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Industrial vs. Organic
Ted,
your Byzantine efforts at defending an indefensible position are boring. The the important features of eating local organic produce a 1) increased nutrients in the produce when consumed locally 2) a marked decrease in pesticides, pesticide residues, and other industrial chemicals in the food 3) cleaner water 4) reduced use of petroleum for shipping (typically 2,400 mi. to your table), cleaner air, and less chance of contamination in transit 5) reduce and eliminate the hazards of GMOs (unknown effects of unique proteins that they produce, encouragement of increased pesticide use, terminator genes) (points 1 thru 5 lead to better health and lower medical costs, i.e. another example of business profiting from a problem that they created and deferring the cost to the public) 6) better flavor of food 7) reduced erosion of top soil, and the possibility of adding to it and restoring loss habitat 8) reduce our dependence on petroleum Food processors like Archer Daniels Midland, don't farm. They along with their co-conspirators, screw farmers and consumers alike leading to fewer family farms (thus reducing food security), and over-fed and under-nourished consumers. If you have any desire to know more, keep reading. http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2...2-11-21-06.asp Food Travels Far to Reach Your Table By Cat Lazaroff WASHINGTON, DC, November 21, 2002 (ENS) - As families travel across the United States next week to gather for the Thanksgiving holiday, many will sit down to eat food that has traveled even farther - between 1,500 and 2,500 miles (2,500 and 4,000 kilometers) from farm to table. A new study by the Worldwatch Institute details the lengthy journeys that much of the nation's food supply now takes, finding a growing separation between the sources and destinations of American food. Supermarket produce may have traveled thousands of miles to reach your local store. (Photo by Ken Hammond. All photos courtesy U.S. Department of Agriculture) The distance that food travels has grown by as much as 25 percent, according to the report by the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental and social policy research institute based in Washington DC. The nation's reliance on a complex network of food shipments leaves the United States vulnerable to supply disruptions, the group argues. "The farther we ship food, the more vulnerable our food system becomes," said Worldwatch research associate Brian Halweil, author of "Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in a Global Market." "Many major cities in the U.S. have a limited supply of food on hand," Halweil added. "That makes those cities highly vulnerable to anything that suddenly restricts transportation, such as oil shortages or acts of terrorism." This vulnerability is not limited to the United States. The tonnage of food shipped between countries has grown fourfold over the last four decades, while the world's population has doubled. In the United Kingdom, for example, food travels 50 percent farther than it did two decades ago. This reliance on long distance food damages rural economies, as farmers and small food businesses become the most marginal link in the sprawling food chain, says the Worldwatch report. Long distance travel also creates numerous opportunities along the way for food contamination, and requires the use of artificial additives and preservatives to keep food from spoiling. Shipping fish and other products from around the world requires the burning of fossil fuels, contributing to global warming. (USDA Photo by Ken Hammond) Food transportation also contributes to global warming, because of the huge quantities of fuel used for transportation. A typical meal bought from a conventional supermarket chain - including some meat, grains, fruit and vegetables - consumes four to 17 times more petroleum for transport than the same meal using local ingredients. "We are spending far more energy to get food to the table than the energy we get from eating the food. A head of lettuce grown in the Salinas Valley of California and shipped nearly 3,000 miles to Washington, D.C., requires about 36 times as much fossil fuel energy in transport as it provides in food energy when it arrives," Halweil said. While most economists believe that long distance food trade is efficient because communities and nations can buy their food from the lowest cost provider, studies from North America, Asia, and Africa show that farm communities reap little benefit from their crops, and often suffer as a result of freer trade in agricultural goods. "The economic benefits of food trade are a myth," said Halweil. "The big winners are agribusiness monopolies that ship, trade, and process food. Agricultural policies, including the new [Bush administration backed] farm bill, tend to favor factory farms, giant supermarkets, and long distance trade, and cheap, subsidized fossil fuels encourage long distance shipping. The big losers are the world's poor." The Crescent City Farmer's Market meets in New Orleans, Louisiana every Saturday morning, offering baked goods, fresh fruits and vegetables, herbs and canned goods. (USDA Photo by Bill Tarpenning) Farmers producing for export often go hungry as they sacrifice the use of their land to feed foreign mouths, Halweil writes. Meanwhile, poor urban dwellers in both developed and developing nations find themselves living in neighborhoods without supermarkets, green grocers, or healthy food choices. "Of course, a certain amount of food trade is natural and beneficial. But money spent on locally produced foods stays in the community longer, creating jobs, supporting farmers, and preserving local cuisines and crop varieties against the steamroller of culinary imperialism," Halweil added. "And developing nations that emphasize greater food self reliance can retain precious foreign exchange and avoid the instability of international markets." Halweil points to a vigorous, emerging local food movement that is challenging both the wisdom and practice of long distance food shipping. "Massive meat recalls, the advent of genetically engineered food, and other food safety crises have built interest in local food," he said. "Rebuilding local food economies is the first genuine profit making opportunity in farm country in years." Communities that seek to meet their food needs locally will reap benefits including a more diverse variety of regional crops, cheaper food that avoids added costs from intermediate handlers and shippers, and a boon for the local economy as money spent on food goes to local growers and merchants. Of course, many consumers will choose local produce just for the flavor. Unlike supermarket tomatoes, which are often shipped green and ripened artificially, these locally grown tomatoes ripened on the vine. (USDA Photo by Bill Tarpenning) "Locally grown food served fresh and in season has a definite taste advantage," Halweil said. "It's harvested at the peak of ripeness and doesn't have to be fumigated, refrigerated, or packaged for long distance hauling and long shelf life." In the United States, for example, more than half of all tomatoes are harvested and shipped green, and then artificially ripened upon arrival at their final destination. Consumers now have a growing variety of local food providers to choose from. The number of registered farmers' markets in the United States has jumped from 300 in the mid-1970s and 1,755 in 1994 to more than 3,100 today. About three million people now visit these markets each week, spending more than $1 billion each year. Innovative restaurants, school cafeterias, caterers, hospitals, and even supermarkets are beginning to offer fresh, seasonal foods from local farmers and food businesses. Consumers can promote local growers by choosing to buy their produce and baked goods from farmers markets. (USDA Photo by Bill Tarpenning) North America now boasts more than a dozen local food policy councils, which track changes in the local food system, lobby for farmland protection, point citizens towards local food options, and help create incentives for local food businesses. But the most powerful force behind the growing local food market is the consumer. The Worldwatch report offers several suggestions for how consumers can help to promote local food systems, including: * Learn what foods are in season in your area and try to build your diet around them. * Shop at a local farmers' market, or link up with your neighbors and friends to start a subscription service featuring seasonal foods from local growers * Ask the manager or chef of your favorite restaurant how much of the food on the menu is locally grown, and then encourage him or her to buy food locally. * Take a trip to a local farm to learn what it produces. * Host a harvest party at your home or in your community that features locally available and in season foods. * Produce a local food directory that lists all the local food sources in your area * Buy extra quantities of your favorite fruit or vegetable when it is in season and experiment with drying, canning, jamming, or otherwise preserving it for a later date. * Plant a garden and grow as much of your own food as possible. * Speak to your local politician about forming a local food policy council. For more information on the report, "Home Grown: The Case for Local Food in a Global Market," visit the Worldwatch Institute at: http://www.worldwatch.org/pubs/paper/163/orderpage.html --------- February 13, 2008 In Defense of Food: Author, Journalist Michael Pollan on Nutrition, Food Science and the American Diet Acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan argues that what most Americans are consuming today is not food but ³edible food-like substances.² His previous book, The Omnivoreıs Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. His latest book, just published, is called In Defense of Food: An Eaterıs Manifesto. Guest: Michael Pollan, Professor of science and environmental journalism at UC Berkeley. His previous book, The Omnivoreıs Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and the Washington Post. His latest book, just published, is In Defense of Food: An Eaterıs Manifesto. AMY GOODMAN: ³You are what to eat.² Or so the saying goes. In American culture, healthy food is a national preoccupation. But then why are Americans becoming less healthy and more overweight? Acclaimed author and journalist Michael Pollan argues that what most Americans are consuming today is not food, but edible food-like substances. Michael Pollan is a professor of science and environmental journalism at University of California, Berkeley. His previous book, The Omnivoreıs Dilemma, was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by the New York Times and Washington Post. His latest book is called In Defense of Food: An Eaterıs Manifesto. Michael Pollan recently joined me here in the firehouse studio for a wide-ranging conversation about nutrition, food science and the current American diet. I began by asking him why he feels he has to defend food. MICHAEL POLLAN: Foodıs under attack from two quarters. Itıs under attack from the food industry, which is taking, you know, perfectly good whole foods and tricking them up into highly processed edible food-like substances, and from nutritional science, which has over the years convinced us that we shouldnıt be paying attention to food, itıs really the nutrients that matter. And theyıre trying to replace foods with antioxidants, you know, cholesterol, saturated fat, omega-3s, and that whole way of looking at food as a collection of nutrients, I think, is very destructive. AMY GOODMAN: Shouldnıt people be concerned, for example, about cholesterol? MICHAEL POLLAN: No. Cholesterol in the diet is actually only very mildly related to cholesterol in the blood. It was a that was a scientific error, basically. We were sold a bill of goods that we should really worry about the cholesterol in our food, basically because cholesterol is one of the few things we could measure that was linked to heart disease, so there was this kind of obsessive focus on cholesterol. But, you know, the egg has been rehabilitated. You know, the egg is very high in cholesterol, and now weıre told itıs actually a perfectly good, healthy food. So thereıs only a very tangential relationship between the cholesterol you eat and the cholesterol levels in your blood. AMY GOODMAN: How is it that the food we eat now, it takes time to read the ingredients? MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. AMY GOODMAN: You actually have to stop and spend time and perhaps put on glasses or figure out how to pronounce words you have never heard of. MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, itıs a literary scientific experience now going shopping in the supermarket, because basically the food has gotten more complex. Itısfor the food industrysee, to understand the economics of the food industry, you canıt really make money selling things like, oh, oatmeal, you know, plain rolled oats. And if you go to the store, you can buy a pound of oats, organic oats, for seventy-nine cents. Thereıs no money in that, because it doesnıt have any brand identification. Itıs a commodity, and the prices of commodity are constantly falling over time. So you make money by processing it, adding value to it. So you take those oats, and you turn them into Cheerios, and then you can charge four bucks for that seventy-nine centsand actually even less than that, a few pennies of oats. And then after a few years, Cheerios become a commodity. You know, everyoneıs ripping off your little circles. And so, you have to move to the next thing, which are like cereal bars. And now thereıs cereal straws, you know, that your kids are supposed to suck milk through, and then they eat the straw. Itıs made out of the cereal material. Itıs extruded. So, you see, every level of further complication gives you some intellectual property, a product no one else has, and the ability to charge a whole lot more for these very cheap raw ingredients. And as you make the food more complicated, you need all these chemicals to make it last, to make it taste good, to makeand because, you know, food really isnıt designed to last a year on the shelf in a supermarket. And so, it takes a lot of chemistry to make that happen. AMY GOODMAN: I was a whole grain baker in Maine, and I would consider the coup