"The impulse to share food is basic and ancient, and it's no
wonder the old stories teach that what you give to a stranger, you give to
God. When I first read about the Prophet Elijah-who was fed in the desert by
ravens and in the village of Zarephath by a starving widow-I suddenly got a
picture of that story, repeated over and over, tumbling down through
thousands of years, repeating at every turn: That's like the time we
found fruit in the forest. That's like the woman who made me tea in the
town. The fact is, people feed one another constantly from their own
bodies, their own plates, their own inadequate stores of insufficient food.
Food is what people have in common, and it is, precisely, common."
-Sara Miles
Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion The Spiritual memoir
of a twenty-first-century Christian
" Historian Alfred Crosby points out that by stripping bare the earth at
cultivation and harvest, Neolithic grain farmers provided openings for
aggressive colonizing plants and so nurtured the creation of weeds as surely
as crops. It is no accident that the Old Testament refers often to weeds,
tares, and thistles plaguing the fields of the Middle East. And by settling
in one place at high enough densities to accumulate garbage heaps, early
farmers and villagers also attracted mice, rats, and roaches and "invented
the animal equivalent of weeds: varmints. " People crowded together in close
proximity to varmints, and domesticated animals provided a new arena for
parasites and diseases to develop-among them pox and influenza viruses and
the morbillivirus family (distemper, rinderpest, measles). These ancient
associations would help later generations of Europeans as well as their
plant, animal , and microbial camp followers to conquer new worlds
together."
-Yvonne Baskin
A Plague of Rats and Rubber-vines: The Growing Threat of Species
Invasions
"in 1798, in a treatise entitled "An Essay on the Principle of
Population," Thomas Malthus, the Anglican parson turned economist, gathered
these trends into a single pessimistic forecast: humanity was doomed.
Although people were astonishingly clever at finding ways to make more
food-and, indeed, the scarcer food became, the cleverer people got-Malthus
believed that hunger would never be eradicated because any increase in food
served only to make populations even larger, These larger populations then
exceeded available food supplies, plunging humanity into famine and strife
until scarcity sparked the next round of productivity increases, which then
sparked yet another populations surge."
-Paul Roberts
The End of Food
before we plow an unfamiliar patch
It is well to be informed about the winds,
About the variation in the sky;
The native traits and habits of the place,
What each locale permits, and what denies"
-Virgil
"Vaclav Smil, a resource economist at the University of
Manitoba and an expert in what might be called the global nutrient economy,
has described Haber-Bosch as the most important invention of the twentieth
century, and its arrival did indeed mark a turning point in food production.
Traditionally, nitrogen supplies had been limited to the quantities
generated by plants; farmers could grow cover crops, which biologically
fixed nitrogen directly into the soils, or farmers could feed the crops to
livestock, which then concentrated the nitrogen in their manure. but in both
cases, the supply of nitrogen was limited to the amount of land farmers
could devote to rotation crops or feed crops. by 1900, for example, farmers
were committing as much as half of their total acreage to growing feed or
cover crops, which meant that just half their land was available to produce
cash crops-a huge constraint in a world where acres are finite. with
Haber-Bosch, however, these natural limits no longer seemed relevant.
Because atmospheric nitrogen was effectively infinite in supply, there was
no limit to how much nitrogen could be produced and used-as long as there
was the energy to run ammonia refineries, which, with the rapid growth of
the petroleum industry, there was. Farmers, could apply as much nitrogen as
their high-growth plants would absorb. Thus, for all the importance of the
new plant-breeding technologies, it was fertilizer that actually fueled the
explosive boom in grain production; by Smil's estimate, nearly half of the
extra food produced since 1950 (and more than two-thirds of the extra
people) has been a direct result of the availability of synthetic nitrogen."
Paul Roberts
The End of Food
"Stanford economist Peter Timmer is a measured, thoughtful scholar not given
to exaggeration, but when it comes to the global markets, one thing worries
him above all else. "I'm quite concerned about what the large food companies
are doing to the quality and safety of our diet," he said. You need not be
an economist to realize that food farmed, harvested, and processed in
enormous quantities and sold at very low prices is unlikely to have been
handled with great care. lack of care can lead to sloppiness, and sloppiness
to contamination, infestation, and infection. More than two hundred known
diseases are transmitted by food through viruses, bacteria, parasites,
toxins, metals, and prions, the protein implicated in a number of fatal
neurological disorders including mad cow disease and its lethal human
version, a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The less we spend on
food, the more likely it is that one or more of these killers will sneak
into our food supply.
