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California 
Mon Jul 20, 2009 at 03:46:56 AM PDT
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An article about community gardens in Flint, Michigan describes a situation that we in San Diego are more familiar with than we wish:
Growing the vegetables and flowers is the easy part. But just ask Meekins what the group went through to build a simple greenhouse with donated materials.
It's a three-year tale of permits, reviews, site plan requirements and endless rounds of meetings with the city Planning Commission...
It's not that Flint officials are opposed to residents growing their own food in backyards or on nearly 2,800 vacant residential lots within the city limits (a list that's still growing to the tune of about 500 vacant lots per year).
The problem is the laws on the books simply predate the city's new urban reality.
"The zoning ordinance hasn't been revised since 1968, when we were a booming industrial city and didn't have to think about agriculture as part of city planning," said Erin Caudell, a technical assistant for the urban agriculture collaborative and the outreach coordinator for the Ruth Mott Foundation's Applewood program.
The entire article is a fascinating and worthy read. I'm thrilled Flint is addressing this, and I wish San Diego would too. I don't know the extent of the difficulties in San Diego, but I know they exist. You can spend a lot of money on all of the necessary permits and whatnot before you even plant a seed. Regulations here are not intended for community gardens and that's why they are so unsuitable and difficult for them. The question is how do we fix the laws so that we can meet our needs?
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Mon Jul 13, 2009 at 18:41:21 PM PDT
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( - promoted by Jill Richardson)
Not really a secret because it's all over the burbs of Southern California, the land of grass farmers. The coveted grass is more valuable than growing food and even in this economic crisis compounded by a devastating drought people are more worried about their lawns and city landscaping then letting people grow food.
I was reading La Vida Locavore when I saw that Jill Richardson posted something about missing her beloved cantaloupes this season due to the lack of water and making it a short growing season for her favorite melon.
But what struck me was the fact that the City of San Diego has a moratorium on community gardens because of said lack of water.
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Sun Jul 12, 2009 at 14:34:52 PM PDT
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Today the drought got a lot more personal. Until now, it was an abstract concept to me. I got angry at idiots who were watering their green lawns here in southern California (particularly the moron who let his automatic sprinklers go off while it was raining), but I wasn't personally affected. Well, the city of San Diego put a moratorium on creating new community gardens due to the water problems, but that still didn't really affect me. But today, the drought affected me.
One of my favorite treats of summer are cantaloupes. I buy them from a farmer named Kyle who grows them in Oceanside. I know in the past I've bought cantaloupes as late in the season as August because I actually packed a few of them in my suitcase to bring to my parents' house in Chicago in 2007. Growing up I hated cantaloupe, but when I tasted Kyle's cantaloupe, I realized I had just never eaten a good cantaloupe before. I don't hate cantaloupe - I hate bad cantaloupe. When my brother tasted the melon I brought home, he said, "I am making love to this melon." That's how good these cantaloupes are.
Last week I got to the market too late to get any cantaloupes. Today I showed up right as the market opened and walked straight to Kyle's stand. No cantaloupes. I asked him and he said they are done for the season. They didn't really grow much this year because of the drought. They are considering leasing more land in an area with a higher water table next year so they can grow cantaloupe again. But until then - nada. No more melons. For an entire year. I am CRUSHED.
I realize that the water situation is a lot more serious than whether or not I can get one of my favorite foods, but it really illustrated how the problem affects everyone - not just distant farmers in the Central Valley.
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Mon Jun 29, 2009 at 06:53:47 AM PDT
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Want to be flame retardant? Eat meat. Apparently, chicken and red meat consumption is linked to a higher body burden of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) - a chemical used as a flame retardant in consumer products. Unfortunately, while that might be a handy trait if possessed by a human, that's not what you get from eating a lot of PBDEs. Instead, what you get is endocrine disruption.
Endocrine disruptors was the subject of a recent column by Nicholas Kristof who encourages us to learn from the frogs. Amphibians seem to be the canaries in the coal mine for endocrine disruptors. The frogs are showing up with all kinds of genital abnormalities. One such chemical that appears to affect frogs, atrazine, is such a popular herbicide that it contaminates drinking water in some parts of the country. Some countries ban atrazine, but it's perfectly legal in the U.S.
Another endocrine disruptor is BPA (Bisphenol A) which JayinPortland has been reporting on regularly. BPA is used in everything from baby bottles to canned foods. One recent headline was that BPA stays in our bodies longer than previously thought. Then we found out what the FDA was doing about it: Nothing. In fact, worse than nothing. They were siding WITH the pro-BPA lobby.
