Yet another window into the industrial manufacturing system we call “food.”

I guess we’ll know if things are really bad when we start raising chickens for meat and eggs. Do other people out there also see little bits of the economy falling apart? What’s happening out there?

I love this holiday. Even though I already screwed it up this morning by dashing to the grocery store for Cream of Wheat.

Even so, I like the idea of noticing, just for a day, how much stuff we habitually buy, and how we go about acquiring it. The buying habit is so incredibly reflexive, so interwoven into our existence that it’s hard to even see it. It’s as if we’re fish in the ocean asked to notice the water. It’s all around us. It defines everything about us. (Queue Obi Wan Kenobi – “The Force surrounds, binds us together…”) We just whip out a credit card or cash for whatever we want, and away we go.

I didn’t even pause as I went out the door to buy the cream of wheat.

Contrast this with the salad I made for Thanksgiving dinner. I used greens from a local greenhouse, sold through our local coop (buying again!), red cabbage from our garden picked earlier this fall, and carrots and beets that I dug out of the ground on the day of the event. It took a fair amount of attention to put the salad together and to decide what to do with my available ingredients, and a fair amount of work earlier in the season to make sure that the ingredients were on hand.

There’s a lot of back story in a carrot or a beet that you’ve dug out of the garden: the beet seeds that didn’t germinate, and the second planting it necessitated; the grasshoppers that ate down the carrot tops and the screening we laid over the cabbage when the grasshoppers started punching holes in their leaves as well; the watering and the weeding; the fencing to keep out the rabbits… at the end of all that, when you go out into the November chill, pull back the insulating leaves and mulch, and dig out a carrot, there’s a certain satisfaction that accrues. Everything about getting the carrot was deliberate.

There’s also a backstory on a box of Cream of Wheat… but I have no idea what it is; it’s pretty well masked. The box is supposed to exist on a shelf, and where it came from or how it got to be there is irrelevant. All I’m supposed to think about, as a consumer, is whether it’s waiting for me when I want it. The convenience is the beginning and end of the story. And that’s pretty much what a highly functional consumer society does: makes things so convenient that you don’t have to think about the buying process at all. Just swagger in, grab the box, throw down money, and satisfy whatever urge twitches within you.

So, I’m interested in Buy Nothing Day, not just because it’s a very brief pause in my cravings for a new computer, or a bouncy ball seat for my office or a new set of speakers, but also because it focuses my attention on how quickly and easily I reach for my wallet to satisfy my needs and wants, and by extension, how many things are passing into my life without my even noticing.

For a few minutes, the buying process is deliberate, rather than reflexive.

Happy Buy Nothing Day!

Just another story from our industrialized food chain. I’d like to see a warning label on all supermarket foods:

“This food product contains unknown quantities of unknown substances. In fact, even though this may look like chicken or beef or spinach, we actually have no idea if it actually is any of these things. We have no idea what else it may contain, and we have no idea if it will kill you. Enjoy.”

Enter, once again, Environmental Working Group. I like these folks because they’re data-oriented. They gather information, and make it available to consumers so that we can make more educated decisions about what we stick into our bodies. In this case, they’ve got a handy wallet card that tells you which fruits and veggies are loaded with pesticides.

The Shopper’s Guide was developed by Environmental Working Group (EWG), based on the results of nearly 43,000 tests for pesticides on produce by the Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration between 2000 and 2004. EWG’s computer analysis found that consumers could cut their pesticide exposure by almost 90 percent by avoiding the most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least contaminated instead.

Eating the 12 most contaminated fruits and vegetables will expose a person to about 15 pesticides a day, on average. Eating the 12 least contaminated will expose a person to fewer than two pesticides a day.

In my mind, this is cool for several reasons:

1) Buying organic is still painfully expensive, so it’s nice to know where you can get the most bang for your organic buck. If you’re on a budget (or you’re a tightwad like me), you should spend more for the organic lettuce, but not worry about breaking the bank for organic broccoli.

2) Information like this allows us to make rational buying decisions, and (not to put too fine a point on it) it allows us to punish bad actors in the agricultural industry. Without this information, a faceless set of supply chain links gets to decide how many and what kinds of pesticides you put in your body, and you don’t get a vote. This way, you can start influencing their behavior, using the only language they really understand: profits. Don’t buy their pesticide-laden products, and they’ll figure out how to provide a safer alternative.

3) This leads to my final bit about EWG and consumer information in general. The thing I hate about the free-market let-capitalism-run-rampant crowd is that they continually downplay the aspect of economic theory that demands a transparent market in order to produce rational economic outcomes.

If information is obscured, then the markets themselves are distorted. I just want strawberries. I can’t see the pesticide load on them, so I don’t know that I’m getting strawberries plus a special gift dose of chemical residue. So my demand for strawberries at a certain price point (insert captain of industry here, mouthing off about how consumers want strawberries for the cheapest price possible) will always be completely misguided, unless I know everything that I’m getting.

Even with this info, I may *still* decide to buy inexpensive pesticide-laden fruits and veggies. But if I know how many pesticides I’m getting (and in the future it would be nice if we better understood how pesticides affect our health and our children’s health), then I really am making an informed buying decision. I may be crazy or reckless, but at least I’m informed.