An estimated 76 million cases of food borne disease occur
each year in the United States, requiring 325,000 hospitalizations and
resulting in 5,000 deaths. new surveillance data-and newfound links between
food and disease-suggest that these are underestimates. The vast majority of
food-related illness goes unreported, and the vast majority of food-related
threats are likely to be as yet unknown."
-Ellen Ruppel Shell
Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
"In the great hogariums a hog remains in one place, on its feet, for life.
Since it does not root about-or even move-it builds up no natural resistance
to disease. This means a great deal of drugs are pumped into the prisoner's
body until its death and transfiguration as inedible ham."
-Gore Vidal
Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
"Industrial agriculture is devastating our land, water, and air, and is now
threatening the sustainability of the biosphere. Its massive chemical and
biological inputs cause widespread environmental havoc as well as human
disease and death. Its monoculturing reduces the diversity of our plants
and animals. Its habitat destruction endangers wildlife. Its factory farming
practices cause untold animal suffering. Its centralized corporate ownership
destroys farm communities around the world, leading to mass poverty and
hunger. The industrial agriculture system is clearly unsustainable. It has
truly become a fatal harvest.
However, despite these devastating impacts, the industrial
paradigm in agriculture, still gets a free ride from our media and policy
makers. It is rare to hear questioning, much less a call for the overthrow,
of this increasingly catastrophic food production system. This troubling
quiescence can be attributed, in part, to the enormous success that
agribusiness has had in utilizing the "big lie," a technique familiar to
all purveyors of propaganda. Corporate agriculture has flooded, and
continues to inundate, the public with self-serving myths about modern food
production. For decades, the industry has effectively countered virtually
every critique of industrial agriculture with the "big lie" strategy."
-The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture
Edited by Andrew Kimbrell
"warned that Britain's food industry was under threat from witchcraft....In
a speech to the Food and Drink Federation in London, Mr. Gummer surprised
delegates when he referred to the "great danger of the revival of
witchcraft." He went on to blame "irrational forces" for the EC ban on BST,
a milk-boosting hormone, and the campaign against food irradiation. (Mr.
Gummer is a former member of the Church of England (General synod), 'He said
"It is an amazing fact that all these things are being looked at through the
suspicious eyes of those who believe in witchcraft"....The latest Gummerism
was described by Tim Lang, head of the health pressure group Parents for
Safe Food, as evidence that the minister had "finally gone off his trolley."
The Independent, 7 march 1992 by Judy Jones
"Juan Zapata is hardly the first person to suggest that consumers need
protection from the modern food system. If Americans and other rich-world
consumers are no longer haunted by scarcity or blandness, the cost of such
varied bounty has been a food supply that is in many respects ill suited to
our physiology. Our scientifically bred produce grows so quickly that it
contains measurably fewer micronutrients. Our processed foods are often
packed with large quantities of salt, fat, and sweeteners, not to mention
hundreds of chemical additives, some of which, such as the preservative
sodium benzoate and yellow food coloring, are definitively linked to medical
problems, such as hyperactivity. and where the wild animals our ancestors
gnawed on were naturally lean, our grain-fed livestock is specially bred not
only to put on lots of fat, but to partition that fat inside the
muscle: indeed, today's premium cuts are those with more marbling."
Paul Roberts
The End of Food
"Corporate, mechanized agriculture in the United States is
often viewed as a success story, able to supply its people with a high-fat,
high-protein diet, which also contains plenty of salt and sugar, along with
many mystery chemicals. Never mind that it spans the entire spectrum of
flavors-from sawdust all the way to cardboard-cleverly disguised by the fat,
salt, sugar and mystery chemicals. Never mind that this questionable food is
often ingested in a hurry, from a piece of paper or plastic. Never mind that
it makes the people fat, crazy and sick. The portions are nothing if not
generous, even for the poorest people, many of whom sport cathedral0like
domes and buttresses of fat."
-Dmitry Orlov
Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects
"Mother earth never attempts to farm without livestock; she always raises
mixed crops; great pains are taken to preserve the soil and to prevent
erosion; the mixed vegetable and animal wastes are converted into humus;
there is no waste; the processes of growth and the processes of decay
balance one another; ample provision is made to maintain large reserves of
fertility; the greatest care is taken to store the rainfall; both plants and
animals are left to protect themselves against disease."
-Sir Albert Howard An Agriculture Testament 1940
"a good part of agriculture is to learn how to adapt one's work to nature.
To live in right relation with his natural conditions is one of the first
lessons that a wise farmer or any other wise man learns."
