Well, in a sharp break from its predecessors, the Obama Justice Department is actually acknowledging the problem and contemplating actually doing something about it. The DOJ has been holding public meetings to let players in the food system air out thier views on the issue.

I will be very surprised — and very pleasantly so — if anything substantial comes of the exercise. But it’s fascinating to watch it play out.

Over on Eclectic Edibles, blogger Shwankie found an interesting tidbit while watching the C-Span feed of recent hearings in D.C. Apparently, a representative from the Food Marketing Institute got to mouthing the food industry’s main defense of consolidation: that it benefits U.S. consumers by allowing us to spend less on food as a percentage of income than the citizens of any other country in the world.

Comparing U.S. consumers’ food expenditures to those of the French and Spanish, the flack concluded that our tightly consolidated food industry is serving us a higher “quality of life” along with all the burgers and frozen dinners.

Shwankie very smartly shredded that assertion by coming up with a little chart comparing food expenditures and various diet-related troubles among the United States, France, and Spain. She didn’t give her data sources, so I felt uncomfortable reprinting her chart. Inspired by her, I came up with my own version. I threw Germany into the mix, just to broaden the sample.

Pay now or pay later: Americans’ and Europeans’ consumption habits reveal different priorities –

and those incur different penalties. Spending metric reates to food consumed at home.

Sources: USDA and OECD

Now, correlation does not prove causation. But if the food industry wants to claim that its abundance of cheap crap delivers higher quality of life, it will have to explain why our citizens come down with diet-related maladies at rates so much higher than those in countries where food is pricier. For most of us, “quality of life” does not dovetail with gaining too much weight, getting diabetes, and dying of a heart attack.

I added to my chart a metric not found in Shwankie’s post: the United Nations’ “Gini index” of income inequality. That’s my tribute to U.K. researchers Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, whose book The Spirit Level: Why Equality Makes Societies Stronger has been blowing my mind.

If the food-industry rep is probably dead wrong that cheap food increases quality of life, Wilkinson and Pickett point to a factor that actually seems to: income equality. Below, find their chart tracking income equality against a broad quality-of-life index.

From The Spirit Level slides, made available by The Equality Trust.

To me, cheap food underpins our highly inequitable income system. If we’re going to have a large low-income class, a perpetually squeezed middle class, and a small caste of super-rich, then a cheap food system plays a vital role in keeping those at the bottom fed — if under-nourished.

Wilkinson and Pickett’s inequality work has provided me with a new way of looking at food-system reform. It may be that that a food system predicated on slashing costs — at the expense of the environment, workers, animals, and public health — is a symptom of a broader problem: an economic system that concentrates power and income at the top. It may well be that we can’t really reform the food system until we reform the economy. That’s an idea I’ll be mulling and teasing out in the new year.

Illustration: Darwin

via Grist

“When I see organic food from China, I question,” environmental journalist Michael Pollan told PRI’s The World, “how organic is it?” Organics are a $26 billion industry in the United States, and an increasing amount of that is coming from China. Pollan points out, “organic is a very big global business now. People don’t realize it.”

“In 2006 alone, China added a staggering 12 percent to the world’s organically farmed land,” Global Post reports. With the market growing that quickly, regulations are lax at best. A Chinese grocery chain owner who spoke with Global Post estimated that “maybe 30 percent of farms that put the organic label on their food produce the real thing.”

“I think in the future the government will improve testing,” the grocery store owner told Global Post. “But now, hygiene officers have so much work to do with essential food safety that they don’t worry about organic.”

Pollan told The World about one of his journalism students who uncovered fraudulently labeled organic foods in China. The student spoke with one ostensibly organic farmer who “essentially thought it was a word that was very popular with Americans, as indeed it is.”

Most of the time, however, the organic label is still a worthwhile investment, according to Pollan. “Most of the farmers growing organic are very serious about their commitment.”

But even if organic labeling were perfect, Pollan believes that consumers have to consider more than just whether it’s organic or not. Even if a head of garlic is organic, for example, importing it from China carries an enormous environmental footprint. Consumers should look beyond the label and consider the real environmental cost of their foods.

Illustration: Darwin

via The World

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has, over the past few decades, gradually displaced cane and beet sugar as the sweetener of choice for soft drinks, candy and prepared foods. In recent years, there have been a growing number claims that HFCS is a significant health risk to consumers, responsible for obesity, diabetes, heart disease and a wide variety of other illnesses.

