the topic, you’ll find that sustainable-food activists have been working for decades to place progressive, community-oriented programs into the ag-policy mix. These hard-fought victories, won during once-every-five-years Farm Bill wars, are vastly outweighed by things like the government’s corn-ethanol fetish, or its hyperaggressive trade policies. 

But the food movement’s political gains are real, they’re fragile, and they need defending. And they’re under withering attack from the GOP-controlled U.S. House, which passed a fiscal 2012 agriculture appropriations bill that if signed into law would snuff out U.S. farm policy’s green shoots like an herbicide-spewing crop duster snuffs out weeds. The D.C.-based National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), the best watchdog/lobbying group we have on ag-policy issues, delivers the grim news on what the House bill would do. Here’s a few highlights, summarized by me:

• Prevent the USDA from fulfilling its mandate to rein in the meat industry: Meat is one of the most tightly consolidated industries in our economy. Just four transnationals — Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and Smithfield — dominate production of beef, pork, chicken, and turkey. They use their market heft to squeeze farmers on price, leading to a host of environmental and social dysfunctions. (Monica Potts’ recent American Prospect article “The Serfs of Arkansas” beautifully illustrates the state of poultry farming under the shadow of a few megaprocessors.) By some small miracle — generated by fierce lobbying from grassroots farmer groups — the 2008 Farm Bill contained a mandate directing the USDA to write rules to end price discrimination against small and mid-sized farmers by corporate processors and to ensure fair contracts for poultry and hog producers. Enter the GOP House — whose funding bill would bar the USDA from ever issuing these rules. In response, a coalition of progressive farm groups are urging people to call the White House between June 20 and June 24 to urge the USDA to issue the new rules now, before Congress can pull the plug on them. 
• Eliminate the USDA’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative: It’s important to understand that the USDA’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative isn’t a program per se. It’s a website that spotlights a set of existing programs, funded by the 2008 Farm Bill, that direct modest amounts of money to rebuilding local and regional food systems and supporting new farmers. The House approved an amendment to its funding bill that would crush Know Your Farmer. 
• Defund conservation programs — one of our only checks on industrial agriculture: Conservation programs give farmers incentives to do things like leave buffer strips along streams, minimizing leaching of agrichemicals into groundwater; or keep erosion-prone land out of production. The House bill would gut them. According to NSAC’s analysis, the bill would cut $1 billion annually from mandatory conservation funding, on top of a $500 million cut already embedded in the fiscal 2011 budget. The cuts would cripple the flagship Conservation Stewardship Program, NSAC reports. 

In short, the House GOP caucus is essentially attempting to stamp out the few progressive elements that exist in U.S. farm policy. The Democrats still own the Senate and the White House. Will they defend these policies, or let them wither in service of deficit hysteria and the desire to appear pro-business and anti-regulation?

By Tom Philpott

Photo: Santiago NicolauCross-posted from Mother Jones.

Recently, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) released its annual “Dirty Dozen” and “Clean Fifteen” lists of produce with the most and least pesticide residues. My reaction was: Well done, but what about farm workers? The EWG lists provide an invaluable tool to help consumers reduce pesticide exposure, but tell us nothing about the folks who grow and harvest the great bulk of food we consume.

Well, over on Pesticide Action Network’s Ground Truth blog, researcher Karl Tupper shed some light on the murky question of farm worker exposure to toxic pesticides. Tupper stressed that pesticide residues pose a real threat to consumers. However, he adds “It’s the farmers, farm workers, and residents of rural communities who are really most at risk from pesticides, not consumers.” Tupper explains:

While these folks are exposed to pesticides from food like the rest of us, they also must contend with pesticide fumes drifting out of fields, exposure from working directly with pesticides, and pesticide-coated dust and dirt tracked into their homes from the fields.

Tupper cross-referenced the Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen lists against USDA numbers for total pesticides applied per acre of each item. He found that from the perspective of farm workers, the Clean Fifteen just aren’t much cleaner than the Dirty Dozen.

Overall, the two lists don’t look that different from the standpoint of pesticide use. The average pesticide use intensity for the list are quite similar: 26.2 lbs/acre for the Clean Fifteen and 29.8 lbs/acre for the Dirty Dozen.

