Stevia : Sweet News in Fight Against Diabetes

Natural sweetener Stevia, now approved by the FDA, doesn't raise blood sugar levels, which is good news in the fight against diabetes, a killer disease affecting millions worldwide.

By Kate Braun and Mariann Wizard / The Rag Blog / June 16, 2009

There's good news in the fight against diabetes: the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved stevia (Stevia rebaudiana) as a food and beverage sweetener! Stevia, a South American plant, has some of the sweetest compounds in the world, but they don't raise blood sugar levels. Used as a sweetener in South America for years, before FDA approval it was available here only as a "dietary supplement."

Now, soft drink and snack giant PepsiCo says it will make a line of drinks and foods with stevia instead of sugar or artificial sweeteners; hopefully, others will follow. Stevia is also available now, under different brand names, alongside sugar in the baking aisles of local supermarkets; ask for it if you don't see it! Stevia can be used in baking, but because it is so sweet, may require recipe changes, or products specially made for baking. Look at package directions to find what works for you!

Millions of people worldwide have diabetes, a killer disease that is very difficult to manage, often causing lost limbs and/or blindness. It is linked to obesity, cardiovascular (heart) disease, and other serious conditions. Some diabetes is hereditary, while adult onset diabetes (type II) is thought to result in large part from poor eating habits. In the US, Hispanic, Native American, and Black people are particularly at risk. Although there is much less diabetes in Asia, Asians who adopt a "typical" US diet (refined sugar, refined flour, fried foods, fatty red meats) raise their risk. People who are sedentary are more at risk than those who are active. Millions more people are "borderline diabetic," with blood sugar levels just below those requiring treatment.

Although originally from South America, stevia does well in Austin's climate. Grow it to make your own inexpensive stevia sweetener! Seeds or plants may be obtained locally in the spring, ask your favorite nursery. Seeds may be purchased on-line from several sites, just search for “stevia seeds." Stevia plants like sunny or partly sunny spots with good drainage. They need enough water to not droop in the heat. Mulching helps them survive the heat. In Austin, they are a "perennial" that dies down in the winter and sends up new shoots in the spring.

It is best to not harvest stevia the first year, whether you start with seeds or plants. The root system is shallow and broad, and needs time to develop. You can grow stevia in a container, but the roots need lots of room; a wide, shallow pot is better than a tall, narrow one. Outdoors, plants self-seed easily. Start with three and in five years you'll have a forest! Some say stevia plants become unproductive after three years; personal experience says "not so!"

When it dies back in winter, break off the dry stalks, but leave something sticking above ground so you'll know where the plants are. When new shoots emerge, make sure they have water, sit back, and watch them grow. Stevia produces 2–3 foot tall fuzzy stalks and lots of leaves. As with any herb, harvest before flowers open (stevia's are small white clusters). Harvest stems and leaves (leave the roots), rinse well, and pat them dry. Place in a clean paper bag and hang it to dry for several days in a well-ventilated area. Store dry stevia in glass containers as you would any herb.

To make stevia water, pack a heat-proof container (a Pyrex pitcher works well) with fresh or dried stevia. Pour boiling water in to cover completely (use a spoon to push/tamp the stevia down; it will try to float). Make sure the water has reached a rolling boil. Cover the container and set aside until cool, at least three hours. Then, either strain out the stevia or refrigerate the container to steep overnight before straining. Longer steeping produces stronger sweetness. After discarding the stems and leaves, you have stevia water! Made from freshly picked stevia, it is a pale honey color; from dried it looks like flat cola. Store as a liquid in the refrigerator, or freeze in an ice cube tray and store the cubes in the freezer.

Stevia water may be used to sweeten coffee, tea, lemonade or limeade to taste (a few drops will do it!), on cereal, to help sweeten fruit pies, and in home-made slurpees, crushed ice drinks, or sherbets; the possibilities are endless. For anyone concerned about blood sugar, stevia is a sweet alternative, and even folks who aren't concerned about their "sugar" will enjoy stevia-sweetened foods!

[Kate Braun, an experienced psychic, teacher, co-op activist, and gardener, often writes about herbs, and grows and uses them in her own home kitchen. Mariann Wizard writes about regulatory matters and reviews scientific research on herbs and alternative medicine for the American Botanical Council. Both are regular contributors to The Rag Blog.]

