Real People Eat Local

 

Slow Food USA Executive Director Josh Viertel (far left) spoke to a special gathering of food influencers during a visit to DC this month. He was accompanied by Slow Food International Executive Director Paolo DiCroce and the gathering was organized by Slow Food DC and hosted by Clyde's Restaurant Group. Both DiCroce and Viertel spoke strongly about the historic opportunities that are within the grasp of food activists right now. Viertel said that at a meeting with White House staff, in itself an amazing step forward in access and opportunity, he was told that the administration wants to effect change in our nation's food system, but that the people have to stay on them and insist that they do it.

 

"Our job description as citizens is being rewritten," Viertel told the Slow Food DC gathering, and we have to be activist with our government leaders to ensure the change we want to see happens. While he was not officially representing the administration, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan (center left) was listening as a food lover and recently relocated DC resident, along with his wife, Liza Gilbert (center right), and local marketing consultant Katherine Newell Smith.

 

Salatin Delivers Remarks at NICFA Event 

Sponsored by the National Independent Consumers and Farmers Association (NICFA), the event included a buffet reception for participants and Hill staffers (seen above in the header), as well as remarks from nationally-known small farmer Joel Salatin, of Swoope, VA (right).  For more coverage go to: www.nicfa.com/ffvdc-2009.html or see Kimberly Hartke's blog post at: http://hartkeisonline.com/2009/04/22/peasants-pitchforks-and-a-perfect-food-supply/. 

 

(Photo courtesy of Aaron Springer)

 

Key leaders in the sustainable agriculture movement met with members of Rep. Henry Waxman's staff and others on the Hill in recent weeks to discuss impending food safety legislation, according to Bryan Snyder, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture (PASA). In addition to Snyder, these leaders included Russell Libby, executive director of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA), Ferd Hoefner of the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), and farmer Joan Norman of Maryland's One Straw Farm, Snyder reported in a May 1 PASA email newsletter.

This meeting was especially significant. For one, Waxman is chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which is the committee expected to decide the fate of food safety legislation on the House side, Snyder notes. Two, "We were told by Waxman's point person on food safety legislation that we were the very first group from the sustainable/organic community they had met with in this process!," he says. Amid great concern in the local food community that new food safety legislation could cripple small-scale, locally based farmers, "the news from Washington was 'good'," Snyder says. "We were also asked to provide input to the process to help avoid 'unintended consequences' as legislation moves ahead later this spring and summer."  

 

For more, see the "Position on Food Safety Legislation" at  www.mofga.org, or www.pasafarming.org. 
 

 

Through its Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is starting "a series of listening sessions" around the country on the controversial National Animal Identification System (NAIS), with the first meeting taking place today (May 16th) in Harrisburg, PA. The meetings will also be in Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Kentucky, Texas and Washington state, through June 1. The USDA's reaching out to the small-scale food community on this issue is new and welcome, given small-scale farmers' predictions that much of the plans included in the proposed NAIS would be so onerous and costly as to put them out of business. Also, while the system is supposedly intended to improve the country's food supply, its "one-size-fits-all" plans may actually make the country's food less safe, according to many small-scale farmers.

"Discussion sessions related to NAIS' cost, impact on small farmers, privacy and confidentiality, liability premises registration, animal identification and animal tracing will allow producers to provide their input on ways to make the program into something they all can support," the USDA said. For more info, go to  www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usdahome?contentidonly=true&contentid=2009/05/0143.xml. 
 

 

As a parent of children in one of the Prince George's County elementary schools that was closed due to fears about influenza A H1N1, a.k.a. "swine flu," recently, I was gathering every last scrap of news on the subject there for a while. One food/agriculture-related issue that failed to reach most headlines, or even artilces--but that did surface in a May 4 article by Joel Achenbach in the Washington Post­--is that large-scale industrial agriculture can play a role in the formation of new, and potentially virulent, diseases.

 

In his article, Achenbach quotes Ellen Silbergeld, a professor of environmental health sciences and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, as saying transmission between species (which is known to potentially create new and possibly more virulent variations) is probably common at industrial pig operations. He went on to quote her stating, "It's appropriate to refer to these animal operations as viral mixing bowls."

For consumers and scientists alike, this is a subject worth watching. Do industrial facilities, where manure may not be regulated properly, and where often-sickly animals live in cramped quarters, provide a breeding ground for new viruses? We have to wonder, at what price are we willing to have cheap food?  (For the record, I lodged a question with the U.S. Department of Agriculture on their opinion of the role of industrial agriculture in the evolution of a new flu or other virulent disease, but did not receive a response as of this writing.)

 

 -- Kristi