local

 Yes, that was the actual topic of a panel I attended last night

 Get ready for a foodie fight at the Museum of the City of New York this Friday, March 25th, as an all-star panel of food writers, restaurateurs, and farmers battle over the efficacy of the locavore and sustainability movements. At the table are Peter Hoffman, chef and owner of the farm-to-table, locavore proselytizing, beekeeping Savoy restaurant in SoHo; Gabrielle Langholtz, editor of Edible Manhattan; James E. McWilliams, author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly; David Owen, author of Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability; and Jennifer Small, owner and farmer of the Flying Pigs Farm. The group will debate the environmental and social costs and benefits of revamping the city's food culture in the contemporary age.
 

All during the panel all I could think about is that I hope these people aren't influencing policy much because most of them don't know that much about economics. At least most of them were willing to admit that, but James E. McWilliams continued to be a weasel. I mentioned him first on my Locavore-Animal Rights Cold War post. Since then, The Atlantic has given him a platform to spew his ill-informed opinions about food (he's a "food historian"). He plays himself as an advocate of low carbon footprint food and says he opposes the locavore movement because it's inefficient in that direction. In the beginning of the panel he says "any imported plant food will have a lower impact than any local animal product." Uh huh. How do you know that? He admitted later in the panel that there is really no way to know the truth of a food's environmental impact. But many economic analyses show that local meat has a lower environmental impact than most imported plant foods, including that done in Meat: A Benign Extravagance. 

The truth is that McWilliams doesn't give a damn about environmental impact. All he cares about is that people don't use animals at all. During the panel he said his utopist vision was highly industrialized biotech fruit and vegetable farms. 

Any time anyone put forth evidence that local meat was a good food, he had something dumb to say, like that "well if everyone can't do it it's not a good model." That's a weird argument that I've written about before. It's almost like his knowledge of economics comes from Sim City. But at least in Sim City he might have learned that when a resource becomes truly scarce the price increases, thus forestalling his magic fantasy dystopia where everyone is destroying the world to have pastured pork. 

Also in his fantasy land is the idea that without CAFOs or farm subsidies our meat would cost $35 a lb. New Zealand got rid of its subsidies and now has pastured meat that's cheap enough to be exported. 

Animal rights activists hate the local food movement because it threatens its propaganda. PETA and its ilk rely on videos of animals being beaten in industrial operations and simplified "meat is bad for the environment" stats. The local food movement comes along and let's people see that its animals are treated well. It lets locavores into the slaughter process, showing them that while it's not fun, it's not like in those videos. 

Then it comes up to light that animal rights activists aren't angry about meat because it's bad for the environment or because the animals are beaten. They are against animals being used by humans in any way, whether for life-saving medical research or for milk. They don't like having to admit it because it reveals their philosophy for its ultimate anti-humanism. And it reveals that they aren't really interested in the true environmental impact of meat unless it supports their philosophy. 

Out of Seattle comes this excellent story about a butcher claiming to sell local organic grassfed meat...but when asked they are unwilling to reveal their sources. Just goes to show that you need to do the research. Apparently marketing genius have realized that food with a story sells...whether the story is true or not.

I think there is lots of room for a trustworthy certification service. I've personally had good experiences with Animal Welfare Approved, which is a group actually devoted to making animal production better instead of eliminating it like other sneaky groups.

Some restaurants have moved away from listing every farm they source from, citing it as trivial and cluttering. But when you are buying your own meat, it's not trivial. Ask "is it possible to visit this farm?" If the answer is no, be suspicious.

Brings me to two new NYC CSAs that are looking for members:

High Point Farms Meat CSA
Grass fed beef, pasture raised pork, free range chicken, free range eggs and local cheese from farms in the Finger Lakes of upstate New York are now available in the City.

High Point Farms, LLC starts a NEW meat, egg or cheese CSA in June to be picked up at Jimmy's 43 in the East Village and at Sweet Pea CSA in Brooklyn Heights.  Animals are humanely raised, without the use of growth hormones or antibiotics, on intensively managed pastures.  All meat is processed USDA and no added nitrates or MSG is used.  Many of the Cheeses are from RAW milk.