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Foodie Friday: Michael Pollan's Food Revolution in the Making

A food revolution in the making from Victory Gardens to White House Lawn
By Michael Pollan / April 20, 2009

Last month, First Lady Michelle Obama broke ground for a new vegetable garden on the South lawn of the White House. It's the first time food will be grown at the President's residence since Eleanor Roosevelt planted her Victory Garden during World War II. Back then, as part of the war effort, the government rationed many foods and the shortage of labor and transportation fuel made it difficult for farmers to harvest and deliver fruits and vegetables to market. The First Lady's Victory Garden set an example for the entire nation: they too could produce their own fruits and vegetables. Nearly 20 million Americans answered the call. They planted gardens in backyards, empty lots, and even on city rooftops. Neighbors pooled their resources, planted different types of produce, and formed cooperatives--all in the name of patriotism.

By the time the war ended, home gardeners were producing 40 percent of the United States' produce. They aided the war effort by creating local food networks that provided much needed produce in their own communities, but their effect on the social fabric of the nation was greater still. Urban and suburban farmers were considered morale boosters who had found a great sense of empowerment through their own dedication to a common cause.

Today, home gardening is on the rise, but most Americans still know very little about where their food comes from, and even less about how the changes in temperature and precipitation associated with global warming may alter national food production. If you break down the fossil fuel consumption of the American economy by sector, agriculture consumes 19 percent of the total, second only to transportation. Unfortunately, there hasn't been a concentrated effort to mitigate its impact on the climate. If we want to make significant progress in reducing global warming we will need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary solar energy.

Resolarizing the food economy can support diversified farming and shorten the distance from farm to fork, shrinking the amount of fossil fuel in the American diet. A decentralized food system offers many other significant benefits: Food eaten closer to where it is grown is fresher and requires less processing, making it more nutritious, and whatever may be lost in efficiency by localizing food production is gained in resilience; regional food systems can better withstand all kinds of shocks.

Here are few examples of how we could start:

· Provide grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers' markets.

· Make food-safety regulations sensitive to scale and marketplace, so that small producers selling direct off the farm or at a farmers' market are not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer.

· Urge The U.S.D.A. to establish a Local Meat-Inspectors Corps to serve and support the local food processors that remain.

· Establish a Strategic Grain Reserve to prevent huge swings in commodity prices.

· Create incentives for hospitals and universities receiving federal funds to buy fresh local produce which would vastly expand regional agriculture and improve the diet of the millions of people these institutions feed.

This isn't just about government reform. Organizations, businesses, and even individuals like you can help advance these key initiatives and support both the revival of food local food economies and the health of our nation.

Next month the Natural Resources Defense Council will honor individuals who have demonstrated leadership and innovation in the field of sustainable food in its first annual Growing Green Awards. As the Chair of the selection committee, I'm excited to be part of this initiative and join NRDC in recognizing the extraordinary contributions this years honorees have made in the areas of ecologically-integrated farming, climate and water stewardship, farmland preservation, and social responsibility. The Growing Green Awards is an opportunity to highlight the contribution individuals can make in creating a more sustainable future through better food production practices that improve the health of people and the planet.

Read the rest at the Source / OnEarth

Many thanks to Janet Gilles / The Rag Blog

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Hawai‘i : Runaway Technology Vs. the Good Food Revolution

Hawaiian taro patch. Photo by Kirk Lee Aeder / HVCB Image Library.
The Good Food Revolution

On Kaua‘i, too, there are people engaged in remembering and reconnecting. Unlike the dry west side of the island, the North Shore is a lush place of almost heartbreaking beauty with a vibrant, racially mixed local culture.

By Claire Hope Cummings / March 9, 2009

The lush landscape of Hawai‘i once offered abundant food. What can these islands teach us about food and sufficiency?

The island of Kaua‘i is one of the most beautiful and fragile places on earth. From above, it looks like a vibrant green flower, lush and pulsing with life, floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The Hawaiian tourist industry calls it “The Garden Isle,” comparing it to the Garden of Eden. The image of Hawai‘i has always been sold as a “paradise.” But there is another side to life on this island, one that visitors rarely see.

The west side of this tiny island is home to the U.S. military’s Pacific Missile Range and testing grounds, part of the longstanding military occupation of the Hawaiian islands, and to the headquarters of giant agrochemical corporations Syngenta and Dupont. These corporations test and produce genetically modified crops on former sugar plantation lands here and throughout Hawai‘i, along with toxic herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizers. It is the very worst of America’s “agrochemical military industrial complex,” imposed on the ancient homelands of a rich traditional farming and fishing culture, in the midst of some of the world’s most precious biodiversity.

