So I appreciate Mark Bittman’s effort to put a positive spin on things, and remind us that not everything is so bad. Though change is slow and cumbersome, there are good things happening for the food movement. Not quickly. Not every day. And the changes that happen aren’t perfect. But over time, he says, things are getting better. And that makes me feel a little better about the world.

Unprocessed food is any food that could be made by a person with reasonable skill in a home kitchen with readily available, whole-food ingredients.

You don’t necessarily have to make them yourself, at home – but you should only eat things that you could theoretically have made.  Beer is okay: plenty of people brew beer at home, even if you don’t.  Same with cheese, some varieties of which you can make at home without any special equipment.  But chocolate is only okay if it doesn’t have additives, and cookies could be okay, if you used whole grain flour (which could be milled at home) and a natural sweetener (unlike sugar, which requires too much processing).  Anything with corn syrup is right out.

Isn’t that cool?  The rules are somewhat arbitrary (and certainly open to bending), but the whole project is an exercise in consciousness, a new awareness about what goes into the foods we eat, even things we cook ourselves. There’s an incredible amount of processed foods, chemicals and preservatives in almost everything you buy at the store.  If you’re buying something with an ingredient list, odds are that list contains at least one processed ingredient, something that could only be made in a lab or a factory. Reading labels is a scary, dangerous business!

While I won’t be going unprocessed for the whole month, I’d love to participate in a small way, by making some things from scratch that I wouldn’t normally.  Perhaps I’ll make cheese, which I haven’t done in a long time.  I will almost certainly make homemade peanut butter cups for Halloween, and will share the recipe.  I’ve never made peanut butter by hand, but this would be a good excuse to try.  And I’d love to experiment with different sweeteners – at the link above, there’s a great discussion of how sugar, agave, honey, and other sweeteners are processed.

Is there something you’ve always wanted to try making from scratch?  Consider this a good excuse to try it.

Or, is there something you’d like to see me make from scratch, and tell you about?

The New York Times points out that, not surprisingly, these pods aren’t so friendly to the environment. They generate a lot of waste.  The article calls out Green Mountain Coffee, a company that tries to be green in many ways, but is selling an increasing majority of their coffee in pod form.  I can’t visualize how many pods we must throw out at my office in a week, but we’re a highly caffeinated bunch, so I bet it’s a lot.

I completely understand the benefit of the single servings, and not just as a manifestation of our single-serving-everything culture.  In an office, single serving means less waste, and no warmed-over coffee sitting in the pot for hours.  But I don’t understand the need for individually-packaged grounds.  The article talks about reusable filters that can be used with normal coffee, which makes a lot of sense, as do compostable pods.  (In my office, people would lay claim to the pods for their own compost piles.)

But in the meantime, there aren’t any widespread solutions.  I also wonder how the waste from the pods compares to, say, a Starbucks cup.  Are those biodegradable?  I’m not a coffee drinker, so I never really thought about it. But it seems like coffee, of all things, shouldn’t generate a lot of garbage…

This week, that education came from Chipotle. I talk a lot about greenwashing on this blog, which is when a company talks about green issues so they can pretend to be greener than they are. But Chipotle is the real deal; they’re the good guys. They actually make a serious effort to get their ingredients from responsible sources.  The cool thing is, that’s not why I have to wait in line every time I go there. People flock there because their food is really good.

But don’t let me tell you that. You can learn about it from the bag that my last burrito came in:

It’s pretty crazy how much influence a single burrito can have, not in a literal sense. I mean, it’s pretty obvious a burrito would have a hard time winning an election (not all, but most). And I’ve never seen a burrito as a lead singer in a band or anything like that (except for maybe that one band in Sweden). But, the burrito you choose to buy & eat, and what it’s made out of, and where the ingredients come from can be pretty powerful. If a restaurant uses responsibly raised pork in their burritos, that means when you eat one, you’re helping to keep a farmer who produces naturally raised meat in business and by doing that you’re influencing the rancher down the road to start changing their practices to be more sustainable & responsible, so they can get a piece of the action, and then maybe that will lead to changes in legislation to make sure that more of the meat in the world is raised responsibly & sustainably. And all of a sudden, that little cylinder of tortilla-wrapped goodness is making policy changes!!!!!!!! See????? Burritos have a lot of pull. So never underestimate the power of a burrito.

Cool, huh? Hardly an exhaustive list of the reasons to buy sustainable food, but a pretty nice quick introduction. And the fact that they practice what they preach makes it even nicer.

In the course of working on the bathroom, I griped to Nathan that it’s really hard to find green products for home improvement, and hard to tell just how harmful conventional products are.  We made a special effort to find low-VOC paint, for example, and it was a lifesaver – you could hardly smell it!  But for caulk, grout, and a dozen other things we kept running to the hardware store to get, we didn’t pay so much attention.

There just aren’t great standards for these sorts of products.  Food has its organic standard, and regardless of whether you feel Certified Organic is strict enough, at least you know what it means, and it’s easy to find food that’s certified.  With cleaning and home improvement products, there’s nothing so widespread.  I know there are a few out there, like the Cradle-to-Cradle certification, which is a very high standard.  Right now, it’s applied mostly to construction materials and textiles. You can see a full list of certified products on their site.  To oversimplify, the goal of Cradle-to-Cradle is to look at the entire lifecycle of a product and find only neutral or positive outputs – no negative side-effects.  And I’ve hardly ever noticed it on a product in a store.

