Our nation’s large agriculture business is amazing. We mass produce food everyday and our consumers can buy it cheaply. But this is not without consequence. The methods we have developed over the last century have taken a toll on our land, our environment and our health. We are a large country with a large and growing population. The need for food is something that people around the world have in common. A concern is food insecurity. Fifteen percent of households in the United States reported in 2012 that they were food insecure, meaning that households were unable to provide sufficient resources for food. Though the majority of households are food secure, there are still some that struggle. But food has become so cheap in the United States, it is taking a toll on our society. In 2008, Michael Pollan, author of the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, wrote an open letter in the New York Times urging the president-elect (Barack Obama) to be proactive on food policy and laid out the issues of our current state. In the letter he writes, “I’m urging you to adopt, but the core idea could not be simpler: we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine. True, this is easier said than done — fossil fuel is deeply imbedded in everything about the way we currently grow food and feed ourselves.” To get back to a place of good food, we must look at it differently. In our highly industrialized society, it’s not surprising that our food is industrialized as well. But to break the cycle of dangerous chemicals, massed and cheaply produced, we must work to lift the veil behind our food. I wonder if you really saw the farm where you “farm fresh” eggs were raised, you would reconsider where your breakfast choice is really coming from.
“At the end of the day, everyone eats.”
“At the end of the day, everyone eats.”
Hannah Farley is the Gleaning Project Coordinator and the Cooking and Nutrition program coordinator for Chautauqua County. She works with local farmers, seed companies, soup kitchens and the disenfranchised to assure that access to healthy food is available.
Gleaning is the second harvest of the farmer’s crop. After the farmer has picked what he is planning on selling at the market or at whole sale, they then call Farley and they pick it up and Glean.
“It dates back to in the Bible. It was part of the farmer’s job back hundred’s of years ago to save of some of the crops for the peasants. If they didn’t, that was really bad of the farmer,” said Farley.
Farley also teaches kids and adults how to garden so that they can become more independent, self-sufficient and healthier.
“It kind of empowers them. I work a lot with disabled youth and adults. So having it be possible for them to be able to see something that they planted grow, is important.”
In addition, she contact greenhouses in Chautauqua County. This is done after Memorial Day. People most often buy their plants after memorial day weekend, after the frost. She contacts greenhouses and asks if they have extra plants and if she can pick them up. Farley then brings the plants to food pantries, soup kitchens and places where people can take them. She also plants many of them herself.
“A large part of my job is to facilitate. I have three gardens that I’m in charge of, I have to make sure that they [the plants] grow to help feed people in the soup kitchen.”
Farley solicits seed companies throughout the country for seeds. She then contacts food pantries and other human services agencies and distributes them through those agencies for their gardens that also serve to meet the need in Chautauqua county.
In addition to Gleaning project coordinator, Farley is also the cooking and nutrition program coordinator of Chautauqua county. It is specific to the Chautauqua County Rural Ministries, but it is a non-faith based human services agency that serves to meet the needs of the disenfranchised and working poor. Farley and the agency do two workshops a month directly for emergency food pantry clients. She uses ingredients that are specifically available in the soup kitchens. This is so that clients learn to take other food items from the pantry, instead of just items like canned soup.
“My job is to make sure that I’m not only giving these working poor people food and healthy food, but I’m also teaching them how to use it. It goes right with gleaning. We get the fresh produce but some people don’t know how to cook a squash,” she said.
It’s Farley’s job to make sure that recipes are available to these people as well as the tools that they need to cook for themselves and their families. She helps people get access to food and nutritional counseling as well. Though Farley is not a certified nutritionist, she doesn’t agree with a lot of the information what the provided by the USDA as guidelines as nutrition.
“It [the guidelines] caters a lot to corn, soy and meat. It’s more for agribusiness than small local farmers. So my perspective when people ask me for advice is try to eat local. Whenever we do workshops I make sure people know where they can get the food locally.”
Farley recognizes that eating local is more expensive, but she believes that people need to spend more money on food and less on other things that are unnecessary.
“People don’t want to hear that, but that’s what we need to do. We need to value food more. If people eat locally they will value their food more. Secondly, [the advice she gives] stop eating when you’re full. And thirdly, eat what you want while eating healthy and locally.”
Farley also advises those who come to her workshops to eat food that will make them feel better, and recommends foods that will do that. She explained that another large part is getting people to be more active.