When I visited the west side of Kaua‘i in 2006, the local newspapers were full of reports of children from Waimea Canyon School who had been sickened by chemicals used on nearby test plots. As many as 60 people were affected, including teachers and staff. It happened again in 2007, with school children suffering nausea, headaches, and dizziness. In 2008, for the third time in three years, chemicals being tested for industrial agriculture sickened children and adults and sent them to clinics and the emergency room with tears in their eyes, holding their heads in their hands, or vomiting. The corporations responsible for the tests deny any role in the incidences. But the open air testing of chemicals and genetically modified crops is a now a persistent worry for people living in this small rural community. Local activists have suggested that the welcome sign at the Kaua‘i airport be changed to warn tourists of what is going on there: “Welcome to the Mutant Garden Island.” Instead of being a source of health and well-being for the land and people, the American system of industrial agriculture has become a source of problematic food and even fear.

The connection to the military is the key to understanding how this tragedy came about. Most of the toxic chemicals used in agriculture came from the implements of war, such as nerve poisons and defoliants developed during World War II. And our military has been repeatedly used to impose our system of industrial agriculture on other lands, depriving traditional farmers of their livelihoods and redirecting their natural resources to the use of U.S. business interests. American plantation owners used the military to force the monarchy of Hawai‘i out of power. The takeover of Hawai‘i—the imposition of plantation agriculture on Hawai‘i’s traditional system and the conversion of the Hawaiian people to a Western lifestyle—is a case history and a warning for all of us concerned about the future of food. We are facing an urgent problem: Given global warming, growing populations, and declining natural resources, how will we feed ourselves?

Before colonization, Hawaiians had a sophisticated system of land, water, and ocean resource use that fed populations equal to or even greater than those on several of the islands today (excluding the urban populations of O‘ahu). Now, residents of Hawai‘i import 85 percent of their food. The descendants of the first Hawaiians, like most native peoples who have been colonized, suffer from some of the worst poverty and diet-related health problems of anyone living in the United States.

The food being imported into Hawai‘i is produced, processed, packaged, and transported using enormous amounts of fossil fuels. By one measure, the current U.S. food system uses 10 times more energy than it produces in the form of food calories. Even if you like industrial agriculture, its built-in obsolescence is a problem. When oil production peaks, and prices rise again, as they inevitably must, food in Hawai‘i will become unaffordable. What will happen when the gas pumps and grocery store shelves are empty? This is a question all of us will face, sooner or later, since we are all on what David Brower called “Earth Island,” a small planet floating in a sea of space.

A Storied Land

Mythologists like Joseph Campbell tell us that many creation myths are stories about how a food plant or animal came to people, usually as a gift from their creator. But invariably, these gifts came with instructions about maintaining respect for and reciprocity with the sources of one’s food, to assure its continuing productivity. These stories are central to the formation of a culture’s core values. And they affect us now, not just in how we feed ourselves, but in how we relate to the natural world and each other.

A Hopi creation story, as told by Frank Waters in The Book of the Hopi, is a good example, illustrating the values inherent in the choices we make. As Waters explains, the continuity of the Hopi people comes from these values and the way corn forms the sacred center of their lives, kept alive in ritual and practices to this day.

Since the beginning of their existence, the Hopi have emerged through several worlds. Whenever they were overwhelmed by wickedness or corruption, their world would be destroyed. Later, they would emerge into the next world. At each emergence, the Creator would give them corn for sustenance. When the people entered the Fourth World, the one we are living in now, the Creator decided to find out how much greed and ignorance there still was among these humans. Many ears of corn were laid out of all different shapes, sizes, and colors. The people had divided into many races, and each was told to choose, according to its wisdom, the corn they would take with them into the Fourth World. They rushed forward and took different corn ears—long ears, fat ears, and ears of different colors. The Hopi held back and waited. All that was left for them was the smallest ear. But, they said, it was like “the original humble ear given them on the First World.” They recognized that this corn would be the best one to help them survive the harsh desert climate where they now lived.

Traditional people worldwide have developed long-standing symbiotic relationships among themselves, their homelands, and their foods. And their farming practices are intimately adapted to the places they inhabit. All over the Americas, people developed corn varieties that were finely tuned to local conditions. According to Boone Hallberg, a botanist and one of the world’s experts on corn, some of these varieties were drought-resistant; some withstood wind, crowding, local pests, and different soils; and some even fixed their own nitrogen. These plants are evidence of an incredible genius at work in the reciprocal relationships among people, plants, and place. New Mexican activist Miguel Santistevan describes how, in the Pueblos, each type of corn “drank” from its own river, producing seed that was specific to its own watershed.

One of the world’s most influential creation stories comes from the Book of Genesis in the Bible. It is often told incorrectly, without the warnings and prohibitions that are in the story—as if the children of Adam and Eve were entitled to control creation. Whether you read this story literally or metaphorically, it has had a powerful impact on Western thought. Many scholars believe that our current environmental conditions came about because our society interpreted this story as a license to dominate nature. When told this way, the development of our military-industrial system of agriculture makes sense. We can see the long arc of history, the search-and-destroy missions throughout the ages, including manifest destiny and the conquest of native peoples, their lands, and their well-developed integrated food systems.