In fact, there are large amounts of experimental data supporting the claims that high levels of fructose in the diet can cause hyperlipidemia (high levels of fats — triglycerides primarily — in the blood), obesity and insulin resistance and may lead to cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes (for a good recent review, see here). A high-fructose diet is thought to cause hyperlipidemia (and probably visceral obesity) because fructose is preferentially “sent” to fatty acid synthesis and it also reduces the activity of lipoprotein lipase (for a good review, see here). The mechanisms by which fructose causes insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease are less clear (see, for example here, here and here), but there is no shortage of hypotheses. Despite the fact that some of the underlying mechanisms are not clear, the evidence seems pretty solid that there are real risks to high fructose consumption.

However, the question remains — is HFCS more of a health risk than other sweeteners? Many of the sources that demonize HFCS list alternative sweeteners — cane sugar, honey, agave syrup, etc. — that they claim are healthier than HFCS, but those claims usually rest primarily on the fact that these alternatives to HFCS are “natural” rather than any actual data showing that they are safer than HFCS.

Sugar 101:

Before we can properly analyze these claims, we need to understand a bit about sugar. To begin with, what is sugar? To most people, sugar is the white granulated solid that they find in the sugar bowl. In reality, sugar is a much broader term. There are two general classes of sugars — aldose and ketose — and over twenty individual sugars (monosaccharides), if you limit yourself to only those found in nature. Of these, only a few play any significant role in human nutrition, primarily glucose, fructose and galactose (ribose, a sugar that forms the backbone of DNA and RNA, also plays a minor nutritional role).

Further complicating the issue, there are also sugars — disaccharides — that are compounds made of two monosaccharides covalently bound together. The most common of these is sucrose, a compound made by joining one molecule of glucose to one molecule of fructose. Sucrose is the sugar in the average sugar bowl. It is also the sugar in brown sugar, molasses, cane sugar, beet sugar and is the major component of maple syrup (and maple sugar). Another common disaccharide is lactose (milk sugar), which is a combination of glucose and galactose. Less commonly encountered is maltose, a combination of two molecules of glucose.

Starches, such as corn starch, are also sugar. They are made up of long interlinked chains (polymers, also known as polysaccharides) of individual sugars (usually glucose). Cellulose, the major component of paper and wood, is also a polymer of glucose (with different bond geometries). Insect and crustacean shells are made of a sugar polymer known as chitin (also a major component of fungal cell walls). We literally live in a world of sugar.

One final note about sugars — humans only absorb monosaccharides; no matter what form the sugar enters the digestive tract, it is only absorbed after it is broken down to its component monosaccharides (there are, as usual in biology, a few minor exceptions to this rule). There are a variety of enzymes — amylases, disaccharidases, etc. — that perform this function. Any disaccharide or polysaccharide that isn’t broken down (such as the raffinose and stachyose in beans and many other gas-causing foods) remains inside the gut, providing food for our gut bacteria.

“Natural” Sweeteners:

Now, let’s take a look at some of the sugar-based sweeteners in common use today. Honey was probably the first sweetener — at least in the part of the world where honey bees are native. Honey is about 82% sugar, with almost all the remainder being water. The sugar in honey is 43% glucose, 50% fructose, 4% galactose, 2% maltose, 1% sucrose and trace amounts of other sugars. As mentioned earlier, it is considered by many to be a natural sweetener that is a healthy alternative to HFCS.

Another sweetener used in ancient times — especially in regions where honey bees were not native — is tree sap. The most famous of these is the sap of sugar maple trees, used to make maple syrup and, when crystallized, maple sugar. Natural maple syrup is 60% sugar, with that sugar being 95% sucrose, 4% glucose and 1% fructose.

Fruit juices also have an ancient history of use as sweetening agents and — not surprisingly — are often cited as natural and healthy alternatives to HFCS. The sugar content of fruits varies with the type of fruit and even with the variety. Apples, for instance, are a bit over 10% sugar by weight, with that sugar being 57% fructose, 23% glucose and 20% sucrose. Peaches, in contrast, are 8.4% sugar by weight with that sugar being 57% sucrose, 23% glucose and 18% fructose. Pears – the most common fruit juice used in sweetening – are 9.8% sugar, with that sugar being 64% fructose, 28% glucose and 8% sucrose. Table grapes are about 15% sugar, with the sugars being 53% fructose and 47% glucose.

Sucrose, the disaccharide in common table sugar, was originally obtained in ralatively pure form from sugar cane, which can only grow in the tropics. The high cost of cane suger led to a search for alternative sources. As early as the 1700’s, sucrose was being extracted from sugar beets, but it took both selective breeding of sugar beets to increase their sucrose content and improvements in the extraction process to make beet sugar economically viable. By the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, sucrose from sugar beets had outstripped cane sugar in Europe and the U.S. Sugar beets have the advantage of growing throughout the temperate zone, closer to the demand. Just to be clear, beet sugar and case sugar are indistinguishable — they are exactly the same chemical compound (sucrose).

