Tag Archives: agriculture
Tofurky is suing over Missouri’s definition of ‘meat’
On Tuesday, Missouri became the first state to ban “meat” from the product labels of plant-based and lab-grown alternatives. The new law, part of a larger agricultural bill, prohibits “misrepresenting a product as meat” if it doesn’t come directly from an animal. Violators are subject to a fine of $1,000 and — wait for it — a year in prison.
Harsh punishment for calling vegetarian sausage “sausage,” huh? Tofurky seems to think so. The vegan company filed a lawsuit against Missouri on Monday to block the law, joined by the Good Food Institute, Animal Legal Defense Fund, and American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri. The suit seeks to defend the right to market meatless products with meaty words on First Amendment grounds.
The Missouri Cattlemen’s Association lobbied to pass the law. The beef industry has been working to protect what it calls “beef nomenclature” with stricter labeling rules, which could potentially leave environmentally friendlier plant-based or lab-grown options with some unappetizing names (anyone want some textured vegetable protein for dinner?). In April, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association president wrote to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to raise the alarm over the “flagrantly deceptive food product labels proliferating the marketplace.”
To counter the claim that “vegan bacon” and the like are confusing shoppers, Tofurky’s lawsuit includes a surprising etymology lesson. The text points out that “the very oldest usages of the term ‘meat,’ and its analogues in the predecessor languages to Modern English … are to describe nourishment or food generally.”
We’ve used the word “meat” in this broader sense since the 9th century, Kory Stamper, lexicographer and author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, told me last month during our conversation about similar tactics over the label “milk.”
Old English speakers used the word to refer specifically to animal flesh in the 1300s, Stamper said. But just a century later, people were also using it for the flesh of a fruit or a nut, like the meat of a walnut — another factoid cited by Tofurky’s lawsuit.
The suit notes that plant-based product labels have included words like “beef” and “sausage” for decades. It suggests that this practice has resulted in little confusion for shoppers: “[T]here have been no consumer protection lawsuits in Missouri — or any other state — challenging the accuracy of plant-based meat products’ marketing or packaging.”
If Missouri’s law stands, it could end up setting the standards for the whole country. As Quartz reports, it’s a big pain for food companies to tweak their packaging for just one state.
The U.S. has seen battles over vegan terminology before, like the vegan “mayo” controversy of 2015. And last month brought news that the FDA was officially reviewing the question of whether almond milk can be labeled as milk (after all, “an almond doesn’t lactate,” according to the FDA commissioner).
While Missouri is the first state to legislate a restricted definition of meat, there’s an international precedent: The language purists in charge of France approved a similar meat terminology ban in April.
View post:
Rainforests: The good, the bad, and the Trump trade war
In the time it takes you to read this story, a forest the size of nearly 100 football fields will be cleared. Farmers have been burning forests for decades — in part to grow soybeans for hungry animals. In fact, soy cultivation is one of the major drivers of deforestation, especially in South America.
In an effort to stop the burning, the Louis Dreyfus Company, one of the world’s largest food corporations, recently announced plans to start policing its soy suppliers. It’s the latest in a series of corporate commitments aimed at stopping deforestation. As Trump’s trade war pushes soy cultivation from the United States into South America, these corporate pledges may be the last barrier against a massive rise in deforestation.
“This is a breakthrough from one of the world’s largest traders with huge significance to the global meat industry,” said Glenn Hurowitz, CEO of Mighty Earth, an environmental activist group chaired by the former Democratic Representative from California, Henry Waxman.
Dreyfus is one of four behemoths running the international grain trade. These so-called“ABCDs” — Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Dreyfus — dominate 70 percent of the industry. Some activists see their clout as an opportunity. How do you get billions of consumers to change their eating habits or convince millions of farmers to change their techniques? You don’t. But if you get those four middlemen to demand an end to deforestation, it might actually happen.
The ABCDs have all pledged to stop their supply chains from causing deforestation. Yet fires continue to consume rainforests. The problem is that corporate commitments and other efforts amount to a “feather on the brake,” according to Frances Seymour, a distinguished senior fellow at the World Resources Institute. And the global hunger for grain and meat is like a brick on the gas pedal.
