Do You Know About Bioregional Eating?

Eating bioregionally is gaining in popularity. Here's what you need to know, including how it differs from the locavore moment.

Growing local has its merits, but a growing movement suggests perhaps we need to let the region dictate what we grow locally. (Photo: Arina P Habich/Shutterstock)

There's a growing trend in sustainable food that sort of fine tunes locavorism. Sourcing from within bioregions is the one of the big food trends for 2016, according to Forbes, and although eating bioregionally has a lot in common with locavorism, it's not the same. What are bioregions and how can paying attention to them help us eat and live more sustainably? Here's a primer.

What are Bioregions?

A bioregion is a "geographical area with a unique combination of plants, animals, geology, climate and water features." When it comes to growing and raising food, each bioregion will have foods that it can naturally sustain and foods that it cannot.

Bioregional Eating vs. Locavorism

I have neighbors here in New Jersey who have a lemon tree in their house. They are avid vegetable gardeners and grow seasonally in both their backyard and a plot in a community garden. They certainly do their part to support the locavore movement. That lemon tree is something completely different, though. The climate where we live doesn't support citrus, so the tree is purely for fun. The number of lemons the tree produces may never equal or surpass the amount of money it costs to buy and sustain the tree, and the resources used to make sure it thrives are considerable.

I mention this not to put down my neighbors. In fact, I would love a lemon tree in my home. It would be fun to pick a fresh lemon each time I needed one, but I've established that my enthusiasm for growing my own food doesn't match my enthusiasm for eating it. So I mention this as an example of how growing locally isn't always sustainable.

Food that comes straight from your backyard has been hailed by many as the holy grail of sustainable eating for about a decade now. It's the ideal that resonated with me when I began my personal blog about eating local in the South Jersey/Philadelphia region. What I've come to learn along the way, though, is that eating sustainably is much more complicated than buying everything I possibly can from within a 100-mile radius.

Tomatoes grown in a hot house during every season may be local, but the practice isn't necessarily in keeping with bioregionalism. (Photo: Tree of Life/Shutterstock)

As with the lemon tree example, just because it can be grown locally doesn't mean it should be grown locally, especially when you take sustainability into consideration. My friends' lemon tree barely makes a dent, but large-scale production of foods that a bioregion doesn't naturally support can make a big dent in un-sustainability. Take for instance, energy-intensive hot houses that grow tomatoes out of season that are sold within the region. Are the tomatoes local? Yes. Are they sustainable? It gets more complicated then, doesn't it? They may (or may not) be more sustainable than a tomato grown in a warm region and shipped across country. Both methods of obtaining a tomato in the winter months in a place where they won't grow naturally use a lot of energy.

The concept of eating bioregionally seems to fine tune locavorism. Eating a locally grown hot house tomato in February is not eating bioregionally; eating a farm- or garden-grown tomato in July is. To truly eat bioregionally, we should forgo all fresh tomatoes once they're out of season.

Bioregionalism Beyond Food

This concept is easy to grasp when it comes to food, but it goes beyond that.

Your food bioregion may contain several towns, more than one state, and even more than one country. Part of bioregionalism is the idea of basing our political borders on nature. When you do that, you can see how it could get complicated fast. Instead of several different local, state or even national governments existing within one bioregion, there would be one political government within its natural borders. If we arranged "political structures around ecological regions and the cultures within them," argues Rachael Stoeve in Yes magazine, there would be sustainability in many areas of life.

There's a whole other blog post to write about that aspect, but it's interesting to look at the food concept with that broader scope. The decisions made about the resources within a bioregion would be more likely to benefit the environment and the people than corporations and those with a financial interest. That's something to chew on.

[via Mother Nature Network]

5 Studies That Link Science Behind the Benefits of Organic

Benefits to Public Health

A new study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health concluded that eating an organic diet can contribute to human well-being. The research was led by Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences-based Dr. Jan Johansson, who reviewed current research on the effect of organic agriculture and crops on public health.

Finding a clear health advantage of consuming organic, her team states that "both animal studies and in vitro studies clearly indicate the benefits of consumption of organically produced food instead of that conventionally produced."

The increased phenolic compounds and lower pesticide residues found in organic produce could partially account for these benefits, but the study also points out that the significant advantages of organic cannot be explained by these variables alone. Researchers suggest that synergistic effects between various constituents within organic food are likely to be part of the reason it's more beneficial to public health than conventional products.