The rise of HFCS:

So, with all of these sugar-based sweeteners available, what prompted the development of HFCS?

Corn syrup is a relatively recent arrival as a sweetener; it had to wait until food processors discovered how to take corn starch (which, like most starches, is a polymer composed of long interlinked chains of glucose molecules) and break it down into isolated glucose molecules using the enzymes amylase and maltase. Commercial amounts of corn syrup were available by the middle of the 20th century. Corn syrup was so much cheaper than sucrose that it saw extensive use as a sucrose substitute for thickening foods and to help retain moisture. It wasn’t much used solely as a sweetener because it isn’t as sweet as sucrose.

The fact is that not all sugars are equally sweet. If we assign sucrose (table sugar) a sweetness of 100%, glucose has a sweetness of 60 – 75% (on a gram-per-gram basis) and fructose has a sweetness of 140 – 170%. (Note: the sweetness of fructose varies with its conformation, and so will differ under different circumstances) Candy and soft drink manufacturers exploited the greater sweetness of fructose even before HFCS was available by using what is called “invert sugar”. Invert sugar is sucrose that has been treated with a weak acid solution and then recrystallized (to get rid of the acid). This treatment causes a portion of the sucrose to break apart into fructose and glucose. Although the glucose part is less sweet than sucrose, the fructose is so much sweeter that the overall effect is to get more sweetness with less sugar. This allowed the manufacturers to use less sugar and thereby save money, even though invert sugar was more expensive than plain sucrose.

In 1957, a process was developed to convert some of the glucose in corn syrup to fructose, yielding a product that was 42% fructose and 58% glucose. This dramatically increased its sweetness, making a product that was a commercially viable competitor to sucrose as a sweetener. This was HFCS 42, which has a sweetness — gram-per-gram — slightly greater than sucrose (110%).

The primary advantage of HFCS 42 to food manufacturers was its low cost — much lower than the cost of sucrose. Secondary advantages were that it retained moisture better than sucrose (twice as many molecules), was slightly sweeter than sucrose (so less was needed), was in a liquid form and didn’t caramelize as readily as sucrose (this last one could be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on the use).

Later, HFCS manufacturers began putting some of their HFCS 42 through separation columns to produce syrup that was 90% fructose (HFCS 90). Today, the bulk of the HFCS 90 production is used to make corn syrup with 55% fructose, known as HFCS 55, although a very small amount is used in some reduced-calorie confections (HFCS 90 is about 60% sweeter per gram than sucrose, which allows a 35% reduction in the amount of sugar used).

With the introduction of HFCS 55, which is 25% sweeter than sucrose, food manufacturers found that the slightly increased price (which was still less than sucrose) was more than offset by the fact that they needed less of it to get the same level of sweetness.

That’s right, HFCS allowed food manufacturers to use less sugar — and thus fewer sugar calories — in their products without compromising sweetness. Using sucrose — cane or beet sugar — would require 20% more sugar (and 20% more sugar calories) than using HFCS 55.

How safe are other sweeteners compared to HFCS?:

Still, none of this alters the fact that a diet high in fructose has been shown to cause — or at least contribute to — hyperlipidemia, obesity, insulin resistance and cardiac disease. However, those who have been paying attention will have noticed that HFCS is not the ONLY sweetener that contains significant amounts of fructose.

In fact, sucrose — even “natural” cane sugar — is 50% fructose once it is digested and absorbed. While this is 20% less than the fructose content of HFCS 55, food manufacturers need to use less (about 20% less) HFCS 55 to get the same sweetness, so it’s a wash as far as fructose content.

Honey, long touted as a “healthy” and “natural” alternative to evil HFCS, is also 50% fructose. Agave syrup (also called agave nectar), often promoted as a healthy alternative to HFCS (especially in diabetics), is very high in fructose, although there is some disagreement over how much fructose it contains. According to the USDA, the sugar in cooked agave is 87% fructose (due to breakdown of fructans — a starch-like polymer of fructose — in the plant when it is cooked). A wholesale supplier of agave syrup, however, lists the fructose as 70 — 75% of the total sugar in their syrup. Either way, agave syrup is higher in fructose than any other natural sweetener (and any form of HFCS except HFCS 90).

Even fruit juices (and what could be more natural and healthy than fruit juice?) are 40 — 70% fructose, if you count the fructose in sucrose. And for those who argue that ingesting sucrose delays the absorption of fructose, Monsivais et al (2007) showed that sucrose breaks down spontaneously in carbonated beverages (and, presumably, all acid solutions), with 50% of the sucrose being hydrolyzed to fructose and glucose within the first 30 days after bottling.

Finally, a study that directly compared the short-term effects of fructose, HFCS and sucrose showed that they are indistinguishable.

