There’s a stunning moment in the Academy Award-nominated documentary “Gasland,” where a man touches a match to his running faucet — to have it explode in a ball of fire. This is what hydraulic fracturing, a process of drilling for natural gas known as “fracking,” is doing to many drinking water supplies across the country. But the other side of fracking — what it might do to the food eaten by people living hundreds of miles from the nearest gas well — has received little attention.
Unlike many in agriculture, cattle farmer Ken Jaffe has had a good decade. But lately he’s been nervous, worried fracking will destroy his business. Jaffe’s been good to his soil, and the land has been good to him. By rotating his herd of cattle to different pastures on his Catskills farm every day, he has restored the once-eroded land and built a successful business with his grass-fed and -finished beef. His Slope Farms sells meat to food coops, specialty meat markets, and high-end restaurants in New York City, about 160 miles to the southeast. “If you feed your micro-herd — the bacteria and fungi in the soil — then your big herd will do well, too,” he said when I visited him recently on a cool, sunny afternoon.
But a seam of black rock lies nearly a mile beneath the topsoil he has so scrupulously nurtured, and the deposit contains enormous quantities of natural gas. Profit-hungry energy companies — and the politicians that their campaign donations support — are determined to exploit that resource, even though it could destroy the livelihoods of thousands of small farmers like Jaffe who have sprung up in New York City’s vibrant, alternative food shed.
Energy companies liberate the gas, which is trapped in tiny bubble-like pockets in the rock, by forcefully injecting chemicals diluted with millions of gallons of water into the rock. This fracking ruptures the earth, creating fissures through which the gas passes — along with a witch’s brew of carcinogens, acutely poisonous heavy metals, and radioactive elements.
“For sustainable agriculture, fracking is a disaster,” says Jaffe. The gas rush started in the South and West, but has spread to the East and now affects 34 states. Under much of West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York lies a 400-million-year-old geographic formation called the Marcellus Shale. Although estimates vary, the shale may hold 50 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, enough to meet New York State’s needs for 50 years. To see what fracking can do to food production, Jaffe has only to look at what has happened to some of his colleagues in nearby Pennsylvania, where the first fracked well came into production in 2005, and where there are now more than 1,500.
Last year, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture quarantined 28 cattle belonging to Don and Carol Johnson, who farm about 175 miles southwest of Jaffe. The animals had come into wastewater that leaked from a nearby well that showed concentrations of chlorine, barium, magnesium, potassium, and radioactive strontium. In Louisiana, 16 cows that drank fluid from a fracked well began bellowing, foaming and bleeding at the mouth, then dropped dead. Homeowners near fracked sites complain about a host of frightening consequences, from poisoned wells to sickened pets to debilitating illnesses.
The Marcellus Shale itself contains ethane, propane, and butane, arsenic, cobalt, lead, chromium — toxins all. Uranium, radium, and radon make the shale so radioactive that companies sometimes drop Geiger counters into wells to determine whether they have reached the gas-rich deposits. But those compounds are almost benign compared to the fracking fluids that drillers inject into the wells. At least 596 chemicals are used in fracking, but the companies are not required by law to divulge the ingredients, which are considered trade secrets. According to a report prepared for the Ground Water Protection Council, a national association of state agencies charged with protecting the water supply, a typical recipe might include hydrochloric acid (which can damage respiratory organs, eyes, skin, and intestines), glutaraldehyde (normally used to sterilize medical equipment and linked to asthma, breathing difficulties, respiratory irritation, and skin rashes), N,N-dimethylformamide (a solvent that can cause birth defects and cancer), ethylene glycol (a lethal toxin), and benzene (a potent carcinogen). Some of these chemicals stay in the ground. Others are vented into the air. Many enter the water table or leach into ponds, streams, and rivers.
For the most part, state and federal governments have turned a blind eye to the problems brought about by fracking. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claims that it has no jurisdiction to investigate matters related to food production, a contention disputed by Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., who wrote a report urging the EPA to study all issues associated with fracking. A concerned farmer who prefers not to be identified forwarded me an email written to him by Jim Riviere, the director of the Food Animal Residue Avoidance Databank, a group of animal science professors that tracks incidents of chemical contamination in livestock. Riviere wrote that his group receives up to 10 requests per day from veterinarians dealing with exposures to contaminants, including the byproducts of fracking. Nonetheless, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has slashed funding to his group. “We are told by the newly reorganized USDA that chemical contamination is not their priority,” Riviere wrote.
