Photo by Chiot’s Run.

If you’ve noticed more carrot-crunching, more orange-peeling, and an abundance of leafy green salads lately, it’s probably not a coincidence. As The Washington Post reported earlier this week, Americans eat more fresh foods than they did five years ago.

The WaPo story was based on a national phone survey conducted by the Kellogg Foundation, which found that the majority of Americans are trying to eat more fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, are shopping at farmers markets at least on occasion, and say they know “a lot or a little about where their fresh fruits and vegetables come from.” These findings are interesting — and they speak to the success of a whole array of efforts to get more of us cooking, examining what we eat, and honing in on the place where healthy and truly delicious foods intersect.

Less visible in the media landscape is the fact that the Kellogg Foundation survey also suggests that all this healthy eating has Americans looking outside themselves.

For one, they’re considering the environment — 64 percent say it’s “very important” that produce be grown in an “environmentally friendly way.” And the same number of people say it’s “very important” or “somewhat important” that produce be organic.

And nearly all — 93 percent — of those surveyed say they think it’s at least “somewhat important” to “make sure all Americans have equal access to fresh fruits and vegetables.” And three-quarters of the respondents said they support the idea of a national program that would double Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamps”) benefits at farmers markets. (Of course, this is more than an idea. As we reported recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is currently expanding the number of farmers markets around the nation that are equipped to accept EBT cards.)

Beyond these basic humanitarian instincts — and despite the apparent popularity of Tea Party politics — the survey also suggests that Americans look to our public institutions to play a part in ensuring healthy food access:

• 81 percent strongly or partly agree that Washington, D.C., needs to do more to increase access to locally produced fresh food in communities throughout the country.

• 86 percent strongly or partly agree that state and local officials should play a role in ensuring local fresh food is accessible to local residents.

• 89 percent strongly or partly agree that the community should play a role in ensuring local fresh food is accessible to local residents.

• 83 percent strongly or partly agree that Washington, D.C., should shift its support more toward smaller, local fruit and vegetable farmers and away from large farm businesses.

• 83 percent strongly or partly agree that Washington, D.C., should provide more incentives to encourage the creation of new businesses that sell, process, and distribute locally produced healthy food.

It may be too late for this data to influence the current Farm Bill process — which has taxpayers slated to support those “large farm businesses” with tens of billions in subsidies while offering a few million here and there for “smaller, local fruit and vegetable farmers.” And that’s the best-case scenario put forth by the Senate; the worst case (the House of Representatives’ version) would also involve tens of billions in cuts to SNAP — the very program that is proving crucial to fresh produce access.

Either way, it raises the question: Is this data a snapshot of a trend that has peaked and will now begin to reverse? Or are we seeing the early signs of a larger shift toward a saner, and — yes — a crunchier, leafier food system?

As I mentioned earlier this week, we do still have some choice in the matter.

Animal behaviorist Temple Grandin has describes raising pigs in gestation crates as “asking a sow to live in an airline seat.” (Photo by Farm Sanctuary.)

Domino’s wants to be different. The company — once known for crap-tastic pizza and mediocre ad campaigns — has struggled in recent years to remake its image with an ironic campaign that admitted to poor quality followed by an effort to incorporate so-called “artisan toppings.”

Domino’s has been doing so much to reach out to food-conscious customers, says Kristie Middleton, outreach manager at the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), that she’s surprised by its latest move — a decision to continue serving pork from pigs raised in gestation crates. “It seems like it would only make sense to include an animal welfare tenet as part of their rebranding,” she says.

Instead, it looks like Domino’s has other allies, including the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), an organization known for its staunch support of industrial agriculture and factory farming. In fact, this week AFBF came right out and endorsed Domino’s decision, complete with a photo of a sausage-covered pizza on the front page of its national website.