What does all this mean?:

So, what are the take-home messages from all of this?

HFCS 42 and HFCS 55 have essentially the same amount of fructose, as a fraction of their total sugar, as honey, sucrose (cane or beet sugar) or maple syrup/sugar (to be agonizingly precise, HFCS has slightly less, and HCFS 55 has slightly more).
HFCS 42 and HFCS 55 have an equal or smaller amount of fructose, as a fraction of their total sugar, as many commonly consumed fruits.
Agave syrup has higher fructose content than any type of HFCS except HFCS 90.
For people who are worried about their health or their children’s health — and who isn’t, these days — the data suggest that the best choice is to reduce intake of all sweeteners containing fructose. That includes not only the evil HFCS, but also natural cane sugar, molasses (which is just impure cane sugar), brown sugar (ditto) and honey. Even “unsweetened” (no added sugar) fruit juices need to be considered when limiting your family’s fructose intake.

Finally, the best nutritional advice is to eat everything in moderation — and that includes sweets. While a diet high in fructose may increase your risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease — maybe — a fructose-free diet is not guaranteed to prevent those diseases. Eat a variety of foods, including a small amount of sweets, get enough exercise, watch your (and your children’s) weight and see your doctor for regular health check-ups.

And stop worrying that HFCS is poisoning you and your children.

Illustration: Darwin

via SBM

Over on Earth Island Journal, Sena Christian has an excellent, rigorously reported article about the tough economics of urban farming. She focuses on some of the more famous city farms of the Bay Area, where EIJ is based — City Slicker Farms, People’s Grocery — but she also discusses projects like Milwaukee’s Growing Power. And she finishes the piece with a farm I’d never heard of before: Greensgrow, in Philadelphia.

Acknowledging the limits of urban ag, Christian seeks to tease out its potential: particularly its economic upside. Limits are an important place to start on this topic. For all the hype urban farms have gotten of late, no one who works in the field expects cities to become anything close to self-sufficient with regard to food. Any realistic vision of “green cities” sees them as consumption hubs in a larger regional foodshed: dense population centers surrounded not by sprawling suburbs, but rather by diversified farms of a multiplicity of scales.

Urban plots can fill in gaps — putting into action the insight, proven in 19th century France and other places, that small spaces, fortified with lots of rich, composted food waste, can be highly productive. (Probably the greatest U.S. proponent of French-intensive, also called “biointensive,” gardening is John Jeavons.) Specifically, urban farms can turn food production into a source of jobs and fresh food in depressed areas that lack access to both.

Yet the task isn’t easy. Christian’s piece hangs on the following premise:

[U]rban farming’s potential to address the challenges of our food system remains unclear. Although popularity and trendiness can be big boons to business, these urban farms haven’t yet found a way to thrive in the market economy. Most rely heavily on volunteer labor and grant funding. They may be at the forefront of ecological sustainability, but economic sustainability eludes them. And that’s a problem because they are unlikely to fulfill their aspirations and make a meaningful dent in the problem of food insecurity if they are forever running on the treadmill of foundation funding.

These are extremely important points, and Christian does some valuable reporting to bolster them. It’s true, as she points out, that most of our most visible and effective urban farm projects were launched with foundation cash and still rely on it to operate. Probably the most celebrated project, Milwaukee’s Growing Power, has received “at least $1 million in grants” over the past five years, Christian reports.

But there’s some missing context here: all farms struggle mightily to “thrive in a market economy” — and relatively few actually do. The most obvious evidence to back up this point is commodity subsidies. If any farm type should be able to thrive in the free market, it would be the large corn and soy farms of the Midwest. They stand on one of the world’s greatest stores of topsoil; they are highly capitalized, with towering combines tricked out with GPS and other technology that allow a single farmer to cover thousands of acres. They have have access to high-tech seeds and bottomless amounts of fertilizer and pesticides. Agribusiness giants like ADM and Cargill have built up an elaborate infrastructure to buy their goods and ship them around the globe.

Yet over most of the past 20 years, corn and soy prices have hovered under the cost of production, making these farms reliant on billions of dollars in annual subsidies to stay solvent. They’ve turned marginally profitable over the past few years — not due to the magic of the free market, however, but because a government-mandated and -subsidized ethanol program has lifted corn and soy prices. Like urban farms, “economic sustainability eludes them.” They are wards not of the foundations, but rather of the state.

Another way to put the economic struggles of urban farms in a broader context is to look at USDA farm-income data. Time for a bracing dip into the Farm Household Economics and Well-Being page, kept up by the USDA’s Economic Research Service.

