If things have seemed a bit quiet on The Daily Table and The Green Fork lately, it’s because the team here has been working toward the arrival of our most ambitious and far-reaching online news project yet.  We hope you will join us this Monday, June 21st, when we launch our new blog, Ecocentric Blog, where we will cover food, water and energy – and the interconnections among the three.

Don’t worry — there will still be plenty of tips on how to green your fork, and we think you’ll appreciate our expanded focus.  And don’t worry about finding us, either — just meet us back here at The Daily Table and we will whisk you along to our new location.

Looking forward!
The Grace Team

The signs are everywhere. People are starting to quietly wonder, and to ask, even to demand information about where the food on their plate comes from. The truth too often is as unsettling as it is eye-opening, considering the rampant rise of factory farming. The question remains, though: are there other options available to us? Other less harmful systems we can support? Or, well, are we as a nation headed for Burger Armageddon?

In my quest to speak with experts directly involved with these matters, I thought to go to the source: ranchers. By ordering that steak, or hitting the drive-thru for that bag of burgers, who and what are we actually supporting? Following on from there, what advice could help those of us who live several steps removed from the food system?

Read the rest of the article here.

The Heaven on Earth Agrarian Road Trip (HEART) is 15 adventurous individuals from around the country who will be exploring local food and food justice initiatives in eight states. These are gallant efforts to rebuild local/regional food supplies that are more equitable, more just for farmers and farm workers, more secure, and more sustainable for the future. At the end of the journey, HEART will join some 17,000 people in Detroit – “Ground Zero for Urban Farming and Renewal” – for the 2nd US Social Forum, where Food Justice will be a powerful theme.

WHY HEART? Vibrant local/regional food economies are needed in the United States AND  everywhere – especially in impoverished nations whose farming has been weakened by international trade rules,  foreign “assistance” policies, and the dumping of subsidized crops on their economies.

Road Trippers have experienced these problems in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and will highlight these issues along the way. But the main focus will be to explore, celebrate and broadcast to the wider church the great things happening to address these systemic problems in our food and farm systems – by starting in our own households, congregations and communities.

As we rebuild food security and sovereignty here in the United States, let us always remember, pray for, and do all we can to support the same around the world. Advocacy on US foreign assistance and global food security legislation, as well as the Trade Act, will be critical this year.

So . . . How to follow the HEART?

Home base for the Heaven on Earth Agrarian Road Trip will be the Food and Faith Blog where you can find HEART photos, posts, videos and interviews from the Road Trippers, June 13 – 26.

Follow HEART and find events along the way! The Eat Well Guide has donated their database of local food farms, farmers markets, restaurants and much more to create a Heaven on Earth map, event descriptions, and even a printable local foods and farms resource for each of the towns we’ll visit.

Find us on the HEART Google map.

And “fan” the HEART facebook page for more updates!

Methyl Bromide, a soil fumigant often used on strawberry crops, was phased out in the US by 2005 because it was depleting the ozone layer.  The phase out was based on the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer and the Clean Air Act.

Good news, right? The EPA was acknowledging that yet one more federally-approved chemical was actually causing more harm than good. But I only found out about the banned Methyl Bromide because of the attention recently placed on Methyl Iodide. Approved in 2007, and currently used in many states as a “good” replacement for the banned Methyl Bromide, Methyl Iodide has its own set of problems.

Methyl Iodide is currently under scrutiny as the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) proposes approval of its use. Even though Methyl Iodide is used in many states already, California, which has its own pesticide approval process, has been questioning its safety level for the last year. While Methyl Iodide is not an ozone depleting pesticide like Methyl Bromide, it is extremely toxic to humans, a consistent carcinogenic that is used in the lab by chemists to induce cancer in experimental subjects such as mice. It has also been found to affect the nervous system, lungs, liver and kidneys, and to damage human fetuses.

While an independent review requested by the DPR concluded that “any anticipated scenario for … use of this agent would result in exposures to a large number of the public and thus would have a significant adverse impact on the public health,” the agency is still pushing for its approval, suggesting more stringent regulations than originally spelled out by the EPA.  These tighter regulations include better training in proper application, controlling the amount used, limiting exposure for workers and requiring special permits. They would also include bigger “buffer zones” between fields sprayed with the toxin and local hospitals, nursing homes, prisons and schools.