Trump’s trade war with China could swap out that brick for a boulder. China, the world’s largest buyer of soy, has already cancelled several shiploads of beans from the United States in response to Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminium. Now they’ll likely turn to South America for soybeans, raising the incentive for farmers there to expand their fields into forest land.
Faced with this challenge, activists have pushed the companies harder — lavishing praise on companies like Dreyfus that make the strongest commitments, while attacking those they consider laggards. Though all four big companies have committed to stop deforestation, some go farther than others. Cargill, for instance, initially aimed to eliminate deforestation from it’s supply chain by 2020, then pushed that goal back t0 2030.
ADM and Dreyfus have strong commitments in place, according to Hurowitz, so he’s putting more pressure on the other two. “There’s now no reason for McDonald’s and other companies to continue doing business with deforesters like Cargill and Bunge,” Hurowitz said.
Both Cargill and Bunge say they are keeping pace. Cargill said it remains committed to the goal of zero deforestation “while balancing forest protection with inclusive growth and sustainable development,” April Nelson, a Cargill representative, wrote in an email.
Similarly, a representative from Bunge told Grist that it’s developing a monitoring program to halt deforestation, and also welcomed Dreyfus’s announcement.
It’s a monumental challenge for a sprawling multinational corporation to figure out how to avoid buying soybeans grown a recently burned rainforest. Companies say they’re making strides. But it’s hard to tell from the outside how significant those strides really are.
Cargill’s CEO, David MacLennan, underscored the difficulty of getting a large and complex organization to change course in an interview with the New York Times last year.
“I don’t think I or others appreciated the vast complexity of the task,” he said. “Let’s say that we are trading or buying and selling soybean meal. Where did the soybeans come from? And did they come from deforested land? Maybe we weren’t buying the soybeans directly. I don’t know.”
Link to article:
Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Jason, LG, ONA, Uncategorized
Tagged agriculture, archer, business & technology, cargill, china, earth, jason, news, representative
Comments Off on Rainforests: The good, the bad, and the Trump trade war
R.I.P. Monsanto. Our hates will go on.
Welp, this is the end of Monsanto.
Not the end of the seed company, mind you, but the end of its name. The scientists, marketers, and lawyers who work there will keep doing their jobs, they’ll just be employed by Bayer, the big German chemical and pharmaceuticals company that’s slowly swallowing Monsanto.
But we’re losing so much more than just a name. Without Monsanto, who will we blame for the death of bees, the unprofitability of small farms, and the insidious spread of mystery diseases which you probably don’t even realize you have? The natural answer is, of course, Bayer, but outrage is rarely transferable– it sticks to the brand.
Case in point: What’s the military contractor Blackwater called today? How about the tobacco corporation formerly known as Phillip Morris? What became of IG Farben, the company that produced Zyklon-B for use in concentration camps? (Answers at bottom.)*
The name Monsanto itself was a valuable tool for activists who could wield it as a boogeyman to rally people without much knowledge of an issue. Groups like the March Against Monsanto depend on the brand. “Will they still march if there’s no Monsanto?” asked Dan Charles, the guy who wrote the book on the company. March Against Bayer just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
Bayer made the deal to buy Monsanto back in 2016, and it’s been jumping through various regulatory hoops since. The deal was among a series of mergers in agribusiness brought on by low food prices and declining profits.
Monsanto was the leader in commercializing genetically modified crops, and today the name is synonymous with GMOs engineered for large-scale agriculture. Before it sold off the chemical business to be a fulltime gene-jockey, the company also created glyphosate, the controversial and most widely used herbicide in the world, though many companies started manufacturing it after the patent expired. Monsanto has done some bad things through its history, developing some nasty chemicals and recently releasing a soybean that encouraged farmers to screw over their neighbors. But it’s also routinely blamed for problems it has nothing to do with.
Monsanto has been the whipping boy for a strange coalition that runs the left-right gamut from anti-corporate greens to fans of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. It was the go-to if you had a problem and needed someone or something to blame it, a point the writer Cirocco Dunlap captured in a satire of new-agey faddism when asking why more people weren’t curing sick children with coconut oil: “It was so nice and so easy; I’m confused why people don’t do this more often. Probably because of Monsanto.”
