Well, I'll be . . . Mainstream attention to this issue is so rare, I am almost in shock to see such a balanced portrayal. Read it!
Thanks to Wendy Mathias of Miami Real Food for bringing this to my attention!
Monday, Jan. 25, 2010How Cows (Grass-Fed Only) Could Save the Planet
By Lisa Abend
On a farm in coastal Maine, a barn is going up. Right now it's little more than a concrete slab and some wooden beams, but when it's finished, the barn will provide winter shelter for up to six cows and a few head of sheep. None of this would be remarkable if it weren't for the fact that the people building the barn are two of the most highly regarded organic-vegetable farmers in the country: Eliot Coleman wrote the bible of organic farming, The New Organic Grower, and Barbara Damrosch is the Washington Post's gardening columnist. At a time when a growing number of environmental activists are calling for an end to eating meat, this veggie-centric power couple is beginning to raise it. "Why?" asks Coleman, tromping through the mud on his way toward a greenhouse bursting with December turnips. "Because I care about the fate of the planet."
Ever since the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization released a 2006 report that attributed 18% of the world's man-made greenhouse-gas emissions to livestock — more, the report noted, than what's produced by transportation — livestock has taken an increasingly hard rap. At first, it was just vegetarian groups that used the U.N.'s findings as evidence for the superiority of an all-plant diet. But since then, a broader range of environmentalists has taken up the cause. At a recent European Parliament hearing titled "Global Warming and Food Policy: Less Meat = Less Heat," Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, argued that reducing meat consumption is a "simple, effective and short-term delivery measure in which everybody could contribute" to emissions reductions.
And of all the animals that humans eat, none are held more responsible for climate change than the ones that moo. Cows not only consume more energy-intensive feed than other livestock; they also produce more methane — a powerful greenhouse gas — than other animals do. "If your primary concern is to curb emissions, you shouldn't be eating beef," says Nathan Pelletier, an ecological economist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, N.S., noting that cows produce 13 to 30 lb. of carbon dioxide per pound of meat. So how can Coleman and Damrosch believe that adding livestock to their farm will help the planet? Cattleman Ridge Shinn has the answer. On a wintry Saturday at his farm in Hardwick, Mass., he is out in his pastures encouraging a herd of plump Devon cows to move to a grassy new paddock. Over the course of a year, his 100 cattle will rotate across 175 acres four or five times. "Conventional cattle raising is like mining," he says. "It's unsustainable, because you're just taking without putting anything back. But when you rotate cattle on grass, you change the equation. You put back more than you take."
It works like this: grass is a perennial. Rotate cattle and other ruminants across pastures full of it, and the animals' grazing will cut the blades — which spurs new growth — while their trampling helps work manure and other decaying organic matter into the soil, turning it into rich humus. The plant's roots also help maintain soil health by retaining water and microbes. And healthy soil keeps carbon dioxide underground and out of the atmosphere.
Compare that with the estimated 99% of U.S. beef cattle that live out their last months on feedlots, where they are stuffed with corn and soybeans. In the past few decades, the growth of these concentrated animal-feeding operations has resulted in millions of acres of grassland being abandoned or converted — along with vast swaths of forest — into profitable cropland for livestock feed. "Much of the carbon footprint of beef comes from growing grain to feed the animals, which requires fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, pesticides, transportation," says Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma. "Grass-fed beef has a much lighter carbon footprint." Indeed, although grass-fed cattle may produce more methane than conventional ones (high-fiber plants are harder to digest than cereals, as anyone who has felt the gastric effects of eating broccoli or cabbage can attest), their net emissions are lower because they help the soil sequester carbon.
From Vermont, where veal and dairy farmer Abe Collins is developing software designed to help farmers foster carbon-rich topsoil quickly, to Denmark, where Thomas Harttung's Aarstiderne farm grazes 150 head of cattle, a vanguard of small farmers are trying to get the word out about how much more eco-friendly they are than factory farming. "If you suspend a cow in the air with buckets of grain, then it's a bad guy," Harttung explains. "But if you put it where it belongs — on grass — that cow becomes not just carbon-neutral but carbon-negative." Collins goes even further. "With proper management, pastoralists, ranchers and farmers could achieve a 2% increase in soil-carbon levels on existing agricultural, grazing and desert lands over the next two decades," he estimates. Some researchers hypothesize that just a 1% increase (over, admittedly, vast acreages) could be enough to capture the total equivalent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions.
This math works out in part because farmers like Shinn don't use fertilizers or pesticides to maintain their pastures and need no energy to produce what their animals eat other than what they get free from the sun. Furthermore, pasturing frequently uses land that would otherwise be unproductive. "I'd like to see someone try to raise soybeans here," he says, gesturing toward the rocky, sloping fields around him.