Though it isn’t looking good, if the California proposal is rejected, it could have a large impact, possibly moving up the next scheduled federal review of Methyl Iodide, now slated for 2013. It could even help lead to a federal ban.

As the revolving doors between industry and the government continue to …revolve, it takes very little digging to unearth a sketchy connection in this situation. In 2007, the year Methyl Iodide was approved by the EPA, Elin Miller, a past employee of Arysta (the company that makes the pesticide), was EPA Administrator for Region 10, which includes Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, Washington State and 267 Indian Tribes. Methyl Iodide was originally approved for one year, but the probationary time line was extended indefinitely as the Bush administration left office.

In the wake of President Obama’s Cancer Panel report, which found that the “risk of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated,” and links between chemicals and diseases (such as that between pesticides and ADHD) showing up regularly, the DPR’s proposal flies in the face of facts we’ve been privy to for a long time. You can send your comments about the proposal to the California Department of Pesticide Regulation until June 29^th at mei_comments@cdpr.ca.gov.

More Information:

Scientists Fume Over California’s Pesticide Plans,  Pesticide Action Network – Methyl Iodide

Helpful tips:

Dirty Dozen – Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides

The Green Music Group (GMG), a project of Reverb, has launched a series of earth friendly calls-to-action this summer. Starting tomorrow, Guster is challenging fans to use the Eat Well Guide to find and eat at least one meal using local, organic food. You have until noon on Friday June 18^th to submit your foodie photos and become eligible to win a Live Nation Ultimate Access Pass. You can check out all the details at the GMG challenge page. The “Eat Local” challenge is part of GMG’s mission to encourage concert venues to sell local and organic food.

GMG is a group of musicians, industry leaders and fans working to inspire environmental action. Directed at music fans everywhere, a different challenge will launch each week though mid-August with an exclusive video from a founding artist, including the Dave Matthews Band, Sheryl Crow, Linkin Park, The Roots, Barenaked Ladies, Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, Maroon 5 and, of course, those CO2-saving superheroes, Guster.  Challenge prizes include season passes to concert venues, a specialized mountain bike and a Honda Insight Hybrid – plus that green glow we all get from just doing the right thing.

Join the GMG community and check out the various challenges throughout August, and don’t forget to use the Eat Well Guide to find fabulous locally produced food all summer long.

Wow, the numbers are startling. Americans consume an astonishing amount of protein. USDA statistics reveal that U.S. men eat as much as 190% of their recommended daily protein allowance, while women eat as much as 160%, the great majority of which comes from saturated-fat heavy meat and meat products.

Protein is essential to life; it builds and maintains muscles, bones and skin, and regulates metabolism and digestion. But the question remains, whether you look at it from the perspective of personal health, or environmental degradation, or cost savings, or animal rights, or veggie activism, or whatever else floats your boat: do we really need to eat all that meat?

I went to the top, to the nation’s most influential nutritionist, Dr. Marion Nestle, professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, to get her take. “All proteins are made up of the same amino acids. ALL. No exceptions,” she reasons. “The difference between animal and vegetable proteins is in the content of certain amino acids. If vegetable proteins are mixed, the differences get made up. Even if they aren’t mixed, all you need to do to get the right amount of low amino acids is to eat more of that food. There is no ‘need’ for animal proteins at all.”

Read the rest here…

But Winkie had a secret – that rhubarb she was cooking up wasn’t so wholesome after all – the leaves are poisonous, filled with large amounts of oxalic acid. Perhaps this element of danger is why today, rhubarb is transcending the age boundary and infiltrating the hip locavore scene. Its tart flavor can tasted in everything from jams to jus and many top chefs are featuring the once dowdy ingredient in various ways throughout their menus.

Over Mother’s Day Weekend, rhubarbs dangerous edge had me captivated but as I could never recreate grandma’s delicious pie, I took an alternative route. After sifting through recipes such as this one for Rhubarb Cobbler and this Buttermilk Panna Cotta with Rhubarb Compote, I finally decided on a cake with unique combination of ingredients, Rhubarb Anise Upside-Down Cake.

