Tag Archives: food and ag

The USDA’s Sustainable Food Champion Steps Down

by Seraphinakbj Posted on March 18, 2013

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Back in 2009, when President Obama chose Kathleen Merrigan as second in command at the US Department of Agriculture, celebration erupted in sustainable-food circles. Last Thursday afternoon, the USDA announced the imminent end of Merrigan’s run as deputy secretary of ag with a terse note from USDA chief Tom Vilsack. It gave no reason for her departure, which is effective at the end of April.

For generations, the message from the US Department of Agriculture to the nation’s farmers could be summed up in the famous piece of advice offered by Ezra Taft Benson, President Dwight Eisenhower’s USDA chief: “get big or get out.” That’s why Merrigan’s tenure is so significant. Under her influence, the USDA suddenly began to urge consumers to “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food,” and made a concerted effort to marshal USDA resources to support local and regional food systems supplied by farms of varying scales: the opposite of the globalized, monolithic system envisioned by Benson an put into place with the consent of his successors.

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The USDA’s Sustainable Food Champion Steps Down

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13 Things to Eat And Drink at SXSW

by 9ji7g4x Posted on March 8, 2013

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How are local farmers and food producers using tech to outsmart Big Ag? Hear Tom Philpott and others weigh in on a SXSW Interactive panel at the Hyatt Regency Austin’s Big Bend Room at 5 PM on Saturday, March 9th.

So you’re coming to Austin for South By Southwest, eh? Well, so is half of humanity. (Sorry—I grew up in Austin and lived here through my 20s, but this is my first time back for SXSW in 15 years, so I’m a little freaked out.) Austin is a city under siege during the week leading up to the ides of March, but if you’re patient, you can find a worthy meal or a pint of something good and brewed nearby. What follows is by no means a comprehensive guide to the huge number of choices on offer—just a local food/beer lover’s idiosyncratic picks.

  1. SouthBites, across from the Convention Center. “Curated” by local celebrity chef Paul Qui—more on him below—this “selection of gourmet food trucks for SXSW attendees” is the place to start your your chowhounding. Duh.
  2. Downtown Farmers Market, 4th and Guadalupe, Saturdays, 9 a.m.-1 p.m. When everyone’s sleeping it off Saturday morning, creep over to this open-air, once-a-week market right in the middle of downtown. You’ll find dozens of farm stands with abundant and magnificent early-spring produce, but it won’t be of much use to you, because you won’t be cooking. What you need to do is locate the stand of Dai Due, at the market’s southeastern corner, and queue up. One of Austin’s culinary treasures, Dai Due has no brick-and-mortar retail presence. Owners Jesse Griffiths and Tamara Mayfield got their rep with their innovative pop-up dinners staged at farms around Austin. Now they’re looking for the perfect space to launch a butcher shop—”I’m a butcher, not a chef,” Griffiths has insisted. But until they do, their farmers market stand is the only way to sample their food. And it’s not to be missed. The menu changes weekly, depending on what locally produced meats and veggies Griffiths gets his hands on. Recent offerings have included chile-braised pork tacos with cabbage (Griffiths has a way with pork, and chile peppers, and cabbage), and an absolutely epic grass-fed bison burger topped with a fried egg. If you love food, do not miss Dai Due. The place often offers Mexican-style cafe de olla—coffee brewed with cinnamon. If so, order some.

    Need a quick breakfast downtown? It’s easy, tiger. Easy Tiger

  3. Easy Tiger, 709 E. 6th. They call it Dirty Sixth, a multi-block stretch of bars and clubs just west of IH 35 on Austin’s fabled 6th Street. And during SXSW, it’s at its absolute maddest. But right in the middle of it all sits an unlikely oasis known as Easy Tiger, its beer garden perched on a scenic creek. By night, it will be utterly packed—the place has one of Austin’s best beer lists, a full bar with fancy booze for the A&R execs on expense accounts (they still exist, right?), and terrific house-made sausage from sustainably sourced meat (with a good veggie option as well). If you find yourself on 6th at night, by all means muscle your way to the bar and get a pint along with a wild-boar sausage or a snack plate featuring homemade pimiento cheese and a fantastic pretzel (menu). But here’s the weird part: Easy Tiger isn’t just a great beer hall; it’s also, by a wide margin, Austin’s best bakery. And you can go there in the morning and get a top-flight cup of coffee along with all manner of expertly baked treats—and likely not have to battle crowds.
  4. 24 Diner and Counter Cafe, both at 6th st and Lamar, next door to each other. 24 will be on every SXSW food-rec list, and for good reason. Run by the same crew as Easy Tiger, it offers delicious comfort food made with nice ingredients in a mod setting. Vegetarians, don’t be put off by the meat-heavy menu—both the house-made veggie burger and the roasted vegetables over quinoa are first-rate. Did I mention that it’s open 24 hours a day, serves breakfast anytime, and has a great beer list? (Guilty pleasure: the roasted bananas and brown sugar milkshake.) If the crowds at 24 are too much, try the next-door daytime alternative Counter Cafe. Stuffed into a long, narrow space and dominated by a soda-fountain style bar, Counter Cafe is another variation on the delicious-diner-food-with-good-ingredients theme (complete with killer veggie burger). And the building is an Austin icon—back when it was an old-school steakhouse, scenes from Slacker (1991) were filmed there.