Viva la free market.

Technically, the democracy thing means that the general populace has a strong say in their local/regional/national governance. And when it was first created, it seems like it must have been pretty okay. When the only things you really needed to legislate about were things like going to war and collecting taxes or building a road, the issues and the impacts were probably clear enough to provide a decent debate and a relatively fair democratic resolution (Yes, yes, sure there are caveats but still, bear with me here).

But highly complex industrialized societies have so many issues that the government must oversee and which are so complex that whatever opinions the general mass of people may have, they are probably either poorly informed or misinformed or left out of the loop entirely. Also, in many cases, a government policy about an issue may have such a localized effect that the few who are impacted cannot muster an effective voice (read: enough votes) to protest or alter a policy being passed at the national level.

This is true in cases like the EPA being explicitly prevented from regulating frac’ing fluids under the Clean Water Act. This is a situatin where where the implications are complex, and the affected areas lack political clout (Who really gives a damn about the Piceance Basin or the San Juan Basin or Sublette County? Not nearly enough people. In fact, unless you follow western natural gas drilling issues, the chances are that you haven’t even heard of the locations or the jargon I cite. Here’s an article from High Country News about the topic and about various problems inside the EPA. (Full Disclosure: I work at HCN, in addition to writing sf).

Democracy is for those who show up. The problem is that in many cases only the most informed and most interested will show up to deal with arcana of natural gas frac’ing fluids — ie the folks who stand to make money. By the time the rest of us know about the situation — and can muster an effective voice — it’s too late. Which brings me, by roundabout way, to the GMO topic again. Here’s the link to the classy folks at Science Creative Quarterly. The whole article on GMO’s is worth a close read, but here’s the quote that jumped out at me:

In the case of GM plants, the engineered trait can easily escape out of the company’s control through a variety of mechanism such as seeds inadvertently spreading out in neighbouring fields or through cross-pollination with non-GM plants of the same species or not. This creates the potential for numerous liability issues. For instance, the wide use of transgenic canola in western Canada has made it practically impossible for organic farmers to propose certified GM-free canola. The market losses resulting form this are estimated to $100,000 to $200,000 a year, without taking into account potential growth of the market resulting from growing consumer concerns about GM food [8]. In this respect, two organic farmers had filed a lawsuit on the behalf of all Saskatchewan certified organic farmers against the biotech giants Monsanto and Aventis for the damage caused by the release of transgenic canola. In the same manner, the European Union had recently banned Canadian honey from its imports because of the inability of the producers to guarantee that it does not contain pollen from GM plants not yet approved in Europe [8]. (emphasis my own)

So, you have a company like Monsanto, that either avoids or guides government regulation for their advantage, and by the time anyone else (for example you, the consumer) find out about the issue, it’s already moot because the seedstock has already spread everywhere.

Monsanto gets a vote; you don’t.

Dr. Katherine Miller (who happens to be teaching a course this semester on sci-fi and science, how cool is that?) just pointed me to the Monsanto vs Schmeiser case, in which a farmer was sued by Monsanto for re-planting Roundup Ready seeds. The farmer took the case to the Canadian supreme court… and lost. I wasn’t aware of it at the time that I wrote “The Calorie Man” but it fits into my overall jaundiced sense of the world.

The most interesting part of it to me, (other than the fact that Monsanto has a snitch-on-the-IP-stealing-farmer hotline) comes from this Cornell Cooperative Extension website, which comes down strongly on the side of Monsanto’s intellectual property right. Their stance (and the court’s) is that Percy Schmeiser had no right to selectively glean seeds from the crops that were growing on his property.

“In this case, Mr. Schmeiser cultivated glyphosate resistant canola plants. His 1998 canola crop was mostly glyphosate resistant, and it came from seed that Mr. Schmeiser had saved from his own fields and the adjacent road allowances in 1997. Although the Trial Judge did not find that Mr. Schmeiser played any part initially in causing those glyphosate resistant canola plants to grow in 1997, the Trial Judge found as a fact, on the basis of ample evidence, that Mr. Schmeiser knew or should have known that those plants were glyphosate resistant when he saved their seeds in 1997 and planted those seeds the following year. It was the cultivation, harvest and sale of the 1998 crop in those circumstances that made Mr. Schmeiser vulnerable to Monsanto’s infringement claim.” [section 56 and 57 in document below; emphasis in original]

This process of a farmer selecting from his/her own crop, and saving the best for next year’s crop (in Schmeiser’s case the glyphosate resistant aka Roundup Ready canola seed ) is exactly what friends of mine do when they run their garlic farm. The little bulbs get sold, the biggest, juiciest, nicest ones get saved for next year’s planting, to improve the overall stock. Schmeiser did it with Roundup Ready seeds. The upshot seems to be that he cannot legally selectively glean seeds from his crop.

As genetically modified crops continue to contaminate non-GMO farms, the potential legal liability to farmers seems set to increase if they participate in anything as transgressive as — God forbid — replanting the seedstock from their land.

Science Creative Quarterly has a nifty roundup (har!) on the topic, as well.