Green Options

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Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.

With an ever shrinking topographical footprint and a population in perpetual flux, the modern city has some feeding issues. A recent article in The Globe and Mail described the frustration of farmer’s market organizers over the shortage of independent farmers who are able to open stalls. The demand, it seems, is far outpacing the supply on a small scale, but also on a large one: the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 80% of the earth’s agriculturally-viable land is already farmed, but the earth’s population is expected to grow by 3 billion by 2050 (NASA via verticalfarm.com). With the impending expansion of an already existent disparity, what can we do to feed all people?

The work of Byron Katie is brilliant! She has been tagged by the 11th Hour Action network as an expert on their list of gurus. Her mission is to end human (mental) suffering. Byron has posted a number of talks to her site called The Work which “is a simple yet powerful process of inquiry that teaches you to identify and question thoughts that cause all the suffering in the world. It’s a way to understand what’s hurting you, and to address your problems with clarity” The Work begins with a four step worksheet:

For one reason or another, thinking about, living with and treating cancer has been a big part of the lives of my friends and family over the past year. Perhaps this has something to do with my current location, but I’m not so sure. Frankly, it is becoming more and more apparent to me that cancer is the new flu. Many of us will get it and, luckily, a growing proportion of us will survive it. But an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of treatment, as they say. And our diets are a big part of that preventative effort.

The term “antioxidant” is one of those vaguely scientific, overly used words that makes my eyes lose focus. It’s up there with “nutraceutical” and “isoflavanoid.” But I decided to make a bigger effort to include antioxidant-rich food in my diet, so I decided to figure out exactly what it meant.

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.

The Urban Agriculturalist is a series on the ways city and suburb dwellers use their land as a food resource.

Toronto-based Food Share is an organization that I really admire. They take a wholistic approach to improving inner-city nutrition, employing principles of locavorism, co-op structure, and progressive, action-based learning.

I was browsing their site the other day and happened upon an initiative of theirs, which focuses on incorporating food studies into the required curriculum in Toronto’s public schools. Food studies and school gardens are nothing new for private, well-funded schools and highly-publicized individual programs, but an integrated curriculum in mainstream schools is a new phenomenon and a hopeful one that is inclusive of everyone.

I must say, I am rather proud of my hometown this morning. In municipal legislation that combats basically every negative impact on the food chain reaction, the City Council has voted in a measure to distribute 1,000 new permits for street vendors who sell produce in underserved communities.

The measure was proposed in December by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Council Speaker Christine Quinn as a way to help assuage the obesity problem in a city where street food usually involves the saturated fat and perplexing, mysterious animal origins of hot dogs, gyros and the like.

Public health records indicate - unsurprisingly - that obesity rates are higher in low-income areas where cheap fast food is more readily available and accessible than fresh food. These neighborhoods also suffer from a scarcity of supermarkets. Residents tend to buy their groceries at the small bodegas and markets that do not have the kind of turnover that supports a large produce section. As a result, there are simply fewer fruits and vegetables available to the urban poor. A survey conducted by the municipal health food department in 2006 found that only 20-40% of the bodegas in neighborhoods like Bedford Stuyvesant, Bushwick and Harlem carried apples, oranges and bananas. Only 2-6% carried leafy greens.

According to Reuters, nearly half of adult New Yorkers are overweight or obese and 700,000 of the 8.25 million residents have diabetes.

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.

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.