Hyde Bailey The Holy Earth
"To whomsoever the soil at any time belongs, to him belongs the fruits of
it. White parasols, And elephants mad with pride are the flowers of a grant
of land."
-Sirwar Jones translator of an Indian grant of land
the resources that go into sustaining the life of the average American.
We use 9,450 quarts of milk during our lifetime. Along with what we eat 150
cows, 225 lambs, 26 sheep, 310 hogs, 26 acres of grain, and 50 acres of
fruit and vegetables, not to mention all the non-edible resources....
Article: "where's the Beef? New York Times Sunday Oct
12, 2008 Magazine Questions for Robert Kenner maker of
Documentary Film "Food, Inc
Q. Your new documentary, "Food,Inc," is the latest contribution to a growing
shelf of books and films that weave ominous narratives about the food we
eat. Would you say your main point is that conglomerates have ruined
supermarket food? I thought I was making a film about food, but the big
surprise was it became about first Amendment issues as much as anything.
Agribusiness doesn't want us looking inside their kitchen. They still want
us to think our food comes from a farm with a white picket fence. I've spent
more on this film in legal fees that I did for my past 15 films combined.
You were worried Perdue or Tyson might sue? Everyone sues. The
companies talked to me on the phone, and some even had dinner with us, but
they didn't want to be on camera. "
Ed* Americans are now afraid to criticize Corporate food producers...Land of
the Free?
See Article: Why Take Food Seriously? Because Your life depends on it"
by Mark Bittman
Sunday New York Times Oct 12, 2008 Magazine
"Cows are everywhere. There are over one billion cows alive today. They are
grazing on six continents. a quarter of the earth's landmass is used as
pasture for cattle and other livestock. The productivity of the world's
grassland is highly variable. On very rich grassland, a cow can be supported
for a year on two and on half acres. In marginal grazing land, fifty or more
acres of grassland may be required to feed a single cow for a year.
In Australia, the number of cows exceeds the number of people
by 40 percent. In South America, there are nine cows for every ten people.
in Argentina , brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay, the cattle population equals or
exceeds the human population. The world's cattle population has increased by
5 percent in the past decade.
there are now about 100 million cows in the United state4s,
nearly one cow for every two and a half Americans. With less that 5 percent
of the human population of the planet, the United States boasts 8 percent of
the cattle population.
Jeremy Rifkin
Beyond beef: The rise and Fall of the Cattle culture
"There are over one billion cows alive today. They are grazing on six
continents. A quarter of the earth's landmass is used as pasture for cattle
and other livestock....nearly 29 percent of the landmass of the United
States is currently used as grazing land, primarily to feed cattle."
Jeremy Rifkin
Beyond Beef
Book: "Dying For A Hamburger: Modern Meat Processing and the
Epidemic of Alzheimer's Disease" by M. Waldman & M. Lamb
"The Hummer-like efficiency of the beef cow, never really
mattered when corn and other feed grains were cheap...'
-Paul Roberts
The End of Food
"....the world's output of meat increased fivefold in
the second half of the 20th century. We now have 22 billion farm animals,
including 15 billion chickens and 1.3 billion cattle. And the industry is
girding its loins for a 50% increase in the next two decades. By 2050, the world's
livestock population will, on present trends, have grown to the point where
the plant food it consumes could feed an extra 4 billion people, if it
wasn't hived off for meat production.
The environment is already suffering and will
further if the extra beasts continue to be raised intensively in
"factories". Million-head "pig cities" already exist in
the US and are now planned for Poland when it becomes part of the expanded
European Union. Collectively, the world's livestock produce 10 per cent of
all the greenhouse gases, including 25 per cent of the methane, among the
most potent of all. Then there is water, which is rapidly becoming the
greatest check on overall food productivity. It takes 4=500 litres to raise
a kilo of potatoes; 900 for a kilo of wheat; nearly 2000 for rice or soya;
3500 for a kilo of chicken; and a staggering 100,000 litres for a kilo of
beef."
Colin Trudge
So Shall we Reap
"Mary had a little lamb/And when she saw it sicken/ She
shipped it off to Packingtown/ And now it's labeled chicken."
That little ditty famously summarized the
message of "The Jungle." Upton Sinclair's 1906 expose of condition in
America's meat-packing industry. Sinclair's muckraking helped Theodore
Roosevelt pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act-and
for most of the next century, Americans trusted government inspectors to
keep their food safe.
Lately, however, there always seems to be at
least one food-safety crisis in the headlines-tainted spinach, poisonous
peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes. The
declining credibility of U.S. food regulation has even led to a
foreign-policy crisis: there have been mass demonstrations in South Korea
protesting the pro-American prime minister's decision to allow imports of
U.S. beef, banned after mad cow disease was detected in 2003.
