Home   ||   FA/RM Blog   ||   Goals   ||   Individual Rights   ||   Activism   ||   Contact FA/RM

Bloggers Monica Hughes Guy Adamson Diana Hsieh Blog Links RSS Feed RSS by E-Mail Blogroll Archives December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 September 2009

Thursday, June 25, 2009 Farm Policy Article in The Objective Standard By Monica @ 1:39 PM What's at the root of tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer-funded corporate welfare yearly, the unhealthy diet of many Americans, the demise of the family farm, and taxpayer-subsidized confined animal feeding operation (CAFO) waste? The USDA. Read all about it in my recent article published in The Objective Standard. Labels: Government Idiocy, Subsidies, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend E-mail Monica    PermaLink    0 Comments   Monday, April 27, 2009 The Price of Grass-Fed vs. Grain-Fed Beef By Monica @ 1:52 PM A few months ago I was involved in an internet discussion about the affordability (or rather, the perceived non-affordability) of grass-fed beef. This led me to investigate the costs of grass-fed beef in a bit more detail. Let's compare the costs of current grain-finished beef with mostly grass-fed beef. I'll use two fairly comparable products: Costco beef and local beef from Colorado's Best Beef Company (CBB). I say "mostly grass-fed" because the product I'm using for comparison isn't grass-finished. At CBB, the cattle are fed grains for probably the last couple of weeks of their lives. However, there's a vast difference between this beef and the feedlot beef in stores. There are no additional inputs from antibiotics or steroids. The cattle are raised on pasture, which doesn't create a waste and animal health problem as it does in feedlot practices where literally tens of thousands of animals are packed per square mile (correction: I had written "acre". I think we can all see it's physically impossible to get that many animals per acre unless we're stacking them high). From a human health perspective, the omega fatty acid ratio and conjugated linoleic acid content resulting from a short grain-finishing time may render this beef as somewhat less ideal than grass-finished beef. It's still corn-finished beef. However, the finishing time is drastically reduced under a mostly grass-fed model. This beef is much higher quality and tastes spectacular. But how much does it cost? The grass-fed beef from CBB is approximately $5.61 per pound, but this doesn't tell you very much because it doesn't allow for a direct comparison of cuts. If it's all ground beef then obviously that's twice as expensive as grocery store feedlot beef!! So, I went through the list of cuts and poundage that are received in a bulk order of 1/2 beef from Colorado's Best Beef Company. Then, I went to Costco and listed the prices per pound for all of these different cuts: T bones, ribeyes, sirloin, round roast, top round, bottom round, chuck, flank, prime rib, sirloin tip, heel of round, arm roast, rump roast, brisket, stew meat, short ribs, soup bones, and ground beef. Where Costco didn't have these cuts, I used local grocery store prices/lb. What I discovered is that if you buy the same poundage of the same cuts at Costco, you will pay 71% of the cost of the local, grass-fed beef. At Costco you'd pay $922.30. Buying the same poundage and cuts 1/2 beef in bulk from CBB you would pay $1303.70. (If you'd like to see the calculations, feel free to email me.) Is it worth it? It depends on your individual value hierarchy. Most of the cuts at Costco are USDA graded as Choice. Costco Choice ribeye is $6.89/lb while Costco Prime ribeye is $8.89/lb. Most of the cuts at Costco aren't available as Prime cuts, so I couldn't make that comparison. I would imagine most of the cuts from CBB are Prime, therefore making CBB affordable when you fairly compare quality. It's up to the individual to decide whether the environmental, animal welfare, taste, health benefits, and convenience of buying in bulk are worth the extra cost. It certainly helps to have a big freezer and some cash up front. For us this is worth it, partly because we do not eat out that often due to living in a remote area. Furthermore, I have discovered in the past year that with a little bit more effort I can make a far more delicious dish than I can get in most restaurants when I have access to quality ingredients. This local beef would be even cheaper if producers had not been hit hard by increase in corn costs due to federally mandated ethanol production: Those of us on the meat production side of agriculture have been thrown a curve ball over the last year by the federally mandated production of ethanol. The historic corn price discovery, dictated by supply and demand, has been replaced by a highly subsidized ethanol industry whose appetite for corn and ability to bid the price up has resulted in record high corn (and rest of the feed commodities) prices. These prices are only to be replaced with higher record prices every time the government opens its mouth. Here, though, I have to point something out. Historic corn prices are not driven solely by supply and demand. This is a mixed economy where prices are also driven by subsidies and USDA economists. I have to point out that even with the ethanol boondoggle, corn prices are still probably lower than they would be due to the existence of government programs that are designed to drive down the price of corn. Yes, I think this is the case even with federally-mandated and subsidized ethanol production. This is not only because the price of corn is directly lowered due to subsidies but because the subsidies encourage overproduction which further lowers the price. I'm not sure anyone can really make a decent stab at what the price of corn would be in a free market. It's an incredibly complex situation since corn has been artificially cheapened since the mid-1900s. In relation to grass feeding, I've encountered a lot of speculation online that either 1) a grass-fed model can't feed the world or that 2) it's not affordable. I'll address the first issue in a later post. As to the second issue, let's consider a commodity where subsidies are pretty much absent:lamb. All lamb is pasture-raised, whether it's in Australia, New Zealand, Chile, or the US. This means the market isn't skewed by feed costs. And what do you find? If you go to different stores you will find that all of these products are pretty competitive in price, despite the foreign products having additional transportation costs. I'd like to end by pointing out that New Zealand's farm economy is almost purely free-market -- unlike the intensely socialized farming system that exists in the United States. There are practically no farm subsidies in New Zealand, and the farm products are quite competitive even on an international basis. The cost of milk production in New Zealand is among the lowest in the world, too. All the cows in New Zealand are grass-fed. And they don't use rBGH to boost milk production, either. New Zealand cows do not see an ounce of grain, except the seed heads they might find on a farm field. How can farmers possibly afford to grass feed? Isn't grass feeding supposed to be expensive? What's my point? The grass-fed animal production model works -- when it doesn't have to unfairly complete with subsidized grains, EQIP subsidized waste disposal, and "vertical integration" of the beef industry due to USDA inspection mandates that make it all but impossible for small producers to slaughter meat affordably. All three of these drive up costs for independent producers operating on a largely grass-fed model. Grain-finished beef is never going to disappear because most Americans like the taste. However, it does not need to be as inhumane and polluting (i.e. violating of property rights) as it is. Nor does it need to be providing as low quality meat as it is providing. Unleash the free market, and we will see the success of grass-fed beef here in the United States. It's already been shown in New Zealand. Labels: Grass-fed, Meat Inspection, Subsidies E-mail Monica    PermaLink    1 Comments   Friday, March 20, 2009 Farmers Go On Strike By Monica @ 9:27 PM Not here in the US, but in Argentina. Read all about it. Seems the government there has a slightly different policy that our government here in the US. Rather than being subsidized, the farmers in Argentina are getting pretty heavily taxed. Neither of these absurd set of policies actually works. Labels: Government Idiocy, Subsidies, Taxes, Trade E-mail Monica    PermaLink    0 Comments   Monday, March 9, 2009 The Cow Tax and PeTA's Dishonesty By Monica @ 12:55 PM I've written previously on the EPA's grand scheme to tax farm animals because they emit "greenhouse gases." Even Fox News reported on this story awhile back. Both a PeTA spokesperson, and the owner of Nature's Harmony Farm in Georgia, were interviewed with regard to the "cow tax". I can't find a way to embed the video of the interview in this post, so be sure to click here and view the video yourself before reading further. OK, did you watch it? You may be surprised to hear me say that I don't disagree with most of the points that the PeTA spokesperson presents. (I wholly disagree with the philosophy that farmers need to "give back". Wouldn't it be easier to just not let them take taxpayer dollars in the first place?) There are a few minor errors, but mostly, he's correct that tens of billions of dollars are poured into factory farming yearly, and that we have a socialized factory farming system. Before I get on to my analysis of his statements, let me say that one thing I found very interesting was the PeTA spokesperson's use of certain terms to appeal to people on both sides of the political spectrum. Instead of sound reasoning, this is a trick more and more people are using to disarm their opponents, and it borders on ad hominem argumentation. The term "socialized" appeals to the conservatives. The term "factory farming" appeals to the liberals. If you use these code words, you can subconsciously get a variety of people on your side who might otherwise oppose you. Clever. The dishonesty isn't in what facts were presented. The dishonesty is in what facts that were conveniently left out. Sure, cows emit methane and alter the biodiversity of natural ecosystems, and feedlots contribute to water pollution. However, it's extremely deceptive or ignorant to argue that one is aiding the environment simply by avoiding meat, as I've described in detail before. Let's get to the criticisms. First, which factory farmers are subsidized? Let's have a look at the agricultural products that get subsidies, shall we? Let's see... it looks like roughly 15 billion of the 177 billion in farm subsidies go to livestock production, a whopping 8 percent or so. Where does the rest of the 92% of the subsidy money go? To all the other crops and the chief behemoths of the USDA food pyramid : corn and wheat. None of these crops and the carbon released from tilling the soil to produce them, nor the darling of the vegan movement -- soy -- gets a mention by PeTA. He knows that soy is about as equaly subsidized as all livestock, erodes the soil, and poisons the Gulf of Mexico. However, he'd rather not share that due to his ideological bias. The second delusion is in thinking that farming is (or was, even 50 years ago) sustainable long term without animals. I ask any vegan reading this to please supply me with an example of an ecosystem where nutrients aren't returned to the soil via primary through tertiary consumers. Without domestic animals, where would this fertilizer come from? Humans, presumably? I'm all for that, but the fact is that we're not doing it. We have divorced animal fertilizer from the farm and replaced it with nitrogen that is pulled from the air and turned into fertilizer using incredible amounts of fossil fuel. We violate those laws of nature by not returning the other nutrients to our food as well, and we cannot continue that process indefinitely. Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed. Do vegans care about soil fertility? Apparently not, or they would not suggest that healthy food can be grown without domestic animals, which they'd like to wipe from the face of the Earth. Remember, domestic animal extinction is PeTA's goal. Their goal is not just vegetarianism for everyone and the abolition of meat eating, and they are not particularly concerned about environmental quality or human health, either. While other vegans may be so deluded into thinking that agriculture is possible and sustainable without animals, PeTA is not. Their goal is ending any exploitation of animals whatsoever, including animals for any purpose in agriculture. Don't be fooled. Their goal isn't mere vegetarianism, it's veganism -- because if you want to make domestic animal species extinct that necessarily eliminates any source of non-meat animal products such as butter, milk, or eggs OR animal fertilizer. Vegans who are vegans for ideological reasons don't even eat honey because they believe they are exploiting the bees. (Obviously it goes without saying that this is a complete deviation from the evolutionary history of human foodways.) If you need some convincing that PeTA's goals are that radical, that they want to eliminate domesticated farm animals entirely and for any purpose whatsoever, here are some quotes of people from various organizations, most notably Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), with known alliances to PeTA: "We have no ethical obligation to preserve the different breeds of livestock produced through selective breeding. One generation and out. We have no problem with the extinction of domestic animals. They are creations of human selective breeding." Wayne Pacelle, Senior VP of Humane Society of the US, formerly of Friends of Animals and Fund for Animals, Animal People, May, 1993 "My goal is the abolition of all animal agriculture." JP Goodwin, employed at the Humane Society of the US, formerly at Coalition to Abolish the Fur Trade, as quoted on AR-Views, an animal rights Internet discussion group in 1996. "The theory of animal rights simply is not consistent with the theory of animal welfare... Animal rights means dramatic social changes for humans and non-humans alike; if our bourgeois values prevent us from accepting those changes, then we have no right to call ourselves advocates of animal rights." Gary Francione, The Animals' Voice, Vol. 4, No. 2 (undated), pp. 54-55. "...the animal rights movement is not concerned about species extinction. An elephant is no more or less important than a cow, just as a dolphin is no more important than a tuna...In fact, many animal rights advocates would argue that it is better for the chimpanzee to become extinct than to be exploited continually in laboratories, zoos and circuses." Barbara Biel, The Animals' Agenda, Vol 15 #3. "It's not about loving animals. It's about fighting injustice. My whole goal is for humans to have as little contact as possible with animals." Gary Yourofsky, founder of Animals Deserve Adequate Protection Today and Tomorrow (ADAPTT), now employed as PeTA's national lecturer "We are not especially 'interested in' animals. Neither of us had ever been inordinately fond of dogs, cats, or horses in the way that many people are. We didn't 'love' animals." Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: A New Ethic for Our Treatment of Animals, 2nd ed. "If that means going onto their farms, releasing their animals and burning the place to the ground, that's morally justifiable, in our opinion…There were always innocent people who got hurt somewhere along the way but it was important that those who oppressed one group of people be stopped, and we don't see the animal liberation struggle being substantially different from these [apartheid and slavery] other struggles.… A sustained campaign against a particular industry or a particular organization has the potential to be quite effective." Jerry Vlasak, in response to indictments of 11 ALF/ELF arsonists. AP, January 20, 2006. These true goals of PeTA align pretty well with such onerous schemes as the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) and the cow tax. NAIS won't really hurt factory farmers since they are the ones who have been pushing for this program for 20 years and are the only ones who will benefit. But if you can shut down family farming of animals through a cow tax or NAIS, and if you can create extinctions of certain animal breeds through NAIS, then you can eventually shut down factory farming of animals, too. The goal of the animal rights activists is the elimination of animal agriculture, not factory farms. That's why PeTA supports the cow tax, which will only possibly be afforded by those producing animals at a huge economy of scale. Don't be fooled. PeTA are a group of bald-faced liars with an obvious agenda. I've already discussed the cattle emissions issue in a previous post, so if you haven't read it, it bears mentioning. As for the issue of biodiversity, I think I'll leave that to an excellent comment from a man named MikeL in this Mark Sisson post on veganism: And finally, anyone who argues that farming soy and grains is more sustainable than, for example, huge herds of free-ranging cattle and bison, has completely forgotten—or never knew—that the prairies of the American midwest were once home to some of the richest plant diversity in the temperate latitudes. But it’s gone now, ripped away to feed our insatiable appetite for cheap and unhealthy carbohydrates. And the residues of that farming is drifting down the Mississippi, killing life at the delta. Think about that the next time you bite into a faux-meat soy burger. So my advice to vegans and vegs: dump the sanctimony and eat some meat. We’ll all be better off for it. Indeed. Labels: Bison, Buffalo, corn, Ethics, Global Warming, Grains, Heritage Varieties, Meat Myths, NAIS, Nutritional Guidelines, soy, Subsidies E-mail Monica    PermaLink    0 Comments   Sunday, March 8, 2009 Thoughts on the Environmental Effects of Carnivory and Veganism By Monica @ 5:24 PM The popular press is awash with stories these days of how meat contributes to global warming and how many people are turning to veganism to reduce their "carbon footprint". There is even a proposed EPA tax on emissions from farm animals. From Scientific American articles, change.org pieces, and statements like this from respected nutritionists: "The more rice, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and beans you eat, the trimmer and healthier you will be – and with those same food choices you will help save the Planet Earth too", environmentalists, vegans, and animal rights activists are attacking any and all methods of raising animals -- whether for meat, dairy, or any other use -- as contributing to "climate change." But is it true? Before I deal with actual truth or falsehood of such statements, I'd like to state my position on "climate change" so that I can be as transparent as possible here. First, I do believe the globe is probably warming, and that it might be happening at least partly from human activities. I honestly don't know. However, I don't believe that this in any way justifies the political "solutions" being proposed to "climate change" (cap and trade, coercive laws, etc.). I haven't actually investigated the global warming issue seriously from a scientific standpoint and don't really have time to do so right now. I used to be a dyed in the wool member of the global warming camp and have gone back and forth on the issue over the past, but the fact is that wherever the truth lies, my knowing it would make very little difference in my day to day activities, and thus, it ranks pretty low on my list of self-education priorities. If that disqualifies me in your mind from commenting on the issue of carnivory vs. veganism as it relates to "climate change", so be it. I believe peoples' actual arguments, and whether they are logical or not, are the things that we should be dealing with. Now that we have that out of the way, let's consider the issue. First, let's be honest. Vegans and vegetarians raise a number of valid points when it comes to meat production. Some of these are actual problems and some may not be problems but the facts remain: feedlots often contribute to waterway pollution, cattle release methane, and that the way in which the animals are raised (indoors, confined, unsanitary conditions, fed antibiotics as a routine measure because of the immense crowding and wrong food which both foster illness) is, by and large, inhumane. I've blogged on each of these points before, including the absurdity and wastefulness of subsidizing this inefficient method of raising animals through the EQIP program. Further, it is absolutely true that as we increase in each level of the food chain from primary producer (plants, algae) to primary consumers eating primary producers, to secondary consumers (animals that eat primary consumers), to tertiary consumers (this last category are the top predators in any ecosystem and eat both primary and secondary consumers: wild cats, dogs, humans, eagles, etc. are examples) about 90% of the energy ingested as food is lost as heat and only 10% is converted to biomass. There are some variations in those numbers, but those are the basics: lots of energy lost as heat or waste products as you go up in the food chain/food web. This all makes perfect sense from the standpoint of physics and basic physiology/metabolism. It's so well-documented in the literature that I see no reason to provide references. No one disputes that most of the energy from the fuel in the internal combustion engine is lost as heat rather than converted into mechanical power. It's the same principle in living organisms. This is the reason that in any given ecosystem, there's an immense amount of biomass of primary producers and hardly any biomass, comparatively speaking, of tertiary consumers, i.e. top predators. This is also the basis for claiming that meat contributes to global warming. After all, if you are running grass or grain through an animal before that animal food gets to a human, lots of the energy is lost as heat or waste. Waste products of respiration are CO2 and water (or CO2 and ethanol or lactic acid if you're a fermenter). One of the waste products of the bacteria in ruminants is methane. Of course, we all know that CO2 and methane are the alleged "bad actors" of "climate change." The logic of the vegan