It’s spring and the books about food and farms are flooding in.  I’ll start with these.

Daniel Imhoff, Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to the Next Food and Farm Bill, Watershed Media, 2012.

Michael Pollan and Fred Kirschnmann introduce this new, gorgeously illustrated edition of Imhoff’s lucid explanation of the farm bill and the vast number of issues it covers.  I’m not aware of anything else that comes close to explaining this most obscure and obfuscated piece of legislation.   Congress is fussing with the bill right now.  If you want to understand what your elected officials are fussing about, start here.  I will use this book in my NYU classes and will borrow the stunning illustrations for talks.

Jim VanDerPol, Conversations with the Land, No Bull Press, 2012.

This is a book of personal reflections on farms, farming, and farmers.  VanDerPol talks about the weather, people and communities, and better ways to produce food and to live.  From his base in Minnesota, he gives his thoughts  about the way agriculture has changed and what can be done to make it better.

I’ve been wondering for ages whatever happened to the piece I wrote for Jonathan Safran Foer’s new translation of the Haggadah, the text traditionally read and debated at Jewish Passover services.

Yesterday’s New York Times style section solves the mystery.

Mr. Foer got the idea for creating a new Haggadah after a Seder at his grandparents’ house in Washington, D.C., nine years ago…So he set out to deconstruct the traditional Haggadah with analysis by 30 marquee writers and artists, including Susan Sontag, Simon Schama, Tony Kushner, Michael Pollan as well as artwork by the painter R. B. Kitaj.

He dropped the idea because the individualism of the essays distracted attention from the text.

I was one of the 30 writers who Jonathan talked into writing for this project.  I submitted my piece in January 2007.

Despite a couple of attempts to find out what happened to it, I never heard from him again (but see update below).

Ah well.  These things happen.

Jonathan particularly wanted me to discuss the non-ceremonial foods of the Passover feast, the dishes that the Hagaddah does not discuss.   Here’s what I sent him:

Haggadah: The Passover Meal

Through the rituals of Passover, we are to re-experience and honor the sufferings of the Jewish people throughout the ages.   The ritual reenactments require us to sip wine, taste bitter herbs and haroset, and reflect upon the symbolic meanings of these foods.

All of this has made us hungry.  Now, we are to eat.   But what?

The rituals say only that we must eat matzo but must not eat anything leavened (hometz).  If we follow Ashkenazi traditions, we also must not eat kitniyot, the beans, rice, or other foods that might fool us into eating hametz by mistake. 

Unlike most else in this ceremony, we are not to question these rules.  By following them unquestioningly, we reaffirm our identity as Jews and our freedom—and our conscious decision—to participate in Jewish cultural traditions.

But what of the feast itself?  On this, the Haggadah is mute.

How are we to interpret this silence?   One possibility is that the meal itself symbolizes freedom, in this case to create our own rituals.   Except for the obligatory matzo and the forbidden hametz, the menus of Passover feasts from Europe (East and West), Iberia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East could not differ more.  Each community, each family within that community, is free to interpret its own food traditions in its own way.

Chicken soup?  Matzo balls that sink or float?  Fava beans?  From one family to another, such differences may be irreconcilable.  But for those who celebrate Passover together year after year, the dishes themselves are not the point.

The point is the predictability of those dishes.   In this respect, the Passover meal not only celebrates survival and freedom from oppression, but also constitutes an oasis of stability in an uncertain and mutable world.

For many, myself included, the significance of Passover is as an occasion on which to honor the most important values of Judaism: freedom from oppression, democracy, social justice, ethical relations with others, and the obligation to transmit these values to our children.  The meal is an excellent means for doing so.

Whatever the foods served, they can inspire yet another set of four questions, these about what food means to us as moral, ethical beings in today’s world.

• Tonight we partake of this feast while others go hungry as a result of the injustices of war, famine, or social and economic inequity.  How can we improve the human condition and ensure that those who need food have enough to eat?
• Tonight we eat many foods.  How can we ensure that those who produce our food are justly compensated for their labor and are employed under conditions that provide for their housing, health, physical safety, and human rights?
• Tonight we eat foods from near and far.  How can we ensure that these foods were produced in ways that sustain our land, water, and air, and that were kind to the animals that give us meat and milk?
• Tonight we feast.   On other days, how can we choose foods that best nourish our bodies, please our senses, promote our health, and make the world a better place for all?

Let the meal stimulate as much discussion as the rest of the rituals.  Now, at long last, it is time to eat.  Enjoy!