For more information about the farm or how to join go to:

Jimmy's 43 CSA  (East Village)
Sweet Pea CSA (Brooklyn Heights)

Grace CSA
Farm Fresh Vegetables at a great price
Convenient Pickup:
Saturdays at Grace Church
139th and Edgecombe Ave.
Flexible Payment Options Available

Receive a Variety of Great Fresh Foods each Week like salad greens, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, green beans, zucchini, kale, potatoes, squash, collard greens, basil, cilantro

There will also be the opportunity to order meat from Veritas Farm, which is a great opportunity since it's not sold anywhere else in the NYC metro area. I have personally been to this farm and it's top-notch! All their animals are happily out on pasture all the time- they are shaggy highland cattle, so they can handle it! I blogged about my visit here.

To find out more, contact: gracechurchcsa@yahoo.com
Visit on the web: http://www.gracecsa.com

I hate to write too much about food policy, but the truth is that if you are eating paleo, the government is a major threat to the freedom to fill your plate with grassfed local meat. While the government buys loads of the crappiest factory farmed meat and grains devoid of nutrition and feeds them to the nation's unwitting children in public schools, it sees no problem in regulations that disproportionately affect farmers that get no government help whatsoever. The local food movement is small and many farmers already struggle getting their meat to market. What is the government doing to help? Oh, it's making more regulations that are easy for Conagra to comply with, but would probably put your local butcher out of business. Great.

The sad thing is that local small scale meat producers have never been involved in a major impact and if they were the government wouldn't need to spend a year figuring out where the poisoning came from. Direct purchasing is 100% tracable.

What can you do? 

The major threats these days are a HACCP proposal, which is a food safety protocol obviously built for Kraft and not for your local farmer, and the Food Safety Modernization Act, a dystopia of paperwork and burdensome rules.

How has local food, particularly meat, impacted your life? What regulatory challenges have you witnessed your local farmers, butchers, and processors dealing with? Why should the government treat small producers differently? 

Read about the HACCP plan at Fair Food Fight and write a comment to: DraftValidationGuideComments@fsis.usda.gov

My comment: 

I urge the USDA to consider the impact this HACCP system would have on the growing movement of small butchers, meat farmers, and farmer's markets. Many people now look to this small, but burgeoning, market to purchase specialty meat products valued for their contribution to the local economy, taste, and health properties connected to grass finishing. When I wrote my honors thesis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on the impact of HACCP on small local food businesses, I couldn't find any studies that analyzed the impact. Despite their small size, they are part of the business landscape and deserve to be informed on the details of this proposal so they may participate in commenting. Furthermore, there is strong evidence that regulations such as this disproportionately impact such businesses. This impact deserves to be further studied as we weigh the costs and benefits of further HACCP implementation. Not doing a full economic impact analysis would be unconscionable.

I would also like to see recognition of the obvious fact that small local food businesses are fundamentally different in their risks and challenges compared to large agribusiness, the source of most large outbreaks this proposal was created to respond to. Such a recognition would allow for specific regulations that are appropriate for small business, further study on less capital intensive HACCP programs, and exemptions that take into account the unique consumer-producer relationship inherent in direct purchasing. Small local food businesses, regardless of their risks, are more traceable and therefore more accountable to the consumer. There is no year long manhunt for the cause of outbreaks when it comes to direct purchasing.

Read up on the Food Safety "Modernization" Act and call your senators. Farm and Ranch Freedom has some great information on how to take action.

We don't want empty farmers markets and boarded up butchers- we want the right to direct purchase food that makes us and the local economy healthy.

Last night I heard Joel Salatin speak in NYC. I was kind of surprising that he would speak on Easter Sunday. I grew up in Georgia and Easter was a big holiday there, but pretty much everything was open here and lots of people turned out for his lecture.