Reduced Pesticide Exposure

A new study published in the journal Environmental Research found that eating an organic diet for a week can reduce a person's pesticide exposure. The research was led by Dr. Liza Oates, who examined pesticide metabolites in the urine of 13 individuals who consumed a diet of at least 80 percent organic over seven days, and conventional food for seven days.

Dr. Oates’ team found that the total pesticide metabolite levels were reduced by as much as 96 percent by eating organic, with an average reduction of 50 percent. This study shows that eating an organic diet can reduce exposure to chemicals that have been associated with health risks. As stated by Dr. Oates, “Recent studies have raised concerns for the health effects of these chemicals even at relatively low levels.”

It’s nice to see a study showing that choosing organic can make a significant difference in your exposure levels.

Nutritional Benefits

A new study published in the British Journal of Nutrition shows conclusive evidence that organic crops, and the food made from them, are healthier than their conventional counterparts. In this study, researchers conducted a meta-analysis on 342 peer-reviewed publications looking at the health benefits of organic agriculture and found that organic crops have higher antioxidant levels, lower cadmium levels and less pesticide residues than non-organic crops. They found that organic crops had significantly higher levels of antioxidants that have been linked to decreases in chronic disease risks such as cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases and certain cancers.

The study also found fewer pesticide residues and lower toxic metal levels in organic versus conventional food, and organic crops had on average 48 percent lower cadmium levels than conventional crops. Cadmium is a highly toxic metal that can cause kidney failure, bone softening and liver damage. It can accumulate in the body, so even at low levels chronic exposure is dangerous. The findings of this study strongly support the health benefits of organic food.

Neonicotinoid Pesticides Linked to Honeybee Die-Off

A new study published in the Bulletin of Insectology by Harvard researchers found further evidence of the link between neonicotinoid use and Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), in which bees abandon their hives over the winter and eventually die.

This study was led by Professor Chensheng (Alex) Lu, an advisory board member for The Organic Center and associate professor of Environmental Exposure Biology at the Harvard School of Public Health. It supports his previous research, which found that 94 percent of hives exposed to low levels of the neonicotinoid imidacloprid died within 23 weeks of exposure. The new study added a second neonicotinoid called clothianidin to their observations. The researchers found that the same negative effects were associated with bee exposure to clothianidin as with imidacloprid. “We demonstrated again in this study that neonicotinoids are highly likely to be responsible for triggering CCD in honeybee hives that were healthy prior to the arrival of winter,” said Dr. Lu.

Organically Managed Soils Could Reverse Effects of Climate Change

The Rodale Institute has done some amazing science supporting the benefits of organic agriculture, and its new report, entitled “Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change,” maintains this high quality of investigation. The report takes an in-depth look at how farming systems affect greenhouse gas emission and illustrates the benefits that organic agriculture can have on climate change. Specifically, the publication focuses on the ability of soil to mitigate climate change when managed organically.

Findings include a decrease of annual greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent if management of all current cropland transitioned to regenerative organic agriculture. Transitioning global pasture would add to carbon sequestration by 71 percent. “We could sequester more than 100 percent of current annual CO2 emissions with a switch to widely available and inexpensive organic management practices,” the report states.

[via newhope 360]

The Other Bees

There are thousands and thousands of bees that are not honeybees out there, pollinating our flowers and helping plants produce food. Who knew?

Hear that hum as a bumblebee settles onto a tomato blossom? It’s a faint but powerful sound: The bee is working hard. It’s grabbing the flower with its jaws, vibrating its flight muscles and producing a tone that’s close to middle C. That vibration causes the flower to release pollen – a process called sonication, or buzz pollination.

More than 85 percent of the world’s plants either require or benefit from animal-mediated pollination. Farmers know this and have panicked in the face of the colony collapse disorder that’s reducing populations of honeybees around the country. (Some were even flying in packaged bees from Australia at $200 a pop until the USDA halted the practice for fear of importing new diseases and parasites.)

But what most farmers don’t realize – and the rest of us, too, as we anxiously search our gardens and parks for honeybees – is that there are another 20,000 species of bees. Four thousand are native to North America – including 50 native bumblebees – and they are busily at work in our landscapes.

We rarely notice our wild native bees because most are small and solitary and gentle – they aren’t likely to draw our attention with a sting.

But their impact on flowering plants is huge, with studies suggesting that they’re twice as effective at pollination than honeybees.

