Last weekend I had the pleasure of escaping the snow-ridden Mid Atlantic to travel to Athens, Georgia for the Georgia Organics conference. I was contacted months ago to come speak to them about what it means to “eat for the future” – the title of the program I run and an apt title for my presentation. After a 3-hour drive during Atlanta’s Friday rush hour, I arrived in Athens in time to enjoy the evening expo and reception. I had attended the Future Harvest conference (the Mid Atlantic’s sustainable agriculture association) a few weeks ago, where they reached registration capacity at 200. I was unprepared for the crowd at Georgia Organics. 1,300 people had registered to participate – apparently they experience exponential growth every year!
I had well over 100 people come hear me speak – a humbling experience since I am still very much a novice in this field. I was reminded by kind woman early on that I was in the South and I needed to sloooooow down my speech. Not an easy task for a Midwestern like me. I was able to stay for most of Nicolette Hahn Niman’s talk on her book entitled Righteous Pork Chop before I returned to the airport and alas, back to snowy Baltimore.
Thank you, Georgia Organics, for inviting me, and inspiring me that this renewed interest in how we grow the food we eat is not just a fad. The diversity of the participants, the excellent questions, and the sheer number of people attending bodes well for the future of agriculture. Eating for our future means supporting sustainable methods of farming to create a thriving market place for farmers and provide a greater share of the nutritious food for us all.
The Meat Industry* hosted a Congressional briefing on Tuesday (2/23/2010) in Washington D.C. on antibiotics in livestock and poultry production.The purpose of the briefing was to uncover, in the moderator’s words, the ‘true science’ on antibiotics.Contrary to his assertion, there was very little science presented.
Instead, the briefing featured anecdotes from two veterinarians (Dr. Craig Rowles and Dr. Leon Weaver) who each spoke on how they responsibly manage their own farms.I’m curious as to how representative this is of most farms. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a live-in veterinarian on every farm to diagnose diseases and prescribe medication on a day-to-day basis? Rowles admitted that typically veterinarians visit swine farms only once a month.
A third speaker (Dr. Timothy Cummings) who focused on poultry provided no scientific findings that supported his anecdotal recollections of flock health management with antibiotics in feed – I found this surprising, given his affiliation with the College of Veterinary Medicine at Mississippi State University.It would be reasonable to assume that he would have some interesting published data on antibiotics use in poultry to share.
The final speaker was a DVM/PhD researcher from West Texas A&M University (Dr. Guy Loneragan) who discussed antibiotic use in beef cattle. This was the first speaker to engage the audience with any sort of science, though his slides with data were not cited. I appreciate Loneragan responding to my email with three citations for his slides. His characterization of the science behind antimicrobial resistance as a black-and-white issue was misleading and polarizing, though I did appreciate his discussion of a risk benefit approach that implicitly acknowledged that there were risks to using antibiotics. Read More >
When I first arrived in Amsterdam, I was thrilled to see that there was a good-sized and well-stocked organic market on the corner of the street I was staying on. I immediately saw that the awareness of and demand for biological (organic) foods was widespread. I saw organic markets littering many neighborhoods in Amsterdam, along with biological options for almost any kind of food offered in regular supermarkets. In many of the restaurants and cafes I visited, there was often an asterix next to the meat on the menu, with “biologische” in the footnote. The only chain fast-food restaurants I saw were in the busiest most tourist-ridden part of the city. However, my initial enthusiasm was a bit blunted by my eventual discovery that the Netherlands seems plagued by some of the same food systems issues as the United States.
German biological lemonade popular in the Netherlands
After Amsterdam, I moved on to visit a friend for a week in University town about 30 minutes away by train, Ütrecht. Ütrecht was also littered with biological markets and even clothing stores. I saw the same presence of biological foods in menus, supermarkets, cheese shops and butcher shops. I began to believe I needed to move there.
I went into a couple of cafes that did not advertise themselves as organic, but in fact, had all biological items on the menus. At one such café, the waiter told me that you have to be careful when considering businesses’ and products’ claims of being organic. It is his impression that there is very little enforcement of biological guidelines in the Netherlands for meat production and produce farming, so it is wise to be wary about what you are being sold. The owners of this café had decided to provide food produced in ways they believed in (organically). They know their meat sources and butchers and have visited them multiple times. But because of the lack of credibility in organic advertising, they operate their business without it. Read More >
Yesterday, CBS News’ Katie Couric had former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler and “Fast Food Nation” author Eric Schlosser on @katiecouric to discuss further last week’s two-part series on the overuse of antibiotics in industrial farm animal production. “There are real risks here, using drugs in a non-therapuetic context,” Dr. David Kessler said. “This industry has a record of viciously going after anyone who criticizes their practices,” Schlosser told Couric, recalling the industry suit against talk show host Oprah Winfrey.