And the good, no, the really wonderful news, is that all over the world, people are engaged in relearning traditional ways, weaving them into new life-enhancing technologies, and making essential ecological and economic reconnections.

We can see the gradual and painful dismembering of North America. Europeans brought with them a fragmented system of agriculture, breaking the sod, fencing, and buying and selling parcels of land. Piece by piece, they went about destroying the natural systems that gave this land its enormous fertility. Their ancestors had deforested many European countries, and they continued seeking sustenance by taking more than was returned, depleting the resources they used, and then moving on. After using up the larger landscapes, they now have turned to smaller frontiers—genes and molecules.

Genetic engineering in agriculture was developed as a way to squeeze more from corn, wheat, and rice, turning these plants into little machines. We demanded that these plants put out more and more for us, and pumped them full of chemicals and hormones. Now, almost 80 percent of corn grown in the United States is genetically modified. The rest is contaminated with GMOs, and the parent seed lines of corn are privately owned by the agrochemical companies. If we cared to learn, corn would have been able to teach us about generosity, adaptability, and resiliency. But rather than learn from nature, we still believe that our limited human imagination is sufficient and that we can solve systemic problems in mechanistic ways.

This approach is fundamentally flawed. Production-based solutions to hunger have failed miserably. And yet the urge to control nature seems unbounded. Farmers at the beginning of the 20th century could make a decent living. They saved and exchanged seeds, and bred their own crop varieties.

Then, in the 1920s and 1930s, a growing private seed industry used the new medium of radio advertising to heavily promote commercial hybrid seeds as the way to increase production. Hybrids can be bred to increase vigor, but they do not produce seed that is “true,” meaning that each year new hybrid seeds have to be purchased and planted. On-farm seed saving and plant breeding began to go out of fashion. Not content with just a good share of the seed market, seed companies began pushing for changes to the law, and by the end of the 20th century, farm-based seed saving and plant breeding ended. Now, sexually reproducing, living plants can be patented—a moral, biological, and legal outrage.

American commodity agriculture has become a bloated industrial machine dependent on chemical inputs and government subsidies to survive. Commodity farming is not about food for people. It’s an extractive industry, often compared to mining. It mines the soil and pollutes the water and creates mountains and rivers of waste. Soil regenerates on a slow natural timescale, about one inch of topsoil in every 500 years. The United States is losing topsoil 13 times faster than it can be replaced, costing the nation an estimated $37.6 billion in productivity losses each year. According to a recent U.S. Geological Survey, the one billion pounds of pesticides that American farmers use every year have contaminated almost all of the nation’s streams and rivers, as well as the fish living in them, with toxic cancer-causing chemicals. Fertilizers pour off farms into the Mississippi watershed, stimulating algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico and creating a “dead zone” where nothing lives.

If science had remained publicly funded and in the hands of land grant universities committed to conducting research in the public interest, production-based innovations might have added another useful tool to farm technology. Instead, private commercial interests hijacked the research agenda and privatized its technologies. Corporations and a few foundations took over the social mechanisms for problem solving, leaving us with only for-profit solutions in the form of products. Government not only deregulated many toxic technologies; it abdicated its responsibility to protect our health and safety.

There are no brakes on this runaway technology train. The continual expansion of corporate power poses even greater looming dangers. Biotechnology, especially as used in agriculture, has been harmful enough, but nanotechnology and synthetic biology, now being developed for biofuels, promise to do far more harm than good.

Industrial agriculture contributes almost 17 percent of all greenhouse gases, along with accelerating deforestation, desertification, and profligate water use. A study released in January this year in the journal Science predicts that half of the world’s population will face food shortages by the end of this century as rising temperatures, drought, and loss of soil moisture depress crop production. Who, indeed, will be feeding us then? Monsanto, with its patented “climate-ready” crops, or the organic farmer who sells at your local farmers market?

As a Native American friend of mine used to say, “Here’s a little bit of native wisdom: If we don’t change direction pretty soon, we’ll end up right where we’ve been headed!”

Severing and Remembering

Another way to look at this rather dismal story is this: At every step of the way, we have disconnected and dismembered the intricate relationships that form the web of life. Recombinant DNA technology, for instance, cuts a genome, inserts foreign material, and severs the original evolutionary lineage of that organism.

The solution to all this severing and disconnection is re-membering, meaning “to put back together.” This is the fundamental lesson traditional peoples keep trying to teach us. They often say that they are minding the rituals that hold the world together. They say that if we want to save the places, peoples, and plants we love, we have to remember their stories. They know that the answers we seek are already available, once we begin reweaving the social and biological webs that sustain us.

