Category: Food Policy

NDP candidates say sustainable agriculture will be a priority.

April 12th, 2013 · · Eating for Ecosystems, Eating for Health, Food Policy No comments

It’s refreshing to hear politicians talk about policy for sustainable agriculture and healthy food.  That’s what Lana Popham did this past week when she spoke to a community group in North Vancouver.  The provincial NDP Agriculture Critic (and former farmer) outlined a few of the steps the NDP will take if – or when – it forms government in BC after the election in mid-May. Here are some of the points she made:

Lana Popham and Craig Keating speaking about sustainable agriculture and healthy food

(1) An NDP govt would put high priority on agriculture. While Ms. Popham has been ag critic over the last four years, she said there have been four different agriculture ministers, a sort of revolving door in a dept that has been considered relatively unimportant by the governing Liberals.

(2) The NDP would re-name the department — as The Ministry of Agriculture and Sustainable Food Systems.  It’s only a name, but words can be powerful. In this case, it suggests an emphasis on ecological production and consumption.  Issues would be addressed under the pillars “Grow B.C., Feed B.C., Buy B.C.”

(3) Local, small-scale producers would be supported, e.g. through ‘extension services’ in which farmers can get help from govt agronomists and other experts.   When she used to farm, said Ms. Popham, and had problems with plant diseases or other challenges, she had the option of phoning a provincial office and having a knowledgeable person come out to her farm to assist.  Much of that service has been disbanded, she said, though it cost little to the taxpayer.

(4) The NDP govt would have a strong policy for institutional purchasing of local and sustainable food. That means that food in B.C. hospitals, for example, would be sourced increasingly from farmers in their regions, creating a more stable market for B.C. agricultural products as well as healthier options to patients.

North Vancouver city councilor Craig Keating introduced Ms. Popham, and also spoke to the issues.  He’s running himself as an NDP candidate in his local riding, and said his personal priorities, and those of his party, emphasize supporting local farmers and healthy food.

 

 

We waste too much food. But a UK expert says we can change our ways.

January 12th, 2013 · · Food Policy, Food Visionaries No comments

Tristram Stuart regularly rummages through giant waste bins behind supermarkets.  It’s not because he needs free meals, but because this UK food writer has developed a passion to understand food waste.  As he explains in a rivetting 2012 TED Talk, Mr. Stuart has realized that huge amounts of perfectly good and edible food get wasted in wealthy countries each day.

I’ve just watched Mr. Stuart’s TED Talk, and actually cried at the end.  http://www.ted.com/talk/tristram_stuart_the_global_food_waste_scandal.html.  Mr. Stuart is an entertaining public speaker — which is hugely helpful when the topic is potentially glum.  He makes it fascinating, and hopeful, since there are really are steps we all can take to help minimize the problems.

And the problems are real, which is why food waste is an aspect of sustainability that is gaining increasing attention.  After all, it’s tragic that so much good sustenance is trashed when almost a billion people are chronically hungry.

One easy take-home tip from the TED Talk:  treat a head of lettuce like a bunch of cut flowers.  Remove the end with a knife, and set it standing in a glass of water.  According to Mr. Stuart, it will last for weeks.

On a larger scale, we need to get rid of ridiculous policies that make it difficult to utilize and reclaim food waste.  According to Mr. Stuart, it is illegal to feed food waste to pigs in Europe,  a continent which then ships in countless tons of Amazon soy to feed livestock.  So not only does food go unnecessarily to landfills, but such livestock production policies contribute significantly to Amazon deforestation.

Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal is Tristram Stuart’s 2009 book.  I’ve just ordered a copy.  Here’s the blurb from Amazon: “With shortages, volatile prices and nearly one billion people hungry, the world has a food problem – or thinks it does. Farmers, manufacturers, supermarkets and consumers in North America and Europe discard up to half of their food– enough to feed all the world’s hungry at least three times over. Forests are destroyed and nearly one tenth of the West’s greenhouse gas emissions are released growing food that will never be eaten. While affluent nations throw away food through neglect, in the developing world crops rot because farmers lack the means to process, store and transport them to market. But there could be surprisingly painless remedies for what has become one of the world’s most pressing environmental and social problems. Travelling from Yorkshire to China, from Pakistan to Japan, and introducing us to foraging pigs, potato farmers, freegans and food industry directors, Stuart encounters grotesque examples of profligacy, but also inspiring innovations and ways of making the most of what we have. Combining front-line investigation with startling new data, Waste shows how the way we live now has created a global food crisis– and what we can do to fix it.”

