Hey friends,
Back again with my lawyer hat on - watching Monsanto in its state by state quest to prevent consumers from knowing what is really in our milk. We beat this back at the Federal FDA, we beat them back at the Federal Trade Commission, we beat them back in Pennsylvania…
Now they are going for Indiana.
A bill introduced in the Indiana House of Representatives by Bill Friend, a rep from the tiny town of Macy, Indiana, would make his state the first to prevent consumers from knowing how their milk was produced.
HB. 1300, which could be voted on any day, is couched as legislation to protect consumers from mislabeling. But it would prevent dairy labels that contain a “compositional or production-related claim that is supported solely by sworn statements, affidavits, or testimonials.” In other words, anything related to the moral or ethical dimensions of the product would be off-limits.
Read more »
Seldom have I found an article as compelling as the January, 19th NY Times article The Food Chain - A New Global Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories.
Many of us are very conscious of what we eat, where it comes from, and how it is produced. We do what we can in our communities by supporting CSAs, local farmers markets, buying not toxic household cleaning products etc. While we are aware on some level of why these choices are important, I find that it is often hard to see the big picture. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around the extent to which there is a global food crisis emerging all around us. Because we live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, in many ways this reality has not yet hit home.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this article.
As a staff attorney for the Center for Food Safety, I was appalled that the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved cloned animals for use in our food today. I have to ask, “who does our federal government protect? How can they allow this into the food system without facts showing it is safe and without any labeling or public disclosure requirements?” As a Jew, it makes me ask other questions: “Will this be allowed in kosher milk? Kosher meat? What do our rabbis think? What about the eco-kosher movement?”
FDA Approves Cloned Animals for Our Food
Today’s FDA decision was a long-awaited regulatory assessment of cloned animals, proclaiming that food from cloned animals are just as safe as food from naturally raised animals. (See FDA on Cloning) And while the FDA did not address whether cloned milk and meat is kosher, they did decide today that it is safe for Americans to eat.
The FDA made this decision in the worst way possible. FDA based its decision on an incomplete and flawed review that relies on studies supplied by cloning companies that want to force this cloning technology on American consumers. Biotechnology companies such as ViaGen provided FDA with the “science” in this case. There are no peer reviewed studies showing that this stuff is safe for us to eat.
Read more »
(x-posted at Lilith)
Last week I had the good fortune of attending a completely packed lecture at the 92nd Street Y called, “Hedonistic, Healthy, and Green: Can We Have it All?” Featuring Michael Pollan (of The Omnivores Dilemma fame), Dan Barber (Head Chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns), and moderated by Joan Dye Gussow (This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader), it was the kind of event that sustainable foodies like me drool over. These are our movie stars, the people we choose when asked, “which famous person would you most want to take to dinner?”
The event itself was pretty straightforward: glowing introductions, 10-15 minutes from both speakers (Pollan on his new book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
and Barber on the fate of Boris, an over-the-hill - ahem - pig, that after much consideration by Barber’s team at Stone Barns, was turned into 500 pounds of the most delicious sausages he’d ever tasted and shared (20% of Boris’ sausages were donated to a local food bank), followed by questions from Gussow and then from the audience.
The real meat of the evening was not in the format of the event, but in the meeting of these amazing minds. For Pollan, Barber, and Gussow, this is life: travelling, speaking (often about the same thing), and answering questions. But for the audience, watching the exchange between these sustainable food “rebbes” felt like watching your grandmother make her favorite recipe. It looked so simple and obvious, and you left feeling full and nourished and inspired to try it yourself.
Read more »
Both amendments– Lugar-Lautenberg’s “Fresh Act” and Dorgan-Grassley’s payment limits– that would have included meaningful farm subsidy reform in the 2007 farm bill failed in the past two days, the latter falling only 4 votes short of the 60 it needed to be adopted.
The Environmental Working Group and the Center for Rural Affairs blogs have some interesting analysis of how the Democrats sabotaged reform by playing politics with the vote’s parliamentary procedure, in order to prevent Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) from embarrassing her own party. They place blame for the failure of Dorgan-Grassley squarely on the Democratic leadership and those reform-touting Senators who voted against the amendment.
A number of other amendments to reform agriculture policy remain to be voted on, including Sen. Tester’s (D-MT) attempt to “beef up” the new Livestock Title by adding a “packer ban” to check the power of industrial meatpackers and processors by reinforcing the Packers and Stockyards Act’s rules against market manipulation. Apparently, the meat industry has been hard at work preventing this amendment from passing.