to be to get our whole grain organic breads in the schools of Maine for the kids, but we just couldnıt compete with Wonder Bread MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. AMY GOODMAN: which could stay on the shelfI donıt know if it was a year. MICHAEL POLLAN: Thatıs amazing. AMY GOODMAN: Ours, after a few days, of course, would get moldy, because it was alive. MICHAEL POLLAN: Right. And, in fact, one of my tips is, donıt eat any food thatıs incapable of rotting. If the food canıt rot eventually, thereıs something wrong. AMY GOODMAN: What is nutritionism? MICHAEL POLLAN: Nutritionism is the prevailing ideology in the whole world of food. And itıs not a science. It is an ideology. And like most ideologies, it is a set of assumptions about how the world works that weıre totally unaware of. And nutritionism, thereıs a few fundamental tenets to it. One is that food is a collection of nutrients, that basically the sum ofyou know, food is the sum of the nutrients it contains. The other is that since the nutrient is the key unit and, as ordinary people, we canıt see or taste or feel nutrients, we need experts to help us design our foods and tell us how to eat. Another assumption of nutritionism is that you can measure these nutrients and you know what theyıre doing, that we know what cholesterol is and what it does in our body or what an antioxidant is. And thatıs a dubious proposition. And the last premise of nutritionism is that the whole point of eating is to advance your physical health and that thatıs what we go to the store for, thatıs what weıre buying. And thatıs also a very dubious idea. If you go around the world, people eat for a great many reasons besides, you know, the medicinal reason. I mean, they eat for pleasure, they eat for community and family and identity and all these things. But weıve put that aside with this obsession with nutrition. And I basically think itıs a pernicious ideology. I mean, I donıt think itıs really helping us. If there was a trade-off, if looking at food this way made us so much healthier, great. But in fact, since weıve been looking at food this way, our health has gotten worse and worse. AMY GOODMAN: Letıs talk about the diseases of Western civilization. MICHAEL POLLAN: The Western diseases, whichthey were named that about a hundred years ago by a medical doctor named Denis Burkitt, an Englishman, who noted that thereafter the Western diet comes to these countries where he had spent a lot of time in Africa and Asia, a series of Western diseases followed, very predictably: obesity, diabetes, heart disease and a specific set of cancers. And he said, well, they must have this common origin, because we keep seeing this pattern. And weıve known this for a hundred years, that if you eat this Western diet, which is defined basically asI mean, we all know what the Western diet is, but to reiterate it, itıs lots of processed food, lots of refined grain and pure sugar, lots of red meat and processed meats, very little whole grains, very little fresh fruits and vegetables. Thatıs the Western dietitıs the fast-food dietthat we know it leads to those diseases. About 80 percent of heart disease, at least as much Type II diabetes, 33 to 40 percent cancers all come out of eating that way, and we know this. And the odd thing is that it doesnıt seem to discomfort us that much. AMY GOODMAN: Talk about coming from another culture and coming here. MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. AMY GOODMAN: When you specifically talk about sugar, refined wheat, what actually happens in the body? MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, thatıs where you see it most directly. When populations that have not been exposed to this kind of food for a long timeweıve seen it with Pacific Islanders, if you go to Hawaii, weıve seen it with Mexican immigrants coming to Americathese are the people who have the most trouble with this diet, and they get fat very quickly and get diabetes very quickly. You know, we hear about this epidemic of diabetes, but itıs very much of a class and ethnically based phenomenon, and Hispanics have much more trouble with it. And the reason or the hypothesis is that, culturally and physically, they havenıt been dealing with a lot of refined grain, whereas in Europe, weıve been dealing with refined grain for a couple hundred years. AMY GOODMAN: And what does refined wheat do? MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, what happens is, when youthere was a key invention around the 1860s, which is we developed these steel rollers and porcelain rollers that could grind wheat and corn and other grains really fine and eliminate the germ and the bran. And the reason we wanted to do that was we loved it as white as possible. It would last longer. The rats had less interest in it, because it had less nutrients in it. And also you get a kind of a real strong hit of glucose. I mean, basically it digests much quicker, as soon as it hits the tongue. I mean, everyone hasyou know, if youıve ever tasted Wonder Bread, you know how sweet it is. The reason itıs sweet is itıs so highly refined that as soon as your saliva hits it, it turns to sugar. Whole grains have a whole lot of other nutrients. You know, it once was possible to live by bread alone, because a whole grain loaf of bread has all sorts of other nutrients. It has omega-3s, it has, you know, lots of B vitamins. And we remove those when we refine grain. And itıs kind of odd and maladaptive that refined grain should be so prestigious, since itıs so unhealthy. But weıve always liked it, and one of the reasons is it stores longer. AMY GOODMAN: Weıre talking to Michael Pollan. His new book is In Defense of Food: An Eaterıs Manifesto. ³Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.² Talk about the funding of nutrition science. MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, nutrition science is very compromised by industry. Organizations like the American Dietetic Association take sponsorship from companies who are eager to findyou know, be able to make health claims. Not all nutrition science. And there are very large, important studies that are, you know, publishedthat are supported by the government and are as good as any other medical studies in terms of their cleanness. But there is a lot of corporate nutrition science thatıs done for the express purpose of developing health claims. This science reliably finds health benefits for whatever is being studied. You take a pomegranate to one of these scientists, and they will tell you that it will cure cancer and erectile dysfunction. You take, you know, any kind of food that you want. And now, itıs not surprising, because food is good for you, and that all plants have antioxidants. And so, you know, youıre bound to find AMY GOODMAN: Explain what an antioxidant is. MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, an antioxidant is a chemical compound that plants produce, really to protect themselves from free radicals of oxygen that are generated during photosynthesis. They absorb these kind of mischievous oxygen radicals, molecules, atoms, and disarm them. And as we age, we produce a lot of these oxygen radicals, and theyıre implicated in aging and cancer. So antioxidants are a way to kind of quiet that response, and they have health benefits. They also help you detoxify your body. Sobut my point is kind of, you donıt need to know what an antioxidant is to have the benefit of an antioxidant. You know, weıve been benefiting from them for thousands of years without really having to worry what they are. Theyıre in whole foods, and itıs one of the reasons whole foods are good for you. And there are not that much in processed foods. AMY GOODMAN: Isnıt it odd that the more you put into foodsso thatıs processing fruitsthe less expensive is? The simpler you keep it, getting whole foods in this day and age in this country, itıs extremely expensive. MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. Well, there are reasons of policy that that is the case. Youıre absolutely right. Most processed foods are made from these very cheap raw ingredients. I mean, theyıre basically corn, soy and wheat. And if you look at all those very-hard-to-pronounce ingredients on the back of that processed food, those are fractions of corn, and some petroleum, but a lot of corn, soy and wheat. And the industryıs preferred mode of doing business is to take the cheapest raw materials and create complicated foodstuffs from it. The reason those raw ingredients are so cheap, though, is because these are precisely the ones that the government chooses to support, the subsidiesyou know, the big $26 billion for corn and soy and wheat and rice. So itıs no accident that these should be the ones, you know, grown abundantly and cheap, and thatıs one of the reasons the industry moved down this path. There was such a surfeit of cheap corn and soy that the food scientists got to work turning it into AMY GOODMAN: In fact, getting away totally from sugar to corn syrup. MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, thatıs right. And we donıtyeah, thereıs very little sugar in our processed food. Itıs all high-fructose corn syrup, which, in effect, the government is subsidizing. AMY GOODMAN: Cottonseed oil, is it regulated by the FDA? Is it considered a food, even though itıs in so many of the processed foods we eat? MICHAEL POLLAN: Is it considered a food? Yeah, I think itıs probably AMY GOODMAN: I was wondering, becauseto do with the pesticide that is in it MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. AMY GOODMAN: that if itıs consideredif itıs done for cotton, it doesnıt matter how much pesticide there is. MICHAEL POLLAN: Right. AMY GOODMAN: But if itıs for food, it does matter. And itıs in so much to keep it right, stable for so long on the shelf. MICHAEL POLLAN: Thatıs right. Thatıs right. And itıs a food I would avoid. I mean, you know, humans have not been eating cotton for most of their history. Theyıve been wearing it. And now weıre eating it. And youıre right, it receives an enormous amount of pesticide as a crop. How many residues are in the oil? I donıt really know the answer, but it has been approved by the FDA as a foodstuff. Andbut itıs one of these novel oils that Iım inclined to stay away with. I mean, my basic philosophy of eating is, you know, if your great-grandmother wasnıt familiar with it, you probably want to stay away from it. AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan is our guest. Talk aboutwell, you started with a New York Times piece called ³Unhappy Meals,² and in itand you expand on this in In Defense of Foodyou talk about the McGovern report, 1977, what, thirty years ago. MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, thatıs really, I think, one of the red letter days in the rise of nutritionism as a way of thinking about food. It was a very interesting moment. McGovern convened this set of hearings to look at the American diet, and there was a great deal of concern about heart disease at the time. We hadwe were havingyou know, after a falloff during the war in heart disease, there was a big spike in the ı50s and ı60s, and scientists were busy trying to figure out what was going on and very worried about it. McGovern convened these hearings, took a lot of testimony, and then came out with a set of guidelines. And he saidhe implicated red meat, basically, in this problem. And he said weıre gettingweıre eating too much red meat, and the advice of the government becamethe official adviceeat less red meat. And he said as much. Now, that was a very controversial message. The meat industry, in fact the whole food industry, went crazy, and they came down on him like a ton of bricks. You canıt tell people to eat less of anything. AMY GOODMAN: As Oprah learned when she said she wonıt eat hamburgers. MICHAEL POLLAN: Exactly. This is just a taboo topic in America. So McGovern had to beat this hasty retreat, and he rewrote the guidelines to say, choose meats that will lessen your saturated fat intake, something nobody understood at all and was much to theand that was acceptable. But you see the transition. Itıs very interesting. Weıve been talking about whole foodeat less red meat, which probably was good adviceto this very complicated constructeat meats that have less of this nutrient. Itıs still an affirmative messageeat more, which is fine with industry, just eat a little differently. And suddenly, the focus was on saturated fat, as if we knew that that was the nutrient in the red meat that was the problem. And in fact, it may not be. I mean, there are other things going on in red meat, weıre learning, that may be the problem. AMY GOODMAN: Like? MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, some people think itıs the protein in red meat. Some people think itıs the nitrosomines, these various compounds that are produced when you cook red meat. We see a correlation between high red meat consumption and higher rates of cancer and heart disease. But, again, we donıt know exactly what the cause is, but it may not be saturated fat. AMY GOODMAN: And then the political economy of, for example, eating meat? MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, thatbecause of thatI mean, thatıs why McGovern lost in 1980. I mean, the beef lobby went after him, and they tossed him out. And sobut from then on, anyone who would pronounce on the American diet understood you had to speak in this very obscure language of nutrients. You could talk about saturated fat, you could talk about antioxidants, but you cannot talk about whole foods. So that is the kind of official language in which we discuss nutrition. Conveniently, itıs very confusing to the average consumer. Conveniently to the industry, they love talk about nutrients, because they can alwayswith processed foods, unlike whole foods, you can redesign it. You can just reduce the saturated fat, you know, up the antioxidants. You can jigger it in a way you canıt change broccoli. You know, broccoli is going to be broccoli. But a processed food can always have more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. So the industry loves nutritionism for that reason. AMY GOODMAN: So, for people who donıt have much money, how do they eat? I mean, when youıre talking about whole foods, they have to be prepared, and if you donıt have much time, as well, processed foods are cheaper and theyıre faster. MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, processed