Rejections are always disappointing but in this instance I’m in splendid company.

I’d love to read the other pieces that didn’t get published.  I’ll bet they are worth reading on their own.

In any case, I look forward to seeing the new Haggadah.

Update, March 16:  I received this note yesterday from Jonathan Foer:

Dear Marion,

I saw your piece this morning and was mortified.  I changed e-mail addresses about a year ago—this is the only e-mail I use anymore—and sent you two notes from here explaining the changes in the Haggadah…I don’t know if my e-mail went to your spam folder, or what, but the thought of you not hearing from me about this makes me very sad…To be honest, when I didn’t hear back, I feared you were pissed about the editorial change, and so after my second e-mail, I thought it best not to keep pushing.

In any case, I’m so genuinely sorry about this.  Your piece is wonderful.  (As are the others that were cut.)  But the longer I worked on the book, the better I understood that it actually just wants the editor and writers to get out of its way.  I wish I could have found you with that message a year ago…

Best, and apologies,

Jonathan

Nice, no?  Apology totally accepted.  We are exchanging books.

Adam Davidson in the New York Times Sunday Magazine asks how come dairy farmers have such a hard time making a living?

His explanation: Dairy farmers thought they were in the business of raising cows.  Wrong.  They are in the business of betting on feed prices.

…in the last decade, dairy products and cow feed became globally traded commodities. Consequently, modern farmers have effectively been forced to become fast-paced financial derivatives traders.This has prompted a significant and drastic change.

For most of the 20th century, dairy farming was a pretty stable business…at base, dairy-farming economics are simple: when the cost of corn and soybeans (which feed the cows) are low and milk prices are high, dairy farmers can make a comfortable living.

And for decades, the U.S. government enforced stable prices for feed and for milk, which meant steady, predictable income, shaken only by disease or bad weather.

…[But] by the early aughts, to accommodate global trade rules and diminishing political support for agricultural subsidies, the government allowed milk prices to follow market demand.

…Animal feed, especially corn and soybeans, became globally traded commodities with all the impossible-to-predict price swings of oil or copper.

Davidson points to the 1% of dairy farmers who have figured all this out and are big enough to hire derivative traders to manage their feed stocks.

Farm bill politics, anyone?

Dairy farmer readers: comments please.

I’m getting caught up on my journal reading and just ran across an editorial from The Lancet, January 21.  It takes on the UK government’s “personal responsibility” approach to health promotion based on the idea that

gently ‘nudging’ people to change their unhealthy behaviours was the key to public health.

Even the UK government has to admit that the nudge approach isn’t working.  Now it is telling physicians in the National Health Service (NHS) to nag:

use every contact with patients and the public to help them maintain and improve their physical and mental health and wellbeing.

The Lancet asks:

Is this a realistic, sensible, and effective recommendation? We would say not.

Effective, evidenced-based public health measures do not include nudging people into healthy behaviours or getting NHS staff to lecture patients on healthy lifestyles.

They include measures such as raising taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, fatty foods, and sugary drinks, reducing junk food and drink advertising to children, and restricting hours on sale of alcoholic drinks….Focusing on other approaches is foolish.

The nudge and nag approaches need one thing: the firm elbow.

I just got my copy of Kate Adamick’s Lunch Money:  Serving Healthy School Food in a Sick Economy (Cook for America, 2012).

I had seen it at an earlier stage and wrote a blurb for it:

Kate Adamick is my go-to guru for tough-minded practical advice about school food.  This book is a must read for anyone who works with school food as well as parents who care what their kids eat in school.

Kate Adamick knows more about how the school food financial system works than anyone I know.  She has figured out how to put the system to work so it produces healthy foods for kids.

Everyone I know who is involved with school food complains about lack of funds.  Kate runs workshops with school food personnel to help them access available funds that can be used to buy kitchen equipment and better foods.

Her secret?  Getting kids to eat breakfast and teaching cooks to cook.

Her book provides diagrams, charts, and worksheets to show how the system works and what to do to transform school food from something that feels like a problem into a program that makes cooks feel proud and kids happy to eat healthier food.

You don’t believe this?  Take a look.

Olivier de Schutter, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has issued five recommendations for fixing diets and food systems:

• Tax unhealthy products.
• Regulate foods high in saturated fats, salt and sugar.
• Crack down on junk food advertising.
• Overhaul misguided agricultural subsidies that make certain ingredients cheaper than others.
• Support local food production so that consumers have access to healthy, fresh and nutritious foods.