Exactly two years from the largest meat recall in history, a California meatpacker has been ordered to recall over 4.9 million pounds of beef and veal products. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the expansion of a previous recall for Huntington Meat Packing, Inc., of Montebello, Calif., and said there is a pending criminal investigation. The original recall, announced Jan. 18, was for 864,000 pounds of meat. The Food Safety and Inspection Service said the meat products were not produced in accordance with the company’s food safety plan.
FSIS went on to say, the recall was expanded “based on evidence collected in an ongoing criminal investigation being conducted by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) with assistance from FSIS. This evidence shows that the products subject to this recall expansion were produced in a manner that did not follow the establishment’s Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan.”
In February 2008, another California Meatpacker, Hallmark Meat Packing of Chino, Calif., was ordered to recall 143 million pounds of beef-the company’s entire production from the past two years.
How food animals are given medication can be very different from how you take medication. While humans are prescribed antibiotics at specific dosages in pills or injections, food animals are often given antibiotics mixed in their feed and freely choose how much to consume. These free-choice medicated feeds (FCMF) make it difficult to deliver an intended or predictable dose of antibiotics to food animals. The result can be disastrous; under-administration of antibiotics leads to unresolved infections and contributes to the development of antimicrobial resistance, while over-administration can cause animal toxicity and increase drug residues in meat and milk.
A new commentary in Environmental Health Perspectives, lead authored by Dave Love, PhD, CLF’s project director of Aquaculture and Environmental Public Health, sheds light on the practice of administering antibiotics in FCMF. The Food and Drug Administration has approved 685 drugs for medicated feed, many of which are consumed on a free-choice basis, according to Dr. Love, who looked into the practice with co-authors Meghan Davis, DVM, MPH a CLF Pre-doctoral Fellow and Sommer Scholar, Anna Bassett, Lead Technical Auditor and Andrew Gunther, Program Director of Animal Welfare Approved, an organization which audits and certifies family farms on the basis of humane animal husbandry, and senior author Keeve Nachman, PhD, MHS, Director of CLF’s Farming for the Future Program.
I hope every lawmaker on Capitol Hill had a chance to watch CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric’s two-part investigative series on the risks of using antibiotics as growth promoters in food animals. After viewing both pieces it would be difficult for most people to question the immediate need to pass the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA). PAMTA would effectively end the practice of administering constant low doses of antibiotics important to human health in food animals in the hopes of reducing the spread of antibiotic-resistant diseases among the general public. As we mentioned Tuesday, the first installment of the series highlighted the connections between industrial food animal production and the growing number of antibiotic resistant infections across the country.Couric’s second installment dismantled several arguments which critics of PAMTA often use to dissuade passage. I’ll point out just two.
First, the report puts to rest the deceptive claims by PAMTA opponents who point to outdated data from Denmark that they say proves an antibiotic-ban in the U.S. would hurt farmers. Opponents allude that the Danish ban on non-therapeutic antibiotics in food animals was a failure, claiming the numbers show the ban increased the mortality of piglets and required the increase of therapeutic antibiotic usage to treat sick pigs. Couric’s second report opened in Denmark, focusing on the “Danish Experience.” Farmers and researchers there tell a much different story. Couric interviewed Danish hog farmer Soren Helmer, who said, “We thought we could not produce pigs as efficient as we did before. But that was proven wrong.” Couric reported, “since the ban the Danish pork industry has grown by 43 percent making it one of the top exporters in the world.”