How did America find itself back in the Jungle?
It started with ideology. Hard-core American
conservatives have long idealized the Gilded Age, regarding everything that
followed-not just the New Deal, but even the Progressive Era-as a great
diversion from the true path of Capitalism.
Thus when Grover Norquist, the anti-tax
advocate, was asked about his ultimate goal, he replied that he wanted a
restoration of the way America was "up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the
socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.".
(See Article by) Paul Krugman BAD COW Disease
New York Times Friday, June 13, 2008
article in New York Times editorial Sunday January 10
,2010
More Perils of Ground Meat
"About eight years ago, a company called Beef
Products Inc. had the novel idea of injecting its ground beef with ammonia
to kill deadly E. coli and salmonella. The Agriculture Department pronounced
the idea effective and exempted Beef Products Inc. from routine tests. The
company's beef began appearing regularly in grocery stores, fast food
restaurants and school lunch programs. it turned out the beef was not
safe........"
(Letter to the editor same page as above)
To the editor:
Let me see if I have this straight: We are now
feeding our children stuff that used to be reserved for dog food, by
treating it with ammonia, in order to save three cents a pound? hey, why not
just feed the little tykes dog food? I'm sure it would save even more
money.................."
"While agriculture prospers all other arts alike are
vigorous and strong, but where the land is forced to remain desert , the
spring that feeds the other arts is dried up."
-Xenophon (440-355 B.C.)
"....According to the Leopold Center for Sustainable
Agriculture at Iowa State University, the food we eat now typically travels
between 1,500 and 3,000 miles from farm to plate. The distance had increased
by up to 25 percent between 1980 and 2001, when the study was published. It
was likely continuing to climb."
-Alisa Smith & J.B. Mackinnon
Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating
Locally
"Indeed, the vast bulk of American farm subsidies go to the
richest agribusinesses in the world. Agricultural subsidies are the most
expensive form of domestic protection. As the San Francisco Chronicle
noted, "From 1995 to 2002 the U.S. taxpayer doled out more than $114 billion
to farmers, and in 2002 President Bush upped subsidies to $190 billion over
the next 10 years.
The Heritage Foundation reports that "these
subsidy programs tax working Americans to award millions to millionaires and
provide profitable corporate farms with money that has been used to buy out
family farms. The Foundation reports that the cost of farm subsidies over a
ten-year period comes to $4,400 for the average American household in tax
payments and in increased food prices."
By subsidizing agriculture, our government not
only soaks us for more tax money but also makes it harder and harder for
third world farmers to eke out a subsistence living. Truly the most selfish
and greedy of our budgetary policies, farm subsidies cost the American
taxpayer billions- and cut farm income in the third world countries by $24
billion a year, according to the National Center for Policy Analysis.
And who gets the benefit? Not America's family
farms. The Environmental Working Group reports that 71 percent of the farm
subsidies to the riches 10 percent of farmers. And the so-called family farm
hallowed in tradition? Sixty percent of farms get no subsidy at all, while
in 2002 seventy-eight farms go more than a million dollars in subsidies.
Further, the government subsidies are not spread out across the country;
more than half of them go to only twenty-five congressional districts (out
of 435)"
-Dick Morris & Eileen McGann
Outrage
"If you added the real cost of industrial food-its health,
environmental, and social costs-to the current supermarket price, not even
our wealthiest citizens could afford to buy it."
-The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial
Agriculture Ed by Andrew Kimbrell
"There can be no manner of doubt that the original home and
habitat of these (orange) trees was on the eastern and southern slopes of
the Himalayan massif; a fact which is reflected in the presence of the
maximum number of old-established varieties in the Chinese culture-area,
also in the extreme antiquity of the Chinese literary references. It is also
betrayed by the considerable number of single written characters denoting
particular species-not only ju for orange and you for pomelo,
but also gan for certain kinds of oranges, cheng for sweet
oranges, luan for the sour orange and yuan for the
citron-always a sign of ancientness in the nomenclature."
-Joseph Needham on the Chinese Origin of Oranges, The Fruit
first mentioned in the Book Shu Jing, probably Dating From 800 BC
From Science and Civilization in China, Vol IV, Part I
"Our modern food system can only truly be understood as an
economic system...one that, like all economic systems, has winners
and losers, suffers periodic and occasionally profound instability and is
plagued by the same inherent and irreducible gap between what we demand and
what is actually supplied."