“The value of honeybees is that you can truck mobile hives to a farm and release tens of thousands of bees into the landscape,” says Eric Maden, the Assistant Pollinator Program Director of the Xerces Society, an organization that advocates on behalf of invertebrates and their habitat. “And people are fascinated with their social structure and with honey production. But bee for bee, most of the wild ones are vastly more productive.”

We rarely notice our wild native bees because most are small and solitary and gentle – they aren’t likely to draw our attention with a sting.



For one thing, Maden says, not all honeybees are even interested in pollen. Some are pollen foragers, but most are nectar foragers that ignore the critical spot where the flowers display pollen, called anthers. For another, honeybees are exceptionally finicky about the weather. They won’t fly when it’s cool, cloudy or rainy, whereas our native wild bees are game for inclement days. And honeybees sleep late.

Maden points to squash bees, the same size and color as honeybees, which co-evolved with squashes and make their individual nests in the soil near the plants. Pumpkin farmers and other squash growers are often unaware of these wild bees and unnecessarily pay to have honeybees hives trucked in for the season. “The squash bees go out before sunrise and are finished foraging by noon,” Maden says. “Honeybees don’t even wake up until it’s sunny and bright and, by that time, the squash bees have already gotten the job done.”

Valuable as our native wild bees are, their populations are dropping – for instance, an analysis by the Xerces Society ‘s Rich Hatfield suggests that 30% of our native bumblebees are threatened by extinction.

But Maden says that this is one threatened species story that can easily have a happy ending: Just plant wildflowers.

The loss of native flowering plants from development and conventional agriculture – especially the vast stretches of Roundup-resistant GMO crops in which everything but that commercial plant has been blasted away – has eliminated habitat for wild bees. Quite simply, there isn’t enough food for wild bees when there is only one plant – the commercial plant – blooming for a few weeks. They need a flowery source of food spring, summer and fall.

“Pesticide use is also an issue, but the single most important factor is habitat loss,” Maden says. “The solution is not complicated, and everyone can have a role. If you’re a farmer, plant native wildflowers around your farm. If you live in the city and your only access to the outdoors is a fire escape, put a pot of wildflowers there. If every person planted one wildflower, conditions for bees in this country would be significantly better.”

Farmers who create habitat for wild bees are doing themselves a favor. Maden points to a study by biologists Lora Morandin and Mark Winston showing that canola growers who took 30 percent of their land out of production and let native plants flourish grew as much or more seed on their remaining land.* A soon-to-be published study by Michigan State University entomologist Rufus Isaacs and former student Brett Blaauw shows that blueberry farmers who put in wildflower borders had more wild bees per bush and up to 800 pounds more fruit per acre adjacent to the plantings.

Planting wildflowers not only helps our wild bees thrive. It also saves butterflies. They aren’t essential pollinators, but they provide food for birds and have a place in the ecosystem – and they’re so darned pretty. Butterfly scientists are alarmed at the rate of disappearance of several common species including the Monarch, whose numbers may be so low that they will be unable to manage a migration this year. Their favored plant, the milkweed, has been decimated by the use of Roundup in cornfields planted with GMO glyphosate-resistant corn.

“I remember when I was a kid in North Dakota and we’d drive a few hours – even if we were just going grocery shopping, we’d have to drive a few hours,” Maden says. “The front of the car would be a sticky mass of insects. Now I can drive across the US in July and not have as many dead insects on my car as we did from a two-hour drive in North Dakota.”

You get the point. He doesn’t want you to kill bees and butterflies with your car, but it would be great if there were once again so many of them that they’re hard to miss. Find some wildflower seeds native to your region, and go sow.

[via Modern Farmer]

Top 10 Reasons to Raise Chickens

Here are the top reasons more people are turning to backyard chickens.

Chickens make great pets. They have personality galore, and they're extraordinarily easy to care for. They're bright, funny, quirky, friendly, loving little balls of feathers-and they're entertaining, too. When you have a flock, you'll find they have their own friends, their own cliques, their own favorite nests. Chickens come in such an array of colors, patterns, shapes, and sizes that some of them look more like exotic tropical birds-or even alien life-forms-than farm animals.

Keeping chickens is a lifestyle choice; you keep chickens if you want to try to live in a more sustainable way. Having chickens helps fulfill a positive, back-to-the-farm way of living that's about becoming more sustainable. It's also a way to celebrate local, slow food, and reestablish a constructive connection with your neighbors and your neighborhood.

