How to Navigate a Farmer's Market Like a Seasoned Veteran
via skillet
The easiest way to eat local is to shop at a farmer's market. By doing so, you're supporting local farmers and getting involved with your community. It's also often the best deal if you're shopping for one.
But, in the same way you have to learn supermarket tricks, it's important to know how to shop savvy at the farmer's market. I love some of my nearby markets and I've been shopping at them for years, so I've accumulated a few pointers that are worth keeping in mind next time you head out.
Prepare Yourself
Come prepared for the market: most vendors only take cash, and often only in smaller denominations. (Some are beginning to accept food stamps, too.) Many don't offer bags, so be sure to bring your own reusable bags (my favorites come from Baggu). Also, leave your dog at home: the majority of markets don't allow them.
Most of all, though, you'll want to know your seasons so that you have the right expectations of what's going to be in stock beforehand. I get aweekly e-letter from my local market that explicitly says what's plentiful and at its peak, what's available in limited supply, what items are winding down for the season, and what special, limited-time items can't be missed. Even if your market doesn't offer that, it's useful to review aseasonal eating chart to get an idea of what will be in supply.
If your market has an info booth, check in there first; you might find they offer chef-led cooking demos, veggie valet, and evening classes, many of them at no charge.
Either Go Early or Go Late
So that you have your pick of the freshest and most varied produce, plan to get to the market when it first opens. (It's also the best time to purchase fresh seafood and meat, before it's been sitting out in a tent for hours.) If you're not an early riser, then aim to arrive at the tail-end of the market, which is often when farmers and stands, in an effort to avoid taking produce home with them, start offering discounts on whatever's left. Steer clear of shopping during the thick of market hours, when stalls will be the most congested.
Make a Loop Before You Buy
Unless you know your market well, never jump into buying the first produce you see. Geoffrey Zakarian cautions against buying anything for your first 30 minutes at the market. That's a little extreme, but you should make a quick loop before purchasing anything, just so you can get the lay of the land, taste samples of what's on offer, and compare prices. People often skip this critical part and get spend-happy on the first, say, tomatoes they see, only the find tastier ones for a lower price an hour later on the other side of the market. That leads to overbuying, overspending, and potentially wasted food — and nobody wants that.
Talk to Your Farmer
It isn't a farmer's market without the farmers, who are the best part. Having them present gives you an opportunity to ask questions about harvesting practices. They can tell you why their produce is or isn't certified organic, explain the difference between a raspberry and a tayberry, or offer their best tips for picking the best peaches.
If you frequent the market regularly, you should absolutely introduce yourself. Talking to your farmer might even score you a better deal, and if you need to make bulk purchases, you might be able to work something out beforehand. I've chatted with farmers about recipes, and shown them what I've made from purchases the week before. Cultivating those relationships are the fastest way to getting VIP treatment.
When you're scouring through piles of fruits and vegetables, be mindful of etiquette. It's considered rude, for instance, to squeeze stone fruits or tomatoes (it tends to bruise them) and to open husks of corn before buying them (it causes the corn's sugars to convert to starch more quickly).
Branch Out
What do cherimoyas, garlic scapes, fiddlehead ferns, green garlic, and bitter melon all have in common? They're all things I've purchased out of curiosity at the farmer's markets. I tend to buy one spontaneous ingredient after getting guidance from the farmer on how to cook with it. Spring onions, for example, are in season right now, and you can use them in just about any recipe that calls for conventional onions.
Bring a Friend
Running errands at the grocery store might be a chore, but browsing the farmer's market is anything but. In fact, I like to bring friends along to socialize while browsing produce. It's also useful if you know you're going to be tempted to buy lots of stuff; that way, you can go in on fruits and vegetables together, and split them at the end.
Don't Lose Sight of the Produce
It's easy to want to sketch out elaborate menus ahead of time, but be prepared to be flexible, just in case the tomatoes you wanted don't actually look that great, but the summer squash turns out to be well-priced.
In general, when cooking food from the farmer's market, I lean toward simple preparations. Muddling a fruit or vegetable's flavors with too many other ingredients would defeat the purpose. Sure, one could make strawberry jam with ripe wild strawberries, but why do that when you can better taste their peak freshness in simple kale salad with pine nuts instead?
Look for produce that is as intact as possible, like carrots and beets with their greens still attached. They'll stay fresh for longer, and as a bonus the green tops make delicious pestos and sautés, too.
One more thing: while baked goods, desserts, refreshments, and those ubiquitous bags of kettle corn may all seem tempting, keep in mind that not everything is better at the farmer's market.
Find the Right Market For You
Limiting your visits to one farmer's market is like only shopping at one supermarket, so visit multiple markets to find out which one best suits your needs. Larger, well-known farmer's markets offer lots of variety and plenty of bustling energy, and often they're fantastic not just for shopping but for incredible dining as well. But smaller farmer's markets have their advantages, too: while they may offer less selection, they often have better deals. Use this search page to track down a farmer's market near you.
Check If Seeds are Still Good to Plant with the Wet Paper Towel Test
via lifehacker
When you’re planting a garden, you want to make sure you’re not wasting time, energy, and garden space with bad seeds. Before you go and buy all new seeds, however, test out what you have with a wet paper towel.
Seeds from all plants have a germination rate that steadily decreases over time, meaning that you have certain window to plant them and get the most out of them. If you have some leftover seeds and you’re not sure if they have gone bad, Trena Heinrich at Food52 suggests the wet paper towel test:
Take a paper towel and run it under water then ring it out. Place 3 to 4 seeds in the paper towel and place in a warm spot in your house. I usually use the top of the clothes dryer because it’s used so often, but you could use a heating pad set on very low.
If you don’t see any sprouts within a couple days, they aren’t viable for planting anymore. Some seeds can be good for years, so don’t go throwing out anything until you’ve checked. Most seeds are inexpensive, but you might at leat be able to save yourself a trip to the store.
How to Know If Your Seeds are Viable for Planting | Food52
Fenway Park Opened a Rooftop Garden to Serve Homegrown Concessions
via bostinno
The oldest baseball stadium in the country, our beloved chapel known as Fenway Park, is constantly evolving in order to maintain an atmosphere and bevy of features designed to make Red Sox nation comfortable and keep them engaged.
On Thursday, April 9, the Red Sox announced its latest Fenway iteration: a rooftop garden aptly called Fenway Farms.
News of the new nursery comes shortly after Boston Mayor Marty Walsh took a tour of Fenway and digested 174 new seats, enhanced Wi-Fi, an interactive video wall for fans to take photos, activity space for children and two new 30” high x 39.3’ wide LED ribbon boards.
According to the Red Sox, the garden will change seasonally but staple herbs and veggies include arugula, green beans, broccoli, carrots, cucumbers, eggplant, kale, lettuce, pea shoots, sweet peppers, tomatoes, basil, chives, cilantro, mint, oregano, parsley, rosemary, and thyme.
BostInno followed up with the Red Sox to see how this may affect food prices – consistently among the most expensive in the country.
"No, it will not affect pricing throughout the ballpark," said spokesperson Zineb Curran.