-Paul Roberts
The End of Food
"For every one of the 18,000 days of the past 50
years, some 218 Farms in the U.S. closed'
"Eating can bind a pair together more effectively than
sex, simply because people eat more often and predictably than they have
sexual relations."
-Peter Farb & George Armelagos
Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating
"Unless It can rejuvenate itself, the hamburger may be wiped out by
a combination of bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE, or mad cow disease)
and jaded palates.
In France, McDonald’s is pinning its hopes on a burger gastronomique,
injecting more a la France and less best of America. McDonald’s in
the U.S. has been cutting prices to boost flagging sales. In Britain, burger
sales plummeted during the BSE crisis. It has been the slowest meat product
to show a recovery.
The Irish burger, for its part, is holding its own. Sales dropped during
the BSE crisis but have nearly recovered. McDonald’s plans to open 20 new
restaurants in Ireland within three years."
Kevin O’Sullivan, Irish Times, Dublin, March 29, 1997*
* Ed note: The New York Times Summer of 2008 has several
articles of the hamburger becoming the meal of choice in fancy European and
New York restaurants with top Chefs vying to reach hamburger
perfection....Several restaurants getting as much as $75 per burger
"Europe’s farms have become highly productive in the last 20
years, thanks to mechanization, fertilizers, and pesticides. But these
improvements are threatening the environment in some agricultural regions,
rain now carries off up to 10 tons of soil per hectare each year, reports a
multinational research project called EUROSEM (European Soil Erosion Model).
The project has created a model of Europe’s climate and other conditions
to evaluate the effects of specific soil-conservation measures (such as
plant cover) on reversing erosion and saving Europe’s farms."
EUROSEM, R.P.C. Morgan, Cranfield University, Silsoe College
"Bruce Hannon of the U of Illinois says: 80 million acres would be
freed of for other uses (If we had one meatless day in 3). Only 5% of this
are set aside for growing vegetables, soy beans, would make up for the lost
protein.
The raising of timber, sugarcane, or sunflowers on the remainder would
supply enough fuel for 225,000 new one-thousand-megawatt power stations.
1 / 2 of the world’s fish catch is fed to livestock.
About 45 million beef cattle roam some 870 million acres-more than 2/3 of
the land mass in our 17 western states.
Over 80% of the corn, oats and soybeans are eaten by livestock. (in the
US)
Each year the world’s farmers are expected to feed 86 million more
people with 24 billion tons less topsoil.
If we were simply to grow food for people we would need 30% of the yield
we now require from an acre. To supply one meat eater – 3 ¼ acre
Lacto-vegetarian – ½ acre Pure Vegetarian – 1/6 acre."
Lester Brown
"Within 10 years we will have a moderate to large scale ecological
or economic catastrophe, because there will be so many (genetically
engineered) products being released."
Norm Ellstrand
The Butterfly People
"They first appeared among poor Spanish shepherds in the eighteenth
century. But it didn't stop there, and the so-called "butterfly
people" were soon seen everywhere: dazed peasants marked on the bridge
of the nose with a curious butterfly design, which soon spread to the rest
of their body in huge throbbing scabs. Some drowned themselves to stop the
itching. Others went slowly insane. By 1881 an estimated one hundred
thousand people in Italy were affected, and corn, which had become a staple
among the poorest of the poor, was fingered as the cause. Some said the
vegetable's "impure Indian" nature lay at the root of the horrible
disease. Others claimed moldy kernels were the culprit. In America, where
the disease was rampant among the poorer people in the South, South Carolina
actually put the vegetable on trial. "Corn stands indicted!" wrote
the state's agricultural commissioner in 1909, "the original wild grass
of Aztecs and given to us by the Indian. You are here assembled to try the
case and render a verdict...for the charge of murder..." It wasn't
until the mid-1900s that Nobel nominee Joseph Goldberger proved that the
disease, now called pellagra (rough skin), was caused by the absence of
vitamin niacin in corn. The mystery, however, was why there were no cases of
pellagra among the Indians, who for centuries had been so heavily on the
stuff. The answer lay in how the plant was processed. Indians always soaked
the kernels overnight in a bath made of water and lime or wood ashes before
grinding it into meal. The European invaders had assumed this was merely to
make the maize easier to grind and had taken it as an example of
"Indian laziness." It turned out that the step of soaking the
grain with ash, called mixamalization, was what released the niacin
"bound up" inside corn and turned the plant into a kind of
universal superfood that met almost all nutritional requirements. The
Indians were well aware of this-they used a similar process with coca
(cocaine) leaves to activate its chemical stimulants-But the European
invaders were apparently so arrogant they hadn't bothered to ask."