Raising chickens allows you to have more control over the type of food you put on your table. You want organic? You want non-GMO? You want cruelty-free? These choices are all yours to make when raising your chickens.

Chickens will eat your table scraps and convert them into eggs on the one hand, and fertilizer on the other. If you grow vegetables or flowers, you'll find that composted chicken manure is great for your home garden, adding organic matter and nutrients to the soil. Plus, chicken manure from layers tends to be relatively high in calcium, which is helpful for plants, warding off blossom-end rot on tomatoes, for example.

Chickens will cut down on the number of insects in your yard. Anywhere chickens are allowed to forage, they'll snap up spiders, ticks, beetles, grubs, worms, grasshoppers, and more. They love to dig through lawn clippings and yard waste, too.

The eggs from hens raised with access to your backyard will be tastier and more nutritious! Research shows they're not only higher in omega-3s, beta-carotene, and vitamins A, D, and E, but they're lower in cholesterol and saturated fat.

They taste better, too. It's something you can see: All that extra nutrition gives backyard eggs a dark orange yolk-not the pale yellow color you see in store-bought eggs.

You'll be eating really fresh eggs—sometimes just minutes old-as opposed to the eggs you get in a grocery store, which can be 6 weeks old or more.

You'll be giving your children positive values. Just as with other pets, keeping chickens can help kids learn about responsibility. But because chickens give back in such a tangible way-eggs!-your kids can also learn about reciprocity and how the care they provide impacts their pets directly. Once they taste the eggs, they'll also come to learn that store-bought isn't always better. Some things are worth doing yourself.

You'll have control over how humanely your wonderful egg producers are treated—and how healthy and clean their environment is.

Chickens are so easy to care for. No walking, no pooper-scoopers, no grooming, no boarding when you go away; they won't scratch up your furniture or chew your favorite slippers.

[via Organic Gardening]

Farmacology: What Business Can Learn From Sustainable Farming

Medical and business communities can take surprising lessons from farming and improve employee well-being and productivity.

Frustrated that conventional medicine had little to offer many of her patients, Daphne Miller, a practicing physician and professor of family medicine at the University of California at San Francisco, decided to take a look at how human health is affected by other natural systems. This led her on a journey of family farms, where she wandered through henhouses, carted produce, and dug in the dirt.

Miller's findings, gathered in her book, transformed her thinking about stress, resilience to disease, and how a systems thinking approach in the medical community could save money and enhance people's health. The lessons she found hold insights for the health of business too. Can companies use the vital signs of farms to measure their own well-being? And how do externalities help drive greater sustainability?

Why should a doctor think like a farmer?

Agriculture has everything to do with medicine. In fact, I've come to see the divisions between the two disciplines as mostly artificial and arbitrary, and am now convinced that a farm internship should be a required part of medical training, and vice versa.

First, there's the direct connection between the farms where our food is grown and our bodies. Many of us are familiar with the headline-catching links between industrial farming and our physical health: superbugs spawned on large-scale dairies and cattle operations that threaten to infect us, or the chemical runoff that contaminates our drinking water. But beyond these issues, we pay little attention to how decisions made on a farm, [for instance] the choice of seed [or] soil management, positively or negatively affect our bodies.

My time spent learning from farmers and researchers has made me think beyond food as medicine to farm as medicine. I've learned how healthy soil can produce a healthy immune system, how microbes on the farm can communicate with our resident microbes – our microbiome – how certain grazing practices can produce food that stress-proofs our nervous system, how the terroir in which an herb is grown can influence its medicinal value, or how inner-city farming delivers unexpected health benefits to the surrounding community.

I also discovered that farming at its best offers a radically new way to think about health and healing. For example, the integrated pest management approach used by a winery in Sonoma gave a group of oncology researchers a more ecological way to understand and treat cancer.

Of two organic egg farms, you say that the one with higher production is the less sustainable. What does this tell us about hidden costs?

The farms taught me how we value short-term productivity at the expense of overall health. The conventional egg farm has higher laying rates and the hens produce larger eggs than the neighboring pasture-based egg farm. But when you take a whole host of factors into account, such as egg taste and quality, market price, fossil fuel inputs, worker health, hen health and environmental health, you realize that pasture-raised is the healthier, more sustainable option.