Independent science supports this interconnected approach to solving problems. The biotechnology industry asked several major international institutions like the U.N. and the World Bank to study how best to feed the world. After a four-year global study, 400 experts prepared a peer-reviewed report, adopted by 60 countries, known as The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. Ironically, the report said biotechnology cannot feed the world. There is now a consensus in government and the scientific community that small-scale farming, traditional knowledge, and a focus on local economic vitality and adaptable agro-ecological methods are the optimal way forward.

And the good, no, the really wonderful news, is that all over the world, people are engaged in relearning traditional ways, weaving them into new life-enhancing technologies, and making essential ecological and economic reconnections. Young farmers, urban activists, cooks and chefs, teachers and students, community organizers, and faith groups are bringing local organic food, seed saving, and sustainable work projects into the mix. The values of the natural world—diversity, integrity, adaptability, and resiliency—are reemerging and re-entering the cultural exchange, just when we need them the most.

On Kaua‘i, too, there are people engaged in remembering and reconnecting. Unlike the dry west side of the island, the North Shore is a lush place of almost heartbreaking beauty with a vibrant, racially mixed local culture. There, the Waipa Foundation hosts a weekly farmers market selling organic local food to support its work reviving traditional foodways. Like many Native Hawaiian organizations, they have a Hawaiian-language immersion school that integrates traditional food, farming, and fishing into their curriculum. They connect local farmers with schools, which are getting young people out of the classroom and into the mud of the taro patch. Activists on the island and throughout Hawai‘i are working toward food security. They achieved a ban on genetically modified coffee and are bringing back the original “gift economy” of exchanging traditional varieties of taro.

Just up the road from the Waipa farmers market, Limahuli Garden is restoring the traditional Hawaiian land-use system called an ahupua‘a. Kawika Winter, an engaging young ethnobotanist, Native Hawaiian, and the garden’s director, says the name lima huli means “turned hand.” It refers to a Hawaiian proverb which, roughly translated, says, “If your hand is turned up, you will be hungry; if your hand is turned down, toward the soil, your belly will be full.” The up-turned hand, Winter says, is not a positive symbol for Hawaiians. It is a sign of supplication. The down-turned hand, however, represents the hard work of cultivating the land.

Winter explains that the work they are doing there is all about remembering that the land is our ancestor. “We know that the way to get through difficult times is to use what was left to us—our land and our traditional knowledge. That will carry us into the future,” he says. “This is also our gift to the world.”

[Claire Hope Cummings wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone, the Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Claire is an environmental lawyer, journalist, and the author of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds (Beacon Press, 2008).]

Source / Yes! Magazine

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Slow Food Nation : You Are What You Eat

The Slow Food Nation gathering promises to be a Woodstock for food lovers and enviros concerned with our food system.
By Kerry Trueman / August 25

SAN FRANCISCO -- A swarm of 40,000 to 50,000 locavores will descend on San Francisco this Labor Day weekend to attend Slow Food Nation, a four-day extravaganza of teach-ins and tastings that's being billed as a kind of "Woodstock for gastronomes."

I'd rather go to a Woodstock for garden gnomes, myself -- at least those Lilliputian lawn ornaments share my fondness for front yard farming. Gastro gnomes, on the other hand, sound like elitist elves who are overly fond of artisanal cheeses and grass-fed beef. Do we really need a celebration of such highfalutin culinary novelties at a time when high fuel and food costs are making it harder for people to keep their pantries stocked with even the most basic staples?

Well, yes, we do, because we need to remember that the fresh, unadulterated, minimally processed, locally produced foods that Slow Food Nation is showcasing were our pantry staples, before the military-industrial complex annexed our food chain a half a century or so ago in the name of progress.

Our great-grandparents would be flabbergasted to learn that grass-fed milk in glass bottles bearing the local dairy farm's logo is now a rare luxury item available to only the affluent few who are willing to pay $4 for a half-gallon of milk.

Back in the day, our breads were fresh-baked and free of high fructose corn syrup, and our eggs and bacon came from chickens and hogs that rolled around in the dirt and saw the light of day. The word "farm" still evokes nostalgic pastoral images for most Americans, but there's nothing even remotely benign or bucolic about the fetid, brutal factory farms that supply us with most of our meat, poultry, eggs and dairy products today. And unmasking this unsavory reality is as much a part of Slow Food Nation's agrarian agenda as dishing out local delicacies.

So don't be distracted by the aroma of wood-fired focaccia wafting from the Fort Mason Center "Taste Pavilions"; Slow Food Nation has the potential to spark a crucial dialogue about where our food comes from, how it's grown, and why all that matters. With forums featuring the good food movement's marquee names, including Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Michael Pollan, Marion Nestle and Eric Schlosser, this Alice Waters-sponsored shindig could be the watershed event that puts America's foodsheds on the map.