Stewart Lee Allen
In the Devil's Garden
"Even when I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our
songs, our language, and eventually our souls. I know that it was a rare
home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare
exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits
of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with
aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn
was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he
grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly
change for the better."
-John Steinbeck
"The anxiety that society was being undermined, that men and
women were being dragged down into a pit of weakness, sloth and ennui,
became the dark counterpoint to the Perfect Human aspirations of the
Enlightenment. When this anxiety flowed into the race fears of the late
nineteenth century, a man such as John Harvey Kellogg was there at the
conjunction. laziness and dependence, the products of consumer culture's
addiction to novelty and luxury, were to be combated with a healthy Puritan
diet. Cornflakes, granola, soya milk, peanut butter and nut-based artificial
meats were all Kellogg discoveries, all promoted with a deep conviction that
diet was the key to unlock the gates of paradise. Radical enfeeblement would
be defeated with improved breakfast habits and the Race Betterment League.
Ironically, in the hands of his entrepreneurial brother, Will, Kellogg's
cornflakes would be part of an important forward step in this debilitating
consumer culture: branded products.
Sylvester Graham, fire-and-brimstone preacher and dietary
guru of the 1840s, introduced another brand, his Graham Cracker, the
antidote to over-sumptuous food and moral infirmities. 'Millions of
children,' Graham announced, would 'soon unite in one dark and mighty
confluence of ignorance and immorality and crime, which will overflow the
wholesome restraints of society, and sweep away the barriers of civil law,
and sap the foundations of our Republican institutions'. Austere wheat
crackers were the answer."
-Kevin Rushby
paradise: A History of the Idea That Rules The World
"The world is but a hill of beans. Nearly every place on earth has its
own native species and nearly every culture has depended on beans. For many
people, they have made the difference between life and death. Beans are
practically indestructible if thoroughly dried and well stored and thus have
provided critical insurance against times of famine and dearth,. They are
also one of the simplest plants to grow. The cultivation of beans has been
crucial to the development of civilization: as a source of protein, as
cattle fodder and as a means of replenishing nitrogen in the soil. Though
all great agricultural societies have their own staple starch-wheat in the
Middle East and Europe, rice in Asia, corn in the Americas-beans are one of
the few foods that serve as a unit of analysis and comparison across time
and space. They are also among the few foods so avidly traded and
transplanted across the continents throughout history that today few people
apart from botanists can keep all the species straight. Sorting out the bean
genealogy is a major goal of this book."
-Ken Albala
Beans: A History
"There has always been a grain trade, ever since men began
to eat bread. The early civilizations of Greece and Rome imported wheat from
their colonies, and Socrates himself recognized that 'no man qualifies as a
statesman who is entirely ignorant of the problems of wheat." From the
fourteenth century on, Mediterranean merchants (well paid by the grand dukes
of the coastal city states) organized relief shipments of wheat from
northern Europe in times of famine. And in the eighteenth century, merchants
gathered in the coffee houses of London to trade information about the
prices of wheat from the feudal estates of Poland, east of the Oder River,
wheat flowed to London from the port of Danzig.
But it was not until the nineteenth century that the modern
grain trade came of age. Southern Russia and North America became the great
suppliers of wheat to the new industrial cities of England and the
Continent. The Industrial Revolution, which drew tens of thousands of
European farmers, peasants, and laborers into factory towns and away from
their food supply, created an insatiable demand for wheat. And gradually,
the international trade in basic necessities-in wheat for bread, in cotton
for cloth, and in tallow for candles-overshadowed the ancient trade in
luxury items for the rich (spices, ivory, silk, and indigo) that had been
the principal activity of merchants until then. The growing international
demand for wheat transformed the world's trade routes. Russian peasants
hauled wheat in wooden oxcarts to Odessa, on the Black Sea, and California
merchants loaded great clipper ships full of bagged wheat and sent them on
14,000-mile journeys around Cape Horn-all so that the new British workingman
could eat wheat bread."
-Dan Morgan
Merchants of Grain: The power and profits of the five giant companies
at the center of the world's food supply
"You want to talk about returns? At 1,000:1, in four months, a tomato
seed makes even the highest fliers seem paltry."
-Eliot Coleman
******************************************************************
Book: The Last Harvest: The Genetic Gamble that Threatens to Destroy
American Agriculture …..by Paul Raebara
Book: "Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American
Meal." By Eric Schlosser
Article: "Food Processor" by Joan Acocella, New Yorker, Aug
19-26,2002
"Half the food grown for sale worldwide rots before it goes to
market. That’s the belief of the agriculture estimators."
