New travel and cooking shows valorize the very practices destroying frogs and other living things

Remember when food shows were about cooking stuff? Now we have shows featuring guys who travel the world stuffing food in their pie holes just so they can tell us how it tastes (usually while the food is still in their mouths). You just can't get a fresher description than that. Because we can only eat so much, we can now entertain ourselves between meals by watching other people eat.

The latest incarnation is the Man V. Food show where Adam Richman runs around the country trying to eat the ubiquitous gargantuan promotional meals offered by so many restaurants, which include everything from a seven-pound monster breakfast burrito to an eleven-pound pizza (which was barfed back up).

One show I find particularly irritating is the Travel Channel's Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, who for some reason reminds me of a turtle. He eats a lot of wildlife, which can't help but fan the flames of the growing wild food trade that's consuming biodiversity. From a recent NYT opinion piece:

As global wealth rises, so does global consumption of meat, which includes wild meat. Turtle meat used to be a rare delicacy in the Asian diet, but no longer. China, along with Hong Kong and Taiwan, has vacuumed the wild turtles out of most of Southeast Asia. Now, according to a recent report in The Los Angeles Times, they are consuming common soft-shell turtles from the American Southeast, especially Florida, at an alarming rate.

Here he is eating a still beating frog heart:

Denny's serves up a plate of petroleum

The millions of Americans (Grist included!) glued to their TVs Sunday for Super Bowl XLIII got a personal invite from fast food chain Denny's to swing by any of its 2,500 U.S. locations this morning for a free "Grand Slam" breakfast -- two eggs, two sausages, two slices of bacon, two pancakes (a whopping 800 calories).

True agricultural policy reform may require climate reform first

I'm becoming more and more convinced every day that addressing climate change and reforming food production are pretty much the same thing. You can't do one without the other. And -- as Yogi Berra might say -- vice versa. The food and agriculture industries, aided and abetted by governments worldwide (not to mention by consumers), have succeeded in offloading just about all external costs involved with feeding us. Environmental issues, public health issues, natural resource utilization issues, even most economic issues related to food have all been socialized to the extent that the industry is almost totally isolated from the societal consequences of its actions.

Until now, few have complained, as this system has led to ever lower food prices in the developed world and thriving export markets in the developing world. But the costs, which for 60 years or so seemed to have been pushed back beyond the horizon, are beginning to loom.

Many of us have high hopes that the new administration can make serious progress on reform, but it's important to focus on how serious the challenge before us actually is. In this way, it's like the global warming debate back in the '90s. The science was pretty clear even then. There were visionaries like NASA's James Hansen and, yes, Al Gore, who understood that we needed to act. But for most Americans, hearing about climate change in the '90s was like being reminded to carry an umbrella on a sunny day. Where exactly were the portents of doom?

Taking a dive into the murky future of extracting food from the troubled sea

In my work on food and agriculture, I've focused nearly 100 percent on land-based issues. But the earth's vast and gaping oceans have always been a major source for human nutrition -- and will be only more so as population grows over the next decades. No one who writes on intersections between food and ecology can ignore the seas. I need to educate myself.

With that in mind, I'm currently attending the Seafood Summit, a confab sponsored by a combination of NGOs (e.g., Marine Stewardship Council), foundations (e.g., Packard), and corporate interests (e.g., Darden, which owns Red Lobster and other restaurant chains).

The hottest topic here is aquaculture -- a truly new practice with a history of around 50 years, compared with agriculture's 10,000-year track record. The question isn't whether aquaculture will continue to grow explosively over the next decades; the question is whether it will mimic the blunders of land-based industrial agriculture, or move in more sustainable directions.

Look for my seafood-ish posts over the next couple of days.

Seattle museum opens coffee exhibit, downs third cup of the day

Photos by Andrew Waits.

Coffee culture is king in Seattle. Whether it's because of the eternally gray weather, the cool, rainy climate, or our inability to socialize outside a dimly lit café, there's no denying the importance of the caffeine bean in a Seattleite's daily life.

And certainly we've earned our rep as a highly caffeinated metropolis, with more coffee shops per capita than anywhere else in the country -- many of them artisanal roasters selling specialty coffees. But the story of your steamy mug of joe doesn't begin and end with a moody barista.

In fact, it probably started in the hands of someone like Edwin Martinez, a third generation coffee grower who has been picking coffee beans in Guatemala with his family since he was a young boy. From there, they may have passed through a co-op set up to help small farmers process and market their beans. Then they'll move on to someone like David Griswold, the founder of Sustainable Harvest, a specialty coffee importer who bridges connections between the farmers in tropical coffee-growing nations and the roasters in, say, Seattle.

The roasting process will awaken the coffee beans' complex aromas and flavors -- and they'll soon be passed from barista to half-awake patron. And though you might be sipping on a half-caf soy latte with sugar-free vanilla syrup, you've really got the whole world in your cup.

It's this story that a new exhibit at Seattle's Burke Museum aims to tell. Opening weekend of Coffee: The World in Your Cup featured exhibit tours, coffee tastings, and informative talks by Martinez, Griswold, and University of Washington professor Max Savishinsky. "We're really putting a huge topic in a small space," said Education Director Diane Quinn.

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?

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.

I'm having a cow over beef-tallow biodiesel

I heard about this on the radio this morning, and couldn't believe the uncritical reporting on it:

The City of Calgary's entire fleet of trucks and buses may soon be partly fueled by biodiesel produced from Alberta beef tallow.

Tallow is all that's left over after an animal has been processed. The city has been experimenting with tallow from the meat-packing plant in High River, Alta., as part efforts to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.

...

Not only is the tallow in ready supply locally, turning it into biofuel recycles a product that would normally be thrown away, he said.

Tallow-waste biofuel is also more ethical than other alternative fuels, since it does not displace food crops such as corn, which is used in the production of ethanol, he said.

That's a neat trick of sunk-cost accounting. Sure, beef production is ridiculously carbon-intensive, making this biodiesel probably more climate-hostile than even corn ethanol, but hey, we've already got all this surplus cow fat to get rid of. I'm all for waste recycling, but reducing the production of waste is the first step, right?

I'll confess this is a first-blush impression, and welcome the opportunity to be proven wrong. But doesn't this sound like a poor excuse to support beef prices?

How to maintain a green, healthy diet on a budget

Dear Lou,

With the economic crunch, how is it going to be possible to afford healthy foods for my family, especially organics? It's not like I can go foraging in the medians of the major roadways.

Karl from Southern California