argument is that if you bypass eating the ruminants (or any other animal, for that matter) you are more efficient at converting the calories of primary production (plants) into biomass and you avoid the energy "wastage" and extra CO2 and methane production. But there are just a few problems with this very simplistic line of argumentation. Let's address them. First, the assertion that humans evolved as vegetarians, or that their most recent common ancestor was vegetarian, has been blown out of the water. Personally, I think a good vegan diet with proper supplementation and avoidance of processed food is probably head and shoulders about even the standard American diet. But that's not the point. The point is, should people have the right to eat the diet they are designed evolutionarily to eat, the diet that is in their own best interest? Or should they eat a vegan diet to "save the planet", in the words of Dr. McDougall? It's a valid question. If you believe a vegan diet is optimal, that's fine for you, but there are serious issues with the scientific basis of such an argument from an evolutionary and nutritional standpoint. And certainly such a diet shouldn't be foisted on humans everywhere for political reasons if the point of morality is to teach us how to enjoy life to its fullest (as opposed to sacrificing for someone or something else, ultimately suffering or dying sooner than necessary). Let's take the issue of energy loss. Yes, it's true that lots of food energy is lost as heat when we eat animals. However, there are more subtle points to consider. How does the caloric intake differ between vegans and carnivores or even vegans and meat-heavy omnivores? If Good Calories, Bad Calories is any indication, those with carb-heavy (read: plant-heavy) diets are driven to ingest more calories. I've certainly found this to be true in my own experience. A meat-heavy diet, at least as far as my own personal experience, results in spontaneously reduced caloric intake of as much as 800 calories daily. That's something that is never accounted for in the "carbon footprint" calculations. And honestly, what quantity of greenhouse gases are produced by grain- and legume-fed vegetarians? Beans, beans, the musical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot. Seriously, eating high-carb plant foods causes the production of more intestinal gas. I'm not sure what the chemical composition of that gas is, but the presence of the gas is something everyone who has switched from a high carb to a low carb diet, or spends a lot of time around bean-eating vegetarians, can amply attest to. Moving on. Is most of the world's land arable and suitable for crop production? It is not. I've blogged about that before. In fact, this is considered a major problem of plant biotechnologists who develop breeding programs to develop crops for less than optimal conditions. Lots of the earth's land, however, is rangeland and quite suitable for animal production. Another problem is the simplistic assumption about modern-day vs. ancient production of CO2 and methane from cattle. Actually, I'm not even sure the vegan "climate change" activists or their followers want to consider this. There are currently about 100 million head of cattle in the United States. Most of our cattle are grain-fed for at least part of their lives and grain-fed cattle produce about twice as much methane as grass-fed cows. However, they are not grain-fed their entire lives. My best estimate is that at any given point, around 25 million head are being fed this way. Estimates of the number of bison present in pre-settlement times is also as high as 100 million head, with bison being about twice as big as cows. I'm sure many people find it difficult to believe that the American continent could foster twice as much ruminant biomass as it currently does, but the fact is that the Americans plains soil was extremely fertile before modern grain- and soy-based agriculture washed much of it into the ocean, with enormous amounts of primary production (much of it underground in the form of prairie grass). I'm not sure how many head of bison were turned over yearly to predation or hunting. Today, approximately 1/4 of the national herd of cattle makes its way into the food chain yearly. But assuming that grass-fed bison produce similar amounts of methane to grass-fed cows, and that there could have been twice as much bison biomass as current cattle biomass, that means there were probably very similar amounts of methane being produced all along and that this hasn't changed much historically. This pretty much blows away the argument that we should consider cattle per se a significant problem when it comes to global warming. Finally, let's consider the darling of the environmentalist/vegan movement: soy. Let's be fair -- soy is a nitrogen fixing plant, meaning it can pull useless nitrogen gas from the air and turn it to valuable, fertilizing ammonia with the aid of bacterial endosymbionts in the root tissue. Even Thomas Jefferson recognized the value of using legume crops such as vetch to restore fertility to depleted soil. Still, soy is a plant with a shallow root system that results in soil erosion when grown in monoculture. Soy is often shipped up from South America, grown on land where rainforests once grew. Then, if the pure soybeans aren't eaten, and they usually aren't, they are processed in an extruder. Here is a picture of a soy extruder: Hint: that puppy doesn't work on solar or wind power. Now let's consider the grain-based diet that the vegans want us to go on. Any crop grown in the US today post-1950s in the era of subsidy-powered commodity agriculture requires vast amounts of ammonia fertilizer input through the Haber process. Animals could provide a much more balanced source of fertilizer, and played an important role in agriculture besides meat production prior to the 1950s. Long-term, there is simply no way to completely amend soil without farm animals if we want optimal plant (and thus, human) nutrition. These are the very animals many vegan activists would like to see eliminated to solve "climate change". Even that is absurd. Let's consider the Haber process, shall we? It is responsible for 1/4 of the world's nitrogen fixation and works by burning nitrogen and hydrogen gas through four rounds of heating to between 300-550 degrees C, to produce NH3. Hint: the fuel for the Haber process does not come from solar or wind power. OK, vegan activists for climate change. Please tell me which of the two options you think uses more fossil fuel: 1) The Haber process and the fuel required to transport the products of the Haber process to the fields? Or 2) locally raised animals depositing their dung directly on the fields, with all the necessary nutrients (not just nitrogen), as they did 50 years ago and as they still do on many family farms in the United States? I hope I have demolished the idea that you have any idea how much carnivory vs. veganism truly contributes to "climate change" or "greenhouse gas" production without doing a lot more in-depth calculation in all of the areas mentioned above. Personally, I think my locally raised real bacon is a lot more environmentally friendly than the soy-based Smart Bacon grown with Haber-produced ammonia, shipped to the US, and then processed in an extruder which uses petroleum products. Here are the ingredients in Smart Bacon: Water, soy protein isolate, wheat gluten, soybean oil, textured soy protein concentrate, textured wheat gluten, less than 2% of: natural smoke flavor, natural flavor (from vegetable sources), grill flavor (from sunflower oil), carrageenan, evaporated cane juice, paprika oleoresin (for flavor & color), potassium chloride, sesame oil, spice extractives, fermented rice flour, tapioca dextrin, citric acid, salt. Look at the amount of processing involved. Many of the substances in bold are produced or extracted through an industrial process. How much fossil fuel is used to produce "environmentally friendly" products like Smart Bacon vs. real bacon? Want to bet? Having fallen prey to "meat is bad for the environment" arguments myself in the past, it disturbs me to see these arguments advance. More and more people are adopting the idea that they will "save the planet" through veganism, often at the expense of their own health. It's fine if their choices stop with them, but ten years ago "cap and trade" would been inconceivable to most people. Today it's being offered up as an actual political "solution", and not a voluntary one. If someone had told me five years ago that the EPA would even consider taxing emissions from farm animals, I'd have laughed in your face. In light of that, ask yourself whether any of the following is truly an exaggeration: How long before our animal protein is rationed for the sake of "saving the planet"? How long after that before vegans, animal rights activists, and environmentalists seriously push to limit or forbid raising livestock in the name of protecting the environment? And how long after that before we're all forced to be vegan? In my practical experience, many of the followers of the vegan movement who do so for environmental reasons are, for whatever reason, unable to understand or investigate the science behind the claims for their action. They are simply woefully ignorant. They aren't actually evil people. But the originators of such claims (PETA and others), those who can understand science and who either knowingly start or perpetuate lies for their own ideological ends at the expense of the truth, are hopelessly corrupt. These lies need to be exposed. More than the simple truth is at stake. For some of us, our very sustenance depends on it. HT for soy extruder picture: Cheeseslave Labels: Bison, Buffalo, Ethics, Global Warming, Government Idiocy, Grass-fed, Individual Rights, Meat Myths, Pastured, Subsidies E-mail Monica    PermaLink    4 Comments   Tuesday, January 20, 2009 More Reasons to Cut Farm Subsidies By Monica @ 8:02 PM As if we didn't have enough reasons already. But here is a good article from the Cato Institute on some of the perhaps unintended effects of farm subsidies. I've already discussed some of the effects. Here are some more: » Farm subsidies damage the economy. In most industries, market prices balance supply and demand and encourage efficient production. But Congress short-circuits market mechanisms in agriculture. Farm programs cause overproduction, the overuse of marginal farmland, land price inflation and excess borrowing by farm businesses. » Farm programs are prone to fraud and scandal. The Government Accountability Office found that improper farm payments amount to as much as $500 million each year. Since 2000, the government has paid $1.3 billion in subsidies to people who own "farmland" that is not even used for farming. The government also frequently distributes disaster payments to farmers who don't need them and often didn't even ask for them. » Farm subsidies are a serious hurdle to progress on global trade agreements that could help productive U.S. exporters. Agricultural trade barriers also damage U.S. security and global stability because they hinder the ability of poor countries to achieve stronger economic growth. » Farm programs damage the environment. Subsidy programs and trade barriers draw marginal farmland into production and encourage the overuse of fertilizers. Lands that might otherwise be used for parks, forests or wetlands get locked into farm use. Florida sugar cane cultivation, for example, causes substantial damage to the Everglades, yet it thrives only because of import protections. » Some farm programs raise food prices and hurt consumers directly. Federal controls on the dairy industry raise milk prices to consumers. Controls on the sugar industry raise U.S. sugar prices to about twice the world level, pushing up consumer costs for breakfast cereals, chocolate and other food products. » If farm subsidies ended, U.S. agriculture would continue to thrive. Farms would adjust, planting different crops and diversifying their sources of income. A stronger and more innovative agriculture industry would emerge, as occurred in New Zealand after it repealed all its farm subsidies in 1984. Labels: Subsidies, Trade, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend E-mail Monica    PermaLink    0 Comments   Monday, January 19, 2009 The Bankruptcy of Ethanol By Monica @ 3:49 PM From Forbes: VeraSun Energy Corp., the nation's second largest ethanol producer, is putting seven of its biorefineries up for auction as part of a bankruptcy court financing agreement. VeraSun needs up to $12.3 million in additional funds to maintain its work force and plants in Ord and Central City in Nebraska; Albert City and Dyersville in Iowa, Woodbury, Mich., Hankinson, N.D., and Janesville, Minn., through April 30, according to a filing approved Thursday by a federal bankruptcy court in Delaware. ... The Sioux Falls, S.D.