By many standards, pastured beef is healthier. That's certainly the case for the animals involved; grass feeding obviates the antibiotics that feedlots are forced to administer in order to prevent the acidosis that occurs when cows are fed grain. But it also appears to be true for people who eat cows. Compared with conventional beef, grass-fed is lower in saturated fat and higher in omega-3s, the heart-healthy fatty acids found in salmon.
But not everyone is sold on its superiority. In addition to citing grass-fed meat's higher price tag — Shinn's ground beef ends up retailing for about $7 a pound, more than twice the price of conventional beef — feedlot producers say that only through their economies of scale can the industry produce enough meat to satisfy demand, especially for a growing population. These critics note that because grass is less caloric than grain, it takes two to three years to get a pastured cow to slaughter weight, whereas a feedlot animal requires only 14 months. "Not only does it take fewer animals on a feedlot to produce the same amount of meat," says Tamara Thies, chief environmental counsel for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association (which contests the U.N.'s 18% figure), "but because they grow so quickly, they have less chance to produce greenhouse gases."
To Allan Savory, the economies-of-scale mentality ignores the role that grass-fed herbivores can play in fighting climate change. A former wildlife conservationist in Zimbabwe, Savory once blamed overgrazing for desertification. "I was prepared to shoot every bloody rancher in the country," he recalls. But through rotational grazing of large herds of ruminants, he found he could reverse land degradation, turning dead soil into thriving grassland.
Like him, Coleman now scoffs at the environmentalist vogue for vilifying meat eating. "The idea that giving up meat is the solution for the world's ills is ridiculous," he says at his Maine farm. "A vegetarian eating tofu made in a factory from soybeans grown in Brazil is responsible for a lot more CO2 than I am." A lifetime raising vegetables year-round has taught him to value the elegance of natural systems. Once he and Damrosch have brought in their livestock, they'll "be able to use the manure to feed the plants, and the plant waste to feed the animals," he says. "And even though we can't eat the grass, we'll be turning it into something we can."
- Find this article at:
- http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1953692,00.html
Friday, January 29, 2010
How Eating Grass-Fed Beef Could Help Fight Climate Change -- Printout -- TIME
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Politics - Making Healthy Lunches a Cause
Now that I have kids in the local schools, I have been pondering cafeteria food recently. That was especially brought home when I was invited this fall to attend a local gathering considering the issue. The Farm to Cafeteria Conference brought together many "stakeholders": local food providers, farmers, health care workers, teachers and administrators, even the Washington Secretary of Health attended. We heard speakers, watched films, had breakout sessions and small heated discussions over the fresh food local farmer Nash Huber provided for lunch.
And what did we accomplish? I am still not entirely sure. There was a followup meeting in our town, with action steps we all could take. But as it is, we are all left to doing our own thing, protesting in isolated ways, hoping to make a difference, but each perhaps reinventing the wheel.
This article in the NYT gives me hope. Maybe we can change something, if we are brave and creative in our approach . . .
Between them, Kristin Richmond and Kirsten Tobey have worked on Wall Street, traveled the world and taught school from East Africa to Ecuador. Now they make lunch for a living.
Friends since they met in business school at the University of California, Berkeley, Ms. Richmond and Ms. Tobey founded Revolution Foods Inc. to ride a political and economic wave: surging support for healthier food in school cafeterias.
Federal nutrition guidelines require subsidized school lunches to meet benchmarks on calories and fat, but they do not require that foods be whole, local, truly nutritious or good to eat.
As a result, the standard cafeteria fare is doing little to curb the nation’s rising rate of childhood obesity and might even be contributing to it.
That was the problem that Ms. Richmond and Ms. Tobey identified in a graduate school class and set out to solve. What began as a class project is now a growing company with headquarters in Oakland, 240 employees and operations in Los Angeles, Denver and Washington.
“The momentum around this issue is unbelievable,” said Ms. Tobey in an interview this month.
Ms. Richmond, 34, the company’s chief executive, and Ms. Tobey, 31, the chief operating officer, came together in 2005 just as child obesity and nutrition were moving toward the top of the nation’s health policy agenda.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, had made fighting obesity a major priority. Mr. Schwarzenegger signed legislation boosting nutrition standards for school meals and limiting the sale of soda and junk food on campus. He also authorized a pilot project to increase the reimbursement for school breakfasts by 10 cents if the meal included fresh fruits or vegetables.