Disturbingly, two Clean Fifteen items — sweet potatoes and mushrooms — land on top of Tupper’s list of most pesticide-intensive crops. And the least pesticide-intensive crop by Tupper’s calculations — spinach — took fifth place on EWG’s Dirty Dozen. In short, what’s clean for consumers is too often dirty for farm workers, and vice-versa. One main reason for the dirty-but-clean nature of so many vegetables that reach consumers’ plates: widespread use of highly toxic fumigants. Tupper describes them like this:

They are very drift-prone and very toxic, and they are applied at very high rates compared to non-fumigant pesticides. But because they are applied to soil before crops are planted, and because they are so volatile and so reactive, they don’t stick around on growing plants and they don’t end up contaminating the food you buy at the market.

As Tupper sums it up, “We can’t shop our way out of this: pesticides are a public policy issue.” Currently, public policy around fumigant use is egregious. Nearly a quarter century after it was banned globally by the Montreal Protocol (1987), a fumigant called methyl bromide remains in widespread use on U.S. tomato and strawberry farms. That’s because the United States keeps negotiating “exceptions” to the ban deemed necessary for industrial-scale production of these crops. Methyl bromide is vile stuff — it has been shown to attack the central nervous system, damage the lungs and kidneys, and is linked to reproductive disorders, including birth defects. It also destroys the ozone layer, which is what got it banned by the Montreal Protocol in the first place.

Over the outraged objections of a range of scientists, first the EPA and then the state of California has approved an even more toxic alternative to methyl bromide called methyl iodide. It’s Montreal-friendly, because it doesn’t harm the ozone layer. But methyl iodide will be a disaster for humans who come into contact with it, scientists warn.

By Tom Philpott

Photo: Daniel LeiningerCross-posted from Mother Jones.

I have a really bad idea.

Let’s push farmers to plant as much as they possibly can of our most ecologically devastating crop. Maybe we’ll even get them to plow up some erosion-prone grasslands to do so. Then we’ll take a huge portion of the bounty (say, 40 percent) and subject it to a Byzantine, energy-intensive process that will turn it into something (barely) suitable for internal-combustion engines. (Never mind that internal-combustion engines, powering private pods over roads always in need of extravagant maintenance, are a rotten way of converting energy into mass locomotion.)

The production process generates a heaping amount of a byproduct tainted with antibiotics and industrial chemicals. No worries — we’ll feed that stuff to livestock on vast factory farms, even though it increases deadly pathogens in beef and does terrible things to pigs. Since the whole idea is so clearly misbegotten, we’ll need to deploy serious government support to keep it from stalling. How about decades of lucrative tax breaks, bolstered in recent years by upward-spiraling usage mandates? We’ll need a bit of PR, too, to keep the public from squawking. Let’s just pretend that the product we’re peddling is a green, job-creating machine that will “wean us from foreign oil.”

You in?

That, in a nutshell, tells the story of America’s corn-based ethanol boondoggle over the past three decades. (For the rollicking tale of how the whole thing got started in the first place, go here). Over the same time span, we’ve allowed our national rail-transport system to wither into self-parody; watched as cities defunded or neglected mass transit; failed to make necessary investments in clean energy sources like wind and solar while also declining to force fossil energy producers to pay for the massive damage they cause; and, most recently, elected a Democratic president who seems hell-bent on putting Sarah Palin’s “drill, baby, drill” energy vision into place. And through it all, our government’s blind, deep-pocketed loyalty to corn-based car fuel has endured.

But that may be changing … at least partially. Last week, the Senate voted 73-27 to remove one of the industry’s oldest and most-cherished pillars: the tax break gasoline blenders get for every gallon of the corn-based fuel they mix.

There’s no doubt that the tax break is a massive waste of resources that must end. This year alone, the ethanol tax credit will cost the Treasury $6 billion — equal to about 65 percent of the annual federal outlay for public school lunches. That means instead of propping up a crappy fuel source, we could boost our annual investment in child nutrition by two-thirds without increasing the deficit by a penny.

Another way to look at it is this: Ethanol sucks in about 75 percent of the total tax breaks granted to alternative energy, leaving wind and solar to fight for scraps. By pulling the plug at long last on the ethanol tax break, we could make significant investments in energy sources that actually reduce carbon emissions (unlike ethanol, which doesn’t).

