If you are of a certain age, you will remember the 1980’s anti-drug advertisement where they fry the egg and opine “This is your brain on drugs”.  Well folks this yolk is your body on drugs.  It comes from a chicken that eats sub-standard food and a pharmaceutical soup of antibiotics and other chemicals.  Now, I don’t blame the chicken.  I do believe though. that it is time we collectively “Just say NO!”  I guess Nancy Reagan had something right.

Factory farms that produce eggs see chickens as machines.  It is all rather Orwellian.  To them hens are a mechanism of economic output.  They are fed the cheapest food possibe and live in ‘Third World’ conditions compared to their organic sisters.  Why?  These ‘farms’, factories really,  want to maximize their profit.  Not your health.

When we purchase most commercially produced eggs we unknowingly support practices like de-beaking, grinding up male chicks alive, forced molting, and other widespread practices of inherent cruelty.  I don’t know about you, but I just can’t bring myself to support these practices, which is what we do when we buy commercially produced eggs.

This fall at the University of California, Berkeley, a new course surveys the political, social, environmental, and gustatory stakes of modern food production. In his Edible Education 101: The Rise and Future of the Food Movement, Berkeley journalism professor and best-selling author Michael Pollan yields the spotlight to other experts: Though he appears frequently as introducer, moderator, and panelist, the classes are focused on an all-star cast of guest lecturers. Taken together, these food A-listers and innovators provide a compelling, comprehensive portrait of 21st-century eating. Each lecture is available, for free and in full, via UC Berkeley’s YouTube channel.

For people learning about food systems for the first time, this class may be the very best place to start.

“This is a very powerful lineup such has never been accumulated for a single class,” Pollan told students in his introduction to the course. If you’re already asking questions about your food, it’s likely your favorite author-activist appears. For people learning about food systems for the first time, this class may be the very best place to start.

Edible Education 101 commemorates the 40th anniversary of Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant founded by chef Alice Waters, whose culinary approach — fresh food, prepared simply and sourced well — has influenced several generations of eaters. This year, Waters has rebranded her Chez Panisse Foundation as the Edible Schoolyard Project, which will seek to recreate the Foundation’s Berkeley-based teaching garden in other school systems throughout the nation. Waters thought that a Berkeley course, taught by Pollan, would be a fitting way to usher in the new era of student outreach.

Pollan found a co-teacher in Nikki Henderson, a Bay Area activist who directs The People’s Grocery, a non-profit that seeks to improve the health and wealth of West Oakland residents with locally grown food. Her focus on food education and social justice complements Pollan’s interest in the philosophy and semiotics of eating, as well as Waters’ farm-to-tastebuds culinary approach.

As they planned the course, Waters, Pollan, and Henderson decided that each weekly meeting would focus on a specific theme — lecture topics like “Nutrition, Health, and Diet-Related Disease,” “School Lunch and Edible Schoolyards,” and “Corporations and the Food Movement.” From there, they began reaching out to qualified authorities on each topic, slowly assembling a food Dream Team.

“Alice brought her years of experience and relationships to the table, which was fantastic,” Henderson told me by phone. “Michael wanted the course to be academically rigorous — a sophisticated inquiry and exploration and into some of the more difficult topics.”

“My focus,” she said, “was to make sure that justice was central — that race and class and power were concepts to be digested deeply by the audience, and by the speakers.”

In the Bay Area, Edible Education 101 has become a phenomenon. Each week, Berkeley made 300 free tickets available to the public, and, according to Henderson, tickets to the first lecture sold out within 10 minutes. But even by live stream, it was thrilling to watch the boldfaced names lecture at the university podium — Raj Patel’s wryly comic illuminations of farm economics, for instance, or Carlo Petrini’s passionately gruff exhortations on the virtues of Slow Food, the movement he founded (extemporaneously translated from the Italian by our own Corby Kummer).

