Headline – PETA wants to put vegan ads on border fence. The billboard would read:
“If the Border Patrol Doesn’t Get You, the Chicken and Burgers Will — Go Vegan.”
and would picture “fit and trim” Mexicans, in their own country, and obese American kids and grownups “gorging on meaty, fat- and cholesterol-packed American food” (according to a PETA spokesperson).

Really?? Apparently, ‘carne’ and ‘pollo’ don’t translate as meat products. And, for border crossers, a picture of a big, fat hamburger might actually be appealing.

Your thoughts?

I’ve had several people email me and/or ask me for my thoughts on the recent New York Times article ‘Sticker Shock in the Organic Food Aisles’. Martin and Severson’s question is: how much is too much?

In reading the article, I had an only-slight ’7 dollars for a gallon of milk!’ moment of outrage. UNTIL I realized a few things (well, three things, listed here in my order of importance).

First of all, a conventional gallon of milk at my local supermarket is about 4 bucks. And, I’m not much of a milk drinker so a gallon of milk is a lot of milk. But organically grown vegetables at places like Whole Foods have generally cost just under double the amount of conventional vegetables at conventional grocery stores. This is nothing that new. The idea that organics were going to price themselves out of the market has been around as long as the USDA organic label paved the path for these foods’ availability in grocery stores. Organic food is quite high in places like Whole Foods anyway, because of the business structure of the distribution system, NOT because of the price of producing the product.

Secondly, this is a point of comparison to conventional food prices, which are artificially low because of government subsidies to big commodity producers. A regular gallon of milk shouldn’t cost 99 cents, and you shouldn’t be able to by chicken for 59 cents a pound, in the year 2008, in the United States of America. Organic food producers (and there is a negative correlation to size here) are much less likely to receive USDA subsidies for their production. Add this to the cost of distribution, and a higher price point for consumers is what happens….. in grocery stores.

This leads to my third point, and one that I think will be echoed this growing season by local food advocates – while prices go up, due to higher prices for oil and fertilizers-of-all-types, those with shorter supply chains (farmers markets and CSAs) will go up less, proportionally, to organic and conventional foods alike in grocery stores.

We’ll wait and see what happens, with conventional and organic food prices alike!

In any case, Food First does it better than I could.  Check out their website for analysis of what is going on.  Raj Patel from Food First has a new book, and recently discussed the food crisis on Democracy Now.  The transcript is worth checking out.

Please stay tuned.  We’ll be posting more on this and other issues soon.

I just downloaded it from their site, but have not explored it enough to offer an opinion on it (other than that I found it tedious to move my person around with the arrow keys). It seems to present an interesting opportunity for exploring these issues, perhaps even in the classroom. I’d be interested in what others think about it, aside from the small issue of the game necessarily requiring sedentary behavior.

I also think you can create communities so you can play the game with friends and family. Anyone have some spare time on their hands?

Raw milk advocates say that we are weakening our bodies’ defenses against disease by eating only “sterilized,” bacteria-free foods. And, they argue, food companies contribute to chronic disease – making far more people sick than unpasteurized milk does – by promoting unhealthy diets. Yet legal and regulatory action is primarily taken against sources of acute, not chronic, illness. So raw milk dairies get shut down, while the major food conglomerates flourish.

I thought this quote from a dairy farmer nicely summarized the contradictions: “If my milk gets someone sick, I deserve some blame, but not all of it. People have to take responsibility for maintaining their own immune systems. And we have to look at an environmental level, too. Where did these germs come from? E. coli O157:H7 evolved on grain-fed cattle. It’s amazing to me that we’ve sat by as factory farmers feed more than half the antibiotics in the country to animals and breed these antibiotic-resistant bacteria at the same time the food corporations are destroying our immune systems.”

The irony, of course, is that Group Danone (maker of Dannon yogurt and Perrier water) is making a fortune selling yogurt advertised as containing probiotics (beneficial bacteria). Danone’s claims about the benefits of Activia and DanActive yogurt have been contested in a class action lawsuit filed earlier this year, but a Time Magazine article last week says that probiotic-fortified foods are the next big thing for the food industry. I guess the idea is to get all of the “good” bacteria with none of the risk. But would “bad” bacteria even pose a risk if we farmed and ate another way?

In the meantime, here’s some more news about food contamination. This time, it’s fancy Italian cheese, containing the carcinogen dioxin. Looks like it’s still not clear how exactly the contamination occurred, or how widespread it is, but yikes.

Although I like the idea of the policy, I wonder if it’s likely to have the desired effect. As much as I think it makes sense for all players in the food business to provide far more information about the nutritional content of their products (in addition to information about where ingredients are sourced, how they were produced, etc.), I just wonder how much impact this has on people’s food habits. The assumption that, “if people only knew X, they would make better decisions about it,” only goes so far. Perhaps the more significant impact of this law would be that having to post this information in plain sight may prompt many of these chains to reformulate their most fattening dishes to make the numbers less forbidding. But they may also figure out ways to sugar-coat the numbers, just as nutrition labels on packaged foods seem to confound as many people as they inform.

A 2006 survey of how well people understood the information on food labels produced some worrisome results. 23% of respondents reported that they rarely or never read food labels. They also found widespread difficulty in correctly interpreting the information on the labels. For example, “only 32% of patients could correctly calculate the amount of carbohydrates in a 20-oz bottle of soda that had 2.5 servings in the bottle.” I would hope that this law stipulates that calorie counts at least refer to the entire item, and not to individual servings within it.

In looking around on-line for information about the bill, I was amazed by the venomous comments on the local news websites reporting on the bill. People seem to be truly angered by the prospect that menus might be cluttered by this information, or that this undesired information will interfere with their enjoyable night out. This, I really don’t get.

For some good information in support of this policy, check out this report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest on trends in restaurant dining and its likely connection to rising obesity rates.