    Just add beer: Panko-fried, all-natural pork belly sandwich, kewpie mayo, karashi mustard, served with Japanese eggplant salad. East Side King

  5. Grackle Bar/Eastside King food truck, 1700 East 6th. East of the highway on 6th St, in what was once a Mexican-American neighborhood, Austin’s latest hipster mecca has arisen. The place now teems with bars, restaurants, and condos. My favorite of the new-wave establishments is a divey bar called the Grackle—named after a bird so common in Austin it almost has pest status—which houses in its parking lot a great food truck called Eastside King. The Grackle is dark, dominated by a pool table, and has a good, small selection of tap beers, several of them local. And the bartenders pour a healthy-sized shot of good whiskey at prices well below what you’ll find at other spots around town. What more can you ask of a bar? That’s where Eastside King comes in. From a modest-looking food truck decorated in garish hippie art, chef Paul Qui—who I believe has won some reality TV contest, and has worked as executive chef for a while at Austin’s much-hyped sushi temple Uchiko—is doing inspired Asian-fusion bar food like fried pork belly sandwich with fiery mayo and “Broccoli Pops,” whole spears of grilled broccoli in chile-miso sauce. North of downtown near the University of Texas campus, there’s another East Side King perched outside of another dive bar called the Hole in the Wall (2538 Guadalupe), where I misspent many a night and even afternoon during college.
  6. Weather Up (1808 East Cesar Chavez). If you find yourself east of the highway, feeling spendy, and in need of a drink, Weather Up is your place. It offers fancy “craft” cocktails poured by mustachioed hipsters (but friendly ones) from a cute old house with a tranquil patio out back.
  7. Houndstooth Coffee, 401 Congress; and Frank, 4th and Colorado. If you’re anything like me, you’re going to need lots of coffee during SXSW—really good coffee. Houndstooth offers the best in town. Its first location, at 42nd and Lamar, is a bit off the SXSW path. Its new location, at 4th and Congress, is right in the middle of everything, but not open yet. Not to worry—during SXSW, Houndstooth will be running a cart on the patio outside its new place with full coffee service. The cortado—a perfect espresso shot with just enough steamed milk—is the signature drink. Another highlight: beans from top Austin roaster Cuvee brewed in a Chemex pot fitted with a Hario metal filter (coffee geeks will know what I’m talking about). Frank, a hotdog joint around the corner from Houndstooth, also offers top-flight, obsessed-over coffee (I’ve never tried the ‘dogs).

    The garden at Olivia; chicken house in back. Olivia

  8. You better lick it: Austin’s best ice cream. Lick

    Lick (2032 S Lamar), Barley Swine (2024 S Lamar) and Olivia (2043 S Lamar Blvd). If you head south on Lamar to see music at the legendary honky-tonk Saxon Pub—and you should—you’ll pass this trio of formidable establishments, which sit just north of Oltorf. Lick offers spectacular ice cream, made from local Mill King Creamery milk and featuring flavors like grapefruit ginger and chocolate pecan with buttered caramel. Starting life as a food truck, Barley Swine presents a down-home version of molecular gastronomy—radical techniques and combinations applied to topflight local ingredients, in a simple setting with lots of beer choices. Olivia is Austin’s least-hyped local-food temple: No one ever talks about it, but there’s a great veggie garden out back, complete with an adorable chicken run for egg production. The menu features impeccably sourced, pricy, and delicious Mediterranean food by night; on weekend days, it’s my favorite brunch spot.

Yes you can: Pearl Snap is an emerging Austin classic; also available on tap. Austin Beerworks

Austin, on Tap
Just in the past five years, Austin has emerged as an excellent beer town. Here are some of my favorites, widely available on tap at bars.