In a study released by the International Journal of Biological Sciences, analyzing the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers found that agricultural giant Monsanto’s GM corn is linked to organ damage in rats.

According to the study, which was summarized by Rady Ananda at Food Freedom, “Three varieties of Monsanto’s GM corn – Mon 863, insecticide-producing Mon 810, and Roundup® herbicide-absorbing NK 603 – were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities.”

Monsanto gathered its own crude statistical data after conducting a 90-day study, even though chronic problems can rarely be found after 90 days, and concluded that the corn was safe for consumption. The stamp of approval may have been premature, however.

In the conclusion of the IJBS study, researchers wrote:

“Effects were mostly concentrated in kidney and liver function, the two major diet detoxification organs, but in detail differed with each GM type. In addition, some effects on heart, adrenal, spleen and blood cells were also frequently noted. As there normally exists sex differences in liver and kidney metabolism, the highly statistically significant disturbances in the function of these organs, seen between male and female rats, cannot be dismissed as biologically insignificant as has been proposed by others. We therefore conclude that our data strongly suggests that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal toxicity….These substances have never before been an integral part of the human or animal diet and therefore their health consequences for those who consume them, especially over long time periods are currently unknown.”

Monsanto has immediately responded to the study, stating that the research is “based on faulty analytical methods and reasoning and do not call into question the safety findings for these products.”

The IJBS study’s author Gilles-Eric Séralini responded to the Monsanto statement on the blog, Food Freedom, “Our study contradicts Monsanto conclusions because Monsanto systematically neglects significant health effects in mammals that are different in males and females eating GMOs, or not proportional to the dose. This is a very serious mistake, dramatic for public health. This is the major conclusion revealed by our work, the only careful reanalysis of Monsanto crude statistical data.”

BestMealInfo lists Ten Facts about Monsanto.

Locals are finding ways to move away from food created by corporations

BY KATHY JOHNSTON

A quiet revolution is stirring in local kitchens. All over San Luis Obispo County, people are claiming their right to decide what goes in their mouths and their power to choose where it comes from.

Residents with various income levels are filling their forks with fresh food from local farms and fields as the local food movement gains ground. The Central Coast is among the easiest places for people to pack their plates with food from the community, rather than corporate commodities.

Eating fresh local food is moving beyond farmers, markets, and fancy restaurants. Today’s options include home delivery of just-picked fruit and vegetables from dozens of local farms; improved access to fresh, local produce for people with limited incomes; backyard gardens and chicken coops; a push to grow old-fashioned crops to meet local demand; even a new SLO City-owned farm.

“There’s definitely a shift away from corporate food,” said Caroline Ginsberg, on a break from picking ripe red apples from an orchard at SLO Creek Farms on a sunny afternoon earlier this month. She’s the volunteer coordinator for GleanSLO, a local nonprofit whose volunteers harvest thousands of pounds of excess local crops for distribution to hungry families by the SLO County Foodbank.

Foodbank staff and volunteers are working to increase the amount of local produce provided to hungry people, rather than relying on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “heavily processed” commodity foods, Ginsberg said.

In addition to GleanSLO and the Foodbank, other groups and agencies are pushing to give people better access to fresh foods in SLO County, according to Clint Slaughter, board chairman for the Environmental Center of San Luis Obispo County (ECOSLO). A new countywide effort known as the Food System Coalition aims to see people with limited incomes use their food voucher cards to buy fresh, local, nutritious products for their dining tables. Under a $100,000 Hunger-Free Communities planning grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, other actions to enhance the county’s food system are also under study.

“Even on a budget, if you cook it, you can make a delicious healthy meal—but it is more challenging until we relearn how to do it,” Slaughter said, pointing out that earlier generations grew a large percentage of their food in backyard victory gardens.

“You can actually grow a decent amount of food on your balcony, or in a community garden plot. Plus the Central Coast has so much opportunity for healthy, locally grown food. You see the benefits across the board, on health and the local economy,” he said.

