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The European Union has traditionally been more cautious of genetically-modified (GM) foods than the rest of us. They require more scientific study than other food safety organizations before approving individual seeds and ban a significant number of GM seeds as well. This stands in stark contrast to U.S. policies that encourage GM crop growing through subsidies. According to an article in the Christian Science Monitor, 92% of Minnesota’s 2007 soybean crop and 86% of its corn crop came from GM seeds.
Now, mounting pressure from both Europe’s farmers and global food aid organizations have caused the high courts of various EU countries to reconsider.
As the prices of basic food staples like corn and wheat have risen 45% since the end of 2006 and food inflation has reached 80% in some countries, the world’s hungry are increasing in number and desperation. A poignant article on the front page of today’s New York Times shows a young girl standing on a garbage heap, interrupting her food foraging to pose for the photographer. The rising costs of food are causing not only desperation in Haiti, but a bread crisis in Egypt, riots in Burkina Faso and inflation-spurred government upheaval in Malaysia. The World Bank now lists 33 countries that are on the verge of large-scale upheaval due directly to inflated food costs. You can understand why I am finding it hard to post the Passover recipes I had planned for the weekend. Who can care about matzo candy when children featured in the Haiti article survive on two spoonfuls of rice each day?
But I didn’t just come here to bring you down. A new agricultural economics paper has given us some reason to hope, if we can organize our food industry to action.
I just read an article about a new in-house organics label from a retail giant here in Canada, Shoppers Drug Mart. Despite the name “drug mart,” Shoppers carries an impressively large inventory of edible items. And while I have always appreciated their supply of organic shampoo, deodorant and toothpaste, I haven’t given the food aisle a second glance.
Most of their offerings are of the Doritos n’ gummi worms variety. You know, food that isn’t labeled with real words. It made me think of the changing landscape of discount organics and what it means for consumers.
I began eating organic foods because I was worried about consuming compounds that are linked to cancer clusters, spiked infertility rates, and neurological disorders like autism. Once I began to learn about what compounds in conventional food could do to my body, I found factory farmed and processed fare pretty hard to swallow. Despite this, it never even occurred to me that there could be a connection between the toxicants in our produce, meat and dairy and the alarming rate of obesity we face.
But according to a 2004 study in the International Journal of Obesity summarized in Bicycling Magazine, a class of pesticides called organochlorines actually slow down human metabolisms, making it harder for the body to use calories. Like many toxicants, organochlorines are bioaccumulaters, which means they are stored in the body rather than excreted efficiently. Most bioaccumulators are stored in the fat tissue of animals, including humans. Mercury is a good example of a bioaccumulator: tuna, swordfish and shark have high levels of mercury than sardines and shrimp because they are higher on the food chain and thus eat the mercury stored in the fatty tissue of prey fish, compounding toxicity. Similarly, organochlorines are stored in our fatty tissue.
But unlike heavy metals like mercury, organochlorines are actually excreted from tissue cells when a person burns calories (thermogenesis). At first, this sounds pretty good; obviously, the organochlorines are expelled from the body with a bit more efficiency than other bioaccumulators. The problem is, when we burn fat, the organochlorines are released into our bloodstream, where they are able to disrupt our mitochondria - the parts of our cells that generate energy. In doing so, they slow down each cell’s metabolic rate, which is another way of saying that they slow down a person’s entire metabolism.
I guess Thursday is Bad Cow Day. Sorry cows! I love your sweet, cud-chewing faces, but your owners have issues!
According to the Humane Society, 17% of the U.S. beef supply comes from spent dairy cows. These cows no longer produce financially viable quantities of milk and are sold at steep discount to slaughterhouses. In fact, prices for dairy cows can be as little as one-tenth the price of a well-fed beef steer on the meat market. This partially has to do with net meat gain: the dairy cow is bred for optimum lactation, not muscle mass. The price differential also has to do with condition: the dairy cows tend to be older and more feeble, depleted of calcium and afflicted with a multitude of bacterial infections, the result of sedentary, unifunctional lives.
Industrial farming costs us dearly in greenhouse gas emission levels. By some measures, the ecological impact of the farming industry outweighs even its economic impact. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock off-gassing (methane, ammonia and others from sheep dung, cow farts, etc) makes up 18% of our total greenhouse gas emissions alone. This statistic does not even include the gas guzzling tractors, coal-fueled processing machines such as automated milkers and pesticide sprayers, or petroleum-based synthetic fertilizers. You know, just to name a few.
But just as our government rewards the profit-focused mentality of factory farmers with further tax breaks and incentives, it is now rewarding their disregard for the environment. Yielding to lobbyist pressure, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reversing a 25 year old requirement that forces industrial farmers to report their toxic gas emissions levels.
By Meredith Melnick •
February 28, 2008
If you’ve been paying attention to food news over the past month, you have surely heard of the downer cow debacle between the Humane Society and the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company. In shocking, secret footage recorded by Humane Society activists at the Chino, California livestock farm, handlers are shown using electric prods, high-pressure hoses and forklifts to rouse “downer” cows to their feet so that they can pass USDA inspection.
A downer cow is an animal that is too ill to stand up on its own. After the Mad Cow Disease scares of the late 1990s, Congress passed legislation that prohibited these animals from entering the food supply because of a slightly increased risk of spreading disease into the human population. But in September of 2007, Congress added a loophole to the measure, allowing downer cows into the food supply if a veterinarian deemed it safe. This measure was included to allow otherwise healthy animals with broken legs or torn ligaments into the food supply, but in fact opened the floodgates to profit-minded decisions in bovine health.
Much has been made of the fact that 30% of the shipment that included these particular downer cows filmed was destined for federally-run nutrition program, including the plates of low-income school children who take advantage of free lunch programs. For an in depth look at the socio-economic and children’s rights implications of this scandal, have a look at this excellent article over at The Ethicurean.
But beyond the incredibly important issue of the socio-economic food division, there are two major but separate complaints leveled against the USDA and their complicity in this incident: the issues of food safety and of animal welfare.
Americans eat more than a ton of corn every year. Literally, a ton. Right now, you’re thinking, "There’s no way. No one eats that much corn, even in August." Well, that ton is not really corn in its unsullied, fresh-from-the-field, bought-at-a roadside-stand form. Nor is it in its canned-creamed-or-not form. Most of the corn we eat is in the form of processed additives and sweetners. Green Options’
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