Food System Remake?

Here is what we know is true about food in the United States of America: Everything bad about it--the demise of family farms, the pollution, the unhealthy products--flows from decades of our government working hand-in-glove with huge corporations to build an industrial algriculture system based on fossil fuels that produces a glut of corn and soybeans subsidized by U.S tax payers.

Neither the fossil fuels nor the glut are sustainable in the long term. In the short term they make our land and our people ill, while producing enormous profits for shareholders.

Keep that in mind as you watch President Obama address or not address the problems with U.S. food. I voted gladly for Barack Obama. I hope he is wildly successful. Even so, as we cheered on candidate Obama there was a little voice that kept reminding me that the former senator from Illinois has been a big supporter of turning corn into ethanol, one of the dumbest ideas to hit agriculture since Earl Butz admonished farmers to plant "fence row to fence row," and guaranteed federal tax dollars to pay for the excess.

No need to list all the ways we hate ethanol. (Or maybe just a few, like jacking up the price of food worldwide, spewing pollution into the nation's air and rivers, gobbling up natural gas and water, taking lands out of conservation. This ain't sugar cane, folks, and we ain't in Brazil.) But look here: Now that the price of oil has tanked, ethanol manufacturers are in trouble and looking for a bailout of their own. Could it be that Obama will use part of his huge stimulus package to prop up ethanol?

This is what the New York Times had to say back in December about Obama and his choice of agriculture secretary, fromer Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack:

"Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack are regarded as staunch advocates of ethanol and other bio-fuels as a way to reduce the nation’s reliance on foreign oil. And Mr. Obama and Democrats in Congress are working on a major economic stimulus package, in which they intend to promote the creation of thousands of new jobs tied to “green energy” industries, including the production of solar and wind energy.

"One of the first major decisions Mr. Obama and Mr. Vilsack may have to make is whether to grant the ethanol industry’s requests for billions in federal aid in the stimulus bill, which Mr. Obama has said he hopes to sign into law quickly, perhaps on his first day in office.

“ 'The big issue for him and any incoming secretary is going to be biofuels, that’s the sector that right now is in such a volatile position,' ” said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit group that is a leading critic of federal farm subsidies. American farmers, Mr. Cook said, are “ 'hitched to both the food system and the energy system, both of which are oscillating.' ”

More recently, an editorial in The Post-Standard of Syracuse New York describes the bankruptcy of one local ethanol plant, joining others around the country in the land of insolvency:

"Before it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Jan. 14, the $200 million Northeast Biofuels facility outside Fulton had yet to reach full production," the paper writes. "At maximum capacity, the plant would have produced about 100 million gallons of ethanol per year from 40 million bushels of corn, making it the largest ethanol producer in the Northeast. The plant started up in August but shut down about a month ago because of flaws in its piping system.

"To resolve its problems and emerge from Chapter 11 ready to resume operations, Northeast Biofuels will have to raise more money. Credit, however, remains tight. The company had arranged to obtain new financing during reorganization, but the lender it was counting on pulled out.

"And the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor's said there's a strong possibility that the company will be forced to liquidate to pay its creditors. In a liquidation, the lenders of the $140 million loan the company used to get started would recover little, if any, of their money, S&P said. That kind of prediction from a respected credit agency could make the company's search for financing even more difficult."

Apparently, the industry's best hope is a handout from Obama. As the Post-Standard notes, "the federal government made available billions of dollars in subsidies and tax breaks to encourage production. Just in 2007, the corn-based ethanol industry received nearly twice as much in subsidies and three times as much in tax breaks as solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable energy producers....

"When the price of ethanol plummeted with gasoline and credit tightened, many ethanol companies went under. About 9 percent of all ethanol plants in the United States have filed for bankruptcy, and some say that could soon exceed 20 percent."

The Ethicurean blog has assembled an admirable list of the nation's pressing food issues as a measure of the new administration's resolve. Each is worthy of attention, but to my mind, the real test is whether this new president from the Heartland, a man whose star was launched in Iowa and who has drunk deeply from the cup of industrial agriculture, is ready to untie the unholy corporate-government alliance that has our food system in a choke hold.