The nut from the ERS’s latest findings: In 2010, the average family farm is forecast to receive 10.3 percent of its household income from farm sources, with the rest from earned and unearned off-farm income. Farm income is forecast to average $8,338. The average off-farm income is forecast to be $72,428.

OK, so those extremely depressing numbers aggregate all farms: from hobby operations claiming farm status for a tax break to Midwestern mega-farms. So let’s drill down by farm size. (See chart.) For farms that bring in between $10,000 and $249,000 in gross sales, farm income represents a tiny fraction of farm families’ overall earnings (see green sliver in middle bar). This category encompasses the non-hobby, small- and mid-sized farms that supply the bulk of produce at farmers markets. After farm expenses, these farm families bring home about $60,000 in annual income, a very small slice of which comes from farm profits. These farms, too, are subsidized — not by the government, but rather by the off-farm income of farmers and their spouses.

My point is that teasing a living from the earth is extremely difficult. People make it work for all manner of reasons; maximizing personal income is rarely one of them. There’s a passage in Richard Manning’s 2004 book, Against the Grain, that puts it well:

A farm scholar once asked an agribusiness executive when his corporation would simply take over the farms. The exec said that it would be dumb for the corporation to do so, in that it is not free to exploit its employees to the degree that farmers are willing to exploit themselves.

On a happier note, farms produce more than food for consumers and money for farmers. To employ a phrase from economics, they are multifunctional: they produce food, yes, but also environmental goods like healthy soil (or damages like depleted soil and polluted waterways); open, pretty spaces for the public (or public nuisances, as in the case of factory-scale animal farms). The problem is that they only get paid for the food — and not nearly enough, many people now agree.

The farms profiled by Christian provide significant positive goods for which the market doesn’t compensate them: interesting, learning-oriented jobs for teens who would otherwise be consigned to the fast-food or narcotics trades; high-quality produce in low-income neighborhoods with limited food access; open public spaces in neighborhoods that lack parks; community organizing opportunities; a mechanism through which food expenditures can circulate within communities, building wealth; and more.

It makes sense that foundations are filling a void that markets can’t. And once urban farms have their farming systems down and sufficient infrastructure in place, I suspect many of them will some day be profitable, if not exactly lucrative. Christian reports that Philly’s Greensgrow now operates in the black, after years of foundation support. I suspect that Milwaukee’s highly productive Growing Power, if it dropped its educational efforts and just marketed food, could too.

But if we wait for the magic of the market to solve inner-city food problems, I fear we’ll be left hungry for change.

Illustration: EJP

via Grist

I think urban farming is one of the most hopeful developments to come down the street in a long time. First of all, it encourages the practical economic advantages and benefits of raising and consuming food locally. But its importance goes beyond that for me. I am sometimes asked why I spend my time writing about farming and gardening when, it is suggested, there are more important topics to which to apply my talents. That, in one sentence, indicates one of the most troublesome cultural problems that modern society faces today: the notion that food-getting is not an important enough subject to merit the close attention of all of us.

First of all, if you let big food business rule the roost in agriculture, you are going to get just what you pay taxes for: more big food business. For example, most people don’t even know that they are eating potatoes that have been genetically modified to kill potato bugs. If sometimes you get a notion that potatoes don’t taste as good as they used to, you just might be right. The potato bugs would surely agree with you.

But there’s something else that I think is important in this regard. The fact that our country has become divided into so-called red and blue states is an outcome directly traceable to the urban-rural division of our society. This is something of a simplification, but food producers and their social allies tend to vote red and food consumers and their social allies tend to vote blue. The division is thought to be between conservative and liberal philosophies, but it much more reflects the difference between rural and urban values. (There are plenty of urban conservatives and rural liberals.) This division is hopefully coming to an end but has a long way to go yet. We are doing a fairly good job of bringing the city to the countryside but a very poor job of bringing the country to the city-side. Both sides need each others’ viewpoints for good government and social interaction. A good way that we can heal the friction is to bring farming to the city. There is nothing that will cure an overly zealous wildlife lover quicker than to make a farmer or gardener out of her. On the other hand, there is nothing that will change the overly-isolationist view of life cherished by rural people quicker than bringing them into close contact with city life. The rural dweller may think that all those rules that cities make are silly, — until he is surrounded by suburbs.

It has become common to say that food is everybody’s business. The only way I know to become convinced of that fact is to grow some food yourself or at least live right next to someone who does. Otherwise it is so easy, especially if you have plenty of money, to demand totally “organic” food: no pesticides, no hormones, no antibiotics, no chemical fertilizers, no manure, no nothing except pure undiluted water and air and leaf compost touched only by the wings of angelic organic growers. Try to grow some of that angelicly pure food yourself and you will quickly realize that whatever you get paid for it, it ain’t enough.