I only saw the first one, which was about whether or not the local food movement is elitist. Salatin mainly talked about how regulations hinder the development of new local food businesses and make food more expensive. I was familiar with this argument because I did my senior thesis on regulatory obstacles to a healthier local food system and Salatin's book Everything I Want to Do is Illegal was one of my starting points.

You can read his original essay on the subject here. What does this have to do with paleo? Well, the main food regulations affect are animal foods, though produce is becoming more controlled thanks to the spinach, peanut, and tomato food poisoning outbreaks that killed and sickened Americans.

The standard regulatory argument is that risk is risk and every farm should be regulated the same way. I personally disagree with that. Part of the rational behind regulations is that people are victims because they can't make a rational consumption decision due to the structure of our food economy. People wouldn't purchase things made unsafely if they could see the production, but they can't and it's pretty unrealistic to expect most people to closely keep tabs on food factories 1000 miles away. Of course a private certifying agency probably could, but it's equally unrealistic for libertarians to expect the US to drop all food regulations.

Even if you are not libertarian, it's clear that most regulations on food producers are unfair. I went to a big agricultural school sponsored by the government. Much of the technology used on farms is developed by such universities and most of it is geared towards large farms. That's an unfair advantage. So when regulations are written they typical require capital that would be unrealistic for a small farm to own or use. Also, there is rent seeking behavior- manufacturers of this expensive equipment often are the loudest advocates for more regulations. Things are changing- there is a foundation around here that is working on small scale mobile slaughterhouses, but they are facing an uphill battle. The mobile slaughterhouse has to have a separate trailer with an office and bathroom for the USDA inspector. They can't just use the normal bathroom in the farm office, regulations stipulate the inspector has to have their own.

Another subsidy is that large feedlot operations are pretty much allowed to pollute. I don't see why they should be allowed to sully steams they don't own. Small farmers often take great care of their land and the environment in general. Many factory operations also employ illegal workers and the government turns a blind eye, while small farmers struggle with the challenge of having legal workers, which is more than just paying minimum wage, it's often also paying worker's comp and dealing with some draconian state employment laws.

Contrasting with shoppers in the grocery store who really would have a hard time really knowing where their food comes from, people who purchase directly are able to talk to the farmer and often able to visit and work on the farm.

The consequences for all these regulations are stressed farmers who have to haul their cattle hundreds of miles to the nearest USDA slaughterhouse and more expensive meat. One of the reasons poultry tends to be cheaper is that there is an exemption that allows small farmers to slaughter on-farm . Why chickens slaughtered on farm are safe but goat aren't never struck me as logical. The safety of an animal to eat has more to do with the skill of the butcher than the magic of a USDA inspector. I'd certainly rather have animals killed by my own butcher that I know.

Either way, read the book, it's great and will help you understand why small farmers have such a tough time. Salatin also addressed the global agriculture problem. He mentioned how large companies like Monsanto who often claim to be the savior of the third world often don't acknowledge that the green revolution is often the cause of the problems in the first place. He mentioned how the old Thai system was diverse and grew rice alongside fish and vegetables. Replacing this system with rice monoculture created the vitamin deficiencies that the GMO golden rice is supposed to cure.

Another factor is that contrary to popular opinion, small sustainable farmers aren't Luddites. There have been massive increases in the efficiency of many sustainable methods like composting in the past 50 years. Such methods are more sustainable not just from an ecological perspective, but from an economic perspective. In unstable third world countries introducing methods that require imported seeds, pesticides, machines, and oil just isn't appropriate.

Salatin also talked about the choice aspect of the matter. I don't make much money myself, but in the past I had to be on all sorts of expensive medication. Now that I eat a better diet, I don't need those pills and inhalers, which unlike grassfed beef, just masked the symptoms and did nothing to nourish or heal me. Joel Salatin mentioned how tests done at the local ag school showed high levels of CLA, a fat that shows strong anti-cancer properties, and DHA, which is the most prized of the omega-3 fatty acids that promote good health in general.

He said it's a shame that libertarians, free marketers, and conservatives have so often been reactionary against healthy eating, but the tide is turning. I agree. While paleo dieters come in all stripes, a growing segment is people traditionally associated with the right.