In Dunkirk, about 30 percent of people are at or below the poverty line. Farley explained that there was a disproportionate amount of other ethnicities at or below the poverty line compared to those of caucasian ethnicities. Because of this, Farely works to learn the Spanish words for the produce and hands them out to clients that come into the soup kitchen.
She also distributes the produce at the WIC offices [women, infants, children]. “That way I’m not just getting it [the produce] to individuals,” she said. “When I go to WIC I get to the women and the children. They’re so happy to see a box of fresh produce that they can just take as much as they want,” she said.
“Health shouldn’t just be a thing for rich, white people,” said Farley.
When doing workshops, Farley constantly hears that the costs are too high to eat healthy. “It really isn’t,” she said. “It costs less money to buy a bag of dried beans than it does red meat. It’s cheaper to buy oatmeal than frosted cheerios,” she said.
To eat locally, Farley suggests that people shop at farmer’s markets. Though it is expensive, she explained it is important to change the way people perceive their food. “People go to a grocery store and want to pay the cheapest amount possible, and if they pay anymore then it’s a rip off,” she said.
For those that use assistance programs, it is possible for them to eat locally. The Fredonia farmer’s market takes SNAP benefits (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program). “New York State has the Farmer’s Market Federation hands out SNAP to EBT machines. People can go to the farmer’s markets and swipe their cards and for dollars in SNAP and they are given that amount in tokens and they can use those tokens with the farmer’s that accept snap. Then those farmer’s can take those tokens and convert it back into money for them,” said Farley.
Farley works to create the community gardens using organic farming methods. Though the process of organic farming is more involved, she couldn’t imagine doing it another way. “The primary concern is not just my health, but the health of those that I want to feed,” she said.
“It’s not worth it to try and grow them [community members in need] quote-unquote ‘healthy food’ if you’re spraying it with crap,” Farley explained.
Though there are several local farmers in the area, only about one-quarter of the ones Farley gleans from use organic farming methods. But many of them use low-spray methods. “There’s an apple farm that we glean from every year and they use low-spray, which I am thankful for,” she explained.
But the larger farmers in the area that donate, do use spraying methods heavily. Farley explained that it is a concern, but she does notice that some farmers, such as a local squash farmer, sets aside an area that is unsprayed, just to donate to the gleaning project.
Farley explained that often the farmers that use spraying methods, do not even realize how dangerous the compounds are that they are handling. “Those that don’t use organic methods, are not only harming their own health but their children’s health and their great-great-grandchildren’s health. But they’re also harming the health of the community,” she said.
“In a large part, I think they’re kind of a victim to the capitalist system that we have. Produce more, make more, do more, make more money. In the end, they just end up racking up their health bills and dying early. It’s not sustainable, not just environmentally, but community wise and family wise.”
Dr. Sherri Mason professor of chemistry at SUNY Fredonia
“People are starting to wake-up and realize the impacts conventional agriculture has had on our air, our water, our soil, our kids.”
Genetically modified organisms are not found in nature. This is not a process of pollination. The process of creating a GMO crop is much more involved and probably the most unnatural way to create such a natural product — food. The work that it takes to create a crop like this, is almost straight out of a sci-fi fantasy novel. But this isn’t a work of fiction, it has most likely already made it to your plate.
Dr. Mason explained that to create these GMOs, developers look for traits in the environment that are desirable. “Maybe it’s in the case of roundup ready. We have a bacteria that’s resistant to a particular herbicide that we want to use. Or one of the things that they’ve done is taken the genetic code in a salmon that allows it to deal with cold temperatures, and extract that. So we take a particular segment within a genetic code that triggers a particular response. And we essentially clip that out. Then we have the genetic code for the food that we are interested in modifying, which maybe is corn or something else. In order to get the genetic code we extracted into the genetic code of the spices of the genetic code that we’re interested in, we can’t just mix them together, we have to chemically attach it. So usually what they’ll do is take the clipped out code and attach it to, typically, a virus that acts as a vector. They usually use viruses because they are very good at invading cells, and creating damage.” After this is done, a new set of recombinant DNA formed. Mason went on to explain that in order to know if this process has worked, an antibiotic is then added so that if this new DNA is resistant to the antibiotic, then it can be verified that the DNA has been recombined successfully.
Sound delicious?