As an emergency room physician, Slaughter is concerned about the costly obesity epidemic in the United States: “Obesity is preventable; it depends on what we’re eating. By eating locally grown fresh vegetables and fruit without sugar or additives, we have the opportunity to avoid obesity.”

Locally raised, grass-fed beef is also healthier than the meat from cattle kept in concentrated feed lots, he added, where the amount of antibiotics used on the animals is “quite appalling,” leading to problems with the development of resistant bacteria. He and his family bought a share of a grass-fed cow raised in the Cayucos hills, part of a growing local movement to provide healthier meat and poultry.

Along with more than 500 other local residents, the Slaughters also subscribe to a weekly home-delivery service for freshly harvested local produce: SLO Veg. Owner Dan Melton collects crops from more than 60 Central Coast farmers, assembling the yield in various sized boxes for delivery to his customers at their homes or workplaces.

“There’s a huge amount of awesome farmland around here, some with fourth- or fifth-generation farmers, some new to it. The farmers have definitely embraced SLO Veg,” Melton said.

So have his customers, as the business continues to expand.

“It’s a growing social psychology to want to know where your food comes from,” he explained. “It’s a great change in people’s attitude. Even people with less income, people who are struggling, are willing to spend more, to look me in the eye and have confidence in their food.”

His customers compare their weekly veggie box to opening a Christmas present: “I hear them say with excitement, ‘The box is here! What’s in the box?’” he said.

For Laura Slaughter, who does most of the cooking in the family home, receiving the weekly box is fun. She and her 2-year-old son unload it together, remarking on each vegetable or fruit.

“We’ve made lots of new things—bok choy, pomegranates—and I do enjoy it. Sometimes there’s a little hesitation—what do I do with a daikon radish?—but that’s part of being local. The food is so healthy, and we know a carrot is a carrot, not something shipped across the country with no taste and no nutrition,” she said.

She’s grateful to have the opportunity to make healthy, pesticide-free baby food from the contents of their weekly box, pureeing the produce and freezing it in ice cube trays for their son’s meals.

As her husband said with a smile, “You just feel better. It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling.”

Fork you, Wall Street

The recent Occupy movement has helped inspire people to think about where their food comes from, said farmer John deRosier.

“There’s a general vibration that we need to go more local with food, to get it out of the hands of corporations,” deRosier said.

“In San Luis Obispo County, you can get everything [locally raised] but grains and dairy. If we get our act together, we could do those, too,” he said.

He’s passionate about supplying locally grown grain crops, leasing fields with different microclimates all over the county where he grows a variety of old-fashioned grains, including hull-less oats, several kinds of wheat, barley, sorghum, triticale, rye, millet, and more unusual crops including quinoa, amaranth, and teff.

A bright green field of vibrant young oat plants shimmered, catching the late-autumn sunshine in the Los Osos Valley recently as deRosier threw out his hands with enthusiasm.

“This is a connection story I feel with humanity and grain,” he said. “We’ve grown grain for at least 10,000 years. This is how we survived. There’s a lot of reverence for grain in pretty much every culture. These plants are so amazing.”

He knelt down in the dark, rich soil, cradling the young shoots, his eyes glowing as he said, “All the stages are so intriguing. They blow in the wind and make a chattering sound. There’s a spirit that’s so vital, that calls up a sense of real life and sustenance and community.”

But industrial farms are geared toward producing great quantities of grains, rather than focusing on quality, he said.

“Grain is the poster child for corporate farming. A few companies own the entire world supply of grain because it’s easy to move and store. To me, being non-corporate is a big part of the story. We’re never going to have a strong community food system without grain. Our food supply is dependent on these plants,” he said.

Turning these plants into useable food is “challenging,” requiring quite a bit of labor and specialized equipment, but for deRosier, the satisfaction is worth it.