“The dangers of fracking to the food supply are not something that’s been investigated very much,” said Emily Wurgh of Food and Water Watch, an environmental group based in Washington, D.C. “We have been trying to get members of Congress to request studies into effects of fracking on agriculture, but we haven’t gotten much traction.”
Fracking is not a new technology. It was first put into commercial use in 1949 by Halliburton, and that company has made billions from employing the extraction method. But it really wasn’t until 2004 that fracking really took off, the year that the EPA declared that fracking “posed little or no threat” to drinking water. Weston Wilson, a scientist and 30-year veteran of the agency, who sought whistle-blower protection, emphatically disagreed, saying that the agency’s official conclusions were “unsupportable” and that five of seven members of the review panel that made the decision had conflicts of interest. (Wilson has continued to work at the EPA, and continues to be publicly critical of fracking.)
A year later, Congress passed the Energy Policy Act with a “Halliburton loophole,” a clause inserted at the request of Dick Cheney, who had been Halliburton’s CEO before becoming vice president. The loophole specifically exempts fracking from the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, the CLEAR Act, and from regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency, and it unleashed the largest and most extensive drilling program in history, according to Josh Fox, the creator of the film “Gasland.”
In 2010 New York State imposed a moratorium on gas drilling, but if that were to be lifted, fracking would deal a triple whammy to Ken Jaffe’s farm, and thousands more like it. (Compare a map of the Marcellus Shale with one of small organic farms.)
Back on his pasture, Jaffe gestured to a pond in a bowl-like valley surrounded by sloping pastures and hillsides of maples, white pines, and blossoming wild cherries and apple trees, that, along with wells on the property, provides water for his animals. Given the geography of the land, any chemical contamination seeping from the rock would go directly into Jaffe’s water supply, poisoning his cattle.
And it’s not just his herd that’s vulnerable; all the plant life on his property would also be in danger. According to Jaffe, ozone is more lethal to crops than all other airborne pollutants combined, and of all crops, few are more susceptible to it than clover, a nutrient-rich feed that is critical to his method of sustainable cattle raising. While ozone is normally associated with automobile exhaust, fracking generates so much of it that Sublette Country, Wyo., has ozone levels as high as those in Los Angeles. This, despite the fact that it has fewer than 9,000 residents spread out over an area the size of Connecticut. What it does have is gas wells.
Even if his cows and his land would somehow remain unaffected by nearby wells, Jaffe’s business would still likely suffer. Joe Holtz is manager of Brooklyn’s Park Slope Food Coop, which buys a cow a week from Jaffe (and upward of $3 million products from other New York area farms). He says that his environmentally conscious organization would be forced to seek alternatives to New York meat and produce if fracking becomes commonplace. “If the air is fouled and the animals are drinking water that contains poisonous fracking chemicals, then products from those animals are going to have poisons,” he told me. Given the progress that small, local farms have made in the region, he says, the decision to stop dealing with long-term suppliers would be hard. But he adds, “We would have to stop buying from them. There is no doubt in my mind.”
With all the folderol around eating local, very few of us know what eating local really entails, or tastes like, for that matter. I’m at McKenzie River Organic Farm to find out.
Gallons of ink have been spilled in the debate on the politics of buying local and/or organic. At the moment, I’m more interested in the practical mechanics of eating local. How far out of my way will I have to go to cook an entirely local meal? How will using all local ingredients inhibit or enhance my cooking experience? Will it taste better?
Figuring out how to cook with locally/seasonally available food has been part of the human experience since the dawn of time — it’s only in the last 60 years or so that sourcing your dinner ingredients from your immediate vicinity has taken on the patina of the unusual. But one person’s exotic is another’s bread and butter.
“We’ve been eating from the farm every night for 15 years,” Carol Rupp says. Carol, the diminutive matriarch of the family-owned biodynamic farm, does not mess around. The family grows and mills triticale [a hybrid of wheat and rye] for flour. They also raise all their own fruit and vegetables, which they can and freeze for winter. A spacious, timbered barn is home to cows, sheep and pigs — the family’s bacon is famous. Naturally, they hand-churn butter in old-fashioned glass churns.