You can watch here.
(cross posted on the US Food Policy blog)
Today’s New York Times included a fascinating op-ed called “Weed it and Reap,” by Michael Pollan, which notes the significant increase in public input on the 2007 Farm Bill. Has the public’s voice made a difference? Read “Weed it and Reap” here.
Have something to say about a kosher estabilishment in your area? Here’s your chance. Kosher Community Surveys is a surveying organization “dedicated to recognizing quality kosher establishments.” There are open surveys for the Washington DC and Philly area, and surveys opening soon across the country.
Reuters reported that Cargill recalled over 1 million pounds of beef distributed in the US because of possible e. coli contamination. This is the second major recall for Cargill in the last month, prompting me to wonder, what is safe to eat these days? Read the article here.
(cross-posted on US Food Policy blog)
Yesterday, the NYTimes reported on the difficult and rewarding nature of trying to get local foods into schools, by overcoming tangible barriers and bureaucratic obstacles in Local Carrots with a Side of Red Tape.
The article illustrates the large example of the NYC School System which has tried to use its tremendous purchasing power to help many of the struggling fruit and vegetable farmers of New York state. This video features a smaller scale example in MA.
The article makes brief mention of the policies which currently make it difficult for the 10,874 [and counting] schools across the country that are part of the Farm to School movement to source school food locally, which brings us back to…drumroll, please: THE FARM BILL.
In case readers of this blog don’t have enough other reasons to care about the Farm Bill–which is scheduled to be debated by the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee next Tuesday, October 23–with farm and conservation payments, organic research, food stamps and the myriad other items up for negotiation, the ability for schools to request local foods for school meals is a small item of great import to be included in the draft of the Farm Bill due out any day now.
Specifically, all schools that receive federal dollars for school meal (lunch, breakfast, after-school, summer, etc.) purchases must follow a federal bidding process, also called procurement, Read more »
Just one short day after Blog Action Day, is World Food Day, an annual celebration of The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization. The theme this year (and shouldn’t it really be every year?) is The Right to Food.
I was struck by how the FAO’s framing of The Right to Food feels so akin to the Jewish obligation of tzedakah, which is often translated incompletely as “charity,” but actually comes from the root meaning “justice:”
“The Right to Food is the right of every person to have regular access to sufficient, nutritionally adequate and culturally acceptable food for an active, healthy life. It is the right to feed oneself in dignity, rather than the right to be fed. With more than 850 million people still deprived of enough food, the Right to Food is not just economically, morally and politically imperative - it is also a legal obligation.”
In celebration of World Food Day, here are four resources for you to check out - an inspiring article by food activists, Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe, and three Jewish organizations that are working towards food justice.
“What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day?” That was the question posed by the folks at Blog Action Day.
The idea is simple and profound: one topic, thousand of different voices across the blogosphere. Well, the day is here and the topic is the environment. Considering The Jew & The Carrot is about food, Jewish life, and sustainability, that shouldn’t be too difficult to handle. Then again, food lies at the core of many aspects of life, so if next year’s topic is business (or family, books, politics, vacations…) we’ll be ready.
To get things started: check out the fascinating op-ed in The New York Times today, where the former president of the American Farm Bureau, Dean Kleckner blasts the US’s continued addiction farm subsidies. Kleckner writes:
“By promising to cover losses [through subsidies], the government insulates farmers from market signals that normally would encourage sensible, long-term decisions about what to grow and where to grow it. There’s something fundamentally perverse about a system that has farmers hoping for low prices at harvest time — it’s like praying for bad weather. But that’s precisely what happens, because those low prices mean bigger checks from Washington.”
With the Senate’s Farm Bill vote looming, it was heartening to see support for a smarter Farm Bill coming not just from well-meaning activists, but from the farmers themselves.
Michael Pollan is at it again, and that’s a good thing.
After a brief hiatus following his bestselling book The Omnivore’s Dilemma,
Pollan is nearly ready to release his next work titled,
In Defense of Food: The Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating.
Pollan says that the work grew out of questions he received about The Omnivore’s Dilemma. In a recent interview with Grist’s Tom Philpott, he said: once I’ve ”looked into the heart of the food system and been into the belly of the beast” what should I eat, and what should I buy, and if I’m concerned about health, what should I be eating? The short answer? “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” To get the more nuanced response, you’ll have to pick up the book which will be out in January, 2008.