The cake was a crowd pleaser, and I think everyone including Winkie, appreciated the departure from the classic pie. The recipe topping called for brown sugar to be caramelized in ½ a stick of butter and while it took me two attempts to get it right, it worked out in the end with a bit of patience and medium level heat. Perhaps the trouble stemmed from the fact that I only used two tablespoons of butter, “health nut” that I am, but it didn’t seem to affect the outcome of the cake. Otherwise, be sure to beat the sugar and butter together well for the batter, as that aids the airiness of the cake. Finally, be sure to enjoy the juxtaposition of danger and grandma together in one baked good.

Season: Rhubarb arrives in the Northern Hemisphere in April and May. It can be difficult to acquire at other times of the year but can be successfully frozen for mid-winter pies.

Buying: Look for long, fleshy stalks with little bruising. Some stalks may be on the greener side but that will not affect the flavor.

A bit of history: Rhubarb originated in China over 5,000 years ago and has been used throughout the centuries for its medicinal purposes as a laxative. It arrived in Maine in the 1820’s and spread throughout the U.S. where it became known as the “pie plant”.

Recipe after the jump!

Rhubarb Anise Upside-Down Cake – Serves 8

Gourmet Magazine, 1999

Ingredients

For topping

• 1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter
• 3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons packed light brown sugar
• 1 1/2 pounds trimmed rhubarb

For cake

• 1 teaspoon anise seeds
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter, softened
• 2/3 cup granulated sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 2 large eggs
• 1/2 cup well-shaken buttermilk
• 1/4 cup milk

Preparation:
Make topping:
In a well-seasoned 10-inch cast-iron skillet melt butter over moderate heat until foam subsides and reduce heat to low. Sprinkle brown sugar evenly onto bottom of skillet and heat, undisturbed, 3 minutes (not all brown sugar will be melted). Remove skillet from heat. Cut enough rhubarb crosswise into 1-inch pieces to measure 3 cups and decoratively arrange, rounded sides down, in one layer over brown sugar.

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Make cake:
With a mortar and pestle or in an electric coffee/spice grinder finely grind anise seeds. Into a bowl sift together anise, flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. In another bowl with an electric mixer beat together butter and sugar until light and fluffy and beat in vanilla. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. With mixer on low speed add flour mixture alternately in batches with buttermilk and milk, beginning and ending with flour mixture and beating until just combined (do not overbeat).| Spoon batter over rhubarb in skillet, spreading evenly (be careful not to disturb rhubarb), and bake cake in middle of oven until golden, about 45 minutes, or until a tester comes out clean. Cool cake in skillet on a rack 15 minutes.

Run a thin knife around edge of skillet and invert a plate over skillet. Keeping plate and skillet firmly pressed together, invert cake onto plate. Carefully remove skillet and serve cake warm or at room temperature.

Attorney General Eric Holder urged to enforce antitrust laws to protect poultry growers

Today, poultry growers from throughout the south told Attorney General Eric Holder that the US poultry business operates through price fixing and production controls that stifle fair competition and destroy the lives of family farmers.  According to the growers, who spoke at a hearing in Normal, Alabama, they are trapped in an unsustainable system that leaves them with skyrocketing costs, poverty wages and zero job security.  As one grower put it, “This system takes hard working farmers and makes them indentured servants on their own land.”

While many of us understand the importance of the nation’s civil rights and environmental laws, less attention has been paid to antitrust jurisprudence.  Yet, it is the source of vital legal protections for consumers and small businesses – at least when the laws are applied and enforced. In the United States, antitrust laws first arose in response to public anger over the control of essential products by groups of related businesses, known as trusts or cartels. These cartels arbitrarily set prices, regardless of a product’s quality, by conspiring to shut out competition.

Since 1960, the amount of chicken meat produced in the United States has grown by 600 percent, supplying an increasingly global market for chicken fingers, chicken nuggets and other fried and breaded abominations.  Meanwhile, four U.S. companies have formed a cartel that controls a majority of all this chicken – poultry that today is almost exclusively raised by people who don’t actually own the birds.

Through a business model of aggressive vertical integration, huge poultry companies in the US own and control the birds, the mills that produce the poultry feed, the factories where the birds are incubated and hatched, the trucks used to transport the chicks, grown chickens and meat, and the factories that butcher the birds and package the meat. Today, more than 90 percent of all poultry in the United States is raised by growers under contract to these vertically integrated poultry companies, rather than being raised and sold by independent farmers.  Not surprisingly, the open competitive market for chicken meat has disappeared.