Domino’s is getting the royal treatment from AFBF because it’s one of very few holdouts, as the last six months have seen an avalanche of announcements by businesses including Burger King, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Denny’s, Carl’s Jr., Safeway, and Hormel (the maker of Spam), which have all expressed the intention to move away from gestation crates. Even Smithfield Foods — the nation’s largest pork producer — has agreed to phase out the crates by 2017. Eight states have also banned the practice, including Michigan, home to the Domino’s headquarters. (The chain’s top supplier is Tyson Foods, a company that has shown no interest in following the trend away from crates — and has even recently been in the news for continuing to embrace the practice.)

The crates, or cages, are used to confine between 60 and 70 percent of breeding sows in this country, and animal behavior expert Temple Grandin describes them as the equivalent of “asking a sow to live in an airline seat” (without lavatory privileges, mind you).

Earlier this month, despite this shifting tide, Domino’s shareholders decided to swim upstream and reject a resolution suggested by the HSUS for a ban. Not only did the Texas Farm Bureau applaud the move (Texas Farm Bureau’s Mike Barnett praised Domino’s for “showing some backbone to the animal rights activist group”), but AFBF has also embraced it on a national level. In fact, the AFBF site features a blog post by a farmer who describes not only buying a pizza from Domino’s in celebration, but leaving a thank-you note.

At the heart of the matter, say the critics of these bans, is whether the crates are in fact more harmful to pigs than other industrial practices. On the Texas Farm Bureau site, Barnett pretends to abdicate, but in fact does nothing of the sort. He writes:

The use of the gestation stalls — which confine sows during pregnancy — is at the center of the controversy. I’m not defending nor condemning their use. I truly don’t know enough about pork production to make that judgment.

Lacking knowledge, I’ll turn to the experts — the American Veterinary Medical Association – for their views on animal care. That organization says there are advantages and disadvantages to both cage-free and caged pork production methods.

While it’s true that the American Veterinary Medical Association has merely asked for more research on the issue, the HSUS also has veterinarians on staff who believe that the available research is quite conclusive [PDF]. And the Pew Environmental Group — which funded the respected Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production — says the crates are “among the least humane of industrial farm animal practices.”

Not that all pigs in confinement aren’t still, well, in confinement. Critics of the alternative — something called “group housing” — point out that pigs in close quarters are known to get bored and aggressive (and often have higher rates of injury). And despite the use of terms like “cage-free” in the PR efforts of the companies phasing out the crates, Middleton doesn’t see an end to gestation crates as a silver bullet for factory farming. “We don’t want consumers to think that just because these animals aren’t in cages that they’re being treated humanely.” Even group housing can be very crowded and must be well-managed to be safe for the animals, who are intelligent and get bored easily, she adds. “To ensure the better treatment of pigs in those group housing situations, we’ve seen farms that provide things like bails of hay just to give them something to do.”

HSUS appears to be shifting a very powerful industry with an incremental approach to change, by focusing on what Middleton calls the “most urgent” problems first. “At the very least, by going to gestation-free pork, these companies are helping spare animals from some of the worst abuses that happen in factory farming,” she says.

And it’s hard not to see how taking pigs out of crates the size of their own bodies — and letting them turn around on occasion — is a move in the right direction, even if Domino’s, Tyson Foods, and the AFBF don’t see it that way — yet.

Senator Debbie Stabenow, head of the Senate Ag Committee, has pledged to get a farm bill passed by September. (Photo by Lance Cheung for the USDA.)

Right now, the Farm Bill needs a hero, and Sen. Debbie Stabenow thinks she’s up for the job. Despite serious setbacks, the Democrat from Michigan is confident she and the committee she chairs can work with the House committee to pass a new farm bill before the current one runs out in September.

And, while hearing Stabenow speak at a conference last week, I just about believed her. The senator has worked on a handful of farm bills before this one and she knows what it takes. But, as I mentioned in a recent post, she’s up against a formidable round of cuts. The Tea Party-driven House Agriculture Committee not only wants to cut $33 billion (compared to the Senate’s $23 billion), but they want to make most of those cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps).