The plan is to use the garden not only to serve home-grown concessions during games and other Fenway events, but to also use it go educate local youth on healthy eating and the importance of environmental preservation.
In June 2008, Fenway piloted growing tomatoes behind the pitchers mound of the bullpen.
"Two local companies from Somerville, Recover Green Roofs and Green City Growers, worked on the installation and planting of Fenway Farms," added the club. "Recover Green Roofs installed the garden planters and irrigation system. Green City Growers planted the produce and herbs and will maintain the garden during its growing season."
2 farmers’ stories: The fall and rise of the mid-size farm
via grist.org
Mid-sized farms are getting squeezed out of our food system. And there’s a story behind every single one of those numbers. Here are two stories: one about losing the farm — and one about hanging on and making it pay.
Traci and Brian Bruckner
Brian Bruckner grew up on a farm in Nebraska. It had beef cattle, dairy cows, and pigs. They grew corn, soybeans, alfalfa, and had some grazing land for the animals. There was enough going on that if hog prices fell, or it was a bad year for corn, there was something else to carry the family through.
“My parents raised six children on a 400-acre dry-land farm,” he said. “They succeeded at that, you know? But they had no extra cash to help us get started, and we weren’t expecting that.”
Bruckner’s parents were just about ready to retire when he graduated from high school, so he and a brother took over the farm. Things were going pretty well. He got married and settled in. Then he took out a loan to buy a nearby hog farm.
“I was in debt approximately $200,000 at the time, which was an awful lot of money,” Bruckner said.
And things started to go wrong. Bad weather hurt the crops. The pigs kept getting sick. Brian acknowledges that he probably made some bad decisions, but he also had more than his share of bad luck. But the real problem, according to Brian’s wife, Traci Bruckner, was that the bottom dropped out of the hog market.
“What really, really damaged us and made it impossible for us to really survive was the consolidation of the hog market.”
After years of soaring growth, pig prices crashed. At the same time, big companies were buying up slaughterhouses, so there were fewer companies a farmer might sell to. Farmers had to accept whatever price they could get. They were losing money on every pig, and the Bruckners couldn’t afford to lose money very long.
“Those things just snowball on themselves, and it really got tough sledding. It was a stressful point in our lives,” Brian said. Then the bank pulled the plug — it took the hog farm and their house. Brian was working on the farm, and doing construction. Eventually, he and Traci walked away, leaving the family farm to his brother.
“Oh man, that’s a rollercoaster of emotions. There was, when I think back, there’s a lot of things I don’t want to remember because there was a lot of anger, too,” Traci said.
There was anger, but also hope for something better. Brian went to college, then got a job doing groundwater management. After learning from this experience, Traci started doing farm policy work for the Center for Rural Affairs. And she says that government policy stacked the deck against small farmers like them. For one thing, government subsidies give the big farms an advantage over the small, and drive up the price of land. “We live in an area where a majority of the people think they don’t want government interference in their lives at all,” she said. “Yet, the government is subsidizing just about every decision they make.”
And then there’s the matter of consolidation. The government has declined to pursue antitrust actions and break up big companies. It’s hard to do that when food prices are falling. The Obama administration’s line has basically been: “hey, if it’s good for the consumer …”
“I think we should worry about what’s good for rural communities,” Traci said. “The way it leads to the consolidation to agriculture is not healthy for rural communities, and in the end it’s not healthy for consumers, either.”
The Bruckners’ experience has left them with the sense that a farmer just can’t compete in the mass market without the money to grow large, and they’ve been sure to tell as much to their son.
“He grew up on the farm for a little while. He was 5 when we moved to Wayne,” Traci said. “And he’s in 4H, and we have some cows yet, maybe five or six cows that we breed out, little Herefords, and he loves them. He always said he wanted to be a farmer and that’s changed now that he’s growing up, he’s going to be 15 next week. But I’ve always told him, Sam, if you want to farm, you need to think about something highly diversified that allows you to dictate what your market is. You cannot be a John Deere tractor driver, combine driver, and expect to make it, because there’s just no room for someone with no money.”
The thing is, there are a lot of other options besides being a John Deere tractor driver and selling your food at a market price. There are premium markets emerging that give farmers more money and offer a new niche for mid-sized farms.
“I wish I could’ve seen into the future,” Brian said. “If I’d have kept raising hogs the way I was raising them, I would’ve had a market for my hogs through organization such as Niman Ranch. But I guess that’s encouraging to me, that those things are available for farmers who want to do things in that manner and that there’s a market for them and it’s a profitable market as well.”
Mass market farms are getting bigger, and as they do, there will be more people, like the Bruckners, pushed out. The economics work like an implacable ratchet. But at the same time, the demand for premium products, like Niman Ranch pork and organic grain, is expanding. And that could be the force that reinvigorates mid-sized farms and rural communities.
Gabe Brown
Rancher Gabe Brown has figured this out — he’s proof that there really is a place for mid-sized farms in modern America. He lives near Bismarck, N.D.
“Well, I was actually born and raised in town, in the city of Bismarck,” he told me. “At a young age, in junior high school I started taking vocational agriculture, got interested in agriculture, started working on different farms and ranches, worked at the dairy barn at the university and put myself through college. Then I was fortunate enough that I married a farmer’s daughter and he didn’t have any sons, so I was able to get into ranching that way.”
But Brown almost lost the family ranch — things just weren’t working out financially. The price of cattle kept falling, and his costs kept rising — especially the cost of the things he used to help his crops grow.
“We were having to use more fertilizers, more pesticides, but our costs were ever increasing, our margins were being squeezed tighter and tighter. Then in our particular case, what happened is the years 1995 through 1998, we went through a period of three years of hail and a year of drought, which economically more or less just devastated us. And the banker, although I’m grateful he didn’t foreclose on me, he wasn’t going to loan me any more money.”
Around this time Gabe Brown started learning about the holistic grazing guru, Allan Savory, and no-till farming master Duane Beck. Brown saw common thread between these and various other thinkers. They were all learning to farm in ways that borrowed tricks from functional ecosystems. So he stopped disturbing the soil with a plow, and made sure that the ground was always covered with some grassy armor, locked in place with its roots.
“You know, the soil is alive,” Brown said. “It’s just that our management, over the last 60, 70 years, has turned it into a sterile petri dish, more or less. All I’m trying to do is mimic nature. I’m not doing anything that hasn’t been done for eons of time.”
Because Brown doesn’t buy fertilizer or pesticides, his costs are low — it only costs him $1.44 to produce a bushel of corn. And how does that compare to the industry standard?
“Nationally, the cost to produce a bushel of corn is close to $5 a bushel,” Brown said.
That’s how much it costs to grow the stuff. But the price of corn is now around $4 a bushel. Which means most farmers are losing money on every kernel they sell. Not Brown:
“With all of our costs in there, from land-rent to seed to the seeding to the harvesting to the trucking it to market, we had a $1.44 cost per bushel for corn,” he said. “Same on the livestock, this past year it cost us $1,241 to take a beef animal from birth until harvest. Well, that’s considerably lower cost than they can do at any of the feedlots in the current conventional model. And then in turn, it’s our belief that as we focused on the soil resource, you know the soil is going to have — a healthy soil ecosystem will have more nutrients moving throughout it. Those nutrients will be in the plants, be eaten by the animals. We will have more nutrient-dense products. Now we’re selling our products directly to the consumer. And we’re getting paid at premium for them.”