foodsyou know, fast food seems cheap. I mean, if you have the time and the inclination to cook, you can eat more cheaply. But you doas you say, you do need the time, and you do need the skills to cook. There is no way around the fact that given the way our food policies are set up, such that whole foods are expensive and getting more expensive and processed foods tend to be cheaperI mean, if you go into the supermarket, the cheapest calories are added fat and added sugar from processed food, and the more expensive calories are over in the produce section. And we have to change policy in order to adjust that. AMY GOODMAN: How do you do that? MICHAEL POLLAN: You need a farm bill that basically evens the playing field and is not driving down the price of high-fructose corn syrup, so that, you know, real fruit juice can compete with it. You need a farm bill that makes carrots competitive with Wonder Bread. And we donıt have that, and we didnıt get it this time around. AMY GOODMAN: Do you feel like any candidates are addressing this issue? MICHAEL POLLAN: No, because they all pass through Iowa, and they all bow down before conventional agricultural policy. In office, I think that, you know, there have beenHillary Clinton has had some very positive food policies, basically because she has this big farm constituency upstate, and sheıs very interested in school lunch and farm-to-school programs and things like that. John Edwards has said some progressive things about feedlot agriculture and whatıs wrong with that, while he was in Iowa. AMY GOODMAN: Explain feedlots. MICHAEL POLLAN: Feedlots are where we grow our meat, in these huge factory farms that have become really the scourge of landscapes in places like Iowa and Missouri, I mean these giant pig confinement operations that basically collect manure in huge lagoons that leak when it rains and smell for miles around. I mean, theyıre just, you know, miserable places. And theyıre becoming a political issue in the Midwest. And I think they will become a political issue nationally, because people are very concerned about the status of the animals in these places. My worry is, though, that when we start regulating these feedlots, theyıll move to Mexico. AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollanıs latest book is In Defense of Food: An Eaterıs Manifesto. Weıll come back to him in a minute. [break] AMY GOODMAN: We return to our conversation with award-winning author and journalist Michael Pollan. His latest book is called In Defense of Food: An Eaterıs Manifesto. I asked him about his earlier book, the acclaimed bestseller The Omnivoreıs Dilemma. MICHAEL POLLAN: The Omnivoreıs Dilemma is, if youıre a creature like us that can eat almost anythingI mean, unlike cows that only eat grass or koala bears that only eat eucalyptus leaveswe can eat a great many different things, and meat and vegetables, but itıs complicated. We donıt have instincts to tell us exactly what to eat, so we havewe need a lot of other cognitive equipment to navigate what is a very treacherous food landscape, because thereas there was in the jungle and in nature, there are poisons out there that could kill us. So we had to learn what was safe and what wasnıt, and we had this thing called culture that told us, like that mushroom there, somebody ate it last week and they died, so letıs call it the ³death cap,² and that way weıll remember that thatıs one to stay away from. And, you know, so culture is how we navigate this. We are once again in a treacherous food landscape, when there are many things in the supermarket that are not good for you. How do we learn now to navigate that landscape? And thatıs what this book was an effort to do, was come up with some rules of thumb. And so, you know, I say eat food, which sounds really simple, but of course thereıs a lot of edible food-like substances in the supermarket that arenıt really food. So how do you tell them apart? AMY GOODMAN: You talk about shopping the periphery of the supermarket? MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah. Well, that was one rule that I found really helpful. And if you look at the layout of the average supermarket, the fresh whole foods are always on the edge. So you get produce and meat and fish and dairy products. And those are the foods that, you know, your grandmother would recognize as foods. They havenıt changed that much. All the processed foods, the really bad stuff that is going to get you in trouble with all the refined grain and the additives and the high-fructose corn syrup, those are all in the middle. And so, if you stay out of the middle and get most of your food on the edges, youıre going to do a lot better. AMY GOODMAN: What is the localvore movement? MICHAEL POLLAN: The localvore movement is a real new emphasis on eating locally, eating food from whatıs called your foodshed. Itıs a metaphor based on a watershed. You know, a certaindraw a circle of a hundred miles around your community and try to eat everything from there. Itıs an interesting movement, and Iım very supportive of local food. I think that itıs verging on the ridiculous right nowI mean, you know, because, frankly, thereıs no wheat produced in a hundred miles of New York. You know, do you want to give up bread? Iım not willing to give up bread. So people get a little extremist about it. But the basic idea of when products are available locally, eating them and eating food in season, is a very powerful and important idea. It supports a great many values. The fact is that food thatıs produced locally is going to be fresher. Itıs going to be more nutritious because itıs fresher. Youıre going to support the farmers in your community. Youıre going to check sprawl. I mean, youıll keep that farmland in business. You are going to keep basically, you know, some autonomy in our food system. I mean, make no mistake: the basic trend of food in this country is to globalize it, and there will come a day when America doesnıt produce its own food. In California, the Central Valley is losing, you know, hundreds of acres of farmland every day, and the projections there are that we will no longer produce produce in California by the end of the century. I donıt want to live in that world. Iyou know, we lost control over our energy destiny, and we donıt want to lose control over our food destiny. AMY GOODMAN: What are the environmental effects of transporting food across the globe? MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, the biggest is energy. I mean, itıs apeople donıt really think about food in terms of climate change, but in fact the food system contributes about a fifth of greenhouse gases. It is as important as the transportation sector, in terms of contributing to greenhouse gas. Itıs a very energy-intensive situation. What we did with the industrialization of food, essentially, is take food off of a solar systemit was basically based on photosynthesis and the sunand put it on a fossil fuel system. We learned how to grow food with lots of synthetic fertilizers made from natural gas, pesticides made from petroleum, and then started moving it around the world. So now we take about ten calories of fossil fuel to produce one calorie of food energy. Very unsustainable system. AMY GOODMAN: And what about the argument of efficiency, and if you want to feed the planet? You have sugar growing in Cuba. You have grapes and meat in Argentina and Uruguay and Chile. MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, thatıs the argument. There are a lot of problems with it. First, it does depend on cheap fossil fuel, and we are not going to have cheap fossil fuel, so that if Uruguay loses its ability to produce anything else, theyıre going to be hungry. Itıs very important that you have local self-sufficiency in foodsome self-sufficiency, not completebefore you start exporting. If you put all your eggs in the basket of, say, coffee, when the international market shifts, as it inevitably does, because it will always go to whatever country is willing to produce it a little more cheaply, you will decimate your industry. And AMY GOODMAN: What if you only consume coffee and nothing else? MICHAEL POLLAN: Oh, you have all sorts of problems we donıt even want to get into. You cannot live on coffee alone. Itıs not like bread. So globalizing food has certain advantages of efficiency, but it also has very high risks. And, you know, efficiency is an important value, but resilience is even more important, and we know this from biology, that the resilience of natural systems and economic systems is something we have to focus more on. This globalized food system is very brittle. When you have a breakdown anywhere, when the prices of fuel escalates, people lose the ability to feed themselves. Whatıs happening with Mexico and NAFTA and corn, you know, they opened their borders to our corn, and it put one-and-a-half million farmers there out of business. They all came to the cities, where you would think, OK, now the price of tortillas should go down, but it didnıt go down, even with the cheap corn, because there was an oligopoly controlling tortillas. Tortilla prices didnıt go down. And so, a lot of these former Mexican farmers became serfs on California farms, and this was the effect of dumping lots of cheap corn. AMY GOODMAN: And now theyıre the target MICHAEL POLLAN: Now the price * AMY GOODMAN: of main politicians all over the country to³We send our food down, and you send immigrants back who are coming here.² MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, ³And we donıt want your immigrants.² And, you know, we donıt understand that these things are connected, that we make a decision in Washington and that this is what leads to an immigration problem. Andbut the dumping of our corn on Mexico is a big part of the immigration problem. AMY GOODMAN: Do you know anything about cloned livestock? The Wall Street Journal says cloned livestock are poised to receive FDA clearance. MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, well, the FDA has been looking at this. There are techniques now to clone livestock, usually for breeding purposes. If you have a really champion bull, the semen of that bull is very valuable. So, gee, if you could turn that bull into five bulls, wouldnıt that be great? Actually, it wonıt be great. Itıs the rareness that makes the semen so valuable. But AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean? MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, if youyou know, if you multiply your champion bull, the supply will go up and the demand will go down. Sobut, anyway, so the FDA needs approval so that once theyıre done using these animals for breeding purposes, they can just drop them into the food system as hamburger. And there is some controversy over whether we should be eating cloned livestock. Iım not, you know, familiar with the risks. Iım a skeptic on genetically modifying food. But the specific risk of cloning livestock, I donıt know. I donıt want to be eating them. But AMY GOODMAN: You have the French farmer, Jose Bove, who has just gone on a hunger strike to promote a ban on genetically modified crops in France. MICHAEL POLLAN: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I hadnıt known that. The Europeans have reacted much more strongly to genetically modified crops than we have. AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think itıs so different? MICHAEL POLLAN: A couple reasons. We have a misplaced faith in our FDA, that theyıve vetted everything and theyıve taken care of it and they know whatıs in the food and that they know the genetically modified crops have been fully tested, which, in fact, they have not, whereas the Europeans, after mad cow disease, are very skeptical of their regulators. And when their regulators tell them, ³Oh, this stuff is fine,² theyıre like, ³Oh, wait. You said that about the beef.² So theyıre much more skeptical. They also perceive it as an American imposition, as part of a cultural imperialism. Even though a lot of the GMO companies are European, the perception is itıs Monsanto. And for some reason, the European countries have managed to get under the radar on this issue. AMY GOODMAN: Does it also have something to do with our media sponsored by food companies? MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, it does. And weand the fact that ourwe have not labeled it, so nobody knows whether youıre eating it or not. I mean, thatıs been a huge fight. You know, Dennis Kucinich has tried to get labeling. Very simple. You know, heıs not saying ban the stuff; heıs saying just tell us if weıre eating it, which seems like a very reasonable position. AMY GOODMAN: And Monsanto fought this. MICHAEL POLLAN: Viciously. AMY GOODMAN: They said that if you say it does not have GMO MICHAEL POLLAN: Thatıs right. AMY GOODMAN: genetically modified organisms, in it MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, you canıt even say that. AMY GOODMAN: that that suggests thereıs something wrong with it, so when Ben & Jerryıs tried to do that MICHAEL POLLAN: Thatıs right. AMY GOODMAN: they werenıt allowed. MICHAEL POLLAN: Thatıs right. Thereıs a lot of litigation over that still in Vermont and other states, in California, as well. Now, why is the industry so intent on not having this product regulatedlabeled? Well, they think, rightly, that people wouldnıt buy it. And the reason they wouldnıt buy it is it offers the consumer nothing, no benefit. Now, if you couldAmericans will eat all sorts of strange things, if there was a benefit. If you could say, well, this genetically modified soy oil will make you skinny, we would buy it, we would eat it. But so far, the traits that theyıve managed to get into these crops benefit farmers, arguably, and not consumers. The other reason, I understand, that they resist labeling is that if there were labels, there would be ways to trace outbreaks of allergy. Any kind of health problems associated with GMOs you could tie to a particular food. Right now, if there are any allergies that are tied to a GMO food, you canıt prove it. And so, one of the reasons the industry has fought it is that theyıre vulnerable to that. When the GMO industry was starting transgenic crops, they made a decision not to seek any limits on liability from the Congress, as the nuclear industry did, and they decided that would not look good to ask for that, so they just took a chance. And this is, in the view