There are a few bills in Congress to ban BPA, and there's a lot of money going into lobbying against those bills. (You can take action here.) The version of the food safety bill that just passed the House Energy & Commerce Committee included a provision requiring the FDA to study the safety of BPA, which - if it passes in the final bill - will essentially just stall any ban on BPA. In other words, calling for an FDA study is WORSE than doing nothing, because it puts off any ban on BPA that might have otherwise passed.
California, Maryland, Connecticut, and Minnesota also have BPA bans in the works. Minnesota was the first to ban BPA, although they only banned it in baby bottles and sippy cups. Connecticut followed suit soon after. California just passed a BPA ban (in food and drink containers designed for kids 3 and younger) through the Senate so now we're waiting on the Assembly - and the signature of the Governator. If you live in California, you can take action here.
Of course, BPA is not the only endocrine disruptor out there - it's just the one that's in the news, and that we're closest to getting rid of. The question we should be asking ourselves is how we came to legalize so many harmful chemicals in the first place, and how we might reform our system so that we can prevent doing so in the future.
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Tue Jun 23, 2009 at 16:02:17 PM PDT
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Prop 2 passed in California last November, but that wasn't the end of the fight for animal welfare laws. The animal ag industry got their butts kicked and they are trying to gain grown after the fact. Now the egg industry saysa literal interpretation of Prop 2 allows them to keep hens in cages. The Humane Society disagrees. And the California State Assembly is considering a bill (AB 1437) to require all eggs sold in the state (not just the eggs laid within the state) to comply with Prop 2. That's a great idea, actually, because it puts CA egg producers on a level playing field with egg producers outside the state.
Meanwhile, in Ohio, the animal ag industry has a brand new tactic to prevent Ohio from passing its own "Prop 2." They want to create a state board that determines animal welfare standards, a measure backed by the state's Democratic Governor. One thing I've learned is that industry doesn't support ANYTHING if it's not in their best interests. That makes me tend to believe the Humane Society's criticism of the creation of a state animal welfare board:
Big Agribusiness' attempt to amend Ohio's constitution by creating an industry-dominated council to oversee farm animal treatment is poor policy and an attempt to thwart meaningful reform. This proposed council is a blatant attempt to stall efforts to halt inhumane confinement practices for veal calves, pigs and other animals on factory farms - systems that are so restrictive that the animals are often prevented from engaging in basic movements such as turning around and extending their limbs.
We have been asking the Ohio Farm Bureau to engage in serious dialogue on these issues for months, but not only have they refused to respond to our initial proposal, but they now want to enshrine their favored oversight system into the state constitution...
It's a special interest power grab that is designed to circumvent the input of all Ohioans into the process and divert attention from serious reform.
This is a fight that will continue to play out around the country and in Washington, DC. Animal ag is spending a lot of money to lobby against animal welfare laws at the federal level, even though there is absolutely no momentum to do anything on the issue in Washington. New York, California, and Ohio seem to be the big battleground states for animal welfare at the moment, and Ohio is the next place we will probably see a ballot measure similar to Prop 2.
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Mon Jun 22, 2009 at 11:30:00 AM PDT
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Earlier this month, the California State Assembly approved a measure to establish minimum nutrition standards for child care facilities. The bill (AB 627), introduced by Assemblywoman Julia Brownley (D-Santa Monica), requires:
- Meals and snacks served at child-care centers to include recommended servings under federal law
- At least one serving of veggies at lunch and dinner
- No more deep-fried foods
- No cereals containing more than 6g sugar per serving
- Provide access to water at all times
- Serve only low-fat or non-fat milk and 100% juice.
If the law passes the Senate and the Governator doesn't veto it, child-care facilities will have until January 1, 2011 to comply with the law. However, the article on the bill states that there are no penalties for non-compliance.
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Sat Jun 13, 2009 at 03:41:36 AM PDT
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California once grew drought tolerant grapes, and it may have to once again. (Hat tip to blogger Elfling for pointing me to this old but relevant article.) Following the introduction of drip irrigation in the 1970's, growers were eager to control the amount of water their vines received and - to best do so - planted water-loving riparian varieties of grapes in the 1980's. Despite the fact that Napa is a dry area, they somehow assumed that water for irrigation was an unlimited resource.
"If you're a grape grower, you want to have that vine dependent on what you do so you can manipulate them," says Williams, whose academic work focuses on irrigation management. Williams further explained: "Since the vine is getting most of its water from the drip system, then a grape grower has greater control on how much the vine gets water."