(this does not include food eaten by rodents & insects)
Denmark has more food per person than any other country.
"Food to stave off starvation is the grim and primary demand of a
misery-ridden world. Does it seem a little irrational that, while we can’t
even keep 3 billion fed today, we cheerfully plan to keep 6 to 7 billion ‘adequately
fed’ tomorrow?"
Robert Rienod & Leona Renow
Movement in the Sun
"Food for all is a necessity. Food should not be a merchandise, to
be bought and sold by those who have the money to buy. Food is a human
necessity, like water and air, and it should be available."
Pearl S. Buck
"Maybe the technologists are right; maybe they can create conditions
that will support ten billion people on planet earth, or even more…it
might be possible, for example, to farm the entire land surface and the
oceans, too. We could process sewage into bouillon cubes, eat algae,
seaweed, plankton. All of these things are theoretically possible. But…it
seems like it would be a wretched world to live in – billions of humans
packed into some sort of planetary food factory. Buckminster Fuller thought
it could be done. But the question is, Should it be done? Who would want to
live in such an ugly world?"
Edward Abbey
"For those who are not hungry, it is easy to palaver about the
degradation of charity."
Charlotte Bronte
"The belly is the reason why man does not mistake himself for a
god."
Nietzche
COST OF BEEF
To produce one pound of steak, a steer consumes five pounds of grain and
2500 gallons of water and erodes about 35 pounds of topsoil.
Portion of land on the North American continent devoted to grazing: one
third.
Percentage of cropland in the United States planted with livestock feed:
more than 50.
Percentage of water consumed in the United States that’s consumed by
livestock: more than 50.
"What is happening in the sub-Saharan Sahel is only a dress
rehearsal for encroaching world famine. This is but the application of a
general law: When more than a certain proportion of value is produced by the
industrial mode, subsistence activities are paralyzed, equity declines, and
total satisfaction diminishes. It will not be the sporadic famine that
formerly came with drought and war, or the occasional food shortage that
could be remedied by good will and emergency shipments. The coming hunger is
a by-product of the inevitable concentration of industrialized agriculture
in rich countries and in the fertile regions of poor countries.
Paradoxically, the attempt to counter famine by further increases in
industrially efficient agriculture only widens the scope of the catastrophe
by depressing the use of marginal lands. Famine will increase until the
trend towards capital-intensive food production by the poor for the rich has
been replaced by a new kind of labor-intensive, regional, rural autonomy.
Beyond a certain level of industrial hubris, nemesis must set in, because
progress, like the broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice, can no longer be
turned off."
Ivan Illich
Medical Nemesis
"The supporters of organic farming, bio-agriculture, alternative
agriculture and optimum production are beginning to make themselves heard,
and not before time. I am convinced that the only steps that can be taken
are to explore methods o production which make better and more effective use
of renewable natural resources."
Prince Charles
"As we talked of freedom and justice one day for all, we sat down to
steaks. I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it
out."
Alice Walker
"If the body is not sacred, what is?"
Walt Whitman
"The world was for long divided into three major empires,
of roughly equal size, based on the three main staple foods, wheat, rice and
maize. But what separated people even more was the sauce of spice they added:
olive oil in the Mediterranean, soya in China, chili in Mexico, butter in
northern Europe, a whole variety of aromas in India. The Russians rioted in the
1840s when the government tried to persuade them to grow potatoes; being used to
living mainly on rye bread, they suspected a plot to turn them into slaves and
force a new religion on them; but within fifty years they were in love with
potatoes. The explanation is that they added the same sourness-kislotu-which
had always given savor to their food, and which was what they were ultimately
addicted to. Every people puts its own scent on its food, and it accepts change
only if it can conceal the change from itself, by smothering each novelty in its
scent. Optimism about change, whether in politics, economics or culture, is only
possible if this premise is accepted."
Theodore Zeldin
An Intimate History of Humanity
See: "Terminator Technology…The Killing Fields of the
Future?" by Martha L.Crouch
www.bio.indiania.edu/people/terminator.html
See: "Victims of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease" Le Monde
See: "No Credit to Politicians" by Reinhard Wandtner,Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung Nov 27,2000
"Rarely have the experts looked more helpless, and rarely have
politicians been so scorned by the public."
