Friday, November 30, 2012

Organic: Food Justice for the 99%

 Once again, Unexpected Environments is happy to share a post from the Cornucopia Institute, which supports strong organic labeling standards and calls out corporate agribusiness for greenwashing unethical farming practices and diluting the value of the USDA Organic certification. Charlotte Vallaeys, the institute's Director of Farm and Food Policy, takes Time Magazine to task for continuing the corporate media's campaign to slander organic agriculture as "elitist" and its produce no more healthy than chemically-laced corporate food. For more information, follow this link to the Institute's website.
...................................................................................................................................................

Dr. Oz in Time Magazine slanders Families Who Choose Safe, Organic Food for Their Children 

 

 As Americans become increasingly aware of the story behind conventional foods—the ecologically destructive monoculture fields, the petrochemical fertilizers, the toxic pesticides and dangerous fumigants—the agrochemical industry has launched an all-out media offensive against the booming organic industry. 

The agrochemical industry’s communications specialists have apparently found willing partners in major nationwide media outlets like The New York Times and Time magazine, which have recently published articles discouraging people from buying organic foods.  The message is nearly always the same, as industry-friendly researchers and reporters downplay the role and harm caused by agricultural chemicals and focus instead on the differences between a handful of common nutrients.  Despite overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, the conclusion is always that organic foods are not worth the extra price because the nutritional differences are minimal.

First, we must set the record straight.  Scientific studies show that milk from pastured cows contains higher levels of beneficial fats.  Beef from grass-fed cattle and eggs from pastured hens are lower in cholesterol and saturated fat and higher in healthy omega-3 fatty acids and Vitamins A and E.  Organic strawberries and tomatoes contain more healthy antioxidants.  These are all undisputed facts laid out in a myriad of published, peer-reviewed scientific papers.

Consumers increasingly turn to organic and grass-based foods, based on this scientific evidence that has been reported in magazines, including Time, in recent years.  Now, the Dec 3rd issue of Time mindlessly repeats the agribusiness mantra: “Nutritionally, an egg is an egg.”  Milk is milk. And canned peas, with toxic pesticide residues, heated to extreme temperatures during processing, and then placed in a container lined with a suspected endocrine disruptor, are just as healthy as those for sale at a farmer’s market, picked fresh from a local field just hours ago.

Sunday, November 25, 2012

Local chicks: Farm-to-table for health meat

This article made the cover of the  Eugene Weekly's August 12, 2012 edition. I first met Brandow while working on my article on Community Supported Agriculture.

...................................................................................................................................................

Clad in a worn tan Carhartt jacket and rubber boots as insurance against the rain threatened by a slate-gray, wind-wiped spring afternoon, Derek Brandow is in his element — multiple elements, really. Today, the former elementary school teacher’s classroom is a field of knee-high grass, his young student a potential customer for the community-supported agriculture (CSA) subscriptions that Our Family Farm, his poultry operation, is selling. After raising backyard laying hens for two years and learning about the horrors of factory-scale poultry farms, that customer-to-be, a precocious preteen girl, is determined not to eat chicken unless she can inspect the farm herself and see that the flock is raised under humane conditions and allowed to express their avian nature, their very chicken-ness.

Derek Brandow appraises one of his young chickens early in the growing season.

That makes her the perfect customer for Brandow, a part-time poultry grower and local standard-bearer for the farm-to-table movement. A bearded, genial bear of a man, with an ever-present grin crinkling his hazel eyes, Brandow squats beside the slim, bleached blond pre-teen next to a mobile pen, getting on her level and addressing her questions and concerns directly and seriously. He shows no hint of the abruptness or condescension that could be expected of a busy farmer pestered by the questions of a child prying into his world. He explains how he pasture-raises his birds, moving their protective pens about the field daily so that they have fresh grass to crop and bugs to scratch for and how he supplements their diet with locally processed chicken feeds. He gently catches a white-feathered, red-wattled pullet from the flock, bunched close together for warmth and companionship on this blustery day, in order to give the young lady he is clearly charming an up-close introduction.