The other objective for replanting was to mirror the density in Bordeaux and Burgundy, up to 2,500 vines per acre instead of the previous status quo of 450. Vines competed for the soil's water and prompted the need for 100 to 200 gallons of water per vine per season -- each vine typically produces two to four bottles of quality wine per year. Though water consumption in California rose as a result, replanting helped revive the state's fine wine industry, and the practices became standard.
With this year's drought, I can only imagine that many more vintners are considering ditching irrigation. Those who rely on heavy irrigation are hurting, while those whose grapes grow with natural rainfall can still thrive. However, as the article points out, this isn't a change that can be made overnight: "if California returned to dry farming, vintners would have to rip out rootstock, replace with drought-resistant types and replant vines farther apart." Looks like we made our beds in the 1980's and beyond, and we are now lying in it.
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Tue Jun 02, 2009 at 17:00:00 PM PDT
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California's Prop 2 and Prop 8 made national news in the past year, but I'm still bitter over a ballot initiative that the state passed before I was even born: Prop 13. The measure more or less froze property tax values, and as Ezra Klein points out, it may be the key to the state's budgetary woes. You know what else it can be blamed for? Our abysmal lack of school funding, including overcrowded schools with no kitchens, short lunch periods, and paltry PE programs.
Fat Land by Greg Critser calls out Prop 13 - which was a California measure but set off a national trend in 20 other states too - as one of the causes for our nation's ever-expanding waistlines:
Proposition 13 and its copycats did lead to many important cuts in the schools. Physical education, for one, was gutted... Perhaps most important, education was no longer considered the great untouchable in discussions of public spending.
In California, where famously well-funded schools had long enjoyed primus inter pares status, school cafeterias felt the first pinch, and the way they reacted to it foreshadowed how school lunch programs nationwide would deal with similar cuts.
In 1981 the California Department of Education ended its successful Food Service Equipment Program. For decades the program had augmented local school budgets by providing millions of dollars for maintenance and upgrading of school cafeterias. For the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), then experiencing unprecedented growth, the cut "was a huge blow," says Laura Chinnock, now the assistant director of the district's mammoth food services department. "What that did was to force us ot make changes in the existing infrastructure instead of expanding. So now we had to feed, say, two thousand kids through the old service windows that were built to service half that. Well, now double that - and keep in mind that the minimum legal amount of time for a child to eat lunch is twenty minutes - and youll see why now some big schools have kids lining up at ten-thirty in the morning for lunch."
Ultimately, the book traces this to the selling of branded fast food in our schools. I'm thrilled that some major voices in the national media are talking about overturning Prop 13. It won't be an easy task - the article notes it may take a statewide constitutional convention - but maybe we're just desperate enough to do it? Speaking as both an advocate for healthy school lunch and as an unemployed Californian who is struggling to deal with the state's over-stressed Employment Development Department, I hope so.
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Tue May 26, 2009 at 22:27:32 PM PDT
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Tue Apr 21, 2009 at 13:30:00 PM PDT
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This morning one of our first speakers at the FAS 2009 conference was A.G. Kawamura, California's ag secretary. I've heard him speak before. He's obviously open to Slow Food and sustainable food as he's addressed both this event and Slow Food Nation. And that's good. I'm glad he's not afraid to be seen with us. And I like his message about achieving the goal of a garden at every California school. He said he came into office when we had 3000 school gardens and California has doubled that number under his watch. Awesome!
But I was upset with one thing he said today. He spoke about the need to double world food output by 2050. That buys into the idea that we don't have enough food. As I posted about earlier, we DO have enough food to feed the world right now and we don't have the WILL to do it. I don't know if we will still have enough food to feed the 2050 world population but assuming the population growth between now and then is something less than 100%, I can't imagine that we'll need food production to double.
The reason it's so important to combat this myth is because when we tell ourselves that the world doesn't have enough food, that makes it OK to let people go hungry who can't afford food. We would actually be taking responsibility for those who go hungry if we admitted that we DO have enough food - we just don't like to feed it to those who can't afford it. And saying we need to grow more food also opens the door for corporations selling toxic agricultural methods to hold us all hostage, telling us that we can't produce enough food without them - when in fact we produce enough food already and COULD produce enough without them as well.
Kawamura also noted that we in the U.S. have the luxury of choosing conventional or organic food. I don't think that's the case. I don't think that "conventional" food is necessary, nor do I think anyone who "chooses" it has a luxury. After all, who CHOOSES to eat food that was sprayed with pesticides? Who CHOOSES food that is less nutritious? Nobody. I mean, they might choose it for budgetary reasons, but they don't choose to be poor, and they don't get a choice about having an agricultural system that accepts so-called conventional agriculture as OK.