But here’s the kicker: Even if the Senate’s move makes it through the House and the White House — both hotbeds of ethanol boosterism — it will do nothing to stem the flow of industrially produced corn from Midwestern farms to distillers to gas tanks. That’s because the tax break became utterly redundant when President Bush signed the 2007 Energy Act, which stipulated that gasoline makers inject a large and ever-growing amount of ethanol into the fuel mix. Take the tax break away, and the ethanol juggernaut will lurch on, sucking in billions of bushels of resource-intensive corn and spewing out billions of gallons of low-quality car fuel.

Moreover, savings from ending the ethanol tax break will not go to crucial programs like school lunches or clean energy. Instead, they’ll almost certainly vanish into the maw of Washington’s deficit hysteria.

In short, the Senate’s move to revoke ethanol’s multibillion dollar annual grab from the national trough is both long overdue and futile. Support for ethanol is too ingrained — so to speak — in our political culture to be ended simply by taking away a redundant tax subsidy. To put corn ethanol in its rightful place — the compost pile of history — would require the Democrats to do something they have utterly failed to do, under Obama or before: spell out a coherent national energy/transportation policy that transitions us from fossil fuels to true renewables. And that will happen not with draconian budget cuts, but rather by spending money to build out a proper renewable-energy/green-transportation infrastructure.

By Tom Philpott

Cross-posted from Mother Jones.

The eminent fisheries writer Paul Greenberg recently gutted and filleted the rationale for a novel type of farmed salmon genetically altered to grow faster. The “improved” fish, created by a Massachusetts-based company called AquaBounty Technologies, threatens to “escape and contaminate wild populations of salmon,” Greenberg wrote. And the business model AquaBounty has in mind is ecologically insane: “the fish requires much wasteful transport since it would be cloned in Canada, grown in Panama, and then flown back to the U.S. for consumption.” On top of those obvious drawbacks, the GMO salmon literally offers no benefits to the environment or consumers. “It is completely unnecessary,” he concludes. Its only rationale is economic — as defined narrowly by the interests of the AquaBounty shareholders. Greenberg writes:

It seems to me that what the AquaBounty AquAdvantage salmon represents is the privatization of the salmon genome. Should salmon farming come to be dominated by the AquAdvantage fish, farmers could become dependent on a single company for their stock, just as soy, corn, and wheat farmers must now rely on large multinationals like Monsanto to provide seed for their fields year in and year out. AquaBounty will literally own salmon farming.

Despite all of this, the FDA is currently deliberating on whether to green-light AquaBounty’s dubious masterpiece — and is widely expected to do just that sometime this year. That is, unless resistance from an unlikely quarter, the Republican-controlled U.S. House, prevails. From the Associated Press:

Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, offered an amendment to a farm spending bill late Wednesday that would prohibit the FDA from spending money to approve AquaBounty’s application. The amendment was approved by voice vote.

Now, the good Rep. Young was not acting on high principle, attempting to protect the environment and consumers from a product that will likely generate much more harm than good. Rather, he was baldly protecting constituents’ economic interests. “Young argued that the modified fish would compete with wild salmon in his state,” AP reports.

As much as I want to applaud it, the move marks a potentially dangerous precedent. If Congress can block regulatory agencies from approving products on the basis of harming narrow economic interests, it can also block agencies from enforcing regulations that harm those same interests. Do we want to live in a world where Congress intervenes to, say, force the EPA to approve a nasty pesticide just because its maker gives cash to some backbencher? Agencies like the FDA and USDA, riddled as they are by industry influence, would be much better positioned to fight off such challenges if they actually did their jobs and protected the public interest. In this case, that would mean forcing AquaBounty to keep its dodgy fish out of the marketplace — based on the merits of the case.

By Tom Philpott

Tom Vilsack.Photo: CIAT International CenterTropicalAgricultureCross-posted from Mother Jones.

Back in March, USDA secretary Tom Vilsack spoke at an event called the Commodity Classic in Tampa, Fla. Sponsored by agribusiness giants Monsanto, BASF, John Deere, Dow AgroSciences, Dupont, Syngenta, and Archer Daniels Midland, among others, the event hails itself as the “premier national trade show and convention for corn, soy, wheat, and sorghum farmers.”

According to an account in the trade journal Agri-Pulse, Vilsack spoke “with sometimes evangelistic fervor.” He thundered against critics of corn-based ethanol, reiterated the Obama administration’s goal of doubling U.S. farm exports by 2014 by ramming open foreign markets, and praised the assembled farmers and agribusiness flacks for their record of “ensuring affordable food for U.S. families,” Agri-Pulse reported. The former governor of Iowa ended his speech on an even more flattering note: “The farmers in this room have provided the prescription that this nation must follow to get itself back totally on its feet … You should never ever bet against the American farmer because if you do, it’s a losing bet.” The audience roared its approval.