-based company owns 16 biorefineries with the total capacity to produce 1.4 billion gallons of ethanol annually, or about 13 percent of the country's total capacity. But only four - Charles City, Fort Dodge and Hartley in Iowa and Aurora in South Dakota - remain operational, with the rest idled until market conditions improve. Corn ethanol is an industry that the government is pouring billions into yearly. And all this government money isn't preventing VeraSun from going bankrupt. When you are making a product that takes more energy to create than you get out of it (thus, actually exacerbating the "problem" of CO2) it is not rocket science to figure out that it's not sustainable. The ethanol subsidy should have been eliminated in the most recent farm bill, not just cut ten percent. This is what Obama's pick for secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, wants to spend your money on. Vilsack comes from a state of Corn (Iowa), is a friend of Big Corn and Monsanto, and has so far only said that corn ethanol is a bridge to cellulosic ethanol. That's his big admission, if you can call it one, that corn ethanol isn't working. Earth to Tom, earth to Tom! Corn ethanol is not a bridge to anywhere, and it's an outrage that even one public penny is being spent on this industry. I suppose VeraSun will be asking for a bailout next, claiming like GM has that if only they could have just a teensy tiny little bit of that government bailout crack, that they will straighten their act out tomorrow. Need I say more? Labels: corn, Ethanol, Government Idiocy, Rants and Whines, Subsidies, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend E-mail Monica    PermaLink    4 Comments   Monday, January 12, 2009 A Vision of Laissez-Faire Corn Production By Monica @ 10:16 PM Kendall Justiano of The Crucible and Column has written an excellent piece on the distortions in the market caused by corn subsidies and sugar tariffs. I'll direct you to the entire post because it deserves to be read in entirety. He provides a vision of one sector of agriculture without subsidies, at least as it relates to corn. Kendall also discusses the nature of government interference in agriculture and how it differs from other industries -- and thus, makes reference to Archer Daniels Midland at the end of his post. ADM makes corn sweetener and lobbies to keep sugar price supports and tariffs in place (because sugar might replace corn sweetener in products if operating in a free market, as Kendall shows). ADM is a huge recipient of government welfare programs, which John Stossel has written about and which Dr. Eades has also commented on several times in various posts. I'll leave you with this priceless little exchange between Stossel and the chairman of Archer Daniels Midland: (Stossel) I foolishly thought I could get him to admit he was a rich guy milking the system. I thought he’d at least act embarrassed about it. Fuggeddaboutit. He was unfazed. John Stossel: Mother Jones [magazine] pictured you as a pig. You’re a pig feeding at the welfare trough. Dwayne Andreas: Why should I care? John Stossel: It doesn’t bother you? Dwayne Andreas: Not a bit. Disgusting. Orren Boyle in the flesh, folks. Labels: Agricultural Adjustment, corn, Individual Rights, Subsidies, Trade E-mail Monica    PermaLink    1 Comments   Saturday, January 3, 2009 What's Wrong With Tom Vilsack? By Monica @ 10:13 PM Lots. Tom Vilsack is Obama’s pick for Secretary of Agriculture, if you hadn’t heard. Let's start with corn. As governor of Iowa, he was named “Governor of the Year” by the Biofuel Industry Organization. If you did not know, ethanol from corn is a process that uses as much or more energy to create than the finished product generates. Only the government could dream up such a wasteful scheme. Cellulosic ethanol and biodiesel may be profitable enterprises, as opposed to corn ethanol, but if that is the case they do not need government to prop them up. This is not rocket science -- even self-described environmentalists agree that ethanol needs to stand on its own. But it would appear that it’s going to be business as usual at the USDA with Vilsack in charge, with yet more taxpayer money -- on top of the $56 billion already spent in a decade on corn! -- going to Big Corn. Monsanto, Syngenta, et. al. must be lapping this news up. Once these programs get started, they grow a life of their own. That's why we have to kill them before they are actually born. Speaking of killing bad programs before they start, let's talk about the National Animal Identification System -- NAIS. Those trying to raise healthy, free-range grass-fed meat animals might be up against more trouble under USDA headed by Vilsack. Vilsack is a supporter of NAIS, and if implemented fully, more small farmers (read: pastured, humane operations) raising animals will be put out of business by it. Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) will be allowed to register hundreds of animals under one tag while other producers will have to buy a tag for each animal. This system will not even prevent animal-borne disease. It can only track it 48 hours after an outbreak. And given that the USDA is allowing the mixing of meat from Canada, Mexico, and the USA and labeling it as such in grocery stores, it is not even going to be useful in meat recalls. NAIS needs to be a top priority under the Obama administration. It's an invention of Big Moo to give them better access to the export markets. It needs to remain a completely voluntary system and the USDA is trying hard to get this implemented for all animal owners by now trying to get it implemented state by state, requiring it for interstate commerce, and requiring it of producers in order to sell meat for the USDA's School Lunch Program. Thankfully, many are fighting hard against NAIS now and it's only been implemented in a handful of states. A recent suit brought against the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has resulted in APHIS canceling their memo requiring NAIS for interstate commerce! This is very encouraging -- it shows that when people stick up for their rights and stand up against intrusive programs before they start, they can be prevented. If you haven't voted to kill NAIS, please do so here. It's in third place for ideas about Agricultural Policy on change.org. You can also vote to legalize raw milk: that proposal is in first place in Agricultural Policy. Obama's pick for Secretary of Agriculture really doesn't look good for people who support individual rights and a more rational farm policy. In addition to wanting to prop up Big Corn and Big Moo with your money, Vilsack himself received $42,782 in farm subsidies over a seven year period. Are we ready to end the farm subsidy programs yet?!? Is this “change we can believe in?" The "change" that economically unsustainable ethanol should continue to guzzle our tax dollars, deplete our soils of vital nutrients, and create an enormous hypoxic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey? The "change" that millions of dollars should be spent on animal eartags in the name of “safety” at the expense of the small farmer? The "change" that billions of dollars should continue to be extorted from hard working Americans to give to lawmakers and billionaires? The "change" that Americans should continue to be fed a steady diet of subsidized commodity corn, wheat and soy products that lead to obesity, cancer, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes, while continuing to be told by the USDA that these foods will lead to better health? No. I saw that I could put an end to your outrages by pronouncing a single word in my mind. I pronounced it. The word was "No." John Galt's Speech, Atlas Shrugged, p. 973 (35th Anniversary Edition) Labels: "Safety", De-regulation, Government Idiocy, NAIS, Nutritional Guidelines, Rants and Whines, School Lunch Program, Subsidies, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend E-mail Monica    PermaLink    2 Comments   Subsidies for Billionaires -- and Congresspeople Too! By Monica @ 8:46 PM Well, dear readers, it’s high time I addressed the issue of farm subsidies. Hold onto your seat. First, a bit of preliminary information about subsidies. The Environmental Working Group has compiled a wonderful searchable database and some excellent statistics on the farm subsidy programs, which are a subset of the Farm Bill spending: $177.6 billion in subsidies 1995-2006 67 percent of all farmers and ranchers do not collect government subsidy payments in United States, according to USDA Among subsidy recipients, ten percent collected 74 percent of all subsidies amounting to $130.6 billion over 12 years Recipients in the top 10% averaged $36,290 in annual payments between 1995 and 2006. The bottom 80 percent of the recipients saw only $731 on average per year Now that you have an idea how the money is generally distributed, here are some more specifics about the top programs and crops that receive USDA money: Corn Subsidies $56,170,875,257 Wheat Subsidies $22,051,566,200 Cotton Subsidies $21,329,862,262 Conservation Reserve Program $20,337,282,263 (This is a euphemism for paying farmers not to farm – i.e. to pull marginal land out of production because subsidies are driving down prices which encourages overproduction.) Disaster Payments $15,114,518,393 Soybean Subsidies $14,239,702,740 Rice Subsidies $11,043,795,298 Sorghum Subsidies $4,569,912,363 Dairy Program Subsidies $3,560,356,847 Livestock Subsidies $2,908,502,988 Peanut Subsidies $2,609,286,072 Barley Subsidies $1,962,025,270 Environmental Quality