Brown’s food is between 30 and 50 percent more expensive than mass market products. And I had to ask him, if his cost of production is really so low, why sell it at a premium?
“It’s supply and demand,” he said. “Some may say, Oh, but Gabe, you should mark your product down and sell it for less. I’ve spent the last 20 years building the health of my soil so I could have this premium product — I think I deserve a premium price. The market will tell me, and dictate what price I can get. For instance right now locally you can buy a dozen eggs for $1.20 to $1.50 a dozen. My son sells his for $4 a dozen and people stand up an hour before farmers market opens to buy those eggs. That tells us that there’s a real demand.”
To capture a greater share of the food dollar and sell directly to his customers, Brown isn’t just a farmer: He’s a shop keeper, a trucker, and a marketer. And he spends a lot of time talking up his products, and people are eager to hear about them. He says he turns down 10 speaking offers for every one he accepts. He spends the entire winter flying to gigs — while his wife and son take care of the ranch.
Brown’s figured out a working formula and been richly rewarded for it. But the biggest reward, he says, is in making a difference and seeing people come around. People like his in-laws, who used to be pretty skeptical of his methods.
“Well, unfortunately, my in-laws retired there when we bought the ranch and unfortunately they passed away since then,” Brown said. “But I’ll tell you this story. When I went to no-till, my father-in-law was not at all happy with his son-in-law, and he more or less told me that. You know, but he was kind about it. But in 2003, the year before he passed away, he asked my wife to get the camera and take a picture of him and his grandson, my son, standing in one of our corn fields, because he was so proud. He had never raised a crop like that himself. So, he knew then that I was on the right path.”
There are two important innovations that Gabe Brown has made. First there’s the technical innovation: figuring out this no-till holistic grazing system. The second is a business innovation: figuring out how to appeal directly to final customers and convince them that his product is worth a premium. Now, the thing about technical innovations is that they can always be scaled up. Lots of other farms, and bigger farms, can do the same thing. So this won’t be a panacea for mid-sized farms forever.
But his second innovation, the business innovation, could be the answer. There’s little future for mid-sized farms in the mass market. But, as a farmer, if you can convince eaters that you do an especially good job as a steward of the land and of their health, they’ll be happy to pay you for that.
Kale is one of our favorite salad greens, but its rough leaves need to be softened before getting added to the salad bowl. Check out these two unusual techniques for tenderizing kale without adding heat.
Over the past few months, I’ve written a number of times on how nutrition recommendations are seldom supported by science. I’ve argued that what many people are telling you may be inaccurate. In response, many of you have asked me what nutrition recommendations should say.
It’s much easier, unfortunately, to tell you what not to do. But here at The Upshot, we don’t avoid the hard questions. So I’m going to put myself on the line. Below are the general rules I live by. They’re the ones I share with patients, with friends and with family. They’re the ones I support as a pediatrician and a health services researcher. But I acknowledge up front that they may apply only to healthy people without metabolic disorders (me, for instance, as far as I know).
Full disclosure: I did not invent most of these. I’ve developed them from reading the work of others, including what may be the most impressive “official” nutritional guidelines, those of Brazil, as well as from earlier suggestions from readers, as in this great NYT interactive graphic. It captures readers’ responses to food rules by Michael Pollan. He is, of course, the promulgator of the well-known advice: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
1. Get as much of your nutrition as possible from a variety of completely unprocessed foods. These include fruits and vegetables. But they also include meat, fish, poultry and eggs that haven’t been processed. In other words, when buying food at the market, focus on things that have not been been cooked, prepared or altered in any way. Brown rice over white rice. Whole grains over refined grains. You’re far better off eating two apples than drinking the same 27 grams of sugar in an eight-ounce glass of apple juice.
1b. Eat lightly processed foods less often. You’re not going to make everything yourself. Pasta, for instance, is going to be bought already prepared. You’re not going to grind your own flour or extract your own oil. These are meant to be eaten along with unprocessed foods, but try to eat less of them.
1c. Eat heavily processed foods even less often. There’s little high-quality evidence that even the most processed foods are dangerous. But keep your consumption of them to a minimum, because they can make it too easy to stuff in calories. Such foods include bread, chips, cookies and cereals. In epidemiologic studies, heavily processed meats are often associated with worse health outcomes, but that evidence should be taken with a grain of salt (not literally), as I’ve written about before.
2. Eat as much home-cooked food as possible, which should be prepared according to Rule 1. Eating at home allows you to avoid processed ingredients more easily. It allows you full control over what you eat, and allows you to choose the flavors you prefer. You’re much less likely to stuff yourself silly if you eat home-cooked food. I’m not saying this is easy. Behavioral change takes repetition and practice. It also, unfortunately, takes time.
3. Use salt and fats, including butter and oil, as needed in food preparation. Things like salt and fat aren’t the enemy. They are often necessary in the preparation of tasty, satisfying food. The key here is moderation. Use what you need. Seasoning is often what makes vegetables taste good. Don’t be afraid of them, but don’t go crazy with them either.
4. When you do eat out, try to eat at restaurants that follow the same rules. Ideally, you should eat at restaurants that are creating all of their items from completely unprocessed foods. Lots and lots of restaurants do. Follow Rule 1 even while out to dinner. Some processing is going to be fine, but try to keep it to a minimum.
5. Drink mostly water, but some alcohol, coffee and other beverages are fine. As I’ve pointed out before, you can find a study to show that everything either prevents or causes cancer — alcohol and coffee included. But my take is that the preponderance of evidence supports the inclusion of a moderate consumption of most beverages.
6. Treat all beverages with calories in them as you would alcohol. This includes every drink with calories, including milk. They’re fine in moderation, but keep them to a minimum. You can have them because you like them, but you shouldn’t consume them as if you need them.
7. Eat with other people, especially people you care about, as often as possible. This has benefits even outside those of nutrition. It will make you more likely to cook. It will most likely make you eat more slowly. It will also make you happy.
I’ve avoided treating any food like the devil. Many nutrition experts do, and it may turn out they’re right, but at this point I think the jury is still out. I’ve therefore tried not to tell you to avoid anything completely. My experience tells me that total abstinence rarely works, although anecdotes exist to support that practice. I think you’ll find that many other diets and recommendations work under these rules. These are much more flexible and, I hope, reasonable than what some might prescribe.
All of these rules are subtly trying to get you to be more conscious of what you’re eating. It’s far too easy these days to consume more than you think you are, or more than you really need, especially when eating out. I’ve found that it’s impossible to tell any one person how much they should be eating. People have varying requirements, and it’s important for all of them to listen to their bodies to know when they should eat, and when they should stop.
Freeze Kale Cubes to Make Super Fast Green Smoothies
via skillet
Homemade green smoothies are a fast, easy, and inexpensive way to get fiber, folate, vitamins, and antioxidants in your diet. One trick that’ll make whipping them up not just easier but also more convenient: freeze some kale cubes ahead of time.