“You’re eating food from someone who touched it, who co-collaborated to bring it to you. If you buy quality food, if you buy fresh and local, you’re supporting individual farming operations that have integrity. We have to support what we want to see with our dollars,” he said. “Farmers and ranchers are the ones interacting with our environment. It takes the consumer to make the big wheel of environmental stewardship turn. It’s the most empowering thing we can do.”

Fresh, local food is also being produced in more and more SLO County backyards. In Garden Farms south of Atascadero, Rob and Karyn Kimmell raise their own “really, really fresh eggs,” honey, herbs, heirloom vegetables, fruit, and nuts behind their home. Known as Tread Lightly Farm, their less-than-an-acre plot is based on permaculture principles that work with nature.

Chickens scratched in the fallen leaves beneath fruit trees just before dusk earlier this month. The birds had been temporarily released from the portable cage Rob Kimmell called a “chicken tractor.” The hens—and a rooster—eat the bugs, till the soil, mow the lawn, and fertilize the ground, he explained.

His passion lately, though, is honeybees and their gift of pollinating the various food plants in the garden, plus “the unity and the soul” they show as they work together for the good of the whole—and, of course, the “precious” honey they produce.

His eyes shining with unabashed love for his six-legged friends, Kimmell showed a visitor the inside of one of the bees’ homes, an elevated, peaked-roof box known as a top bar hive. Along with several others around the yard, it was constructed by hand from plans he found online. The couple’s bees are managed naturally, with an emphasis on helping the pollinators proliferate rather than a focus on honey production.

Although backyard beekeeping is not allowed in many parts of SLO County, the large plots and supportive attitude in Garden Farms have made the bees a welcome addition to the neighborhood, Kimmell said.

And, he added, the backyard honey is much more healthy and alive than chain-store honey from China.

“We enjoy the excitement of growing our own food. This is an easily reproducible model. You don’t have to have much land to increase the proportion of your diet that comes from your own yard,” he said.

Trading some of the backyard harvest with other nearby gardeners can turn a neighborhood into a grocery store, according to Elizabeth Johnson, who helped form the SLO County Seed Exchange, which she described as a nonpolitical, non-hierarchical group that gets together annually to share seeds from their gardens.

“The Seed Exchange is a celebration of all the good things, such as the aesthetics of what seeds look like. Although the organizers don’t want it to be political, for me personally, that’s such a major thing, especially this year, the way corporations are trying to take over seeds,” Johnson said.

“Where corporations have become so strong, it’s really important to regain control over your own life and what you eat. Food from large corporate farms has become toxic, with 15 forms of corn in one product. It behooves us to stay away from that,” she added.

Back at the GleanSLO apple harvest gathering just south of San Luis Obispo, SLO Creek Farms’ owner Robyn Gable expressed his appreciation for the many volunteers who have helped him see this year’s bumper crop picked and distributed to those in need.

Surrounded by trailers piled with the just-picked red-and-gold orbs of Braeburn apples reflecting the afternoon sun, Gable smiled as he said, “People on the East Coast are shoveling snow, and we’re shoveling sunshine!”

GleanSLO volunteers sipped golden apple juice bursting with fresh flavor, crushed from apples that were hanging on heavily laden trees less than an hour before.

“We’re hoping to figure out how to preserve more of the produce from local farms. Even after we glean, there’s still more there,” said Stephanie Peaford, a board member for the organization. A fruit-canning gathering at the SLO Senior Center was a “community-building” experience, bringing older residents with knowledge of food preserving together with younger folks eager to learn, she said.

Another local-food activist at the apple orchard, Greg Ellis, explained his vision for “garden matchmaking,” a system to connect gardeners with unused garden space. He’s also working on a project to create more backyard gardens this coming springtime, with a “flash mob” of workers converging to build and install raised beds for growing food.

Even the City of SLO is hopping on the local-food bandwagon, with the newly created, city-owned SLO City Farm on 25 acres off Los Osos Valley Road and Calle Joaquin at the south end of town. Shopping-center developers were required to preserve 50 percent of their land in agriculture, under the city’s General Plan.