Watch what he does with ethanol.

Meet Clarabelle

Something I've been doing the last four years is reading stories three times a week to one of the classes at my daughter's charter school. In addition, I incorporate a storybook into my "food appreciation" classes at a private elementary school here in the District of Columbia. All of which means I check out a lot of books at the local library. In fact, I think the librarians experience a certain amount of dread when they see me walk through the door. They never know what kind of strange request I'll be bringing, like, "Got a picture book to go with deviled eggs?"

This week the librarian practically leaped out of her chair when I arrived and began pointing madly, madly, madly at something new on the shelf. It was this story called, "Clarabelle: Making Milk and So Much More." Now, I'm not normally looking for explication when I go searching for childrens books. I eschew the kids cooking section. No, I'm on the prowl for literature that fits the theme of the week. But something intrigued me about this "Clarabelle" book. I was taken with the idea that books like this--the ones that explain to children where milk comes from, or how tractors work--are still being written and printed, only in an updated fashion.

I was very curious to see what this book had to say about a modern dairy.

The story takes place on a real dairy farm called Norswiss near a place called Rice Lake in Wisconsin. It's a big operation, with 1,300 cows. To bring it down to a kid's level, two young boys--Sam and Josh, children of the dairy's owners--figure prominently. Sam and Josh are there when Clarabelle gives birth. They also help feed the calf its first big bottle of milk. My first thought was, "Oh, right. Like that really happens. Sam and Josh are bottle feeding calves every time one of the 1,300 cows gives birth." (In fact, about four calves are born every day at Norswiss.)

But maybe I'm too cynical. So I read on.

There are lots of close-up photos of Clarabelle. She is a fine, sturdy Holstein cow.
But after a while you begin to notice that all of the photos are taken indoors. Apparently Clarabelle is an indoor cow. She never goes outside.

"Each year, she gives birth to a calf that weighs about one hundred pounds," the book exclaims. Presumably she has been artificially inseminated to further her production of milk, which "is bottled for drinking or made into cheese, ice cream, yogurt and other dairy products."

And this part caught my attention, because, "To make all that milk, Clarabelle eats heaping piles of hay, corn, and soybean meal."

Aha! I thought. Clarabelle is just another part of the industrial food apparatus. She doesn't eat grass, the way cows were intended, but a "scientific" diet of silage produced by our monocropping, taxpayer subsidized, eco-polluting corn and soybean complex. Not only that, "Her amazing four-compartment stomach recycles leftover food and fiber products such as brewer's grain, sugar-beet pulp and cottonseed."

So basically, Clarabelle is a walking garbage recycler. There is no mention whether Clarabelle is regularly dosed with bovine growth hormone to increase her milk production. I was ready to write this whole Clarabelle story off as a piece of cleverly packaged Big Ag propaganda aimed at children when another interesting factoid emerge: The Norswiss farm is equipped with a manure processor that uses a microbial system to create methane. The methane from this dairy farm produces enough electricity to power 700 homes, and the leftover solids become bedding for the cows.

I thought this interesting enough to do a little research and found that Norswiss since 2004 has been engaged in a partnership with the Dairyland Power Cooperative to generate local electricity using cow manure and the latest technology.

In addition, the Norswiss owners, Annelies and John Seffrood, have integrated a system of composting to reduce the need for straw bedding and cut down on manure removal, according to an article published by the Central Plains Dairy Association.

"They tub grind the straw to reduce particle size to about 2 inches and use an 8-foot tiller to aerate the compost once a day. Switching to a compost system has cut the amount of straw needed for bedding in half, reduced the number of times the barn has to be cleaned from four times a year to once a year and cut the volume of manure and straw that has to be removed from approximately 2,400 tons to 600 tons annually. The compost also costs less to apply as fertilizer than the bed back, and more fertilizer is immediately available to crops, John says. They are currently building a 70 X 210 foot compost barn for fresh cows."

I don't understand all of it. But I'm impressed that a modern dairy operation in the nation's heartland is not just about feeding cows government subsidized corn and dosing them with hormones from Monsanto, but also is involved in developing ingenious was to reduce waste and turn manure into electricity. Is that a good thing? Is this the future we want for our agriculture, or do we really want something the looks more like the picture on the yogurt container: cows grazing in grassy meadows, submitting occasionally to a tow-headed milk maid?

What I draw from the Mirabelle story is that I just don't know enough about what's happening on our modern farms and I wish I did. I think we should The author of this book, Cris Peterson, herself runs a 700-cow dairy farm in Wisconsin, according to the book's dust jacket, and recently was named National Dairy Woman of the Year by a group that counts Monsanto Dairy among its members.

Such as it is, this is the kind of information about farming that's being passed to our kids at school. I would dearly love to see a book about our alternate dairy system, the one where cows wander around in green pasture and produce hormone-free milk. Has anyone written that book?

Pork Guilt

For weeks I've been planning on a choucroute garnie with some homemeade sauerkraut that's been waiting in the fridge since almost a year ago. Yesterday I made the trek to Eastern Market on Capitol Hill for the pork part of the garnie and was suddenly overcome with a sinking feeling as I stood at my favorite vendor's meat counter.

The first thing you need to know about the famous Eastern Market is that it suffered a terrible fire last year that destroyed the roof. For months, the vendors were out of business until a temporary facility that looks a little like a circus tent was erected across the street. In fact, there's a lot to be said for the new digs. There's more light, and all the facilities are new and gleaming.

But now we come to the second thing you need to know, and that is it's been almost a year since I purchased pork at Eastern Market. In that time, the ground has shifted where our outlook on the meat industry is concerned. And as I stood there contemplating a meat display as long as a battleship, I realized I had never before inquired where my favorite vendor got his pork.

So this time I asked and heard the words I dreaded most: Smithfield, Iowa, North Carolina. In other words, my favorite vendor was and always has been a devoted, unabashed link in the confinement pork industry. From the pork chops and whole loins, to the hog maws, tails and chitterlings--the entire display is testimony to everything about the meat industry that the sustainable food movement (us included) is railing against.

As the owner gathered up my order--a pound of bacon ends, two smoked pork chops, a smoked shank, a whole shoulder--I mentioned a bit awkwardly that some people now are looking for more local products. But the words fell to the floor like lead weights. It was if he never heard me. "These chitterlings here come from Denmark," he said proudly.

I quickly changed the subject to when he thought the work on the old market building might be finished.

So is this feast the equivalent of a drunk's last bender before going on the wagon? As I looked at the incredible array of meats--all from the evil Big Ag empire--I couldn't help wondering where one would find anything similar using the local, sustainable products that are now de rigeur. In fact, it is rare enough to find a local butcher. But you'd have to go back to another century to find local pig turned out this way, in such glorious diversity. Or maybe another part of the country. Or maybe another country.

There is, in other words, a huge adjustment still to be made.

So it was with feelings of guilty and sadness and nostalgia all mixed together that I constructed this choucroute garnie. First trimming the pork shoulder--removing the skin, the fat, the bone--and turning it into big, fat links of fresh Kielbasa sausage. Then browning five of the Kielbasa and three weisswursts I had purchased and two smoked pork chops.

Then, at the bottom of a large, heavy pot, lightly brown with the lipid of your choice one whole onion, peeled and thinly sliced lengthwise. Peel a Granny Smith apple and grate it directly into the pot. Add about six cups fresh sauerkraut and a cup of white wine. Stir in 1 teaspoon carraway seeds and a dozen crushed juniper berries. Nestle the smoked pork shank into the kraut along with the bacon ends, cut into thick slices. Add the pork chops and on top of everything the sausages.

Bring the pot to a boil, cover, reduce heat and simmer for 1 hour. When the time comes, arrange the choucroute on a warm platter and serve with boiled potatoes, tossed with butter and parsley, and perhaps some glazed carrots. Our friends Helen and Jeff came over to help us eat our choucroute and Helen brought a wonderful loaf of bread she had made. We drank cold ale, but an Alsatian Riesling is traditional.

Enjoy, and try not to think too much about where your pig came from.