https://vimeo.com/173969073
Our food choices are deeply connected to climate change. Food will play a critical role in the next frontier of our efforts to solve the environmental crisis.
Unbroken Ground, a compelling new film by Chris Malloy that explores four areas of agriculture that aim to change our relationship to the land and oceans.
You buy organic eggs for any number of reasons, probably related to not wanting to support factory farms that mistreat chickens, pollute the environment and produce eggs that are nutritionally inferior.
Unfortunately, not all organic eggs are created equal. You may be surprised to learn that most of the retail grocery chain store-brand “organic” eggs actually come from huge factory farm-type operations that routinely violate USDA National Organic Program (NOP) rules.
We’re talking about brands like Whole Foods 365 Organic; Trader Joe’s; Aldi’s Simply Nature; Sprouts Market; Wegmans; Target’s Simply Balanced—brands that stores claim as their “own” even though they don’t actually produce them
In our alert this week, we target some of the retail grocery “organic” private-label store brands that are produced for stores by one of the three worst industrial-scale “organic” producers (and violators of USDA organic standards) in the country: Cal-Maine Foods, Rose Acre Farms and Herbruck’s.
How do these companies get away with running fake “organic” egg operations?
In theory, USDA standards for organic eggs dictate that hens should have access to the outdoors. But as this 2015 report by the Cornucopia Institute explains, those standards are unclear and thus open to interpretation. The standards are also largely unenforced. According to the report (p. 39):
Not a single industrial-scale egg producer has come under investigation by the USDA for violating the standards; on the contrary, industrial-scale producers apparently felt shielded from legal action soon after the organic standards went into effect in 2002.
We would ask you to hound the Big Three fake organic egg producers—but we know they won’t care what you think, as long as stores like Kroger and Target and Safeway and others keep buying up the eggs and slapping their own labels on them.
The only way to make the organic egg industry honest is to get retailers, including the big retail grocery chains like Publix and Giant Eagle and Costco, to stop sourcing their eggs from industrial-scale producers like Cal-Maine Foods, Rose Acre Farms and Herbruck’s. And the only way to do that, is to stop buying the store brands until they switch.
Read the Cornucopia Institute report on the egg industry
Good eggs and bad eggs—check out the Cornucopia organic egg scorecard
More at Yes! magazine..
The scientists investigating this soil-health connection are a varied bunch—botanists, agronomists, ecologists, geneticists, immunologists, microbiologists—and collectively they are giving us new reasons to care about the places where our food is grown.
For example, using DNA sequencing technology, agronomists at Washington State University have recently established that soil teeming with a wide diversity of life (especially bacteria, fungi, and nematodes) is more likely to produce nutrient-dense food. Of course, this makes sense when you understand that it is the cooperation between bacteria, fungi, and plants’ roots (collectively referred to as the rhizosphere) that is responsible for transferring carbon and nutrients from the soil to the plant—and eventually to our plates.
Given this nutrient flow from soil microbes to us, how can we boost and diversify life in the soil? Studies consistently show that ecological farming consistently produces a greater microbial biomass and diversity than conventional farming. Ecological farming (or eco-farming, as my farmer friends call it) includes many systems (biodynamic, regenerative, permaculture, full-cycle, etc.) that share core holistic tenets: protecting topsoil with cover crops and minimal plowing, rotating crops, conserving water, limiting the use of chemicals (synthetic or natural), and recycling all animal and vegetable waste back into the land. Much of this research supports what traditional farmers around the world have long known to be true: the more ecologically we farm, the more nutrients we harvest.
Read the rest at Yes! magazine
In certain situations, Virginia and Pennsylvania continue to allow the land application of organic waste to be nitrogen-based, guaranteeing a massive over-application of both nitrogen and phosphorus and proving that agricultural economic concerns continue to trump concerns about water quality.
Pollution is an externality and its real cost is never accounted for. In Virginia, dairy manure is applied assuming that 35 percent of the nitrogen is available to the next crop because it takes time for microbes to decompose the organic material in the waste and release the nutrients for plant uptake.