  1. Austin BeerWorks Pearl Snap Lager. This is just a rock-solid, clean, crisp, light Pilsner—a tribute, I think to Pearl Beer, an old-time Texas brewery whose lagers fueled Austin’s lefty political class until their simultaneous demise sometime in the ’80s. Pearl Snap lager is my go-to refreshment for weekend garden work—and a great way not to get bogged down during a long night on the town. (All the ABWs are worth drinking—if you can get your hands on a Sputnik, the brewery’s deep-black, roasty, dry, and oddly quaffable “Russian imperial coffee oatmeal stout,” by all means, do it.)
  2. Real Ale Brewing Phoenix Double ESB. This slightly sweet, malty, medium-bodied dark brew is perfect for Austin’s current weather, which takes on a slight late-spring chill at night. Careful, though—while Phoenix is deceptively drinkable, its 7.2 percent alcohol level will catch up with you.
  3. Hops & Grain Alt-eration and Pale Dog Pale Ale. This newish Austin brewery has just two offerings on the market, and both are worth seeking out. Alt-eration is brewed in the style of a classic German alt—light auburn and malty—and the Pale Dog is just perfect example of the classic American style popularized by Sierra Nevada.
  4. Rogness Giantophis Imperial IPA. If your thing is a big, reeking IPA, loaded with piney hops and balanced with a malt punch, then the well-named Giantophis has your name on it. All of the Rogness offerings are excellent—milder souls will appreciate the Rattler pale ale or the Saison-style Beardy Guard.
  5. Balcones True Blue Corn Whiskey. Ok, this isn’t a beer, but attention must be paid to Central Texas’ emerging cult craft distiller. Balcones’ signature True Blue whiskey, made from “roasted Atole, a Hopi blue corn meal,” is deep, slightly smoky, and balanced by a long sweet, spicy finish. It’s a fixture in Austin’s fancier bars, and you should treat yourself to a shot of it, neat.

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13 Things to Eat And Drink at SXSW

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Buying Local and Organic? You’re Still Eating Plastic Chemicals

by pitery Posted on March 4, 2013

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Bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates are what’s known as “endocrine disruptors”—that is, at very small doses they interfere with our hormonal systems, giving rise to all manner of health trouble. In peer-reviewed research, BPA has been linked to asthma, anxiety, obesity, kidney and heart disease, and more. The rap sheet for phthalates, meanwhile, includes lower hormones in men, brain development problems, diabetes, asthma, obesity, and, possibly, breast cancer.

So, ingesting these industrial chemicals is a bad idea, especially if you’re a kid or a pregnant woman. But avoiding them is very difficult, since they’re widely used in plastics, and are ubiquitous in the food supply. The federal government has not seen fit to ban them generally—although the FDA did outlaw BPA from baby bottles last year (only after the industry had voluntarily removed them) and Congress pushed phthalates out of kids’ toys back in 2008. Otherwise, consumers are on their own to figure out how to avoid ingesting them.

Unfortunately, that’s a really hard task—and eating fresh, local, and organic might not be sufficient, as new research (abstract), published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, shows.

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Buying Local and Organic? You’re Still Eating Plastic Chemicals

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Best. Diet. Study. Ever.

by Pauline80x Posted on March 2, 2013

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“All calories count,” declared the voiceover in an infamous recent Coca-Cola ad. “No matter where they come from, including Coca Cola and everything else with calories.” Message: a calorie is a calorie; don’t blame our sugary drinks for your troubles!

But all calories aren’t created equal, two recent studies suggest. The first one, on sugar, is alarming; the second, on the so-called Mediterranean diet, is comforting.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.

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Best. Diet. Study. Ever.

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Yep, Sugar (Not Other Stuff) Appears to Cause Diabetes

by oe8o7kdg Posted on February 28, 2013

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A new study published in the open-access science journal PLoS One offers some of the strongest evidence yet that sugar, and not other diet and lifestyle factors, is the primary cause of type 2 diabetes—a theory that the sugar industry has sought for decades to debunk.

The study’s four authors, including Robert Lustig of the University of California-San Francisco, examined data on sugar intake and diabetes prevalence in 175 countries “controlling for other food types (including fibers, meats, fruits, oils, cereals), total calories, overweight and obesity, period-effects, and several socioeconomic variables such as aging, urbanization and income.”