College-focused cooking site Spoon University explains how (and why) to make kale cubes: purée kale (or any other desired leafy green, like spinach) with a little bit of water in a blender, then pour into ice cube trays and freeze. Transfer them to a zip-locked plastic bag, and pop a block into your blender anytime you want to add a dose of green to a blended drink.
This not only prevents you from having to worry about washing or chopping kale every time you want a green smoothie, but it also means you don’t have to keep fresh leafy greens on hand every time you want a green blended drink. Bonus: the frozen block keeps the smoothie cold, so you won’t need to add as much (if any) ice.
Court Declares Vermont’s Genetically Engineered Food Labeling Law Constitutional
Ruling Denies Big Food’s Preliminary Injunction Motion
April 27, 2015 (Washington, DC)--Today, Center for Food Safety (CFS) hailed the just-issued federal court decision from the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont affirming the constitutionality of Vermont’s genetically engineered food labeling law, Act 120. The ruling fully denied the preliminary injunction motion brought by the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association, Snack Food Association, and other plaintiffs to try and halt the law’s implementation, and granted the State of Vermont’s motion to dismiss on several claims.
“This important ruling affirms the constitutionality of genetically engineered food labeling, as well as the rights of Vermonters and U.S. citizens across the country,” said George Kimbrell, senior attorney for Center for Food Safety and counsel in the case. “Americans are demanding the right to know if their food is produced through genetic engineering, for health, environmental and many other reasons. This decision is a crucial step in protecting those rights.”
"What a victory for Vermont consumers," said Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group. "From the beginning, we have said that Vermonters have substantial interests in knowing whether their food has been genetically engineered. This ruling brings us one giant step closer to that reality."
Act 120 was signed into law on May 8, 2014. The Grocery Manufacturer’s Association (GMA), which represents the country’s largest food manufacturers and has poured tens of millions of dollars into anti-labeling campaigns in other states, sued Vermont just over a month after the bill was signed into law.
In the denying the Plaintiffs’ injunction, Judge Reiss declared, “Because the State has established that Act 120’s GE disclosure requirement is reasonably related to the State’s substantial interests, under Zauderer, Act 120’s GE disclosure requirement is constitutional.”
The Vermont law is scheduled to take effect in July 2016. Two other states, Connecticut and Maine, passed GE food labeling laws with effective dates contingent on other states passing similar legislation. Oregon also has a ballot initiative on GE labeling in November 2014. There are currently 64 countries with labeling laws and 70 state bills were introduced in 2013-2014, in 30 different states.
CFS and the Vermont Public Interest Research Group are Amici in the case, represented by legal counsel from CFS and Vermont Law School’s Environmental & Natural Resources Law Clinic, and have litigated in support of the State and defending Act 120 since June 2014 (see for example, here andhere). Prior to that, CFS advised the State and Vermont groups on the crafting of the legislation for several years leading up to the law’s passage last spring. More broadly, CFS has led U.S. public interest efforts to secure the labeling of GE foods for nearly two decades, across the country. In 2012-2014, CFS co-authored GE labeling ballot initiatives in California, Washington, and Oregon, which all narrowly lost.
Among other decisions, the 84-page ruling by the Court specifically:
*Denied the Plaintiffs’ Motion for a Preliminary Injunction;
*Granted the State of Vermont’s Motion to Dismiss on several grounds, including dismissing claims that Act 120 was preempted by Federal Law, and that Act 120 violated the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, and that the Plaintiffs’ 1st Amendment Claims were subject to strict scrutiny;
*Held in the State’s Favor on the remaining 1st Amendment claims, but did not dismiss the Plaintiffs’ complaint; and
*Ruled that the Plaintiffs were likely to prevail on Act 120’s prohibition on labeling GE food as “natural.”
GMA represents the country’s largest food manufacturers, which already label GE foods all over the world, but have forcefully fought efforts to label here in the U.S., including California, Washington, and Oregon. GMA has also supported a bill in Congress that would preempt states from pursuing labeling laws, even in the absence of a federal standard.
Maple: David Chang’s Healthy and Sustainable Alternative to Take-Out
(from pskf)
Word on the street is that David Chang might show up by bicycle on your doorstep today. That is, if you’re located in the Financial District and hungry for Tarragon Roasted Chicken Salad, with a green goddess dressing, crisp greens and garlic broccoli or green chile enchiladas with corn tortillas for the more indulgent. The lucky customers to get a surprise visit from Momofuku’s acclaimed chef are among the first to tryMaple, a new on-demand service to make food delivery exceptional from first touchpoint to doorstep.
At its core, Maple offers chef-inspired meals at an accessible price point. But with this food app, users will never have to step foot inside a restaurant. In fact, they don’t even have to leave their home or office.
PSFK was first teased by Maple back in November, with no real knowledge to the intricacies of the technology, design and delivery process. Late last week, we got a first-hand preview of it with Co-Founder and CEO Caleb Merkl and Executive Chef Soa Davies, the industry veteran formerly at Le Bernardin.
Every day, Maple offers three dish options for each meal; the limited options specifically allow for greater quality of produce and operational efficiency. Our tasting menu showcased one of everything you might expect to find : a healthy protein, additional sides and a hearty alternative. A Maple user might imagine roasted fennel and leeks, broccoli rabe and roasted potatoes paired with roasted chicken. Pescatarian, gluten-free and vegetarian diners alike can all find something to eat, though the service doesn’t specially cater to allergies. Rather, the menu, currently with 190 fresh dishes in rotation, was created using the highest-quality and sustainable ingredients.
Down the line the food service will also roll out nutritional information so you’ll know exactly how many steps you need to log on your Jawbone during the evening’s workout.
A knock on the Maple office door, located in the heart of the Financial District, signified lunch was served. But these lunchbox looked more like a perfectly wrapped gift than an eco-friendly package of salad. Each box is optimized to keep the food warm and prepared as one might see at a restaurant. “Unlike traditional plastic bags used in delivery, Maple’s packing won’t subject you to spilt sauce and floating silverware. Maple is rethinking food delivery in not just an economical and culinary sense, but with its carefully designed take-out boxes,” noted PSFK’s Editorial Research Assistant Melanie Ehrenkranz.
The restaurant-less service competes with the likes of Seamless orPostmates, but operates in a league based on the efficiency of delivery alone. To ensure the most efficient and reliable travel time, each member of the Maple delivery team is equipped to the app’s built-in routing system. In the world of empowering business through big data, this feature allows the Maple developers to track the bicyclists from the kitchen to the front door and back — all while measuring how long it takes them to pedal through traffic, hackle with a doorman or climb a five-story walk-up.
As Maple expands and improves, this information will be used to determine the best future delivery routes. For instance, Merkl explains that a building noted with slow elevators within the system will inform how meals are prepped. Specifically curated grouping of delivery is necessary to keep all orders within the appraised 30-minute time bracket.
Additionally, the service is currently available within the parameters of Maple’s first kitchen below Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan. If you’re as anxious to give it a try as we were, you can always post up at a park or a street corner within the delivery parameters and wave down the bicyclists with the goody-box. That’s some serious customer service for a lunch priced at approximately $12, and dinner under $15—with tip, tax and delivery included.