of many activists, their great vulnerability, is product liability. And so, labeling is a way to help prevent that eventuality. So they fought it, you know, ferociously and successfully. AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan, what were you most surprised by in writing this book, In Defense of Food? MICHAEL POLLAN: I was most surprised by two things. One was that the science on nutrition that we all traffic in every daywe read these articles on the front page, we talk about antioxidants and cholesterol and all this kind of stuffitıs really sketchy that nutritional science is still a very young science. And food is very complicated, as is the human digestive system. Thereıs a great mystery on both ends of the food chain, and science has not yet sorted it out. Nutrition science is where surgery was in about 1650, you know, really interesting and promising, but would you want to have them operate on you yet? I donıt think so. I donıt think we want to change our eating decisions based on nutritional science. But what I also was surprised at is how many opportunities we now have. If we haveif weıre willing to put the money and the time into it to get off the Western diet and find another way of eating without actually having to leave civilization or, you know, grow all your own food or anythingalthough I do think we should grow whatever food we canthat it is such a hopeful time and that thereıs some very simple things we can all do to eat well without being cowed by the scientists. AMY GOODMAN: The healthiest cuisines, what do you feel they are? MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, the interesting thing is that most traditional cuisines are very healthy, that peoplethat the human body has done very well on the Mediterranean diet, on the Japanese diet, on the peasant South American diet. Itıs really interesting how many different foods we can do well on. The one diet we seem poorly adapted to happens to be the one weıre eating, the Western diet. So whatever traditional diet suits youyou like eating that wayyou know, follow it. And thatyou know, thatıs a good rule of thumb. Thereıs an enormous amount of wisdom contained in a cuisine. And, you know, we privilege scientific information and authority in this country, but, of course, thereıs cultural authority and information, too. And whoever figured out that olive oil and tomatoes was a really great combination was actually, weıre now learning, onto something scientifically. If you want to use that nutrient vocabulary, the lycopene in the tomato, which we think is the good thing, is basically made available to your body through the olive oil. So there was a wisdom in those combinations. And you see it throughout. AMY GOODMAN: The whole push for hydrogenated oils? I grew up on margarine. ³You should never eat butter! Only margarine!² MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, I know. I did, too. And that was a huge mistake. That was a mistake. AMY GOODMAN: Can we go back in time? MICHAEL POLLAN: Yeah, we can. Yeah, the butter, fortunately, is still here. AMY GOODMAN: Re-eat? MICHAEL POLLAN: We canıt re-eat, but we can switch toone of the important AMY GOODMAN: Where did it come from? MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, margarine was cheaper. Again, take a cheap raw material, which was to say they had developed these technologies for getting oil out of cottonseed and soy and all this kind of stuff, and there then was this health concern about saturated fat, the great evil. I mean, one of theanother hallmark of nutritionism is that thereıs always the evil nutrient and the blessed nutrient, but itıs always changing. So the evil nutrient for a long time has been saturated fat, and the good nutrient was polyunsaturated fat. So people thought, well, letıs take the polyunsaturated fats, and weıll figure out a way to make them hard at room temperature, which involved the hydrogenation process. You basically fire hydrogen at it. And then you had something that looked like butter. It was very controversial, though. Peopleactually, in the late 1900s, several states passed laws saying you had to dye your butter pink so people wouldnıt be confused and would know that thatıs an imitation food. And then the Supreme Courtthe industry got the Supreme Court to throw this out. So butter was elevated as the more modern, more healthy food. And it turned out that we replaced this possibly mildly unhealthy fat called saturated fat with now a demonstrably lethal one called hydrogenated oil. AMY GOODMAN: How is it demonstrably lethal? MICHAEL POLLAN: Well, they have since proven to, you know, pretty high standard that trans fats are implicated both in heart disease and cancer. AMY GOODMAN: Michael Pollan is a UC Berkeley professor. His latest book is called In Defense of Food: An Eaterıs Manifesto. Oh, and by the way, this interesting note: the New York City Board of Health voted to require restaurant chains operating in New York to prominently display calorie information on their menus and menu boards beginning on March 31st. It applies to any New York City chain restaurant that has fifteen or more outlets nationwide and includes posting calorie information about cocktails. ------- -- Billy Bush and Pelosi Behind Bars http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KVTf...ef=patrick.net http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1016232.html |
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Industrial vs. Organic
"Isabella Woodhouse" wrote in message ... In article , "Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: "Isabella Woodhouse" wrote in message ... In article , "Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: "Billy" wrote in message ... In article , "Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: [...] They do not want to go out and separately negotiate orders of corn of this magnitude from 100 separate small farmers who can each only supply a ton of corn. You didn't read the chapter. Chem ferts kill top soil. The less top soil, the more chem ferts, and more pollution of ground water and fishing areas. Who pays to remediate the land and the water? The tax payer does. It is called "privatize the profits and socialize the costs". The price of the box is only part of the price. You don't actually have to remediate the land and water, you know. At one time we didn't. People would just use the resources until they were all gone, then move to a new place. What? When the Earth's population was only a few million? Surely you are not defending this practice in the current timeframe? I never was. Then what exactly did you mean when you said, "You don't actually have to remediate the land and water, you know." Billy's statement was: "...Who pays to remediate the land and the water? The tax payer does...." This is a false statement for a number of reasons. First, as I pointed out, the land and water isn't always remediated. Someone might dig out a gravel quarry on their property then just abandon it when they are done and let nature reclaim it. Remediation only occurs when someone decides that they -want- to do it. There's tons of stories of polluters who never remediated, some legally, some illegally. And some who wern't originally designated polluters, and now are. Another reason this is false is that the taxpayer doesen't always pay for remediation, private industry does quite a lot. Google up brownfield properties. Property values in certain areas are now so high that it is cheaper in many cases to buy polluted properties for a song, clean them up, then build on them, rather than buying and building on unpolluted properties. But the most important reason this is a false statement is that it makes an implicit assumption. The CORRECT way for Billy to write this would have been: "...Who pays to remediate the land and the water if the public demands that the land and water be remediated? A lot of times, the tax payer does..." THAT would have been logically correct and internally consistent because it removes the FALSE assumption that the land and water -always- get remediated. But, then it would have destroyed Billy's rant. Because it would have made it obvious that when the public wants something fixed, many times the public has to pay for it to be fixed. In other words it gets rid of this emotional straw man of the big, ugly, polluting agribusiness and replaces it with reality, which is much greyer and not black and white. I recognized Billy's rant style a mile off. Take a complex issue, strip out all of the complexity until it is so simple that it's black and white, then frame it like the other guy is an absolute demon. That is why Billy refused to engage in debate with me. He knew that I saw through this and was busy introducing reality into his rant and he knew if I did that would kill it, so he ran away so he could live to rant another day. However, nowadays people are valuing clean water and clean land more than they used to. So now there is a cost for those things that we didn't have before, which is now being factored in. That is why you have to file environmental impact statements nowadays when you want to build a factory. They didn't require environmental impact statements when those large farms were created years ago. So the real question is, are we going to apply current laws retroactively? No, I don't think that is the real question at all. Environmental laws have been on the books for decades. Nowadays? The Clean Water Act goes back to at least the 1960s, no? That's nearly 50 years FCOL. Since when has it been legal to pollute and contaminate your neighbor's property with a stinking mountain of pig or cow shit (pardon my French) like those created by factory "farms"? You should ask Billy. No, I am responding to what *you* said, not Billy. He is the one that is asserting that such behavior is legal. You appear to be making a ridiculous inference but it's up to Billy to counter that, not me. He will not because his goal is to make an illogical, emotional argument and he doesen't want it dissected. Here is Billy's argument in a nutshell: Big agribusinesses are bad because they game the system to get everyone else to pay for their operations cost. Therefore we need to tell everyone this so they realize how bad big agribusinesses are and maybe rise up on their haunches and ban big agribusinesses. Of course, Billy isn't interested in admitting that big agribusinesses exist because we, the consumers, WANT them to exist. We buy products that only they produce. He would much rather live in his fantasy world that big agribusinesses exist because somehow they figured out an angle to game the system and drive the small farmers out of business. This is the same logic that, for example, Michael Moore used in his film Roger and Me about the devastation of Flint, Mich. Now, I love Michael Moore films. And some of his, like Farenheight 911, are right on target. The bad guys in -that- film have, with the benefit of history, turned out to be even worse than he portrayed them in that film. BUT, with Roger and Me, the point of the film is that it was Roger Smith's fault that the auto plants at Flint closed. But in reality, Roger was merely reacting to losses that GM had begun experiencing. Yes, those specific plants were profitable when they were closed - Roger Smith was a terrible CEO for his time, and GM is still in trouble because of his legacy - but if it had been a different CEO then other plants would have been closed and the same sob story would have happened. If GM had not experienced losses in 1981 then Smith would not have reacted and the plants at Flint would not have been touched. And, WHY did GM experience a loss? Because people were not buying as many of it's cars, and were buying more foreign imports. But, wait a minute. Who where those people buying foreign imports? Yes, that's right - US customers. Some of these even living in Flint, itself. Roger and Me is a film about American outsourcing of manufacturing and how it destroys America, just like Billy's rant is about big agribusinesses destroying American small farmers. Both the film and the rant cast the bad guys as the corporations. But both ignore the true facts - which are that the American consumer is causing the outsourcing as well as the emergence of the big agribusinesses, mainly by their insistence on buying the cheapest thing possible and ignoring everything else, like product quality, manufacture location, etc. I think you are wrong about that. I do not think that applying current laws retroactively is the real issue here. Factory farms are relatively new. They came way after most of the environmental laws. OK, then if your insistence is that factory farming came after the environmental laws, then how does that square with your claim that it's illegal to pollute with big mountains of cow shit like those created by the factory farms? So I don't understand how retroactivity came into the picture or even how that relates to the main thrust of the quoted article which is that bigger is not necessarily best in terms of farm size. Retroactivity is central to this. Not necessairly legal retroactivity, although that is some of it - despite your assertion that the factory farming came after laws like the clean water act (which I doubt but it doesen't matter) - but retroactivity in terms of changing societal values Despite the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1977, the fact of the matter is that the -majority- of people in US society haven't been that interested in the environment until around the last 10 years. Seriously!!! I was born in 1966 and I've seen this firsthand. What spurred the Clean Water act wasn't medical issues like germs in the water. What spurred it was the VISIBLE pollution like foaming rivers, lakes that caught on fire, etc. Things that were obvious to everyone. But once that was cleaned up, it was same old, same old. What is different now is that people are beginning to see THEMSELVES as polluters. Thus we have laws now (or will real soon) making it illegal to throw lead in the trash (tv sets carry about 5 pounds of lead in their picture tubes) and people are told not to flush meds down the toilet, etc. And people are starting to spend MORE MONEY on products like organic foods that don't use pesticides, etc. And so now, people are starting to realize that THEIR OWN CHOICES are creating factory farming and those proverbial mountains of shit you were talking