De Schutter explains:

One in seven people globally are undernourished, and many more suffer from the ‘hidden hunger’ of micronutrient deficiency, while 1.3 billion are overweight or obese.

Faced with this public health crisis, we continue to prescribe medical remedies: nutrition pills and early-life nutrition strategies for those lacking in calories; slimming pills, lifestyle advice and calorie counting for the overweight.

But we must tackle the systemic problems that generate poor nutrition in all its forms.

Governments, he said:

have often been indifferent to what kind of calories are on offer, at what price, to whom they are accessible, and how they are marketed…We have deferred to food companies the responsibility for ensuring that a good nutritional balance emerges.

…Heavy processing thrives in our global food system, and is a win-win for multinational agri-food companies…But for the people, it is a lose-lose…In better-off countries, the poorest population groups are most affected because foods high in fats, sugar and salt are often cheaper than healthy diets as a result of misguided subsidies whose health impacts have been wholly ignored.

Much to ponder here.  Let’s hope government health agencies listen hard and get to work.

For further information, the press release adds these links:

• Nutrition diagrams for developed and developing countries
• The mandate of the Special Rapporteur
• The Universal Human Rights Index

My Tuesday Q and A for NYU’s Washington Square News:

My monthly (first Sunday) Food Matters column in the San Francisco Chronicle is inspired by California’s petition initiative to get labeling of genetically modified foods on the ballot.

Q. I was just handed a petition for a ballot initiative to label genetically modified foods. I signed it, but how come GM foods aren’t already labeled?

A. Labeling GM foods should be a no-brainer. Practically everyone wants them labeled. That’s why the Committee for the Right to Know is collecting signatures for a California ballot initiative to require it.

To say that food biotechnology industry supporters oppose this idea is to understate the matter. They think the future of GM foods is at stake. They must believe that if the foods were labeled, nobody would buy them.

If consumers distrust GM foods, the industry has nobody to blame but itself. It has done little to inspire trust.

Labeling promotes trust. Not labeling is undemocratic; it does not allow choice.

As I discuss in my book, “Safe Food,” I was a member of the FDA’s Food Advisory Committee when the agency approved production of the first GM tomato in 1994. As we learned later, the FDA was not asking our opinion. It was using us to gather reactions to decisions already made.

For reasons in part scientific but largely in response to industry pressures, the FDA decided that GM foods are inherently safe and no different from foods produced through traditional genetic techniques. Therefore, the thinking went, labeling would be unnecessary and mislead people into thinking that the foods are different and somehow inferior.

Some of us strongly advised the FDA to reconsider. We thought the issue of trust was paramount. If the products had some public benefit, people would buy them.

Consumers in Great Britain, for example, readily accepted tomato paste prominently labeled GM, not least because the cans were priced below those with conventional tomatoes.

But once Monsanto shipped GM corn to England without labeling it, and placed advertisements in British newspapers hyping the benefits of GM foods, the British public lost confidence. Sales declined and supermarket chains no longer were willing to carry GM items.

Today, close to 90 percent of corn, soybeans and sugar beets grown in the United States are GM varieties. You must assume that ingredients made from these foods are GM – unless the product is certified organic.

When researching “What to Eat,” I knew that Hawaiian papayas engineered to resist ringspot virus were the most likely candidates. I had some tested. The conventional was GM. The organic was not. Without labels, you have no way of knowing whether you are buying GM fruits and vegetables.

Intelligent people can argue about whether GM crops are good, bad or indifferent for agriculture, the environment and market economies, or whether the products are safe. But one point is clear. The absence of labeling cannot be good in the long run for business or American democracy.

Consumers have a right to know how foods are produced. Polls consistently report that most people want GM labeling. Lack of labeling raises uncomfortable questions about what the biotechnology industry and the FDA are trying to hide.

The FDA already requires labels to identify food that is made from concentrate or irradiated. At least 50 countries in Europe and elsewhere require disclosure of GM ingredients. I’ve seen candy bar labels in England with this statement: “Contains genetically modified sugar, soya and corn.” We could do this, too.

Last year, 14 states, including Oregon, New York and Vermont, introduced bills to require GM foods to be labeled. None passed, but the campaign has now gone national.

If you want a GM-label measure on the California ballot, go to labelgmos.org.  Just Label It is still collecting signatures. Signing these petitions is an important way to exercise your democratic rights as a citizen.