What happens to the other 65 percent of the nitrogen? Unless nitrogen fertilizers are considerably reduced for subsequent crops — which is not required and rarely done — much of the excess nitrogen is pollution. It is easy to understand why animal waste — poultry litter, sewage sludge and manure — accounts for half of all agricultural nutrient pollution, or a little more than a quarter of Bay nutrient pollution because less than half of the disposed nitrogen and phosphorus ends up in the crop.
Read the rest..
http://www.bayjournal.com/article/agricultural_pollution_is_the_price_we_pay_for_cheaper_food
Agricultural pollution is the price we pay for cheaper food was originally published on Rural Madison
![11951923_896248013801598_6893196901041960876_n[1]](https://i0.wp.com/ediblearia.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/11951923_896248013801598_6893196901041960876_n1.jpg?resize=604%2C248&ssl=1)
Do we want what we grow and what we eat to be determined by a few giant corporations whose first and foremost agenda is profit before people and planetary well-being?
Imagine a world where small farmers are respected as experts in the processes of nature and are honored as stewards of our arable land.
What about a world where farmers are no longer replaced by massive machines force-feeding toxic chemicals into vast monocultures of GMO seeds?
The film is important because Vandana Shiva articulately and scientifically presents the alternative: Ecological agriculture that restores biodiversity, organic seed freedom, healthy soil, fresh water and clean air.
http://kck.st/1N9AOkN
How did the willful daughter of a Himalayan forest conservator become the world’s most powerful opponent of Monsanto? The Seeds of Vandana Shiva, a feature-length documentary, presents the remarkable life story of the Gandhian eco-activist and agro-ecologist, Vandana Shiva. A classic David versus Goliath tale, the film shows how Vandana, a brilliant scientist, became Monsanto’s worst nightmare and a rock star of the international sustainable food movement.
Every day in America, as we consume whatever food we can access and afford, the system that supplies our sustenance is engaged in its own form of consumption. It feasts on human toil, commodifed animals, natural resources, and our own bodies. Food, one of the foundations of life, has become a hub of suffering and struggle.
Surveying the landscape of food, we find a long menu of problems, from farm closures to climate change. Corporate-patented genetically modified organisms (GMOs) threaten farmers, food democracy, and biodiversity. Honeybees, life-giving pollinators central to our food supply, are in mass decline from pesticides and other factors. In the United States and worldwide, hunger and malnutrition remain rampant—affecting nearly one billion people globally, and at least forty-five million Americans—even as United Nations data show we have more than enough food to feed everyone on the planet.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other U.S.-based regulatory bodies have created rules for how much glyphosate is allowed in drinking water, and these rules are based on the assumption that the toxin isn’t bio-accumulative. Glyphosate is water soluble, so it’s been assumed that if you eat a peach with glyphosate on or in it, then within a few days your body will expel the toxin and everything is peachy keen. However, the Moms Across America testing found “high” glyphosate levels in three out of 10 breast milk samples submitted. This discovery questions the assumption that glyphosate is not bio-accumulative, and it points to the idea that this toxic chemical is indeed building up in our bodies faster than it can be expelled.
On March 20 2015 the World Health Organisation’s cancer agency IARC declared that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen. IARC reached its decision based on the view of 17 top cancer experts from 11 countries, who met to assess the carcinogenicity of 5 pesticides.
Get informed, get tested, and protect yourself!
Over 80% of genetically modified (GM) crops grown worldwide are engineered to tolerate being sprayed with glyphosate herbicides. GM glyphosate-tolerant crops have led to a 239 million kilogram (527 million pound) increase in herbicide use in the US between 1996 and 2011, compared with the amount that would have been used if the same acres had been planted to non-GM crops. People and animals that eat GM glyphosate-tolerant crops are eating potentially high levels of Roundup residues.
Over 80% of genetically modified (GM) crops grown worldwide are engineered to tolerate being sprayed with glyphosate herbicides,1 the best known being Roundup. The herbicide kills all plant life in the field apart from the crop. These crops are known as glyphosate-tolerant or “Roundup Ready” (RR) crops.