about. Billy is still stuck back in the 70's - asserting that the corporations themselves are what is driving factory farming when the reality is that the consumers have always driven it by their product selections. It's not all consumers, of course, but some. We don't need tired old rants like Billy's. We need rants that actually put people up to a mirror and say: "Hey, you! YOUR buying of cheerios is causing factory farming which is causing mountains of pig shit that are polluting YOUR water!!" If not, then how are you going to justify taking current environmental requirements for creating a large farm and apply it to large farms that were created years ago? What "environmental requirements for creating a large farm" are you talking about? How is this even relevant? What are you talking about when you refer to "large farms" created years ago? How many years ago? I'm just trying to understand what you mean here. Keep in mind that the average size farm in the 1950s was around 200 acres. It has only been in the last 10 years that ranting against agribusinesses has become fashionable due to environmental concerns. Now, farm subsidies, that's a different matter - people have been complaining about farmers being propped up by the government since the 70's. But before the advent of the large agribusinesses, nobody was ranting against large farms because, as you pointed out, they didn't exist. Wait just a minute; you are sidestepping again with more balderdash. Once more, you failed to explain yourself. Can you not answer a direct question? To reiterate, What "environmental requirements for creating a large farm" are you talking about? I don't recall ever having heard of such a thing! Your saying here that there are no environmental requirements for creating a large farm. Then earlier your asserting large farms are breaking the clean water act? That sounds pretty strange to me. To reiterate, what are you talking about when you refer to "large farms" created years ago? How many years ago and, for that matter, how large? Billy's problem is that he sees that large agribusinesses are bad, which so far is true. However he is unwilling to grasp the simple fact that it is not the agribusinesses fault that they are bad. It is the CONSUMER'S fault. I am not here to discuss Billy. Defend your other assertions. As my assertions are in a response to Billy, your discussing Billy's rant, whether you like it or not. Every time someone walks into the supermarket and picks up a box of Frosted Flakes for their kids, instead of getting the bulk sugar corn flakes from the bulk food bin which cost half of Frosted Flakes, they are contributing to the problem. Yes, I can agree with you here that overly processed foods are huge part of the more general American food industry problem. When they have to add something to a food-like product to make it "more nutritious", that is the first really bad sign. I can honestly say that I never, ever fed my children any cereal coated with sugar. What did you feed them? My opinion is that most so-called convenience foods are a contrivance of marketers to make more money by marketing to children or by refining valuable nutrients out of real food. Why sell a quart of real apple juice when you can sell a quart of only 10% apple juice and 90% water + HFCS for an even higher price and still call it "apple juice"? Actually, they sell both the real apple juice and the 10% stuff in the grocery store, and the real stuff is more expensive - unless your buying the individually packaged juice boxes, in which case your buying convenience in packaging. I'd presume that if they put 100% real apple juice in the individually packaged juice boxes it would be even higher priced than the 10% stuff. If people didn't buy all of the processed food they do, then the large food manufacturers like General Mills wouldn't be setting up large production runs of Frosted Flakes and demanding 100 tons of corn at a time. (or whatever it is) There would be no need for the agribusineses and they wouldn't exist. Billy needs to be ranting and railing against the dumb consumers not the agribusinesses. Let me defend the consumer. How "dumb" are consumers who buy boxes of incredibly sugared cereals that have the American Heart Association logo on them, Ted? How dumb are consumers who, for decades, have based their meals on the "USDA" dictated food pyramid, therefore consuming a diet vastly overloaded with carbohydrates and starches? How dumb are consumers who buy a box of anything that our government allows to say "0 transfats" when it actually has significant amounts of the same? I could go on and on. My point is that you can't put this all on the consumer's back. Our own government and agencies that are supposed to be working for us have allowed industry to defraud the public at an ever-increasing rate. If people spent the same amount of energy researching the food they purchase as they spend researching a new car, they wouldn' t be buying these scam foods. Dollar for dollar they spend MORE money on the food they eat than the new car. The difference is that they pay for the food in bits and pieces and the car in one lump sum. It's why practically all states opt to get tax money through a sales tax than a higher property and income tax. It IS the consumer. The comsumer has the money. The problem is that too many dumb consumers out there think they are paying less when they pay me $10 a day for a whole year than if they pay me $3,500.00 once a year. These are the same people who are having homes foreclosed because they got ARMs instead of traditional 30-year fixed mortgages. Food choices tend to remain stable. When a person buys a brand and likes it, they typically won't buy a different brand. With a little effort when they are in their early 20's they can figure out which food brands are the good ones and they will be buying them the rest of their lives. Ted |
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Industrial vs. Organic
In article ,
"Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: "Isabella Woodhouse" wrote in message ... In article , "Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: "Isabella Woodhouse" wrote in message ... In article , "Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: "Billy" wrote in message ... In article , "Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: [...] They do not want to go out and separately negotiate orders of corn of this magnitude from 100 separate small farmers who can each only supply a ton of corn. You didn't read the chapter. Chem ferts kill top soil. The less top soil, the more chem ferts, and more pollution of ground water and fishing areas. Who pays to remediate the land and the water? The tax payer does. It is called "privatize the profits and socialize the costs". The price of the box is only part of the price. You don't actually have to remediate the land and water, you know. At one time we didn't. People would just use the resources until they were all gone, then move to a new place. What? When the Earth's population was only a few million? Surely you are not defending this practice in the current timeframe? I never was. Then what exactly did you mean when you said, "You don't actually have to remediate the land and water, you know." Billy's statement was: "...Who pays to remediate the land and the water? The tax payer does...." This is a false statement for a number of reasons. First, as I pointed out, the land and water isn't always remediated. Someone might dig out a gravel quarry on their property then just abandon it when they are done and let nature reclaim it. Remediation only occurs when someone decides that they -want- to do it. There's tons of stories of polluters who never remediated, some legally, some illegally. And some who wern't originally designated polluters, and now are. Another reason this is false is that the taxpayer doesen't always pay for remediation, private industry does quite a lot. Google up brownfield properties. Property values in certain areas are now so high that it is cheaper in many cases to buy polluted properties for a song, clean them up, then build on them, rather than buying and building on unpolluted properties. But the most important reason this is a false statement is that it makes an implicit assumption. The CORRECT way for Billy to write this would have been: "...Who pays to remediate the land and the water if the public demands that the land and water be remediated? A lot of times, the tax payer does..." THAT would have been logically correct and internally consistent because it removes the FALSE assumption that the land and water -always- get remediated. But, then it would have destroyed Billy's rant. Because it would have made it obvious that when the public wants something fixed, many times the public has to pay for it to be fixed. In other words it gets rid of this emotional straw man of the big, ugly, polluting agribusiness and replaces it with reality, which is much greyer and not black and white. I recognized Billy's rant style a mile off. Take a complex issue, strip out all of the complexity until it is so simple that it's black and white, then frame it like the other guy is an absolute demon. That is why Billy refused to engage in debate with me. He knew that I saw through this and was busy introducing reality into his rant and he knew if I did that would kill it, so he ran away so he could live to rant another day. However, nowadays people are valuing clean water and clean land more than they used to. So now there is a cost for those things that we didn't have before, which is now being factored in. That is why you have to file environmental impact statements nowadays when you want to build a factory. They didn't require environmental impact statements when those large farms were created years ago. So the real question is, are we going to apply current laws retroactively? No, I don't think that is the real question at all. Environmental laws have been on the books for decades. Nowadays? The Clean Water Act goes back to at least the 1960s, no? That's nearly 50 years FCOL. Since when has it been legal to pollute and contaminate your neighbor's property with a stinking mountain of pig or cow shit (pardon my French) like those created by factory "farms"? You should ask Billy. No, I am responding to what *you* said, not Billy. He is the one that is asserting that such behavior is legal. You appear to be making a ridiculous inference but it's up to Billy to counter that, not me. He will not because his goal is to make an illogical, emotional argument and he doesen't want it dissected. Here is Billy's argument in a nutshell: Big agribusinesses are bad because they game the system to get everyone else to pay for their operations cost. Therefore we need to tell everyone this so they realize how bad big agribusinesses are and maybe rise up on their haunches and ban big agribusinesses. Of course, Billy isn't interested in admitting that big agribusinesses exist because we, the consumers, WANT them to exist. We buy products that only they produce. He would much rather live in his fantasy world that big agribusinesses exist because somehow they figured out an angle to game the system and drive the small farmers out of business. This is the same logic that, for example, Michael Moore used in his film Roger and Me about the devastation of Flint, Mich. Now, I love Michael Moore films. And some of his, like Farenheight 911, are right on target. The bad guys in -that- film have, with the benefit of history, turned out to be even worse than he portrayed them in that film. BUT, with Roger and Me, the point of the film is that it was Roger Smith's fault that the auto plants at Flint closed. But in reality, Roger was merely reacting to losses that GM had begun experiencing. Yes, those specific plants were profitable when they were closed - Roger Smith was a terrible CEO for his time, and GM is still in trouble because of his legacy - but if it had been a different CEO then other plants would have been closed and the same sob story would have happened. If GM had not experienced losses in 1981 then Smith would not have reacted and the plants at Flint would not have been touched. And, WHY did GM experience a loss? Because people were not buying as many of it's cars, and were buying more foreign imports. But, wait a minute. Who where those people buying foreign imports? Yes, that's right - US customers. Some of these even living in Flint, itself. Roger and Me is a film about American outsourcing of manufacturing and how it destroys America, just like Billy's rant is about big agribusinesses destroying American small farmers. Both the film and the rant cast the bad guys as the corporations. But both ignore the true facts - which are that the American consumer is causing the outsourcing as well as the emergence of the big agribusinesses, mainly by their insistence on buying the cheapest thing possible and ignoring everything else, like product quality, manufacture location, etc. I think you are wrong about that. I do not think that applying current laws retroactively is the real issue here. Factory farms are relatively new. They came way after most of the environmental laws. OK, then if your insistence is that factory farming came after the environmental laws, then how does that square with your claim that it's illegal to pollute with big mountains of cow shit like those created by the factory farms? So I don't understand how retroactivity came into the picture or even how that relates to the main thrust of the quoted article which is that bigger is not necessarily best in terms of farm size. Retroactivity is central to this. Not necessairly legal retroactivity, although that is some of it - despite your assertion that the factory farming came after laws like the clean water act (which I doubt but it doesen't matter) - but retroactivity in terms of changing societal values Despite the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1977, the fact of the matter is that the -majority- of people in US society haven't been that interested in the environment until around the last 10 years. Seriously!!! I was born in 1966 and I've seen this firsthand. What spurred the Clean Water act wasn't medical issues like germs in the water. What spurred it was the VISIBLE pollution like foaming rivers, lakes that caught on fire, etc. Things that were obvious to everyone. But once that was cleaned up, it was same old, same old. What