Food stamps aside for the moment, there’s still quite a bit on the table. The Senate released a draft of its version of the 2012 Farm Bill a few weeks back, and that draft is supposed to hit the Senate floor in June; the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) is guessing mid- to late-June, more precisely. Until that point, a variety of food movement advocacy groups will be looking to make a big push to inch the Senate bill in a sustainable direction — one that puts local, organic food and fruit and vegetable production high on the national priority list.

The Senate draft does make some important — if small — strides. (Of course it helps that the committee lowered expectations dramatically last fall during the so-called “Secret Farm Bill” process.) As Craig Cox of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) put it in a recent statement by the group, the bill it proposes would “support healthy diets, expand links between local farmers and consumers and help new farmers,” even if the funding for such efforts is comparatively small given the size of the overall bill. For instance, the Senate is earmarking $100 million for the Farmers Market and Local Food Promotion Program and $70 million annually for the Specialty Crop Block Grant program, which is designed to help fruits and vegetables compete with commodity crops. That may sound good but, when put in context, they’re mere slivers compared to total farm bill pie, which will cost $85 billion a year.

Indeed, a great deal of that money will go to subsidize commodity farmers through what’s being called crop insurance, but amounts to what is essentially income insurance. Nonetheless, Cox points out that the Senate has at least proposed linking these subsidies to some conservation efforts. In the EWG statement, he says the committee “took an important step to limit insurance subsidies for farmers who plow up grasslands in order to grow crops.”  The NSAC blog covered this important change as well, saying:

The Senate Committee-passed bill caps [Agricultural Risk Coverage] payments at no more than $50,000 per farm per year, and also includes important new “actively engaged in farming” requirements that close existing loopholes that currently allow mega farms to collect many multiple times the legal payment limit.

When the bill does go to the Senate floor next month, NSAC is optimistic that additional amendments will be proposed, like one to cap insurance subsidies. As the organization’s blog puts it, “NSAC is currently involved in discussions on a half dozen potential floor amendments.”

Meanwhile, some lawmakers are also working to influence the forthcoming House draft. For instance, last week, some 30 House Democrats from California sent a letter [PDF] urging the House Agriculture Committee’s leaders to level the playing field for a state that has very little commodity farming. They asked “to expand funding for programs that promote local and regional food systems and organic farming and that support beginning and disadvantaged farmers, agricultural research and marketing.”

All this also might explain why farm bill advocacy efforts — by groups like CREDO, Slow Food, and NSAC — haven’t died down, even if it seems as if the visions they put forth are wildly different from the reality of the bill. And while it’s still possible that the House will delay the whole Farm Bill by insisting on extreme SNAP cuts, it looks like the budget numbers only get worse in 2013. So what might matter most at this point is that this Farm Bill — or really any farm bill — passes by September.

And the more members of Congress hear from constituents – phone calls and individual letters are the most effective — that food and farming matter to people other than the big commodity farmers (who have already had plenty of opportunity to speak to the committees), the more likely they are to put forth the kinds of risky, progressive amendments NSAC is talking about.

Steph Larsen, an occasional Grist contributor and an organizer at Nebraska’s Center for Rural Affairs, is one person pushing to get sustainable farmers, voters, and others in the Midwest to make their voices heard while there’s still time.

“Say it’s 6 p.m. on election night, or the top of the eighth inning,” says Larsen. “Of all the moments to walk away, is that the one to pick? For farm and food policy in the U.S., it’s getting to be that moment. The next five years of what we eat and how it’s grown are being written as we speak. And since we all eat, we are all impacted by the results.”

Thomas Keller in his kitchen. (Photo by Arnold Gatilao.)

Thanks, Thomas Keller. Now we know where you stand. When you joined forces with Andoni Luis Aduriz and came out publicly in The New York Times this week as a chef who does not feel any obligation to the environment, we heard you.“With the relatively small number of people I feed, is it really my responsibility to worry about carbon footprint?” you asked.

You think it’s not your place, as reporter Julia Moskin puts it, “to provide a livelihood for farmers near [your] restaurants, to preserve traditional culinary arts or to stop the spread of global warming.”