As I pointed out in an earlier blog post, Danish scientists, from the National Food Institute at the Technical University of Denmark, Drs. Frank Møller Aarestrup and Henrik Wegener, submitted last July written testimony for a U.S. House Committees Rules hearing on PAMTA. They wrote, “As you may be aware, representatives of organizations funded by U.S. agri-business have criticized and mis-represented the facts on the Danish ban of antibiotics since its inception.” The scientists found that the total antibiotic use for pork decreased by 50% and that piglet deaths initially increased, but after improving animal living conditions those numbers have since dipped below pre-ban numbers. Read More >
Watch CBS News Videos OnlineIn the first installment of a two-part series, CBS Evening News Anchor Katie Couric investigates the connection between the use of antibiotics in factory farms and the incidence of MRSA in humans. Couric talks to a worker at an Arkansas poultry processing facility who developed MRSA; discusses the use overuse of antibiotics on the farm with Shelley Hearne, managing director of the Pew Health Group at The Pew Charitable Trusts; and tells viewers about a University of Iowa study, which found a new strain of MRSA — in nearly three-quarters of hogs (70%), and nearly two-thirds of the workers (64%) — on several farms in Iowa and Western Illinois. All of them use antibiotics, routinely. On antibiotic-free farms no MRSA was found. Couric also talks with Iowa hog farmer Dave Kronlage who admits he uses antibiotics to accelerate growth and fend off disease. The CBS web site contains the expected statements from the National Pork Producers Council, the National Pork Board, and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Tomorrow night CBS Evening News will feature part two of the series, which focuses on Denmark’s ban on antibiotic use.
When is the last time you walked around an urban public high school in the United States? For most of us, it’s been a while. For me, it was just last month and I will tell you what I noticed when I walked around. It wasn’t the dilapidated buildings, the lack of experienced teachers, or the missing vocational and practical trades that disappeared a long time ago with shrinking budgets. I noticed land. I saw opportunity.
What some say is the last vestige of the “commons” in America, our public school system sits on an incredible amount of land! Walk around a public high school and you see land that is not being used; it’s either being under-utilized or it is completely abandoned. Pavement and asphalt is the default, and green-space upkeep costs too much money for strapped urban districts. Was it ever used? I don’t know, but it’s time to utilize this public space for the community.
As we stare at our nation’s expanding waistlines and the “franken-foods” that dominate our store shelves, we realize that what the communities of our great nation need is real food. We’ve watched the obesity rates in our children triple in the last two decades, and we are left with no choice but to creatively respond to this epidemic. If we don’t, there is a good chance they may become the first generation in our history to live a shorter life span than their parents.
As a Government and Economics teacher in a deeply urban school in California, I come face to face with disturbing daily realities. Recently, a 16 year old Latina student came up to me in astonishment and asked, “Are you telling me that a lemon is a fruit?” Equally astonished are the students that walk out to the school garden and marvel at the sweet peas they can pick fresh off the vine. “I never knew that came out of a flower,” I’ve heard them gasp. They recoil at the sight of dirt touching a piece of produce, yet they don’t blink at paying $2 for bottled water that is less regulated than the water coming out of their tap. I don’t blame my students for a system that produces 3,800 calories per day per person (we only need half that amount) and then uses the most sophisticated marketing tools on the planet to get our youth to consume them. As a teacher, I have learned that you must accept your students “where they are” because getting angry about how they got there is wasted energy. Accept the challenge and then work like hell to help them reach their potential. I’ve accepted that the industrialized food companies got to my students first, and now I know through local food production in the schools, I can help them become healthier once again. Read More >
I recently attended the lecture series at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. The topic of the talk was urban agriculture. What I found most interesting was that the lecture series was targeted at architects, planners and builders; even though the topic seemed to be directed at the sustainable food movement. I think this is a really important development because urban planners, builders, architects need to be aware and skilled in urban agriculture as they design our cities for the next century. The monthly lecture series is called “For the Greener Good.” Future lectures include “sustainable schools” and “greening the supply chain.”
The four people on the panel of this discussion were Josh Viertel, President of Slow Food USA, Liz Falk, co-founder of Common Good City Farm in D.C., and Steve Cohen, food policy and programs from Portland Oregon’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability. The discussion followed the expected path of most discussions that I’ve heard in the past about the development of community gardens, urban farms, CSA’s, and Farmer’s Markets etc, and the growth of backyard and front yard gardens. Seven million families installed new home gardens last year, which to me signifies a very tangible trend reminiscent of the “victory garden” movement during World War II. During that period, only 60-odd years ago, over 1/3 of all produce grown in the United States was grown in home gardens. Read More >
Last weekend I had the pleasure of escaping the snow-ridden Mid Atlantic to travel to Athens, Georgia for the Georgia Organics conference. I was contacted months ago to come speak to them about what it means to “eat for the future” – the title of the program I run and an apt title for my presentation. After a 3-hour drive during Atlanta’s Friday rush hour, I arrived in Athens in time to enjoy the evening expo and reception. I had attended the Future Harvest conference (the Mid Atlantic’s sustainable agriculture association) a few weeks ago, where they reached registration capacity at 200. I was unprepared for the crowd at Georgia Organics. 1,300 people had registered to participate – apparently they experience exponential growth every year!