is different now is that people are beginning to see THEMSELVES as polluters. Thus we have laws now (or will real soon) making it illegal to throw lead in the trash (tv sets carry about 5 pounds of lead in their picture tubes) and people are told not to flush meds down the toilet, etc. And people are starting to spend MORE MONEY on products like organic foods that don't use pesticides, etc. And so now, people are starting to realize that THEIR OWN CHOICES are creating factory farming and those proverbial mountains of shit you were talking about. Billy is still stuck back in the 70's - asserting that the corporations themselves are what is driving factory farming when the reality is that the consumers have always driven it by their product selections. It's not all consumers, of course, but some. We don't need tired old rants like Billy's. We need rants that actually put people up to a mirror and say: "Hey, you! YOUR buying of cheerios is causing factory farming which is causing mountains of pig shit that are polluting YOUR water!!" If not, then how are you going to justify taking current environmental requirements for creating a large farm and apply it to large farms that were created years ago? What "environmental requirements for creating a large farm" are you talking about? How is this even relevant? What are you talking about when you refer to "large farms" created years ago? How many years ago? I'm just trying to understand what you mean here. Keep in mind that the average size farm in the 1950s was around 200 acres. It has only been in the last 10 years that ranting against agribusinesses has become fashionable due to environmental concerns. Now, farm subsidies, that's a different matter - people have been complaining about farmers being propped up by the government since the 70's. But before the advent of the large agribusinesses, nobody was ranting against large farms because, as you pointed out, they didn't exist. Wait just a minute; you are sidestepping again with more balderdash. Once more, you failed to explain yourself. Can you not answer a direct question? To reiterate, What "environmental requirements for creating a large farm" are you talking about? I don't recall ever having heard of such a thing! Your saying here that there are no environmental requirements for creating a large farm. Then earlier your asserting large farms are breaking the clean water act? That sounds pretty strange to me. To reiterate, what are you talking about when you refer to "large farms" created years ago? How many years ago and, for that matter, how large? Billy's problem is that he sees that large agribusinesses are bad, which so far is true. However he is unwilling to grasp the simple fact that it is not the agribusinesses fault that they are bad. It is the CONSUMER'S fault. I am not here to discuss Billy. Defend your other assertions. As my assertions are in a response to Billy, your discussing Billy's rant, whether you like it or not. Every time someone walks into the supermarket and picks up a box of Frosted Flakes for their kids, instead of getting the bulk sugar corn flakes from the bulk food bin which cost half of Frosted Flakes, they are contributing to the problem. Yes, I can agree with you here that overly processed foods are huge part of the more general American food industry problem. When they have to add something to a food-like product to make it "more nutritious", that is the first really bad sign. I can honestly say that I never, ever fed my children any cereal coated with sugar. What did you feed them? My opinion is that most so-called convenience foods are a contrivance of marketers to make more money by marketing to children or by refining valuable nutrients out of real food. Why sell a quart of real apple juice when you can sell a quart of only 10% apple juice and 90% water + HFCS for an even higher price and still call it "apple juice"? Actually, they sell both the real apple juice and the 10% stuff in the grocery store, and the real stuff is more expensive - unless your buying the individually packaged juice boxes, in which case your buying convenience in packaging. I'd presume that if they put 100% real apple juice in the individually packaged juice boxes it would be even higher priced than the 10% stuff. If people didn't buy all of the processed food they do, then the large food manufacturers like General Mills wouldn't be setting up large production runs of Frosted Flakes and demanding 100 tons of corn at a time. (or whatever it is) There would be no need for the agribusineses and they wouldn't exist. Billy needs to be ranting and railing against the dumb consumers not the agribusinesses. Let me defend the consumer. How "dumb" are consumers who buy boxes of incredibly sugared cereals that have the American Heart Association logo on them, Ted? How dumb are consumers who, for decades, have based their meals on the "USDA" dictated food pyramid, therefore consuming a diet vastly overloaded with carbohydrates and starches? How dumb are consumers who buy a box of anything that our government allows to say "0 transfats" when it actually has significant amounts of the same? I could go on and on. My point is that you can't put this all on the consumer's back. Our own government and agencies that are supposed to be working for us have allowed industry to defraud the public at an ever-increasing rate. If people spent the same amount of energy researching the food they purchase as they spend researching a new car, they wouldn' t be buying these scam foods. Dollar for dollar they spend MORE money on the food they eat than the new car. The difference is that they pay for the food in bits and pieces and the car in one lump sum. It's why practically all states opt to get tax money through a sales tax than a higher property and income tax. It IS the consumer. The comsumer has the money. The problem is that too many dumb consumers out there think they are paying less when they pay me $10 a day for a whole year than if they pay me $3,500.00 once a year. These are the same people who are having homes foreclosed because they got ARMs instead of traditional 30-year fixed mortgages. Food choices tend to remain stable. When a person buys a brand and likes it, they typically won't buy a different brand. With a little effort when they are in their early 20's they can figure out which food brands are the good ones and they will be buying them the rest of their lives. Ted Bozo boy, the debate here is organic vs. industrial. $32 billion in advertising vs. $100 million in consumer education. Healthy foods vs. medical bills. Environmentalism vs. commercialism. Honesty vs. deceit. Good vs. bad. Me vs. you. -- Billy Bush and Pelosi Behind Bars http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KVTf...ef=patrick.net http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1016232.html |
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Industrial vs. Organic
sometime in the recent past Ted Mittelstaedt posted this:
"Isabella Woodhouse" wrote in message ... In article , "Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: "Isabella Woodhouse" wrote in message ... In article , "Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: "Billy" wrote in message ... In article , "Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: [...] They do not want to go out and separately negotiate orders of corn of this magnitude from 100 separate small farmers who can each only supply a ton of corn. You didn't read the chapter. Chem ferts kill top soil. The less top soil, the more chem ferts, and more pollution of ground water and fishing areas. Who pays to remediate the land and the water? The tax payer does. It is called "privatize the profits and socialize the costs". The price of the box is only part of the price. You don't actually have to remediate the land and water, you know. At one time we didn't. People would just use the resources until they were all gone, then move to a new place. What? When the Earth's population was only a few million? Surely you are not defending this practice in the current timeframe? I never was. Then what exactly did you mean when you said, "You don't actually have to remediate the land and water, you know." Billy's statement was: "...Who pays to remediate the land and the water? The tax payer does...." This is a false statement for a number of reasons. First, as I pointed out, the land and water isn't always remediated. Someone might dig out a gravel quarry on their property then just abandon it when they are done and let nature reclaim it. Remediation only occurs when someone decides that they -want- to do it. There's tons of stories of polluters who never remediated, some legally, some illegally. And some who wern't originally designated polluters, and now are. Another reason this is false is that the taxpayer doesen't always pay for remediation, private industry does quite a lot. Google up brownfield properties. Property values in certain areas are now so high that it is cheaper in many cases to buy polluted properties for a song, clean them up, then build on them, rather than buying and building on unpolluted properties. But the most important reason this is a false statement is that it makes an implicit assumption. The CORRECT way for Billy to write this would have been: "...Who pays to remediate the land and the water if the public demands that the land and water be remediated? A lot of times, the tax payer does..." THAT would have been logically correct and internally consistent because it removes the FALSE assumption that the land and water -always- get remediated. But, then it would have destroyed Billy's rant. Because it would have made it obvious that when the public wants something fixed, many times the public has to pay for it to be fixed. In other words it gets rid of this emotional straw man of the big, ugly, polluting agribusiness and replaces it with reality, which is much greyer and not black and white. I recognized Billy's rant style a mile off. Take a complex issue, strip out all of the complexity until it is so simple that it's black and white, then frame it like the other guy is an absolute demon. That is why Billy refused to engage in debate with me. He knew that I saw through this and was busy introducing reality into his rant and he knew if I did that would kill it, so he ran away so he could live to rant another day. However, nowadays people are valuing clean water and clean land more than they used to. So now there is a cost for those things that we didn't have before, which is now being factored in. That is why you have to file environmental impact statements nowadays when you want to build a factory. They didn't require environmental impact statements when those large farms were created years ago. So the real question is, are we going to apply current laws retroactively? No, I don't think that is the real question at all. Environmental laws have been on the books for decades. Nowadays? The Clean Water Act goes back to at least the 1960s, no? That's nearly 50 years FCOL. Since when has it been legal to pollute and contaminate your neighbor's property with a stinking mountain of pig or cow shit (pardon my French) like those created by factory "farms"? You should ask Billy. No, I am responding to what *you* said, not Billy. He is the one that is asserting that such behavior is legal. You appear to be making a ridiculous inference but it's up to Billy to counter that, not me. He will not because his goal is to make an illogical, emotional argument and he doesen't want it dissected. Here is Billy's argument in a nutshell: Big agribusinesses are bad because they game the system to get everyone else to pay for their operations cost. Therefore we need to tell everyone this so they realize how bad big agribusinesses are and maybe rise up on their haunches and ban big agribusinesses. Of course, Billy isn't interested in admitting that big agribusinesses exist because we, the consumers, WANT them to exist. We buy products that only they produce. He would much rather live in his fantasy world that big agribusinesses exist because somehow they figured out an angle to game the system and drive the small farmers out of business. This is the same logic that, for example, Michael Moore used in his film Roger and Me about the devastation of Flint, Mich. Now, I love Michael Moore films. And some of his, like Farenheight 911, are right on target. The bad guys in -that- film have, with the benefit of history, turned out to be even worse than he portrayed them in that film. BUT, with Roger and Me, the point of the film is that it was Roger Smith's fault that the auto plants at Flint closed. But in reality, Roger was merely reacting to losses that GM had begun experiencing. Yes, those specific plants were profitable when they were closed - Roger Smith was a terrible CEO for his time, and GM is still in trouble because of his legacy - but if it had been a different CEO then other plants would have been closed and the same sob story would have happened. If GM had not experienced losses in 1981 then Smith would not have reacted and the plants at Flint would not have been touched. And, WHY did GM experience a loss? Because people were not buying as many of it's cars, and were buying more foreign imports. But, wait a minute. Who where those people buying foreign imports? Yes, that's right - US customers. Some of these even living in Flint, itself. Roger and Me is a film about American outsourcing of manufacturing and how it destroys America, just like Billy's rant is about big agribusinesses destroying American small farmers. Both the film and the rant cast the bad guys as the corporations. But both ignore the true facts - which are that the American consumer is causing the outsourcing as well as the emergence of the big agribusinesses, mainly by their insistence on buying the cheapest thing possible and ignoring everything else, like product quality, manufacture location, etc. I think you are wrong about that. I do not think that applying current laws retroactively is the real issue here. Factory farms are relatively new. They came way after most of the environmental laws. OK, then if your insistence is that factory farming came after the environmental laws, then how does that square with your claim that it's illegal to pollute with big mountains of cow shit like those created by the factory farms? So I don't understand how retroactivity came into the picture or even how that