The Central Coast Agricultural Network recently received a $255,000 grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture to develop the SLO City Farm, with the idea of providing organically grown food crops and public education.

Awareness of the pitfalls of the nation’s corporate-dominated food supply is spreading, with locally grown food widely seen as a solution. For example, a prestigious foodie group, the James Beard Foundation, chose this theme for its national conference in October: “Sustainability on the Table: How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats.”

The way SLO County eats is moving away from the influence of money and media, with local menu choices relying increasingly on what’s growing on local farms and ranches, what’s living in nearby coastal waters, and what’s thriving in backyards and garden spaces.

As Melton of SLO Veg observed, “Food is such an intimate part of a person’s life. Everyone wants to be healthy.”

Contributing writer Kathy Johnston can be reached at kjohnston@newtimesslo.com.

As the weather begins to cool off, I find myself spending more time baking in the warmth of my kitchen. Lately, I’ve taken the opportunity to experiment with sourdough breads.

Sourdough is a game entirely unlike bread baking with active dry yeast or a bread machine – it requires a little more time and attention. But, once you learn the basics of keeping a sourdough starter you’ll discover an infinite world of bread making.

Sourdough bread has a rich history, dating back as far as the Ancient Egyptians of 1500 BC. Until only 130 years ago, all bread was leavened with a sourdough starter…

Continued via The Fine Print’s City Farmer: DIY Sourdough Starter and Chestnuts A’Plenty

Samoan breadfruit in Ghana

PR – The Ghana Alliance against Hunger and Malnutrition (HAG) has announced that one thousand 300mm tall Samoan variety breadfruit trees arrived in Accra, Thursday evening from a mass propagation facility outside Frankfurt, Germany.

They are of the Ma`afala and Ulu Fiti varieties of Samoa in the Pacific Islands which produce 500 kg of fruit per tree, per year and have complementary fruiting patterns resulting in shorter hungry months. The present Ghanaian breadfruit variety produces perhaps 250 or 300 kg per year, and has a single main season.

The HAG executive director, Nana Ayim Poakwah, related that he had met America’s Breadfruit Institute director, Dr Diane Ragone, some years ago and left his contact details with her because she was predicting the mass production phase would soon become a reality. In the summer of 2010, Ragone contacted Poakwah with word that the mass propagation methods were working out nicely and that Dr Jeff Marck, a Breadfruit Institute volunteer and liaison to Africa, would be in touch.

Marck, an African rural economies and population health specialist, began working with Poakwah, who had been developing breadfruit arrival plans for several years. Poakwah’s idea was to establish demonstration plantings around homesteads, schools and municipal buildings, on farms and on wasted or rough ground as breadfruit is an exceptional tree for regenerating ecoforests.

Marck had the news that an entire shipment was thriving in the care of the Jamaican Ministry of Agriculture, where previous shipments around the Caribbean did not land in the hands of master horticulturalists and that the Jamaican model was the only one which produced such high survival rates for the newly arrived plantlets. So the plants will now go to a Ghanaian agricultural research station for 4 to 6 months before going off to their community plantings.

HAG’s will now keep closely abreast of the Jamaica successes and failures as they will forever be two years ahead of these initial Ghanaian plantings. Jamaica is trying very hard for success and commercialisation. Breadfruit is their national food.

These are believed to be the first new variety breadfruit varieties reaching West Africa’s shores since the 1840s when missionaries brought a Tahitian variety from the Caribbean. This was just a few decades after the legendary voyages involving the mutiny on the Bounty and other such breadfruit-dedicated voyages brought Tahitian and other Pacific Island breadfruit varieties to the Caribbean.

Public and corporate viewings shall be arranged after the plants are stabilised when their location announced. HAG is a Ghana NGO whose executive director Mr Poakwah was responsible for starting up the Ghana School Feeding Programme and other happy Ghanaian stories. The African Breadfruit Revolution has begun.