Don't know what a "foodshed" is? Don't worry, nobody else does, either -- the word is still so obscure it hasn't earned an entry on Wikipedia. It means, essentially, the area through which food travels to get from the farm to your plate. That would have been a pretty short trip a few generations ago, but in this era of globalization, our foodshed now encompasses the whole world, more or less.

This far-flung food chain has enslaved us with a false sense of abundance, turning the produce aisles of our supermarkets into a seasonless place where you can find berries and bell peppers all year round. But this apparent bounty diverts us from the fact that industrial agriculture has actually drastically reduced the diversity of the foods that our farmers grow.

As small and mid-size farms got swallowed up by the massive monoculture operations we now call "conventional," the varieties of fruits and vegetables grown on those farms got whittled down to just those few that shipped the best and had the longest shelf life. Breeders chose to focus on species of livestock and poultry that fatten up the fastest, such as big-breasted but bland Butterball turkeys so top-heavy they can't reproduce naturally and have to be artificially inseminated. For this we give thanks each November?

This focus on economies of scale, and the illusory "efficiency" of a food system dependent on cheap fossil fuels and perpetual subsidies, gave us, the richest nation in the world, the cheapest food. And we are all the poorer for it.

Along the way, we lost hundreds of different kinds of plants and animals; currently, "at least 1,060 food varieties unique to North America are threatened, endangered or functionally extinct in the marketplaces of the United States, Canada, and northern Mexico," Gary Paul Nabhan writes in Renewing America's Food Traditions, a new book that celebrates the distinctive culinary regions of our country that Agribiz almost obliterated in recent decades.

But Renewing America's Food Traditions is not just a book; it's an alliance: Called RAFT for short, it's a collaborative effort from Slow Food USA and six other sustainably minded organizations. RAFT's mission is to inspire what the folks at Slow Foods USA call "eater-based conservation" by preserving and promoting the culinary heritage and extraordinary biodiversity that blessed this country for centuries before we shifted gears and became a fast food nation.

Nabhan is participating in a Slow Food Nation forum, "Re-Localizing Food," along with Pollan, Dan Barber and Winona LaDuke, but this powerhouse panel is, alas, already sold out, along with most of the other forums featuring the rock stars of the real food movement.

Thankfully, the Slow Food Nation folks are offering some free events and exhibits, too, including the Marketplace, which promises "to transform San Francisco's Civic Center Plaza into an urban garden, farmers market, outdoor food bazaar and soapbox," and the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden in front of City Hall, whose impressive array of organic heirloom vegetables is being donated to local food banks.

In keeping with its goal to promote all things sustainable, Slow Food Nation aspires to be a "zero waste event:" In addition to recycling and composting food waste, plates, flatware and packaging, Slow Food Nation is joining forces with Food and Water Watch to banish bottled water from the four-day festival. Echoing Food and Water Watch's Take Back the Tap campaign, the event will instead offer five tap water stations where folks can refill their water bottles -- or, if you didn't bring your own, you can buy a reusable, eco-friendly stainless steel canteen.

Not content to just spare us the spectacle of 50,000 good food fanatics washing down all those sustainable snacks with bottled water, Food and Water Watch has posted a much-needed guide on its Web site for the rest of us on how to "Free Your Event From Bottled Water." Pair this with Slow Food Nation's Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture, to be unveiled on Aug. 28 at San Francisco's City Hall, and you've got a virtual road map to a real revolution, even if you're not going to San Francisco.

Source / AlterNet

Thanks to David Hamilton / The Rag Blog

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Food For Thought

Turning Your Lawn into a Victory Garden
Won't Save You -- Fighting the Corporations Will
By Stan Cox / June 23, 2008

The corporate agriculture industry would like nothing better than to see us spend all of our free time in our gardens and not in political dissent.

I didn't mean to lead anyone down the garden path. Adding my small voice to those urging Americans to replace their lawns with food plants wasn't, in itself, a bad idea. But now that food shortages and high costs are in the headlines, too many people are getting the idea that the solution to America's and the world's food problems is for all of us in cities and suburbia to grow our own. It's not.

Don't get me wrong: Growing food just outside your front or back door is an extraordinarily good idea, and if it's done without soil erosion or toxic chemicals, I can think of no downside. Edible landscaping can look good, and it saves money on groceries; it's a direct provocation to the toxic lawn culture; gardening is quieter and less polluting than running a power mower or other contraption; the harvest provides a substitute for industrially grown produce raised and picked by underpaid, oversprayed workers; and tending a garden takes a lot of time, time that might otherwise be spent in a supermarket or shopping mall.