Chipotle to Stop Using Genetically Altered Ingredients
From the nytimes.com:
In a first for a major restaurant chain, Chipotle Mexican Grill on Monday will begin preparing only food that is free of genetically engineered ingredients.
“This is another step toward the visions we have of changing the way people think about and eat fast food,” said Steve Ells, founder and co-chief executive of Chipotle. “Just because food is served fast doesn’t mean it has to be made with cheap raw ingredients, highly processed with preservatives and fillers and stabilizers and artificial colors and flavors.”
In 2013, Chipotle was the first restaurant chain to indicate which items contained genetically modified organisms, and a small but growing number of restaurants, largely in fine dining, also now label their menus.
Grocers, too, are moving to offer consumers more products free of genetically altered ingredients. Whole Foods stores will label any products containing such ingredients by 2018, and Walmart is vastly expanding its selection of organic foods, which are free of genetic alteration by law.
Even big food companies are moving to take genetically modified ingredients, or G.M.O.s, out of their products or to label products so that consumers know which are free of them.
Chipotle’s announcement does not mean that the restaurant will be entirely G.M.O.-free. The company acknowledges that some of the soft drinks it sells are likely to contain sweeteners made from G.M.O. corn, and that some of its meat and dairy supplies come from animals fed G.M.O. grains.
Whether other major restaurant chains will follow Chipotle’s lead is uncertain. The increased demand for such products has made them more expensive and difficult to obtain in the amounts that big businesses need.
“Say that to live up to the promise of being non-G.M.O., you need a non-G.M.O. ingredient that accounts for just 1 percent of your formula,” said Nicole Bernard Dawes, founder and chief executive of Late July Snacks, which makes chips, crackers and other snacks from organic ingredients. “If you have a supply shortage in that ingredient, you can’t produce your product.”
Ridding the supply chain of genetically altered components is difficult. They lurk in baking powder, cornstarch and a variety of ingredients used as preservatives, coloring agents and added vitamins, as well as in commodities like canola and soy oils, corn meal and sugar.
Chipotle has run short of beef from time to time, and last December it announced that it could not supply all of its restaurants with the pork needed for carnitas after an audit found that one of its suppliers had failed to meet its standards for raising pigs.
That shortage continues, cutting into the company’s sales, and last week it said it probably would not be able to offer carnitas in all of its more than 1,800 restaurants until this fall.
Mr. Ells said he did not expect to run into the same problem with supplies of non-G.M.O. ingredients. “We’re working with our farmers to plan enough of these crops we need to meet our supply,” he said. “With pork, it’s harder because we only need one part of the animal, the shoulder, and the farmer needs to sell the whole animal to make it work.”
Eliminating genetically engineered ingredients is easier for Chipotle, where the entire menu uses just 68 ingredients, including salt and pepper, while one of its competitors uses 81 just to make a burrito. “The vast majority of our ingredients don’t come in a G.M.O. variety, and we use lots of whole, unprocessed foods, so it was easier for us to do,” Mr. Ells said.
More than 90 percent of corn and soy grown in the United States is genetically modified, and Chipotle used soy oil to fry its chips and tortillas. Canola oil comes from rapeseed, another large G.M.O. crop.
Getting rid of genetically engineered corn was easiest. Chipotle’s primary tortilla supplier was already producing non-G.M.O. corn flour in small amounts, and it agreed to increase its production.
But one oil can’t simply replace another. Different oils have different smoking temperatures. They impart different flavors and have varying viscosity.
Chipotle’s chefs preferred sunflower oil but finding enough was tricky. Chipotle found a farmer willing to increase his production of sunflower, but the company needed more oil than he could produce.
So instead of using one oil for the majority of its needs, Chipotle now uses sunflower to fry its chips and tortillas, while a non-G.M.O. rice bran oil will be mixed into rice and used to fry fajita vegetables.
The flour tortillas posed a bigger problem. “The shortening had an oil in it that was derived from soybeans,” said Chris Arnold, Chipotle’s spokesman. “We won’t use lard for tortillas because of our vegan and vegetarian customers, and we can’t use palm oil because of the environmental impact.”
So Chipotle’s flour tortillas are now made with a non-G.M.O. canola oil, which costs more, and the company said last week that it might have to raise prices slightly this year.
But Mr. Ells said the cost of going G.M.O.-free was “de minimis.” “It’s really mostly about beef,” he said.
Correction: April 28, 2015
An article on Monday about Chipotle Mexican Grill’s decision to stop using genetically engineered ingredients misstated the breadth of the action. While the company will use only products from non-genetically modified organisms in its food preparation, it will continue to serve some soft drinks with sweeteners derived from genetically engineered corn. It will not be “serving” only food free of G.M.O. ingredients.
URBAN FARMING IS BOOMING, BUT WHAT DOES IT REALLY YIELD?
City-based agriculture produces 15 to 20 percent of food globally. In the U.S., its benefits go far beyond nutrition.
Midway through spring, the nearly bare planting beds of Carolyn Leadley’s Rising Pheasant Farms, in the Poletown neighborhood of Detroit, barely foreshadow the cornucopian abundance to come. It will be many months before Leadley is selling produce from this one-fifth-acre plot. But the affable young farmer has hardly been idle, even during the snowiest days of winter. Twice daily, she has been trekking from her house to a small greenhouse in her side yard, where she waves her watering wand over roughly 100 trays of sprouts, shoots and microgreens. She sells this miniature bounty, year round, at the city’s eastern market and to restaurateurs delighted to place some hyperlocal greens on their guests’ plates.
Leadley is a key player in Detroit’s vibrant communal and commercial farming community, which in 2014 produced nearly 400,000 pounds (18,000 kg) of produce — enough to feed more than 600 people — in its more than 1,300 community, market, family and school gardens. Other farms in postindustrial cities are also prolific: In 2008, Philadelphia’s 226 community and squatter gardens grew roughly 2 million pounds of mid-summer vegetables and herbs, worth US$4.9 million. Running at full bore, Brooklyn’s Added-Value Farm, which occupies 2.75 acres, funnels 40,000 pounds of fruit and vegetables into the low-income neighborhood of Red Hook. And in Camden, New Jersey — an extremely poor city of 80,000 with only one full-service supermarket — community gardeners at 44 sites harvested almost 31,000 pounds (14,000 kg) of vegetables during an unusually wet and cold summer. That’s enough food during the growing season to feed 508 people three servings a day.
That researchers are even bothering to quantify the amount of food produced on tiny city farms — whether community gardens, like those of Camden and Philly, or for-profit operations, like Leadley’s — is testament to the nation’s burgeoning local-foods movement and its data-hungry supporters. Young farmers are, in increasing numbers, planting market gardens in cities, and “local” produce (a term with no formal definition) now fills grocery shelves across the U.S., from Walmart to Whole Foods, and is promoted in more than 150 nations around the world.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nationsreports that 800 million people worldwide grow vegetables or fruits or raise animals in cities, producing an astonishing 15 to 20 percent of the world’s food. In developing nations, city dwellers farm for subsistence, but in the U.S., urban ag is more often driven by capitalism or ideology. The U.S. Department of Agriculture doesn’t track numbers of city farmers, but based on demand for its programs that fund education and infrastructure in support of urban-ag projects, and on surveys of urban ag in select cities, it affirms that business is booming. How far — and in what direction — can this trend go? What portion of a city’s food can local farmers grow, at what price, and who will be privileged to eat it? And can such projects make a meaningful contribution to food security in an increasingly crowded world?
