Green Options

One issue that’s come to my attention since I started thinking more about my food is the debate about organic foods — are they healthier, and is the cost worth the potential benefits?

I’d love to buy organic food all the time, but it’s just not financially possible for me right now. That said, I believe in the health risks of pesticides on foods and would like to start moving in the direction of eating foods grown without them. But if I’m going to get a bang for my buck, which foods should I buy organic in order to protect myself from ingesting the most pesticides? Are some fruits and vegetables more susceptible to absorbing pesticides than others?

One list I found that can help answer this question is the Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides, which ranks 47 popular fruits and vegetables based on how many pesticides they contain, often after being washed and peeled. The list was put together by the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit group working on public health and the environment.

Nope, it’s not a spooky tale left over from Halloween. After word got out that Canada’s flax seed crops had been cross-contaminated with a genetically modified variety, the country’s entire flax industry is in peril.

Last week was a win for healthy foodies! Food manufacturers opted to suspend the Smart Choices labeling program, which would have deemed products like Fruit Loops and Lucky Charms as healthy picks.

Chicken nuggets. Taco salad. Pizza. Cartons of milk. Hot dogs. Mystery meat. These foods were all staples of my elementary and high school cafeterias, despite clear guidelines about the nutritional benefits for school meals. Efforts to reform school lunch got a boost Tuesday when Institute of Medicine of the National Academies released “School Meals: Building Blocks for Healthy Children,” a report of recommendations for how to reform school lunch.

The report was requested by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in order to help align the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs with the most recent set of dietary guidelines for Americans. Current school lunches must meet guidelines set in 1995, but nutritional knowledge has progressed since then, and the report tries to address those changes.

Fresh ingredients go a long way in adding flavor to any dish.  The same culinary theory holds outside of the kitchen in other contexts as well, as evidenced at the 13th annual Community Food Security Coalition Conference this past week in Des Moines, Iowa.  Over 500 activists from around the country gathered to connect, collaborate and challenge each other on ways to transform and improve our food system, including representation from young women dedicated to a farming career in sustainable agriculture.

As a female farmer myself, running Inn Serendipity farm and B&B with my husband, John Ivanko, in Wisconsin, this increasing blending and crossover between new women farmers with a passion for raising both cabbage and change cultivates a hefty serving of inspiration. These new women farmers grow more than food for our table; they rethink the status quo approach to our food system and provide keen insights into what needs to change.

“As one of the fastest growing groups of new farmers, women can be the change makers that transform our agricultural system into one that provides organic, healthy and fair food to us all,” explains Faye Jones, Executive Director of the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES), a Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) member organization that sponsored two women farmers to attend this conference. Wisconsin women farmers Jai Kellum of King’s Hill Farm and Erin Schneider of Hilltop Community Farm attended the CFSC Conference on behalf of MOSES.“It is important to keep the voice of farmers represented in the national discussion on food and agricultural policy and priorities,” sums up Jones.

Here are four of their tips for politicians to policy makers from Kellum and Schneider to improve our agriculture and food system:

The US Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, announced last month plans to use an additional $30 million dollars to purchase pork in 2009 for federal food and nutrition assistance programs.

This announcement comes as the USDA has already spent some $151 million of Recovery Act (widely known as the “stimulus”) money to purchase pork products.  To me there’s always a bit of irony when pork barrel money is spent to purchase actual pork, as is the case here.  You can read the USDA Press Release here.

There’s theoretically nothing wrong with using taxpayer money to support pork producers who are struggling with a glut of supply and lagging demand, as well as slower sales due to the economic conditions in the US.  But since a majority of pork producers in the US are huge CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations), essentially your tax money is being used to bail out pork producers who are having a slow year.

[Sugar Beet Field. Creative Commons photo by Gilles San Martin]

A federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the USDA illegally approved Monsanto’s genetically modified, Roudup Ready beets.

General Mills and Kellogg’s want to sell sugary processed foods like Froot Loops and Lucky Charms to your kids.  This isn’t anything new.  But under the guise of the new “Smart Choices” Program, large food corporations want to proudly label sugary, highly processed foods as good nutritional food options.

The program was recently created by a conglomerate of conglomerates, including ConAgra Foods, Kellogg’s, Kraft Foods, Pepsico, Tyson Foods, and Unilever.  The participating companies list all their products that “meet a comprehensive set of nutrition criteria based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and other sources of nutrition science and authoritative dietary guidance”.  You can review the Smart Choices website for yourself.

A visionary, inspiring image:  “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food.”

No, this isn’t some crunchy, organic non-profit’s local food campaign or a new Slow Food slogan.  This message comes to us fresh from our United States Department of Agriculture.  “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” is a national effort collectively launching this week, designed to build vibrant local and regional food systems that provide healthful food and build the economic base of rural communities.  It showcases the importance of the connection between us and our food sources and includes $65 million in new funding initiatives.

The fact that this message comes from the USDA represents the fresh crop of vision under the Obama Administration.  Thanks to the efforts of USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack and Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan, there’s a new ingredient at the USDA that has the potential to cook up something big:  leadership.  Harvesting inspiration from back in 1862 when Abraham Lincoln established the USDA as the “People’s Department,” this week’s collective efforts takes a transforming perspective on the relationship between our food and us:  personal responsibility.

Egypt has been enforcing some stringent food quality standards, and now they’re talking about banning all imports and exports of genetically modified foods (GMOs).

[Cairo. Creative Commons photo by Andrew A. Shenouda]

Over the summer, Egyptian officials rejected several import shipments of wheat, saying they were unfit for human consumption. Since then, the parliament has been pushing for stricter food standards. It looks like they got their wish.

There is new evidence that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) may be a culprit in what is known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), or the disappearance of honeybees.

Colony Collapse Disorder has killed off more than one-third of the bees in the United States.

Beekeepers know that when there isn’t nectar readily available to their hives, as in the winter months, some turn to supplements. Traditionally it was (guess what) honey. But that’s what you want to harvest, so many turn to cheaper substitutions. Cane or beet sugar, mixed with water, was seen as acceptable as long as you removed the part of the comb containing the sugar once bees started producing again. It was important to keep the bees fed so they’d keep brooding and ready to produce honey.

Except it hasn’t only been the occasional sugar-water substitution. We’ve substituted the substitute. People have also turned to high fructose corn syrup.

And once again, it seems our need for convenience and affordability has cost us: a new study shows that a contaminant from heat-exposed HFCS may be killing off the bees.