relates to the main thrust of the quoted article which is that bigger is not necessarily best in terms of farm size. Retroactivity is central to this. Not necessairly legal retroactivity, although that is some of it - despite your assertion that the factory farming came after laws like the clean water act (which I doubt but it doesen't matter) - but retroactivity in terms of changing societal values Despite the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1977, the fact of the matter is that the -majority- of people in US society haven't been that interested in the environment until around the last 10 years. Seriously!!! I was born in 1966 and I've seen this firsthand. What spurred the Clean Water act wasn't medical issues like germs in the water. What spurred it was the VISIBLE pollution like foaming rivers, lakes that caught on fire, etc. Things that were obvious to everyone. But once that was cleaned up, it was same old, same old. What is different now is that people are beginning to see THEMSELVES as polluters. Thus we have laws now (or will real soon) making it illegal to throw lead in the trash (tv sets carry about 5 pounds of lead in their picture tubes) and people are told not to flush meds down the toilet, etc. And people are starting to spend MORE MONEY on products like organic foods that don't use pesticides, etc. And so now, people are starting to realize that THEIR OWN CHOICES are creating factory farming and those proverbial mountains of shit you were talking about. Billy is still stuck back in the 70's - asserting that the corporations themselves are what is driving factory farming when the reality is that the consumers have always driven it by their product selections. It's not all consumers, of course, but some. We don't need tired old rants like Billy's. We need rants that actually put people up to a mirror and say: "Hey, you! YOUR buying of cheerios is causing factory farming which is causing mountains of pig shit that are polluting YOUR water!!" If not, then how are you going to justify taking current environmental requirements for creating a large farm and apply it to large farms that were created years ago? What "environmental requirements for creating a large farm" are you talking about? How is this even relevant? What are you talking about when you refer to "large farms" created years ago? How many years ago? I'm just trying to understand what you mean here. Keep in mind that the average size farm in the 1950s was around 200 acres. It has only been in the last 10 years that ranting against agribusinesses has become fashionable due to environmental concerns. Now, farm subsidies, that's a different matter - people have been complaining about farmers being propped up by the government since the 70's. But before the advent of the large agribusinesses, nobody was ranting against large farms because, as you pointed out, they didn't exist. Wait just a minute; you are sidestepping again with more balderdash. Once more, you failed to explain yourself. Can you not answer a direct question? To reiterate, What "environmental requirements for creating a large farm" are you talking about? I don't recall ever having heard of such a thing! Your saying here that there are no environmental requirements for creating a large farm. Then earlier your asserting large farms are breaking the clean water act? That sounds pretty strange to me. To reiterate, what are you talking about when you refer to "large farms" created years ago? How many years ago and, for that matter, how large? Billy's problem is that he sees that large agribusinesses are bad, which so far is true. However he is unwilling to grasp the simple fact that it is not the agribusinesses fault that they are bad. It is the CONSUMER'S fault. I am not here to discuss Billy. Defend your other assertions. As my assertions are in a response to Billy, your discussing Billy's rant, whether you like it or not. Every time someone walks into the supermarket and picks up a box of Frosted Flakes for their kids, instead of getting the bulk sugar corn flakes from the bulk food bin which cost half of Frosted Flakes, they are contributing to the problem. Yes, I can agree with you here that overly processed foods are huge part of the more general American food industry problem. When they have to add something to a food-like product to make it "more nutritious", that is the first really bad sign. I can honestly say that I never, ever fed my children any cereal coated with sugar. What did you feed them? My opinion is that most so-called convenience foods are a contrivance of marketers to make more money by marketing to children or by refining valuable nutrients out of real food. Why sell a quart of real apple juice when you can sell a quart of only 10% apple juice and 90% water + HFCS for an even higher price and still call it "apple juice"? Actually, they sell both the real apple juice and the 10% stuff in the grocery store, and the real stuff is more expensive - unless your buying the individually packaged juice boxes, in which case your buying convenience in packaging. I'd presume that if they put 100% real apple juice in the individually packaged juice boxes it would be even higher priced than the 10% stuff. If people didn't buy all of the processed food they do, then the large food manufacturers like General Mills wouldn't be setting up large production runs of Frosted Flakes and demanding 100 tons of corn at a time. (or whatever it is) There would be no need for the agribusineses and they wouldn't exist. Billy needs to be ranting and railing against the dumb consumers not the agribusinesses. Let me defend the consumer. How "dumb" are consumers who buy boxes of incredibly sugared cereals that have the American Heart Association logo on them, Ted? How dumb are consumers who, for decades, have based their meals on the "USDA" dictated food pyramid, therefore consuming a diet vastly overloaded with carbohydrates and starches? How dumb are consumers who buy a box of anything that our government allows to say "0 transfats" when it actually has significant amounts of the same? I could go on and on. My point is that you can't put this all on the consumer's back. Our own government and agencies that are supposed to be working for us have allowed industry to defraud the public at an ever-increasing rate. If people spent the same amount of energy researching the food they purchase as they spend researching a new car, they wouldn' t be buying these scam foods. Dollar for dollar they spend MORE money on the food they eat than the new car. The difference is that they pay for the food in bits and pieces and the car in one lump sum. It's why practically all states opt to get tax money through a sales tax than a higher property and income tax. It IS the consumer. The comsumer has the money. The problem is that too many dumb consumers out there think they are paying less when they pay me $10 a day for a whole year than if they pay me $3,500.00 once a year. These are the same people who are having homes foreclosed because they got ARMs instead of traditional 30-year fixed mortgages. Food choices tend to remain stable. When a person buys a brand and likes it, they typically won't buy a different brand. With a little effort when they are in their early 20's they can figure out which food brands are the good ones and they will be buying them the rest of their lives. Ted Seriously major yawn. IS IT OVER YET? Christ Ted, you have a lot of time on your hands. I recognize your style too. Throw everything you know at something until you figure you have buried it, and in fact you have. Just so you know, I only scrolled down once and then I saw the volumes you typed and my eyes glazed over ... need more rest ... yawn, pages of Mittelstaedt to go ... yawn... never gonna make it ... arrhhgg . -- Wilson N44ş39" W67ş12" |
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Industrial vs. Organic
In article ,
"Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: "Isabella Woodhouse" wrote in message ... In article , "Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: "Isabella Woodhouse" wrote in message ... In article , "Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: [...] Then what exactly did you mean when you said, "You don't actually have to remediate the land and water, you know." Billy's statement was: No, I wanted to know what *you* meant--- whether you were advocating not remediating ruined lands and waterways (which is what it sounded like), whether you stating that as a legal position, or whatever. snip long rant about Billy ...So the real question is, are we going to apply current laws retroactively? No, I don't think that is the real question at all. Environmental laws have been on the books for decades. Nowadays? The Clean Water Act goes back to at least the 1960s, no? That's nearly 50 years FCOL. Since when has it been legal to pollute and contaminate your neighbor's property with a stinking mountain of pig or cow shit (pardon my French) like those created by factory "farms"? You should ask Billy. No, I am responding to what *you* said, not Billy. He is the one that is asserting that such behavior is legal. You appear to be making a ridiculous inference but it's up to Billy to counter that, not me. He will not because his goal is to make an illogical, emotional argument and he doesen't want it dissected. No reasonable person would draw such a ridiculous conclusion. What you have fashioned here is another strawman of convenience in an attempt to give your own position credibility. Pardon me for pointing this out but this is really a very bad habit you would benefit from breaking. Here is Billy's argument in a nutshell: I have eyes and have read what Billy has written, Ted. I certainly don't need you to interpret for me. snip additional immaterial rant about Billy, Michael Moore, etc This is the same logic... No. Not logic. I think you are wrong about that. I do not think that applying current laws retroactively is the real issue here. Factory farms are relatively new. They came way after most of the environmental laws. OK, then if your insistence is that factory farming came after the environmental laws,... It has nothing to do with "insistence", as you call it. It's a fact. If you can disprove it, then do so. Otherwise, I stand by my position that applying laws retroactively is not the issue here. You've yet to show, even remotely, that the application of laws retroactively with regard to factory farm environmental issues is even a fact, let alone a problem. ...then how does that square with your claim that it's illegal to pollute with big mountains of cow shit like those created by the factory farms? Once again, I need to point out that you really have a problem with misquoting other people, Ted. I never really stated that explicitly. Had *I* done so, I'd have been far more specific and discrete. I did, however, mention mountains of cow and pig shit in a pejorative sense. Now as to your question (such that it is), let me see if I can shed some light on at least part of it. First of all, given US laws, the word "pollute" does have some legal meaning. Recognize that while it is possible to have a mountain of pig shit that doesn't pollute, use of the word "pollute" in your question does imply illegality. Furthermore, I'd point out that this illegality is not conferred strictly by your general description but, rather, by statutory prohibitions against the act as under laws and their codified regulations. This is an important distinction. What I mean is that either it is legal to pollute or illegal depending on the findings facts in a given case, such findings determined by a qualified court of law. In light of the fact that (1) you have yet to prove that retroactive legal determinations are even an issue and, (2) you have not given a single factual (or even hypthetical) example, your question makes no sense whatsoever. So I don't understand how retroactivity came into the picture or even how that relates to the main thrust of the quoted article which is that bigger is not necessarily best in terms of farm size. Retroactivity is central to this. Not necessairly legal retroactivity, although that is some of it - despite your assertion that the factory farming came after laws like the clean water act (which I doubt but it doesen't matter) - but retroactivity in terms of changing societal values Then prove it. Any of your claims. You talk a lot but prove nothing. Where are your facts? Despite the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1977, the fact of the matter is that the -majority- of people in US society haven't been that interested in the environment until around the last 10 years. Maybe a fact.... maybe not. You play fast and loose with your claims of fact when you've given not the slightest bit of data to support your claims. [...] What is different now is that people are beginning to see THEMSELVES as polluters. People have seen themselves as polluters before now--- like when they stopped emptying their chamber pots in rivers and streams. So I do not agree that this is as much a difference as you assert. But I agree that there is a building awareness. Off the top of my head, I suspect one major difference is a new awareness of far more substances that pollute and actually how that affects us directly. ...Thus we have laws now (or will real soon) making it illegal to throw lead in the trash (tv sets carry about 5 pounds of lead in their picture tubes) and people are told not to flush meds down the toilet, etc. And people are starting to spend MORE MONEY on products like organic foods that don't use pesticides, etc. And so now, people are starting to realize that THEIR OWN CHOICES are creating factory farming and those proverbial mountains of shit you were talking about. Yes, I agree that there is increased awareness that personal choices have consequences. snip more ranting about Billy If not, then how are you going to justify taking current environmental requirements for creating a large farm and apply it to large farms that were created years ago? What "environmental requirements for creating a large farm" are you talking about? How is this even relevant? What are you talking about when you refer to "large farms" created years ago? How many years ago? I'm just trying to understand what you mean here. Keep in mind that the average size farm in the 1950s was around 200 acres. It has only been in the last 10 years that ranting against