So it was in 2005 that our family volunteered our front lawn to be converted into the first in a now-expanding chain of "Edible Estates," the brainchild of Los Angeles architect/artist Fritz Haeg. We already had a backyard garden, but growing food in the front yard (which, as Haeg himself points out, is a reincarnation of a very old idea) has been a wholly different, equally positive experience.

Our perennials and annuals are thriving, we've gotten a lot of publicity, and I've been talking about the project for almost three years. Yet neither of our gardens, front or back, can stand up to the looming agricultural crisis. Good food's most well-read advocate, Michael Pollan, has written that growing a garden is worth doing even though it can make only a tiny contribution to curbing carbon-dioxide emissions. He might have added that growing food is worth it even if it does very little to revive the nation's food system.

World cropland: the pie is mostly crust

The edible-landscaping trend is catching on across the country, and with food prices rising, it has taking sadly predictable turns. A Boulder, Colo. entrepreneur, for example, has tilled up his and several of his neighbors' yards and started an erosion-prone, for-profit vegetable-farming operation. It will supplement his income, but it won't make a nick in the food crisis.

That's because the mainstays of home gardening -- vegetables and fruits -- are not the foundation of the human diet or of world agriculture. Each of those two food types occupies only about 4 percent of global agricultural land (and a smaller percentage in this country), compared with 75 percent of world cropland devoted to grains and oilseeds. Their respective portions of the human diet are similar.

Suppose that half of the land on every one-acre-or-smaller urban/suburban home lot in the entire nation were devoted to food-growing. That would amount to a little over 5 million acres (pdf) sown to food plants, covering most of the space on each lot that's not already covered by the house, a deck, a patio, or a driveway. (And in many places it couldn't be done without cutting down shade trees and planting on unsuitably steep slopes).

That theoretical 5 million acres of potential home cropland compares with about 7 million acres of America's commercial cropland currently in vegetables, fruits, and nuts, and 350 to 400 million acres of total farmland. The urban and suburban area to be brought into production would not approach the number of healthy acres of native grasses and other plants that are slated to be plowed up to make way for yet more corn, wheat, soybeans, and other grains under the newly passed federal Farm Bill.

A nationwide grow-your-own wave would send good vibes through society, ripples that could be greatly amplified by community and apartment-block gardening. But front- and backyard food, even if everyone grew it, would not cover the country's produce needs, much less displace our huge volume of fresh-food imports.

We could, instead, plant every yard to wheat, corn, or soybeans, which would account only for a little over two percent of the US land sown to those crops. Other policies, like dispensing with grain-fed meat and fuel ethanol, would free up far more grain-belt land than that.

Not even a poke in the eye

I've played a part in the promotion of domestic food-growing, and I now I seem to hear daily from people who believe that it's the best alternative to industrial agriculture (as in, "I'll show Monsanto and Wal-Mart that I don't need their food!"). Even though most prominent home-lot food efforts, like the "100-Foot Diet Challenge," also try to draw attention to bigger issues, the wider message can get lost in the excitement. Whatever its benefits, replacing your lawn with food plants will not give Big Agribusiness the big poke in the eye that it needs, nor will it save the agricultural landscapes of the nation or world.

To do that, the big-commodity market must be not just modified but overthrown. Until then, most of that two-thirds or more of the human calorie and protein intake that comes from grains and oilseeds (directly in most of the world or among Western vegetarians, largely via animal products for others in this country) will continue to be served up by a dirty, cruel, unfair, broken system.

Essential for providing vitamins, minerals, and other compounds, a highly varied diet is important, and home gardens around the world help provide such a diet. But with a world population now approaching seven billion people and most good cropland already in use, only rice, wheat, corn, beans, and other grain crops are productive and durable enough to provide the dietary foundation of calories and protein.

Grains made up about the same portion of the ancient Greek diet as they do of ours. We've been stuck with grains for 10,000 years, and our dependence won't be broken any time soon.

The United States emulate Argentina and a handful of other countries by raising cattle that are totally grass-fed instead of grain-fed and thereby consuming less corn and soybean meal. But most of the world is utterly dependent on grains. The desperate people we saw on the evening news earlier this year, filling the streets in dozens of countries, were calling for bread or rice, not cucumbers and pomegranates.

Capitalism: It doesn't go well with food

Humanity's attachment to cereals, grain legumes, and oilseeds has acquired a much harder edge in the industrial era, but as a base for political and economic power, the staple grains have always been unsurpassed. Because they hold calories and nutrients in a dense package that can be easily stored for long periods and transported, the more fortunate members of ancient societies could accumulate surpluses. Those surpluses are recognized by the majority of scholars as necessary to the birth of market economies, which allowed the prosperous to exercise control over society's have-nots. Eventually, states used control over grains to exert political power over entire populations.