Yet, to my surprise, I found it here:

This is the box that my seed potatoes came in (from Wood Prairie Farm by way of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange).  The potatoes are organic, but the box itself is just a plain ol’ Post Office box.  I didn’t notice the certification until I was breaking it down for recycling.

So not only does USPS let you send a letter across the country in a few days for less than a dollar, apparently they also have super-sustainable packaging!

Isn’t that just cool?

Recently, Peggy Orenstein wrote an editorial arguing almost the opposite: that growing one’s own food (and, in her examples, raising chickens and bees) could be fulfilling and empowering to women who chose not to work, but wanted something more meaningful than housework to fill their days.  She calls it femivorism.

I’m intrigued, and I can see the appeal of staying home and spending time working the land.  At the same time, it’s again framing “putting dinner on the table” as the woman’s responsibility – this time, with a much higher bar for what “dinner” should be.

What do you think?  Can cooking and gardening be empowering for women?  Or does the local food movement need equal participation by men and women to avoid leaving women with an unfair share of the burden?

Today’s Washington Post had a great article explaining the many issues with disposing of animal waste from factory farms. If you don’t know much about it, it’s a fascinating and disgusting topic.

On a small farm, one that runs the “old-fashioned way,” things function in a more-or-less closed system.  You feed the animals.  The animals poop, and you use their manure to fertilize the crops.  The crops grow, and you use some of the crops to feed the animals.  Sure, you probably supplement their feed with some food from outside, and supplement the fertilizer, too, but most of the waste gets used. It’s a nice, neat cycle.  Sustainable, even.

On a large farm, it’s a different story.  When you pack thousands of animals into a tiny space, they generate a whole lot of waste, and there just isn’t enough nearby farmland around to absorb it all.  Some fraction of it gets used as fertilizer, but some dries out and becomes an airborne pollutant, and some seeps down into our waterways.  This is bad news for people who breathe air, and bad news for our major lakes and bays – not the least because all the extra nutrients in the water are causing huge algae blooms, which lead to large dead zones where plants and fish can’t live.  This is happening all over the world, notably in the Gulf of Mexico and our own Chesapeake Bay. And it’s truly frightening.

The Post article goes into the process in more journalistic, unbiased detail than I could hope to.  But manure pollution is just one of a dozen good reasons to avoid factory farms.  If this troubles you like it troubles me, the best way to protest factory farms is to buy all your meat, eggs, and dairy from small, local farms.

This recent article in the San Francisco Bay Guardian suggests that I was wrong – the average organic farm treats its workers similarly to large farms, and may provide less benefits.

This is likely the next big conundrum in the world of sustainable food.  While more and more people are recognizing the health benefits of local, organic food, in most cases the lower-income people who (perhaps) need it most are unable to afford it.  And often, that group includes the people who grew it in the first place.

So, to treat workers better, the cost to produce the food goes up, and so does the cost to buy it… bringing it further out of reach for low-income families.

I do believe that “sustainable” food should by definition include social justice, and should be available to all people.  But as a movement, we’ve still got a long way to go.

A friend recently shared with me Tracie McMillan’s article Better Off On Big Farms, where she argues that large farms are better for workers than small farms, and it rubbed me the wrong way.  My first instinct was to reject her claims out of hand, because, of course small farms are better than big ones.  We’ve all learned that big farms are pure evil, right?  How could they be better for labor?  I didn’t want to reject her ideas simply because they seemed strange, because she made some interesting points.

The gist of McMillan’s claim is that small farms have less stability and less capacity for employment.  Being small, they have few employees, tight margins, and might not be able to give workers regular work in all seasons, never mind benefits like health care.  A large farm or company can keep their employees year-round, moving to a new area as the seasons change.

Sounds plausible, to some extent.  But she also talks about how small farms are less well regulated than large farms – which is the opposite of anything I’ve ever heard from a small farmer.  If anything, the anecdotes I hear are usually about small farms being held to ludicrous standards designed for large farms, while large farms lobby their way out of regulations they don’t like.  And just because large farms have more revenue, does that mean they will, or are even likely to, treat their workers well?  (We know they treat their animals horribly, in pursuit of profit – I’m skeptical that they would, at the same time, go out of their way to treat their workers well.)

McMillan cites a story from one worker on a large farm.  What about large-scale protests of agricultural workers like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, who have been a huge voice for workers’ rights and cited terrible conditions for workers on farms, standing up to companies like McDonalds and Burger King?  Should we believe that they are an anomaly, that most agricultural workers are treated well and fairly?

I do agree with McMillan on one point – labor rights is an issue that’s far too often left out of the debate when we talk about sustainable food.  To have truly responsible food, it should be good for workers as well as the environment.

But if you want to make sure the people who produced your food are being treated well, don’t buy from big companies – buy Fair Trade instead.  And if you’re concerned about the labor practices on your local farms, go to the farmer’s market and ask the farmers.  The best way to know where your food comes from is to look for transparency – and when it comes to transparency, small farms definitely do it best.

I will admit, I don’t know much about labor practices on farms large or small.  Has anyone out there worked on a farm, and have a story to share?