agribusinesses has become fashionable due to environmental concerns. Now, farm subsidies, that's a different matter - people have been complaining about farmers being propped up by the government since the 70's. But before the advent of the large agribusinesses, nobody was ranting against large farms because, as you pointed out, they didn't exist. Wait just a minute; you are sidestepping again with more balderdash. Once more, you failed to explain yourself. Can you not answer a direct question? To reiterate, What "environmental requirements for creating a large farm" are you talking about? I don't recall ever having heard of such a thing! Your saying here that there are no environmental requirements for creating a large farm. NO. I said no such thing! *You* said there were such requirements and I've asked you repeatedly what requirements you're talking about. And you still have not explained. What in the heck are you talking about? Since you refuse to explain, one can only assume you cannot. Then earlier your asserting large farms are breaking the clean water act? Where did I say that? Pardon me, but when are you going to stop pulling these statements out of your backside? Stop attributing to me things I never actually said. It only makes you look foolish. That sounds pretty strange to me. To reiterate, what are you talking about when you refer to "large farms" created years ago? How many years ago and, for that matter, how large? As my assertions are in a response to Billy, your discussing Billy's rant, whether you like it or not. Nonsense. Every time someone walks into the supermarket and picks up a box of Frosted Flakes for their kids, instead of getting the bulk sugar corn flakes from the bulk food bin which cost half of Frosted Flakes, they are contributing to the problem. Yes, I can agree with you here that overly processed foods are huge part of the more general American food industry problem. When they have to add something to a food-like product to make it "more nutritious", that is the first really bad sign. I can honestly say that I never, ever fed my children any cereal coated with sugar. What did you feed them? Real, unprocessed or minimally processed food. My opinion is that most so-called convenience foods are a contrivance of marketers to make more money by marketing to children or by refining valuable nutrients out of real food. Why sell a quart of real apple juice when you can sell a quart of only 10% apple juice and 90% water + HFCS for an even higher price and still call it "apple juice"? Actually, they sell both the real apple juice and the 10% stuff in the grocery store, and the real stuff is more expensive - unless your buying the individually packaged juice boxes, in which case your buying convenience in packaging. I'd presume that if they put 100% real apple juice in the individually packaged juice boxes it would be even higher priced than the 10% stuff. I merely used that as an example to illustrate both the folly of processed foods as well as the ease with which companies actually convince people that such crap is better for them than real food. Juice is simply another processed food lacking in many nutrients, enzymes and other substances found in the real food it attempts to emulate--- fruit. My family eats fruit but rarely juice. If people didn't buy all of the processed food they do, then the large food manufacturers like General Mills wouldn't be setting up large production runs of Frosted Flakes and demanding 100 tons of corn at a time. (or whatever it is) There would be no need for the agribusineses and they wouldn't exist. Billy needs to be ranting and railing against the dumb consumers not the agribusinesses. Let me defend the consumer. How "dumb" are consumers who buy boxes of incredibly sugared cereals that have the American Heart Association logo on them, Ted? How dumb are consumers who, for decades, have based their meals on the "USDA" dictated food pyramid, therefore consuming a diet vastly overloaded with carbohydrates and starches? How dumb are consumers who buy a box of anything that our government allows to say "0 transfats" when it actually has significant amounts of the same? I could go on and on. My point is that you can't put this all on the consumer's back. Our own government and agencies that are supposed to be working for us have allowed industry to defraud the public at an ever-increasing rate. If people spent the same amount of energy researching the food they purchase as they spend researching a new car, they wouldn' t be buying these scam foods. Dollar for dollar they spend MORE money on the food they eat than the new car. The difference is that they pay for the food in bits and pieces and the car in one lump sum. I agree. It IS the consumer. I've already stated my position on this. You have not convinced me that consumers are solely responsible. ...The comsumer has the money. The problem is that too many dumb consumers out there think they are paying less when they pay me $10 a day for a whole year than if they pay me $3,500.00 once a year.... [...] Isabella -- "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" -T.S. Eliot |
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Industrial vs. Organic
On Sep 17, 1:23*am, Isabella Woodhouse wrote:
In article , *"Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: "Isabella Woodhouse" wrote in message ... In article , *"Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: "Isabella Woodhouse" wrote in message ... In article , *"Ted Mittelstaedt" wrote: [...] Then what exactly did you mean when you said, "You don't actually have to remediate the land and water, you know." Billy's statement was: No, I wanted to know what *you* meant--- whether you were advocating not remediating ruined lands and waterways (which is what it sounded like), whether you stating that as a legal position, or whatever. snip long rant about Billy ...So the real question is, are we going to apply current laws retroactively? No, I don't think that is the real question at all. * Environmental laws have been on the books for decades. * Nowadays? *The Clean Water Act goes back to at least the 1960s, no? *That's nearly 50 years FCOL. *Since when has it been legal to pollute and contaminate your neighbor's property with a stinking mountain of pig or cow shit (pardon my French) like those created by factory "farms"? You should ask Billy. No, I am responding to what *you* said, not Billy. He is the one that is asserting that such behavior is legal. You appear to be making a ridiculous inference but it's up to Billy to counter that, not me. He will not because his goal is to make an illogical, emotional argument and he doesen't want it dissected. No reasonable person would draw such a ridiculous conclusion. *What you have fashioned here is another strawman of convenience in an attempt to give your own position credibility. *Pardon me for pointing this out but this is really a very bad habit you would benefit from breaking. Here is Billy's argument in a nutshell: I have eyes and have read what Billy has written, Ted. *I certainly don't need you to interpret for me. snip additional immaterial rant about Billy, Michael Moore, etc This is the same logic... No. *Not logic. I think you are wrong about that. *I do not think that applying current laws retroactively is the real issue here. *Factory farms are relatively new. *They came way after most of the environmental laws. OK, then if your insistence is that factory farming came after the environmental laws,... It has nothing to do with "insistence", as you call it. *It's a fact. * If you can disprove it, then do so. *Otherwise, I stand by my position that applying laws retroactively is not the issue here. *You've yet to show, even remotely, that the application of laws retroactively with regard to factory farm environmental issues is even a fact, let alone a problem. ...then how does that square with your claim that it's illegal to pollute with big mountains of cow shit like those created by the factory farms? Once again, I need to point out that you really have a problem with misquoting other people, Ted. *I never really stated that explicitly. * Had *I* done so, I'd have been far more specific and discrete. *I did, however, mention mountains of cow and pig shit in a pejorative sense. * Now as to your question (such that it is), let me see if I can shed some light on at least part of it. *First of all, given US laws, the word "pollute" does have some legal meaning. *Recognize that while it is possible to have a mountain of pig shit that doesn't pollute, use of the word "pollute" in your question does imply illegality. *Furthermore, I'd point out that this illegality is not conferred strictly by your general description but, rather, by statutory prohibitions against the act as under laws and their codified regulations. *This is an important distinction. What I mean is that either it is legal to pollute or illegal depending on the findings facts in a given case, such findings determined by a qualified court of law. *In light of the fact that (1) you have yet to prove that retroactive legal determinations are even an issue and, (2) you have not given a single factual (or even hypthetical) example, your question makes no sense whatsoever. * So I don't understand how retroactivity came into the picture or even how that relates to the main thrust of the quoted article which is that bigger is not necessarily best in terms of farm size. Retroactivity is central to this. *Not necessairly legal retroactivity, although that is some of it - despite your assertion that the factory farming came after laws like the clean water act (which I doubt but it doesen't matter) - but retroactivity in terms of changing societal values Then prove it. *Any of your claims. *You talk a lot but prove nothing.. * Where are your facts? * Despite the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1977, the fact of the matter is that the -majority- of people in US society haven't been that interested in the environment until around the last 10 years. * Maybe a fact.... maybe not. *You play fast and loose with your claims of fact when you've given not the slightest bit of data to support your claims. [...] What is different now is that people are beginning to see THEMSELVES as polluters. * People have seen themselves as polluters before now--- like when they stopped emptying their chamber pots in rivers and streams. *So I do not agree that this is as much a difference as you assert. *But I agree that there is a building awareness. *Off the top of my head, I suspect one major difference is a new awareness of far more substances that pollute and actually how that affects us directly. ...Thus we have laws now (or will real soon) making it illegal to throw lead in the trash (tv sets carry about 5 pounds of lead in their picture tubes) and people are told not to flush meds down the toilet, etc. *And people are starting to spend MORE MONEY on products like organic foods that don't use pesticides, etc. And so now, people are starting to realize that THEIR OWN CHOICES are creating factory farming and those proverbial mountains of shit you were talking about. Yes, I agree that there is increased awareness that personal choices have consequences. snip more ranting about Billy If not, then how are you going to justify taking current environmental requirements for creating a large farm and apply it to large farms that were created years ago? What "environmental requirements for creating a large farm" are you talking about? *How is this even relevant? *What are you talking about when you refer to "large farms" created years ago? *How many years ago? I'm just trying to understand what you mean here. Keep in mind that the average size farm in the 1950s was around 200 acres. It has only been in the last 10 years that ranting against agribusinesses has become fashionable due to environmental concerns. *Now, farm subsidies, that's a different matter - people have been complaining about farmers being propped up by the government since the 70's. *But before the advent of the large agribusinesses, nobody was ranting against large farms because, as you pointed out, they didn't exist. Wait just a minute; you are sidestepping again with more balderdash. Once more, you failed to explain yourself. *Can you not answer a direct question? *To reiterate, *What "environmental requirements for creating a large farm" are you talking about? *I don't recall ever having heard of such a thing! Your saying here that there are no environmental requirements for creating a large farm. NO. *I said no such thing! **You* said there were such requirements and I've asked you repeatedly what requirements you're talking about. *And you still have not explained. *What in the heck are you talking about? * Since you refuse to explain, one can only assume you cannot. Then earlier your asserting large farms are breaking the clean water act? Where did I say that? *Pardon me, but when are you going to stop pulling these statements out of your backside? *Stop attributing to me things I never actually said. *It only makes you look foolish. That sounds pretty strange to me. *To reiterate, what are you talking about when you refer to "large farms" created years ago? How many years ago and, for that matter, how large? As my assertions are in a response to Billy, your discussing Billy's rant, whether you like it or not. Nonsense. * Every time someone walks into the supermarket and picks up a box of Frosted Flakes for their kids, instead of getting the bulk sugar corn flakes from the bulk food bin which cost half of Frosted Flakes, they are contributing to the problem. Yes, I can agree with you here that overly processed foods are huge part of the more general American food industry problem. *When they have to add something to a food-like product to make it "more nutritious", that is the first really bad sign. *I can honestly say that I never, ever fed my children any cereal coated with sugar. What did you feed them? Real, unprocessed or minimally processed food. My opinion is that most so-called convenience foods are a contrivance of marketers to make more money by marketing to children or by refining valuable nutrients out of real food. *Why sell a quart of real apple juice ... read more ğ A black helicopter just flew over my place with an ADM logo on it. I think it was headed towards Billy's place. cheers oz |
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