cakeaustin

Let me preface this entry by saying that John Besh is my favorite chef. He’s actually one of my favorite human beings. Not only has he served our country, but he is the model of locally and regionally-based cooking and cultural food preservation in the Gulf states. I’ve not had the pleasure of meeting him, but my colleagues and I have done everything within our power–and nonprofit salaries–to dine at nearly all of his restaurants over the past few years. In short, I adore John Besh. There is no place I would prefer to spend my money than in his restaurants.

This week we received in the mail an invitation to participate in the Food Dialogues, a “town hall” meeting of sorts produced by the newly formed U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance. I wrote about this organization in April here and they are a puppet regime.

Organized at the behest of AgriBiz, the U.S. FRA has nothing to do with actual farmers. Less than 1% of farmers still live on the land they farm in the U.S. and as you likely know, if you are reading this, you are aware that those represented by Ketchum, Zocalo and the multinational conglomerates they represent, have absolutely nothing to do with local and regionally based food economies. And everything to do with the bottom line, despite co-opting the terms “sustainable” and “environmentally responsible.”

Over the past week I have considered reaching out to John Besh directly. Given my work with chefs I am well aware of the limitations on their time. And so I am positing that Besh, most likely through no fault of his own, has, through someone close to him, become a party to those who would undermine all that we collectively stand for.

It is quite plain, even if one had no background knowledge of the issues at hand, that U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance, is at minimum a trade group bankrolled by the entities stated quite plainly in their “Meet Our Affiliates and Industry Partners” page.

The USFRA “Premier Partner Advisory Group” includes Monsanto and DuPont.

“American consumers are interested in learning how their food is grown and raised,” said John Raines, vice president of customer advocacy for Monsanto. “Billions of people depend upon what farmers and ranchers do on a daily basis. Monsanto is proud to support USFRA’s efforts to lead a dialogue – bringing together the voices of farmers, ranchers and agricultural partners – to address questions consumers are asking.”

On September 22nd, this puppet entity will hold a Town Hall-style meeting in which our beloved chef, John Besh, is involved. The purpose is ostensibly to unite all scales of producers in dialogue about how America’s food is produced. It is, in fact, a propaganda mechanism by AgriBiz. Won’t you join me in saying “no” to this thinly-veiled attempt to sway Americans’ hearts and minds toward an agriculture that pollutes, kills and holds false arguments that misframe the issues before us all?

cc: @michaelpollan @tomphilpott @FARFA_org

Over the weekend I had a life-changing experience. I met a man who had recently retired. From Monsanto. There was nothing in his handshake, in his gaze, in his countenance, to suggest anything evil. And yet, there he was.

In my struggle to sleep Saturday night, I turned to T.S. Eliot. The Hollow Men seemed best to illustrate the feeling in the pit of my stomach.

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

The final stanza of the poem is haunting, and captures precisely what I felt:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Saturday night, as I sobbed and struggled against the fact of having had someone in our home who had lived and breathed and worked at this unconscionable institution, I was reminded that they are only men. Individual men, who as a collective realize their power on the world stage. Their time is coming. This is the way the world ends.

Since SXSWi 2011 I’ve become aware of counterinsurgencies of varying levels on the Big Ag PR front. A couple of days ago Michael Pollan tweeted:

michaelpollan Michael Pollan

“Big Ag hires Ketchum and Zocalo to “strengthen” its image and combat critics. Here comes the campaign http://p2.to/1aGG“

…Before examining their marketing goals, let’s take a moment to acknowledge this cutely named newly-formed org: “U.S. Farmers & Ranchers Alliance (USFRA)“. Sounds farmy doesn’t it? Kind of like, “we’re for the farmers? and if you aren’t with us, you aren’t for the farmers.” That is exactly the line of logic their shills will lead with. I’m calling it now. Then they’ll descend into misframing the issues at hand with fearmongering and questions parried with much hype, the most reliable being:

“HOW CAN WE FEED THE WORLD WITH SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE!?”

The swill-selling shills love this one, because it covers all bases. Whether the debate which ensues includes reasonable, sane-person responses such as, “with local and regionally based food systems appropriate to their geographic place,” the hacks and flacks will howl, “wrong! you cannot ‘feed the world’ with local ag!” They have recently begun referring to it as “peasant ag,” in fact. Charming.

And should the debate enjoy more favorable dialogue from fellow Biggies, the tweeting heads will go right ahead and co-opt the word “sustainable”, citing Monsanto, ADM, DuPont, ConAgra and a host of others who since 2007 have been running wild with bastardizations of the term. I canceled my years-long subscription to The Atlantic Monthly over insipid ads such as the one below, which does nothing more than play upon the public’s fears and encourage the lemming-like masses to trust that the big guys have got this food thing covered. Nothing to see here!