The ag secretary was essentially promoting an agribusiness-as-usual vision of farm policy: maximum production of a few commodity crops, mainly to be used to fatten confined animals, create cheap sweeteners and fats, and fill gas tanks. He did so amid much rhetoric about “jobs,” the Agri-Pulse account shows. But that’s ludicrous. The modern food system lionized by Vilsack has been a massive net destroyer of jobs. And the fixation on doubling U.S. ag exports can’t be good news for farmers in the global south, who struggle to compete with their highly capitalized U.S. peers.

Meanwhile, U.S. ag policy as expressed by Vilsack is putting us increasingly at odds with an emerging global consensus on how to structure food production in an era of climate change, resource scarcity, and population growth. As I wrote last week, for years now, development specialists and ag scientists associated with the U.N. and even the World Bank have been questioning the assumption that only chemical-intensive consumption of a few commodities can “feed the world” going forward. The latest data point: the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has come out with a policy blueprint called “Save and grow: A policymaker’s guide to the sustainable intensification of smallholder crop production.” Its central premise reads like a direct rebuke to Vilsack: “The present paradigm of intensive crop production cannot meet the challenges of the new millennium.”

The report acknowledges that the advent of pesticides, mined and synthetic fertilizers, and monocrops represented a “paradigm shift in traditional agriculture” that led to higher crop yields in the short term. But then it pushes for “another paradigm shift,” to what it calls “sustainable crop production intensification, which seeks to increase food production without eroding the long-term productivity of farms and their surrounding ecosystems. It promotes farming practices that won’t be popular with the agribusiness giants that funded the Commodity Classic: things like minimizing fertilizer use and increasing soil organic matter by planting nitrogen-fixing cover crops; and using a broad variety of plants and animals in conjunction, rather than each farm specializing in massive quantities of one or two crops.

According to the report, such approaches have been proven to work:

A review of agricultural development projects in 57 low-income countries found that more efficient use of water, reduced use of pesticides and improvements in soil health had led to average crop yield increases of 79 percent. Another study concluded that agricultural systems that conserve ecosystem services by using practices such as conservation tillage, crop diversification, legume intensification and biological pest control, perform as well as intensive, high-input systems.

But such systems don’t appear by magic, the FAO stresses. Intensifying agriculture sustainably will require policy reform at the global and national levels.

Meanwhile, an agribusiness-funded backlash against FAO’s policy agenda has been launched, Tom Laskawy reports. A project called Global Harvest Initiative — backed by DuPont, John Deere, Archer Daniels Midland, and Monsanto, in conjunction with Big Green groups the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, and Conservation International — has released its own policy brief, subtly titled “Embracing Science-Based Solutions.” The main problem facing global food production, the report suggests, is “resistance to adopting new technologies” in the global south. The solution is simple: the creation of “rule-based and predictable regulatory systems” that can “bring technology forward and foster innovation.” In other words, resistance to the industry’s products must be brought to heel.

In Vilsack’s Commodity Classic speech, he hewed close to the industry party line, defying the emerging consensus exemplified by the latest FAO report. Taken as a whole, the Obama administration’s ag policy has from the start been wildly inconsistant, sometimes veering in the direction of progressive change, other times lurching back toward the agrichemical status quo. Meanwhile, the U.S. style of input-intensive commodity agriculture has succeeded in creating mountains of cheap food, but has has given rise to a massive crisis in diet-related disease, contributes mightily to climate change [PDF], and routinely trashes the ecosytems it touches. In short, it’s a system badly in need of reform, not one that needs be exported to other nations.

By Tom Philpott

EWG: Don’t resist the temptation to eat apples — just buy organic when you can. Photo: D. Sharon PruittCross-posted from Mother Jones.

Every year, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) sifts through USDA testing data and figures out which “Dirty Dozen” fruits and veggies deliver the largest doses and the widest variety of pesticides. This year’s winner, announced Monday: apples. According to EWG, 92 percent of the apples tested by the USDA carried two or more pesticide residues. And even as supermarket shelves feature a pretty narrow range of apple varieties — Red Delicious, Granny Smith, etc. — farmers are spraying them with a stunning diversity of poisons. Altogether, the USDA picked up no fewer than 56 distinct pesticides on the apples it tested, EWG reports.

