Ten reader food quandaries solved!

In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries. Lettuce know what food worries keep you up at night.   Dear Checkout Line readers, You know how those languishing items on your to-do list start to gnaw at you like — I […]

Tufts study: Corn subsidies are a sop to HFCS industry, but don't alone make bad food cheap

I have a complex and much criticized view of farm subsidies. 

On the one hand, I acknowledge that the "commodity program" embedded in the Farm Bill is a back-door sop to agribusiness giants like meat titan Tyson and grain-processor Archer Daniels Midland. By encouraging farmers to produce as much corn and soy as possible even when prices are low, subsidies push down the price of commodity crops -- and fatten the profits of the firms that buy them.

On the other hand, I disagree with sustainable-food activists who claim that subsidies are the root of our food-system problems. Take them away, I've argued more than once, and you'd still have a food system that mainly produces junk churned out by a few big companies. Plus, rather than campaigning to end subsidies, I think we should be pushing to redirect them to more useful purposes: like rebuilding local and regional food infrastructure.

A study just released by the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts illustrates my point. The authors -- veteran Tufts researcher Tim Wise, plus Alicia Harvie -- look at the effect corn subsidies have had on consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, the U.S. food industry's favorite sweetener.

They essentially pose two questions: 1) Do HFCS producers benefit from the subsidy program?; and 2) Can the rise in obesity/overweight and diabetes rates be tied to corn subsidies through HFCS?  Their conclusions might surprise you.

Why is it so hard for farmers to donate their crops?

Because there aren't enough roadblocks to getting hungry people healthy food, here's another one. And it's something that could be fixed with a small dollop of legalese (ideally right on top of the stimulus package). Someone at Bread for the City, which runs the biggest D.C. food pantry, pointed me to a post on their blog that sets up the problem thusly:

[L]iterally tons of fresh fruits and vegetables will be grown this year that will never make it to market for one reason or another. (For instance, major supermarkets turn away curvy cucumbers since they don't stack well ...) In a country where about half of all food grown is wasted, the gap between the field and the market is where a shockingly large amount of the loss occurs.

Their goal is to get this "wasted" food to the people who need it. Naturally, it's not easy (although nothing about helping the poor ever is). But it's not finding the produce that's the problem -- many farmers are more than happy to participate. It's getting it: the food pantries have to organize teams of volunteers to harvest, pack, and transport the produce themselves. Why not just have the farmers do it for them? Sometimes they do, of course. But for many farmers already on the edge financially, throwing in labor and fuel as part of the deal just isn't possible. The tax-savvy among you will no doubt object -- what about the write-off?

WaPo on the new USDA chief

As Tom Laskawy pointed out here a few days ago, controversy rages around new USDA chief Tom Vilsack's choice of deputy secretary -- traditionally a powerful figure within the agency, tasked with implementing policy in a sprawling bureaucracy.

The sustainable-ag world is rallying around Chuck Hassebrook, director of the Center for Rural Affairs in Nebraska, who's thought to be under serious consideration for the post.

Evidently, the choice is being held up because Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) is threatening to fight it in the ag committee. It's pretty unsavory stuff -- Conrad is evidently furious that Hassebrook supports stricter limits on subsidies paid to a single farm (a policy also supported by Vilsack and President Barack Obama).

Astonishingly, this back-room brawl in what used to be a back-water agency has gotten high-profile attention. NYT pundit Nicholas Kristof weighed in on his blog recently.

As I've written before, the USDA suddenly operates under the glare of media attention. Can anyone remember a similar situation at USDA during Bush II's reign? I tried to make a fuss when Bush chose a deputy secretary who had served as president of the Corn Refiners Association. No one seemed to see what the big deal was.

Those days are over. Now the USDA chief's got reporters bird-dogging him about his attitude toward reform. And he's been making an effort -- unprecedented, as far as I know -- to soothe his critics in the sustainable-food world. Here he is waxing downright Pollanesque to a Washington Post reporter:

Cheap-chicken ad from KFC hides true cost of food; here’s a tastier, low-cost alternative

What’s he hiding? Undeterred by the thorough trouncing he received last time he threw down the gauntlet, the Colonel has placed it gingerly at my feet once more, with another apocryphal advertisement that premiered during — what else? — the Super Bowl. I know that times are tough, and every business has a right — […]

Direct and organic farm sales rise rapidly, new census shows

Direct sales from farmers rose 49 percent, and organic farm sales more than tripled from 2002 to 2007, new USDA farm census data show.

USDA released the 2007 Agriculture Census data today, giving Americans a far more detailed understanding of agricultural trends -- just as interest in local foods expands dramatically.

For me, one of the key indicators of the growth of interest in community-based foods is the rapidly rising sales of food direct from farmers to consumers. Direct food sales rose a whopping 49 percent to $1.2 billion in 2007, up from $812 million in 2002. This includes farmstand, farmers market, internet, or other direct sales of fruit, vegetables, meats, and many other foods.

Canada saved us from more bad peanuts

In the stream of news about the troubling "our peanuts are tainted and our food system is whack" situation, this gem has floated to the surface: It was Canada that first raised the red flag on Peanut Corp's products last spring. The tale unfurls a bit like a parody of bumbling agency hijinks, but the moral is clear: Canada. Always. Rocks.

On the importance of getting personal with your food

Real food doesn't often compete with the delicious paper-and-ink smell of bookstores, but last Saturday, chefs, farmers, photographers, and writers filled Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Company with their wares: two appetizing reads. The back-to-back book events featured the authors of Chefs on the Farm and Edges of Bounty.

One lesson I walked away with that day was that food is only as good as the relationships on which it's based. These relationships can be between soil and seed, eater and herb, farmer and goat, or even you and your neighbors. Both books' authors reinforced this idea and went on to suggest that diverse, well-tended, and personal relationships produce the best meals and the best stories.

Impressions from the Seafood Summit in San Diego

My plunge into the complex world of sea stewardship has been invigorating but also overwhelming. I find myself among literally hundreds of people who know various aspects of the topic intimately. My mind buzzes with ideas to develop and questions to ask -- more than can be done in the span of a few days.

I'll be developing Grist's coverage of the impacts and potential of seafood production over the next weeks. In the meantime, here are some impressions:

A new sustainable sushi book, restaurant, and debate

Sustainable Sushi: A Guide to Saving the Oceans One Bite at a Time, the definitive guide to sustainable sushi, was written by Casson Trenor, alum of the International Environmental Policy Program at the Monterey Institute.

What I particularly like about this volume is that Casson outlines vegetarian alternatives to fish at the end of the book, since as he freely admits, not eating fish is one of the best ways to protect the oceans.

Casson is not only spreading the printed word, but also walking the walk by putting all of his knowledge into practice at his new sushi and sake bar Tataki Sushi in San Francisco -- the world's first sustainable sushi restaurant. It has garnered rave reviews and has been nominated for the city's No. 1 sushi restaurant. He is constantly updating the menu to keep pace with developments in science, policy, and business practices.

And for anyone who can make it to Monterey, Calif. on Feb. 19, Casson along with Kim McCoy of Seashepherd (and the star of the show Whale Wars), Stanford PhD student Dane Klinger, and myself will be participating in a debate entitled, "Seafood sustainability: Is it real and is it enough?" Info here.