Located in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, the farm is primarily devoted to blueberries. You can pick your own or buy fresh in summer, and dried blueberries and juice are available year-round at their onsite store, a curious example of hay bale architecture that looks like it was built by enterprising hobbits. Carol’s sons Jack and Sam, who are in their 20s, have devoted their lives to making the farm work. Her eldest, Annie, also participates, though these days she spends more time raising her 3-year-old daughter Zoie and hand-crafting her sustainable fashion line. The entire family looks ridiculously healthy: Sam and Jack are handsome, with a ruddy farm-fed glow, and Annie has the unearthly blonde beauty of an avenging angel. They are the type of people who think nothing of working 14-hour days. You can see it in their eyes.
If this is all starting to sound unbearably wholesome and virtuous, keep in mind that the family has a sense of humor: The farm’s T-shirts are emblazoned with the logo “organic redneck,” accompanied by the tagline, “I make dirt look good.”
I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the price difference between my local supermarket’s organic food aisle and its pesticide-saturated alternative: I understand that small organic farms can’t always compete pricewise with their subsidized mainstream competitors, but it’s always struck me as a bit elitist to sing the praises of your organic diet when so many people don’t even have the option to make that choice. I know from personal experience that it’s difficult to choose organic when you only have $15 to spend on groceries. That said, for me, it’s worth the time and effort to find good sources of food. To that end my husband, Rich, and I recently moved from the city back to my home valley in rural Oregon, which allows us to forage, garden on a large scale and source food directly from farms like this one.
It’s not just a matter of politics or budget, I realize as I watch Annie mill grain — the experience and adventure of procuring and making good food is worthwhile. I have a lot of respect for people, like the Rupp/Richardson family, who have gone several steps further than me and made the experience of producing exemplary food a way of life. They work hard to be able to eat local — I just waltz around and reap the rewards. On that note, I must mention that my first delightful experience with milling flour involves me forgetting to connect the hose between the electric mill and the receptacle — a minute later, the cluttered farmhouse kitchen is dusted white.
Annie is my guide around the farm. We haven’t planned for this experiment, so we’re working with the ingredients the farm has on hand. She grabs a package of last harvest’s strawberries from a cavernous freezer, ladles this morning’s milk out of a metal can, and suggests that I consider cooking pork chops. I agree.
In keeping with the local ecosystem and my scavenger nature, I figure our 100 percent local meal should feature at least one edible invasive plant. As Annie and I ramble, basking in the rare warmth of a sunny spring afternoon, we consider various in-season options: dandelions, borage, nettles. But then I spot it: clusters of Japanese knotweed sprouting from the muddy banks of the pond.
“Japanese knotweed!” I shriek, sounding way too excited. “Yes,” Annie says dourly. I’m excited because Japanese knotweed is edible. Annie is dour because Japanese knotweed is a harmful invasive species; it’s nearly impossible to eradicate and it grows in leaps and bounds. She looks at me like I’m crazy. “It’s supposed to taste like rhubarb!” I say, by way of explanation. Annie perks up, no doubt contemplating the poetic justice of consuming her enemy. She brandishes the frozen strawberries. “Pie,” we say simultaneously. Sweet revenge, indeed. I harvest a couple of handfuls of the smallest shoots, which are the size and shape of asparagus, though tinged with red, like rhubarb.
For dinner, I stuff pork chops with Annie’s home grown garlic and heat a cast iron frying pan. Because I’m cooking with butter instead of olive oil, I can’t get the pan as hot as I normally would, but I manage to brown the chops anyway. Meanwhile, I make biscuits with hand-ground flour, fresh cream and fresh butter. My only nonlocal ingredients: salt and baking powder. (If I’d thought of it, I could have replaced these ingredients with sourdough starter and local sea salt, but I didn’t know what I’d be cooking when I left home.)
When the chops are brown, I cover them with homemade applesauce, more garlic and a tablespoon of fresh rosemary, and I put then in the oven, which is heated to 325. Easy.
The pie is a bit more challenging and worrisome. Even rabid foraging enthusiast “Wildman” Steve Brill notes that knotweed should be cooked thoroughly and used sparingly, and I’m worried of a repeat of my bitter fern fiasco. Baking pie is a perilous choice for experimentation: I won’t be able to tweak the flavor as the knotweed cooks. I go heavy on the honey in order to drown out any potential bitterness, and I stick to a relatively low knotweed to strawberry ratio: 1½ cups of knotweed to 3½ cups of frozen strawberries. (Apart from the bitterness factor, moderation is wise. Although knotweed is rich in Vitamin A, potassium, magnesium and resveratrol, “Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast” warns that the plant’s close relative, giant knotweed, contains oxalic acid, which is not healthy in large quantities. I don’t know if oxalic acid is present in Japanese knotweed, and even if it is, it’s not a big deal. Oxalic acid is not toxic — it’s also found in other common edible plants such as sorrel, spinach and rhubarb.) When it comes to wild plants, it’s generally best to err on the side of caution.