The contract growers who actually raise the birds earn, on average, about 5 cents a pound for the poultry. To put it another way, according to testimony from West Virginia poultry grower Mike Weaver:

When you purchase a twelve piece chicken meal at Kentucky Fried Chicken or any other fast food restaurant it costs you about $26.99 in our area.  The grower who raised that chicken only received about $.30 cents.

The poultry growers who attended today’s hearing describe an industry that sounds like nothing so much as the old con man’s game of “bait and switch.”

When I retired from teaching in 1993 and was considering the construction of two, 500-foot chicken houses, I was promised a long-term relationship as long as I raised a good bird or followed the company’s instructions.  Initially, I was provided a contract for the ten-year length of my loan.  However, a few years later, the company brought out another version of the contract and said I needed to sign it to continue to get chickens.  Before the end of the initial ten-year term, the company again changed the contract to a one-year term.  I came to realize that the company could change contracts easily by threatening to stop placing birds if I refused to sign. – Kay Doby, former president of the North Carolina Contract Poultry Growers Association

The poultry companies require enormous investments in infrastructure before they will enter into a contract with a grower. But while the grower must take on huge mortgages for periods of from 10 to 30 years in order to satisfy the companies’ requirements, most are only guaranteed work on a “flock to flock” basis – that is, for about seven weeks at a time.    Meanwhile, in addition to their mortgage debt, the growers are liable for waste disposal (and any environmental damage that might result), as well as for maintenance of barns and equipment that the companies can leave vacant and unused for weeks or months at a time – periods during which the grower earns no income.

The companies also “rank” the contract growers against each other to decide whether to terminate contracts or otherwise penalize growers.  The problem is that the companies also control these rankings through decisions they make about the age and health of the chicks and the quality of the feed they provide to the growers, leaving them unable to complete on anything like a playing field.

Mississippi poultry grower Andy Stone described his life this way:

This insecurity hangs over my head each day that I grow chickens. You could argue this and say, No one’s job is secure in today’s economic environment. But the situation is not the same. Their job is a job. Mine is a job with a huge debt attached to it. . . .  The situation in contract poultry growing is out of control.

The Sherman Act, the nation’s first antitrust law, passed in 1890, made it illegal for businesses in the same industry to make agreements that limit competition. The Packers and Stockyards Act, passed in 1921, made it illegal for a poultry dealer to engage in unfair or deceptive business practices. According to advocates, however, the Stockyards Act is especially poorly enforced due, in part, to the fact that the Department of Justice and the Department of Agriculture are jointly responsible for its enforcement.

Meanwhile, poultry growers point to what they perceive as collusion among members of the poultry cartels:

When I started growing chickens in 1995, I bought land and moved sixty miles from where I grew up. I moved to the broiler capital of our state. I did this thinking that if I had a reason to switch from one integrator to another, I could. After a few months into the business I realized that the integrators have an unwritten pact with their “sister” integrators – “You don’t take our growers, and we won’t take your growers.” – Andy Stone

Equally sinister is the fear of retaliation that can deprive any grower of his or her income. As Kay Doby described it:

Another ugly reality in poultry is that growers are often intimidated by company personnel.  Growers that are here today know they are taking a big risk by being here and especially speaking about how things are done in the contract poultry business.  I had a grower tell me that he was complaining to company personnel about the quality of chicks he received and the answer he got was, “You know, you should just be glad you got a job.”  The grower got the message real quick, since the company he grows for has over 160 poultry houses sitting empty and the growers have no way to pay the loan payments.

According to Patty Lovera of Food & Water Watch, who attended today’s hearing:

Many areas have only one or two chicken processors, which leaves growers few options except taking whatever contract they are given.  When companies have this much control over the food supply, they make all the decisions, and farmers and consumers pay the price.

Today’s meeting was the second in a series taking place this year in which the US Department of Justice and the US Department of Agriculture are hearing public testimony on antitrust issues in agriculture.  The first, held on March 12 in Ankeny, Iowa, focused on issues facing crop farmers.   The next hearing is scheduled for June 25 in Madison, Wisconsin, and will focus on the dairy industry.

You can read recommendations for reform of the US poultry contract system in testimony submitted to the Department of Justice and Department of Agriculture.

