2010 June | Center for a Livable Future

Baltimore School District Food Survey Reveals Parents agree with the District’s initiative to provide Healthier Options for Their Kids

As the Baltimore City Public Schools system continues the transformation of its food service for more than 80,000 kids (see food revolution), a new survey reveals that students and parents are hungry for more. Melissa Mahoney, the districts “top chef”, nutritionist and dietitian , sent out the survey to measure opinions about the ongoing changes and what they’d like to see in the future. Some of the biggest changes include the introduction of Meatless Monday menu options, fresh local fruits, and the creation of the Great Kids Farm as an education center focused on food and agriculture.

The survey link was presented to parents and students on the March, April and May school menus that are sent home in addition to being permanently placed on the “What you need to know” section of the district website. Parents and students were encouraged complete a web-based survey reflecting their opinions about current menu items and preferences not only for future specific menu items, but attitudes about how the district should be focusing its initiatives. Read More >

‘Diet for a Hot Planet’ Explores Links between Diet and Climate Change

Anna Lappé’s new book Diet for a Hot Planet is critical. It is critical because it helps fill a significant gap in the literature that was previously identified by the Johns Hopkins Center for Livable Future.

And thus, in an accessible and comprehensive manner, Diet for a Hot Planet is critical to understanding how inextricably linked food is with climate change. But to do so, Lappé conveys that we, as the reader, must understand: (1) the food-life-cycle, from its roots in the ground to going back to the ground as waste and (2) that “we are not bystanders.”

The food life-cycle and its connection with climate change

Diet for a Hot Planet emphasizes that the global food system is connected to climate change “within nearly every sector of our economy;” from waste and wastewater to our energy supply to transportation to industry to forestry to building structures to agriculture. Throughout the book, it becomes clear how “the entire global food chain may account for roughly one third of what’s heating our planet.”

Not all of the climate impact from food is related to livestock. Yet, with 70% of all agricultural land tied up in livestock production, red meat and dairy products may account for as much as 48% of the global warming effect. Lappé’s book underscores the importance of thinking about the journey from livestock to edible meat production, especially regarding methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions; that, she teaches us, has a much greater negative impact on global warming than carbon dioxide (CO₂). Read More >

Poultry Processing Plant Receives Maryland’s Highest Ever Fine for Occupational Safety & Health Violations

Wow: The state of Maryland has issued its highest ever occupational safety and health fine, to a poultry plant run by Allen Family Foods: $1.03 million. I wanted to blog about it both because I think it is important that those working on food systems and public health issues keep in mind not only the environmental and nutritional health implications of our food system, but also the impacts on the nearly 1/5 of US workers whose jobs involve food. I also wanted to blog about it because it is a big deal that MOSH (Maryland Occupational Safety & Health) and OSHA (the federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration) are stepping up enforcement.

THE BACKGROUND

MOSH issued the million dollar fine after a worker’s hand was seriously injured from reaching under a conveyor belt that should have been guarded but wasn’t. At the post-injury inspection of the Hurlock, MD plant, OSHA identified 51 violations – including 15 “willful” and one “egregious.” In recent years, OSHA has found over 200 violations at that plant. According to the state’s MOSH director, “The biggest problem we have here is repeated warnings over the years, and a lot of times they’d repair something or take care of the problem and then go right back to the same habits.”

The case follows a $182,000 OSHA fine last year to an Allen Family Foods poultry processing plant in Delaware for “hazards with industrial trucks, falls, personal protective equipment, machine guarding, electrical hazards, process safety management, respirators and emergency response” – incurred after MOSH suggested OSHA look at Allen’s non-Maryland plant.

While fines like these may not seem that high compared to those issued by EPA and other agencies, in occupational safety and health they are major. For example, in Maryland, the average fine per “serious” violation (e.g., posing substantial probability of death or serious physical harm) was only $688. That’s 78% of the national average, which itself is only $882.