Urban Advantages
Like anyone who farms in a city, Leadley waxes eloquent on the freshness of her product. Pea shoots that have traveled 3 miles (4.8 km) to grace a salad are bound to taste better and be more nutritious, she says, than those that have traveled half a continent or farther. “One local restaurant that I sell to used to buy its sprouts from Norway,” Leadley says. Fresher food also lasts longer on shelves and in refrigerators, reducing waste.
Food that’s grown and consumed in cities has other advantages: During times of abundance, it may cost less than supermarket fare that’s come long distances, and during times of emergency — when transportation and distribution channels break down — it can fill a vegetable void. Following large storms such as Hurricane Sandy and the blizzards of this past winter, says Viraj Puri, cofounder of New York City–based Gotham Greens (which produces more than 300 tons [272 metric tons] of herbs and microgreens per year in two rooftop hydroponic operations and has another farm planned for Chicago), “our produce was the only produce on the shelf at many supermarkets across the city.”
Despite their relatively small size, urban farms grow a surprising amount of food, with yields that often surpass those of their rural cousins. This is possible for a couple reasons. First, city farms don’t experience heavy insect pressure, and they don’t have to deal with hungry deer or groundhogs. Second, city farmers can walk their plots in minutes, rather than hours, addressing problems as they arise and harvesting produce at its peak. They can also plant more densely because they hand cultivate, nourish their soil more frequently and micromanage applications of water and fertilizer.
Though they don’t get as much press as for-profit farms and heavily capitalized rooftop operations, community gardens — which are collectively tended by people using individual or shared plots of public or private land, and have been a feature in U.S. cities for well over a century — are the most common form of urban agriculture in the nation, producing far more food and feeding more people, in aggregate, than their commercial counterparts. As social enterprises, community gardens operate in an alternate financial universe: they don’t sustain themselves with sales, nor do they have to pay employees. Instead, they rely on volunteer or cheap youth labor, they pay little or nothing in rent, and they solicit outside aid from government programs and foundations that support their social and environmental missions. These may include job training, health and nutrition education, and increasing the community’s resilience to climate change by absorbing stormwater, counteracting the urban heat island effect and converting food waste into compost.
Funders don’t necessarily expect community gardens to become self-sustaining. These farms may increase their revenue streams by selling at farmers markets or to restaurants, or they may collect fees from restaurants or other food-waste generators for accepting scraps that will be converted into compost, says Ruth Goldman, a program officer at the Merck Family Fund, which funds urban agriculture projects. “But margins on vegetable farming are very slim, and because these farms are doing community education and training teen leaders, they’re not likely to operate in the black.”
Several years ago, Elizabeth Bee Ayer, who until recently ran a training program for city farmers, took a hard look at the beets growing in her Youth Farm, in the Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn. She counted the hand movements involved in harvesting the roots and the minutes it took to wash and prepare them for sale. “Tiny things can make or break a farm,” Ayer notes. “Our beets cost US$2.50 for a bunch of four, and people in the neighborhood loved them. But we were losing 12 cents on every beet.” Ultimately, Ayer decided not to raise the price: “No one would have bought them,” she says. Instead, she doubled down on callaloo, a Caribbean herb that cost less to produce but sold enough to subsidize the beets. “People love it, it grows like a weed, it’s low maintenance and requires very little labor.” In the end, she says, “We are a nonprofit, and we didn’t want to make a profit.”
Sustainable and Resilient
Few would begrudge Ayer her loss leader, but such practices can undercut for-profit city farmers who are already struggling to compete with regional farmers at crowded urban markets and with cheap supermarket produce shipped from California and Mexico. Leadley, of Rising Pheasant Farms, realized long ago that she wouldn’t survive selling only the vegetables from her outdoor garden, which is why she invested in a plastic-draped greenhouse and heating system. Her tiny shoots, sprouts, amaranth and kohlrabi leaves grow year-round; they grow quickly — in the summer, Leadley can make a crop in seven days — and they sell for well over a dollar an ounce.
Nodding toward her backyard plot, Leadley says, “I grow those vegetables because they look good on the farm stand. They attract more customers to our table, and I really love growing outdoors.” But it’s the microgreens that keep Leadley from joining the ranks of the vast majority of U.S. farmers and taking a second job.
Mchezaji Axum, an agronomist with the University of the District of Columbia, the first exclusively urban land-grant university in the nation, helps urban farmers increase their yields whether they are selling into wealthy markets, like Leadley, or poorer markets, like Ayer. He promotes the use of plant varieties adapted to city conditions (short corn that produces four instead of two ears, for example). He also recommends biointensive methods, such as planting densely, intercropping, applying compost, rotating crops and employing season-extension methods (growing cold-tolerant vegetables like kale, spinach or carrots in winter hoop houses, for example, or starting plants in cold frames — boxes with transparent tops that let in sunlight but protect plants from extreme cold and rain).
“You learn to improve your soil health, and you learn how to space your plants to get more sunshine,” Axum says. Surveying D.C.’s scores of communal gardens, Axum has been surprised by how little food they actually grow. “People aren’t using their space well. More than 90 percent aren’t producing intensively. Some people just want to grow and be left alone.
“Using biointensive methods may not be part of your cultural tradition,” Laura J. Lawson, a professor of landscape architecture at Rutgers State University and the author of City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardening in America, says. “It depends who you learned gardening from.” Lawson recalls the story of a well-meaning visitor to a Philadelphia garden who suggested that the farmers had planted their corn in a spot that wasn’t photosynthetically ideal. The women told their visitor, “We always plant it there; that way we can pee behind it.”
Axum is all about scaling up and aggregating hyperlocal foods to meet the demands of large buyers like city schools, hospitals or grocery stores. Selling to nearby institutions, say food policy councils — established by grassroots organizations and local governments to strengthen and support local food systems — is key to making urban food systems more sustainable and resilient, to say nothing of providing a living to local growers. But scaling up often requires more land, and therefore more expensive labor to cultivate it, in addition to changes in local land use and other policies, marketing expertise and efficient distribution networks.
“Lots of local institutions want to source their food here,” says Detroit farmer Noah Link, whose Food Field, a commercial operation, encompasses a nascent orchard, vast areas of raised beds, two tightly wrapped 150-foot-long hoop houses (one of which shelters a long, narrow raceway crammed with catfish), chickens, beehives and enough solar panels to power the whole shebang. “But local farms aren’t producing enough food yet. We’d need an aggregator to pull it together for bulk sales.”
