Part I: Let's talk eco-logic

We'll start with the fun stuff tonight: pictures of food. Then, if you stick around, you can sit in on a sermon about the food system.

Without further ado, here's dinner on August 2: pan-fried tilapia fillet accented with lemon and parsley, more carrot-currant bread, and garden-veggies medley.

The tilapia is the obvious issue here. As it turns out, we had these fillets hidden in the back of the freezer and decided it would be better to purge them now than have them crowd the icebox for a month. Packaging aside, these were a pretty good eco-choice: choosing sustainable seafood is of great importance. We make regular use of the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch Program's responsible seafood guide. These frozen tilapia fillets from Whole Foods are farm-raised in Vermont, making them a "Good" choice. They also work for us -- we like to incorporate fish into our mostly vegetarian diet every now and then, and having frozen fish on hand allows for a tasty meal with less planning and fewer cross-town trips.

If we return to this meal (or another like it) later this month, we'll be able to get fresh fish from the Whole Foods seafood deli and meet all our targets: eco-friendly, package-free, and tasty.

The veggies medley was simple and not especially inspired, but it made good use of our garden's late-summer bounty. I chopped a beet (and baby beet!) and a handful of gorgeous purple potatoes into small chunks and cooked them in a pan with some water and salt until they were mostly tender. The beet greens and some kale came next, chopped and thrown in to cook down. Onions, garlic, some frozen dumpster jalapeños, and zucchini followed in a stir-fry technique with tamari and savory spices.

Tonight (August 3) was another instance of compromise cuisine. Audrey took our ground beef and inputted the term in Smitten Kitchen's search engine. The result: delicious ground-beef empanadas. She hand-made the dough and filling, using all package-free ingredients except for the ground beef. (Once again, in the future we can and will get fresh ground beef in bulk from Whole Foods.) 

After downing three of them, I can't really say that this was "compromise cuisine"; they were really, really tasty and made with love. We just need to find a plastic-free alternative! 

And let's not forget dessert: a perfectly sweet, juicy yellow watermelon. You've gotta love summer.

About that "Eco-Logic"

Okay. Enough frivolity. Let's get real, boys and girls.

I won't belabor this too much because this audience is probably a) self-selecting for the eco-conscious and/or b) already subjected to the normal deluge of eco-proselytizing that is the price of my friendship. In other words, I'm likely preaching to the choir here.

One of my chief axioms is that "every dollar is a vote," and this has major implications for the food system and how our food choices affect the world. If your only motivation is to get the cheapest food possible, or to get the most food for your money, you're likely benefiting yourself and your family at the expense of the larger community. On the other hand, when you choose to pay a premium for food that is produced in an environmentally and socially responsible way, you are telling "the Invisible Hand" of the market to wave on some more of that type of product, increasing its viability and market share and thereby promoting those same goals of social and environmental stewardship.

What is wrong with conventionally produced food, you ask? The secret is pretty much out at this point. Large conventional farms that produce gazillions of units of the same crop are environmentally devastating in a number of ways. They fatigue the soil by planting season after season the same crops that demand the same nutrients. To compensate for this, conventional farmers spend big bucks on synthetic fertilizers that are derived from scarce, planet-harming fossil fuels. Even these fertilizers are a short-term fix, as they do not replace all of the soil's nutrients or support underlying soil ecology. Further, excessive use of fertilizer leads to runoff during rain or irrigation. As this nitrogen-heavy sludge makes its way into waterways and the oceans, it encourages the growth of algal blooms that consume the water's oxygen. The end result are massive "dead zones" in the oceans that turn parts of our oceans into water wastelands.

But that's not all! By creating large "mono-cultures," conventional farmers trade crop security for efficiency. If a mold or pest or disease infects one part of an enormous swath of crops, the entire crop is imperiled because it lacks the biological diversity that normally shields ecosystems from system shocks. This same monotony gives farmers an incentive to use one-size-fits-all technologies such as massive pesticide spraying. Pesticide runoff poisons rivers, streams, and aquifers for man and beast alike. The pesticides themselves often leave residues on the crops even as they make it to the supermarket. And if you remember the basics of evolution, you'll know that natural selection drives the adaptation of bugs to these pesticides, creating super-bugs that can only be killed with stronger super-pesticides and churning the wheels of what is known as the "pesticide treadmill."

The story with conventionally produced meat and dairy is disturbingly similar. Mono-cropping is replaced by what is known as a concentrated animal feeding operation, or CAFO. Diseases can spread like wildfire through dingy feedlots so the animals are pumped full of medicines and antibiotics that end-users then consume. (Other ailments like salmonella are also more likely to reach outbreak level due to these same conditions.) Instead of chemical fertilizer, the animals are given growth hormones and steroids and fed unnatural cocktails of cereal grains and ground animal meal. Yum! And instead of pesticide runoff, CAFOs pollute water sources with concentrated animal excrement and even dead bodies. That charming smell driving down I-5 in California? Pure CAFO, baby! Oh, and let's not forget about the inhumanity of factory meat. (Warning: that's one disturbing link.)

That's pretty much the short case for supporting organic agriculture: conventional farming attempts to apply factory logic to living systems, with the result that increasing amounts of chemical inputs are expended to gain a decreasing benefit all while imperiling both the consumers and bystanders of these products. In other words, it's a big fat fail. Writer Michael Pollan lays out these issues in thoroughly readable form in books like "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and other works.

(Straddling organic and conventional farming is the GMO phenomenon...There is a battle raging a present over the idea of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and the role they can play in the food system. Based on the historical myopia of "food science" in the last century, there is plenty of reason to be suspicious of GMOs and the possible downstream impacts they can have on our food, families, and flora/fauna.)

You can count me to revisit this conversation to touch on other aspects of the food system vis-à-vis global trade and social justice. Stay tuned. =]

-k