To prepare the knotweed I wash the shoots, snap off the tips, and remove all unfurling leaves. I also peel the larger shoots, though I’m not sure it’s necessary. I chop the knotweed and throw it into a pot with a tablespoon of butter, the frozen strawberries and 1 1/3 cups of honey. As this mixture simmers down to syrup, I turn my attention to my other problem.
My other problem is the crust. My sister-in-law Nikki recently told me the secret to making a proper flaky pie crust (freeze the butter and use ice water or frozen vodka) and I’m loath to go back to the leathery hippie crusts of my youth. But turning grainy hand-ground flour into a thin, flaky pie crust is easier said than done. To make matters slightly more perilous, Annie’s kitchen is also the domain of Zoie, a precocious child with the mind of a lawyer, who naturally insists on helping. Eventually we come up with some semblance of a crust, though it’s not exactly beautiful. I dump the filling over it and shove the pie in the oven, hoping it’ll be edible.
The simplest element of the meal, sautéed greens, most acutely illustrates the limitations and pleasures of cooking with limited ingredients. None of my normal crutches for greens are available — I can’t use olive oil, soy sauce, white wine, lime juice, ginger or even vinegar. Instead I sauté the spinach and chard in butter and a few tablespoons of water.
“Do you guys grow anything spicy?” I ask Annie, without much hope. To my surprise and delight, she produces a large bag of dried Thai chiles. I dice a few to sprinkle on the greens and the pork chops. I would not naturally think to combine butter and Thai chiles, but the greens taste good — the sweetness of the fresh butter enhances the fresh earthiness of the spinach, and the chile provides a keen counterpoint.
As I eat dinner, I am reminded that reining myself in is a good thing — the limited number of ingredients clearly work in this meal’s flavor. Because the biscuits are the only starch, I give them my undivided attention — the coarse, home-ground flour creates a satisfying consistency, reminiscent of corn bread. And the pie — the pie is good. Though the crust is grainy and, as I suspected, not at all flaky, the honey-tinged filling delivers a tangy, summery flavor. It tastes like home.
Knotwood strawberry pie
Ingredients
-
Filling
- 1 tablespoon of butter
- 1 ½ cups of knotweed (chopped)
- 3 ½ cups of strawberries
- 1 1/3 cups of honey
-
Crust
- 2 cups of flour
- ¾ cup of butter (frozen)
- 6 tablespoons of water (iced)
- ¼ teaspoon of salt (optional)
Directions
- Heat a saucepan at low and melt butter.
- Add remaining filling ingredients. Simmer for 5 minutes or so, until syrup forms. (If necessary, add a little water or flour to modify consistency.)
- Mix and roll dough ingredients. Line 9″ pie pan with ½ of the dough.
- Put knotweed strawberry filling in pie pan, cover with remaining rolled dough, and bake at 350 for 45 minutes.
Sometimes, this is the kind of chatter you hear in a coffee shop in Fancy Brooklyn:
Man 1: “Well, how are we going to drive home the point that sustainable seafood is good? I think I should have, like, five to seven minutes to talk about it before we serve.”
Man 2: “You’re going to have to do all the talking while I cook. I have to focus on the food while I cook. Don’t let people bother me.”
Woman: “I think mussels. We have to do mussels. They’re responsibly farmed, and they carry around their own sauce. They’re perfect.”
Man 1: “OK, but will we serve wine too? Or is just the lecture and the food enough?”
Aren’t you sad you didn’t get an invitation to the World’s Most Sanctimonious Dinner Party? I am. I want to know what gets served for dessert at a soiree like this.
But my Fancy Brooklyner self-hatred aside, the lady had it right, for sure — mussels are the jam. They taste great, are cheap, are ridiculously easy to cook, still pack some heat on the impress-the-guests scale, are seriously versatile and are, yes, sustainable. Calling seafood “sustainable” is usually tricky business because there are so many variables, but with mussels, you’ll almost always get responsibly farmed shellfish that actually clean the water they’re grown in. (They’re a “best choice” on the well-respected Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch list.)