Incentive Program $943,955,199 (This is a euphemism for paying farmers to clean up the factory feedlot waste that creates obnoxious odors for local residents and manure pollution sometimes hundreds of miles downstream. This program started around 1996.) Tobacco Subsidies $530,488,022 Sunflower Subsidies $461,135,751 Apple Subsidies $261,540,987 Sugar Beet Subsidies $242,064,005 Canola Subsidies $200,281,433 Oat Subsidies $198,255,252 Wool Subsidies $185,590,080 Get a load of what is missing. With the exception of apples, all fruits and vegetables are conspicuously absent. Grains are very highly subsidized. I don’t know exactly why this is, but I believe it probably stems back to Earl Butz’s desire to feed to world and mass-produce food cheaply. I need to do more research to confirm this, but it is interesting that what almost all of the subsidized items above have in common is that they store well. It’s clear with all of the above data that most farmers producing fruits and vegetables are managing to stay in business without any federal "help" whatsoever. Most people think of the farm subsidy system as helping small family farms stay afloat. Nothing could be farther from the truth: Farm subsidy payments are based on acreage, so by definition, the largest agribusinesses get the largest subsidies. Consequently, commercial farmers — who report an average income of $200,000 and net worth of nearly $2 million — now collect the majority of farm subsidies. Most farm subsidy dollars go to millionaires. … Payment limits exist — on paper. However, an entire industry of lawyers exploits loopholes, rendering these limits meaningless. Farmers can simply divide their farms into numerous separate entities and then collect subsidies for each farm. For example, The Washington Post reports that Tyler Farms in Arkansas has collected $37 million in farm subsidies since 1996 by dividing itself into 66 legally separate corporations. Other farmers evade payment limits by signing up family members, such as the Georgia farmer who reportedly collected thousands in additional subsidies by listing his two-year-old daughter as a co-farmer. It gets even sillier. Most subsidies are based on land’s historical use, even if it is no longer used for farming. So when 75 acres of Texas farmland was recently converted into a housing development, the homeowners on these $300,000-properties become eligible for annual farm subsidies for the lawn in their backyards. Residents never asked for these subsidies and have even stated that as non-farmers they do not want the government mailing them checks. It gets worse. You may be shocked to know that more than 50 billionaires received a total of more than $2 million from farm welfare programs between 2003 and 2005. The government has begun to try to curb the amount of subsidies pocketed by millionaires and billionaires. The problem is that some of the recipients are congresspeople themselves, with ten of the twelve recipients receiving up to 6 figures each in farm subsidies, pocketing a total of about $6 million over a ten year period. Do you think that the congressional recipients of this pork dole-out are likely to vote out the farm subsidy system that fattens their own paycheck? Not a chance. Get a load of this statement: "Without these programs, there are some years that we would have been in very, very dire straights," said Sen. Jon Tester, a Montana Democrat elected last year who farms 1,800 acres. Along with his wife, he received about $232,000 from 1995-2005, according to Department of Agriculture records gathered by the Environmental Working Group. Hm. I wonder if the “we” he is referring to there in "dire straits without their farm subsidies" would be he and his wife. It would also appear that there is some sneakiness involved on the part of some lawmakers in reporting this “farm” income: Members of Congress must report sources of income totaling more than $200, but most get payments through partnerships or other entities, so it can be difficult to learn which ones receive the subsidies. Recipients are searchable by name on www.ewg.org, but, for example, payments to Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., are listed under her maiden name, Lambert, at a Virginia address near Washington. Records show Lincoln and her family members collected $715,000 from 1995-2005, the most recent year complete data are available. She said she personally received less than $10,000 a year, and the subsidies ended in 2005 when her land was sold. The proposed $283 billion, five-year Senate farm bill would preserve a system that pays 84% of subsidies to the biggest 20% of the farms, according to the working group, which supports caps on farm payments. Some agribusiness companies receive millions from taxpayers each year, even with crop prices at record levels. One farmer-senator, Republican Chuck Grassley of Iowa, plans to offer an amendment that would cap payments at $250,000 annually. Grassley collected about $225,000 for his corn and soybean farm from 1995-2005. His son took in about $654,000, records show. Neither ever got $250,000 in a year. How convenient for Grassley, keeping the annual payment cap above what he and his family would receive in a given year. How generous! But I almost forgot about the billionaires: Microsoft co-founder Allen, who got $39,932 worth of subsidies; brokerage bigwig Charles Schwab, $67,498; the Walton family, at least $8,800; and banker-philanthropist Rockefeller, who received $50,023 in subsidies. Wait…it gets better! The Pritzker family — which besides Hyatt Hotels also owns Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines and commands a collective worth of at least $22 billion — took in a total of $273,461.57 in subsidies. Among their holdings: cattle and horse ranches in California and Wisconsin, along with timber interests in Louisiana, Illinois and elsewhere. Oil heir and avid outdoorsman Lee Marshall Bass, of Fort Worth, Texas, who is estimated to command a $3 billion fortune, collected nearly $250,000. Also in the upper ranks was oil-and-gas kingpin Tom Ward, who received subsidies totaling $135,710.98 for his investments in Kansas and Texas farms and feedlots. Most of the money came via wheat subsidies. Ward's estimated wealth is $1.6 billion. According to this article, Paris Hilton’s grandfather, hotel czar William Barron Hilton, got some farm subsidy money too. That means Paris Hilton may actually inherit some of your hard earned tax dollars. Ready to end the farm subsidies yet? Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., says the system works well: He and his family's farming interests received almost $2.4 million in federal payments from 1995-2005, records show. His net worth in 2005 was $1.7 million to $6.6 million, according to his financial disclosure statement. "He has firsthand experience of how this really benefits farmers," said his spokeswoman, Angela Guyadeen. Wow, he sure does! Believe it or not, it actually gets even more absurd. We’re paying dead people to farm: In July of 2007, the Government Accounting Office discovered something about the farm subsidy program. It turns out, the government was still paying farmers after they had died. And it wasn’t just a small amount. It was over a billion dollars in subsidies. Over a seven year period, the Department of Agriculture paid $1,100,000,000 in subsidies to farmers who had shuffled off this mortal coil. Of the 73 estates checked by the GAO, sixteen has received over $200,000 in subsidies, and 4 topped $500,000. The Department of Agriculture also paid $400,000 to a soybean and corn farm in Illinois after the owner had died in Florida in 1995! The farm just told the government that the owner was “actively engaged” in the day to day operations of the farm. An Indiana corporation that was owned entirely by one person never notified the government of the owner’s death in 1993 and continued to collect unspecified payments for a decade before new owners filed for farm benefits. The government made $567,000 in payments to an Alabama estate over seven years on behalf of an owner who died in 1981. Another estate continued to receive unspecified payments on behalf of a person who died in 1973 — more than three decades ago — without any investigation or review. Please refer your acquaintances, friends, and family members to this post the next time they claim that agriculture would collapse without subsidies. It’s a load of hooey. In fact, 90 percent of all farm subsidies in the United States are linked to just five crops — wheat, cotton, corn, soybeans and rice. Producers of fruits, vegetables, beef and poultry receive almost no farm subsidies and most farmers simply aren't even getting farm subsidies. Somehow, their products manage to make it to market. Thankfully, we also have a 35 year case study of a country with almost completely free market farm economics. In 1984, New Zealand swiftly eliminated farm subsidies under a newly elected labor government. Only 1% of farmers lost their farms and New Zealand’s farming industry is doing better than ever, particularly the sheep industry which was previously subsidized. The advice of the Federated Farmers of New Zealand to the farmers of America? “Get off the subsidy gravy train as soon as possible.” Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. Tom Vilsack, governor of Iowa and Obama’s new pick for Secretary of Agriculture, received subsidy payments of $42,782 from 1995 to 2006. That's approximately 1/3 of the Farm Bill, folks. Your tax dollars at work, paying lawmakers and billionaires tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, giving farm subsidies to landowners who don’t farm, paying farmers not to farm, and doling out checks to dead people. This isn’t a system that needs reform. It needs complete elimination. Especially considering that it’s been going on since 1929. Labels: Government Idiocy, Subsidies, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend E-mail Monica    PermaLink    3 Comments   Wednesday, December 31, 2008 The Problem with the Popular Face of "Food Activism" By Monica @ 9:47 AM There's been an enormous buzz in the blogosphere about Michael Pollan, who is a food journalist at UC Berkeley and has done a lot of first-hand research about the food supply. It would not be a mistake to say that he is one of the foremost, if not the foremost popular author writing about food today. He's the author of In Defense of Food, The Botany of Desire, and The Omnivore's Dilemma. Stephan of Whole Health Source recently wrote: I heard an interview of Michael Pollan yesterday on Talk of the Nation. He made some important points about nutrition that bear repeating. He's fond of saying "don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food". That doesn't mean your grandmother specifically, but anyone's grandmother, whether she was Japanese, American or African. The point is that commercial food processing has taken us away from the foods, and traditional food preparation methods, on which our bodies evolved to thrive. At this point, we don't know enough about health to design a healthy synthetic diet. Diet and health are too complex for reductionism at our current level of understanding. For that reason, any departure from natural