 It’s with great anticipation I await the Ketchum/Zocalo campaign executions. I hope you’ll follow along with me.

 Right out of the starting gate we have this gem of a quotation from the Ketchum head:

“We are honored to have been asked to serve America’s agricultural community for this incredibly important and    unprecedented assignment,” said Linda Eatherton, Ketchum Partner and Director of its Global Food & Nutrition  Practice. “With over 50 years of service to food and agricultural organizations, our firm was literally built for this  assignment. Working side by side with USFRA members, stakeholders and allies, we know we can help people re-  think  the role of American agriculture in feeding hundreds of millions of Americans every day.”

Note in particular, “RE-THINK” and “the role of AMERICAN AGRICULTURE”…”in feeding HUNDREDS OF  MILLIONS” (of Americans) every day. I’m truly surprised they didn’t go for “the world”. Even the world is not enough.

My favorite morning routine includes hopping on the treadmill and watching a half hour or so of Ted talks or interviews between smart people. Today I watched this gem, Alex Bogusky talking Truth with Robyn O’Brien, whom I met a year ago when she was at SFC Farmers’ Market Downtown signing copies of her best seller, The Unhealthy Truth. Alex Bogusky I knew of from my NYC ad agency days; he of hotshot agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky “Subservient Chicken” fame. This man has had a long journey from creating Burger King ads to finding the Truth, and I’m grateful to my friend Marty Butler for bringing Alex’s story to my attention as a fellow agency defector. The credo for his blog, posterous, reads:

Fear is the mortal enemy of creativity, innovation and happiness

His interview with Robyn goes through dark, frightening territory. Both of their young children had life-threatening food allergies and conditions they are now certain were caused by synthetic proteins in our food system. Robyn cites 1994 as the year Pandora’s box was opened and biologically engineered food was launched into the US food supply. Europe, having noted the ill effects to animals – and I’m not talking about lab rats; these were large scale studies on cows and pigs – banned GMOs until harm could be ruled out. Whereas, America’s decision makers decided, we’ll release this exciting new technology into the food system until proven harmful. The Obama Administration has just reprised this logic in its decision to allow farmers to plant GMO alfalfa. Those who continue to question the USDA ruling are repeatedly marginalized and treated as a fringe cell. Hippies out of our minds.

“In our country you have this choice between Orthorexia and Obesity.” Adds Alex, “If you’re obese, they say you have great mental health. But if you’ve opted out [of the conventional food system], you’re orthorexic. That’s a GREAT term, well done. Whomever the folks were who came up with orthorexia, this compulsion to eat better as a medical condition – SO GOOD. BRAVO.”

If you read this blog regularly, you know I’m a fan of people who aren’t afraid of popping the hood on Big Ag – and in particular, those who go after its marketers. Alex and Robyn are certainly in the hall of fame for me.

Best quotation of the interview is from Alex, in closing, with regard to traits being engineered into our food supply: “God had some great ideas, but he just wasn’t a good capitalist…You don’t have to pay Him anything. You just take stuff.”

Settle a debate for us, gentle readers: what is the proper Twetiquette for sending a Tweet at the dinner table? Does one need to say, “excuse me for a moment while I post the witty remark you just made on Twitter,” OR is one justified in looking down as briefly as possible to compose and send the 140 characters without making an announcement? A loved one insists it is the former, while I have been adhering to the latter. Said loved one calls this behavior no different from taking a call in the middle of dinner, but I disagree. What may be one of the most marked differences between Gen Y and our elders – comfort with seamlessly integrating technology into our lives – is certainly not worth offending or embarrassing a friend over. Because that, I’m afraid, is precisely what I’ve been doing, it seems! Methinks I’ll ask my friend Proper Paige to weigh in. She recently posted on the topic of sending invitations via text message, and I do agree with her logic. Paige, what say you about Tweeting-at-the-Table?

Dan Cathy, the President and COO of Chick-fil-A, has been on a media tour the likes of which I’ve never seen by a fast food mogul.  I have always been vaguely aware of him, and since I was a child, have identified Chick-fil-A as slightly a cut above the other fast food brands, partly for what most seem to perceive as better quality ingredients. But there’s something else, I now realize: the brand is avowedly Christian.

Chick-fil-A is not open on Sundays; a pretty bold move in the fast chain business, but also a fairly obvious marketing tool towards Christians. It sends the message, “We don’t need your money on Sundays, friends. We are taking this Biblically prescribed day of rest, and you should, too.”