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For each bump in sugar “availability” (consumption plus waste) equivalent to about a can of soda per day, they observed a 1 percent rise in diabetes prevalence. This is a correlation, of course, and correlation does not always equal causation. On the other hand, it’s an exceptionally strong correlation. “No other food types yielded significant individual associations with diabetes prevalence after controlling for obesity and other confounders,” the authors wrote in their summary. “Differences in sugar availability statistically explain variations in diabetes prevalence rates at a population level that are not explained by physical activity, overweight or obesity.”

The correlation, they also found, was “independent of other changes in economic and social change such as urbanization, aging, changes to household income, sedentary lifestyles, and tobacco or alcohol use. We found that obesity appeared to exacerbate, but not confound, the impact of sugar availability on diabetes prevalence, strengthening the argument for targeted public health approaches to excessive sugar consumption.”

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Yep, Sugar (Not Other Stuff) Appears to Cause Diabetes

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Study: Organic Tomatoes Are Better for You

by Unacoomt Posted on February 23, 2013

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Remember that Stanford research meta-analysis purporting to show that organic food offers no real health advantages? (I poked some holes in it here). Buried in the study (I have a full copy but can’t post it for copyright reasons) is the finding that organic foods tend to have higher levels of phenols—compounds, naturally occurring in plants, widely believed to fight cancer and other degenerative diseases.

After the study’s release, one of the study’s authors, Dena Bravata, downplayed that result in a New York Times report :

While the difference in total phenol levels between organic and conventional produce was statistically significant, the size of the difference varied widely from study to study, and the data was based on the testing of small numbers of samples. “I interpret that result with caution,” Dr. Bravata said.

A paper published Feb. 20 in PLOS One highlighted the link between organic agriculture and phenols. A team of researchers compared total phenol content in organic and conventional tomatoes grown in nearby plots in Brazil. By cultivating the tomatoes in the same microclimate and in similar soil, the researchers were able to control for environmental factors that might otherwise affect nutrient content.

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Study: Organic Tomatoes Are Better for You

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87 Percent of Snapper is Mislabeled, Study Says

by rakil23 Posted on February 21, 2013

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Trust salmon, maybe red snapper, but not canned tuna. These are the lessons a nervous seafood eater could glean from a new study by the marine-life advocacy group Oceana. A whopping 87 percent of red snapper and 84 percent of canned “white” tuna tested was found to be mislabeled, the study found.*

But only seven percent of salmon—one of the most commonly consumed fish in the US—was mislabeled, making it a somewhat bright spot in a sketchy fish market.

More than 300 volunteers served as food detectives for the study, purchasing more than 1,200 samples of seafood from 674 restaurants, sushi bars, and grocery stores in in major cities between 2010 and 2012. Oceana then DNA-tested the fish to catch imposters.

So what are you eating, really? For example: The report found a hodgepodge of fish masquerading as snapper, some more palatable than others:

The best chances of finding actual red snapper were in Miami, New York, and in Boston, where several samples of red snapper ironically turned up in a grocery store mislabeled as a different fish. In samples from out west, including San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles, all of the red snapper was mislabeled, according to USDA standards.

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87 Percent of Snapper is Mislabeled, Study Says

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Can Sustainable Food Feed the Whole US?

by dig1iti43 Posted on February 20, 2013

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In the early 20th century, political ads for then-presidential candidate Herbert Hoover promised Americans continued prosperity, or a “chicken in every pot.” But today, in a new era of ecological crises, does our ability to feed ourselves in the future hinge on a chicken in every backyard?

This was one of the ideas explored at last night’s panel of food journalists, moderated by New York Times contributing columnist Allison Arieff and co-sponsored by Mother Jones and the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR). Addressing a room of 70-90 modern farmer types, urban-planners, and Bay Area locals, Mother Jones‘ Tom Philpott, Earth Island Journal‘s Jason Mark, and former Grist.org editor Twilight Greenaway discussed issues taking up the most space on their plates, along with their vision for the future of the sustainable food movement. You can listen to their conversation here:

“The implication that we can vote with our fork will only get us so far,” said Philpott, who went on to critique the idea that consumer choice and a backyard crop alone can reverse an entrenched trend of industrialized and consolidated control of the food supply. “The infrastructure for small farms doesn’t exist,” he said. “The only policy solution is federal policy.”

One way to legislate change would be through anti-trust laws that dismantle Big Ag’s grasp on production, Philpott explained, but even so, the sustainable food movement is dealing with its own internal struggles in attempting to expand. “What’s the sweet spot for scale for the sustainable food movement?” asked Jason Mark. While organic farmers are still negotiating the balance between quality and affordability of their products, “It’s a rational choice to buy junk food instead of healthy food,” Mark added.