I applaud A.G. Kawamura for engaging the sustainable ag community but I also invite him to perhaps give Frances Moore Lappe a call. I have a hunch she'd be glad to talk to him and get him on the right page.
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Mon Mar 30, 2009 at 09:12:29 AM PDT
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It's not news but the California drought will lead to higher food prices. The linked article is excellent - I suggest reading all of it - but here's what I found most significant:
Already officials in Fresno County are predicting farmers will grow half the acres of lettuce that they did in 2006, and economists are predicting the drought could cost between 60,000 to 80,000 jobs and $2billion in revenue as farmers are forced to use expensive well water and will almost certainly have to cut crops and jobs. Using well water will also force price hikes. 850,000 acres are likely to go unplanted this year.
So, what should we do about this enormous problem? Switch to more sustainable growing methods that can better withstand climate extremes? Invest in public transportation and green buildings? Or we can take a page out of Australia's book and have an ad campaign. Come on, consumers! Drought-defaced produce tastes great!
(Another article about Australia might also be worth checking out - it says that Australia might be a predictor of what the American West could become.)
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Sat Mar 28, 2009 at 16:58:29 PM PDT
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Thu Mar 26, 2009 at 06:00:00 AM PDT
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Does Maria Shriver have a case of Obama-envy, or does she just have very coincidental timing and a green thumb? It could be a little of both. According to Obama Foodorama, Shriver has been a fantastic supporter of school gardens in California for a long time now.
Ms. Shriver will be assisted by California's Food and Agriculture Secretary A.G. Kawamura, and the California School Garden Network. Ms. Shriver has been honorary chair of the CSGN for five years, and in that time the number of gardens in the program has doubled to 6,000.
The garden will not be at the Governor's Mansion. Instead it will be in Sacramento's Capitol Park. It's intended to teach the community about gardening, and the produce will likely go to homeless shelters. And - you guessed it - the simultaneously loved and hated Alice Waters will be playing a role. No surprise there.
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Sun Mar 15, 2009 at 08:00:00 AM PDT
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Check out the New York Times article about two Californias:
"Those Hollywood types don't have any idea what's going on out here on the farms," said Mr. Rogers, a retired dairyman from Visalia, the county seat in a Central Valley region where cows far outnumber people...
"They think fish are more important than people, that pigs are treated mean and chickens should run loose," said Mr. Rogers... "City people just don't know what it takes to get food on their table."
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Wed Mar 04, 2009 at 15:30:00 PM PST
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There are several state food laws currently making news:
- Maine and Maryland might join California, New York City, Portland, OR, and Philadelphia labeling calories on menus! (See a second article on Maryland here)
- Maryland might also ban trans fats.
- And Maryland might also ban artificial food dyes that cause behavior problems and hyperactivity in children. (Tom Laskawy has more info on the effects of artificial food dyes here and IATP has its own comments here)
- Natasha Chart writes about a number of victories for Wisconsin farmers in Gov. Doyle's budget this year.
- Suffolk County, NY banned BPA from us in baby bottles and sippy cups.
Consumers Union has repeatedly called on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ban BPA materials in infant and children's products and food and beverage contact containers, as FDA already has enough scientific data to support such a decision. Several states, such as Oregon, Washington and California, and cities, such as Chicago, are also considering BPA bans as the FDA continues to research BPA, while allowing the product to remain on the market. In 2008, the Canadian government banned its use in baby bottles.
BPA-a chemical found in the linings of cans and in many plastic products, including sports bottles, food-storage containers and baby bottles-has potential links to a wide range of health effects. BPA has been linked to a variety of diseases including an increased risk of diseases or disorders of the brain, reproductive, and immune systems; recent studies have linked BPA exposure to problems with liver function testing, an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease, and interruptions in chemotherapy treatment; and BPA exposure has long been linked to hormonal disturbances. A study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has shown that 93% of Americans excrete some BPA in their urine. New studies also show that BPA seems to stay in the body longer than previously believed.
- And in California, the reorganized "Food and Agriculture Committee" in the state Senate has a chair who supports animal rights and consumer causes. Crazy! The San Diego Union-Tribune called this "a blow to agriculture, which for years has counted on the panel to thwart unfriendly bills."
"Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter, the new chairman, has a history of tangling with agriculture over food safety. He plans an oversight hearing next week to explore livestock welfare issues."
The article noted that, "Lawmakers and animal rights advocates say they are motivated to be more aggressive this year, particularly after voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 2 - an initiative that requires egg producers to provide hens more space by 2015.
"'It sent a signal that Californians are ready for and are demanding humane treatment of animals, whether they are farm animals or companion animals,' said Assemblyman Pedro Nava, D-Santa Barbara."
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