I often see this thinking applied to human productivity. Many of my patients work for companies where the work ethic is one of intense competition, with 60-80-hour work weeks, all in the name of greater annual profits. They tell me they rarely take vacations and wouldn't dream of exercising during their lunch break, as that would be interpreted as a lack of dedication to their job.

These patients mortgage their health in order to maximize their work performance and their revenue; they pull all-nighters, skip meals, eat food that offers fuel but few nutrients, use caffeine to stay awake and then alcohol to go to sleep, and rarely move their bodies except to hop on a plane or walk from desk to car. This approach is not sustainable and eventually leads to chronic health problems, including high blood pressure and blood sugar, weight gain, depression, anxiety and sleep apnea.

Not surprisingly, newer research is showing that this is as unhealthy for businesses as it is for individuals. Maximally taxing employees translates into lower work performance and, in the long term, less financial success.

You make an analogy between factory farming and factory medicine. What are the implications for managing healthcare costs?

Eighty percent of health expenditures in the US are spent within the four walls of a medical institution, and they are spent treating disease. This is consistent with the factory model: consolidate and streamline your efforts for maximal impact. But farm health and human health are not just a matter or treating disease, just as business health is not just a matter of tackling problems. I would argue that in all these sectors our money is much better spent on nurturing our environment – our air, our soil, our social institutions, our educational resources – than on fixing end-stage problems.

You say your farm odyssey gave you a new understanding of "vital signs". Can you explain?

I was fascinated to learn what farmers consider the "vital signs" of a healthy farm ecology: diversity, synergy, and redundancy.

Diversity means not just variability in crops, but also in the populations of microbes and other life forms on the land. Synergy – the whole being greater than the sum of the parts – is why a given farm's success cannot be predicted simply by looking at its discrete components. Redundancy, or self-sameness, describes the emergence of specific designs within each organism and throughout an entire ecosystem. Recurring patterns are a sign of a system's resilience: in the event of a failure, one part can provide backup.

These vital signs – diversity, synergy, and redundancy – are rarely discussed within medicine, but I now see them as helpful ways to describe a healthy human. My friends in business who've read Farmacology tell me that these same vital signs have given them a useful way to assess the health of their company.

Judith D Schwartz is the author of Cows Save the Planet and Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth. More information on Daphne Miller's book, Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us about Health & Healing, can be found here.

[via The Guardian]

National Farmworker Awareness Week highlights a dirty labor plight

This week it’s time to pay some respect to the folks who actually do most of that farming work.

The vast majority of our stateside fruits and vegetables are handpicked by more than 3 million migrant and seasonal farmworkers. Without those farmworkers, we’d be very hungry. But as a whole those workers are treated badly: They’re underpaid, underinsured, and undereducated. About half of them are undocumented, and only about a third are U.S. citizens. These workers bear the brunt of our food system with their bodies, but only California requires that they get water and bathroom breaks. On average, one farmworker dies on the job every day in the U.S., and laborers can be as young as 12 — legally.

 

Data from reports by the National Center for Farmworker Health, Center for Progressive Reform, and the Kresge Foundation.

[via: Grist]

We Used To Have 307 Kinds Of Corn. Guess How Many Are Left?

Just a brief look at the biodiversity loss in our modern food system. Biodiversity is like a bank for nature, the more you have in it the more you make, the more you take out the closer you are to going ecologically bankrupt.

'In Organic We Trust' focuses on food industry's foibles

A new documentary from director Kip Pastor examines how food production affects our social, economic and physical health. 

Filmmaker Kip Pastor (left) in a scene from his new movie, 'In Organic We Trust.' (Photo: Emma Fletcher)

Is organic food really better for people — and the planet? Filmmaker Kip Pastor endeavors to answer that question in his documentary "In Organic We Trust" (available On Demand and on iTunes starting Jan. 22) as he explores social and economic aspects of our food system and its impact on our health. Pastor, who has produced and directed short films documentaries and music video and is also a journalist, gave MNN his insights into the topics he chronicles on screen.

MNN: Where did you get the idea for the film?
Kip Pastor: I became a filmmaker because I believe that film is the most effective medium for disseminating big ideas and effecting change. The story for "In Organic We Trust" weaves together environmental, social and economic issues with something that we all do everyday — eat. Food provides a complete path for us to better understand our world, what we’re doing wrong, and how to create a more sustainable society. "In Organic We Trust" explores how these issues relate and impact our world and what people are doing to make a difference.

