Eat With Your Head

To blog yet another Slate article, here’s a case for why farm workers would rather work at big, industrial farms rather than the small family farms we romanticize on our trips to the farmer’s market.

The main point is, big farms have more money, so they can afford to hire workers for longer periods of time and provide health insurance.

Ideally, I’d like to see all farmworkers (and actually, everyone) have health coverage, which is too expensive for small farms. So sure, if you have more money, you have more resources to fairly compensate employees and ensure a strong workforce.

Slate is all about articles that turn conventional liberal wisdom on its head, and it’s worth noting that not everything about small farms is sweet and good,  and everything about big farms evil and wrong… though I would argue that working for a large farm is probably not exactly a luxury job…or we wouldn’t be so  dependent on undocumented immigrants to pick our crops.

Credit: Culturewaves.es

Coca-Cola is coming out with a mini can of coke, 7.5 ounces and 90 calories per can, a number prominently displayed on the can’s new design.

Slate’s William Saletan, clearly irked, compares the new coke can to the tobacco industry’s marketing of light cigarettes.

He lays out  how smaller coke bottles can lead to even greater consumption of calories and “that coke sparkle” — just as light cigarettes often led to higher consumption of tobacco and nicotine.

Of course, I share Saletan’s cynicism, although it made me wonder what size coke cans used to be, before  food companies caught on to the fact that selling bigger portions meant consumers would buy and eat more,  not cut back. I know the cans were smaller, though I can’t find any information on how much smaller, just yet.

Marketing ploy it may be, but perhaps it’s also a sign of a growing trend of moderation? Even if that moderation comes in a can of astoundingly high levels of sugar.

Personally, I usually avoid drinking soda but sometimes I get a craving that nothing but a glass of soda can ease. So this is a good option for those of us who don’t want to feel deprived but do want to moderate our consumption of soda.

On a side note, I came across this tidbit in my attempt to research coke can sizes — Coca-Cola reduced the size of its cans in Hong Kong (they are now aligned with can sizes in Europe) in response to rising aluminum costs.

Our taxpayer dollars help food advertising to citizens of other countries.  Personally, I think it’s pretty arrogant of the USDA to believe it can help companies like McDonald’s and Tyson Foods practice capitalism.

According to Jonathan Rauch, McDonald’s received $465,000 through the Poultry and Egg Council to promote chicken mcnuggets abroad. This figure comes from Government’s End: Why Washington Stopped Working in which Rauch argues that interest groups (like the Poultry and Egg Council) choke the federal government into inaction.

It has a benign-sounding name  (the Market Access Program), and it makes no secret of its effort to help promote “brands.”

It’s fine for companies to promote their products, but why is the American public called to help them out? How does paying for  M&M/Mars advertisements  serve us?

And  why do billion-dollar corporations need these subsidies that, to them, amount to pocket change? And if we’re so set on channeling government funds to sell food to people abroad rather than feed homeless people here, why not direct it all instead of just some to smaller food companies, to foster competition?

There’s lots of upsetting things about this, but here’s one more:  There doesn’t seem to be an adequate amount of reporting on this. Rauch quotes NPR and the Fresno Bee, and I came across this article in a google search. It’s easy to see why there hasn’t been an outcry from a program working this quietly.

…Seriously.

Surprise! Organic farming is not a silver bullet, and may even be more harmful than conventional farming. So explores this article from the New Scientist. Organic farming can have harmful impacts, too, leading to effects such as soil erosion.

Of course, any action anyone takes has an environmental impact.  But it’s difficult to imagine that organic farms cause environmental destruction comparable to conventional farming — think massive amounts of pesticides, nitrates, using genetically modified organisms, and so on.

Still, with so few farms organic (2 0r 3 percent) I do agree with the assertion that simply certifying more farms as organic is the solution to protecting our planet while also feeding the world.

Forgot to add that we connected with the family farmers in Pennsylvania through WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities for Organic Farmers.) We had fun daydreaming about which country to go to and wwoof next.

I’m 9 months wiser (cringe) and more ready than ever to get back in the blogging game. I have a great food adventure to kick things off.

Last week I worked the land. That’s right, with my wonderful friend Georgia, who counts among her many great qualities the ability to humor me, I spent a week working at an organic family farm in rural Pennsylvania.

Tomatos as they were meant to look!

Other than the usual weeding and harvesting, we helped prepare the garden for next year, which primarily involves killing weeds.  Rather than spray soil with harmful chemicals to kill weeds, we simply covered the weeds with wet newspapers, then topped the area with topsoil and compost. This kills the grass and prepares a suitable soil bed for farming.

Details are important: The couple who ran the farm took the time to call the newspaper companies to make sure they were using soy ink that would be safe to leach into the soil.

Me and glorious basil bounty

Back view of the farm

No major life lessons to share (aw, shucks.) But the experience definitely inspired me to take up gardening. And it reminded me of what a great thing it is to eat what you grow.

Credit: Drinknerd.

Half food. Half fun little toy. All good. This week I salute swedish fish, which I like to consume while reading magazines or watching a movie.  I think it’s the wax that makes them so delicious. Mmm!

Something that will take me a lifetime to understand — While they produce junk for international consumption, companies like Kraft and General Mills reserve their the use of chemical food dyes to Americans only:

Similarly, in the U.S., McDonald’s strawberry sundaes are colored with Red 40 but—amazing as it might sound—real strawberries in the U.K.

Fact: This bottle of coke from Indonesia has more real stuff in it than what you're drinking.

Also ever notice how Coca-cola is made with real sugar in other countries? What is it about us that doesn’t make us good enough for the real thing?

Wired has a super cool, elaborately designed feature on the future of food, including fun graphs on the dairy industry, world eating habits and how information technology can yield more effective farming practices. Less cool for me is this blind faith in genetically modified crops as the solution.

GM crops can pose many problems. They can contaminate other types of crops, for example. And with some companies patenting certain GM crops, they can lead to even more commercialization of food than is already occurring.

I think before we throw our hands in the air and our money into the lab, we should get some hope and ideas from stories like this one, which found an organic farm in Africa to not only “increase crop yields” but restore the health of the soil on which the food was grown.