Despite Allen Family Foods’ protestations that safety is its top priority, there is further evidence that the company has not emphasized a strong safety culture. In a case decided last year, 250 poultry plant employees challenged the company under the Fair Labor Standards Act, saying that the company should pay them for their time putting on and taking off safety gear. Disturbingly, and with national implications, the judge said that personal protective equipment wasn’t clothing and that the company didn’t have to pay. Way to encourage workers to gear up properly!

Allen Family Foods is less well known than a company like Perdue, but it is quite large. According to its website, the company sells 600 million pounds of chicken annually in the US and abroad, and owns breeding and hatchery facilities, feed mills, processing plants, feed grain production, and 28 company-owned growout farms. Allen also works with over 500 independent growout farms that grow company-provided chicks. About a fourth of the company’s processing staff are non-US born, and the company has an established partnership with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Allen Family Foods announced plans to appeal the million dollar fine, and has also announced it is actually selling the Hurlock plant. By contrast, after the Delaware fine, the company announced a 20% expansion of that plant, to enable producing 1.2 million chickens weekly.

Is Allen just a “bad actor,” and the rest of the industry is doing ok? Is MOSH making an example of Allen with this fine in order to motivate better compliance throughout the industry? I personally can’t say. Perhaps both. Read More >

International aquaculture course stresses natural systems thinking for fish farming

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the 12^th annual International Aquaponics and Tilapia Aquaculture Course in St. Croix at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI). I was able to meet and learn from many wonderful people who traveled from about 21 U.S. states and 18 countries including Canada, Mexico, six Caribbean islands, Peru, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Singapore, and Saipan, a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Course participants ranged from commercial and aspiring farmers to backyard hobbyists, non-profit and international development workers, aquaculture extension specialists, academics, entrepreneurs, and investors.

Charlie Schultz, course instructor, harvesting basil

Throughout the week, the course instructors emphasized that integratedfarming systems, such as aquaponics, can be more environmentally sustainable, resilient and potentially more profitable than monoculture of either fish or plant species. Course lectures included tilapia biology, broodstock spawning, fry cultivation and growout, plant propagation and hydroponics, integrated pest management, system design, and commercial considerations. Field work followed in-class lectures for hands-on learning activities.

Aquaponics is essentially a method for boosting profits from aquaculture (i.e., fish farming) by capturing excess nutrients inherent in fish waste to raise plants as a secondary revenue crop. In this regard aquaponics borrows heavily from hydroponics — a method for raising plants in a soil-less, nutrient-rich water, but it differs in one key respect. Hydroponics is performed with microbiologically clean water where all inputs come from fertilizers, while in aquaponics “we keep our system dirty” says the course’s lead instructor and UVI professor, Dr. Jim Rakocy, repeating the mantra this leader in the aquaponics movement has developed during his 30 years of research. Read More >

The Hidden Hazard of Poultry Litter Pelletization

The following letter to the editor was submitted by the Center for a Livable Future to The Baltimore Sun following an article published in Sunday’s edition on Perdue’s efforts to recycle poultry litter. The article was also discussed in a blog post on B’MoreGreen yesterday.

We were disappointed to see that Timothy Wheeler left out any mention of an important environmental and human health consideration in his recent piece on the Perdue poultry manure pelletization plant (“Perdue manure recycling plant reduces nutrients in bay”).

According to estimates from Delmarva Poultry Industry, Inc., 88% of domestically produced broiler chickens are fed an arsenic-containing drug called roxarsone. Some of the arsenic from this drug stays behind in the edible portions of the chicken, and the rest ends up in the poultry manure.

Numerous scientific and peer-reviewed research studies have measured heightened levels of arsenic in poultry manure, and research from the United States Geological Survey and other researchers has shown that the arsenic in poultry manure is rapidly converted into an inorganic form that is highly water soluble and capable of moving into surface and ground water.

