Climate Food and Agriculture

Why conventional popcorn sucks, and what you can do about it

Dear Lou,

What about popcorn? Is it safe, healthy, and free of pesticides? What exactly is in the artificial butter flavor?

Thanks,
Greenee Trailer Trash from Mississippi

Maintaining healthy wild-oyster beds isn't quite as easy as oyster pie

Pearl, interrupted. I have long been partial to oysters. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that I came to understand the environmental challenges they face. Many folks assume that water pollution poses the main threat to oysters. Turns out the real damage comes from water scarcity — specifically, a lack of freshwater draining […]

Jeremy Piven's sushi addiction: good for mercury awareness

Whether you believe the Hollywood rumor that Jeremy Piven dropped out of the Broadway production of Speed-the-Plow due to a heavy regime of partying and a subsequent rehab session, or his doctor's assertion that the star was ill due to mercury poisoning from a high dose of sushi (two servings per day, Pivs? Good Lord), the winner in this agent's nightmare is awareness of mercury contamination.

Piven went on Good Morning America on Thursday to explain himself, warn about excessive consumption of fish high on the food chain like tuna, and point people to BlueVoice.org. BlueVoice correctly pins the blame largely on coal-burning power plants and their propensity to sprinkle lakes, rivers, and oceans with emissions high in methylmercury that bioaccumulates up the food chain. I'd call that, um, a quicksilver lining.

An ode to the sea kitten

Today we give a tip o' the carp
To the bitterlings at PETA
Who've thought of yet another way
To make us better eatas.

Agog at all our fishy friends
That on sharp hooks have bitten,
They've launched a cutesy-boots campaign
Called, yes, "Save the Sea Kitten!"

If fish were "kittens," so they say,
You'd view them differently --
Your tuna would change if today's lunch
Were Kitten of the Sea.

Does America have the food system that we deserve?

McDonald's is on a roll. Says the NYT:

Six years into a rebound spawned by more appealing food and a less aggressive expansion, McDonald's seems to have won over some of its most hardened skeptics.

The chain has managed to sustain its momentum even as the economy and the restaurant industry as a whole are struggling. Month after month, McDonald's has surprised analysts by posting stronger-than-expected sales in the United States and abroad.

I've been won over all right. Won over to the argument that changing food policy in this country is a quixotic proposition. The article presents as progress that McDonald's responded to flattening beef consumption by going, quoth one executive, "at chicken hard."

Firstly, um, ew? And secondly, learning that McDonald's now sells more chicken than beef worldwide doesn't quite feel like the revolution is right around the corner.

Half of world's population could face climate-driven food crisis by 2100

"Ignoring climate projections at this stage will only result in the worst form of triage."

The headline is from the University of Washington news release on a study in Science, "Historical Warnings of Future Food Insecurity with Unprecedented Seasonal Heat" ($ub. req'd). The quote is the study's powerful final sentence. The release explains:

Rapidly warming climate is likely to seriously alter crop yields in the tropics and subtropics by the end of this century and, without adaptation, will leave half the world's population facing serious food shortages, new research shows ...

"The stresses on global food production from temperature alone are going to be huge, and that doesn't take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures," said David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor.

Worse, the study must also be considered a serious underestimate of likely impacts since, as is common in such analyses, they based their simulations on "the 'middle of the road' emission scenario, A1B." In 2100, A1B hits about 700 ppm with average global temperatures "only" about 3°C warmer than today. In fact, on our current emissions path, we are going to get much, much hotter.

Figure. "Histogram of summer (June, July, and August) averaged temperatures (blue) observed from 1900 to 2006 and (red) projected for 2090 for (A) France, (B) Ukraine, and (C) the Sahel. Temperature is plotted as the departure from the long-term (1900-2006) climatological mean (21). The data are normalized to represent 100 seasons in each histogram. In (A), for example, the hottest summer on record in France (2003) is 3.6°C above the long-term climatology. The average summer temperature in 2090 [assuming A1B] is projected to be 3.7°C greater than the long-term climatological average."

The results are still alarming:

Grist cooks lunch for America’s leading food writer

Today Grist had the somewhat surreal experience of hosting Michael Pollan, the nation’s premier food writer, for lunch. And just to make it more stressful, we decided to do a potluck — each of us brought in a dish. Cooking for Pollan! Yikes! Happily, he enjoyed the food, and we had a nice conversation. We’ll […]

Fishermen who play by the rules deserve some help

Taking up Tom Philpott's food stimulus challenge, I suggest bailing out the fisherman. Of course, fish stocks internationally are still in serious decline -- you need look no father than the Atlantic bluefin tuna to see that. But according to a report on NPR, we're having some serious fisheries-management success stories on the West Coast. Now it's the local fishing fleets rather than the fisheries that threaten to collapse. At first, the government thought they had engineered a "soft landing" for fishermen when:

... five years ago many fishermen who trolled for groundfish agreed to give up their boats for a lump sum of cash. That dramatically reduced the size of the fleet. There are only about 160 bottom trawlers left in California, Oregon and Washington.

As a result, nets are full and quotas are easily met. But now regulators are converting fishing quotas into a cap-and-trade system. There's no question that this is an important development. Since fishermen will be able to buy and sell portions of their quotas, they'll throw less of their catch overboard (dumping fish being the only legal way to dispose of excess catch). Under the new system, they'll just hop on the radio and buy some of the fishing rights from a fellow fisherman who has room to spare in his hold.

Everything looks peachy so far, but all industries need a certain scale. As the fleets continue to shrink and more fishermen sell their quotas and their boats, fishing ports, which include processing plants and other supporting services, will shut down entirely. These are businesses that, unlike the meat industry's now defunct network of local abattoirs and butchers, have so far resisted centralization.

So how about some incentives to keep these folks afloat? Fishermen should be encouraged to stay on the water, not to become fish stock brokers. If a little of the stimulus money can help us manage the fishermen along with the fisheries, it would be a boon to struggling coastal communities and would preserve fishing as an environmentally and economically sustainable tradition. Aside from the fact that any job lost is a crisis in this economy, it would be a shame that our success with the fish should lead to disaster for the people.

Think locally, act infrastructurally

President-elect Barack Obama and the new Congress can’t afford to turn their attention to reforming the food system. We’ve got two wars to fight, the Middle East conflict is raging again, the financial system is in chaos, and layoffs are mounting. And don’t forget the likelihood of trillion-dollar annual budget deficits for years to come. […]

'Minimalist' cooking master connects the dots between food, climate, and bad health

The great Mark Bittman -- whose new book I am eager to get my paws on -- delivers a powerful spiel connecting the industrial food system with climate change and the health-care crisis. Watch it.