Five Key Challenges for Food Systems II

April 6th, 2011 · · Eat Less Meat, Eating for Ecosystems, Food Policy One comment

As a biologist studying water quality, Dr. Eva Pip is concerned about Lake Winnipeg.  The water sample she is holding in this photo, sampled by her University of Winnipeg students near a public beach last summer, is full of toxins, as she has demonstrated in her lab.  Swallow a mouthful of this, Dr. Pip says, and you’d get very ill.

One of the courageous Canadian researchers I’ve had a chance to visit recently, Dr. Pip has for years been measuring and documenting high levels of toxins in Manitoba water.  Last summer she found levels of the potentially lethal substance ‘microcystin’ at 400 times the allowable limit for human health.  Thankfully the local beaches were closed at the height of the problem.  But that’s no solution to pollution.

Lake Winnipeg, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world, has a pathological level of algae, partly due to excessive chemical runoff from surrounding agriculture — largely intensive livestock operations (ILOs).  One of the pork capitals of Canada, Manitoba has more pigs than people.  The province has a human population of just over one million, yet there were eight million hogs produced in Manitoba in 2010, according to a a report called Manitoba Pig and Pork Industry 2010.   And while the pigs/hogs are almost all kept in unnatural environments, crowded into factory farms, nonetheless nature calls to each of them each day to produce an amount of manure far beyond what can be useful fertilizer.

“If you say anything against ILOs, you’re considered to be anti-jobs and anti-business,” says Dr. Pip.  But large-scale hog production is one of the main contributors to the pollution, she says.

Factory farming on the Canadian Prairies is one example of numerous food production systems that damage the environment.  It illustrates the second of my Five Key Challenges for Food Systems outlined previously:

  • To feed a large and growing world population
  • To produce food ecologically
  • To consume food for human health
  • To act compassionately toward all living beings
  • To support community well-being.

What can you and I do?  We can cut back on our meat consumption, and thereby stop supporting intensive factory farming.  We don’t need to eat meat several times a day, as do many Canadians.  If, instead, we choose meat several times a week, we’ll be healthier personally and communally.

We can also talk with our politicians and other policy-makers to insist that they stop pushing large-scale, export-oriented industrial meat systems, and instead promote small-scale sustainable production of animal foods.

Intensive hog barns just south of Winnipeg, surrounded by black 'lagoons' of manure

Policy makes meat plentiful, cheap, and disconnected.

September 27th, 2010 · · Food Policy One comment

“I’ll have the lunch salad,” said my friend to the restaurant server, “but without the chicken option.”   A group of us were having a light mid-day meal at a downtown spot.   A few minutes later our meals turned up, and the server placed a large salad in front of my friend, plus a side-plate piled with chicken.  “In case you change your mind about the meat,” he explained.

The pile of chicken sat, untouched, until the end of the meal when the server came to clean up.  “What will happen to the chicken?” one of us asked.    “Oh, we’ll have to throw it away,” he replied casually.

This beautiful creature of God, this little chicken, gave its life so a human being could have a meal, in this case one that the person neither needed nor even wanted.   For the restaurant, it’s no problem.  Chicken in Vancouver is available in such abundance, at such low prices, and perceptually so far from the animals, that it can be served trivially, then tossed in the trash.   Chicken and other meats are plentiful, cheap, and disconnected.  It’s a result of intensive, industrialized animal production, also known as factory farming, which is supported and promoted in numerous ways by our federal and provincial governments.   Those supports allow factory farms to churn out chicken, pork and beef at prices that are artificially low and that don’t reflect the true costs of large-scale production of animal products, for the environment or for communities.

We need new food policies in Canada that stop encouraging factory farming, and that support sustainable and compassionate production.  We need new respect for small-scale, local farmers who produce meat and dairy products in ways that are ecologically sound and respectful to animals.   We need new attitudes toward chickens and other species with which we share the earth.

On this site, I’ll soon be reviewing Food Policy reports from federal political parties, and suggesting ways in which you can affect such policy — on the meat issue and on other aspects of the quest for sustainable, healthy, and just food systems.

Could we learn from the Ministry of Food?

July 8th, 2010 · · Eating for Ecosystems, Food Policy 2 comments

Could millions of people learn to grow their own vegetables, and change their diets to include more greens, less meat, and almost no sugar and junk food?  It sounds like a nutritionist’s dream.  But it happened in Britain during World War II when the country achieved a massive alteration in the diets of its almost 50 million citizens.  Through a remarkable public education campaign, the country changed its food system and achieved more self-sufficiency in food, environmentally sustainable production, improvement in the health of the population, and a narrowing of the gap in physical well-being between rich and poor.