Link doesn’t grow microgreens — the secret sauce for so many commercial operations — because he can break even on volume: His farm occupies an entire city block. Annie Novak, who co-founded New York City’s first for-profit rooftop farm in 2009, doesn’t have the luxury of space. She realized early on that she couldn’t grow a wide enough diversity of food to satisfy her community-supported agriculture customers in just 5,800 square feet (540 square meters) of shallow raised beds. “So I partnered with a farm upstate to supplement and diversify the boxes,” she says. Now, Novak focuses on niche and value-added products. “I make a hot sauce from my peppers and market the bejesus out of it,” she says. She also grows microgreens for restaurants, plus honey, herbs, flowers and “crops that are narratively interesting, like purple carrots, or heirloom tomatoes, which give us an opportunity to educate people about the value of food, green spaces and our connection to nature,” she says.
Sometimes being strategic with crop selection isn’t enough.Brooklyn Grange, a for-profit farm atop two roofs in New York City, grows more than 50,000 pounds (23,000 kg) of tomatoes, kale, lettuce, carrots, radishes and beans, among other crops, each year. It sells them through its CSA, at farm stands and to local restaurants. But to further boost its income, Brooklyn Grange also offers a summerlong training program for beekeepers (US$850 tuition), yoga classes and tours, and it rents its Edenic garden spaces, which have million-dollar views of the Manhattan skyline, for photo shoots, weddings, private dinners and other events.
“Urban farms are like small farms in rural areas,” says Carolyn Dimitri, an applied economist who studies food systems and food policy at New York University. “They have the same set of problems: people don’t want to pay a lot for their food, and labor is expensive. So they have to sell high-value products and do some agritourism.”
Under Control
On a miserable March morning, with a sparkling layer of ice glazing a foot of filthy snow, a coterie of Chicago’s urban farmers toils in shirtsleeves and sneakers, their fingernails conspicuously clean. In their gardens, no metal or wood scrap accumulates in corners, no chickens scratch in hoop-house soil. In fact, these farmers use no soil at all. Their densely planted basil and arugula leaves sprout from growing medium in barcoded trays. The trays sit on shelves stacked 12 feet (3.7 meters) high and illuminated, like tanning beds, by purple and white lights. Fans hum, water gurgles, computer screens flicker.
FarmedHere, the nation’s largest player in controlled environment agriculture — CEA —pumps out roughly a million pounds (500,000 kg) per year of baby salad greens, basil and mint in its 90,000-square-foot (8,000-square-meter) warehouse on the industrial outskirts of Chicago. Like many hydroponic or aquaponic operations (in which water from fish tanks nourishes plants, which filter the water before it’s returned to the fish), the farm has a futuristic feel — all glowing lights and stainless steel. Employees wear hairnets and nitrile gloves. But without interference from weather, insects or even too many people, the farm quickly and reliably fulfills year-round contracts with local supermarkets, including nearly 50 Whole Foods Markets.
“We can’t keep up with demand,” Nick Greens, a deejay turned master grower, says.
Unlike outdoor farms, CEA has no call for pesticides and contributes no nitrogen to waterways. Its closed-loop irrigation systems consume 10 times less water than conventional systems. And with 25 high-density crops per year, as opposed to a conventional farmer’s five or so, CEA yields are 10 to 20 times higher than the same crop grown outdoors — in theory sparing forests and grasslands from the plow.
Is CEA the future of urban farming? It produces a lot of food in a small space, to be sure. But until economies of scale kick in, these operations — which are capital intensive to build and maintain — must concentrate exclusively on high-value crops like microgreens, winter tomatoes and herbs.
Reducing food miles reduces transit-related costs, as well as the carbon emissions associated with transport, packaging and cooling. But growing indoors under lights, with heating and cooling provided by fossil fuels, may negate those savings. When Louis Albright, an emeritus professor of biological and environmental engineering at Cornell University, dug into the numbers, he discovered that closed-system farming is expensive, energy intensive and, at some latitudes, unlikely to survive on solar or wind power. Growing a pound of hydroponic lettuce in Ithaca, New York, Albright reports, generates 8 pounds (4 kg) of carbon dioxide at the local power plant: a pound of tomatoes would generate twice that much. Grow that lettuce without artificial lights in a greenhouse and emissions drop by two thirds.
Food Security
In the world’s poorest nations, city dwellers have always farmed for subsistence. But more of them are farming now than ever before. In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, it’s estimated that 40 percent of the urban population is engaged in agriculture. Long-time residents and recent transplants alike farm because they’re hungry, they know how to grow food, land values in marginal areas (under power lines and along highways) are low, and inputs like organic wastes — fertilizer — are cheap. Another driver is the price of food: People in developing nations pay a far higher percentage of their total income for food than Americans do, and poor transportation and refrigeration infrastructure make perishable goods, like fruits and vegetables, especially dear. Focusing on these high-value crops, urban farmers both feed themselves and supplement their incomes.
In the U.S., urban farming is likely to have its biggest impact on food security in places that, in some ways, resemble the global south — that is, in cities or neighborhoods where land is cheap, median incomes are low and the need for fresh food is high. Detroit, by this metric, is particularly fertile ground. Michael Hamm, a professor of sustainable agriculture at Michigan State University, calculated that the city, which has just under 700,000 residents and more than 100,000 vacant lots (many of which can be purchased, thanks to the city’s recent bankruptcy, for less than the price of a refrigerator), could grow three quarters of its current vegetable consumption and nearly half its fruit consumption on available parcels of land using biointensive methods.
No one expects city farms in the U.S. to replace peri-urban or rural vegetable farms: cities don’t have the acreage or the trained farmers, and most can’t produce food anything close to year-round. But can city farms take a bite from long-distance supply chains? NYU’s Dimitri doesn’t think so. Considering the size and global nature of the nation’s food supply, she says, urban ag in our cities “isn’t going to make a dent. And it’s completely inefficient, economically. Urban farmers can’t charge what they should, and they’re too small to take advantage of economies of scale and use their resources more efficiently.”
That doesn’t mean that community gardeners, who don’t even try to be profitable, aren’t making a big difference in their immediate communities. Camden’s 31,000 pounds (14,000 kg) of produce might not seem like a lot, but it’s a very big deal for those lucky enough to get their hands on it. “In poor communities where households earn very little income,” says Domenic Vitiello, an associate professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, “a few thousand dollars’ worth of vegetables and fruit grown in the garden makes a much bigger difference than for more affluent households.”
History tells us that community gardening — supported by individuals, government agencies and philanthropies — is here to stay. And whether these gardens ultimately produce more food or more knowledge about food — where it comes from, what it takes to produce it, how to prepare and eat it — they still have enormous value as gathering places and classrooms and as conduits between people and nature. Whether or not cultivating fruits and vegetables in tiny urban spaces makes economic or food-security sense, people who want to grow food in cities will find a way to do so. As Laura Lawson says, “City gardens are part of our ideal sense of what a community should be. And so their value is priceless.”
It isn’t every day that the definition of a common English word that is ubiquitous in common parlance is challenged in federal court, but that is precisely what has happened with the word “natural.” During the past few years, some 200 class-action suits have been filed against food manufacturers, charging them with misuse of the adjective in marketing such edible oxymorons as “natural” Cheetos Puffs, “all-natural” Sun Chips, “all-natural” Naked Juice, “100 percent all-natural” Tyson chicken nuggets and so forth. The plaintiffs argue that many of these products contain ingredients — high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors and colorings, chemical preservatives and genetically modified organisms — that the typical consumer wouldn’t think of as “natural.”