Inorganic arsenic is recognized by the U.S. EPA as a carcinogen. Earlier this year, the agency released a draft reassessment of arsenic toxicity, which indicates that the most recent evidence suggests that arsenic is 17 times more potent as a carcinogen than previously understood. Arsenic exposures have also been linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurological deficits, and other health problems. Read More >

Transforming and Rewriting Baltimore: How the city’s new zoning code may affect your health and what you can do about it.

Baltimore's Food Deserts

Baltimore is currently in the process of revising its zoning code for the first time since 1971. Since this process only happens once every 30-40 years, this is your once in a lifetime chance to influence what development in this city is going to look like for the next 40 years. Here’s a little info on what zoning has to do with health and what changes related to health are in store the newly released draft code which is open for public comment until September 10, 2010. Read on to get a sense of what to look for from the health perspective in the rewrite and how to participate in the rewrite process as a resident of Baltimore.

What does zoning have to do with public health?

If you are someone who cares about health in Baltimore, then you should care about the zoning code rewrite. Zoning influences the way a city looks from what kinds of houses and businesses can locate where, how big they can be, and often what the design of those buildings has to look like. Zoning codes comprise two pieces: a document that lists the categories of uses and a zoning map that assigns the zoning categories do different parts of the city. This is probably not news to you…but zoning is actually much broader than this. It dictates how much external lighting buildings can have, if and where farmers markets and urban agriculture can operate, how much parking both businesses and homes must offer, and also influences how “walkable” the city is.

The original goal of zoning was to protect ‘public health and welfare’ by separating healthy and unhealthy land uses – like keeping industry and manufacturing away from where people lived and went to school. Today, ‘public health and welfare’ encompasses much more than it used to – from safety from crime to mental health to food access. With this in mind, one can see how other aspects of the built environment and city-scape, such as green space, distribution of housing options and proximity to daily services, can play a role in influencing residents’ ability to lead healthy lives. Read More >

The Push for More School Food Production Gardens continues…

On Saturday, June 5th, DC Prep Academy Charter School and Rails to Trails Conservancy teamed up to add another urban/school garden into the growing rolls of urban agriculture taking place around the country. The 1000 square foot garden set in Northeast D.C.’s Edgewood community will combine an edible forest of fruit trees, perennial vegetables, herbs, insectary plants and dynamic accumulators with a large space for growing annual crops like collards, corn, squash, tomatoes and more.

Garden Site before Transformation

The advantage of this garden site is that it is located along the brand new Metropolitan Branch Trail coming out of Union Station which provides previously cut-off communities accessibility to the metro and to Union Station and the Capital. The garden will not only beautify the new bike trail it will hopefully connect the charter school to the community in a new way. DC Prep is housed in the old industrialized buildings that would use the nearby railroad industry and even now their middle school campus has no playground to speak of. A true “urban” campus, DC Prep students are absolutely the students that most need to be reconnected to the growing of food and how it affects our lives

New Garden Site

Plans are being made for how the garden will be used, but classes and teachers are already lining up to use the garden in their curriculum. Hopefully, the site will be used not only to educate students in genuine food production, but bring a small and steady stream of locally grown produce into the homes of the students and teachers at the school. DC Prep already is at the forefront of school food, using Revolution Foods as their sourcing agent and we hope next year to collaborate with Revolution Foods in cooking demonstrations using food from the garden.

Sheet Mulching!

Three 60 ft rows will keep the kids busy

Oil disaster may not affect seafood prices drastically, but Gulf remains in peril

The Deepwater Horizon/ BP oil rig has been leaking for seven weeks and counting, and is already responsible for one of the worst environmental disasters in our nation’s history. The spill, among other things, highlights our intimate connection to aquatic ecosystems.

NOAA fishing area closure map

Last week, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) expanded the Gulf of Mexico fishery closure area to nearly 76,000 square miles, (which is a surface area more than 1.5 times larger than the state of Mississippi) and which enshrouds much of the coastline (see below). High-number animal fatalities, such as dolphins (29 dead) and sea turtles (228 dead) are indicators of the impacts the spill has had and will have on marine life. Food system effects are already rippling through both coastal and inland seafood markets as some brace for potential increases in seafood prices.