foods and traditional food processing techniques is suspect. I agree. The recent discovery of vitamin K2 is evidence that we should resist the simplistic reductionism of nutritionists focusing only on calories and macronutrients. And while I disagree with Pollan on various matters, he has done some good first-hand research on the food supply and has made this information very accessible to the public. For that he should be applauded. Real food is increasingly under government and government-sponsored industry attack in our society. Pollan also wrote a very long piece in the New York Times entitled Farmer in Chief in which he exhorted the future president to consider the health, ethical and environmental issues surrounding government farm and nutrition policies. It's definitely worth a read and it got a great deal of attention in the farming, nutrition, and whole foods blogosphere. I don't agree with everything in that article by a long shot, but I'm going to save my (very long) critique for a future post. So what's the problem? First, Pollan has a strong focus on our botanical heritage, but I believe Pollan's proclivities toward plants when it comes to human nutrition are less rooted in science than they are in emotion and our rich neolithic food culture. Pollan is a long-time gardener and has had interests in botany his entire life. As someone who has also personally been more interested in the botanical side of things and used to teach botany, I can attest to the fact that this can create a certain bias in a person's mind. I'm not sure that's intended but it does come out in his writing. In the context of personal food choices and education about the rich co-evolutionary history of plants and humans, this isn't an issue. In fact, much of Pollan's writing on ethnobotany is delightful. But Pollan is the popular face of food activism. And when it comes to "food activism" and government policies with regard to food, this has become a huge problem. Since Pollan is so highly regarded and has such public appeal and charisma, people have been repeating his "eat mostly plant schtick" like it's going out of style. This dogma has most definitely overshadowed Pollan's defense of real foods. I see this arrogance and presumption a lot on the web, with many commenters in various internet venues claiming that people are fat and sick because they are eating too much meat. "Eat mostly plants. A little meat. Not too much. What is so hard to understand about that?" they preach. A lot of people read Pollan and end up not defending food, but attacking meat. This attitude wouldn't worry me too terribly except that there's an enormous politically motivated tendency toward vegetarianism in our society already -- with a strong basis in modern environmentalism, Malthusian ideas propagated by both environmentalists and biotech corporations, and grain-based nutritional dogma. It's pretty clear that most people without extraneous health issues need animal products in their diet as a source of EPA, DHA, vitamin B12, and fat soluble vitamins A, D, and K2 -- and who knows what else since nutrition science is definitely on the low end of the learning curve. But despite that Pollan too resists nutritional reductionism; despite Pollan's focus on our corn-based system of agriculture and the problems with HFCS and hydrogenated vegetable oils; despite Pollan's endorsement of Good Calories, Bad Calories, as "A vitally important book, destined to change the way we think about food" -- those aren't the messages that the public and the media are disseminating from Pollan's writing. The message that they are disseminating is that meat is bad. I'm not so sure this is entirely Pollan's fault rather than an effect that is combined with the result of decades of government propaganda. But even in his Farmer in Chief article, he suggests that the president and his family have a meatless day once per week. There's also little criticism of wheat being subsidized. Below are two prime examples of how the media pick up on and then selectively disseminate some of Pollan's ideas. First, this editorial in the New York Times by Nicholas Kristoff, in which he lauds Pollan's larger ideas about food and agriculture, but winds up with this little gem: We face an obesity crisis and a budget crisis, and we subsidize bacon? The implication is that obesity is caused by eating bacon. Bzzzzt. And another implication is that most of the ag money we are spending is to subsize meat. Bzzzzt. The first absurdity has been adequately dealt with elsewhere, but I feel compelled to point out that meat is not directly subsidized. The USDA's EQIP program that Kristoff criticizes, capped at $450,000 per feedlot, is to clean up manure pollution from feedlots. While it is not a valid government spending project, why doesn't Kristof point the gun at the grain and soy subsidies that are responsible for feeding animals this way -- and dumping cheap HFCS, corn oil, and soy on the market to boot? No, it's meat that takes the blame for obesity and government spending, even though meat doesn't make people fat and it is not directly subsidized. The amount of money spent on EQIP is miniscule in comparison to commodity crop subsidies, but does Kristoff criticize subsidized wheat? Of course not, because that's not where Pollan's focus is. We've all known for decades that wheat doesn't make people fat, right? And what is to criticize in corn and soy? Only the HFCS, the feeding of corn to cattle, and hydrogenated oils, Pollan's main focus in all of his writing. Here's the second media piece in the Boston Globe, which specifically discusses Pollan and speculates on what Obama's agricultural policies might look like. Here's an excerpt: Obama is the most healthy eater to enter the White House in a long time, unlike George H.W. Bush who castigated broccoli as he craved pork rinds.. Guess Derrick Z. Jackson didn't see this piece, where Michelle Obama proclaims, "We're bacon eaters." Good for her and her family... and for HW Bush. Don't expect the media to pick up on stuff like that, though. Do you see what I mean about how the media picks up on what they want to pick up on? "Plants good, meat bad." It's arrogant and ignorant. How much does Derrick Z. Jackson, the author of that article dissing pork rinds, actually know about dietary fat? Apparently, not much. Wait -- it gets better. Not too far down in the article, there's this little gem: Obama purchased peaches, pears, apples and nectarines from farmers markets on the campaign trail. Well, wonderful. It's a good thing Obama doesn't have Type II diabetes caused by a steady diet of commodity wheat, because all that modern fruit, bred for sugar and not even available 150 years ago, wouldn't help his insulin problem much. He'd be better off with the pork rinds in that case. These are just two examples of how the media get it so totally wrong with regard to nutrition, picking up on some of Pollan's ideas and selectively disseminating them, while the general public laps up this fodder like the non-thinkers they are. I couldn't say it better than Keith Norris of Theory to Practice: The frightening thing here, from my prospective, is the fact that there is so much of this that Kristof gets right — only to then tumble down the “fat is evil” rabbit hole. I can easily see a “fat tax” imposed, in the very near future, on suspect foodstuffs that the “informed government” will use as a carrot/stick (depending upon your point of view, I suppose) to wean us from the plethora of “unhealthy” foods. This tax would then be used, I’m guessing, to help support/promote the more “healthy” grain-based alternatives. ... No matter how in-vogue (and fun, I’ll have to admit) it may be, however, to bash on the government, it is really the actions of the collective citizenry that will turn the tides here. Unfortunately, I don’t have much confidence in the “collective citizenry” on this issue. For the vast majority at least, it seems as if health, fitness and diet (and independent research in these areas of concern) is just not worth their time. We are living collectively (and “paying” via ever-increasing health care premiums) with the ramifications of such apathy now. One thing I’ve never suffered well is willful ignorance; being forced to financially support the ramifications of another’s willful ignorance is enough to push me over the edge. Indeed. Keith and I are not the only ones to pick up on some of the perhaps unintended political effects of Pollan's writings. The Weston A Price Foundation released an excellent open letter to Michael Pollan two years ago, encouraging him to pursue a more objective approach to human diet. Here's an excerpt: What's so disappointing about your conclusions is the fact that after revealing the dark side of the industrial food system, and blasting the vegetarian argument out of the water, you end up dishing up the food industry's tired old anti-saturated fat, plant-based-diet propaganda. What you've done is present your health-conscious yuppie readers with the prudent diet dressed up in designer clothes and introduced your foodie readers to food Puritanism in a silk gown. She looks lovely and slim, she's popular with all the right people, but the shocking secret that emerges on the honeymoon is her frigidity; the girl in green turns out to be barren, unable to provide us with the thing we most desire—a healthy productive life. In retrospect, your inadequate prescription is not surprising because you actually show your hand right at the beginning of The Omnivore's Dilemma, where you tell us that foie gras and triple crème cheese are "demonstrably toxic substances" and that bread and pasta are "two of the most wholesome and uncontroversial foods known to man." You describe yourself as an investigative journalist, so we are justified in asking: have you found any science proving that foie gras and triple crème cheese are "demonstrably toxic?" These delicious traditional foods are not demonstrably toxic to the French, so why would they be toxic for us? And have you interviewed even one person among the millions suffering from carb addiction or celiac disease, or stood in the bread aisle and read the labels on what passes today for bread, the stuff made from plants that we are supposed to eat six to eleven servings of every day? Because you are such a persuasive writer, people believe you when you say that saturated fat is bad, that lean meat is healthier than fatty meat, and that vegetarians are healthier than meat eaters. You repeat these ideologies, these "shared but unexamined assumptions" as you call them, without examining them at all, passing on to your readers many of the malicious dietary falsehoods put together by the industry you claim to dissect. Your endorsement of the McGovern Committee recommendations—at least of its original recommendations to cut back on meat and dairy products—is truly perplexing given that a quick search of the internet reveals the former senator's marriage to corporate agriculture, a system that would much rather we consumed plants, especially processed plants, than animal foods. ... The omnivore's dilemma is not in fact a dilemma at all, but a construct of false nutritional doctrine. We need investigative journalists like you to help us