Legislation

Safe-food advocate and attorney,
Bill Marler, in his Seattle law office.
                       

ana Sofia joanes to DOJ:
"Free our farmers"

The following excerpt is from “A White House Chef Who Wears Two Hats,” published this week in the New York Times. It offers a profile of the Obama family’s personal chef, Sam Kass, who serves up policy advice along with his own style of local, organic cooking. Read how a 29-year-old with a history degree and looks that earned him a slot on People magazine’s 100 Most Beautiful People list is now one of the most influential advocates for a better, more sustainable food system.

Let’s say you’re the CEO of a factory pork producer. Your top priority is squeezing profits out of pigs. But there’s a downturn in the market. There’s more supply than demand for pork products, which means prices have fallen so low that you can’t charge enough to make the profit you promised your board of directors and shareholders.

Is it time to worry?
Sign FDN's petition and help stop government pork for factory pork

Every Tuesday morning, the supplier, under cover of pre-dawn darkness, packs up his truck in rural Minnesota to make his weekly delivery. His drop-off site is a nondescript, middle-class home in a Minneapolis suburb, where his regular customers begin to converge around 8:00 a.m. They drive up, park, pick up their orders, leave cash, then return to their everyday lives.

What they’re doing is illegal, but the contraband isn’t cocaine, krugerrands or even Cuban cigars.

It’s milk. Straight from the cow. Whole, non-pasteurized, non-homogenized, non-industrialized, raw milk.

So you shop at farmer’s markets and your local co-op. You buy local, organic, sustainably grown and harvested food. Your coffee is grown in the shade, your chocolate is fair-trade, and your bread is homemade.  How else can you can declare your support for the cause of "local, sustainable, organic foods and the people who produce them?”

Satellite image of the Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone, courtesy of Phytoplankton Dynamics Laboratory, Texas A+M University

Every time I take a bite, I can’t help but remember two of the biggest ecological challenges we face. Both are caused directly by agricultural practices. Both are driven by the U.S. appetite for cheap food, and lots of it. Here they are:

1. Factory farming degrades the oceans.

If you’re following the national shouting match on health care reform, you may have noticed a hue and cry against fat people. If you Google the phrase “obese people should pay more for national health care,” you’ll see a slew of articles, blogs, and comments on the subject. Many people who say “amen to that” are being pretty judgmental. They characterize obesity as the self-imposed condition of slackers who refuse to change their willfully poor food and exercise choices. Commentators describe payment as punishment and health care as burden. As in, thin people are being punished by having to pay for fat people’s choices.

From the excellent blog You Are Where You Eat. Homegrown Minneapolis is an initiative to develop recommendations for the City of Minneapolis to improve sales, distribution and consumption of fresh, locally grown foods to positively impact the health, food security, economy and environment of our City and the surrounding region. Read the rest of this excellent post and get a link to the Minneapolis' draft recommendations for how