“I think that’s one of the scary things about GMOs,” said Mason. “It’s not just that it’s genetic material from two different organisms that couldn’t normally combine — like a fish and corn — that’s creepy enough, and it’s the fact that you have viral DNA in there and antibiotic resistant triggers in there. We’re already having issues in humans being resistant to antibiotics anymore because we’re perpetually exposed to them.”
But the health impacts of ingesting these foods is unclear. Mason explained that this is largely because no one is keeping track. There are a few case studies that are known for GMO foods affecting health.
“A woman, for example, went out for lunch. She knew that she had a peanut allergy, so she didn’t eat peanuts. She went out to lunch at a Taco Bell and had a taco, and after lunch her throat was closing up and she went into anaphylactic shock and was taken to the hospital. She survived, but what they were able to trace it back to was that the corn had been genetically modified with the peanut DNA so while it didn’t have any peanuts, it had peanut DNA.”
The Non-GMO project, a non-profit third party project that works to label non-GMO foods and products, the only organization like this in North America. According to their website, over 60 developed countries do not consider GMO products to be safe. But the United States, that is not the case. “In the U.S., the government has approved GMOs based on studies conducted by the same corporations that created them and profit from their sale.” Their organization helps Americans to make choices to try avoid GMOs by tracing foods to their sources and giving them a Non-GMO label.
Though the United States is certainly a developed country, GMO foods are not only legal, but are not even labeled as such to the consumer. Mason feels that this is due to issues of money. “I think our government is under the control of money more than in other areas, quite frankly. I think that money is power. I think that a lot of governments, especially over in Europe, perpetually come out and have mass actions, and really kind of keeps the government in check because they know what they have to do what the people are asking or there will be uprisings, there will be resources. That just doesn’t happen here,” she said.
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| Photo courtesy of labelgmos.org |
Mason feels that people fear that GMO labeling will increase the costs of food. Economic and jobs related issues are concerns to people when it comes to labeling. “Therefore people will lose their jobs and I think lobbying has a lot to do with that,” she explained.
Regardless of many people wanting their food labeled, Mason believes that it may not help the situation. “The reality is that a lot of people would continue to eat the same old foods even if they are labeled, unfortunately. We have all sorts of warning labels, like cigarettes, saying that they’re bad for you.”
Mason believes that we can have sustainable agriculture without having “big agriculture.” She explained that there are many studies coming out, such as from the University of California, showing that non-GMO and using less chemicals (like organic farming methods) are much more sustainable and can produce equal, if not better crop yields than conventional agriculture. “I think even more so, I think it’s necessary. We’re killing our soil. Without soil we don’t have food, so it doesn’t work. At some point we’re going realize that there’s no other option. I very much think that it’s possible to sustain our populations using organic agriculture,” she said.
Though it is slow going, Mason believes that there is already a shift happening. Because we are such a large country, it will take time to make changes. “I think the change is happening, I think that’s why you see places like Walmart selling organic soy milk. They’re doing a lot to increase their organic labeling and I don’t think they’re doing that because they care about sustaining the world, they’re doing it because of the pressures of people and the market pressures,” she said.
But organic is not always a solution, an apple could be organic but shipped from California to New York, using an abundance of fossil fuels. So which is better? The locally produced sprayed apple, or the organically grown apple from the other side of the country? Mason explained that in terms of greenhouse gasses, it ends up balancing out. “It really depends on your preference, this one will have less synthetic chemicals on the outside, so if you’re going to eat the skin of the apple, you should probably eat the organic,” she said. But in terms of nutritional value and taste, the locally produced apple would be the best choice.
As a consumer, how to we make the smart choices? They are pros and cons of both forms of food. Even by attending farmer’s markets, not all of our food can be local and organic. The Environmental Working Group, an environmental research and advocacy group, has come up with a list called, “The Dirty Dozen.” These are foods that when farmed conventionally, use the most chemicals. Some of these include, apples, tomatoes and potatoes. They also have a corresponding list called, “The Clean Fifteen,” which are foods that are either not sprayed as much or the skin is not eaten and the spray is not affecting the food. Some of these types of foods include, corn, onions and avocados.
Though GMO foods are not labeled in the United States, we do have different types of food labels. But some have legal standing where others essentially mean nothing other than marketing tactics. For example, USDA Certified Organic, is a label given by the government. Inspection is done to make sure that industry standards are made before receiving these labels. But some smaller local farmers, do use organic methods, but cannot afford the seal. To find out, talk to your local farmer.
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