Why was it important to you to tell this story?
Before I began making "In Organic We Trust," I thought that I was a healthy, conscientious eater. I looked at labels, ate fruits and veggies, and avoided fast food as much as I could. But the more and more that I learned about our agriculture system and the consequences that our systems have on public health and the environment, the more I realized how much everything is connected. Our personal choices make a difference not just for us but also for everyone else. I was compelled to show people how we can positively impact our own lives and those of our communities. I learned a tremendous amount, and it has profoundly changed my life.

What are some examples?

One scary thing is that while we ban some of the most harmful chemical pesticides in this country, they are still used in other countries where they can hurt farmers, their workers, their families and the environment. Sometimes, they can even come back to us in contaminated imported foods. Although certified organic is a $30 billion enterprise, it represents only roughly 1 percent of farmland. It is not the only way to reshape agriculture and improve public health. We have to think bigger. Along those lines, I was blown away by the ingenious and powerful solutions that individuals and communities are doing to combat our agricultural and public health problems. "In Organic We Trust" explores many of these new models at the Watkins School in Washington, D.C., and the Calhoun School in New York City. (Check out a trailer for the movie below.)

Have you changed your diet as a result of making the film?

I’ve changed many things in my life already and continue to change. It has been less about the things that I don’t do anymore and more about the things that I do more often. I shop at farmers markets more, and I pay more attention to the restaurants that I frequent and where/how they source their food. I don’t exclusively eat organic, but I try very hard to only eat food that is chemical-free, in season, and grown by someone I know. It’s important for me because I know that pesticides are dangerous for people and the environment. By eating seasonally, I am reducing my carbon footprint, supporting local growers, and enjoying the diversity of every time of the year. What I eat affects how I feel daily, and it impacts our world in the long term. Although I was a practicing vegetarian for several years, I enjoy some meat and fish. I try to limit the amount of red meat that I eat. I religiously practice Meatless Mondays as a good way to start off the week. It’s a very intentional approach to avoid meat that usually carries over several days into each week. It’s been a great conversation starter as well.

What do you want viewers to take away from the documentary?

The most important parts of the film are the solutions. I wanted to make a film that examined problems and provided solutions for you and me and society at large. We can all make different choices in our own lives, but even more importantly, to really create change, we need to make different choices as a society. What we eat affects our own personal health as well as the health of the environment for generations to come. One of the most profound things that we can do is to have gardens in schools, teach children about nutrition by growing something, learning how to cook it, and serve it to them for lunch. I believe that we can fundamentally reverse many of our public health problems in one generation if we teach kids how to grow healthy food, what to eat, and how to prepare it. Can you imagine a world full of young farmers? That’s the future we need. We can grow something good for everyone, and change will happen from the soil up.

What was done during production to reduce the film's carbon footprint?

During pre-production, we made a very intentional plan to reduce our carbon footprint wherever we could. Having worked in production for years, I knew that filmmaking can be extremely wasteful and inefficient. I sought out leaders in the Green Production space to advise me on how to make a film with fewer environmental consequences. I took a class on “How to Green Your Production” offered by the Burbank Green Alliance and also received a Resource Management Certification from California Resource Recovery Association. In order to take that education one step further, I volunteered at events around Los Angeles to better understand people’s waste patterns. There are many categories where environmental waste and carbon usage can be reduced and made more efficient. We focused on five: travel, food, crew, paper and electricity. We succeeded in greatly reducing our carbon footprint by using energy-efficient vehicles, eating seasonally and locally, hiring regionally, and minimizing electricity usage. We tracked our carbon footprint throughout production by keeping count of the miles traveled, paper used, and the electricity used in production and post-production. We worked with SNP Patagonia Sur to calculate what those emissions would total, and we purchased carbon offsets from them. We were recently honored with a Special Mention for the Green Award given at the Planet in Focus Film Festival for our diligent work throughout production to reduce our carbon footprint.

What about your personal green practices?

I do as much as I can to reduce my carbon footprint on a daily basis. At all times, I carry a metal water bottle, cloth bags, and a bamboo set of utensils. There is never a good reason to purchase a plastic water bottle or use a plastic bag. Although I live in the very car-centric city of Los Angeles, I walk as much as possible. I think little actions can have a profound impact on the environment and other people’s behavior. Not only am I personally reducing my carbon footprint, but I also hope that my example helps to change the actions of others.

Do you have another film in the works?