clear away the misinformation. Please accept our invitation to a meal. I hope Pollan is getting the message and will start disseminating it. I'm still skeptical but somewhat hopeful that he will, since he's now read Good Calories, Bad Calories. His food activist followers, many of whom want to cram grains, vegetables and fruits down all our throats and deprive us all of meat through shifted subsidies, coercive laws, and government nutritional edicts, could certainly stand to hear it from him. Labels: Conventional Wisdom, Grains, Meat Myths, Modern Ignorance, Nutritional Guidelines, Subsidies E-mail Monica    PermaLink    11 Comments   Vitamin D, Vitamin K2, and the Power of Government Influence By Monica @ 7:37 AM I point you to four posts by Richard Nikoley of Free the Animal that just might revolutionize the way you think about the sun, and perhaps even change the course of your life: Epidemic Influenza and Vitamin D Vitamin D and Type I Diabetes Sunscreen Vitamin D Deficiency and Cancer Another great site with hours of reading on Vitamin D is the Vitamin D Council. After reading these you'll truly believe fact is stranger than fiction when it comes to the government's public service announcements. Dr. Eades has advised a much more rational approach toward sunscreen as well. In short, it may be very wise for you to revisit your relationship with the sun considering humans' evolutionary relationship with it. This doesn't mean you should sit around all day in the sun and get a severe sunburn. It means you need to understand the difference between UVA and UVB, which one is correlated to melanoma, which one is correlated to the prevention of all diseases of civilization, and which rays the sunscreens are actually blocking. In a timely and related post, Stephan of Whole Health Source charts the consumption of butter and margarine with heart disease mortality over the past 100 years. Real butter also contains vitamins D and K2, both fat-soluble vitamins. The entire post with charts should not be missed, but I can't help posting a good portion of the prose here: Was the shift from butter to margarine involved in the CHD epidemic? We can't make any firm conclusions from these data, because they're purely correlations. But there are nevertheless mechanisms that support a protective role for butter, and a detrimental one for margarine. Butter from pastured cows is one of the richest known sources of vitamin K2. Vitamin K2 plays a central role in protecting against arterial calcification, which is an integral part of arterial plaque and the best single predictor of cardiovascular death risk. In the early 20th century, butter was typically from pastured cows. (There's very old, as in 70 year old, evidence for this and its correlation to seasonal mortality from heart disease in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Mortality is highest in the winter when both of these vitamins, D and K2, are low in humans.) Stephan continues: Margarine is a major source of trans fat. Trans fat is typically found in vegetable oil that has been hydrogenated, rendering it solid at room temperature. Hydrogenation is a chemical reaction that is truly disgusting. It involves heat, oil, hydrogen gas and a metal catalyst. I hope you give a wide berth to any food that says "hydrogenated" anywhere in the ingredients. Some modern margarine is supposedly free of trans fats, but in the U.S., less than 0.5 grams per serving can be rounded down so the nutrition label is not a reliable guide. Only by looking at the ingredients can you be sure that the oils haven't been hydrogenated. Even if they aren't, I still don't recommend margarine, which is an industrially processed pseudo-food. One of the strongest explanations of CHD is the oxidized LDL hypothesis. The idea is that LDL lipoprotein particles ("LDL cholesterol") become oxidized and stick to the vessel walls, creating an inflammatory cascade that results in plaque formation.... Several things influence the amount of oxidized LDL in the blood, including the total amount of LDL in the blood, the antioxidant content of the particle, the polyunsaturated fat content of LDL (more PUFA = more oxidation), and the size of the LDL particles. Small LDL is considered more easily oxidized than large LDL. Small LDL is also associated with elevated CHD mortality. Trans fat shrinks your LDL compared to butter. In my opinion, it's likely that both the decrease in butter consumption and the increase in trans fat consumption contributed to the massive incidence of CHD seen in the U.S. and other industrial nations today. I think it's worth noting that France has the highest per-capita dairy fat consumption of any industrial nation, along with a comparatively low intake of hydrogenated fat, and also has the second-lowest rate of CHD, behind Japan. Funny, I thought it was the socialized healthcare system of the Japanese and the French that increased their lifespans (joking). Connect the dots. Diet is king. Not only do the French get lots of K2 and D in their dairy, which is raised more on grass than grain, but the Japanese have an intake of a different form of K2 in natto. The reasons for the health of foreigners with socialized medical systems has never been a secret to those "in the know" about nutrition. There is no paradox, let alone a "French paradox." Imagine how long they could live with a free market healthcare system that provided them with the best technology in a timely manner. Imagine how long Americans could live with our mixed economy healthcare system if it hadn't been for us getting a steady stream of nutritional information from the government for the past 40 years. Our government has been pumping out faulty nutritional advice to medical professional organizations and the public for decades, and it's worked hand in glove with farm policy. Our agricultural system is largely based on subsidized commodity wheat, corn and soy (and canola and cotton), thanks in part to the government's "public service" when it comes to nutrition, coupled with USDA farm "support" programs. The corn and soy don't even feed humans outside of providing some corn oil, high fructose corn syrup, soy oil, and some limited soy protein for tofu and baby formulas. Instead it is almost all fed to animals (with the exception of wheat. There goes the "feeding the world" myth -- are you seeing yet how this all fits together?). Is it any wonder that the government has been telling people to eat more vegetable oils (cottonseed, corn, soy, canola) and soy for "heart health"? They have to sell the stuff somehow. I've given you just a snippet of the reams of information available on the internet when it comes to these two vitamins and their crucial role in human health. Experts on vitamin D agree that the RDA for vitamin D (400 IU daily) is ten times too low and should be up around 5000 IU in wintertime -- echoing what Weston Price only told us in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration 70 years ago. Vitamin K2 is all but unknown to the medical community. As for the government propaganda that led to the ubiquity of those "heart healthy" margarines in our stores -- devoid of either fat soluble vitamin but full of trans fats originally promoted by George McGovern's dietary committee and Center for Science in the Public Interest, you can read all about the history here. The best I can say is that it's made butter in the stores dirt cheap, which is good for me. The grass-fed butter that Stephan talks about is only available from a farmer whose cows are fed on grass in summertime (I get this cream in the summertime and make butter with it). This butter is not even available in a store anymore because all the butter is made from grain-fed cows by an industrial process. It would be the highest source of vitamin K2 for those not eating fish eggs. It's nothing short of revolting that the government nutritional propaganda that has been fed to Americans in a steady diet stream of "public service" announcements has been shortening peoples' lifespans by the millions. Even worse, the end of such advice is nowhere in sight. And to think some folks want to nationalize it. Labels: Conventional Wisdom, Government Idiocy, Nutritional Guidelines, Subsidies, Vitamin D, Vitamin K2 E-mail Monica    PermaLink    3 Comments   Saturday, December 27, 2008 King Corn By Monica @ 12:56 PM I took out King Corn from my local library a couple of weeks ago at the suggestion of a friend. It is a documentary about the prevalence of corn in our society. The two twenty-something filmmakers move to Iowa for a year to document their life as it revolved around the planting of one acre of corn and to follow where that one acre of corn actually goes. King Corn is not a fraud like Supersize Me, but it’s not as informative as it could have been. On top of that, it has an annoying Napoleon Dynamite feel to it. What I mean by that is that there are long stretches of silence without any narration or musical score. Often these stretches are taking up by footage of the wind across a cornfield, or a bunch of people sitting or standing in cornfields staring at one another. Despite the propensity for more and more films to use this technique, I do not share the belief that this silence coupled with a lack of information is intellectually enlightening. However, if you don’t know anything about the agriculture of corn in this country, I’d recommend King Corn so long as you have a computer or book available to do something else while you’re waiting for the interesting points. If you know something about American agriculture already, you probably won’t learn too much. However, I’ll sum up the salient points of King Corn. First, we grow an incredible amount of corn in this country. Production capability has increased roughly 8-fold in 100 years, mostly through breeding to produce crowd-tolerant strains. There are some interesting shots of the filmmakers sliding down mountains of corn in the Midwest as one would slide down a snow-covered hill on a sled. These are piled up higher than salt and sand for road service in the northeast. It is quite an amazing spectacle! Because corn is a C4 plant, it fixes a higher ratio of C13 into sugar, as opposed to C3 plants. (I wasn’t really paying great attention at this point so I don’t know if they specifically explained this -- I just happen to know this as a previous instructor of botany.) Isotopic studies show that most Americans are made largely out of corn. If you were born after 1970, chances are you’ve never tasted grass-fed beef, and the carbon molecules in your body prove that a lot of your food (whether beef, corn oil, fructose syrup, etc.) is coming from corn if you eat a typical American diet. What corn is not made into cattle feed, ethanol, or oil is made into high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) – this is only about 5% of the corn although HFCS is in almost every sweetened item in the US. That gives you an idea of the immense amount of corn the United States produces. Because the filmmakers are not allowed into factories to view this process, they research the process and start from pure dent corn, going through the chemical extraction process of making HFCS. It’s mildly interesting but the process is performed too