Try to raise livestock and chickens as lovingly as you would raise a child as so many non-husbandmen think we should. Then have a ram plant its horns or head into your rear end, dislocating a disc or two in your back. Rams and bulls and roosters are very effective educators of new farmers who think our time-honored rules of husbandry are too cruel. Go ahead. Don’t dock your lambs. You might get lucky. You might even be on the trail to a better practice. But after you have scraped the maggots out of the lamb’s hide and then watch it die anyway, come talk to me.

I like to tell the story of an editor friend of mine who worked on my books at Rodale Press back in the days when we were first trying to champion environmental ways of farming. I told her once that I had just that morning shot a groundhog that was ruining my garden. She was horrified. She could not believe that someone who appeared very civilized (in those days I could appear very civilized when I needed to) would do such a beastly thing. A couple years later, she succumbed to her own desire to farm environmentally. She and her husband bought a place in the country and began garden farming in earnest. About a year later, I met her again at a conference. She came up to me and said she wanted to apologize for the callous way she had treated me when I said I had killed a groundhog. She explained, after swearing me to secrecy:

“Last week I finally cornered the groundhog that was tearing up my plantings. It was in the tool shed. I killed it with a shovel, the only weapon handy.”

Illustration: Tonyç

via OrganicToBe

To live in the modern person is to be a purchaser of things. We all shop.

Many of us are paying more attention to the quality and impact of the things we buy. More and more of us are questioning how much we shop and whether we need so much stuff in the first place. But in the last few years, there’s a been a quiet revolution emerging in where and how we shop as well.

Right now, many of us in the developed world shop by driving to large chain stores — this is especially true in North America, but has become common elsewhere too. The problem is, this way of shopping adds an enormous ecological burden to all the good we buy: not only do we burn gas getting to the store and back, but the building and operation of that store and its parking lot have a huge impact; the supply chain that keeps huge stores stocked with masses of various kinds of goods adds more impacts; while the packaging and sales presentation of the goods we buy tops it all off with more energy and materials waste. From the lighting to the loading docks, the freezer cases to the shopping carts, conventional retail is unsustainable.

Retail today has other costs as well. Big chain stores are not generally known for their excellent labor practices, meaning that part of the savings we get by shopping in them comes from the mistreatment of the people who serve us while we’re there. The kinds of volumes that it takes to stock big box chain stores means that these stores will only buy things in huge orders, often from the lowest-cost big provider, which often means supporting sweat shop work conditions, factory farmed food or toxic knock-off products. Furthermore, because the backstories of the objects they sell is often so atrocious, big chain stores are often at the forefront of fighting transparency and labeling laws (Walmart’s latest effort may or may not be an exception to the trend).

Not all chains are as bad as this, of course, and certain leaders, like Marks and Spenser, have shown that even giant retail corporations can take seriously their ethical obligations and offer better products, with clearly labeled impacts, in more energy-efficient stores. But there are real limits to how much the model of big box, auto-dependent chain stores can be improved.

A better model is emerging. Innovative companies that are changing not only their stores themselves, but how the whole experience of shopping works and what it means. Think of it as bright green retail.

What are the main components of this better way of shopping?

*Webfronts: having stores which work as the physical showroom for a virtual store, which let you try clothes on, try tools out, and so on, and then order the thing online for later delivery, saving money and facilitating smaller storefronts, minimal stock costs and car-free shopping.

*Flexible spaces: sharing under-utilized spaces between multiple businesses, for instance, having two restaurants share one space by offering meals at different times of the day, which cuts down on their costs and maximizes the use of the facility, lowering its ecological impact.

*Microcommerce: direct purchases from a producer (whether at a farmer’s market or an online service like the craft site Etsy) means more of your money goes to supporting that producer, rather than middlemen and brokers. Increasingly, there are even stores and markets designed to mix the webfront model with microcommerce, offering sample products from small-scale producers, like São Paulo’s Endossa.

*Backstories and display transparency: backstory management has become a big trend, provoking leading companies to explore new ways to not only try to track everything that went into their products but where and how they were made. Increasingly, these backstories are being built into the brand identity of the product itself, and detailed information about their origins and performance is being made available online (sometimes without a company’s permission). When companies actively engage in transparency, though, they also gain another benefit: they can offer their customers participatory retail experiences, allowing them to pick the precise origins and characteristics of the products they will by, down to the farmer that grew their coffee, or the worker who assembled their laptop.

*Delivery: the shipment of good from producer to store, and store to customer has been undergoing a rapid shift, with a move toward low-impact shipping and home delivery from centralized locations, both of which save enormous amounts of energy. Even bigger savings are to be had through dematerialized delivery (Netflix streaming a movie to your TV instead of you picking up a DVD at the video store) and decentralized manufacturing (having a neighborhood fabber where you can go to pick up a printed-out version of the product you’ve ordered online).