We are currently in the research/fundraising stage of my next film that focuses on waste and toxicity in people and the environment. When we throw things away, they stay in our environment and impact us. Many of these chemicals are found in our daily lives and don’t break down in the environment or our bodies. Like "In Organic We Trust," it will be a solution-based film that will expose problems and offer tangible alternatives for people as individuals and society as a whole. 

DVDs of the film are also available at InOrganicWeTrust.org.

[via Mother Nature Network]

Labeling GMO Crops [video]

The current issue isn't about banning GMO crops in the United States, it's about labeling them - a consumer's right to know. We will work on getting them banned as our next step.

Organic Food Products To Be Tested For Residues Starting In 2013

by: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports – Your Universe Online

In order to make sure that farmers are not using banned pesticides or genetically-modified organisms, organic food will be forced to undergo periodic residue testing starting in 2013, USDA officials have announced.

The agency first implemented regulations governing organic food production 10 years ago, and since then, only a select few private and accredited firms have been responsible for testing the farms that grow such produce, according to Bill Tomson of the Wall Street Journal.

The reason, he says, is that current USDA regulations offer “little guidance” regarding testing procedures — specifically, the reasons behind such examinations and the scheduling of them.
All organic food processors must undergo an initial inspection in order to become certified as organic food producers, Tomson explains, but there are regulations on the books requiring farms to be re-evaluated on a regular basis.

“The USDA said it is mandating that agents test annually a minimum of 5% of the farms or production facilities they are contracted to monitor,” the Wall Street Journal reporter wrote. “That is enough testing, the USDA said, to discourage use of prohibited substances without raising costs to the organic industry that has to pay for the testing.”

Currently, there are less than 100 accredited agents allowed to complete residue tests on the approximately 30,000 organic food producers across the globe that currently market their ware in the US, Tomson said.

The USDA will reportedly allow those agents to determine the 5% of the farms that will be tested each year, as mandating which facilities are tested would increase costs.

“The USDA said the new testing requirements will protect the integrity of the organic food industry. Periodic residue testing, it said, will discourage the mislabeling of organic food that consumers buy in supermarkets,” he wrote on Friday.

Tomson added that it was “an audit performed by the USDA’s inspector general that the USDA said prompted its decision to mandate periodic testing. Auditors interviewed four of the agents that monitor organic food producers in the U.S. and found that none of the agents were conducting periodic testing.”

[source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online]

Urban Foraging

Today's post comes from Bistro OneSix, an entertaining blog full of stories about all things delicious. Enjoy this post about urban foraging and then head over to Bistro OneSix for more fabulous tales from the kitchen. 

I hear the term “urban foraging” tossed around more and more lately and knew what my definition of it was but decided to look it up in the Urban Dictionary to confirm.

1.	urban foraging
	Urban foraging is a process of sorting through the dumpsters, gargbage bins, and other containers of waste to reclaim “wasted” food.

In looking a little further I found : Urban foraging can be defined as foraging for free fruits, vegetables, and other “wild food” around the city.

I walk and bike a lot around my neighborhood, and often come across trees that are so laden with fruit that they droop across the street, littering the pavement and sidewalk with overly ripe little bombs. I have contemplated doing a little harvesting but always considered that to be stealing. It’s someone else’s tree after all.

But then this whole “urban foraging” idea came to light. In fact, there’s a Google map for it in Boise, Idaho, charting out delicacies that can be found all over town. But the sound of my mom’s voice is in my head…”Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t make it right.”

So, I wonder – when is urban foraging stealing?

I love blackberries. Like REALLY love blackberries and there is this huge blackberry bush on a road I cycle on all the time. Year after year I have admired them. This year intoxicated by the idea of urban foraging, I stopped one morning… just to sample a few. Before I knew it my hands were stained dark reddish purple. I quickly rode off like a kid that had just gotten away with something, feeling more than a little guilty. But shortly thereafter, their sweetness overtook my guilt and I returned with a box and picked as many as I could reach. It’s a busy road and with each passing car, I felt like at any moment I was going to get busted by the blackberry police. Or worse…the owner of the property.

But that begs the question, who does own these? They are on the side of a highway, seemingly in the easement. Does that mean they are ripe for the taking?

I like to explore the alleys of my neighborhood (there are lots of interesting things to look at in the alleys afterall) and there is an apricot tree that hangs heavy over the fence, rotten fruit strewn around the ground. Apricots are definitely on my list of summer fruit favorites (although let’s be honest…which summer fruit isn’t?) and so I stand there and ponder. Fair game to take them since obviously the owners aren’t harvesting or because I just used the word “owner” does that denote that indeed they intrinsically belonged to someone else? Are they “wild food” if they are in someone else’s yard?