What Chick-fil-A also does not need is to procure its food from factory farms and hope that Christians making the connection between spirituality, ethics and knowing where our food comes from, will turn a blind eye.

This Christian will not.

Have you seen this piece, “Every Person Has a Story”? I’m not sure if fast food gets to do that. What do you think?

I admire Dan Cathy, and I pray for him a transformation on the issues of large-scale procurement as they relate to inhumane animal treatment, unnaturally grown food and personal responsibility toward stewarding human health. We’ve all witnessed what is possible for a national fast food chain: just look at how far Chipotle has come.

I think Dan Cathy should visit Joel Salatin. I’ll bet they’d like and respect one another. When Chick-fil-A begins to take steps towards clean, just, sustainable food sourcing, I’ll rejoice. Rather than wishing for the brand’s demise, I hope they’ll choose a new beginning based on the triple bottom line. A resurrection like that? Nothing would befit a Christian more.

My friend Jill Richardson, LaVidaLocavore, has already said it best, but really, guys: is the American public so lemming-like that we will honestly buy the horse manure being served up by the Corn Refiners Association as they petition the FDA to allow “corn sugar” to be used in place of “high fructose corn syrup?”

I want to highlight that the FDA has also approved cloned animals for human consumption, and most recently, GMO salmon. Lest you argue, “the data does not prove, nor indicate compellingly, that GMO foods present a danger to health,” I submit that the entities bankrolling these “foods” have leagues of scientists on the payroll, and that corporations in general do not have human health and wellbeing as their chief directive. Profitability is it.

Broccoli, wild Alaskan salmon – what’s left of it – and non-Monsanto corn do not have an army of well-paid scientists at their beck and call. So I’m asking you today, as someone who cares about not only where your food comes from, but in hope of saving civilization: SAY SOMETHING. Tell everyone you know. Even family and friends who say they do not care. Cheap food is not cheap. Things will not just continue as they always have. The price will be paid – by us, our children and our children’s children.

Recently a childhood friend with whom I’ve reconnected on Facebook made a post about sitting in the drive-thru at McDonald’s, laughing about the items her children were ordering. The children are about 3 and 5 years old, respectively, and I admit I was incensed by this window into a young family’s life, well beyond any and all rights I may have to pass judgment.

actual print ad via consumerist.com

I generally restrict my rage over fast food victimization to drives down Airport Boulevard between, oh, MLK and Oak Springs. The density of fast food chains in that stretch of road is mind-boggling. There are no grocery stores, with the exception of City Market, and residents I speak with about it cite a consistent lack of fresh produce. In my work, this is what is referred to as a food desert. Research is being done as we speak to document and assess the factors, impacts and ultimately, potential solutions to this public health crisis-causing situation.

In the meantime, I seek ways not to feel helpless when seeing and hearing of people – from friends to strangers – consuming fast food. Lest you say it’s none of my business, I argue that it is all of our collective business. If we do not make it so, our way of life will deteriorate even more rapidly than the current indicators of public health suggest. Did you know that one third of children aged 2-18 are now overweight in this country? Low income and ethnic groups other than white, as you might expect, fare the worst, with 40% of Latino children currently being overweight. Where does this lead? To a lifetime of challenges, from diet-related disease to social stigma and economic struggles affecting not only the individual, but all who pay taxes.

I don’t place blame on people who have no other viable food options in their neighborhoods and who face other barriers to access such as finances and transportation – I blame the corporations preying upon them – but I am grappling with those on the “other side” – like my childhood friend who could afford to do better, and most certainly is aware of the perils of fast food. It is those of us living or working on the other side who must take action. The simplest form is to abstain from eating fast food. When one mother in Westlake stops driving the girls through McDonald’s on Bee Cave, but instead takes a half hour earlier in her day to prepare a healthy snack for them, the ripple effect is palpable. Janey tells her mom that Chloe’s mom isn’t getting them McDonald’s anymore and wants to know what’s up with that. Janey’s mom thinks about this, and the social stigma of continuing a behavior her child’s friend’s family has deemed undesirable will affect her actions.

Keeping up with the Joneses can be a positive force, too.

In closing, think for a moment about the power Austin, Texas has. With the national spotlight continuing to shine a halo on us, we are called to demonstrate judgment which puts sustainability – economic, environmental and ethical – at the forefront of each decision. Why not strive for goals beyond just the low-hanging fruit? Why not, no new fast food establishments? No foods-of-minimal-nutritional-value (the technical name for vending machine foodlike items) in schools and work places? In my next posting I’ll be examining how these sorts of measures have worked – or not – in places like Berkeley, LA, Boulder, NYC and others.