It’s probably a good thing we won’t have Monsanto to kick around anymore. Much of the animus against Monsanto stems from a sense that corporations are changing food and farming in ways that we don’t understand. The thing is, those corporations have taken the lead in innovation because our government hasn’t been all that interested in funding public-sector research in agriculture. Funding research on destructo swarmbots to slaughter our enemies? That’s a no-brainer. Funding to feed people and keep them from becoming our enemies in the first place? Well, that’s where we tend to tighten the belt.
Perhaps now, instead of searching for an easy villain, we might consider searching for the root causes of our problems and fixing them.
*Philip Morris is now Altria. Blackwater became Xe. IG Farben was broken up after World War II into other companies which have since become parts of five others: Agfa, BASF, Celanese, Sanofi, and … Bayer.
View post:
Should You Buy Organic Wine?
While organic produce may be increasing in popularity, it is surprising how many organic devotees give little thought to their wine. Wine is made from grapes, a highly pesticide-sprayed crop, which would lead many to believe that purchasing organic wine would be a top priority for health-conscious wine drinkers.
But are wines often affected by pesticide and herbicide use? What are sulfites, and should you worry about their presence in your wine? And finally, is it really worth it to go organic when it comes to your vino?
Organic vs. Biodynamic
While grapes are indeed a highly sprayed crop, a USDA organic label may be slightly less meaningful in winemaking than it is in other areas of agriculture. To be certified organic in the United States, winemakers must not only avoid using pesticides, herbicides and other chemicals on their grapes, they must also steer clear of sulfites, which many winemakers prefer not to do ? wine lovers tend not to like the taste of sulfite-free wine. As a result, many of the highest-quality, top-rated wines out there do not apply for an organic label.
So how can you avoid pesticides and herbicides in your wine while and ensure you’re getting a high-quality vino without sacrificing flavor? Many wine lovers look instead for the word “biodynamic” in wines. Though not regulated by the USDA, this term is used by fine wine makers to refer to a synergistic growing process that encompasses natural, eco-friendly practices and the avoidance lack of chemicals and additives.
Sulfites in Wine
Okay, so you’re on the hunt for a naturally grown biodynamic vino that is?crafted in a rich environment and lovingly crafted by expert winemakers. Should you worry about sulfites?
The truth is, sulfites ? essentially, sulfur that is naturally occurring in wine and also added to wine as a preservative to keep its flavor stable ? aren’t a big deal for people who are not sensitive to them. According to Wine Folly, 5 to 10 percent of people have asthma sensitivities to sulfites, which can cause major health issues if sulfites are consumed in excess. For these people, sulfite-free wines are probably a must. But for everyone else, they’re probably not a huge deal. And furthermore, if you are concerned about reducing your sulfite exposure but feel that a high-quality, artisan wine is a treat you enjoy, you may be better served by giving up french fries or dried fruit, both of which contain much larger amounts of sulfites than wines.
Image via Wine Folly.
Where to Find High-Quality Wines
In case you haven’t already gathered, finding a high-quality, non-toxic wine can be difficult, because wine growers don’t tend to want to sacrifice the quality of their wine (which does happen when sulfites are removed) for an organic label. Here are some tips for finding safe, high-quality wines you can trust:
Ask the attendant at a small, locally owned wine store to point you in the direction of wines that are not sold and distributed by large, behemoth companies. Smaller distributors tend to carry wines that are made by true wine artisans and small vineyards.
Purchase your wine at a local vineyard to enjoy the specific terroir of your home region. Be sure to ask the vintner about their pesticide and herbicide use practices.
Look for wines labeled “biodynamic.”
Consider a subscription service such as Dry Farm Wines.
If you are vegan, be sure to look for wines that are labeled as “vegan,” as even USDA organic wines are allowed to filter their wines through animal-derived “fining agents,” according to Dr. Weil.
Related Articles:
Is Your Honey Loaded With Pesticides?
Are Pesticides Making You Sick and Fat?
How to Tell If Your Wine Habit is Healthy
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.
View post:
Hurricane Maria has crushed Puerto Rican farmers.
The devastation wiped out 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s agricultural production, according to Puerto Rico’s agriculture secretary, Carlos Flores Ortega. The New York Times visited farmer José A. Rivera after the winds flattened his plantain, yam, and pepper fields.