The idea behind such crops was to simplify weed control for farmers. The farmer could douse the entire field with glyphosate herbicide, killing all weeds without killing the crop.
But this is not the way things turned out. Weeds have quickly become resistant to glyphosate herbicide through a process called selection pressure, in which only those weeds that tolerate the herbicide survive to pass on their genes. The resulting epidemic of glyphosate-resistant “superweeds” has caused huge problems for farmers in countries where glyphosate-tolerant crops are widely planted.
By Bob Benenson and Jim Slama, FamilyFarmed
Chicago on Monday hosted the annual James Beard Foundation culinary awards ceremony for the first time, and Rick Bayless — one of the city’s most decorated and highest profile chefs — was frequently on the stage as one of the event’s co-chairmen.
He has a long-running public television show (Mexico: One Plate at a Time), won the Bravo network’s Top Chef Masters competition in 2009, and has written several cookbooks, including More Mexican Everyday, which was just released on April 27.Famed for popularizing regional Mexican cuisine in the city at his Frontera Grill and Topolobampo restaurants, Bayless won his first James Beard award — Best Chef Midwest — at the organization’s inaugural ceremony in 1991, and his most recent this year for Best Podcast (The Feed, which he co-hosts with Chicago food critic Steve Dolinsky). In between, he received James Beard medallions as National Chef of the Year in 1995 and Humanitarian of the Year in 1998, and Frontera Grill received the organization’s Outstanding Restaurant award in 2007.
Yet it is Bayless’ role as a pioneer in helping establish a market for local, sustainably produced — and delicious — food in the Chicago region that, to advocates of the Good Food movement, is one of his greatest lifetime achievements.
An alarming new study, accepted for publication in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology last month, indicates that glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide due to its widespread use in genetically engineered agriculture, is capable of driving estrogen receptor mediated breast cancer cell proliferation within the infinitesimal parts per trillion concentration range.
The study, titled, “Glyphosate induces human breast cancer cells growth via estrogen receptors,” compared the effect of glyphosate on hormone-dependent and hormone-independent breast cancer cell lines, finding that glyphosate stimulates hormone-dependent cancer cell lines in what the study authors describe as “low and environmentally relevant concentrations.”
The Pi Day of the century, 3.14/15 is only a little over a week away. For a time now Pi Day has been all about fun and of course pie, but with the way in recent years, science and even reality itself have come more and more under attack, I’m thinking maybe this year it’s time for Pi Day to emerge as something more than just fun.
For so much of our history, the people of our country and the world have benefited greatly from the science-based reality that has shaped America’s future. Science may be based on numbers, but science’s actual value is in its humanity. It’s beyond doubt that through science and the honest representation of reality our lives have become safer, healthier and happier.
Yet today the very science that has done so much to reduce suffering in our lives is now under attack. From the climate, to vaccines, to Wisconsin’s own Governor Walker’s belief that there are more votes in denying evolution than there are in embracing it, clearly somewhere something has gone very wrong. There is more than enough blame to go all around for how we got here, but maybe this is one of those times that where we are is not nearly as important as where we need to be.
Maybe rather than a debate of our differences, what we need is a celebration of what we share. At Penzeys we think Pi Day could grow into just the holiday we need. There really is no time to lose to get on to celebrating the truth of science-based reality and the math behind it. And there is also no time better than now to get back to celebrating the kindness, compassion and the nurturing nature of our shared humanity that has always been behind the very best that science has brought to our lives.
In Pi, the number is all the value and beauty and wonder that is at the heart of the reality science holds. In the gift of a good slice of pie, the desert is all the kindness and compassion that our shared humanity encompasses. Pi Day really is ready to become so much more. And could there be a better day to relaunch Pi Day as the holiday we truly need than 3.14/15; the Pi Day of the Century?