Mr. Schwarzenegger is expected to propose new measures this year, and now Michelle Obama has joined the movement, announcing that she will make fighting childhood obesity a special cause in the White House. In a speech this month to the United States Conference of Mayors, Mrs. Obama called it one of the “biggest threats” to the American economy.
As students at Berkeley, Ms. Richmond and Ms. Tobey saw this trend coming. They interviewed dozens of teachers, parents and school officials in the Bay Area to learn more about the school meal business and to find out what kind of change might appeal to the school community.
“The teachers said they were embarrassed,” Ms. Tobey said. “They were teaching about nutrition in their classrooms and then the kids were going into the lunch room and saying, ‘Why are you serving me this?’ ”
So Revolution Foods adopted higher standards than the government requires for school meal programs. The meals are prepared fresh daily and feature foods free of artificial preservatives, colors, flavors and sweeteners. Every lunch includes fresh fruit and vegetables.
The breakfasts and lunches contain no high-fructose corn syrup or trans fats, the milk is hormone-free and the meats are from cattle that have not been given antibiotics or hormones. Whenever possible, the food is organic and uses locally grown ingredients. Nothing is fried.
Revolution Foods built a partnership with Whole Foods, the natural foods grocery store chain, and tapped into that company’s network of suppliers. Whole Foods also prepared and packaged the first meals Revolution Foods sold to an Oakland charter school as a pilot to see if the business could be viable.
Even before that project ended, other local schools began inquiring about the service, and the business quickly grew and attracted capital from investment firms with a social mission, including the Bay Area Equity Fund. Today Revolution Foods is serving more than 30,000 lunches a day, mostly in low-income communities, and still growing.
Later this year Congress and the president will most likely reauthorize the federal child nutrition program, which subsidizes school meals for poor children. Ms. Richmond and Ms. Tobey say they hope to see that bill increase reimbursements to the schools while targeting any new money to schools that buy or make meals that use whole, fresh foods and healthy ingredients.
That would improve nutrition for children while boosting Revolution Foods’ bottom line. The idea that they could do both has been at the heart of the pair’s business plan from the beginning.
Daniel Weintraub has reported on California politics and policy for more than 20 years.
More Articles in US » A version of this article appeared in print on January 24, 2010, on page A27A of the National edition.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Wow! Read this: Report on Absorption of magnesium sulfate
For those of us trying to raise magnesium levels and using mag sulfate/Epsom Salts for detoxification, this is a clearly written summary of a study that shows that what we are doing is indeed effective (if you had any doubts! Most of us know from how we feel, but it is useful to have research that corroborates our subjective assessments.)
If you read all the way through, you will see that they did a small test using a patch with Epsom Salts, which was also effective. I have been making magnesium "oil" (really a saturated solution in water) with the Epsom Salts, and using this as a spray on the muscles that tend to cramp up. This has been amazingly helpful, making my sleep deeper and alleviating my back pains into the next day. The only downsides are a bit of stinging at times and grittiness when the solution dries. I understand that proper magnesium oil is made with magnesium chloride, but I don't have easy access to it, I had Epsom Salts on hand, I get plenty of chloride from sea salt and the sulfate is really useful for supporting detox pathways. Seemed like a great solution to me!
Wow! Read this: Report on Absorption of magnesium sulfate
For those of us trying to raise magnesium levels and using mag sulfate/Epsom Salts for detoxification, this is a clearly written summary of a study that shows that what we are doing is indeed effective (if you had any doubts! Most of us know from how we feel, but it is useful to have research that corroborates our subjective assessments.)
If you read all the way through, you will see that they did a small test using a patch with Epsom Salts, which was also effective. I have been making magnesium "oil" (really a saturated solution in water) with the Epsom Salts, and using this as a spray on the muscles that tend to cramp up. This has been amazingly helpful, making my sleep deeper and alleviating my back pains into the next day. The only downsides are a bit of stinging at times and grittiness when the solution dries. I understand that proper magnesium oil is made with magnesium chloride, but I don't have easy access to it, I had Epsom Salts on hand, I get plenty of chloride from sea salt and the sulfate is really useful for supporting detox pathways. Seemed like a great solution to me!
Monday, January 11, 2010
The 2010 SAVEUR 100 List
Note, among other wonders, that Nourishing Traditions is on the list (#95). I can't help but love Saveur! After you kvell over the NT inclusion, browse and learn . . .
Friday, January 8, 2010
Is there more to the Christmas “miracle” mom & baby “mystery?” | Crunchy Domestic Goddess
as the video gives a completely different picture. This is not about food, but about keeping your eyes and your mind open, and about health freedom. I say hiring a doula is a good idea, but hiring a midwife is an even better way to reduce interventions. Thank goodness this family is intact and has the choice to analyze what went wrong.
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