Nowadays we’re used to depending on the Comedy Channel to report the news. Michael Pollan was on the Daily Show yesterday, promoting his latest book, Food Rules.
Pollan theorized back in September, in a NYT article called Big Food vs. Big Insurance, that if health insurers are forced by reform to cover the unhealthy they could turn into an enemy of agri-business (which creates unhealthy people).
He makes the point well here, pointing out that the food industry today creates patients for the health industry.
Here’s a slightly nuanced story in the Washington Post about a DC restaurant called Founding Farmers (lovely name!) that claims it’s all about “sustainable” food. Turns out they rushed into print a little too soon on that score however, considering the amount of quality control they still had to learn. Oops.
I’m not going to outline the story here – it’s worth a read because it gives a pretty balanced weighing of the pros and cons of the restaurant’s operation compared with its menu claims. It’s hard not to sympathize a little with Founding Farmers – and the comments to the article from readers frequently say things like, why pick on people trying to do some good? But the message here is that the devil is in the details, and we have to pay attention to the details if we want to survive.
Because, as the story shows, it can be a treacherous thing just trying to eat healthy. And by the way, “farmwashing” doesn’t appear in the story once, although it should. It’s like greenwashing, the telling of fibs by companies trying to ride the sustainability wagon without actually being, well, sustainable.
(You get it already, but if you want more collateral, in my old town of Santa Fe they can explain farmwashing to you and make it entertaining.)
In the end, it comes down to if you can believe the claims made by anyone or anything that tells you a product is organic, or sustainably grown, or healthy – or even free of poison (which might have been easier in a less polluted, earlier age).
Local Food Grid takes as a working rule of thumb that the entire food chain is poisoned. This is the basic ground zero that we have to start from. Everything is poison – except, what might not be?
How about food from a farmer I know personally? Grown in soil I’ve seen. From animals pastured on grass I’ve watched grow. How about food offered to me by people who look me in the eye, and have a vested interest in my not getting sick?
As a concept it’s very simple. Just a matter of building the local infrastructure, and the local economy woven in, snug against all storms.
Chefs get it: the best ingredients are the freshest, and that means local. Authentic flavor also comes from absence of processing – local again. As all the old jobs disappear, probably forever, sustainable jobs in the new economy show their fresh faces. Jobs such as those created by local cuisine.
Fortune Magazine just last week featured the stories of 6 green cooks – chefs who use local ingredients, bought from local farmers or even grown themselves.
Chef and restaurateur Jeremy Barlow described discovering that the best way to find the cheapest and freshest ingredients was to turn to nearby farmers.
“As my passion for cooking evolved, I made the connection between getting good product and buying local, and what that does for the environment,” he says. “It’s about the importance of keeping farmland around within a region in order to support a community. Without farmers you have no community.”
Portland caterer Brittany Baldwin, chef and farmer both, saw a market in catering meals prepared using local ingredients, and was surprised that no one had thought of it. She leased a half-acre to raise quail and chicken, growing beets, sweet peppers, onions and salad greens.
Baldwin’s idea spread throughout Portland and she now has a waiting list longer than six months. A typical customer might be a young family of four that is too busy to organize dinner; or a grandmother following new dietary restrictions; or a wealthy couple who wants to entertain guests with fresh, local produce. “All the time and realize how lucky I am,” says Baldwin.” I wake up, I go out in the garden, and I pull the order.”
Check out the full article for profiles on all six new-economy entrepreneurs.
Here’s a nice little introduction to permaculture. The clip closes with some URBAN permaculture – you can do it in the city. Ask your landlord if he’d like some fresh veggies
Paul Hawken gave a keynote address in Seattle last month at the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum. I recommend you take 50 minutes and watch it all. I’ve seen nothing like it for a usable perspective on the challenge and the opportunity facing us.
Hawken gives the state of play of our global footprint as humans, and a view of how rapidly we’re using up the legacy sunlight easily available to us as fossil fuels. From this he outlines the steps we’ll need to take to replace these fuels with real-time solar – and nuclear – energy.
Hawken has an uplifted lightness of spirit combined with a scientific and business understanding of where we are as a race, combined again with an engineering realism that generates solutions.
His ideas are so far-ranging that one can’t help but be inspired by something out of all the possibilities he covers – the business opportunities of sustainable world are immense. His view is heartening because he believes that stepping up to the limits of growth doesn’t mean deprivation – rather it means innovation. Abundance remains in the new world just as in the old.
Among the solutions Hawken proposes are local everything – make small bigger, produce everything locally: chemicals industrial products, transportation. Get out of the import economy.
And much of the energy we need can be gained from efficiency in the way we use energy. We can easily convert waste into resource, even to the extent that sewage plants can be profit centers. And retrofitting buildings can be the biggest job creator ever known to our economy.
We need optimism to get through all the bad news about the way of the world. Worldchanging has an interview with Paul Hawken that reminds us of this very thing.
What I discovered was people, themselves. And really just the number, and the breath, and depth of the ingenuity and authenticity in which people really applied themselves to being problem solvers and alleviate suffering, to addressing the ills of the world, and innovating and re-imagining what was possible. And they are organizing around different ways and different issues around different cultures and different manners. And when you stand back and you really get to see, if you will, not visually, not directly, but see it in a conceptual way, how large and diverse this movement is, then you just have to either laugh, or grin or smile.
[...]
Now then, you know what we pay attention to instead? All the institutional obstacles, and the resistance, and corruption, and financial chicanery, and on and on and on. And you look at that and you want to just jump off a bridge. And because you just see that, humans seem self serving, greedy, short sighted and violent. And if you just look at that, you just drink that potion, its toxic.
- Worldchanging Interview: Paul Hawken
If Paul Hawken, perhaps the greatest exponent of sustainability, can be optimistic about things, it’s worth putting a cheerful attitude on. Give yourself a lift and read the whole interview
Here’s a slightly nuanced story in the Washington Post about a DC restaurant called Founding Farmers (lovely name!) that claims it’s all about “sustainable” food. Turns out they rushed into print a little too soon on that score however, considering the amount of quality control they still had to learn. Oops.
Chefs get it: the best ingredients are the freshest, and that means local. Authentic flavor also comes from absence of processing – local again. As all the 