swiftly to figure out what all the reagents are. This is another example of why this film is less informative than it could have been. It’s important to realize that the vast majority of the corn is actually not eaten directly by humans except as food additives such as HFCS and corn oil. Roughly 55% of it is fed straight to cattle. Practically all beef in the United States is now finished on corn, in the feedlot. That grain-finishing time has greatly expanded in recent decades to up to a third of a cow’s life, not just the last few weeks as it used to be. This is a complete anomaly in the history of animal husbandry. Grain-finishing makes cattle sick and can quarter a cow’s lifespan. It also believed to have created at least one acid-resistant strain of E. coli not seen before 1980: E. coli O157:H7. Cows aren’t supposed to eat corn and soy: they are evolutionarily designed to eat grass. When they are fed grain it creates an acidotic state in their bodies, which makes them susceptible to bacterial infections, which then necessitates the routine feeding of antibiotics to all cattle in feedlots. What the film doesn’t tell you is that this also alters the omega fatty acid profile of the meat and dramatically increases the ratio of omega 6 to omega 3 fatty acids. The film also features Loren Cordain bashing the amount of saturated fat in hamburger (sigh). Personally I think this is not a concern and the problems with the “saturated fat is bad” argument may be found here, here, and here. Seeing how cattle are raised in feedlots was one of the more interesting points of the film. Not only are there resulting issues of animal welfare, but of pollution as well. The larger feedlots cause tremendous pollution in the form of enormous manure lagoons that pollute water supplies and create obnoxious odors for local residents, which many residents are now suing over. Because of the pollution created by feedlots (which are really exacerbated by corn subsidies, as enormous feedlots did not exist in such high quantities before subsidies), the USDA has had to create “conservation incentives” like EQIP to get these factories to clean up their waste, to the tune of $450,000 per feedlot. To call something like this a conservation incentive is a fraud. Would we call it a “conservation” incentive to get a city to clean up an enormous holding tank of human waste that spills over into rivers? This is another example of how a proper understanding of property rights (and a privatization of our waterways), rather than a government prop-up of a certain industry as “economically necessary”, would go a long way toward improving environmental quality. I’m not bashing meat. I love meat. But it’s a plain fact that most people in the cattle industry do not like this method of raising cattle. The older ones were around 40 years ago doing things differently and they know that what they are doing is intensely inhumane and polluting. However, the fact is that government subsidization of the corn itself and the pollution cleanup process have made the feedlot method cheaper than it otherwise would be. (I'm not convinced that such long grain-finishing times or feedlots would necessarily disappear under the free market but I do believe they'd largely return to some minimum level and a smaller scale.) A key point in the film is that it’s very difficult to make money as a Midwestern farmer, and that the subsidies have spurred a great deal of consolidation due to the lower prices for corn caused by the subsidies. The cost of the special herbicide-resistant seed and other inputs (fertilizer and herbicides) is very high. Farmers would simply not make money without the government subsidies. (Of course, if subsidies were immediately eliminated the prices would eventually adjust because the government wouldn’t be promoting overproduction with subsidies that drive down the price of corn.) Many farmers now rent their land rather than owning it. The filmmakers don’t discuss this too much but it’s obvious to me that there is less incentive for farmers to care about the long-term effects of what they are doing to the land when they are just renting it. Like the people raising cattle, the people producing corn aren’t all exactly proud of the product they are producing. However, they also know that’s what the government wants them to plant. Frankly, with its long periods of silence, roughly half the movie is devoid of any truly informational content. I think much more could have been revealed, including the rotation of soy with corn, how such intensive agriculture has led to soil fertility problems and the USDA’s CRP program, and the manufacture and effect of corn and soy products (including vegetable oils) on human health. The filmmakers spent a good deal of time on corn subsidies, high fructose corn syrup, and the feeding of corn to cattle, which are all worthy of attention but are the not the entire picture when it comes to corn. There are other aspects of corn production that deserve attention: the absurdity of subsidizing ethanol production, the pollution of waterways from soil runoff and the resulting soil fertility problems necessitating more expensive inputs, the displacement of third world farmers by the dumping of cheap grains onto the international market, and the deleterious effect of corn oil (not just HFCS) on the health of Americans. Others have pointed out the absurdity of subsidies for biofuels, and I couldn’t agree more. It makes no sense to sink money into something that is economically infeasible and make it artificially cheaper at taxpayer expense, not to mention that it’s a violation of an individual’s right to his or her own income. But those that agree that we shouldn’t be subsidizing ethanol agree that we shouldn’t be subsidizing any of the commodity crops, either – which means they would almost certainly be more expensive in a free market, as would the foods (corn oil, HFCS, meat, and all corn-, wheat-, and soy-based foods) made from them. The lack of emphasis in the film on these more subtle points is probably evidence itself of how influenced even the filmmakers are by media and other government information. There are simply many other indictments against corn that should also have been included to fill the sheer amount of silence in the film. The film concludes with the filmmakers deciding to plant their one acre the following year with wheat instead of corn, and a really visually interesting overhead shot of the two playing catch in a square acre plot of wheat grown within acres upon acres of corn. The take-home point is assumed to be that they decided to use their acre to grow something healthier. Ironically, what they may not realize is that it is not corn that is really directly king in the American diet, but wheat. King Wheat. Wheat, too, is also subsidized and is probably just as bad for human health as corn. Same for soy. Now that we have a film entitled King Corn, someone should perhaps make films entitled King Wheat and King Soy. Maybe the makers of these hypothetical films could conclude their works by sticking a cow on a square acre of grass that is surrounded by a wheatfield or a soyfield. To conclude, this little film was somewhat flimsily researched. The filmmakers lifted most of their ideas straight from Michael Pollan, who is an ardent critic of the corn-based system of agriculture. But I don’t want to be too hard on this little film because most of the public probably doesn’t know this information – and they should. But enough of my opinions. Has anyone else seen this film? If so, what did you think of it? Labels: corn, Government Idiocy, Grains, Nutritional Guidelines, Subsidies, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend E-mail Monica    PermaLink    6 Comments   Monday, December 15, 2008 FDR's Farm Policies By Monica @ 8:13 AM Those of you who've read my short history of the USDA know that the agency expanded greatly under FDR's administration. I also make brief reference in the same document to FDR's bungled attempts to reduce crop and animal production, but here are some more details from Ari Armstrong's FreeColorado, in which Armstrong writes about Burton Folsom Jr.'s New Deal or Raw Deal? Here's the basic story. Hoover with his Smoot-Hawley Tarriff destroyed American agricultural exports. Then, with the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, Roosevelt paid farmers with tax dollars to stop growing crops on some of their land, artificially propped up the prices of various (politically selected) agricultural products, and unleashed thousands of bureaucrats to enforce the Byzantine controls. The bureaucrats were, of course, paid to reduce agricultural output and increase prices through taxes on food processors that were passed along to consumers. And yet some people continue to praise FDR as an enlightened, "progressive" president, despite the profound harm of his stunningly stupid programs. Folsom notes on page 67, "In 1933, the U.S. was plowing under 10 million acres of cotton and killing 6 million piglets; in 1935, the U.S. was importing 36 million (bales) of cotton and 2 million pounds of ham and bacon." What is less well known is that we are still subsidizing agricultural overproduction, though in somewhat different ways now. This overproduction is ironically spurred (as it was in the decades preceding the FDR era) by the some of the USDA's own research, so that we are paying for both the creation of the problem and the "solution" to the problem. How do we pay for this overproduction? Through "commodity crop" subsidization and storage of surplus crops, which cost the taxpayer roughly $10 billion yearly from 2002-2006. Under various conservation incentives, Farm Bill money is also used to pay farmers to not plant crops periodically in order to enhance soil fertility because of past policies that encouraged the overproduction and encouraged unwise agricultural practices in the first place. Farmers have let fields lie fallow for thousands of years as a wise agricultural practice to enhance soil fertility. Now we are paying farmers to do it because the government has, for decades, paid farmers to produce too much. A prime example of how government intervention spurs unwise agricultural policies is the subsidization of corn for ethanol. Instead of planting corn on beans, farmers will for the first time ever plant corn on corn, which would be against their long term interest in a truly free market. Planting legumes such as beans results in higher soil nitrogen due to nitrogen fixation. Now that farmers will not be replenishing soil nitrogen through this ancient method, more inputs will be needed which will further raise the price of corn. This will almost undoubtedly lead to the need for more "conservation incentives" to "solve" the soil fertility problems caused by the ethanol subsidies in the first place. Today, approximately 95%-96% of the USDA annual Farm Bill Budget goes toward programs not devised until the FDR era, approximately 70 years after the inception of the USDA. These are the School Lunch Program, Food Stamps, and the various "farm support" programs described above. Labels: Government Idiocy, Subsidies, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend E-mail Monica    PermaLink    0 Comments