Yep, you’re just here to “create great, brilliant food.”

And you know what? That might make sense — if we lived in the 19th century. Then you could just focus on making your brilliant food (it would probably be served to royalty) and someone else would do the driving, someone else the laundry, and so forth. While the farmers — out in the countryside — would do nothing but farm. Of course, no one would dream of writing about you in a national publication, either. You wouldn’t have to be a global citizen of an information age.

And indeed — even in this day and age — you do have a choice. As a celebrity chef with an international following at whose restaurant a reservation may only be acquired with help of a skilled expert, you can opt out of caring about the impact the producers of your food have on the soil, water, and the atmosphere. You can downplay the role of the local food economy your restaurant supports and tell the “ambitious young chefs around the world hanging on [your] every word” that flavor comes first. You can also, by all means, call on “the world’s governments” to worry about climate change (and for all I know, you might even think they have the political will to do that). You absolutely can.

But you should know just how irresponsible this statement is. Not just irresponsible — destructive.

We’re at a turning point, globally, and food production — especially in its current, ultra-industrial form — is a huge part of the problem. We’re running out of land and water and, yes, the atmosphere is filling up with methane, nitrous oxide, and carbon dioxide. In fact, agriculture is a larger contributor of greenhouse gases than the transportation sector. (This TEDx video gives a good, brief overview of the problem.) Meanwhile, our broken food system asks that its producers plow under native forests and grasslands to grow soybeans that feed pigs in China and over-fertilize their crops even when they know it will contribute to a giant dead zone in the nation’s most important fishery.

The famous garden at the French Laundry. (Photo by Ernest Bludger.)

Meanwhile — as you know, Mr. Keller — there are a number of small-scale farmers, ranchers, and artisans willing to live on next to nothing because they believe there’s a better way. Many of today’s most sustainable farmers live without insurance, buy almost nothing, and find ways — by hook or by crook — to live on what they could otherwise earn driving buses or cleaning offices. And — thanks in part to the chefs and eaters who support them — they’ve succeeded at maintaining a small but growing front against monocropping and factory farms. And not coincidentally, the food they’re producing is some of the best; you and I absolutely agree on that fact.

Moskin calls your decision to undercut the role these producers are playing as stewards of the land at a crucial moment “radical.” She points out: “While their restaurants may be accessible only to the world’s 0.1 percent, chefs at top restaurants influence the entire global food community with the way they think, write, tweet and talk about food — not just the way they cook it.”

And indeed, some in the food world have responded critically, if subtly, which speaks to power chefs like you wield. In a wrap-up of Twitter responses on The New York Times‘ The Diner’s Journal blog, one of the harshest criticisms was, “Not sure this is the best strategy for ensuring history will treat you kindly.” Meanwhile, Chefs Collaborative — an organization dedicated to making the culinary industry more sustainable — has also begun collecting responses to the article.

I asked Laurie David — one well-known environmentalist who has recently turned her attention to food — what she thought about the chef’s statement, and, true to form for this producer of An Inconvenient Truth, she cut straight to the heart of what many in the food world are likely feeling. “The chef’s lack of concern for the serious challenges facing the world is anything but courageous. It’s really quite shocking. Why check your citizenship at the kitchen door?”

A young farmer is arrested on the sidewalk outside the Gill Tract. Click to watch the raw footage.

The farmers and activists who have been occupying the Gill Tract — a 10-acre piece of land on the outskirts of Berkeley, Calif. — since Earth Day, had a rude awakening Monday morning. As the Oakland Tribune reported, around 100 police officers clad in riot gear and brandishing batons appeared at the farm at 6:15 a.m. and made nine arrests. The officers, the report continues:

… encountered fewer than 10 protesters on the field, most of whom were still sleeping. By 9 a.m., the remaining encampment was cleared.

All except a young man who is sitting in a tree near the tract and refuses to come down.

Of the nine arrested, two were detained for sleeping overnight on the actual tract and seven were arrested outside the fence line on suspicion of unlawful assembly.