"No plant is licensed to dispose of confirmed BSE-infected material
in the republic. In July last year, government scientists said arrangements
for disposal, particularly burial of BSE-infected cattle, were
unsatisfactory. The latest solution-putting BSE carcasses in fridges-is not
ideal. It still does not get rid of the material. As with clinical waste, it
is not appropriate for it to be used for landfill or recycled. Exporting
such waste is an Irish solution to an Irish problem and not sustainable. The
ultimate solution is thermal treatment with an incinerator shown to operate
to the highest standards, as exists in many countries and within the Irish
industry."
Patrick Wall The Irish Times, Dublin, Nov 29,
The Green-back Revolution
by Seth Shulman
“Bona
Fide or not, concerns about the safety of genetically modified crops have been
grabbing headlines. But a far bigger story looms in agricultural biotechnology:
that of an industry choking on its own patent claims. For a powerful example,
consider recent patent activity at Monsanto.
First, the company won a patent-number 6,174,724 for those keeping
score-that covers a seminal technology in transgenic plant research: the use of
antibiotic-resistant genes as markers. It works like this: when researchers want
to insert new genes into plant cells, say to create a drought-tolerant variety,
they couple these ingoing genes with such a genetic marker. By then exposing the
target cells to antibiotics to see if they die (they don’t if things got to
the right place), scientists can easily test whether the gene transfer was a
success. There is probably no one in transgenic plant research who doesn’t
make use of this technique. But now, thanks to the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office’s woeful ineptitude, they will all have to beg permission from Monsanto
to use this fundamental technology, not mention pay an royalties the firm sets.
Amazingly, however, an even worse intellectual-property nightmare is
brewing. A pending Monsanto patent claims exclusive rights to a pivotal, widely
used germ called Agrobacterium tumefaciens. This was the very first
Trojan horse that scientists employed to sneak foreign genes into plants way
back in 1983. And if Monsanto wins exclusive control over it, the field will be
rocked even harder.
The real tragedy here is that both these patents (one
granted, one pending) would confer monopolies on technologies that fall way too
far upstream of the market to deserve patent protection. As many scholars have
noted, patents are supposed to be a compact between the public and the inventor:
in exchange for allowing the inventor a limited monopoly, the public gets access
to a new product. But in these cases, there is no new product. Instead, Monsanto
has essentially grabbed a piece of the ag biotech “info structure”-claiming
exclusive rights to a technological technique that every one in the field needs
to compete.
The problem is even worse in the Agrobacterium case. This patent
was filled nearly two decades ago but has been tied up in a purgatory called
“interference.” With four competing research teams claiming to have invented
essentially the same thing, the torturous case has already taken a mind numbing 18 years to adjudicate, with, not one, but two administrative-law judges
retiring during the process!
Thankfully , new rules will prevent the worst excesses of such situations
by starting the clock ticking on a patent’s life when an application is filed.
But under the rules operating in this case (and all pre-1995 filings), the clock
doesn’t start until a patent is granted. Which means that Monsanto is poised
to walk away with a spanking-new 17-year monopoly on a technology that has long
since become indispensable.
Which leads me to another gripe: the private capture of public
investment. Several teams that developed this powerful technology included
academic researchers operating partly on government grants. In a collegial
spirit, these scientists freely passed valuable findings to Monsanto, which is
now turning them into an exclusive claim.
The full story is chronicled with great insight by Daniel Charles in Lords
of the Harvest: Biotech, Big Money and the Future of Food. The book has a
lot more on its mind that Agrobacterium tumefaciens, , as Charles
examines the outsized ambitions that characterize the whole ag biotech industry.
But to my eye, if Monsanto succeeds in patenting the use of this germ, it will
go down as a classic tale of a collaborative scientific endeavor perverted by a
capricious winner-take-all patent system.
The problems extend far beyond two bad patents. In fact, so many overly
broad patents have issue in agricultural biotechnology that the entire field
will likely suffer. With tremendous consolidation in recent years, warring
fiefdoms of technological know-how have emerged. Firms like Monsanto use their
patents to squelch competitors and leverage control of technology in the
pipeline. Researchers are becoming so hamstrung by proprietary claims to key
conceptual tools-sometimes shut out from using them entirely-that it is becoming
ever harder to bring new inventions to market.
This is bad enough in the commercial sector. But the tangle of exclusive
claims on basic research is also smothering public-sector researchers who, just
a generation ago, launched the Green Revolution to bring high yield crop
varieties to the famine-plagued developing world. That revolution was spawned
not only by new technology but by a commitment to use new seed varieties as
building blocks to breed even better varieties in the future. With proprietary
claims like Monsanto’s, we’re tilling a far less fertile field. Maybe we
should call it the Greenback Revolution."