For too long relegated to “mixed-seafood pasta” jumbles or clichéd steams with white wine and herbs, it’s time for mussels to get shown a little love. They can seem intimidating for home cooks, but really, I can’t think of anything easier to prepare. And I love how sitting there with a big pot of them, slurping them out of the shell, soaking up the broth with bread, turns dinner into an event of conversation and juice-slicked hands.
How to clean mussels
Most mussels come pretty clean, actually, and there’s pretty much never a problem with grit or sand, as you might have with clams. If there’s a beard coming out of one — you’ll know it when you see it — just give it a yank to pull it off. Some chefs want you to scrub them afterwards with a stiff brush or pad, but I never do. Your call.
How to store mussels
You don’t want to hang on to them for too terribly long, more than a couple days, but they’re fine in the fridge. Especially if you keep them in a bowl lined and topped with a moistened towel or paper towel. Whatever you do, don’t keep them in water; fresh water will kill them.
How to cook mussels
Get them hot. They will open. They are cooked.
How to cook delicious mussels
OK, this is the fun part. Mussels have a flavor that’s unmistakably oceanic — salty, briny, minerally. They’re not as saline or meaty as clams, not as clear and ringing as oysters, but they’re a little earthier, a little down-and-dirtier. And they pair beautifully with anything you can think of that would do well with that salty, earthy bass note.
Earlier, I knocked on the combination of mussels with garlic and shallots, white wine, herbs and butter, but there’s a lot to be learned in the basics. You have garlic and shallots (and usually butter or olive oil) as the aromatic base; an acidic liquid to help the steaming and to lighten the flavor; a bunch of fresh herbs towards the end of cooking to add a nice top note, and a finishing stir-in of butter to enrich the broth.
Using this framework, you can start improvising your way to limitless combinations. Basically, if you can imagine a bunch of flavors tasting good together, they will probably be good with mussels. Like a version with leeks or onions (aromatics), bacon (just because) and dark beer (liquid), and finished with a stir-in of crushed or ground nuts for more richness. (And maybe a final splash of malt vinegar or something if it wants a little brightness.)
The handsome chef Barton Seaver (who once chipped the hell out of my cleaver when I was in culinary school with him, and no, that’s not a euphemism) has a new, excellently named book, “For Cod and Country,” and it’s got a bunch of fantastic mussel pairings: mustard in the classic white wine version, with scallions instead of herbs. Shallots, roasted until soft and caramelized, with red wine, finished with butter and rosemary. Roasted garlic and IPA or another strong beer, also finished with butter. A fistful of spices, finished with chorizo. (That one’s called Mussels Saint-Ex, and it’s probably worth buying the book for.)
Steamed mussels
This isn’t a recipe so much as a basic method for steaming mussels; please do improvise with different flavor combinations, liquids, finishers, etc. Serve with big hunks of bread, crisp toasts, French fries, rice, pasta or whatever floats your boat. Allow about 1 pound of mussels per person for a main course, or half that for an appetizer.
Ingredients
- Aromatics, sliced or chopped, to taste (garlic, onion, shallots, ginger, lemongrass, chilies, bacon, salami, you name it. Just make sure it’s tasty stuff.)
- ½ cup wine, beer, juice or whatever liquid you’d like (use more for a brothier dish, but the mussels themselves will release a lot of juice)
- 2 pounds mussels, cleaned (see above)
- Herbs, chopped (parsley, thyme, rosemary or others) or other delicate flavor additions, to taste (orange zest? A little more raw shallot?)
- Butter, cream, olive oil, ground nuts or other finishing touch to enrich the broth, to taste
- Lemon, vinegar or some other kind of tart flavoring, to taste, if your liquid isn’t very bright
- Salt and pepper, to taste (mussels do tend to be salty, so this might not be necessary)
Directions
- Grab a pan big enough to fit all the mussels comfortably, preferably with a lid. Get it hot over medium heat. Add a touch of butter or oil, and sweat or sauté your aromatics. When they’re throwing off delicious smells, add the liquid and turn the heat up to high.