As I wrote on Thursday, the University of California has been pushing to see the farmers removed since last week.

The university’s press office released a statement before the arrests began. It reads: “We deeply regret that the occupiers’ actions and continued insistence on free and unfettered access to what is an open-air laboratory left us no choice but to take this step.”

Over the weekend, with the entrance to the property blocked, Occupy the Farm participants passed jugs of water over the fence surrounding the property in order to keep the farm’s young plants alive. (Photo by Wendy Kenin.)

The farmers broke their camp down on Saturday as the university insisted, but several of them stayed on the Gill Tract over the weekend, asking for a public dialogue with UC Berkeley.

So while this mornings arrests aren’t surprising, they still seem draconian, especially considering the fact that most of the folks arrested were not on the property at the time. (See raw footage of the arrests here.)

Occupy the Farm organizer Anya Kamanskaya told CBS San Francisco: “There are literally seven people on the sidewalk not doing anything and they’re telling us it’s an unlawful assembly.”

If you’re a plant nerd like me, you’re probably wondering: What will happen to the crops? Well, let’s just say the photos of bulldozers that have been appearing recently in the #OccupyTheFarm Twitter feed aren’t exactly comforting.

Still on the fence about trying some edible insects? This video from Quest might just give you the nudge you need. In it you’ll meet several entomophagists (bug-eaters), including Monica Martinez of Don Bugito, a taco stand we covered last fall.

You’ll also hear compelling evidence for insects as one answer to feeding a growing population. As one scientist puts it: “Cows and pigs — they’re warm-blooded. When they eat, they have to actually waste a lot of energy producing heat. Insects are cold-blooded. I mean that in a good sense. They don’t have to maintain their body heat, so when they eat they don’t have to waste energy, they convert that into protein.”

The video takes us into the kitchen of a serious bug connoisseur as she prepares roasted figs with sautéed grasshoppers and bee larvae (the “bacon of the edible insect world”) — and manages to make the dish look surprisingly appetizing.

Photo by Steve Rhodes.

“Maybe you’ll be my one phone call from jail,” urban farmer and activist Ashoka Finley says, just before our phone conversation ends.

He’s joking, but I imagine he can probably see a group of police officers out of the corner of his eyes as he says it. Finley is one of a group of Occupiers who have been living and farming on a 10-acre piece of land on the outskirts of Berkeley, Calif., called the Gill Tract.

Finley has also just told me that he’s prepared to get arrested if things at the Gill Tract escalate. “We’re not going anywhere, we’re going to keep planting and farming,” he says, as if it’s the most defiant thing he can imagine.

Until recently, the Gill Tract was a fairly invisible piece of property many Bay Area residents have driven by for years: Its fence butts right up against a major freeway intersection en route to the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Then, on Earth Day, April 22, Finley and fellow activists cut a bolt, set up tents, and began planting food. Their occupation has transformed the Gill Tract into a kind of stage on which a very modern drama is playing out.

Since we first reported on the Gill Tract occupation last week here on Grist, things on the ground there have begun heating up.

On Wednesday, the day I spoke with Finley, the land’s owners, University of California at Berkeley, had officially lost their patience. The college had sent in campus police officers to blockade the entrances to the property in what appeared to be a slow-and-steady tactic similar to their approach to a student-led tree sit that took place at UC Berkeley a few years back. Later in the afternoon, UC announced its intent to take legal action against 14 of the group’s organizers for trespassing and illegal encampment, among a list of other grievances.

UC cut off the water supply to the property shortly after the occupation began, and Finley says they have been trucking in water ever since. Once vehicles could no longer enter the property on Wednesday, the Occupiers parked at the edge of the plot and set up “a water train” of people passing buckets. “Watering three acres by hand is no small task,” he says.

In the last week, university officials have met with the Gill Tract Occupiers, and in the days since then the university issued an ultimatum. Then the Occupiers responded with a list of their own demands.