“There will be no food in Puerto Rico,” Rivera, told the Times. “There is no more agriculture in Puerto Rico. And there won’t be any for a year or longer.”
Food prices will surely rise on the island, although the loss of crops will not necessarily mean people will starve. Puerto Rico imports about 85 percent of its food. Even so, the storm damaged the infrastructure used to distribute imported food, like ports, roads, and stores.
On CNN, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló pleaded for aid from Congress. “We need to prevent a humanitarian crisis occurring in America,” he said. FEMA and the Coast Guard are working in the territory.
Flores, the agriculture secretary, appeared to be looking for a silver lining. This may be a chance to rebuild the island’s agriculture so that it is more efficient and sustainable, he told the Times.
As climate change accelerates, we can expect the rate of disasters like this to accelerate as well.
Taken from:
Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, Good Sense, LG, ONA, Uncategorized
Tagged agriculture, anchor, cnn, coast-guard, hurricane, news, puerto rico, territory, times
Comments Off on Hurricane Maria has crushed Puerto Rican farmers.
Hurricane Irma wiped out half of Florida’s citrus crop.
There’s been a long decline in the nutrition of our crops, often attributed to people breeding plants for higher yields rather than health benefits. But, as is often the case, climate change is making it worse.
An altered atmosphere means altered food, because plants suck up CO2 from the air and turn it into sugars, Helena Bottemiller Evich points out in a new piece for Politico. That means we’re getting more sugar per bite, and less protein, iron, and zinc. The global phenomenon puts hundreds of millions of people at risk for nutrient deficiencies.
It’s not just a problem for humans. Analysis of pollen samples going back to 1842 shows that protein concentration declined dramatically as atmospheric CO2 rose. That makes yet another suspect in the great bee-murder mystery.
“To say that it’s little known that key crops are getting less nutritious due to rising CO2 is an understatement,” Evich writes for Politico. “It is simply not discussed in the agriculture, public health, or nutrition communities. At all.”
The world is changing in so many ways that it’s nearly impossible to track them all — even when those changes happen right at the ends of our forks.
Link –
Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized
Tagged agriculture, alo, analysis, at-risk, bottemiller, florida, helena-bottemiller, irma, oranges, points-out, pur
Comments Off on Hurricane Irma wiped out half of Florida’s citrus crop.
How to Share Extra Bounty from Your Garden with the Community
You?ve frozen, dried and canned all the fruit and vegetables you can use over winter. But your garden keeps on producing. Now what?
Your extra fruit and veggies can easily find a loving home. And there?s good reason to make sure your entire harvest makes it to someone?s table.
About 50 percent of all fruits and vegetables grown worldwide go to waste. This staggering number is especially tragic considering that one in nine people in the world suffer from chronic undernourishment, including one in approximately 650 people in developed countries.
You can make a difference in your community by using some of the following suggestions to share the food you grow.
Donate to Charitable Organizations
Many different organizations will welcome your extra fruit and vegetables, such as food banks, homeless shelters, community or seniors? centers, spiritual groups and churches, or home-delivered meal programs.
AmpleHarvest.org has an extensive listing of different organizations throughout the United States that will accept extra produce. You can search for one near you on their website.
FeedingAmerica.org also has a searchable listing of food banks throughout the U.S.
Contact Your Local Gleaners
Gleaning is the act of collecting fresh foods from farms, gardens or other sources to share it with those in need. Many communities have a gleaning group that can come to your home and collect your excess produce.
Food Rescue has a listing of groups you can contact in the U.S., or you can search the internet for groups in other countries.
Can?t find any gleaners near you? The United States Department of Agriculture has published a good guide on how to start your own gleaning program.
Put Up a Stand
A simple table on your front lawn with some veggies and a ?Free? sign on it should encourage most of them to find a new home.
A more elaborate option is to build a stand or booth to shade your fruit and vegetables. You could also add a basket or lockbox for donations to your favorite charity in exchange.
Feed It to Your Pets and Livestock
Your animal friends don?t need to miss out on your harvest. Many pet birds, rodents, horses, goats, reptiles and other animals would appreciate your extra produce. It?s even been shown that some vegetables are healthy for dogs.
Related: Best & Worst Fruits and Veggies for Pets
Advertise Your Bounty
RipeNear.Me is a great site designed for home growers to share their overabundance with others. You can choose to give away your produce or charge a fee for it.