Media reports understandably focus on the lives and futures of Gulf Coast fishermen, as well as the issue of tightening regulations on offshore drilling. But, aside from the disturbing images seen in the media, many are wondering how will those of us who do not live near the Gulf be affected? Read More >

AVMA Member Hopeful Association Will Revisit Antimicrobial Position

U.S. industrial animal agriculture routinely incorporates low-dose concentrations of antimicrobials into the feed or water of healthy production animals for the purposes of growth promotion and feed efficiency, an application approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). This practice selects for resistance among bacteria exposed to antimicrobials, and there has been concern that such resistance could negatively impact public health. Considerable evidence is accumulating that these resistant organisms (and/or antimicrobial residues) move beyond the food animal production operation via 1. food products, 2. soils (upon which animal wastes are applied), 3. water (waste runoff into surface streams and seepage into underground aquifers), 4. crops (antimicrobial uptake from soil), 5. air (blown out of animal holding facilities by industrial tunnel fans), 6. insect carriage (e.g., flies), 7. rodent carriage and 8. human carriage (e.g., farm personnel).

During a time when bacterial resistance to an array of antimicrobials is increasing, renewed attention has been directed toward the threat that resistance arising from low-dose use of antimicrobials on food animal production farms could pose for human and veterinary pharmaceuticals, particularly with fewer novel antimicrobials reaching the market. We now know that resistance to antimicrobials can develop rapidly, extend to other antimicrobials in the same or a different class, and be shared among bacteria through multiple genetic exchange mechanisms within or between genera, culminating in multi-drug resistance in some organisms. While the FDA has recognized the threat that resistance might present, regulatory action has been slow to evolve on this problem, particularly in an atmosphere of industry pushback. Nevertheless, discontinued use of antimicrobials for non-therapeutic use has been called for by the World Health Organization, the World Organization for Animal Health, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, the American College of Preventive Medicine, the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and others. Read More >

Eat Less Meat, Eat Better Meat

The list of Meatless Monday supporters continues to grow across the globe, and surprisingly to some, many of the latest enthusiasts make their living either cooking meat, such as chef Mario Batali or producing it, like rancher Nicolette Hahn Niman. What makes Meatless Monday so successful is its simple and inclusive message which promotes moderation with the goal of improving public health and the health of the planet.

Nicolette and her husband Bill run the BN Ranch in Northern California near the seaside raising beef cattle on pasture and heritage turkeys. Bill knows a thing or two about ranching. He founded the famous Niman Ranch Inc. known for its sustainable and humanely raised meats. Nicolette is a Renaissance woman of sorts—new mom, writer, environmental lawyer, and interestingly, a vegetarian.

I recently was able to catch Nicolette for a few minutes by phone to ask her why she and Bill support Meatless Monday. She made it clear that she didn’t have much time; she was in the midst of a writing project, running the ranch (Bill was traveling) and taking care of her 14-month-old son who I could hear in the background chatting and occasionally clinking the keys of their piano. Knowing that time was short; I got straight to the point:

RL: A lot of people mistakenly believe that the Meatless Monday campaign is promoting the demise of all meat production, while it has always maintained that its message is simply one of moderation and inclusion of omnivores and vegetarians alike. As a rancher yourself, what would you say to any farmer who is threatened by the MM campaign?

NHN: Bill and I are very supportive of the Meatless Monday campaign and here’s why: We think that to really improve the way food is being produced and the way people are eating in this country people should eat less meat but eat better meat. All food from animals—meat, dairy, fish, eggs—should be treated as something special. Anyone who is raising food animals in the traditional healthy way, without relying on industrial methods, drugs and chemicals, is someone who will benefit from people embracing that approach. We think the Meatless Monday campaign is part of a shift in attitudes about meat, towards something that is precious not something that is consumed without thought or in enormous quantities. Read More >

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