Both parties want decision-making power over the land. The Occupiers want to see it farmed in perpetuity as a sustainability-focused education center, while the university sees the tract primarily as an agricultural laboratory. It also has plans to redevelop buildings at the edge of the property into retail space, including, ironically, a Whole Foods Market.

In the short term, the farmers want access to water, and the university says it will grant that access only after the tents have been removed.

“We’ve been really patient. This occupation has been going on since April 22 and we’ve taken no direct action until today,” said University of California spokesperson Dan Mogulof on Wednesday afternoon. “The last thing we want is confrontation.”

That makes sense, of course. University officials know that the eyes of the media are on the Gill Tract. And not much time has passed since the 10-campus university system was criticized for its response to Occupy protests last fall (including at UC Davis, where the famous pepper-spray incident went down). In fact, just last week, UC released a draft of a report that urges restraint and mediation in cases of civil disobedience.

But Mogulof prefers to frame the discussion as one about the core principles of academia. “We cannot negotiate academic freedom,” he said, referring to the research that takes place at Gill Tract. “It’s the heart of what every great research institution is all about — the ability of our faculty and students to pursue their intellectual and academic interests in a free and unfettered fashion without interference from the administration, corporations, politicians, or government. And certainly not from a self-selecting group of individuals.”

It’s odd to hear the word “corporations” on this list of unwanted external influences, since UC Berkeley has been heavily criticized for its corporate relationships, including a recent collaboration with BP and a five-year research deal between plant biologists and the biotech company Novartis. There are no genetically engineered crops grown on the property. But many of the protesters have pointed out the sharp contrast between the typical Gill Tract tableau of the past and the new scene there today: Instead of the uniform rows of industrial corn that have grown here every summer for the last several decades (thanks to research funded in part by the nearby Western Regional Office of the United States Department of Agriculture), Occupy has brought a multigenerational crowd to the location, looking excited and sun-kissed as they work together to build a farm.

Not that all Gill Tract’s neighbors support the occupation. In fact, several see it as a brash and aggressive approach by outsiders to grab something many of them had been working to get for a long time — access to the Gill Tract. (In this recent op-ed, a nearby citizen refers to the four-year negotiation he and other neighbors participated in with the area city council.)

Of course, as UC sees it, getting the Occupiers off the land is the first step to a negotiation process that could, they say, involve some inclusion of urban farming on the plot — at the university’s discretion.

“There is room on the site for both our research and for urban farming. It’s possible that some or all of what [the Occupiers] have planted could remain. But that’s far from certain,” says Mogulof.

The Occupiers see it in reverse; rather than a research facility with some space for actual farming, they envision a farm with some space for research. In fact, one agroecological researcher who grows experimental crops in the Gill Tract tried to begin his research for the season on Wednesday morning. Miguel Altieri appeared at the plot in an effort to plant dry-farmed tomatoes, but was reportedly told by university police that he wasn’t authorized to do so [hear a short audio interview with Altieri]. Apparently, he then passed the tomatoes through the fence and instructed the Occupiers how to plant them.

“Obviously research can continue under the context of this organic farm,” says  Finley. “But the UC administration has forbidden all research — just as a political move. If researchers started cooperating with us, it would send a message that it can continue without their supervision.”

It’s clear, however, that the right to do research is only part of the issue for UC. One recent university statement read, “If the encampment is ended we are, as previously stated, more than willing to discuss opportunities for a metropolitan agriculture program affiliated with the campus.” Either way, says Mogulof, “We think it’s clear that there’s shared interest if they’re willing to take the simple step of allowing the rightful owners to regain the supervision and control of the land.”

Then again, the Occupy movement has always been about giving a voice, however fleeting, to disenfranchised young Americans who feel they have very little to lose. Ownership might not be a sacred concept, or even a major priority, for many of the younger Occupiers. They graduated at a time when the relationship between student debt and the availability of work for people under 25 might lead them to doubt they will ever be able to own a car, let alone a piece of land. Meanwhile most young people who do dream of farming probably know they’re likely to have to rent land for the foreseeable future.

