Articles by Tom Laskawy

A hint of the future appears at a Miami-area produce market

No, this isn't another cap-and-trade post. I'm talking about the yummy kind of markets.

As we grapple with ways to reform food production in this country, one problem that crops up is the loss over time of the old farm-to-market networks that fed cities before air freight and transcontinental trucking took over. So even if we wanted to (or, more ominously, were forced to) re-regionalize our food distribution system, the infrastructure no longer exists.

This desire, by the way, is not motivated simply by a need to reduce food miles -- a misleading measure for sure. I and others have talked at length about the misplaced focus on food miles as a way to guide food distribution. Rail, for example, is an especially good way to move food long distances -- especially compared to the option of driving huge fleets of diesel trucks even relatively short distances (which is why rail freight stimulus is such a great idea. Right, Ryan?).

But as we explore ways to reform industrial agriculture and its reliance on fossil fuels in food production, more, smaller farms inevitably come up as an alternative -- and for that sort of system to work, they would need to be proximate to population centers. Speaking of the food miles argument, it's likely that, using our existing infrastructure, exclusively procuring produce from farms within, say, 75 miles of urban centers would cause the transportation component of agricultural carbon emissions to go way up. So, there's a lot to do before anything like this could happen.

And thus we come to the point -- a means to counteract my recent gloom-and-doom posts. Ready?

Let's get a little something in exchange for our biogas

Here's something someone should run with. Via Green Inc. I learned that Sen. Ben Nelson just introduced a bill that would encourage development of the agricultural biogas industry with hopes of including it in the stimulus package. Biogas is a renewable form of natural gas derived from any methane source, like, say, manure. While burning biogas does create carbon emissions, it's more than offset by its effect in eliminating methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas (Marc from the Ethicurean explains how much of an offset in this comment).

In many ways, it's not a particularly high-tech approach and it's currently in common use in China and India - although unlike with the digesters in use in the developing world, the US biogas industry is attempting to significantly increase biogas content to almost pure methane. Because biogas can be produced and used on site as well as shipped via pipeline to power stations, it's theoretically possible for farms to become energy self-sufficient AND deal with excess manure. This isn't a magic bullet, of course, and in the future, farms are likely to use a lot more manure as fertilizer (remember Peak Phosphorus?). But, even in the post-CAFO world we all dream about, there will continue to be excess manure around. Indeed, this is exactly the sort of thing USDA chief Tom Vilsack means when he talks about developing "new technologies and expanded opportunities in biofuels and renewable energy."

Is there anything that isn't peaking?

Felix Salmon mused on the subject of Peakniks recently (and what a neologism that is!) after reading Ben McGrath's entertainingly morbid piece, "The Dystopians" in The New Yorker ($ub. req'd). While it's worth observing that "peaknik" has typically referred to Peak Oilers, I think it's safe to say that we're all peakniks now.

McGrath talks mostly about financial doomsayers, i.e. Peak Debt and Peak Dollars, but refers generally, if somewhat dismissively, to the "Peaknik Diaspora" and some of its adherents. These would be folks who "believe" in Peak Oil, Peak Carbon, Peak Dirt, Peak Fish. Personally, I think Peak Carbon is a not a terribly useful way to refer to climate change -- although "climate change" is itself a not terribly useful way to refer to climate change (something that Gar Lipow has taken it upon himself to fix). Peak Things, in my humble opinion (speaking of which, why did IMHO go out of favor? Is there no longer any humility on the Internet?), should only refer to resource maximums. Switching that around for carbon -- i.e. we're trying to stop producing carbon so we can declare/achieve Peak Carbon and continue reducing from there -- is just plain confusing. So let's dispense with Peak Carbon.

Recent food safety struggles suggest the limits of regulation

It's been a bad week for food safety. First it was the peanut butter, then it was the high fructose corn syrup, and now it's deadly antibiotic-resistant staph bacteria (MRSA) in CAFO pigs (and their minders). And of course, as Bill Marler -- litigious scourge of the food industry -- reminds us, we're continuing to lose the fight against E. coli.

Much has been written about the efforts to track down the sources of contamination.  And invariably the companies involved quickly close the their doors (which is how we lost one of the largest ground beef distributors in the country virtually overnight and why the Peanut Corporation of America is no more). But what's truly worrisome is that in each case, the USDA and the FDA (who have joint responsibility for food safety) had information at hand about all of these problems.

In the case of the peanut butter outbreak, the plant in question had a long-documented history of health violations -- discovered, not by the FDA, but by local Georgia authorities to whom the FDA had contracted out inspection services. In essence, short of allowing self-regulation, the FDA managed to find an entity that enjoys even cozier relationships with industry than the FDA itself has. In theory, the Georgia Agriculture Department should have forwarded on reports of violations to federal officials. There's no word yet on where in the lines of communication the breakdown occurred.