Few foods could have filled that role. Noting that before grain agriculture came along, ancient Egyptians might have gathered a surplus of various foods from nature, most of them highly perishable, economic historian Robert Allen once wrote, "If all a tax collector could get from foragers was a load of waterlilies that would wilt by next morning, what was the point of having them?" The Pharaohs managed to exert control over the area's population only after people started farming wheat and barley.

The even bigger problem with grains -- which are short-lived annual plants, grown largely in monoculture -- is that they supplanted the diverse, perennial plant ecosystems that covered the earth before the dawn of agriculture. We've been living with the resulting soil erosion and water pollution ever since.

Then, when grains became fully commodified a couple of centuries ago, things really started to go downhill. In discussing his new book Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Raj Patel cited India as an example: "The social safety nets that existed in India under feudal society had been knocked away by the British. If people couldn't afford food, they didn't get to eat, and if they couldn't buy food, they starved. As a result of the imposition of markets in food, 13 million people across the world died in the 19th century. They died in the golden age of liberal capitalism. Those are the origins of markets in food."

Indeed, if capitalism were a wine, it would be a wine that doesn't go well with any type of food.

Most food today is produced not as an end in itself but as a by-product of a global economy with the singular goal of turning maximum profit. That is a dysfunctional arrangement, as Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the founder of ecological economics explained almost 40 years ago in his book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process: "So vital is the dependence of terrestrial life on the energy received from the sun that the cyclic rhythm in which this energy reaches each region on the earth has gradually built itself through natural selection into the reproductive pattern of almost every species, vegetal or animal ... Yet the general tenor among economists has been to deny any substantial difference between the structures of agricultural and industrial productive activities."

Industrial or commercial output can be increased by building more capacity, stepping up the consumption of inputs, taking on more workers, and pushing workers harder and for longer hours. Farming, by contrast, is inevitably bound by the calendar -- by month-to-month variation in the capacity of soil and sunlight to support the growth of plants. It depends fundamentally on the productivity and the habits of non-human biological organisms over which humans can exert control only up to a point.

That clearly isn't the ideal pattern for efficient wealth generation, so the past century has seen relentless efforts to mold agriculture into the factory model as closely as possible and, where that can't be done, to graft more easily regimented industries -- farm machinery, fertilizers, chemicals, food processing, the restaurant industry, packaging, advertising -- onto an agricultural rootstock. In the US, the dollar outputs of those dependent industries are growing at two to four times the rate of agriculture's own dollar output, putting ever-greater demands on the soil.

With a wholesale shift toward mechanization of US agriculture, 75 percent of economic output now comes from fewer than 7 percent of farms; furthermore, there has been a steep rise in the proportion of farms owned by investors living in distant cities (some of them perhaps avid urban gardeners).

Because, as Georgescu-Roegen showed, there's a fundamental difference between the farm and the factory, the well-used term "factory farming" represents more an aspiration than an accomplished fact. Nevertheless, agribusiness's attempts to defy natural rhythms and achieve industrial efficiency have been ecologically devastating. The biofuel craze, encouraged by subsidies that continue in the new Farm Bill, compounds the problem.

"We must cultivate our garden," and ...

To repair the broken system that supplies the bulk of the nation's diet will require Americans to step out of the garden and into the public arena. Beyond working to get a better Farm Bill passed five years from now, we have to work together to break the political choke-hold that agribusiness has on federal and state governments.

With land and wealth being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands (and with more prisoners than farmers in today's America) we have actually reached a point at which land reform is as necessary here as it is in any nation of Latin America or Asia. Only when we get more people back on the land, working to feed people and not Monsanto, will the system have a chance to work. Most home gardeners know that the root of the problem is political, but the agricultural establishment would like nothing better than to see us spend all of our free time in our gardens and not in political dissent.

Ironically, it's that great troublemaker Voltaire who has too often been trotted out (and too often misquoted) as an advocate of withdrawing from the tumult of society, into tending one's own property. Voltaire was indeed a gardener, and he did end his most famous novel by having Candide, after surviving so many far-flung hazards, utter those famous words to his fellow wanderer Dr. Pangloss: "We must cultivate our garden."

However, with the publication of Candide in 1759, Voltaire entered the most politically active part of his life, as he "went on to a series of confrontations with the consequences of human cruelty that, two hundred-odd years later, remain stirring in their courage and perseverance," in the words of Adam Gopnik.

If Voltaire could find the time for both gardening and radical political action, then all of us can do it.

[Stan Cox is a plant breeder and writer in Salina, Kansas. His book, Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine, was just published by Pluto Press.]

Source. / AlterNet

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