Former UC agroecology student Anya Kamenskaya, an Occupy the Farm organizer who is named in the UC lawsuit, told me that the Gill Tract started as a 104 acres of prime agricultural land — the kind with soil that can grow food without needing much preparation (scientists call it “class 1”).  As she described it to me, I started thinking about how many houses, streets, businesses, and gas stations has been built right over this soil.

“There are only 10 acres left, and only about five are really presently useful for farming,” she said. “We want to highlight the fact that it started out as farmland and it’s been parceled out and cut down.”

That’s why, on Wednesday night, the Occupiers were gathering at a nearby community center, marching to the farm, and preparing — if necessary — to get arrested for those five acres of good remaining soil.

Update: On Thursday afternoon there had still been no arrests, but the #occupythefarm Twitter feed reported that UC police has stopped allowing anyone to enter or exit the Gill Tract. The farmers tweeted “asking for sandwiches, prepared food, nuts, power bars, dried fruit, things that are easy to get over a fence.”

Watch an Occupy the Farm solidarity march from Wednesday, May 9:

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Photo by Andrea Nguyen.

On the Mother Jones website yesterday, contributor and author Julia Whitty posed some important questions about a small, less popular fish that’s begun to come back into vogue in recent years.

The post, called “It’s Okay to Eat Sardines…Right?,” began like this:

Sardines are considered a “sustainable” seafood, one of the few fish you can eat guilt-free, right? Well, not exactly. Forage fish like sardines and anchovies are the key players in huge but delicate food webs known as wasp-waist ecosystems. These are so complex and dynamic that it’s questionable whether we have the know-how to manage them well yet.

Whitty went on to illustrate that we don’t, in fact, seem to know how to manage the world sardine fisheries very well. And she presented a telling and useful chart that tracked the global capture of sardines over the last 50 years. It shows a mountain of consumption that rises steeply in 1975 and goes crashing back down again 20 years later. She also points out that although the Marine Stewardship Council approves of sardine eating, Whitty herself has written in the past about what she sees as lapses in judgement on its part, when it comes to the fishing practices surrounding other types of fish.

I was with Whitty through a great deal of her argument, and I can always get with a considered note of caution about what we eat and how much. So I waited patiently for her to get to the discussion of what happens to the rest of the sardines. But it didn’t come.

You see, as many ocean conservationists and sustainable seafood experts point out, the problem isn’t that people are frying or grilling up too many sardines. The problem is the fish we’re not eating, but feeding to other, farmed fish (like tuna and salmon) and industrially farmed animals (fish oil makes pigs, chickens, and cows grow faster).

The author of a recent New York Times article about forage fish (another name for the small fish generally thought of as feed for other fish), called “Too Many Small Fish Are Caught, Report Says,” put it this way:

The consumer market for forage fish is relatively small; most of the fish are ground and processed for use as animal feed and nutritional supplements and, increasingly, as feed for the aquaculture industry, which now produces about half of all the fish and shellfish that people eat.

A task force from Oregon State University, which has been studying the forage fish crisis for a while now, agrees. Like Whitty, they point to the fact that such fish are critical prey for larger species and a key link in the ocean ecosystem. Last month, the task force released a report, saying:

The harvest of these forage fish has increased with demand, as they are used not only for food … but primarily for fish meal and fish oil to feed farmed fish, pigs and chickens.

And:

The report estimates that forage fish worldwide generate $5.6 billion as direct catch, but contribute more than double that — $11.3 billion — by serving as food for other commercially important fish.

In other words, the role that sardines — and other forage fish like menhaden and anchovies — play in the larger food system is invisible to most of us.

Geoff Shester, the California program director at Oceana, talked to Grist contributor Clare Leschin-Hoar for the article, “Small fish, big ocean: Saving Pacific forage fish.” We followed up with him to ask his take on sardine-eating. In the case of Pacific sardines, he said that “the lion’s share go to bluefin tuna farms (ranches) in Australia, then to commercial longline bait in international tuna fisheries.”