The next time you wait too long to eat and your stomach is howling, along with the kids’, who may now be audibly howing, make an exceptional choice. Don’t drive thru. The world is watching!

By now, most of us have read, attempted to digest, or at minimum, skimmed the numerous retorts to Caitlin Flanagan’s anti-school-garden rant in Atlantic Monthly. The allocation of Monsanto’s, and other agribusinesses’, annual ad spends with the magazine, might automatically allow us to dismiss Flanagan or any other Atlantic writer’s credibility on the topic of growing food sustainably – but then, the majority of subscribers are not us. And this is what troubles me.

I grew up reading Atlantic Monthly. It was, indeed, the publication with which I credit a great deal of my love of words. My father encouraged me to read its lengthy and often obtuse articles, and my rhetoric and writing skills grew as a result. Just over two years ago, he canceled his subscription – and last year, I, mine. I cannot read articles on “feeding the world” facing opposite ads by the chemical and seed companies seeking to dominate not only our own country’s market and food sovereignty, but that of the world.

Certainly, I am aware of positive ideologies disseminated by Atlantic, such as our friend Carol Ann Sayle’s food blog and in general, much of the writing of Corby Kummer. I am, myself, consistently faced with the quandry of whether conventional agricultural entities might be brought around to the light by participating in public dialogue with us – such as conferences to which we find ourselves invited, branded by certain meat trade groups. The square I find myself landing on, however, is most often doubt. These organizations and media outlets are enriching themselves and benefiting in the public eye by association with us – those entrenched in the true sustainable agriculture.

While I’ve enjoyed the sea of rebuttals to Flanagan’s vitriol, from Tom Philpott to Kurt Michael Friese, my favorite has been the “renegade lunch lady”, Ann Cooper’s. She cites the great Satan, unregulated marketing to children, a point among they myriad missing from Flanagan’s article which I consider to be the most obvious and yet, challenging, to address in the court of American public opinion, particularly given our government’s love of appointing ex-Monsanto executives to positions regulating our food.

“From the union of government and science…The Mad Farmer walks quietly away,” proffers Wendell Berry.

“Come all ye conservatives and liberals/ who want to conserve the good things and be free,/ come away from the merchants of big answers, whose hands are metalled with power…by the purchase of everything from everybody at the lowest price/ and the sale of anything to anybody at the highest price.”

Our children are being fed, in school cafeterias, with our tax dollars, everything from everybody at the lowest price. Will you stand for it? Will you stand with us?

The Times published this Cargill-damning story a few days ago, set against the narrative of a 22-year old woman whose bout with E. coli-tainted beef paralyzed her for life. Likening the U.S. beef industry to roulette, the writer takes us on a tour of the reasons industrially farmed beef is such an unsound product. One of the best passages follows:

Ground beef is usually not simply a chunk of meat run through a grinder. Instead, records and interviews show, a single portion of hamburger meat is often an amalgam of various grades of meat from different parts of cows and even from different slaughterhouses. These cuts of meat are particularly vulnerable to E. coli contamination, food experts and officials say. Despite this, there is no federal requirement for grinders to test their ingredients for the pathogen. The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled “American Chef’s Selection Angus Beef Patties.” Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

The article goes on to say that the USDA allows companies to devise their own safety plans. We are not in good hands, friends. I urge you to join me in speaking up and asking questions about our food system while partaking in a local one whose participants and producers you know, or can easily meet.

Stephanie Smith, 22, paralyzed by E. coli

Lest you chalk Stephanie’s condition up to “one in a million”-style bad luck, I submit for your consideration that 940 people were sickened in this same 2007 outbreak traced to a Cargill plant. Remember seeing it in the news? Me either. Funny, the bigger you get, the better PR men you can afford.

Cargill is paying for Stephanie Smith’s medical treatment in advance of any legal settlement. If that’s not an admission of guilt – or at least a playing-it-safe strategy that implicates responsibility – color me stunned.

Visiting Cargill’s corporate website yields this language: Some Cargill products are only approved for use in certain geographies, end uses, and/or at certain usage levels. It is the customer’s responsibility to determine, for a particular geography, that (i) the Cargill product, its use and usage levels, (ii) the customer’s product and its use, and (iii) any claims made about the customer’s product, all comply with applicable laws and regulations.

There is a map of the world showing the company’s ubiquitous reach. One eventually gets to the page that explains everything. No shock or awe here.