*Dropshops and reverse supply chains: as producer responsibility and zero waste laws become more common, “reverse” supply chains — systems for taking back products, breaking them down, recycling and/or salvaging their parts and then getting them to the appropriate manufacturer for reuse — become needed parts of the commercial system. Some leading thinkers have begun to imagine that returning used products may become a major part of the shopping experience, that special stores may even emerge to facilitate consumer returns (I like to think of them as “drop shops”) by offering a cafe setting, public information on the future fate of the returns dropped off in that store, and affirmation of the consumer’s effort. This would make a chore more pleasurable while building further brand loyalty in shoppers who can look forward to enjoying returning a product almost as much as they enjoyed buying it. Perhaps they’ll even shop for the replacement while they’re there.

No single one of these innovations will suddenly reverse the massive damage mega-scale retail is doing to the planet (and our communities), but taken together, they offer the outline of something pretty exciting: a smarter way of connecting to better stuff, with a smaller impact on the planet.

Illustration: Darwinbell

via World Changing

Diplomatic Standards is an attempt at organizing the chaos of the current organic industry on a global scale and openly. We are an active community that believes that you should understand the importance of having an unclouded source of sustenance. You and I, together with anyone that believes in the quality of the food they eat, now have the opportunity to ensure that outcome.

We would like to issue a call out to anyone and any organization to come and actively participate and collaboratively work to implement a new global standard and enforcement apparatus that can ensure safety and compliance. Diplomatic Standard is a direct response to a current global organic industry that is full of ambiguity, fraud, turmoil and that maintains a closed system.

Where Diplomatic Standards fits

It is of no secret that current national standards were created as deliberate pure marketing efforts to expose the organic concept to consumers. Pressured by the major firms in the agricultural industry, many governments had since setup numerous apparatus towards the effort of promoting organic goods to farmers and consumers alike. It was also within the judgment of the consumer that these governmental frameworks would protect, enforce and uphold the true idea behind the term organic as it was understood and believed to be.

Regrettably, during the course of this remarkable growth of the industry globally, the organic image has unnecessarily immensely deteriorate and has prompted a need for a new approach. The idea of Diplomatic Standards is to use current technology to form a global, bottom-up, open standard where all parties can truly collaborate in reaching consensus and whose primary mission is for transparency and decentralization. Diplomatic Standards is positioned to place itself as the third choice within a two system framework that is currently composed of either conventional or organic foods.

Where within any system, the fundamental conflict exists where vendors by nature compete to capture the largest market share possible whereby raising costs vs. the market at large which seeks lower costs and freedom, Diplomatic Standards’ goal is to remove this conflict by empowering the individual with universal access to the standard’s process – made possible through modern technology.

Illustration: Darwinbell

When purchasing fruits and vegetables, I believe, for most, freshness is of priority. However, buyers may not have a keen eye for discerning a particular fruit’s freshness nor even its edibility – considering that vendors do wax-coat their apples, brush and fluff their pears so that they appear to be fresh. Peas and other greens are dipped in dye for a ‘greener’ look – not to mention the practice of having ground meat warped in plastic bags made for that specific purpose of diminishing the grayish look of dated meat. The truth is, trust of vendors is neither necessarily an affordable nor a worthy practice.

This is where the concept of the Fresh Code comes in. Conceived from the folks at Yanko Design, this bar code diminishes gradually based on the freshness of a particular item. It intelligently displays through a graph the freshness level of the item as time passes until it reaches ’0′ indicating that item should be thrown away.

Beneficial to any supermarkets, another purpose might include lessening all together the vendors effort at managing products saleability through this improved visualization of freshness. I for one would find its implementation very useful, which would include alleviating doubts of my veggie freshness through a similar achievable standardized concept.

If a ‘natural and organic’ supermarket such as Whole Foods sells the same junk as everyone else, then what’s the point?

Not long ago I made one of my periodic forays to Whole Foods, the all-natural-groceries conglomerate. My assignment was to buy a Christmas ham from a pig that had not suffered unduly, and that was relatively free of chemicals and antibiotics.

I was somewhere between the Amy’s organic soups and the own-label cans of vegetables when I came upon an unexpected sight: bottles of Heinz regular ketchup that, like much of the industrial food that comprises the American diet, is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

As you may know, HFCS is among the laboratory-created synthetic foods targeted for elimination by activists, most notably the journalist Michael Pollan in his influential book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Though scientific opinion differs on whether HFCS is any worse for you than regular sugar, there’s little doubt that its cheap ubiquity – a consequence of misguided government farming subsidies – has contributed significantly to our epidemics of obesity and type-two diabetes.

