How to Miss the point entirely

In the midst of the Agri debacle, I've been even more focused on food in the news than I might be. Over the past few yers we've seen an awful lot of problems in the general food distribution system than ever before, from tainted meat ending up in school lunch programs, to all sorts of problems with vegetables from the effects of pesticides on our children to unlabeled GMOs appearing in our produce to the government enforcing the ridiculous rule that one may not label organic milk as not coming from RBGH-polluted cows without also noting that supposedly there isn't any difference between cows treated and cows not so treated (despite the growing evidence that there is). Oh, and don't forget the recent outbreaks of salmonella in produce.
It is thus not surprising that AP reports that people have become significantly less confident in their food. According tho the report people have changed their buying habits (when they are able to; those poorer people living in places where it's difficult to do so are even less confident in their food, and for good reason). One woman cited in the article has said that she has switched from supermarket produce almost entirely over the Farmer's Markets. Which is great for her, but what about those people who aren't able to do so?

But it's the end of the article that grinds me. As if it were somehow an answer to the problem, the authors quote Senator Richard Durbin.

"We live in an age of technology where you can bar-code a banana," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill. "We've got to work this through with the industry and come up with something that's reasonable. The more confidence consumers have, the more goods they will purchase."

It then follows with the idea that federal tracking might be the answer:

While the produce industry agrees that federal standards for preventing contamination are necessary, there is no consensus on a mandatory tracing system. Cost is a concern, especially for smaller companies.

The poll also found that 56 percent of consumers do not believe the government has enough inspectors to scrutinize food imports. If more are needed for imports and domestic produce, 70 percent said the cost should be covered through fees on industry. That echoes a proposal by Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The problem is that while that might limit the way the problem has been spreading in a particular case, it completely avoids addressing the real problem, which is how farming is done in our country. The government subsidizes big agro business -even though actually small farms are more efficient! - and in particular allows companies like Monsanto to corrupt our farming practices in all kinds of ways: whether we're speaking about the practice of hiring laborers who are illegally imported and underpaid - sometimes kept in conditions akin to slavery- who have no sanitary facilities (an we wonder how the produce develops problems?) and often are heavily exposed to pesticides, or whether we're talking about the ways that our government is colluding with big business over the consumer - that would be citizens, to you and me- in allowing those businesses to make decisions about what is and isn't safe for us whether that's genetically modified foods altered through viral insertion of unrelated genetic material (which can then spread -and is spreading, like wildfire- outside of the fields in which it's planted, to neighboring fields, weeds and unrelated other plants - and a whole host of other problems with GMOs as well) or cloning of dairy animals, or using hormones to procue more milk per cow, or simply getting with dangerous unsanitray practices (like pig farmers whose slurry ponds leak out into the ground water... the list goes on and on. The problem isn't tracking food; the problem is that we need to get serious about trying to alter the way we rpoduce food.

I'm not saying to get rid of grocery stores. I like my CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program and our farmer, but if I had to depend on our weekly box, we'd all be rife with scurvy. Even if I supplemented it with other local farmers from the market (and none of the ones that actually have a decent possibility to supplement are all that close - I can't bike to any, I have to drive) that still wouldn't help me much in the winter.
But it does mean that we need to think seriously as a nation about how to reorganize so that our food comes mostly from local areas in the summer when it can, and depends on longer shipping in the winter when it can't. It means that we need to really consider our labor practices in the fields and what we're doing when we ship (regular food, let alone luxuries) from overseas, and how it affects the wider environment.

Chad Gadya

Liveblogging from the Hazon Food Conference (for more see Jewschool's posts from YehuditBrachah).



We all have a huge amount to say about the goats. I'm not sure that this was planned, but in some ways, this topic has nearly taken over the Hazon Food Conference. And I do not think that this is necessarily a bad thing. The questions that have arisen throughout the past years, regarding the ethics of eating meat - especially kosher meat produced in factory farms, slaughtered in places like Agriprocessors, where the heart of kashrut seems to have bled right out are questions which are just right for the people of this new Jewish sustainable food movement to address.

And while there is a lot going on at this conference, your intrepid livebloggers (YehuditBrachah, KungFu Jew and KRG) have set aside an entire post to talk about the shchita and the conversations surrounding it.

Thursday night, the first night of the conference, Nigel Savage of Hazon started out by explaining how it came about that it was decided to shecht a goat this year at the food conference. Last year during the conference, Nigel asked meat eaters if they would still eat meat if they had to participate in the death of the animal: some said yes, others: no; he then asked the veggies if they would eat meat if they were part of its slaughtering: again, some said no, but others, yes. From this arose the idea to try to humanely schecht a goat at the Hazon Food conference.
That is how Nigel introduced the first panel of the conference: a panel including a shochet, Rabbi Yehuda ben Chemhoun, Rabbi Seth Mandel of the Orthodox Union, who oversees all American slaughterhouses, the shepherd who raised the goats Aitan Mizrahi, the woman who continued to shepherd them when the shepherd separated them from their dams (he is a dairy farmer, and this is how female goats are kept giving milk) Rachel Gall, Dr. Shamu Sadeh of Adamah and Simon Feil.

Rubashkin's: will it never end?

The latest from the Forward: United Food and Commercial Workers are now entering the fray over Rubashkin's skeezy practices in their plants. As the Forward reported, "Activists with United Food and Commercial Workers stood outside kosher supermarkets and Trader Joe’s stores around the country last Wednesday, distributing fliers that purported to be a 'Kosher Food Safety Alert.' The fliers cited controversial reports — many of them published in the Forward — about food-safety issues at the Postville, Iowa, slaughterhouse." They also made automated phone calls to households in Orthodox neighborhoods and placed full-page advertisements in Jewish newspapers.

Most of these will be violations that if you read Jewschool or Failed Messiah's excellent coverage, you will already know about - the bribery, the unsafe food handling practices, and of course the mistreatment of non-Jewish workers, prompting the Conservative Movement's creation (at least in theory) of the Hechsher Tzedek. I want to emphasize a citation from Failed Messiah's post on the topic which comes from the USDA's inspector:

There were also at least five instances in which AgriProcessors was cited for not taking the required measures to fend off Mad Cow disease. In one instance, an inspector says he asked for a suspicious cow to be taken off the line and later discovered that the cow had been slaughtered with the rest of the animals. The inspector says he informed someone at the company of the “very serious noncompliance that had occurred.”

I emphasize these words because, of course, Agriprocessor's response, published on its Web site and in Yeshiva World News, was simply to deny, deny deny. “Concerns about Mad Cow disease are simply wrong,” the letter said. “We have never had product from any suspect animals leave our plant.” they claim.

Astonishingly, according to KosherToday,a trade publication that has defended AgriProcessors, none of this has hurt Agriprocessor sales. In fact, they claim that to the contrary, “The net effect of the onslaught against Agri was that sales of its products in some stores have risen by as much as 30% and it has opened an unprecedented number of new accounts.”