You can also advertise to trade, give away or sell your extra fruit and veggies in your local newspaper, community newsletter or online at sites like Freecycle.org, Kijiji.ca, EbayClassifieds.com, or Craigslist.org.
Community sites like Nextdoor or your community Facebook page are other excellent places to post.
Organize a Group Cook-off
Cooking big batches of food is a fun excuse to get together with friends and try making something new. And the best part is, everyone has some healthy meals to take home for later.
Check out MamaBake.com for suggestions on organizing group cooking and some big batch recipes.
It?s also a great idea to donate extra prepared food you make to a neighbor in need.
Host a Meal
This can be as basic as inviting a few friends over for a meal featuring lots of your home-grown fruit and vegetables.
If you?re interested in something a bit more ambitious, try hosting a pop-up restaurant. You can register on sites like EatWith.com that matches up hosts and diners to share meals worldwide.
Swap with Other Gardeners
Ask your friends, neighbors and around your community to find people interested in trading their excess fruit and veggies with yours.
You can also throw a produce swapping party and invite guests to bring their overabundance to be redistributed.
Check out programs like Food Is Free that helps communities grow and share fresh food.
Donate to Animal Rescue Organizations
Certain animal shelters can use excess fruit and veggies to feed plant-eating animals like rabbits, guinea pigs, parrots, iguanas and turtles. Check with your local shelters to see if they have these types of animals before bringing over your produce.
Save Your Seeds
It?s not a loss if your crops have become over-mature or gone to seed. That?s a great time to keep them for harvesting seeds for next year.
You can also give your seeds to organizations like Seed Savers Exchange or Seedsave.org, who work towards saving and distributing non-GMO, heirloom and organic seeds for now and into the future.
Another option is to start a seed library for your local community. Shareable has detailed instructions on how to create your own seed lending library.
Recycle Your Produce
There?s no shame in rounding up your bolted lettuce and the zucchinis that somehow grew 3 feet long, and tossing them on your compost pile. All their goodness will go towards nourishing next year?s bountiful crop.
Related
9 Mistakes to Avoid When Planting a New Vegetable Garden
10 Hot Ideas for a Drought-Resistant Garden
Edible Landscaping: A Delicious Way to Garden
Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.
Link:
How to Share Extra Bounty from Your Garden with the Community
Posted in Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, organic, PUR, Seed Savers Exchange, Uncategorized
Tagged agriculture, crafts & hobbies, food, garden, gleaners, Landscaping, united, What
Comments Off on How to Share Extra Bounty from Your Garden with the Community
Arkansas just banned the weedkiller that damaged hundreds of farmers’ crops this year.
View the original here:
Arkansas just banned the weedkiller that damaged hundreds of farmers’ crops this year.
Democrats are proposing a bill to keep farm laborers from being deported.
Politico reports that senators from California, Vermont, Colorado, and Hawaii came out with legislation to give undocumented agricultural laborers a “blue card” — a sort of talisman to ward off deportation.
To qualify, immigrants would need to have worked at least 100 days on farms in each of the previous two years. They would have the opportunity to convert their blue cards to some form of legal residency later on.
This would come as welcome relief to workers who produce labor-intensive products like milk, fruit, and vegetables. On the other hand, it’s an example of government trying to keep farm labor semi-legal and cheap. Because most farmworkers live in a legal gray zone, they have little bargaining power and few options, which keeps wages from rising.
It’s a tough deal: We’d be asking immigrants to keep our food prices down by taking hard, low-paying jobs, and in exchange they’d get an anti-deportation card.
On yet another hand — we need at least three hands to juggle this one! — that kind of tradeoff is inevitable. For now, Congress is unlikely pass any immigrant protections unless the farm lobby can pull in Republican votes.
Excerpt from –
Democrats are proposing a bill to keep farm laborers from being deported.
Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, Green Light, LAI, ONA, OXO, Ringer, The Atlantic, Ultima, Uncategorized
Tagged agriculture, alo, california, down-by-taking, farms, farmworkers, have-the-opportunity, oxo, previous, republican, unless-the-farm, vermont
Comments Off on Democrats are proposing a bill to keep farm laborers from being deported.