We know what’s up on Pollan’s plate - what’s next for you?
- Preorder your copy of In Defense of Food here.
- Read Philpott’s full interview (highly recommended) here.
- Read The Jew & The Carrot’s interview with Pollan here.
The Jewish Council on Public Affairs (JCPA) has posted several compelling narratives of Jewish leaders, including JCPA and JCRC leaders, Rabbi David Saperstein of the RAC, and Congressmen Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who’ve been participating in its Food Stamp Challenge on its new blog.
In the latest post, JCPA Director Steve Gutow says “To grow up on this over-starched way of being limits our humanity” of his experience spending only $21/day or $1/meal on food this week, to replicate the real lives of many food stamp recipients around the country.
“Hunger and poverty are not going to end because a couple of hundred people around the country are taking the challenge but because a few million people simply decide that the richest country in the history of the world must not tolerate the state of affairs in which tens of millions live in a nutritionally debased way and have no health insurance at all. That will take all of us including the press.”
An earlier post by a participant in CA alludes to one of the reasons why the obesity epidemic has taken root so strongly among low-income households: “I found calories to be affordable. I did not find the wide array of food that I had expected to find when I prepared my shopping list.”
Gutow has also posted a copy of the transcript from the press conference JCPA held in Washington yesterday.
Wednesday’s Washington Times included an op-ed blasting the Food Stamp Challenge as a useless publicity ploy–a gross overgeneralization that does highlight a genuine problem with the Challenge. Read more »
The Jewish Week published an article this week that examines: The Yom Kippur tradition of kaporot, the Jewish ethical food movement. Hazon and The Jew & The Carrot both get significant shout-outs. Read the full article here (or below).
Swinging No More
Kaporos and the new eco-kosher movement.
Steve Lipman - Staff Writer
Growing up out of town, in a non-Orthodox household, I never knew from kaporos.
It’s a post-Talmudic, pre-Yom Kippur custom in some traditional circles that involves swinging a live chicken three times over your head, reciting some verses that symbolically transfer your sins to the fowl — a rooster for a man, a hen for a woman — then leaving it behind to be slaughtered, in a kosher manner of course, and given to a needy family.
Kaporos is Hebrew for “atonements.” The custom is supposed to teach sensitivity for God’s creatures and awareness of one’s own transgressions. Orthodox, but a rationalist, I wasn’t interested. Then Tami called.
“Do you want to do kaporos with me?” she asked.
Read more »
There’s no question - the 2007 Farm Bill, which will be voted on by the Senate at the end of September - is serious stuff that will impact farmers and consumers alike. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be funny video about it where a do-gooding apple chases an mischevious snack cake around the city, right? Right?
Click here to watch the video.
In other weird news, PETA - the veggie sensationalists of the “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” campaign - is at it again. The New York Times reports in “Trying to Connect the Dinner Plate to Climate Change:
PETA is outfitting a Hummer with a driver in a chicken suit and a vinyl banner proclaiming meat as the top cause of global warming. It will send the vehicle to the start of the climate forum the White House is sponsoring in Washington on Sept. 27, “and to headquarters of environmental groups, if they don’t start shaping up,” Mr. Prescott warned.
I don’t really have the words for this - but something tells me this stunt won’t bring much credibility to PETA’s cause…
Read the article here.
Leadership of the JCPA (Jewish Council for Public Affairs) will be participating in the now-famous Food Stamp Challenge during the Days of Awe period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (Sept. 14th-21st).
Executive Director Rabbi Steve Gutow and JCPA Chair Lois Frank will stick to the $1 per meal or $21/week budget of an average food stamp recipient, as part of the organization’s new Anti-Poverty Campaign, to highlight the connections between Jewish teachings surrounding poverty and the current Food Stamp reauthorization component of the Farm Bill.
JCRC leadership and Jewish communities around the country are being encouraged to also ”Take the Challenge,” coinciding with the Locavores’ September Local Food Challenge. Do any of us dare to take the double challenge? I think this would result in nearly an 11-day long Yom Kippur fast, or perhaps subsistance only on apples, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes and the remains of nectarines and melon.
Ideally, an organized Jewish participation in the Food Stamp Challenge, including Rabbis and other national Jewish leaders, could have an impact on federal legislation, if it is publicized appropriately for advocacy. Hopefully, continued action surrounding Food Stamps will have an impact on the Farm Bill, which has yet to pass out of the Senate Agriculture Committee (expected in mid-October).