Judges hearing these cases — many of them in the Northern District of California — have sought a standard definition of the adjective that they could cite to adjudicate these claims, only to discover that no such thing exists.
Something in the human mind, or heart, seems to need a word of praise for all that humanity hasn’t contaminated, and for us that word now is “natural.” Such an ideal can be put to all sorts of rhetorical uses. Among the antivaccination crowd, for example, it’s not uncommon to read about the superiority of something called “natural immunity,” brought about by exposure to the pathogen in question rather than to the deactivated (and therefore harmless) version of it made by humans in laboratories. “When you inject a vaccine into the body,” reads a post on an antivaxxer website, Campaign for Truth in Medicine, “you’re actually performing an unnatural act.” This, of course, is the very same term once used to decry homosexuality and, more recently, same-sex marriage, which the Family Research Council has taken to comparing unfavorably to what it calls “natural marriage.”
So what are we really talking about when we talk about natural? It depends; the adjective is impressively slippery, its use steeped in dubious assumptions that are easy to overlook. Perhaps the most incoherent of these is the notion that nature consists of everything in the world except us and all that we have done or made. In our heart of hearts, it seems, we are all creationists.
In the case of “natural immunity,” the modifier implies the absence of human intervention, allowing for a process to unfold as it would if we did nothing, as in “letting nature take its course.” In fact, most of medicine sets itself against nature’s course, which is precisely what we like about it — at least when it’s saving us from dying, an eventuality that is perhaps more natural than it is desirable.
Yet sometimes medicine’s interventions are unwelcome or go overboard, and nature’s way of doing things can serve as a useful corrective. This seems to be especially true at the beginning and end of life, where we’ve seen a backlash against humanity’s technological ingenuity that has given us both “natural childbirth” and, more recently, “natural death.”
This last phrase, which I expect will soon be on many doctors’ lips, indicates the enduring power of the adjective to improve just about anything you attach it to, from cereal bars all the way on up to dying. It seems that getting end-of-life patients and their families to endorse “do not resuscitate” orders has been challenging. To many ears, “D.N.R.” sounds a little too much like throwing Grandpa under the bus. But according to a paper in The Journal of Medical Ethics, when the orders are reworded to say “allow natural death,” patients and family members and even medical professionals are much more likely to give their consent to what amounts to exactly the same protocols.
The word means something a little different when applied to human behavior rather than biology (let alone snack foods). When marriage or certain sexual practices are described as “natural,” the word is being strategically deployed as a synonym for “normal” or “traditional,” neither of which carries nearly as much rhetorical weight. “Normal” is by now too obviously soaked in moral bigotry; by comparison, “natural” seems to float high above human squabbling, offering a kind of secular version of what used to be called divine law. Of course, that’s exactly the role that “natural law” played for America’s founding fathers, who invoked nature rather than God as the granter of rights and the arbiter of right and wrong.
“Traditional” marriage might be a more defensible term, but traditional is a much weaker modifier than natural. Tradition changes over time and from culture to culture, and so commands a fraction of the authority of nature, which we think of as timeless and universal, beyond the reach of messy, contested history.
Implicit here is the idea that nature is a repository of abiding moral and ethical values — and that we can say with confidence exactly what those values are. Philosophers often call this the “naturalistic fallacy”: the idea that whatever is (in nature) is what ought to be (in human behavior). But if nature offers a moral standard by which we can measure ourselves, and a set of values to which we should aspire, exactly what sort of values are they? Are they the brutally competitive values of “nature, red in tooth and claw,” in which every individual is out for him- or herself? Or are they the values of cooperation on display in a beehive or ant colony, where the interests of the community trump those of the individual? Opponents of same-sex marriage can find examples of monogamy in the animal kingdom, and yet to do so they need to look past equally compelling examples of animal polygamy as well as increasing evidence of apparent animal homosexuality. And let’s not overlook the dismaying rates of what looks very much like rape in the animal kingdom, or infanticide, or the apparent sadism of your average house cat.
The American Puritans called nature “God’s Second Book,” and they read it for moral guidance, just as we do today. Yet in the same way we can rummage around in the Bible and find textual support for pretty much whatever we want to do or argue, we can ransack nature to justify just about anything. Like the maddening whiteness of Ahab’s whale, nature is an obligingly blank screen on which we can project what we want to see.
So does this mean that, when it comes to saying what’s natural, anything goes? I don’t think so. In fact, I think there’s some philosophical wisdom we can harvest from, of all places, the Food and Drug Administration. When the federal judges couldn’t find a definition of “natural” to apply to the class-action suits before them, three of them wrote to the F.D.A., ordering the agency to define the word. But the F.D.A. had considered the question several times before, and refused to attempt a definition. The only advice the F.D.A. was willing to offer the jurists is that a food labeled “natural” should have “nothing artificial or synthetic” in it “that would not normally be expected in the food.” The F.D.A. states on its website that “it is difficult to define a food product as ‘natural’ because the food has probably been processed and is no longer the product of the earth,” suggesting that the industry might not want to press the point too hard, lest it discover that nothing it sells is natural.
The F.D.A.’s philosopher-bureaucrats are probably right: At least at the margins, it’s impossible to fix a definition of “natural.” Yet somewhere between those margins there lies a broad expanse of common sense. “Natural” has a fairly sturdy antonym — artificial, or synthetic — and, at least on a scale of relative values, it’s not hard to say which of two things is “more natural” than the other: cane sugar or high-fructose corn syrup? Chicken or chicken nuggets? G.M.O.s or heirloom seeds? The most natural foods in the supermarket seldom bother with the word; any food product that feels compelled to tell you it’s natural in all likelihood is not.
But it is probably unwise to venture beyond the shores of common sense, for it isn’t long before you encounter either Scylla or Charybdis. At one extreme end of the spectrum of possible meanings, there’s nothing butnature. Our species is a result of the same process — natural selection — that created every other species, meaning that we and whatever we do are natural, too. So go ahead and call your nuggets natural: It’s like saying they’re made with matter, or molecules, which is to say, it’s like saying nothing at all.
And yet at the opposite end of the spectrum of meaning, where humanity in some sense stands outside nature — as most of us still unthinkingly believe — what is left of the natural that we haven’t altered in some way? We’re mixed up with all of it now, from the chemical composition of the atmosphere to the genome of every plant or animal in the supermarket to the human body itself, which has long since evolved in response to cultural practices we invented, like agriculture and cooking. Nature, if you believe in human exceptionalism, is over. We probably ought to search elsewhere for our values.
Organic farming can reverse the agriculture ecosystem from a carbon source to a carbon sink
Approximately 35% of global greenhouse gases (GHGs) come from agriculture. Some argues that human can reverse global worming by sequestering several hundred billion tons of excess CO2 through regenerative, organic farming, ranching and land use. Increasing the soil's organic content will not only fix carbon and reduce emissions, it will also improve the soil's ability to retain water and nutrients and resist pests and droughts.
Born and raised at Punta de Lobos, Ramón Navarro found his passion riding the biggest waves on the planet. But his accomplishments in giant surf are just one part of a bigger vision to protect the culture and environment of the Chilean coast.
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