News & Views

Photo courtesy of RawFoodLife.comLast December, we wrote about ana Sofia Joanes, food policy activist and director of the movie Fresh, and her campaign against BigAg monopolies.

The following post was written by Carrie Oliver, founder and CEO of The Oliver Ranch Company and The Artisan Beef Institute. It originally appeared on her blog last October. We thank her for letting us re-post it here. You can read more about Carrie and her work, below.

A recent New York Times article on ground beef has led a lot of friends, colleagues, and clients to ask my thoughts on the issue.

Back in November -- appropriately enough, on Thanksgiving Day -- four scientists for the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, published a report about the environmental impact of food waste in America. They calculated that, every year, as much as 40 percent of America’s food supply is discarded! (That’s a 28 percent increase, by the way, since 1974.) If you divide that amount among every man, woman and child living in the U.S., we’re talking 1,400 kilocalories -- or 1.4 million calories -- per day, per person, that end up in the trash.

Would you laugh if I told you the key to human potential is a bowl of vegetable soup? Or a plate of meat loaf? A chocolate chip cookie? If the food is part of a delivery from Open Arms of Minnesota, then it is indeed key to someone’s independent and meaningful life.

Since 1986, Open Arms of Minnesota has run a meal delivery program for Twin Cities residents living with, and affected by, chronic progressive illnesses. (Full disclosure: I’ve volunteered in their kitchen for close to twelve years.) Its largest and original client population is people living with HIV and AIDS. Open Arms also serves people with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), MS, breast cancer, and similar illnesses. The meals can be the difference between staying healthy and spiraling into disability. For many, this means living at home instead of going to a hospital or nursing home.

Theresa Marquez, Chief Marketing Executive for Organic Valley Cooperative, is captivating. She speaks quickly, compellingly, and passionately. Her eyes shine when she mentions a favorite book or describes the Earth Dinners Organic Valley has hosted for several years around the country, connecting people to both food and the environment. An hour with Theresa can include a poem, a discussion of politics, a newspaper article throw-down (Paul Krugman’s “Missing Richard Nixon”), a look at Organic Valley’s new packaging, and - of course - a discussion about food.

I’m thinking a lot about food systems these days. Fundamentally, there seems to be collective agreement that ours is broken (unless you happen to work for Monsanto or Smithfield), so I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how we might fix it. (Jill Richardson’s excellent “Recipe for America” has a few ideas too - that and her La Vida Locavore blog are well worth reading.)

Specifically, I’ve been thinking about food systems that are:

Photo from http://educate-yourself.org/As I type this, I am sick to my stomach.

No, it’s not something I ate. It’s something I read, this headline:

Forbes Magazine named Monsanto the #1 company of the year for 2009

Makes me want to puke.

If you want to read the article yourself, you’ll have to Google it; I refuse to drive traffic to the Forbes Magazine website.

I read it, and then had to create an account to post a comment. Here’s what I wrote:

Two articles that I’ve read recently have convinced me to never again let my children eat a school lunch.

The first, published in October by the New York Times, chronicles the flawed U.S. meat inspection process, and how an E.coli-infected hamburger permanently disabled Minnesota resident Stephanie Smith.

Conscientious omnivores of the Michael Pollan variety champion grass-fed beef. It is claimed to be better for the cattle themselves than grain-finishing, since they eat what their rumens are evolved to digest (grass and legumes) instead of what fattens them quickest. Plus, they get to graze open pasture instead of being confined to a feedlot for the final four to six months of their lives. Grass-fed enthusiasts also claim it’s better for people because grass-fed meat is leaner and has a higher proportion of omega-3 fats than grain-finished meat. Some even argue that it’s better for the environment, since you don’t have huge piles of feedlot manure to manage; the cattle deposit their manure on grass, as they naturally would, and it ultimately nourishes the soil.