But as stubborn as the status quo may be, panelists also shared stories about small, ecology-minded innovation in the age of engineered shmeat (“meat grown on a sheet,” Twilight Greenaway explained). Greenaway also discussed polyculture experiments in the Long Island Sound, and panelists bounced insights off one another about the challenges and promises of biotech in the sustainability movement. “We’ve got this beautiful niche happening,” Philpott said of efforts to de-industrialize food production in the last decade. “But staying away from self-satisfaction,” he added, “is paramount.”

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Can Sustainable Food Feed the Whole US?

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Do GMO Crops Really Have Higher Yields?

by 2KeaheySchoeffler461 Posted on February 13, 2013

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According to the biotech industry, genetically modified (GM) crops are a boon to humanity because they allow farmers to “generate higher crop yields with fewer inputs,” as the trade group Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) puts it on its web page.

Buoyed by such rhetoric, genetically modified seed giant Monsanto and its peers have managed to flood the corn, soybean, and cotton seed markets with two major traits: herbicide resistance and pesticide expression—giving plants the ability to, respectively, withstand regular lashings of particular herbicides and kill bugs with the toxic trait of Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt.

Turns out, though, that both assertions in BIO’s statement are highly questionable. Washington State University researcher Charles Benbrook has demonstrated that the net effect of GMOs in the United States has been an increase in use of toxic chemical inputs. Benbrook found that while the Bt trait has indeed allowed farmers to spray dramatically lower levels of insecticides, that effect has been more than outweighed the gusher of herbicides uncorked by Monsanto’s Roundup Ready technology, as weeds have rapidly adapted resistance to regular doses of Monsanto’s Rounup herbicide.

And in a new paper (PDF) funded by the US Department of Agriculture, University of Wisconsin researchers have essentially negated the “more food” argument as well. The researchers looked at data from U-Wisconsin test plots that compared crop yields from various varieties of hybrid corn, some genetically modified and some not, between 1990 and 2010. While some GM varieties delivered small yield gains, others did not. Several even showed lower yields than non-GM counterparts. With the exception of one commonly used trait—a Bt type dessigned to kill the European corn borer—the authors conclude, “we were surprised not to find strongly positive transgenic yield effects.” Both the glyphosate-tolerant (Roundup Ready) and the Bt trait for corn rootworm caused yields to drop.

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Do GMO Crops Really Have Higher Yields?

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New Study: Common Pesticides Kill Frogs on Contact

by HartkePoundstone568 Posted on February 2, 2013

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To me, there are few more comforting sights on a farm or in a garden than a frog hopping about amid the crops. Frogs and other amphibians don’t just look and sound coolâ&#128;&#148;they also feast upon the insects that feast upon the plants we eat. These bug-scarfing creatures are a free source of what is known as biological pest control.

But modern industrial agriculture doesn’t have much use for them. It leans on chemistry, not biology, to control pestsâ&#128;&#148;and in doing so, it’s probably contributing to the catastrophic global decline of amphibians, a natural ally to farmers for millennia. The irony is stark: in industrial agriculture’s zeal to wipe out pests, it is helping to wipe out those pests’ natural predators. The latest evidence: a new study showing that exposure to common pesticides at levels used in farm fields can kill frogs rapidly.

For a decade or so, it has become increasingly clear that widely used herbicides like Syngenta’s atrazine, in tiny amounts found in streams after running off from farm fields, do crazy things to the sexual development of frogs. Such “endocrine-disrupting chemicals” have what scientists call chronic, not acute, effects on amphibiansâ&#128;&#148;that is, they don’t kill them outright, but they alter them profoundlyâ&#128;&#148;even change their gender. (See Dashka Slater’s profile of a scientist who documented atrazine’s impact on frogs, earning a backlash from Syngenta.) Monsanto’s blockbuster herbicide Roundup also exerts subtle but important harm on amphibians, research suggests.

Again, this research focuses on what happens to amphibians when they encounter agricultural poisons at low levels in ponds and streams. But what happens when they are actually sprayed with chemicals in farm fields? That’s where the new study, a recent peer-reviewed paper by a group of German and Swiss scientists, comes in. They write that the phenomenon of frogs experiencing direct contact with pesticides has been little-studied, even though the scenario is quite common on the groundâ&#128;&#148;farmland has become one of the “the largest terrestrial biomes on Earth, occupying more than 40% of the land surface,” and thus represents an “essential habitat for amphibians.”

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New Study: Common Pesticides Kill Frogs on Contact

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