Britain’s wartime food transformation has inspired me to ask whether we could make it happen today.  I’ve been intrigued by the potential of this for our time since my husband and I visited a fascinating museum exhibit in London called The Ministry of Food.[i] Here’s what we learned.

When war broke out in September 1939, the British government had already designed a detailed plan for getting food to the millions.  Painful memories lingered of WWI, when lack of planning had led to food shortages, high prices, and widespread hunger.  This time, officials hoped to keep the population healthy on limited agricultural land and inputs, and with as few imported foodstuffs as possible.  A densely-populated island, Britain had large food requirements.  And the reality of war meant that boats might be bombed as they steamed toward the Thames with imported supplies.

Within a week of declaration of war, government systems had been reorganized and a department created called the Ministry of Food.  Under its auspices, the country began a multifaceted campaign for more local food production and new consumer habits.  Every citizen was encouraged to ‘dig for victory’ by finding any piece of land that could be used to grow potatoes and cabbage.  Based on research showing more people could be fed if land was used to grow vegetables and oats rather than meat, thousands of acres of grazing lands were plowed up to grow food directly for people.  So much new land was cultivated, and so many men off fighting the war, that the Women’s Land Army was created and tens of thousands of young females recruited to work the fields.

Citizens were asked to make considerable changes in their daily lives – to accept rationing of meat, dairy products, tea, sugar, and cereals; to become farmers in backyards and allotments; and to create many ways to cook homegrown potatoes.  Every Briton was persuaded to cut food waste by composting, by saving scraps for animals, and by using leftover vegetables and bones for soup stock.  In the tens of millions, people grew as much of their food as they could, and altered habits and recipes to minimize imports and rely mostly on locally-grown sustenance.

The campaign was breathtaking in its ability to elicit public support.  Historical accounts suggest that most people welcomed the sacrifices, believing that the war was just and that the government needed to manage food supplies. While there was occasional grumbling, by and large citizens were willing allies with the Ministry of Food.

For its part the Ministry showed leadership.  Headed by a business executive who was seen as a compassionate and effective communicator, the Ministry rallied citizens through radio broadcasts and public meetings, explaining the reasons for the sacrifices and teaching people how to procure and prepare food in ways that would assist the war effort.   People needed to be taught the basics.  How to dig.  How to design a garden.  How to compost.  Don’t leave tools out in the rain.

The Ministry conducted large-scale advertising to teach and to inspire enthusiasm for the campaign.  My husband, Harley, is a historian and observed that the propaganda techniques used were ones that have been effective at other places and times.  They elevated the campaign to a matter of national survival, and made individuals feel like heroes contributing vitally to the cause. Posters called for citizens to:

  • ‘Dig for plenty.  Grow food in your garden or get an allotment.’
  • ‘Help win the war on the kitchen front.  Above all, avoid waste.’
  • ‘Lend a hand on the land at a farming holiday camp.’
  • ‘Eat greens for vitality.’
  • Better potluck with Churchill today than humble pie with Hitler tomorrow.  Don’t waste food.’

The results were dramatic.  Production and consumption of vegetables and other local foods increased markedly.  People ate more natural foods, and less that had been processed.  They got accustomed to brown bread rather than white.  While few people were vegetarian, everyone frequently ate meatless meals.  Wartime Britons ate modest but adequate amounts, and most were slim.  The campaign had disallowed most culinary luxuries, but had ensured sufficient calories and nutrients.  As a result, “the war left us healthier as a nation than we had ever been before or have been since,” says a recent publication The Ration Book Diet.  This volume, along with one called The Ministry of Food, suggest that wartime-style consumption would benefit us today.[ii]

With our current food systems and habits causing problems for environment and health, it’s useful to ponder whether we could learn from the Ministry of Food.  Could we implement sustainable food systems and rouse widespread commitment from citizens for the project?  In Britain of 70 years past there was a war on, and one almost universally considered necessary given the terrible threat.  As Harley commented, today’s enemy is environmental degradation, and it is largely a silent enemy.  But we are at war for the health of the planet and survival of humanity, and so far it’s not clear we’ll win.  Perhaps we can take some lessons from the Ministry of Food.

[i] The Ministry of Food.  Exhibit on at the Imperial War Museum, London, England, running from February, 2010 to January 3, 2011.  lwm.org.uk/food

[ii] Brown,M., Harris,C., Jackson,C. (2005)  The Ration Book Diet.  Gloucestershire: The History Press.   Fearnley-Whittingstall,J. (2010)  The Ministry of Food: Thrifty Wartime Ways to Feed Your Family Today. London: Hodder & Stoughton.