My parents have gleaned potatoes and onions out of neighbor’s fields for as long as I can remember, albeit certainly with the farmer’s permission because that’s how they roll. Potatoes and onions that otherwise would have rotted. Potatoes and onions that easily fed our family with extras, to give to others, all winter long.

I refer back to the definition that kicked this all off. That of “reclaiming wasted food”. It sounds valiant. Honorable. Or maybe it’s just the way I justify the bowl of apricots on the kitchen counter.

2012 Food and Farm Bill

Last week, Washington D.C. became the food capital of the country as the Senate debated the 2012 Food and Farm Bill, culminating in the passage of the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012. If you're asking yourself "What does this mean for me?" you're not the only one.

What it means is that our country is one step closer to the approval of the single biggest piece of legislation that governs what we grow and eat. It is a 5-year, $969 billion bill that touches every single person's life in America. Every farmer, parent, cook, eater, student, and activist is impacted by the policies addressed by this bill that only comes around once every five years. Now that the Senate has passed their version, it is up to the House of Representatives to pass their own before the bill can officially become law.

Now that you've got a little bit better idea of what it is, you may now be asking yourself, is the Senate Bill a good thing or a bad thing? The answer to that question depends on what your priorities are. Earlier this year, our friends at Slow Food USA wrote a letter to the leaders of both the Senate and House Agriculture committees outlining their priorities for the upcoming Food and Farm Bill.

The three biggest points from Slow Foods' letter were:

1. A health focused food system, an end to hunger and access to healthy food.
2. A level 'plowing' field for family farmers and vibrant regional farm and food economies.
3. Good environmental stewardship

With these requests in mind, Slow Food has broken down the top 5 wins and bottom 3 losses following the Senate's voting on a bill involving over 300 amendment requests.

Wins: 

1. The Senate passed and amendment sponsored by Senate Sherrod Brown (D-OH) that provides critical funding for rural jobs and new farming opportunities. This means, among other things, that a young person who wants to start a new farm, but lacks access to the kind of credit that would allow them to do so could now qualify for funding through the Rural Micro-entrepreneur Assistance Program.

2. The Senate passed an amendment sponsored by Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) that makes sure that farms receiving subsidized crop insurance will be required to follow basic conservation guidelines. This means that if a large conventional farm in Ohio receives insurance payments to cover against their losses for the year, they will need to follow the same conservation laws that were previously applied to farms receiving direct subsidies.

3. The Senate passed an amendment sponsored by Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) which makes it much easier for organic farmers to gain access to crop insurance. Right now, if an organic farmer in wishes to receive crop insurance, they will have to pay a much higher premium than their conventional farming neighbor, despite being reimbursed at the same rate. This would change that and set the reimbursements to more appropriate levels.

4. The Senate rejected amendments by Senators Rand Paul (R-KY) and Jeff Sessions (R-AL) that would have further weakened the already weakened SNAP program. These amendments would have made it harder for states to provide food assistance to their most vulnerable citizens.

5. The Senate Agriculture committee's bill puts an end to costly, direct subsidy programs that do nothing to support healthy farming practices. Currently, if you own farm land in New Mexico that qualifies for a direct subsidy, you will receive payments from the government even if you don't plant a single crop. This bill would end that practice.

Losses:

1. The Senate did not consider an amendment sponsored by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that would have made it unlawful for meat packers to own or feed livestock intended for slaughter. The current practice among meat packers is to slaughter their own livestock when prices are too high and buy from farmers when prices are low. This amendment would have created a fair marketplace for family farms raising livestock, not disproportionately favoring large slaughterhouses.

2. The Senate rejected an amendment by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) that would have re-directed some crop insurance funding to eliminate the cuts to the SNAP program. Without this amendment, an estimated 500,000 households across the country will lose $90 per month in SNAP benefits.

3. The Senate did not consider an amendment by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) that would have enabled schools to purchase from local and regional producers. This amendment would have allowed school districts to continue participating in the Department of Defense Fresh Program while making their own fresh produce purchases.

Leading up to the official casting of votes, Senate Agriculture Ranking member, Senator Pat Roberts described the bill by saying, "Is it the best possible bill? No. It is the best bill possible."