- When the liquid is boiling, add the mussels all at once, cover the pan, and give it a couple of good, hard shakes. Peek under the lid after about two minutes to see how they’re doing. Once they’re open, they’re cooked. Give the pan another shake, and another after two minutes or so, until all the shells are open. (If there are stubborn stragglers, way behind the rest, just ditch them. They might be dead, and you don’t want to overcook the rest of the mussels waiting for the dead to make contact.)
- Now have a taste of the broth. Season it with salt and pepper if need be, but here’s a tip — when you season, tip the pan and season directly into the broth, and stir it in to dissolve. (Just tossing salt into the pan might get a bunch of it tucked into the mussels’ shells, and you won’t be able to really tell how seasoned the broth is.)
- Add your herbs, butter and/or other finishers. Stir or toss to combine everything and emulsify the butter to a creamy sauce, and serve right away.
For all the talk of economic stagnation in the U.S., you could pick a worse time to live in parts of the developing world. Average worldwide income is expected triple over the next 40 years. And in developing nations that figure could jump 500 percent. The global infant mortality rate has more than halved over the past 40 years, according to the World Bank. Technological advances and economic liberalization have opened a whole new world of opportunity for billions who only decades ago would have been abandoned to extreme poverty. Then Thomas Malthus rears his ugly head, and his warnings of the dangers of population growth are like a post-historic Hydra.
As the global population surpasses 7 billion this year — experts expect that figure will surge to 9 billion by 2050 — and standard of living rises, natural resources continue diminish. All of this conspires to put additional pressures on a global ecosystem already buckling under the weight of human consumption. According to scientists at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the confluence of precipitous demographic and environmental factors amount to a massive ecological bubble; one that, should it burst, could lead to catastrophe.
According to the World Wildlife Fund’s Jason Clay:
[To feed everyone] we will need to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000. By 2050 we will not have a planet left that is recognizable.
As such, scientists at the AAAS meeting urged for more funding for global family planning initiatives to stem population growth, especially in the developing world, as well as reforms to food production practices. Whether there’s the political will in nations like the United States — especially at a time when Congress is slashing foreign aid expenditures — remains to be seen.
The New York Times’ Opinion pages welcomed a new columnist today, and he’s … a food writer. We can save the discussion for what this means for our national dialogue on food for later; right now, I want to point you to Mark Bittman and his inaugural column, titled no less ambitiously than “A Food Manifesto for the Future.” It’s a nine-point plan to save us from our fast, cheap and out-of-control eating selves, and he might be the perfect person to write it.
A few years ago, Bittman was in a TV commercial. Goofy words flashed on the screen: “BIG DEAL FOOD WRITER” and under them, the man who normally exudes an utterly casual confidence looked nonplussed. They had him leaning in a weird way, a way that was supposed to suggest a level of informality, but only made him look, unfortunately, like he couldn’t stand up straight while he was singing the praises of the product.
What I’m saying is that the man who spent a dozen years writing a wildly popular column called “The Minimalist” is visibly uncomfortable with bull. His great talent is to make good cooking and good food seem totally natural, totally simple and totally understandable. (“The Minimalist” is still my girlfriend’s all-time favorite food column. Ahem.) But I don’t begrudge him the success; no one else I can think of can pull off a newspaper story — a newspaper story, not a book — called “101 meals ready in 10 minutes” and have it make sense, let alone read well and taste great. True to the column’s name, he boils down cooking to its minimal essentials. He reduces without dumbing down.
And now he takes that sensibility to talking about the absurdly complicated world of food production and policy. Today’s piece doesn’t present startlingly original analysis and insight, but rather lays out pretty much everything that food policy geeks have been talking about for years … in 818 eminently sensible words. Like this:
Break up the U.S. Department of Agriculture and empower the Food and Drug Administration. Currently, the U.S.D.A. counts among its missions both expanding markets for agricultural products (like corn and soy!) and providing nutrition education. These goals are at odds with each other; you can’t sell garbage while telling people not to eat it, and we need an agency devoted to encouraging sane eating. Meanwhile, the F.D.A. must be given expanded powers to ensure the safety of our food supply. (Food-related deaths are far more common than those resulting from terrorism, yet the F.D.A.’s budget is about one-fifteenth that of Homeland Security.)
Boom! Cue the common-sense revolution! Give it a good read, and let me know what you think in the comments.
3-year-old Zoie helps out in the kitchen at McKenzie River Organic Farm. 
A depiction of pork butchering in Cincinnati from an 1873 print. 
Mark Bittman 