Here is a taste of what the Washington Post had to say about Meatless Monday…

It’s enough to make the meat industry nervous. Over the past year, lobbying groups including the American Meat Institute, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Pork Board and the Farm Bureau have launched a quiet campaign to try to reverse the momentum. They have fired off missives to institutions that embrace the call to reduce meat consumption, and they have posted talking points for meat producers on the Internet. They are also making a final push to ensure that the government recommendation of two servings of meat per day remains enshrined in the new dietary guidelines that the Department of Agriculture will release this fall.

“When you start talking about this kind of stuff at institutions, it sends a panic through the industry,” said Tony Geraci, the director of food service for Baltimore City Public Schools, who received a raft of what he calls “cease and desist” letters from meat industry lobbyists. “If Baltimore does it, then what happens? The goal is to cut meat consumption by 15 percent.”

This is not the first time the meat industry has faced a meatless-day movement. The concept has its roots in World War I, when the U.S. Food Administration told Americans that “Food Will Win the War” and proclaimed Meatless Mondays and Wheatless Wednesdays. The New York-based nonprofit group Healthy Monday relaunched the idea in 2003 in association with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It really began to take off in 2009, said the organization’s president, Peggy Neu, when institutions and restaurants started to embrace the idea. The scheme has spread overseas. Last year, the city of Ghent in Belgium became the first European city to endorse a meat-free day.

Read the rest of the article here.

Remember when President Jimmy Carter visited the blighted south Bronx, with the result that images of burned-out houses and trash-stewn lots flashed across TV screens all over the nation? That visit and the movie, The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 created an indelible image of the Bronx as a hopeless borough riddled with crime and despair.

Enter Steve Ritz, a teacher at Discovery High School (the tall fellow pictured in the center of the photo above) who figured out a way to help turn all that around by teaching his students to grow vegetables on walls. Yes, vegetables on walls.

As prolific HuffPo blogger Kerry Trueman pointed out last February :

Ritz has figured out how to grow good food, good jobs and good citizens by tapping into one of our greatest wasted resources–urban youth. And he’s doing it in Hunts Point, a quintessential “food desert” that, ironically, just happens to also be one of the world’s largest food distribution centers; 2.7 billion pounds of fresh produce from 49 states and 55 foreign countries passes through Hunts Point’s New York City Terminal Market annually on its way to more affluent neighborhoods.

On June 3 Ritz is orchestrating a huge “School Garden to School Cafe” event where the teens will be cooking and serving 450 healthy organic meals with vegetables grown by them from seeds on classroom walls and in containers. Well, that’s one mighty fine way to make sure that high quality vegetables get eaten right in the Bronx! No surprise that Ritz was recently awarded an EPA Environmental Quality Award.

How did Ritz manage to grow truckloads of organic vegetables indoors with virtually no equity but sweat equity? One thing he did was partner with a for-profit enterprise called Green Living™ Technologies, a pioneering developer of cutting edge urban agricultural systems. George Irwin, CEO of Green Living™ Technologies and a man with a big heart and a vision as huge as Ritz’s, contributed all of the building materials for the grow wall.

As Ritz points out, before they started growing their own on classroom walls, these teens had no easy access to fresh vegetables. And when kids grow their own vegetables, they want to eat them–so improved nutrition is a built-in bonus when teens become vegetable gardeners.

And there are other bonuses as well: Gardening not only improved class attendance from 40 % to 93%, but has also resulted in the startling fact that 100% of the gardening teens achieved passing grades on the state Regents exams in math and science.

On April 27th, at the magnificent Art Deco Bronx County Courthouse, I was privileged to witness Bronx Borough President, Ruben Diaz, Jr. present ten of Ritz’s students with graduation certificates for completing the Green Living™ Technologies training program in green wall and green roof maintenance and installation. The training was co-sponsored by Boston Cityscapes and held in Boston. According to Irwin, “These students are the youngest in America to obtain such living wage certifications by GLT in an emerging and green industry.”

At the graduation ceremony, Ritz talks about how he and the teens made this all happen and shows some slides of the process.

Before handing out the certificates, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. talks about his passionate vision of greening the Bronx.

Up on the beautiful green roof of the Bronx County Courthouse, President Diaz receives a “shelf” of green-wall-grown lettuces from Steve Ritz: