Ruminations

A White House garden has been a dream of Alice Waters for a long, long time, and finally it is a reality. First Lady Michele Obama, assisted by local school children, broke ground in March for a kitchen garden on the south lawn of the White House.

The garden will produce vegetables to be cooked in the White House kitchen and given to Miriam’s Kitchen, which serves the homeless in Washington, DC. The school children will be involved in the planting and care of the crops. The First Lady also plans to introduce a bee hive.

Read more in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Filed by admin at 11:58 pm under Sustainable Agriculture & Policy
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Dan Barber, chef at Stone Hill Barns, says this in an article in Food and Wine magazine:

“Credit for animal ultrasounding goes to Ridge Shinn, a farmer at Out of the Woods Farm in central Massachusetts, who is a part-time livestock consultant and a full-time proselytizer of raising cattle on an all-grass diet. ‘Conventional ranchers rarely understand the quality of what they are producing. The processing centers identify the best meat and grade it ’prime,’ but they do that after the slaughter,” he says, turning up his hands in disbelief. “Works for the processor all right­ — they get the increased profits from the sale of a well-marbled animal, and the customers are happy because they know what they’re getting.”

Read the article in Food and Wine here: www.foodandwine.com/articles/creating-flavor-in-the-field

Filed by admin at 11:35 pm under Better Beef
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Michael Pollan, among other food writers and activists, argues persuasively that the food we eat in this country is way too cheap. And that’s why we are too fat, and suffer from food-related illnesses. He’s so persuasive that even that cynic George Will wrote a column in the March 8 Washington Post about the problem. Pollan observes that the availability of cheap abundant fertilizer after World War II basically revolutionized our agriculture in the U.S. … and not in a good way. Then the Nixon Administration in the 1970s panicked over the rise in food prices and authorized a massive campaign of subsidies, all to keep the farmers and middle America fat and happy.

Read these two related articles: George Will’s column

Steve Cornett’s comments at agweb.com

Filed by admin at 11:32 pm under Nutrition, Diet & Food Politics
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While the new Obama administration disappointed food safety advocates with his choice of former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack to be Secretary of Agriculture, we all are much happier with his selection of Kathleen Merrigan to be Deputy Secretary of Agriculture. She is an advocate of sustainable and organic agriculture and in her position at Tufts University in Boston, she directed a group of projects designed to stimulate community gardens, develop regional marketing strategies between consumers and local farmers, and promote food and gardening education in local schools.

Hearings on her confirmation earlier this month turned into a debate on organic farming practices, with the ranking Senate Agriculture Committee member, Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), arguing his concern that “in promoting your passion for organic production and sustainable agriculture, you tear down other types of agriculture with different points of view.”

Filed by admin at 11:20 pm under Nutrition, Diet & Food Politics, Sustainable Agriculture & Policy
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The USDA website describes the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) this way: “To protect the health of U.S. livestock and poultry and the economic well-being of those industries, we must be able to quickly and effectively trace an animal disease to its source.”

A March 11 op-ed in the New York Times by Shannon Hayes, a farmer and author of The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook and the forthcoming Radical Homemakers, argues that the proposed NAIS may sound like a good idea to identify affected animals when there is an outbreak like mad cow disease or avian flu.  But the effect of the system would be disastrous for rural farmers: “The burden for a program that would safeguard agribusiness interests would be disproportionately shouldered by small farmers, rural families and consumers of locally produced food.”

Read this articulate editorial here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/opinion/11hayes.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Filed by admin at 11:05 pm under National Animal ID System
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