Overall, he says, “consumers are demanding the wrong things. Instead of demanding farmed salmon, which uses at least three pounds of forage fish to get one pound of salmon, people should be demanding the forage fish themselves.”

If all those consumers substituted sardines for a typical meal of farmed salmon or tuna, he adds, they would spend less, while fishermen would command a higher price than they might if they sold the sardines as a mere feed source. We could feed three times more people with the same amount of fishing, and leave many more sardines in the water, where they can remain as part of the ecosystem — and where they are worth way more.

So, not eating sardines might make environmental sense if you’re choosing a plant-based meal instead. Otherwise, the fact that they’re so low on the food chain still makes them a sustainable choice, by comparison to a great deal of the other animal protein available to us.

As Shester puts it: “The best thing we can do right now is make more efficient use of the forage fish we do take out of the ocean.”

If meat eating is a race, China is so far ahead of us we can’t even see what color shorts it’s wearing. Americans still eat about twice as much of the stuff on a per-person basis, but, well, China has a lot more people.

If you like geeking out about who eats what where and how it impacts the environment, you might enjoy spending some time with this very data-rich post about the recent doubling of China’s meat consumption from the Earth Policy Institute (EPI). But, for those who want a cheat sheet, I’ve collected what I think are some of the most memorable bits below.

First, take a look at this very telling chart, which shows plain and clear how fast things have been changing:

Where as Chinese diet has long centered around grains and vegetables (meat and eggs were more like a garnish), it’s clear that pork, chicken, and fish have been taking up a much more substantial place in the national diet.

You’ll notice I didn’t say beef. That’s because beef is still somewhat of a delicacy there (they eat only 6 million tons a year, compared to our 11 million). Not only is land less available for grazing, writes EPI’s Janet Larsen, but:

Cattle in feedlots gobble up about 7 pounds of grain for each pound of weight gain. For pigs, the feeding ratio is 3 to 1, and for chickens it is 2 to 1. With one fifth of the world’s population and limited land and water supplies, China has had to rely heavily on the more-efficient forms of animal protein.

Pork belly in box, served at a restaurant in Beijing. (Photo by Omefrans.)

Pork, on the other hand, has been the national object of affection for a while now, and accounts for almost three-fourths of the nation’s meat consumption (they eat a whopping 52 million tons a year to our 8 million). And, to accommodate all the pork dumplings and sweet pork belly, the mode of production in China has also changed hugely. Larsen adds:

Traditionally China’s pigs were raised in small numbers by households feeding them crop waste and table scraps. As many American kitchens today have a garbage disposal, Chinese kitchens had a pig. Indeed, the written Mandarin Chinese character for “home” depicts a pig under a roof, signifying the animal’s longtime domestic importance. But now the ramped-up demands of a richer and increasingly urbanized society have taken more pigs out of the backyard and into specialized livestock operations [read CAFOs], where they are fed grain and soybeans.

China also farms a lot of seafood. A full 37 million tons of it, or 60 percent of the world total. Many of these fish are herbivores and also rely on grains. Which brings us to what might be the most surprising finding from the EPI article: China now grows more corn that rice. And — you’ve probably guessed this by now — most of it goes to feed animals!

In 2011, they grew 192 million tons of corn for animal feed, while the 140 million tons of rice and 118 million tons of wheat they grew all went directly to foods eaten by people — like noodles, buns, dumplings, etc. They also import an astounding quantity of soybeans from the U.S. and Brazil to feed animals. In 2011, China harvested the most grain of any country in history and around one-third of that harvest is going to feed animals to meet their demand for meat, milk, eggs, and farmed fish. And environmental impact — like today’s global cuisine — knows no borders. Larsen writes:

China’s incredible appetite for meat has altered the landscape of the western hemisphere, where the land planted in soybeans now exceeds that in either wheat or corn. Rainforest and savanna have been cleared to make way for a vast soybean monoculture.

Indeed, that’s what happens when you take our Western food system and blow it up really large. And I don’t know about you, but the next time someone tries to tell me they think food and farming isn’t an important global issue, I’ll know just where to send them.