So we are reaching out to our customers for help. We need your stories and a recipe or two. We already have good stories in the works for living with climate change, the value of vaccines, evolution, and the psychology/brain chemistry of why as humans we are so resistant to seeing the certainty of climate change.
Where we still really need your help is in finding an economist or two to speak to why our deficit spending has left our economy and our humanity in so much better shape than what Europe is facing today. And we could also use one more person with the knowledge to speak to the monetary cost and the human cost of sending to prison people who simply need treatment instead.
For recipes we are flexible. Pies are great but not necessary. Maybe you have another baked good you like to share. Or possibly you have a way you like to make some other circular item: a sliced carrot recipe, scallops are always popular, or even a beet salad that’s an old family tradition would do the trick. We really are flexible.
The important thing is if you have the science, or the numbers, or the knowledge that is needed for good policy making in the fields of economics or restorative justice please actually contact us. Don’t wait for someone else to do it. Just email a phone number where we can reach you and I will have one of our friendly writers give you a call.
It’s time to get off the sidelines. We can’t let science and all the goodness it can bring to our lives be a victim of our cultural wars. I don’t mean to be overly dramatic, but the future really is at stake here. With your help 3.14/15 could be the turning point the world so very much needs.
We realize we are looking for a needle in a haystack here, and on short notice. If you know someone who fits what we are looking for, please forward this email to them, or better yet, give them a call.
Thanks,
Bill Penzey
bill@penzeys.com
Rainforests across Southeast Asia are being destroyed every day to make way for massive palm oil plantations, where workers, even children, are trapped in modern slavery to cultivate the vegetable oil. The clearing of these rainforests and peatlands are driving many species like the orangutan and Sumatran tiger to the brink of extinction, while also polluting the Earth’s atmosphere by releasing gigatons of greenhouse gases.
“PepsiCo has contributed $1,716,300 to oppose the passage of California Proposition 37, which would mandate the disclosure of genetically modified crops used in the production of California food products.”
Each year, PepsiCo buys 427,500 tonnes of palm oil. Given how high profile the Doritos Super Bowl campaign is, we’re using this opportunity to let consumers around the world know about PepsiCo’s irresponsible palm oil sourcing policy. there’s never been a better time to spread the message and make friends, family and colleagues aware of PepsiCo’s practices.
please sign the petition to PepsiCo
The State Corporation Commission’s latest attack on clean energy makes clear just how out of touch this body, charged with regulating electric utilities, is with the people of Virginia and the reality of climate change (“Power customers to see bill refund,” Nov. 27 news story).
In approving a standby charge, a tax on the sun, the SCC believes AEP’s claim that citizens who put solar panels on their homes are somehow shortchanging the rest of us.
This position could not be further from the truth, but it is consistent with the SCC’s recent attack on the EPA’s Clean Power Plan to reduce climate-changing carbon pollution by encouraging investments in efficiency, wind and solar.
When businesses and homeowners install solar panels, they actually save the rest of us money by deferring the need for AEP to invest in new power plants.
Sadly, Commissioners Mark Christie, Judith Jagdmann and James Dimitri care more about protecting utilities’ monopoly on electricity sales than about Virginians or the climate.
GLEN BESA
Virginia Director
Sierra Club
RICHMOND
Taxing the Sun was originally published on Rural Madison
According to a late-breaking story in The Recorder (the newspaper of record for Bath and Highland counties), Houston-based Spectra Energy Corp has dropped their plans to run a fracked gas pipeline from the Marcellus Shale gas fields in West Virginia, passing through Fauquier, Rappahannock, Culpeper, Madison, Orange on its $4 billion, 427 mile route to a Duke processing plant in North Carolina.
“We will continue to evaluate opportunities in the region which could include the study corridor in your area, and should there be developments, we will keep you informed,” Spectra spokesman Arthur Diestel said
Rural Madison has accordingly suspended its online petition drive and public meeting, which had been scheduled for September 10th. We will keep you apprised of any further developments.
Thank you for your support!
Spectra suspends pipeline proposal was originally published on Rural Madison