Right after EWG shines its bright light on the USDA’s pesticide-residue data, the large-scale fruit-and-veg industry typically shrieks the equivalent of “Move along — nothing to see here!” This year is no different. In a statement released early Monday, the produce trade group Alliance for Food and Farming declared that EWG’s list is “misleading to consumers and should not be used when making purchasing decisions about fruits and vegetables.” The Alliance has been hectoring the USDA to emphasize the “safety of products [i.e., poisons] used to bring fresh fruits and vegetables to consumers” when the agency issues its annual residue reports. Indeed, the Alliance for Food and Farming’s campaign against the Dirty Dozen list was launched with a $180,000 grant from the USDA (administered through the California Department of Food and Agriculture), EWG reports.

The industry wants to assure us that pesticide residues pose no threat. That’s specious. Last year, Tom Laskawy pointed to research suggesting that the danger to children posed by ingesting pesticides from fresh produce has probably been underestimated because of seasonal effects. The amount of residue on a single apple might not be enough to cause harm, the researchers found; but during the fall apple season, kids tend to eat more apples, leading to a spike in exposure. Also, the combination of several pesticide residues on a single piece of fruit — a routine situation, EWG shows — may pose more of a risk than is suggested by the tolerance levels for each individual pesticide. Such a “synergistic” or “cocktail” effect has been documented in the case of amphibians — and little tested for on humans. As Pesticide Action Network puts it:

U.S. EPA sets limits on the maximum amount of each pesticide that can be on each food item, but there’s no limit to the number of different pesticides that can be on your food, or the total amount of contamination. Interacting chemicals can have synergistic effects at very low levels — and little research has been done on the impact of such “Chemical Cocktails” on human health.

The industry also fundamentally distorts EWG’s efforts. “There are some organizations with agendas that do want to scare people away from fresh produce,” one produce industry flack recently told The Washington Post. That’s absurd. EWG prefaces its list like this:

Eat your fruits and vegetables! The health benefits of a diet rich in fruits and vegetables outweigh the risks of pesticide exposure. Use EWG’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides to reduce your exposures as much as possible, but eating conventionally-grown produce is far better than not eating fruits and vegetables at all.

The real purpose of the Dirty Dozen — as well as its companion, the “Clean Fifteen” list of fruits and veggies with the least residues — is to help consumers decide which items are most important to buy organic. This is crucial information for cash- and time-strapped shoppers trying to put healthy food on their family’s dinner table.

My only concern about campaigns like EWG’s Dirty Dozen is that they keep the spotlight on consumers and off of another population segment that deserves protection from the produce industry’s pesticide habit: farm workers. In The Death of Ramon Gonzalez (1990), Angus Wright showed that in the wake of Rachel Carson’s landmark 1962 book Silent Spring, pesticide makers had to fundamentally rethink how they formulated their poisons. Silent Spring sparked a backlash against so-called “persistent” pesticides, which build up over time in soil, groundwater, and the bodies of animals. These dangerous chemicals also tended to cling even more than present-day pesticides to fruits and vegetables in the supermarket.

The agrichemical industry’s response — embraced by farm owners, government regulators, and global aid institutions — was to promote pesticides that break down rapidly. But these alternatives, known as “non-persistent” chemicals, are much more dangerous at the time of application. That is to say, they’re much safer for consumers, and much more dangerous for farm workers. And as Barry Estabrook shows in his masterful new book Tomatoland, workers are still routinely exposed to highly toxic chemicals on U.S. farms, to disastrous effect.

EWG’s effort to distinguish between “dirty” and “clean” produce doesn’t take any of this into account. It considers only factors that might harm consumers; and says nothing about what goes on in the field. But no fruit or vegetable that harms the people who grow our food can be considered “clean,” even if it poses no danger to the people who eat it.

So, bottom line: Eat your fruits and veggies; buy organic when you can; if you have to prioritize, EWG’s Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen lists are the best guides we have; and don’t forget the farm workers. Check in with Pesticide Action Network of North America for the latest on the campaign to ban methyl iodide — a cancer-causing fumigant that will soon be widely used on strawberry and tomato fields. It leaves no residue on produce but severely threatens farm workers.