Thus I considered it a breach of faith that Whole Foods would carry such a product. Shopping there means you’re going to pay more and drive farther than if you simply stocked up at the nearest supermarket. In return, it doesn’t seem too much to ask that you be spared from having to worry about ingredients such as HFCS. So it was with a perverse sense of anticipation that I started reading Nick Paumgarten’s 9,100-word profile of Whole Foods founder and chief executive John Mackey in the current issue of the New Yorker.

As Paumgarten observes, Mackey has stepped in it several times in recent years, engaging in embarrassing (and legally dubious) internet sock puppetry with regard to his acquisition of Wild Oats, a rival chain, and writing a commentary for the Wall Street Journal in opposition to government healthcare reform. The latter enraged his largely liberal customer base, engendering brief calls for a boycott.

What makes the New Yorker article valuable, though, is the way Paumgarten captures Mackey’s “crazy uncle” and “right-wing hippie” personae and places them in the context of his radical libertarianism. In the course of talking (and talking, and talking), Mackey reveals an important contradiction that illustrates why Whole Foods simply isn’t as good as it should be. On the one hand, Mackey, now a vegan, is absolutely committed to healthy food. On the other, his naive belief in individual responsibility informs not just his contempt for government but, in a sense, for his own company as well.

Consider, for instance, Mackey’s much-criticized statement that “We sell a bunch of junk.” In fact, Whole Foods sells meat, which Mackey eschews, as well as nutritionally empty snacks. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Meat, candy and potato chips have been with us for a long time, and, in their unadulterated, pre-industrial incarnations, were considerably less toxic than they are today.

But Mackey’s libertarianism means that the consumer must always beware, even at Whole Foods. As Paumgarten writes of Mackey:

His belief in the power of the individual is such that blame falls on individuals, too. In his view, it tends to be the fault of the unhealthy or fat person that he or she is unhealthy or fat. People just need to eat better….

It matters less to him that our food system, for a dozen reasons, … has been rigged to deliver unhealthy food at artificially low cost to a misguided public. People have the power and the means to choose rice and beans over Big Macs, and when they fail to do so they bring ruin on themselves, and on everyone else.

The trouble with this type of thinking is that, at its end point, it’s our own fault if we buy ketchup loaded with high-fructose corn syrup – even if we got it at Whole Foods. After all, there was a shelf full of Heinz organic ketchup next to the regular variety. If you choose the cheap stuff, what concern is it of Mackey’s? Whole Foods is a store that sells “a bunch of junk”, not a shrine.

Except that Mackey misconceives an important part of his business. At a time when even Walmart is carrying organic foods, the niche Whole Foods ought to fill is that of the trusted guide. If I have to walk the aisles of Whole Foods with the same label-reading skepticism that I bring to supermarket shopping, well, I might as well go to the local supermarket. It carries more natural and organic foods than it used to, it’s closer to our house and it’s a lot cheaper.

Besides, as Paumgarten writes, Mackey’s libertarianism ignores larger social and cultural forces. My wife and I would love to do better than Whole Foods – to buy most of our food from local farmers, and to leave the industrial-food system altogether. We’ve tried. But unless we are willing and able to devote a lot more time and money to the enterprise, the best we can manage is to buy produce from farmers markets during the growing season and milk from a nearby dairy.

For us, a place like Whole Foods should be an important way station between industrial food and something better. Mackey seems to understand that, but his blind exaltation of the individual misses some pretty important caveats.

Individuals live in a social setting, turning over some tasks so that they can specialise in others. I don’t want to perform my own surgery or maintain my own roads. And I don’t want to come home from the grocery store with unhealthy food only to be told it’s my own damn fault.

Especially if I bought it at Whole Foods.

via The Guardian by Dan Kennedy on 12/29/09

Illustration: Lyza

In an unusual yet stimulating proposition, The L.A Times recently covered an interesting tale of Hantz Farms buying abandoned properties in the city of Detroit with the plans of turning these plots into large scale commercial agriculture use.

Officials at Hantz Farms imagine the current trend of local food consumption must continue to grow in order to make this venture a successful investment. The idea has also gathered some support due to the hope that it might help in revitalizing the city which was hit terribly hard by the economic crisis with an almost 50% of the population either unemployed or underemployed.

In addition, aesthetically this would also allow for the redevelopment of the over one-third of the city’s 376,000 either vacant or abandoned parcels while supplying an alternative to the idea of Vertical Farms, which has yet to date neither supportive nor contradictory data for the theory.

However, no endeavour is lack of hurdles – the city must rethink its zoning laws, make plans in case of soil contamination, propertax mundanes and answer the question of who would bare the cost of parcel preperation.

Illustration: cuellar