Scientists aiming their gene sequencers at commercial seafood are discovering rampant labeling fraud in supermarket coolers and restaurant tables: cheap fish is often substituted for expensive fillets, and overfished species are passed off as fish whose numbers are plentiful.

Yellowtail stands in for mahi-mahi. Nile perch is labeled as shark, and tilapia may be the Meryl Streep of seafood, capable of playing almost any role.

Recent studies by researchers in North America and Europe harnessing the new techniques have consistently found that 20 to 25 percent of the seafood products they check are fraudulently identified, fish geneticists say.

Labeling regulation means little if the “grouper” is really catfish or if gulf shrimp were spawned on a farm in Thailand.

Environmentalists, scientists and foodies are complaining that regulators are lax in policing seafood, and have been slow to adopt the latest scientific tools even though they are now readily available and easy to use.

“Customers buying fish have a right to know what the heck it is and where it’s from, but agencies like the F.D.A. are not taking this as seriously as they should,” said Michael Hirshfield, chief scientist of the nonprofit group Oceana, referring to the Food and Drug Administration.

“As demonstrators seek accountability from Wall Street, a dark horse rises from our amber waves of grain with a message of economic growth–the organic farmer. The Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF) collected and reviewed American scientific research on organic farming in an effort to help policy makers understand the true value of organics. In addition to the usual environmental and human health benefits, one of the features that has been so far undersold is that of economic stability and growth.

“Organic food and beverage sales have grown from $1 billion in 1990 to $26.7 billion in 2010. And sales for organic fruits and vegetables in 2010 increased 11.8% over 2009, despite the slow economy.”

Great visual on What We Eat from the Washington Post.

Michael Pollan on what we feed kids in school lunches.

Now, Mark Bittman: THE “fact” that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes. I frequently read confident statements like, “when a bag of chips is cheaper than a head of broccoli …” or “it’s more affordable to feed a family of four at McDonald’s than to cook a healthy meal for them at home.”

This is just plain wrong. In fact it isn’t cheaper to eat highly processed food: a typical order for a family of four — for example, two Big Macs, a cheeseburger, six chicken McNuggets, two medium and two small fries, and two medium and two small sodas — costs, at the McDonald’s a hundred steps from where I write, about $28. (Judicious ordering of “Happy Meals” can reduce that to about $23 — and you get a few apple slices in addition to the fries!)

If you’re interested in taking a step away from the big (and often overwhelming) picture and remembering all the little things people are doing to improve our food system, consider Exhibit A:  Just Food, a nonprofit that does terrific food justice work in New York City, is gearing up for a fifth year of its City Chicken Project, which brings egg-laying hens, necessary coop-building equipment, and training to urban gardens and schools in underserved neighborhoods.

Consider making a donation through the City Chicken page. A $15 donation or more will get you in the door at our July 6th “Kegs and Kluckers” event at Brooklyn Brewery, where home brewers, chicken keepers and their supporters can meet and celebrate. On top of that, spent grain from the brewing process can be fed to chickens as a highly nutritious feed supplement – so this will be a chance to do some matchmaking!

Its seventh annual report analyzed government data on 53 fruits and vegetables, identifying which have the most and least pesticides after washing and peeling. For produce found to be highest in pesticides, the group recommends buying organic.

Apples moved up three spots from last year, replacing celery at the top of the most-contaminated list; 92% of apples contained two or more pesticides.

“We think what’s happening to apples is more pesticides and fungicides are being applied after the harvest so the fruit can have a longer shelf life,” says EWG analyst Sonya Lunder. “Pesticides might be in small amounts, but we don’t know what the subtle, long-term effects of many of these pesticides are yet.”

The worst offenders also include strawberries (No. 3) and imported grapes (No. 7). Onions top the “clean” list, found to be lowest in pesticides.