Mention the words "sustainable food" and for many people, Alice Waters comes to mind. In Andrew F. Smith's book Eating History, she is credited with "launch[ing] an American culinary revolution." He says she pioneered "the emerging culinary credo of fresh ingredients, simply prepared and presented" at her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse. The restaurant opened in 1971 and gained national fame in the October 1975 issue of Gourmet magazine. Smith goes on, saying:
As Chez Panisse matured, becoming a touchstone of American cuisine, Waters found willing partners in her mission of promoting local, fresh, seasonal ingredients. She joined fine cooking with community activism, supporting local farmers, organic food, sustainable agriculture, and other causes. Cooking is, in her view, a product of agriculture as well as a part of culture. To help change the culinary culture, Waters created, in 1996, the Chez Panisse Foundation. Part of its mission is to help fund a program called the Edible Schoolyard, which involves schoolchildren in planting gardens and then harvesting, cooking, and enjoying what they've grown.
Given all of this - why on earth would Alice Waters refuse to denounce San Francisco's policy of giving away sewage sludge marked as "organic biosolids compost" to unsuspecting gardeners? |
| Between 2007 and 2009, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission gave away tons of sewage sludge, mixed with yard waste, marked as "organic biosolids fertilizer". Why they did this is a good question. After all, San Francisco is known for being green - and one of the city's most prominent environmentalists, Francesca Vietor, is the Vice President of the SFPUC.
The practice of using manure as fertilizer is common knowledge. Many people even know that the Chinese historically used human waste ("night soil") to fertilize their fields. That's as far as most of us go with wondering where our #1s and #2s go once we flush the toilet. But some people have composting toilets, and the truly dedicated own dog-eared copies of The Humanure Handbook. So it's only natural that a city like San Francisco, interested in reducing its environmental footprint, wondered if their own sewage could be put to good use.
The answer to that is no. Not with our current sewage system, which mixes all types of waste; whatever you flush down the toilet gets mixed in with whatever nearby industries wash down the drain. Human waste alone can be composted and used, albeit cautiously. But once human waste reaches the wastewater treatment plant, it's mixed in with so many contaminants that it's no longer safe to apply it to land for use as fertilizer.
Unfortunately, San Francisco must have bought into the propaganda campaign to clean up sewage sludge's image that has now spanned three decades. This propaganda campaign began in the 1980's with acts like applying sludge to the White House lawn, sped up in the early 1990's when sewage sludge was renamed "biosolids" and reclassified by the EPA (it was hazardous waste; now it's fertilizer), and it continues until today. (For more information on the PR effort, I recommend reading Toxic Sludge is Good For You by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. The relevant chapter is available as a free download here but the entire book is well worth reading. And, for full disclosure, I've been collaborating with John Stauber on my reporting about sewage sludge.)
Sadly, San Francisco went from buying into the pro-sludge propaganda to promoting it themselves. When confronted about the issue in early March, San Francisco offered to indefinitely suspend the sludge giveaways to local gardeners and schools and to discontinue the use of the word "organic" on the sewage sludge given away. However, they will continue to give away 80,000 tons of sludge to nearby counties for us on farm fields and they will not apologize for giving away sewage sludge labeled as compost or take any action to help gardeners who received the sewage sludge detoxify their gardens.
Back in early February, Organic Consumers Association (OCA) contacted a number of San Francisco organizations to ask them to sign onto a letter opposing the city's sludge give-aways. Most of the organizations they contacted eagerly signed on, but Waters' Chez Panisse Foundation declined. The letter came from the foundation's new Executive Director, Francesca Vietor, who noted that they generally do not sign onto letters at all and thus they could not offer their support to OCA's effort.
Francesca Vietor, Executive Director of Chez Panisse Foundation, is the same person as Francesca Vietor, Vice President of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. OCA picked up on Vietor's conflict of interest and contacted Alice Waters directly, requesting that she take a stance against growing any foods in sewage sludge.
Waters responded with the following:
I have been involved with the organic garden movement for 40 years. I believe in the transparency of public institutions and count on the government to offer the highest standards outlined by the Organic Consumers Association and other reliable advocates. I look forward to reviewing the science and working with the SFPUC to ensure the safety of composting methods.
I support Francesca Vietor, Executive Director of the Chez Panisse Foundation and a PUC commissioner, whose environmental work I have admired for many years and whose integrity has been questioned.
Alice Waters
Owner and Founder of Chez Panisse Restaurant and Foundation
By all accounts, Vietor's environmental record is incredible. She's the heiress to the Jell-O fortune and she's used her wealth to support a number of admirable causes. She's made a tangible difference in the sustainability of San Francisco, and no doubt the city owes part of its green reputation to her. But in this particular case, she has not come out against using sewage sludge to grow food, and her boss, Waters, is defending her. Ronnie Cummins, Director of Organic Consumers Association, said:
They [SFPUC] are still trying to claim that this is compost, not hazardous materials, and Alice Waters has directly refused to state that this is hazardous material and that food should not be grown on it. We're trying to point out that this is pretty hypocritical for her to establish real organic gardens and then support giving away sewage sludge to low income neighborhoods and schools.
It's truly odd that such well-respected environmental heroes are willing to make public statements on this issue without doing their homework on it. Waters notes in her letter that she looks forward to learning more about the safety of sludge. She sits on the advisory board of the Center for Food Safety, an organization that petitioned San Francisco to stop its free sludge giveaways. Hopefully she'll consult them to learn more about it and then she'll come out against it. |
